On Christians, atheists, and torture

By Frank Moraes 

I have this tendency to be most critical of the groups that I'm part of. You see this a lot in terms of my thinking about the Democratic Party. But I dare say you see it most of all with my thinking about atheists. And there is a lot to dislike about the modern atheist movement. I am an atheist in the Arthur Schopenhauer tradition. Much of modern atheism is intellectually vacuous. But as popular movements go, it is still pretty good. There isn't likely to be a mass movement that I have any less criticism of.

Probably the best aspect of modern atheism is that there is a strong current of humanism in it. I think it is the case that people like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens are admired despite being torture proponents, not because of it. What's more, I don't so much see myself as part of the atheist community in the sense that I read atheist blogs and go to atheist conventions. I see myself as a member of the growing numbers of people who just aren't religious. And by and large, this is a mighty fine group.

I found the recent release of the torture report as upsetting as it was unsurprising. So I was somewhat pleased to read Steve Benen's "This Week in God" today. Its focus was on a new Washington Post/ABC News poll on attitudes about torture. It confirms the results of a 2009 poll by Pew. As you've probably heard, Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of torture. Of those polled, 59% were just peachy with what the CIA did; only 31% had a problem with it. Obviously, that was not what pleased me.

This poll subdivided people by their religious affiliations. So Benen put together the following graph that sums up the main categories:

Benen pointed out that people with "no religion" were pretty much the only group in the report that were against torture. I wish the numbers were better than they are, but they are far better than average. And the major Christian groups are all worse than average. It's disgusting, but again, unsurprising. It goes along with my primary complaint against modern American Christians: their religion is all culture and no theology. The one thing they absolutely believe is that people like them are "good" and people not like them (e.g., Muslims) are "bad." Thus they don't really care. After all, it's not like anyone is suggesting burning the evildoers alive. (Not that they would be against that either.)

As much as I'm pleased that we non-believers demonstrate more humanity than average, this information is profoundly disturbing. We are, after all, an almost 80% Christian country. And the only takeaway from that is that Christianity is "right" and that Christians are oppressed whenever someone says "Happy holidays!" to them. We live in a sad world.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

American torture: Gul Rahmân and Dick Cheney

By Infidel753 

I don't actually know who Gul Rahmân was, and neither do most Americans, which is unfortunate. One salient fact about him is known, however -- he was not a terrorist. Nevertheless, due to an error, he was apparently arrested on suspicion of being one. He later died under torture in CIA custody.

Take a moment to let that sink in. An innocent man died under torture, torture inflicted by Americans, as part of a program officially sanctioned by the American government at the time.

The horror of the situation goes beyond that, however.  Here is part of an interview with Dick Cheney, in which the case came up: 

CHUCK TODD: Let me ask you, what do you say to Gul Rahman, what do you say to Sulaiman Abdula, what do you say to Khalid al-Masri? All three of these folks were detained, they had these interrogation techniques used on them. They eventually were found to be innocent. They were released, no apologies, nothing. What do we owe them? 

DICK CHENEY: Well -- 

CHUCK TODD: I mean, let me go to Gul Rahman. He was chained to the wall of his cell, doused with water, froze to death in C.I.A. custody. And it turned out it was a case of mistaken identity. 

DICK CHENEY: -- right. But the problem I had is with the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield. Of the 600 and some people who were released out of Guantanamo, 30% roughly ended up back on the battlefield. Today we're very concerned about ISIS. Terrible new terrorist organization. It is headed by named Baghdadi. Baghdadi was in the custody of the U.S. military in Iraq in Camp Bucca. He was let go and now he's out leading the terror attack against the United States. I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent. 

CHUCK TODD: 25% of the detainees though, 25% turned out to be innocent. They were released. 

DICK CHENEY: Where are you going to draw the line, Chuck? How are -- 

CHUCK TODD: Well, I'm asking you. 

DICK CHENEY: -- you going to know? 

CHUCK TODD: Is that too high? You're okay with that margin for error? 

DICK CHENEY: I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.

