[Peace-discuss] Torture and secrecy under Obama

[Carl G. Estabrook]

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> NY Times covers for Brennan
> Posted: 12 Jan 2013 07:08 AM PST
> FAIR - The New York Times' Scott Shane, reporting on the news that President Barack Obama plans to nominate his terrorism adviser John Brennan to be head of the CIA, writes:
>     The president had considered naming Mr. Brennan to head the CIA when he took office in 2009. But some human rights advocates protested, claiming that as a top agency official under President George W. Bush, Mr. Brennan had supported, or at least had failed to stop, the use of interrogation techniques like waterboarding that are widely considered to be torture. Mr. Brennan denied those accusations but withdrew from consideration, and Mr. Obama gave him the advisory position, which did not require Senate confirmation.
> That Brennan was a supporter of torture is not a claim or an accusation, though–it's a matter of public record. As we pointed out after Brennan's name was withdrawn in 2009, here's what he had to say to CBS News in 2007:
>     The CIA has acknowledged that it has detained about 100 terrorists since 9/11, and about a third of them have been subjected to what the CIA refers to as enhanced interrogation tactics, and only a small proportion of those have in fact been subjected to the most serious types of enhanced procedures…. There have been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists. It has saved lives. And let's not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the deaths of 3,000 innocents.
> If the words "support" and "torture" have any meaning, then Brennan is supporting torture there. This is another example of how in order to be an "objective" reporter, you have to deny that there's any such thing as objective reality.
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> Obama claims right to ignore law he signed
> Posted: 12 Jan 2013 06:40 AM PST
> Dana Liebelson, Mother Jones - Obama signed a new law expanding whistleblower protections for some government employees in November, and on January 2, he signed the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, which extends similar protections to defense contractors who expose waste and corruption. But the NDAA signing came with a caveat that blindsided the bill's backers and has some in the whistleblower community up in arms: In a signing statement, Obama wrote that the bill's whistleblowing protections "could be interpreted in a manner that would interfere with my authority to manage and direct executive branch officials," and he promised to ignore them if they conflicted with his power to "supervise, control, and correct employees' communications with the Congress in cases where such communications would be unlawful or would reveal information that is properly privileged or otherwise confidential."
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> "12 million contractors are going to be out in the cold because of this," warns Jesselyn Radack, the national security and human rights director for the Government Accountability Project and a former whistleblower. "Asking employees to go to their boss before going to Congress defeats the purpose of blowing the whistle." 
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> Obama didn't alert either Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who backed the protections, nor Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), one of the bill's sponsors, that the signing statement was coming, according to reports in the Huffington Post and the Washington Post. In a press release, Speier called Obama's signing statement "deeply disturbing," and warned it could potentially undo the language meant to protect contractor whistleblowers.
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