While he’s doing his best to uphold the taboo against torturing people, he’s doing it in a way that makes him just look terrified of his own intelligence apparatus, and that is not comforting to watch. It may be eminently sensible, but this bending over backwards not to be “sanctimonious” about people who torture folks in their custody and at their mercy is very hard to stomach. And then there’s that taboo against lying that the president is not trying to uphold.
Overall, one of the worst performances of his presidency. But, at least he said “we tortured some folks,” which is unvarnished truth-telling.
I feel like I’ve fallen through the looking glass. “We tortured some folks and that’s not right. But everyone was doing his best and no one should be faulted.”
Sounds like W, doesn’t it? Just with better grammar and diction.
Can’t agree. Bush never admitted to torture. He played word games and redefined it out of existence. While Obama’s performance is appalling, he’s not in a league with W.
Terrorism doesn’t win when it blows up buildings. Terrorism doesn’t win when it kills people. Terrorism wins when it gets the nation it has targeted to change its values. Obama didn’t mention that.
This may be the low point of his time in office.
Only if you were holding on to expectations that don’t match the facts.
The way I look at it, maybe Obama’s trying to tell us something.
My expectations were those anyone would hold when our president is a centrist Democrat. No more, no less.
The low point so far.
There’s more to come.
Watch.
AG
Like I’ve said, over and over, the President doesn’t have the pay grade to mess with the CIA.
Anyone remember what happened to Jimmy Carter when Stansfield Turner tried to reform the CIA?
What happened to Jimmy Carter? He wouldn’t have won a second term if not for Reagan’s team of traitors thwarting the release of the Iranian Embassy hostages.
Obama’s pay grade is more than sufficient to “mess with the CIA.”
Let’s also not overlook the following moves by Carter and all the people they pissed off:
October 22, 1979 the exiled Shah was allowed into the US for medical treatment. (Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller urged Carter to permit the Shah’s entry.) Highly unlikely there would have been an Iranian hostage crisis if Carter had refused the Shah’s request.
Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics
1980 Soviet grain embargo (Reagan ran on lifting the embargo if he won)
Operation Eagle Claw
Am hearing echoes of these boneheaded moves this year — almost as if Obama has Brzezinski whispering in his ear.
People in CIA headquarters were walking around with Bush for President buttons. That’s a no-no for federal employees, but what he hell, I guess if you get away with shooting a President to death a little violation of the Hatch Act is no big deal.
After Carter was out of the way via the October Surprise Reagan/Bush (not necessarily in that ranking) ran the country for 12 years. Reagan’s relationship to the CIA goes back at least to the early fifties when he was a spokesman for the Congress For Freedom, one of those CIA programs used to import WWII war criminals.
Then came Clinton. I have long suspected that Clinton had a relationship with the CIA. He was a student in Europe and was ostensibly anti-war. He went where international anti-war students gathered. I think he went to Moscow, too. When he was governor of Arkansas and Asa Hutchinson was the federal prosecutor for that corner of Arkansas, it rained duffel bags of cocaine in Mena, allegedly in an operation run by the CIA, and both he and Hutchinson managed to not notice anything unusual.
Then 8 years of the son of the CIA Director. I’ve read that the string of bad businesses that Dubya ran had the appearance of being fronts for money-laundering. And the CIA has always needed money-laundering operations.
So while I haven’t spent any time exploring whether or not Obama had a history with the CIA, I presume that that’s just part of the job now. The CIA makes sure that the major candidates are either CIA or in their pocket.
So not only doesn’t a President have the pay grade, he’s probably also got other allegiances that get in the way of tearing the CIA into a thousand pieces.
I was speaking of 1980. The October Surprise wasn’t a CIA operation. Casey was Reagan’s campaign manager and had by then had been a private attorney, campaign operative, and been appointed to various executive positions for decades but not intel. GHWBush was likely also involved, but his less than one year stint as DCI would have been a negative and not an asset in working with the Iranian government.
Military, FBI, and CIA employees tend to support GOP POTUS candidates because they expect that one will favor them more at budget time and give them a freer hand to do whatever.