And there you have it. Leave aside the consensus, among most who understand the issue, that torture almost never produces reliable or useful information. Cheney has "no problem" with using torture even though a quarter of the victims were innocent, even though at least one innocent person (and I certainly don't believe he was the only one) died under torture. This is a former Vice President of the United States, but the words coming out of his mouth sound better suited to Lenin or Himmler.

Cheney justifies the use of torture on the basis of the 9/11 attack, which was indeed a horrific atrocity. The problem is that almost every regime we have ever condemned for using torture could advance a comparable argument. North Vietnam, for example, lost a lot more than 3,000 innocent civilians to American bombing during the war in which it tortured John McCain. There are certain lines which a civilized state doesn't cross, even under that kind of provocation. Such standards are what distinguish us from a communist dictatorship or a fascist gangster-state.

Or used to.

McCain, the only Republican to really distinguish himself honorably in the wake of the torture report's release, understands this. The many members of his party who continue to defend the program and attack its detractors do not.

And this means that I owe some people an apology. In the past I've been very critical of bloggers who compared the Republican party to the Nazis. I believed that they were weakening a strong case against the Republicans by making an absurdly overblown comparison. Yes, there is much evil in the Republican Party, but comparing them to the Nazis was going much too far, offensively so.

Those bloggers were right. I was wrong. Not that the Republicans are guilty of everything the Nazis were guilty of, of course, but if a politician of Cheney's stature can defend torture, even torture of the innocent, and if a broad range of political figures from the party can continue to support that position, then yes, they are straying onto the same ideological turf.

These people have no idea what they've done. This program, and the continued defense of it by a major part of our political establishment, have done damage to our country's moral authority and global standing that can probably never be repaired.

A lot of ordinary Americans don't yet understand it either. As commenter Tommykey observed in response to last weekend's link round-up over at my blog: 

Of course, my Facebook feed was filled with people posting pictures of the Twin Tower burning with captions like "Waterboarding is fine with me" or some variations of approval for torture juxtaposed with a picture of 9/11, as if that automatically justifies it.

And, of course, from Pakistan to Morocco there are probably millions of people reading the revelations of the torture report and thinking, "Terrorist attacks on the United States are fine with me -- now."

(Cross-posted at Infidel753.)

Maybe they'll finally do something

By Carl 

The CIA searched computers intended to be used solely by the Senate Intelligence Committee in an apparent effort to determine how committee staff members gained access to a draft version of an internal agency review of its controversial interrogation program, U.S. officials said.

The action, some officials say, would mark the first time a U.S. intelligence agency has accessed congressional computers and would be an apparent violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers.

So the CIA finally decided that senators are people, too? 

It's not the separation of powers that should concern senators. It's the fact that the CIA is directly tasked with espionage overseas, not domestically (that's the purview of the NSA, thankyewverymuch).

And it's not like this is an ambiguous situation. We've been down this road already once in recent memory.

As with many things CIA, it looks like a case of trying to intimidate and badger people looking into behaviors they would prefer be kept under wraps, no matter how sworn to secrecy that investigator(s) might be. I can understand that a spy agency might want to keep a lower profile about some of the sausage-making it has to perform – after all, imagine if someone got a whiff of Zero Dark Thirty ahead of time – but senators?

And even allowing for the grandstanding many of them, who really ought to know better, engage in, it might be a good idea to rein in the hounds.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Well, now this is interesting

By Carl

President Obama made an overture to Iran today at the United Nations:

This mistrust has deep roots. Iranians have long complained of a history of US interference in their affairs, and America's role in overthrowing an Iranian government during the cold war.

This is the first official acknowledgement of CIA involvement in the 1953 coup that overthrew the very popular elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was friendly towards the Soviet Union, and installing an ally in the Shah.

Verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry interesting.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Benghazi still not a scandal

By Frank Moraes 

So what is this stuff about Benghazi I wrote about earlier? Last Thursday, CNN broke a story suggesting that the CIA was running guns from Libya to Syria out of the Benghazi proto-embassy. This, supposedly explains the administration's "cover up" of the attack. The big problem I see here is that the story is an answer to a question no reasonable person is asking. But okay, I'll bite.

