Phony?

A couple of weeks back, the President admonished us little people not to get distracted by what he termed “phony scandals.” We were wondering just which phony scandal he was wishing we should just drop from our collective radar screens.


Since the IRS admitted that they were targeting and bureaucratically harassing conservative and tea party groups and the decision-making point to do this keeps moving higher and higher up the food chain, we kind of think this still qualifies as scandalous in nature.


How about the NSA data-vacuuming operation? Over the past few weeks, Americans have learned the FISA court that is responsible for approving wire-tapping and snooping in general of overseas phonecalls to suspected bad actors is nothing more than a rubber stamp for monitoring in-country communication between U.S. citizens suspected of zero wrongdoing. And the person who blew the lid on this whole thing, Edward Snowden, has sought and has been granted temporary asylum in Russia. No, that certainly is no mere distraction.


Then you have the Department of Justice snooping on 20 Associated Press reporters and snooping on and naming Fox News reporter, James Rosen, as an unindicted co-conspirator in two separate government leak investigations. The miserable hack that runs the Justice Department who most likely perjured himself in earlier Congressional testimony by saying Justice did not participate in such activities, recently claimed he felt really, really bad about all this. Bullshit. He feels really, really bad that his agency got caught doing it. It’s kind of tough to see how this qualifies as phony.


Which of course brings us to Benghazi and the absolute clusterfark the actions on the ground were on 9/11/2012 and the resulting clusterfark to cover up just what happened and why it happened including the laughable assertion that the coordinated assault was actually a random demonstration fueled by a crappy Youtube video trailer, the maker of which is rotting away in jail right now.


On Thursday, CNN dropped the bombshell that the CIA was intimidating their own people who happened to be in Benghazi on the night of the attack into silence.

"You don't jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well."

And just what were upwards of 35 CIA operatives doing on the ground in Benghazi? Community organizing? We find it rather hard to believe people are shocked that the CIA may have been providing weapons to the Libyan rebels when the New York Times was reporting out on such activities as far back as December of last year.



And check out this 4+ minute video below where we learn that not only has the CIA been thugging their own people into silence they have turned into a witness protection and relocation agency as well.








So, in closing, we implore the President to help us out and be specific with respect to just which one of these scandals is the phony one so our betters there in D.C. can get back to, you know, doing the business of the people.

You think you've had a bad day?

A "profanity-laced screaming match" at the White House involving CIA Director Leon Panetta, and the expected release today of another damning internal investigation, has administration officials worrying about the direction of its newly-appoint intelligence team, current and former senior intelligence officials tell ABC News.com.
.

In addition to concerns about the CIA's reputation and its legal exposure, other White House insiders say Panetta has been frustrated by what he perceives to be less of a role than he was promised in the administration's intelligence structure. Panetta has reportedly chafed at reporting through the director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, according to the senior adviser who said Blair is equally unhappy with Panetta.

"Leon will be leaving," predicted a former top U.S. intelligence official, citing the conflict with Blair. The former official said Panetta is also "uncomfortable" with some of the operations being carried out by the CIA that he did not know about until he took the job.

As Instaglen correctly notes, with respect to operations being carried out by the CIA that Panetta is "uncomfortable" with, aren’t these operations authorized by the President? What is the CIA doing that Panetta would be uncomfortable with?

This is especially curious in light of the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder has just hired a special prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators, Panetta’s own men, may have violated anti-torture laws.

And to make things curiouser and curiouser, the Obama administration has stated they do not plan to suspend the policy of extraordinary rendition initiated under the Bush administration and which received intense criticism from human rights groups.

As it stands then, we wouldn’t blame Panetta one bit for declaring “a pox on all your houses” and getting the hell out of Dodge. His own men will be under the white-hot spotlight of a Justice Department investigation as the administration will use this as a bashing Bush by proxy but he will still be expected to maintain morale and discipline among his troops in the dark and dangerous world of intelligence gathering while fighting a turf war with the DNI and all the while having reservations about administration-approved policies currently being executed by his own agency. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.

