anybody in CIA going to be held PERSONALLY accountable?
So that's at least CLAPPER and BRENNAN who outright lied to Congress.
penalty? or just "settle" as Too Scary Powerful Out-of-Control To Jail
I expect NO ACTION from Congress, and/or EVERYTHING proposed to be killed by House tea baggers, Cruz, etc.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 08-01-2014 at 11:23 AM.
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/...is-weekend-52/no one at the CIA will suffer any consequences for their astonishing attempt to spy on their Senate overseers:
So we discover that it was Brennan himself who directed that the CIA spy on the Senate staffers! And it’s worth recalling why he resorted to that violation of the basic cons utional order. He did so because the staffers had come upon the CIA’s own internal report on the torture program, and it came to the exact same conclusions as the Senate Report, i.e. that the progam was obviously torture and completely ineffective. The so-called “Panetta Report” utterly devastated Brennan’s continuing view that torture provided good intelligence and all but proved that the CIA had no utilitarian defense of their barbarism whatsoever. And so Brennan panicked.The five C.I.A. officials who were singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of CIA director John Brennan.
He needn’t have. It’s clear that the CIA’s place in our “democracy” will not be dislodged any time soon. President Obama has not the slightest qualms about employing war criminals and working closely with them. He never has. Opponents of torture are, for the president, “self-righteous.” And the system, in any case, ensures that the CIA always polices itself and will therefore always exonerate itself:
A panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode, according to current and former government officials … While effectively rejecting the most significant conclusions of the inspector general’s report, the panel, appointed by Mr. Brennan and composed of three C.I.A. officers and two members from outside the agency, is still expected to criticize agency missteps that contributed to the fight with Congress.Notice that the “panel” has a built-in CIA majority. And the CIA will never allow anyone in its employ to be held accountable for his or her actions – least of all the chief conspirator in this attack on the Senate, Brennan himself.
There is one person missing in all this: the president. He has allowed his own CIA director to violate the cons ution and to lie to the public in defending the torture program’s effectiveness. After a report proved that American torture was sadistic and useless, the president allowed his CIA director to stand up and say the answer to the latter question is “unknowable”. This is not a neutral stance, and never has been. It is a classic example of truthiness versus the truth. It is a stance that reaffirms that we live in only the appearance of a democracy, but that the deep state of the US is a law unto itself. It is a position that one agency in government is beyond any accountability. It is a recognition that this president, like all the others, reports to the CIA and not the other way round.
compare with persecution to suicide of Aaron Schwartz
No Law Is Above The Man
there are dedicated threads for Aaron Schwartz, boutons.
by trying to derail this thread it appears you're carrying water for the deep state you claim to hate.
whine hole, gfy
After Scrutiny, C.I.A. Mandate Is Untouched
But the scathing report the Senate Intelligence Committee delivered this month is unlikely to significantly change the role the C.I.A. now plays in running America’s secret wars.
A number of factors — from steadfast backing by Congress and the White House to strong public support for clandestine operations — ensure that an agency that has been ascendant since President Obama came into office is not likely to see its mission diminished, either during his waning years in the White House or for some time after that.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/27...hed-.html?_r=0
iow, the "CIA torture, crimes, murders, over the decades, R US"
CIA panel clears CIA of wrongdoing, criticizes own IG:
http://news.yahoo.com/panel-clears-c...030659646.htmlA CIA panel Wednesday cleared agency officials of any wrongdoing when they accessed the computers of a Senate committee investigating the agency’s involvement in torture. The finding ended a yearlong dispute marked by angry accusations of “hacking” and criminal misconduct.
Instead, the panel — whose members were appointed by CIA Director John Brennan — faulted the agency’s own outgoing inspector general for suggesting in a report that there may have been grounds to discipline five officials at the agency.
there's more whitewashing, hypocrisy:
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, STRONG ADVOCATE OF LEAK PROSECUTIONS, DEMANDS IMMUNITY FOR LEAKER DAVID PETRAEUS
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2...avid-petraeus/
iow, more proof that No Law Is Above The Man
The White House knew about the snooping beforehand:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/0...tml?1421346327Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.
The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before CIA employees were ordered to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal do ents had wound up in Senate investigators’ hands. The conversation with McDonough came after Brennan first issued the directive, but before he reiterated it to a CIA attorney leading the probe.