CNN claims that they've learned that "dozens" of CIA operatives were "on the ground" in Benghazi the night of the attack. I want to start with the vague number "dozens." It literally means at least 24. Yet the article later claims that there were only 35 people total at the compound and that there were 21 at the annex, which is claimed to have been run by the CIA. Still, 21 is a lot of people.

But why would this make us believe that it had (1) anything to do with gun running and (2) anything to do with the attack? CNN doesn't even have a source for the first connection. All it says is this, "Speculation on Capitol Hill has included the possibility the U.S. agencies operating in Benghazi were secretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels." Note all the weasel words here: speculation, included, possibility. As for the second connection there is nothing at all.

The article also gives major time to Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). He believes that we need to have public hearings with everyone who was in Benghazi the night of the attack. I'm all for that, but I don't think that Wolf is an honest broker here. This is a man, after all, who thinks that Edward Snowden is a traitor. He's said some nice things against the surveillance state, but I suspect if a Republican where in the White House, he wouldn't even go that far.

It seems to me just another Republican witch hunt with the vaguest of targets. After all, even the CNN article provides no reason to believe that anything the CIA was doing had anything to do with the attack. So what would Wolf's hearings be but an open ended opportunity for the Republicans to snipe at the Democratic administration?

Read more »

Edward Snowden and U.S. hypocrisy

By Frank Moraes

Glenn Greenwald mentioned an interesting bit of American hypocrisy over the weekend that relates directly to what is going on with Edward Snowden. In 2001, Muslim cleric Abu Omar was granted asylum by Italy because he was being persecuted by the Mubarak government in Egypt. Then, two years later, a group of CIA agents kidnapped him off the street in broad daylight. They took him back to Egypt, where he spent four years in prison being tortured. He was originally charged with belonging to an illegal group, but the charges were ultimately dropped.

In February of this year, four members of the Italian secret service were convicted of complicity in this kidnapping and were given six to ten years in prison. What about the American CIA operatives? In 2009, the Italian government indicted 23 of them, including Milan station chief Robert Lady. The United States would not cooperate (justice is for the little people and foreigners) so the Italian government had to convict them in absentia. Greenwald made three points about this at the time. First, such convictions would never happen in our country; government officials have done far worse and we just ignore it. Second, our government did everything it could to interfere with the Italian judicial process. And third, our lack of accountability is an indication that we don't have a truly independent court system. The article is very good and well worth reading in full.

Since retiring, Robert Lady has lived in Latin America. Last week, while crossing the boarder into Panama, Lady was arrested at the request of Italy who wanted to extradite him to serve his sentence for the kidnapping. But on Friday, he was released following some negotiations with the U.S. State Department. And that is probably as it should be. I think that countries ought to look out for their citizens, although as in this case, the United States has far too much power in this regard.

Read more »

The Benghazi scandal that isn't: How Republicans and the media are distorting a tragedy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Another day, another breathless report of something supposedly "new" in the whole Benghazi saga, which really just amounts to a media-enabled Republican assault on the the Obama Administration -- first the president himself as the target, now, with Republicans looking ahead to 2016, Hillary Clinton.

Today it's from Jonathan Karl of ABC News, who "reports" the following:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.  The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

Okay... and? 

As ThinkProgress notes:

[T]he ABC report suggests the State Department "scrubbed" the talking points of terror references as some sort of nefarious cover-up of what really happened in Benghazi for political reasons. This, of course, playing into the GOP's conspiracy theory that President Obama was trying to preserve his campaign theme that his policies has significantly crippled the terror network. 

And I would note that Karl's piece seems to be written from the perspective of those conspiracy theories. At the very least, Karl is playing right along with the right's obsessions. ThinkProgress continues:

The story soon set reporters and Twitter alight. "Scrubbing the truth from Benghazi," a National Journal headline read. Even the BBC speculated that "heads will roll."

But absent in ABC's report is the key point that Obama and various members of his administration referred to the Benghazi assault as a terror attack on numerous occasions shortly after the incident (thereby negating the need to "scrub" any references in the talking points) and that then-CIA Director David Petraeus said the terrorist references were taken out to, as the New York Times reported, "avoid tipping off the groups" that may have been involved.