It’s kind of a difference without a distinction. If GWH flew to Europe on an SR-71, he didn’t rent it. A lot of the operators were former CIA or people who turned out to have CIA connection, which means CIA being paid by other means. And Bush I was always CIA.
The tell was that Ollie North was part of the brain trust for the hostage rescue plan, probably to throw a spanner or two into the works. I think that guy named Abrams was involved too. Long time ago.
If you don’t mean “CIA” then don’t say it was a CIA operation. The best and most solid evidence about the 1980 October Surprise puts Casey and Donald Gregg at the center of it. (The NSC was passing info to team Reagan in 1980). Not discounting that GHWBush wasn’t read in and didn’t participate in putting together assets for it, but they hardly would have needed him in Paris for anything.
As some people have alleged.
Ollie North was nowhere near the October Surprise (and never CIA either).
Zbigniew Brzezinski isn’t gone, nor is Madeleine Albright. Brzezinski needs the media stints to explain away the stupid decision to intervene in Afghanistan with allies ISIS of Pakistan and Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia. This alliance has been more deadly across the globe than the Vietnam intervention by Johnson/McNamara and Eisenhower’s ‘domino theory.’ This was also a ‘containment’ of Communism policy.
I recently witnessed Madelein Albright deeply involved in the Ukraine crisis, backing the Atlantic Council and NATO containment 2.0 of Russia [policy set and advocated by Gen. Breedlove, Rasmussen, Ivo Daalder and more of their ilk] to Russia make it a pariah state. Just add the mishap to Vietnam, Cambodja, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine. Batting somewhere around 0.050 for White House foreign policy since WWII.
Brzezinski next generation is his son Mark – see my new diary Coalition of the Willing Against Iran: US Justice Dept, Ungar, UANI and Mossad. In the footsteps of his dad. The elder is deeply involved in speeches and interviews with lobbying groups, see conferences at White Oak Plantation in Florida.
Sometimes I throw out a nice juicy slow pitch for others to hit instead of going into my usual lecturing/teaching mode that others find tiresome. Not surprised that you hit this one well.
Should add that Z-Big is also connected to the Atlanta Council.
Pls Don’t Blame Georgia, unless you know more than I do! Atlanta should read Atlantic Council and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
What about Madeleine Albright and the Orange Revolution? She has been advising Vicky Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt. How deeply is MA involved in the dark state?
This comment grew into a diary – World In Turmoil: Role of Brzezinski and Albright, Our Democrats .
You think Reagan’s traitors had nothing to do with the CIA, or a right-wing cabal of CIA operatives and veterans? George H.W. Bush was his vice presidential candidate and William Casey was his campaign manager. It was on Casey’s secret 1980 trip to Madrid during the campaign, that arrangements with Iran would have been made. Reagan himself and his political operators were ignorant fools, they had no competence to do any of this stuff.
More to the point than “look what happened to Carter” in any case is the case Booman has thought a lot about, what happened to another president who tried to cut the agency down to size: John Kennedy.
Oops — my response above to Bob in Portland was meant for you.
Is this true:
As shocking and horrific as the events on the morning of 9/11/01 were, they were over that morning (with the exception of GWB and AF1 flying to various military installations until that evening).
Scary was the Cuban Missile Crisis — nukes not nutcases with boxcutters — that went on for thirteen days. And yet even then at a fundamental level, we trusted or hoped that JFK and Khrushchev (contrary to US propaganda of that time) weren’t that nutso and it would get worked out without frying us.
Shocking and horrific was the assassination of JFK, but we didn’t go into a collective national meltdown. Even if the full truth of his assassination isn’t and may never be known.
