OK, this is not what I signed up for. Andrew Sullivan accurately diagnoses President Obama’s stance on torture as “hate the torture, love the torturer,” linking to this story by Jonathan S. Landay, Ali Watkins and Marisa Taylor in the newsobserver, which tells me far more than I would like to know about the Obama Administration’s past and continuing whitewash of the Bush Administration’s numerous crimes. I can’t say that the coverup is worse than the crime, but it comes awfully fucking close. Sullivan recaps as follows:
“We are still, of course, waiting for the Senate Intelligence Committee Report to be released to the public. It’s been forever since it was finished, and forever since the CIA managed to respond, and the endless process goes on and on – even after John Brennan’s attempt to spy on the very committee supposed to oversee his out-of-control agency, and then lie about it. The very fact that Brennan is still in his job – after displaying utter contempt for the Constitution and the American people – tells you all you really need to know about where Obama really stands on this question. He stands for protecting the CIA – and Denis McDonough, his chief-of-staff, has become the CIA’s indispensable ally in enabling not only its immunity from any prosecution for war crimes, but from even basic democratic accountability.”
As Landay, Watkins, and Taylor report, the Administration is working feverishly, and, it appears, successfully, to ensure that the report that finally emerges will say as little as possible about what happened. But the president, it also appears, is pissed that the damn investigation even happened at all. They report that when the CIA first agreed to allow the Senate committee access to its files, then CIA Director Leon “Douchebag” Panetta, definitely not my favorite rave, got a screaming phone call from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel: “The president wants to know who the f— authorized this release to the committees. I have a president with his hair on fire and I want to know what the f— you did to f— this up so bad!”
Paybacks are hell, Barack.
Afterwords
Sullivan speculates—accurately, no doubt—that Obama is terrified of “losing the agency”—pissing off the CIA and setting himself up for two solid years of political kneecapping, if not an actual garrotte.