Brennan’s consultation with McDonough also came before the CIA revealed the search to then-Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), whose staff was the target of the snooping.
The new information suggesting the White House was aware of -- and did not stop -- the CIA’s computer snooping is unlikely to improve the existing distrust between Senate committee members and the executive branch.
We tortured innocent people and got nothing for it.
We still hold some of them incommunicado, in the legal black hole at Gitmo, in contravention of our own laws and acknowledged norms of civilization and democracy.
Gitmo is injurious to our own republic and our international standing. Obama should put a stop to it, like he promised.
Several GITMO guys left recently, so Obama is doing unilaterally what he can, but the Repugs, strict asshole obstructionists, are blocking any closing of GITMO by blocking funding, so place your blame accurately.
It looks like Obama will not be able to trickle out all the GITMO guys before he leaves office, which suits the Repugs just fine.
I think US should close Guantanamo Bay base, a vestige of and now notoriously a -stain on the American Empire, clean up the soil (US military being the biggest, nastiest polluter, eg, Kelly Field, perchlorate, fuels, etc), and give the base to Cuba.
btw, the battleship USS Maine was not sabotaged by Spain. USA needed an excuse to go to war, no matter how flimsy. War is America's favorite pastime.
The hull shows the explosion was from the inside.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...maine-explodes
the blame is accurately placed. Obama promised to close Gitmo.
He hasn't.
When he proposed moving GITMO guys to high-security prisons on US soil and closing GITMO, Repugs blocked the $200M? cost, LYING such prisons would be terrorist targets.
A President isn't an autocrat, and his unilateral powers are quite limited.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 04-27-2016 at 06:44 AM.
bull . the detainees are held on POTUS's authority. POTUS can release them.
if he can't, GITMO is void of controlling political authority and that is ing bull .
you can't have multi-tiered justice and the US Cons ution. it doesn't work that way.
in fact, that's the thing that breaks it.
bull , he'e been trying to get countries to take them for years
It's not because of terrorist targets it's because they automatically get more rights when on US soil.When he proposed moving GITMO guys to high-security prisons on US soil and closing GITMO, Repugs blocked the $200M? cost, LYING such prisons would be terrorist targets.
A President isn't an autocrat, and his unilateral powers are quite limited.
That's not what the Repugs were saying. It was all about the prisons and local communities becoming terrorists targets. iow, Repugs, lying and pushing bull paranoia, as always.
bull . he could stop everything with the stroke of a pen. he won't.
goddam BULL
"In the larger defense bill that the President signed into law in November, congressional Republicans included a measure, opposed by Obama, that
prohibits the use of funds to close or abandon the prison,
transfer detainees to the United States (or Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen) or
build or modify facilities to house detainees in the United States."
The Bowe Bergdahl affair hasn’t made things easier
The controversial exchange of Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban detainees angered many Republicans and has put Guantanamo transfers in an even more unfavorable light among opponents. Bergdahl was released after five years in captivity in exchange for five detainees who were being held at Guantanamo Bay.
Following the swap, Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said he was “very disturbed about the policy of releasing prisoners from Guantanamo Bay while the war is still raging,” saying the decision “undercut the war effort.” Sen. Saxby Chambliss said the prisoner trade “is one of the reasonswhy a number of us have been so strongly opposed to the release of individuals there.”
http://time.com/4179278/state-of-the...esident-obama/
https://nsarchive.wordpress.com/The preservation of the Senate’s report on the CIA’s Torture Program is increasingly in doubt; the DC Circuit Court of Appeals recently affirmed the District Court’s ruling that the report “is a congressionally generated and controlled do ent that is not subject to disclosure under FOIA.” Days after the appeals court decision, news broke that the CIA Inspector General’s office “accidentally” destroyed its copy of the report. The recently revealed destruction allegedly took place last summer – months after the CIA’s IG, David Buckley, resigned. Before his resignation Buckley issued a report finding that five CIA officials improperly monitored Senate Intelligence Committee staff working on the Torture Report; while his report admonished the involved officials, the agency opted not to punish them. A CIA panel handpicked by Director John Brennan, “in what was widely seen as an embarrassing rebuke to Buckley,” went so far as to clear the officials of any wrongdoing, concluding that the officials had acted reasonably in the face of a potential security breach. The Obama administration has yet to nominate a permanent replacement.
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