Basically, the State Department -- specifically former Cheney advisor Victoria Nuland -- was more involved in the development of the talking points than previously reported.

Republicans and their various enablers in the media -- who may think they're digging for the truth but are really just doing the Republicans' bidding -- seem to think this rises to the level of, well, something possibly worse than Watergate.

Read more »

Breeding distrust

By Mustang Bobby

John Brennan will go to Capitol Hill today for his confirmation hearing as the next director of the CIA. Thanks to the news about the memo on drones, it should be an interesting hearing.

Whether or not you think killing people — Americans or not — by remote control is a good or a bad idea, or whether you think the level of secrecy around it insulates us as a people from the harsh things our government does in our name, the part that gets to a lot of people — myself included — is that the attitude of the people who knew about it turns out to be “Trust us.” As anyone who has grown up beyond the age of ten knows, when you have to tell someone to trust you, you shouldn’t.

I don’t buy into all the conspiracy nutsery (see below), but I also believe trust is binary: you either have it or you don’t, and winning it back is not just a matter of “Well, we mislead you on this, but the next time, trust us.” It becomes a loop.

Charlie Pierce gets to it.

It is now beyond cliche to observe that government secrecy “breeds distrust” in our institutions. What is never mentioned is that, if you breed enough distrust in the institutions — or, more to the point, if the activities of the institutions breed distrust in themselves — the trust people once placed in them has to gosomewhere. And, generally, it goes into dreams and schemes and circus clowns that the people dream up themselves. The very real use of drones, and the very real possibility that they will be in general use in domestic law-enforcement before very long, because we’re more than already halfway there now, already have combined to set the paranoid imagination fully a’bloom. Government secrecy and deception blurs the line between genuine fears over the decline of civil liberties, and the wild-assed fantasies of the black-helicopter crowd. If you want to see the true destructive power of Droneworld in this country, look deeply into the Id of the democratic political imagination. There are angry, feral creatures in there, stalking the ruins, howling for blood.

There are those who will never trust the government or any elected official. They fully believe that once someone becomes a public servant they are secretly led into the cabal and become “one of them.” They’re the ones who start looking for pods in the basement. It’s when the rest of us start thinking that there might be something to it that we get into real trouble.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Dr. Jekyll and President Hyde

By Frank Moraes

My friend Andrea gets mad at me when I rag on the president too much. To her, Obama is so much better than Bush that we should just be grateful that we don't have a complete fucking idiot in the White House. But here's the thing: I am grateful. I usually defend myself by saying, "I think Obama is the best president we could ever expect to have!" But this is more a statement of my terrifying level of cynicism than it is of my opinion of Obama.

Let me pull back for a moment. If I were in the Senate and I got to question John Brennan today, I would have only one question for him, "Do you want to be head of the CIA?" I assume his answer would be, "Yes." And that would tell me everything I needed to know. "Then I'm afraid, Mr. Brennan, that you are not qualified to run the CIA. I'm very sorry. I hope you will spend the rest of your life volunteering at a local homeless shelter. The second to last place we can afford to put a power hungry asshole in charge is at the CIA."

The very last place we can afford to put a power-hungry asshole in charge is the presidency of the United States. I suspect that when Obama was a community organizer, he was a great guy. He was the kind of guy who should be the President of the United States. But once he started to be noticed as a member of the Illinois State Senate? And certainly, by the time he became a United States Senator? He'd been corrupted.

Read more »

Torture worse than torture disclosure

By Frank Moraes 

Does irony still exist in the United States? I doubt it. Former CIA officer John Kiriakou has been given two and a half years for leaking classified information. In the end, all of his charges were reduced to giving the name of one covert operative to a reporter. (Why does that sound familiar?) But in reality, Kiriakou has been prosecuted for leaking the information that the CIA was engaged in torture.

Let's see now, this prosecution follows how many indictments of people for engaging in torture? Oh, that's right: none! Because it is totally okay in the United States to torture anyone we claim is an "evil doer" but it is treasonous to tell anyone we are doing it. Hell, with all our military capacity, we don't have to be good, we can just enforce the appearance of good.