You write:
But Marie…we did not know that they were over. And there was the real terror. I lived through it in NYC. People walked as if they were sleepwalkers for nearly 6 months. It wasn’t until the spring…Easter marked the turning point…that I saw a change for the better, a cessation of automatic shock and fear. I seriously considered getting in my car, taking my son…and my ex-wife if she wanted to come along…and going straight north until I reached my extended family in Maine. (My parens and brothers moved there in the miid-’60s because things were getting too rough here to bring up children. Or so they thought.) I still don’t understand why the 9/11 people didn’t try to take out the Indian Point nuclear plant 20 miles upwind of NYC. If they had done so, that would have been the end of this country as we know it. Millions dead. To this day, I dread performing in Times Square on New Years Eve. I it is a perfect, defenseless target, streamed to millions of people live. I do it, but only for the same reason that I did not cut and run in 2001. My family have lived and died mostly in NYC area…one side of my family was the first settlers of Brooklyn and on out into Long Island in the mid-1600s; the other side came in the 1830s as poor Irish immigrants and its second generation produced a NYC mayor…Thomas F. Gilroy. You could look it up. I’ll be damned if I will allow myself to be terrorized. Not by external or internal enemies. But the terror remains. Bet on it.
Thirteen years later…the terror remains.
AG
Yes it does. It wasn’t over on 9/11. Next my mail was contaminated with anthrax. After that, my government told me to get plastic sheeting and duct tape and extra water. After that, the color-coded terror charts. And the constant hum of fighter jets over our cities for nearly a year.
Yes.
But that was government-sposored terror.
They used it as a control mechanism.
Used it pretty well, it seems to me.
Terror from enemies is one thing, but terror from our own supposed “government!!!???”
Unacceptable on any level.
AG
in ny area it went on for years; a giant tent of forensics trying to identify DNA, no transportation in lower Manhattan’s rutted streets, fire burning until feb with the unnamed smell, then all the friends who got sick, died before the 10 yr anniversary
I worked for the Post Office at the time of those color-coded warnings. We had one tacked to the wall. I thought about taking it but decided against it. Did not want to risk a career in the federal government by theft.
When I first started working at a VA Hospital Nixon resigned. I was thinking about stealing his portrait, but decided against getting fired for theft. I did get a thank you from Nixon and all it cost me was two years of my life.
Were you in Maintenance? Remember those super-expensive biohazard detectors installed on the AFCS’s? With the sole source reagents? Someone made a bundle on that. BTW, they are gone now, but we are still vacuuming instead of blowing the equipment, although Jersey was the only incident that ever occurred.
No, I was a letter carrier and union activist. When my hands gave out (repetitive stress) they put me behind a desk with a telephone on it and told me to answer it if it ever rang.
God love you, you had the worst job in the Postal Service. Everyone either transfers to another job or winds up disabled.
Is it just because I was young (8th grade when planes hit) or am I the only one who went on living life the same as I always did without much fear?
probably because you weren’t in the greater NY area or working for post office. The Towers could be seen from NJ, CT, Long Island and most ppl oriented themselves by them when driving in the region. ppl would get lost driving for months afterward. I talked with several ppl who worked in nearby buildings who walked away and had never been back ten years later. for years the roads weren’t repaired and even the electric in lower Manhattan wasn’t fully functional. The Anthrax added a bizarre dimension to it. I recall an illustrative incident from late October: on a narrow Greenwich Village street that was a thoroughfare to one of the Avenues a truck was unloading furniture and traffic was way backed up. As the entire fall was that year, it was a sunny warm day; instead of what would have happened before – drivers leaning on car horns yelling at the truck, everyone got out of their cars and started chatting, enjoying the weather; the street was lined with saw horses, hundreds of with missing signs posted along them and on doors. One effect of the trauma was that the usual had lost any urgency.
to me the DNA tent was one of the worst things. It was set up by the NYU hospital complex around 3rd AVe and took up what seemed to be an entire block. It was there over a year, I don’t recall how long, until they finally gave up trying to identify DNA – I believe for about a third of those who died no DNA was ever found
I should have noted that those in NYC that had more directly experienced the events of that day would naturally have been shaky and scared for a while. Just as we here in CA are after a larger earthquake which hit without warning/advance notice.
we weren’t scared, (at least I wasn’t) that doesn’t describe it, how do you describe the state of breathing in that smoke for months and knowing what it was
I think most ppl were just trying to get through every day, and that was difficult. many ppl moved, changed career (financial analyst to chef, one person I talked with), got married/ divorced, and so on.