Exit question: Given the situation laid out in the paragraph above, precisely how screwed are we?

If it's July, it must be the silly season

Breathless panting all around regarding this secret plan hatched by former Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA to “deal” with the terrorists. With Congressional investigations pending, Nancy Pelosi thinks she will be getting her proverbial day in court with regard to her running feud with the CIA.

We predict, as with the torture kerkuffle a couple of months back, America will give a collective shrug or worse be thankful that someone had the foresight to confront the bad guys on their own terms, thus keeping America safe.

But if the term “secret” seems a little far-fetched to you, it should.

Here’s President Bush from his 2003 State of the Union address:

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries.
And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

(italics, ours)

And here’s President Bush from a radio address back in January of 2005:

In the years since I first swore to preserve, protect and defend our Constitution, our nation has been tested. Our enemies have found America more than equal to the task. In response to attacks on our home soil, we have captured or killed terrorists across the Earth. We have taken unprecedented steps to secure our homeland from future attacks, and our troops have liberated millions from oppression.

(italics, ours)

Yep, definitely sounds like Cheney’s work to us.

B-Daddy has more on this “scandal” and what the President plans on doing about it, here.

And with respect to the above, Big Media is already hard at work providing cover for the precarious prospects of cap and trade and health care reform. CNN.com headline: Bush-era distractions may weigh down Obama’s agenda. Good grief.

H/T: The Corner

And not even a lousy magazine cover to show for it.

"Security Breaches: Scooter Libby went to prison for the "outing" of a desk-jockey CIA agent. He forgot conversations. Pelosi forgets briefings. And the outing of our entire intelligence apparatus by Democrats is OK."

... but not nearly as glamorous, unfortunately.

Rest of article, here.

And this is a good idea, because...?

The random-ideas-that-stink generator was up and running again at the White House.

A day after telling CIA employees at their headquarters in Langley, Va. that he won’t prosecute CIA operatives for employing certain interrogation techniques, the President says that perhaps he’ll go after the Justice Department lawyers instead who devised the legal authority for the interrogations… except that he won’t, he’ll leave that decision up to the Attorney General, Eric Holder.

The question of whether to bring charges against those who devised justification for the methods "is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general within the parameters of various laws and I don't want to prejudge that," Obama said

Translation: Obama has floated the idea and is now seeing which way the winds blow before telling Holder to unleash the hounds on Bush administration officials. Want proof?

Obama also said he could support a congressional investigation into the Bush-era terrorist detainee program, but only under certain conditions, such as if it were done on a bipartisan basis. He said he worries about the impact that high-intensity, politicized hearings in Congress could have on the government's efforts to cope with terrorism.

If that isn’t trial balloon-floating, then we don’t know what is.

We can’t begin to describe what a bad idea this is. We’ve already given up quite a bit of the playbook with the highly-selective release of the CIA interrogation memos and with a trial even more classified and secret information will be required to be made public. How does this benefit our safety?

Some people will argue that the claim that the interrogations did indeed prevent future attacks as Dick Cheney has argued is akin to proving a negative. And they would be correct unless those memos are released for examination. Again, more playbook revealed and again, how does any of this actually benefit our safety?

And, despite assurances that CIA operatives will not be prosecuted themselves, how comfortable do you think these people will be taking the stand against people they believed to be in good legal standing and for which they were being advised in good faith on the war on terror? And how does this effect morale with respect to the CIA’s efficacy in continuing to round up the bad guys, foil plots and continue this fight? How is any of this of actual benefit to our safety?

As the President even intimated above, how is the time and energy that will be spent on this whole affair by our intelligence community of any benefit to our safety? Instead of doing their job of protecting this country, they will be preparing for trial. Awesome.

And you wanna bet some Democratic law makers who had full knowledge of these techniques yet did nothing to stop it aren’t squirming in their seat right now? We’re looking at you, Nancy.

Unfortunately, it’s this last reason that will be why we most likely won’t see any real action instead any of the aforementioned ones. No matter – results are all we care about around here.