To top matters off, it's always good to know that we have a whole bunch of evil idiotic assholes passing judgement on all of us. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema was none too happy with the sentence. She thought it was way too light. And if that wasn't enough to establish her evil-stupid credentials, she said, "This is not a case of a whistleblower. This is a case of a man who betrayed a solemn trust."[1] Yeah, like trashing the Constitution and allowing free reign of the surveillance state.

Fuck the United States of America! Long may the elites rape it! 
__________

[1] Note that "man who betrayed a solemn trust" is more or less the definition of a whistleblower as seen from the inside.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

The problem with John Brennan

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The focus yesterday was on Chuck Hagel, whom President Obama tapped for defense secretary, but the president's nominee for post-Petraeus CIA director, White House insider and key Obama advisor John Brennan, deserves some attention as well, because it says a lot -- a lot that isn't good -- about Obama's national security values and priorities.

While I continue to object to Hagel's nomination, I don't object to Hagel himself. He's a conservative Republican, but his record on U.S. militarism over the past decade has been extremely good, turning on the Iraq War when it was rather unpopular to do so, particularly for a Republican, and proving to be an admirable realist in his approach to the military. (As something of a liberal interventionist, I find his realism admirable but hardly sufficient. But I'll take his realism over the right-wing militarism you find among the neocons. That's an easy call.)

Indeed, my problem with the nomination is not so much that it's going to Hagel but that it's going to a Republican when there are strong Democratic alternatives, including especially Michèle Flournoy, who would be just as good, if not better. As Jon Chait pointed out yesterday, the only thing that really sets Hagel apart is the fact that he's been the target of a vicious smear campaign led by neocon Bill Kristol. Although, to be fair, he does have other things going for him as well, including the fact that he's a vet and that he has a strong relationship with both Obama and Vice President Biden. 

Anyway, my point is that whatever my concerns I can accept Hagel at the Pentagon. He'll be fine. Far more troubling is Brennan's appointment, which suggests once more that the president's objective is not just to continue the Bush-Cheney national security state but to extend and expand it (even if on at least one key issue, torture, he has pulled back).

Read more »

Senate letter condemning Zero Dark Thirty

By Frank Moraes 

A remarkable thing happened yesterday. Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain sent a letter to Michael Lynton, the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment. It was regarding the portrayal of torture in the new film, Zero Dark Thirty. Feinstein does it as the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

It is a most reasonable, if direct, letter. They point out that they understand that writers make things up to tell a more dramatic story. Their concern is with the opening of the film which displays on the screen, "Based on first-hand accounts of actual events." They call for the producers to make clear that torture was not helpful in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Read more »

Rice burners

By Carl 

It strikes me that the Republicans are being a little disingenuous in their efforts to derail the not-even-announced nomination of UN Ambassador Susan Rice to Secretary of State, replacing the resigning Hillary Clinton.

Her CV, for one, suggests an intelligent and gifted person who would be adept at managing foreign affairs for the Obama administration, perfect for the job. In this, she would outshine the presumptive second choice, Senator John Kerry, which is no easy feat.

The controversy, as you know doubt know ad nauseam, is Rice's comments in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the Benghazi compound of the American ambassador there.

The facts are pretty clear: an organized attack occured on the compound on September 11. Either coincidentally or in a coordinated misdirection, there was also a protest in Egypt over some bloody idiot's idea of a prank on the same day. It doesn't really matter how Egypt played into this, except it also made a convenient excuse to buy a little time if needed.

Rice went on the Sunday talk shows, and implied that the Egypt attack may have been a part of the Libyan massacre, even if tangentially. This was the talking point the CIA had handed up to the administration, which greenlighted it as an interim explanation, even though it was clear from the get-go this was a terrorist attack.

Why the deception? The CIA had assets on the ground in Libya that would have been exposed if their information had been made public.

Read more »

Terror and injustice: Obama Administration considers rules for drone campaign

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The big story today -- and obviously I'm not including the Steelers' embarrassing loss to the Browns (let's talk no more of that) -- is the revelation that the White House is working to establish rules governing drone strikes:

Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.

The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6. But with more than 300 drone strikes and some 2,500 people killed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military since Mr. Obama first took office, the administration is still pushing to make the rules formal and resolve internal uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action is justified.