I remember the seemingly endless waves of C-119’s flying south east out of O’Hare right over our house, O’Hare being a major marshaling center. You’re right, it was scary, but also exhilarating as I was a 17 year old boy which is about where testosterone peaks. We were as crazy as stags in Autumn and for about the same reasons.
No, Booman. That is <u<not</u>”unvarnished truth-telling.” That is mealy-mouthed, half-hearted confession after it’s way too late. “Unvarnished truth-telling” would have been saying this before it was politically expedient to do so. Way before. Like the first day his handlers laid out on his desk what had been up for the previous 8 years. But…like a good PermaGov company man…he kept his mouth shut and allowed the cancer at the heart of this country to continue to metastasize .
He reminds me of that GM CEO…Mary Barra…claiming that the life-threatening set of flaws in GM’s cars had not come to the attention of the bosses during the decade or so previous to their publicized “discovery.” Sayinbg that they’ve finally found our about it and “They’re doing the best they can” to ameliorate the situation. It’s bullshit, Booman, and you damned well know it. Up and down the corporate line. Sheer bullshit. The police and intelligence forces will continue to do what they have been doing under ever-deeper cover and the corporate bosses will continue to try to hide faults in their products as long as no one important goes to jail or is…let us pray….publicly executed on the White House lawn.
Same game, different frame.
WTFU.
Obama’s actions are and have been indefensible.
End of fucking story.
AG
Thank you, Arthur.
If Obama – or anyone else in a position of authority – says “we murdered some people,” then I’ll consider it truth-telling. And if enough varnish is chipped away to give the “some folks” actual names and a measure of dignity, and their murderers fully prosecuted – like we would expect with any other murders, most of which are far less premeditated and horrific – then I’ll truly be impressed. Not before.
On a truth-telling scale of 1 to 1000, s high score of 3 is not cause for celebration.
“Mistakes were made.”
Is there significance to the fact that the name of the president does not feature in this piece?
I’ve always assumed that “terrified of his own intelligence apparatus” explained much of his actions. Kennedy spoke up and was dead a week later. When a new president learns just how powerful they are, how can there be any reaction but terror?
Enlisting to serve one’s country has risks. Wouldn’t the military reject those volunteers too terrified to do their job? And those young men and women volunteers have a higher risk of incurring great bodily harm than politicians or a President does.
If those volunteers found out after they showed up for boot camp that any defiance would result in the deaths of everyone they love, what would they do? Yes, I know the idea is paranoid, but would it really surprise you that much?
Would make an effort to get a record of such a threat for public dissemination at a much later date and keep my head down and not enlist for a second term.
Do you wear your tinfoil hat with or without a ground strap?
I understand that it sounds paranoid. Maybe it is. But the things that we now know to be true were considered paranoid by all the serious people only a year ago. Do you have any reason to believe that we know everything now?
We know they tapped Angela Merkel’s cell phone. And Dilma Rouseff’s cell phone. So it only stands to reason that they’ve tapped Obama’s cell phone too. Along with the cell phones of every low-level grunt in the White House, the Dept. of Justice, the State Dept… all the way up to the top.
That kind of stuff is what these people do and if you think about it, the most valuable intelligence to them, the intelligence that they need day in and day out, is not the intelligence from Germany or Brazil — it’s the intelligence from the people in the other branches of our (um, “our”) government that they go to war against every day. Think J. Edgar Hoover, but on a massive scale.
So when you suggest that Obama should just grow a pair and start naming names — who’s going to prosecute? Where is the follow-through? You don’t have to postulate a personal threat against Obama, his family, etc., it’s way beyond that. It’s not just Obama and it’s not a question of a single individual’s courage any more: they already own everyone’s balls, and ovaries too.
The Oath of Office:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
You may notice that it doesn’t read “Except if I’m afraid of the CIA.”
Volunteered to serve in Vietnam and did so. Don’t step up if you aren’t packing the gear.
What risk would you be willing to take if they threatened your family, your friends, every single person you ever met? If you knew they had the power to start wars, kill millions, and write it off as a necessity to maintain their control over you? At what point do you decide that the best thing you can do for the Country, and the world, is to not defy them? Do we know for sure that such a thing isn’t possible?
