CIA Chief Believes Cheney Almost Wants U.S. Attacked
June 15th, 2009Why not go all the way and detail Cheney’s role in 9/11? Or any of the dozens of other links between the regime and 9/11? Ah, because the same regime is in power!
How’s the Change working out?
Obama Exempts CIA Torture Staff from Prosecution
Obama Signals His Reluctance to Look Into Bush Policies
Etc.
This is from yesterday’s Washington Post:
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama criticized the Bush administration for using state-secrets arguments dozens of times to stop lawsuits over warrantless surveillance, alleged abuse of terrorism suspects and other controversial subjects.
One day after the judges issued a sharply worded ruling in the rendition case, known as Mohamed et al v. Jeppesen Dataplan after the Boeing subsidiary that provided support for the overseas rendition flights, the president said he would direct his lawyers to develop a more “surgical” policy on state secrets. That effort continues, according to the White House and the Justice Department.
But yesterday’s court filing frustrated civil libertarians who said their hopes for a significant break from the Bush era on state-secrets policy had been all but dashed.
“This is a watershed moment,” said Ben Wizner, a staff lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “There’s no mistake any longer . . . the Obama administration has now fully embraced the Bush administration’s shameful effort to immunize torturers and their enablers from any legal consequences for their actions.”
Tracy Schmaler, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, declined to comment.
In the government court filing yesterday, lawyers reported that the “highest levels of the Department of Justice” had reviewed the case and had sided with former CIA director Michael V. Hayden. He had twice submitted sworn statements warning that any release of information would cause “grave harm” to the agency’s intelligence-gathering efforts and its relationships with foreign leaders.
“It is the government’s position that allowing this suit to proceed would pose an unacceptable risk to national security and that the reasoning employed by the panel would dramatically restructure government operations by permitting any district judge to override the executive branch’s judgments in this highly sensitive realm,” the Justice Department filing said.
Wizner and other advocates for greater disclosure called the argument puzzling, because details about the rendition program have already emerged. European researchers have compiled documents tying Jeppesen to the CIA-commissioned flights, and one of the five men suing in U.S. court has recovered $450,000 from the Swedish government for its alleged role in his capture.
While the KosTards and other crackpot Left sites will woop it up, this nonsense below is just more theater and laudanum for people who are complicit in the regime’s atrocities.
Via: Reuters:
CIA director Leon Panetta says it’s almost as if former vice president Dick Cheney would like to see another attack on the United States to prove he is right in criticizing President Barack Obama for abandoning the “harsh interrogation” of terrorism suspects.
“I think he smells some blood in the water on the national security issue,” Panetta said in an interview published in The New Yorker magazine’s June 22 issue.
“It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.”
Cheney, who was a key advocate in the Bush administration of controversial interrogation methods such as waterboarding, has become as a leading Republican critic of Obama’s ban on harsh interrogations and his plan to shut the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In a blistering May 21 speech, Cheney said Obama’s reversal of Bush-era policies were “unwise in the extreme” that would make the American people less safe.
Panetta called Cheney’s actions “dangerous politics.”
He told The New Yorker he had favored the creation of an independent truth commission to look into the detainee polices of former President George W. Bush. But the idea died in April when Obama decided such a panel could be seen as politically vindictive.