Mr. Obama and his advisers are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory. 

This was always an obvious problem, a gaping hole in Obama's drone war. Leave aside for a moment the question of the justice/injustice of the drone strikes themselves. The president has used unchecked executive authority to use drone strikes to conduct America's nebulous war on terror. This has left the door wide open for excess and abuse -- and indeed, 2,500 dead and countless more injured, including innocent civilians (however much the CIA may try to avoid such collateral damage), seems to point to both.

Read more »

On Benghazi, it's desperately partisan Republicans vs. Obama, the CIA, and the facts

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The desperate Republican obsession with Benghazi -- and more broadly with bringing down President Obama no matter what -- ran into a problem on Friday by the name of General David Petraeus.

Yes, yes, I know, l'affaire Petraeus is the current media obsession, but let's detach that scandal from the general's closed-door comments to Congress.

But first, the obsession, courtesy this time of the WSJ:

David Petraeus told Congress Friday in closed hearings that the CIA believed from the start that the September 11 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi were by terrorists. That leaves one VIP who's still missing from Congressional scrutiny: Hillary Clinton.

GOP Congressman Peter King said Mr. Petraeus's testimony differed from what the former CIA director told Congress immediately after the attacks. Mr. King also said Mr. Petraeus said that the CIA's original talking points on the attacks were edited. The altered version became the basis for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's misleading and now infamous comments blaming the attacks on a YouTube video. Both that discrepancy and the issue of the altered talking points need further digging, especially if Ms. Rice is nominated to be the next Secretary of State. 

The overt purpose of this editorial is to smear Hillary (as well as Rice), but the selective "reporting" of events typical of Republican conspiracy theorizing on Benghazi (and on pretty much everything else) is clear from out outset: the talking points were edited, which is proof of a conspiratorial cover-up (that in the warped view of some Republicans rises to the level of, and even surpasses, Watergate).

But what did Petraeus really say? And what are these Republican partisans (and the WSJ is nothing if not a partisan Republican organ) leaving out?

First, the Obama administration did change "consulate" to "diplomatic facility" -- but only for the sake of accuracy.

Second, and more to the point, check out Daily Intel's recounting of the general's testimony, from the AP report. Basically:

-- Yes, the CIA from the outset thought the attack involved a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda.

-- Yes, CIA talking points referred to it as a terrorist attack.

-- Yes, those talking points were changed to remove references to terrorism, though by whom exactly Petraeus wasn't clear.

-- Yes, Rice's comments on the Sunday talk shows reflected these new talking points, which means she was relaying the CIA's "best intelligence" when saying the attacks were spontaneous.

But: 

Democrats said Petraeus made it clear the change was not made for political reasons during President Barack Obama's re-election campaign.

"The general was adamant there was no politicization of the process, no White House interference or political agenda," said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. "He completely debunked that idea."

So why the changes? Well, there was a really, really good reason -- one that contrats starkly with Republican efforts to politicize the entire Benghazi story -- lead-up, attack, and aftermath (we saw it from Romney in the heat of the moment just as we're now seeing it from the likes of McCain and Graham): 

The recently resigned spy chief explained that references to terrorist groups suspected of carrying out the violence were removed from the public explanation of what caused the attack so as not to tip off the groups that the U.S. intelligence community was on their trail...

"There was an interagency process to draft it, not a political process," Schiff said. "They came up with the best assessment without compromising classified information or source or methods. So changes were made to protect classified information."

Which is to say, as Dan Amira summed it up, "there was a conspiracy... to catch the terrorists."

You'd think this would shut Republicans up on the matter. It won't.

Desperate to catch Obama in a major scandal, even more so now after what to many of them was a shocking re-election win, they'll keep playing politics not just with a tragedy but with intelligence and the anti-terrorist effort, including the effort to track down the perpetrators of this deadly attack, even with the facts staring them in the face.

Petraeus resigns over affair

By Libby Spencer

Few details but just now, CIA head David Petraeus resigned because of an extra-martial affair. All the smart people are saying he had to do it because, blackmail. Not sure how that works once the affair has been admitted. What leverage does the rejected lover have once it's made public?

