“The creatures outside looked from CIA to Obama, and from Obama to CIA, and from CIA to Obama again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
George Orwell remains unfortunately on-point 30 years after, thanks to the absolute determination of our “most open administration in history” president to ensure that there shall not shine one ray of daylight between his White House and the CIA. Daylight, in fact, is a most despised commodity around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.
Andrew Sullivan puts the wood to Obama’s massive hypocrisy over the CIA’s own endless hypocrisy over its godawful record of torture and suppression, pulled into the light of day by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, one of the last persons I would have picked to dare to bring the almighty rogue agency to task. But Dianne did it, in her history-making speech, recounting how the CIA has unscrupulously manipulated and lied in its efforts to prevent Feinstein’s committee from releasing its report on what Feinstein called the “horrible details of a CIA program that never, never should have existed.”
As Sullivan points out, Obama claims that he wants the committee’s report to be released: “I would urge them [the committee] to go ahead and complete the report and send it to us and we will declassify those findings so that the American people can understand what happened in the past and that can help guide us as we move forward.”
This bit of balderdashery proves to be a bit more than Andrew can handle. “Wha-wha-wha-what? The Senate Committee completed the report fifteen fricking months ago! The only reason it has not been declassified and published is because the CIA has been engaged in aggressive stonewalling and obstruction –to the point at which Diane Feinstein was forced to denounce her beloved spies on the Senate floor this week. The president should not be telling the Senate Committee to finish their report (which they did over a year ago), but the CIA to quit the harassment of a committee’s vital work.”
Sullivan’s headline is “Is Obama a phony on torture?” Andrew, I think it’s time to drop the interrogative.