Oh please. This is the outfit that missed the fall of the Berlin Wall and any number of other things before and after. This is the outfit that’s reliant on cell phone algorithms to target drones in Kuwait. If they were supermen they’d be doing a better job of spycraft. The reason Obama is kowtowing to them has more to do with placating the MIC than it does fear.
Being incompetent at analysis and at cutting edge technology doesn’t mean they don’t know how to do a political assassination.
Or who to hire to outsource it. So your argument here is not convincing.
OTOH, I agree that it’s not so much a matter of “fear”. My strong suspicion is that it’s much more a matter of “pick your battles” and “setting priorities”.
Remember how Senator Obama was opposed to the FISA extension in 2008 until the substitute plane on his Presidential campaign carrying him and his family had engine trouble and had to make an emergency landing.
That was right before the Secret Service shut off the metal detectors at that big rally in D-A-L-L-A-S.
That was right before he switched his position on FISA.
I wonder how the NY Times would cover the press conference where Obama outs the CIA for their various crimes over the years.
“President has meltdown.” “Is Obama mentally ill?” “Biden steps up to take over during crisis.”
Don’t fucking run for president then. No one forced him to run.
I’m guessing that he didn’t mention this:
Release of heavily redacted CIA torture report delayed
Look, you would have to be an idiot not to know that there was dirt there in the CIA if you were running for President in 2008, so anyone who ran knew what was ahead. But as we saw, Clinton had no problem overlooking Iran-contra and all the associated crimes. And maybe the CIA wanted someone who could be trusted (Mena) who was not drawing a lot of attention, as Bush I was doing.
My point is that anyone who was elected in 2008 should have, by moral and legal obligation, known that a lot of fellows in Langley should be doing time. And I can guarantee you that no one who would have been elected was going to. The problem isn’t Obama. The problem is what happened to our country.
Most of the prosecutions for Iran/Contra happened during the Bush I administration. Most of it was over by the time Clinton arrived. The Democrats is Congress allowed the Republicans to walk over them by their being reluctant to consider impeaching another President. And their failure to impeach lower officers like Poindexter, which would be a more proper use of impeachment, allowed Poindexter to work the revolving door and return.
A corrupt system allows corruption to continue and metasize. And we have had a corrupt system of governance almost from the beginning–with sporadic episodes of housecleaning only when the public gets riled up enough about the right things.
The problem with our country is that Rush Limbaugh and the Koch brothers control our domestic policy and the deep state controls our foreign policy and internal surveillance and both are in runaway mode.
The President as much as said yesterday with his “full confidence in Brennan statement” and his “documents the Senate shouldn’t have” statement that the CIA has him under threat.
Time for the Senate Intelligence Committee to leak the full report and let the dirty laundry all come out. If the committee can’t rise to that patriotic duty, then some subset of the committee should. We should stop pretending that we don’t have a serious Constitutional crisis that has continued because of the failure of Congress during the Carter administration.
Right now we are entering some dangerous ethical discourse in which torture is minor and genocide is thinkable again even by Jews. In the 1960s, we thought that that at least was settled.
I agree. However, I’m just guessing the leaking the report is likely some kind of crime. And they will find out who did it. So it’s a question of do you want to end your career for that principle? Obviously someone should, but I doubt it will happen.
War crimes are some kind of a crime. That doesn’t seem to be ending any careers.
Mike Gravel understood the calculus with regard to the American people. And he used his Congressional immunity to put the Pentagon Papers in the Congressional Record even though the Department of Justice then sought to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg.
There are more legal wrinkles now that Congress has limited immunity to collective actions of a committee. But a Member of Congress leaking a document by reading it into the Congressional Record has many precedents.
The administration of “No Drama Obama” however will be furious and Holder will likely unload another Espionage case on a member of Congress who is doing his job of oversight. That’s the Constitutional crisis we should be having instead of this mindless GOP obstructionism.
Every President from day one has known that evil has/is done in the name of whatever- god, country, money, family…
And some people just don’t mind being evil.