Always being the outlier, I'm not a fan of his at all, but I find it hard to believe he would compromise national security for sex. Think it's more likely he had a fling with a younger woman, because that's what men so often do at that stage of marriage, and wants to spare his wife and family the media circus which would be relentless if he held on to the job. This way, since it appears he's leaving immediately, the media will lose interest in a couple of days once they tease out what few prurient details they can. 

**********

Update by MJWS:

The woman in question, according to Slate's Fred Kaplan, is Paula Broadwell, the author of a recent hagiographic book about him, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. Kaplan writes:

Sources tell me that President Obama, who has been getting along with Petraeus very well in the past couple years, agonized for 24 hours over the letter of resignation before accepting it. The move no doubt ends the career of the most famous, and perhaps most strategically astute, American military commander in decades...

It had long been rumored that something was going on between Petraeus and Broadwell. Her book, co-written with Vernon Loeb, is widely regarded as a valentine to the general. When she was embedded with him in Afghanistan, they went on frequent 5-mile runs together. But Petraeus went on 5-mile runs with many reporters, and few people who knew him took the rumors seriously. In his personal life, he’s always been seen as a straight shooter, a square. Few could have imagined that his end would come as the result of a morals scandal.

But that's how it often is, right? It's the ones who seem morally/religiously disinclined to do such things who end up self-destructing.

(And All In's quite the title, no? The jokes write themselves.)

Anyway, here's a photo making the rounds:

As Libby writes:

Looking at this photo, I suspect that may well turn out to be the story. I see an older guy giddy from the attention from a young, attractive, adoring fan girl.  

It's not impossible that there's some dark nefarious plot going on I guess, but lust makes people do crazy things. I'm inclined to go with Occam's razor on this one. I mean, who doesn't know of any otherwise happily married people who were thrust into close proximity for professional reasons and succumbed to sexual attraction? 

I'm generally not one to make too much of these things, which are mostly private matters (except when there's moral-political hypocrisy going on, as in the case of many Republican transgressions). But whatever you think of Petraeus, there's no denying it marks a stunning ending to a long and distinguished career.

CIA documents say Obama was right on Libya attack

By Richard K. Barry

The Washington Post is reporting that the Romney campaign may have screwed-up in saying that statements by President Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice about the Benghazi attacks were not supported by intelligence.

This is according to documents provided by a senior U.S. intelligence official.

The Post writes:

"Talking points" prepared by the CIA on Sept. 15, the same day that Rice taped three television appearances, support her description of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate as a reaction to Arab anger about an anti-Muslim video prepared in the United States. According to the CIA account, "The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations."

And this, I find much to the point:

The Benghazi flap is the sort of situation that intelligence officers dread: when politicians are demanding hard "yes" or "no" answers but evidence is fragmentary and conflicting. The political debate has focused on whether the attack was spontaneous or planned, but the official said there's evidence of both, and that different attackers may have had different motives. There's no dispute, however, that it was "an act of terror," as Obama described it the next day.

The official said the only major change he would make now in the CIA's Sept. 15 talking points would be to drop the word "spontaneous" and substitute "opportunistic."

So, there was a demonstration and some bad buys took advantage of the confusion? Whatever happened, it was an act of terror.

Is this really going to be where Romney hangs his hat on Monday?

One point worth making is that I thought Joe Biden did a very good job at the VP debate of suggesting just how complicated international relations are, especially in the context of violence or potential violence. Romney and Ryan want to throw around a bunch of stupid jingoistic platitudes and call it a foreign policy. As stated above, professionals in the field hate this kind of black and white nonsense that fails to appreciate the reality of complex dynamics.

Romney and Ryan aren't ready for the big time, and this is just one more reason why.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

All just bluster

By Mustang Bobby

In case you missed this piece from Kurt Eichenwald in the New York Times the other day:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that "a group presently in the United States" was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be "imminent," although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives' suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

"The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden," the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government's transliteration of Bin Laden's first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.

That makes this more than just a tad ironic:

A day before the 11th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, former Vice President Dick Cheney jabbed President Barack Obama over a new report that he opted not to attend a number of presidential daily briefings, a decision that Cheney claims is indicative of his aloofness on national security.

