As reported here, Congressman Alan Lowenthal (D-CA) recently released a public statement concerning the much-publicized release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report concerning CIA interrogation techniques.

Rep. Lowenthal represents California’s 47th Congressional District, which includes Long Beach, Lakewood, Signal Hill, and Avalon. Rep. Lowenthal was entirely right to release a statement about the Senate report given his own membership on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade.

The report that was released, and which has since received considerable public, media, and government attention, is actually a declassified 525-page executive summary. The full 6,700 page report remains classified. I encourage readers to review the actual summary and avoid relying solely upon news reports or other anecdotal information from friends or various pundits.

The summary has proven extremely controversial for two main reasons:

  • Many people in government, and particularly in the intelligence community, loudly objected to the release of any information related to previous interrogation techniques because they feel that doing so both endangers intelligence operatives currently in the field and, perhaps more damaging, puts ally nations who may have assisted in these efforts in a difficult position on the word stage
  • Many are arguing that the summary is inaccurate and that both its contents and the decision to release it are purely political and highly partisan

Let’s be completely clear, the United States no longer uses the enhanced interrogation (EI) techniques described throughout this summary. President Obama issued an Executive Order five years ago expressly prohibiting them. Because this is so, many question the need to declassify and release such a summary at all, which condemns techniques our nation has not used in some time.

It is also important to remember that, like all other Senate Committees, the Select Committee on Intelligence is ostensibly bipartisan. It is currently comprised 15 Senators, eight Democrats and seven Republicans. The investigations this committee conducts and the reports it releases are likewise supposed to be bipartisan. This was unfortunately not the case with this summary. Not a single Republican member of this committee endorsed either the contents of the summary or the decision to release it.

This concerns me and I think it should concern others, regardless of political party affiliation. Despite beliefs some LB Post readers often express to the contrary, I am not a Republican. I am a registered independent. I lean to the conservative in some of my political views and to the liberal in some others. For this reason I chose to register as an independent, so that I would not feel a blind allegiance to any political party and, instead, could feel entirely free to vote my conscience -as informed by facts- regardless of the causes or the candidates on the ballot.

Some assume that the only reason Republican Committee members chose not to endorse the summary or its release is politics. The summary is highly critical of former President George W. Bush, who is a Republican, and his administration. While party politics may certainly have been factor (another part of why I refuse to join any of them), I don’t think it was the only or even the main factor.

Fortunately, we need not speculate as to why the Committee Republicans have problems with this summary. They have published their own report in an effort to explain their reasons. I encourage LB Post readers to review this “Minority Views” report as well. I think it raises some very legitimate concerns that I think many are either ignoring or discounting primarily due to political preferences on their own part. There seems no other explanation, given the reasonable concerns the Minority Views document describes.

Finally, what I will call the Majority View report is atypical in an important sense, it offers no recommendations. The absence of recommendations in the report released by the committee majority seems to give support to the belief that the primary motivation for its content and release is a political one.

As an elected Congressman, Rep. Lowenthal must do his best to represent all of the people in his district, including conservatives and, yes, even Republicans. I think he did himself and all of his constituents a grave disservice in this regard when he failed to consider, or at least mention, the very real and reasonable concerns of the Republican members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Long Beach Post, nor its editorial staff.