America (The Land That Never Has Been but Should Be) is full of hypocrisy, folks.
‘Folks’! The usage is so quasi quaint. Where did he pick it up? And the word’s juxtapositiion with ‘torture’ is stomach-churning. I guess he means ‘people’. About that taboo against lying: are you talking about his lying or someone else’s? Whatever, he’s lying. For almost six years Obama has been rearranging the ghosts on the deck of the Titanic hoping that no one notices the ship sunk some time ago. If he asked for my advice, I’d say perform less and put yourself on the line more. But he won’t ask me. We can still look forward to the first woman president. Can you imagine, after her stint the disillusionment will then be total. Oh well, maybe the first gay president will save the Republic or maybe even a rat!
I wouldn’t suppose that Obama might be afraid of ‘his own intelligence apparatus’ almost as if he’s a victim? Obviously he finds it hunky-dory the way it is. Consider the rabid application of the Espionage Act against anything that even stirs. After all, his friend Eric at Justice seems to agree. I better stop posting on this, I’ll only make myself sick. As if Gaza is enough.
“Folks” is common usage for Chicago’s South-side black people. I’ve heard it many times when discussing weighty matters with black friends. He probably picked it up at Church. Don’t know if it’s common in Hawaii, I’ve never been there.
Statements that weighty should be carefully drafted, not spoken off the cuff. “Folks” minimized the seriousness of what are essentially war crimes.
Thank you TarheeDem. I though it just might be me, folks.
Far be it for me to defend Obama, but I think that was intended to be weighty. I also think it was intended to be the last word.
At least he didn’t say, “Whoopsa daisy!”
I kind of like “some folks”.
“We accidentally blew up some folks at a wedding.”
“We accidentally eviscerated some folks who were goat-herding.”
Well, Obama, it just so happens is as about as far from Chicago’s Southside black community as he could possibly be.
Well, that’s who he represented as a State Senator.
That was then, and this is now.
The ethnocentric vocabulary knowledge of some of the posters here is sad. Folks is natural in African American speech. And frankly, it was a likely a sincere indicator of his true despair about American torture (read evil in America).
Can’t avowed liberals accept the fact that the President of the United States of America is an African American! He shouldn’t have to whitesplain all the time.
And, BTW, friends, the president and his family are afraid all the time. They still function better then most public figures, forgiving folks who would do them harm and doing as much as possible in this toxic culture.
As above, a statement about the CIA torturing should be carefully drafted and not said off the cuff.
Sincere. It should be sincere.
Careful crafted statements about Torture has been the problem.
…though it gave white collar voyeur predators good CVs.
What was so especially sincere about it? He said about as little as could get away with. How can you judge if he was sincere? Actions speak louder than words, as they way. I won’t be sanctimonious about that, just hypocritical.
The best you can say for the President is that he was better than the alternative…
no, that is not true. don’t blather about things you know nothing about
I saw this on tv at a restaurant with no sound. I don’t watch the president a lot, but to me he looked very tired, very sad, and more than a little angry.
Yes, this nation has not allowed him the possibilities he and the rest of us envisioned.
I think “folks” was part of his emotions
There’s more than one way of reading this. At Juan Cole’s place they’re referring to Obama’s speech as a “forthright condemnation” of CIA torture, and
Cole doesn’t say things like that lightly, and he’s certainly not biased in Obama’s favor on national security issues.
John Brennan, one of the architects of the torture policy, as no doubt the report documents, still has his job. Guess blackmailing over screwing your biographer is more effective than blackmailing over collaborating in an official program of torture as far as White House advisers are concerned.
There is a reason that the CIA was snooping on the Senate; it wants to keep the American people in the dark about what it has done. And John Brennan most especially wants to hide his role in the Bush administration.
I just scrolled past this title and read it as “Worse Than Medicare Performance.”
The answer…???
Yes.
By far.
Obama has sealed his fate as president with this performance.
He is worse than a lame duck now.
He is a lame duck with clipped wings.
On a chain.
Cain’t swim, neither.
Chain’s too heavy.
So it goes.
Later…
AG