"If President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden," a Cheney spokeswoman told The Daily Caller in an email.

So the next time you hear a Republican natter on about being "strong on defense," the most polite response would be derisive laughter.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

OPSie: The lies and hypocrisies of Obama's "patriot" attackers

By Mustang Bobby

A group of former Special Ops personnel are coming after President Obama, accusing him of taking credit for killing Osama bin Laden for himself and leaking national security secrets for political gain. Small problem: according to the Los Angeles Times, they've been leaking secrets themselves:

In politics, the story line rarely changes: Do as I say, not as I do.

Thus several former U.S. intelligence and special operations personnel who have accused President Obama of leaking and "politicizing" national security information have themselves talked publicly about sensitive security matters.

They are members of a new nonprofit group called Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund. Known as OPSEC, military shorthand for operational security, the group says it has raised about $1 million for TV ads and a short film called "Dishonorable Disclosures," which criticizes the Obama administration for alleged national security leaks.

The organizers say they don't intend to release a list of their donors or their members. Neither is required by law.

"It's time for President Obama and other administration officials to stop jeopardizing national security operations for political gain," said Fred Rustmann, an OPSEC member, who worked at the CIA for 24 years before he retired in 1990.

Rustmann and two other key members of the group, all self-described Republicans, have a history of talking openly to the media about national security, a review of articles and transcripts shows.

Rustmann appeared on Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes" in 2005 to discuss Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA operations officer who was outed in July 2003 by members of the George W. Bush administration. A federal jury convicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, of four felony counts for his role in the crime.

There's another group of like-minded patriots called SOS that bases its opposition to Mr. Obama on the fact that he's Not One of Us:

President Barack Obama is a socialist, was raised by communists, and wasn't born in the United States, according to the former Navy SEAL who founded the group Special Operations Speaks (SOS), which aims to portray Obama as anti-military in this election season.

[...]

"I have to admit that I'm a Birther," said SOS founder Larry Bailey, a retired 27-year veteran of the Navy SEALs, in an interview. "If there were a jury of 12 good men and women and the evidence were placed before them, there would be absolutely no question Barack Obama was not born where he said he was and is not who he says he is."

Do the Republicans really want to have a group going around reminding the voters of who got Osama bid Laden when the last guy they had in office couldn't be bothered? And it really doesn't help when they're as loose-lipped with national security secrets as they claim the president has been.

As for the other group, the general consensus is that as soon as you come out with the birther line, you're nothing but a racist asshole and therefore not worth listening to.

Sighted Swiftboat; sank same.

H/T to mistermix at Balloon Juice.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Bush-Cheney ignored CIA warnings about al Qaeda, failed to go after bin Laden prior to 9/11

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yet more evidence that the Bush Administration, for all its self-aggrandizing post-9/11 bluster, did little to nothing to root out America enemies before the attack:

Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.

The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida's relationship with America's ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn't get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. "I don't think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn't get the institutional support they needed," says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.

So Bush-Cheney pushed the CIA around in the lead-up to the Iraq War, politicizing intelligence and fabricating a case for war, but basically ignored the CIA's efforts and warnings about a very real threat to the country's security before 9/11.

Not to excuse the CIA entirely, of course, but this certainly adds to the view many of us have had for a long time now -- not least given that notorious "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US" brief of August 6, 2001, as well as Richard Clarke's January 2001 memo to Condi Rice about the al Qaeda threat, as well as George Tenet's briefing of Condi Rice on July 10, 2001 about an imminent threat -- that Bush & Co. had no interest in dealing with terrorism (and was largely isolationist) before 9/11 and only later used 9/11 as an excuse to go into Afghanistan (justifiably, perhaps, but certainly without focus and a clear long-term purpose) and then to launch the bloody misadventure in Iraq that directed America's resources against a supposed "enemy" that had nothing at all to do with 9/11.

Perhaps there's nothing all that new here, but it's compelling nonetheless, additional confirmation that Bush, Cheney, Rice, and their various minions and cronies were utterly negligent with respect to their national security responsibilities.

Make sure to read the whole piece.