After Sharp Words on C.I.A., Obama Faces a Delicate Task

After Sharp Words on C.I.A., Obama Faces a Delicate Task
Democratic Underground Latest Breaking News — ... policies he has condemned and concern about alienating an agency with a central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda. Mark M. Lowenthal, an intelligence veteran who left a senior post at the C.I.A. in 2005, said Mr. Obamas decision to exclude Mr. Brennan from contention for the top job had sent a message that if you worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror, you are now tainted, and had created anxiety in the ranks of the agencys clandestine service. Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/us/politics/03intel.h...

The NYT And The T-Word
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan — The front-page piece in the NYT today on Obama's thorny task in staffing the CIA, after seven years of its violation of the Geneva Conventions, is revealing in many ways. Like many in the MSM, the NYT cannot bring itself to describe the techniques that the CIA has used as "torture." And yet we know that the CIA has tortured prisoners under the plain legal definition of torture, and we know that this was the whole point of giving the CIA explicit legislative permission for this in 2006. No doubt some of the techniques only rise to the level of abuse and not the "severe" mental or physical ...

Interrogation Policy Still A Bit Shadowy
Swampland — ... over torture will end if this amendment to place the CIA under the Army Field Manual becomes law," she said a year ago. "This amendment is a matter of strong principle. It is the bedrock on which the United States stands." Now Feinstein is set to take over the Senate Intelligence Committee. And the next president, Barack Obama, is a man who supported the Army Field Manual bill. So everything should be pretty open and shut, right? The answer is no. Read closely this passage from today's New York Times. [I]n an interview on ...

Leaving Some Running Room
JustOneMinute — Andrew Sullivan reads the NY Times coverage of the impending Obama flip-flop on enhanced interrogation and is aghast: The front-page piece in the NYT today on Obama's thorny task in staffing the CIA, after seven years of its violation of the Geneva Conventions, is revealing in many ways. Like many in the MSM, the NYT cannot bring itself to describe the techniques that the CIA has used as "torture."Big Skip and... This is the strategy of the torture defenders: render this debate once again a red-blue, right-left ding-dong, culture war struggle . It isn't. It's a foundational, moral and constitutional issue that transcends all ...

Democrats Take a Second Look at Torture
Weekly Standard Blog — Michael Scherer flags this quote from Dianne Feinstein in today's Times: Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who will take over as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, led the fight this year to force the C.I.A. to follow military interrogation rules. Her bill was passed by Congress but vetoed by President Bush. But in an interview on Tuesday, Mrs. Feinstein indicated that extreme cases might call for flexibility. “I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the ...

Stuff that gets my grouch on
BlueOregon — ... was yesterday's Blogtown post by Dan Savage, noting that 31% of black Democrats in America say homosexual relations are morally acceptable. This is roughly equivalent to the 30% of Republicans who agree. By contrast, 61% of nonblack Democrats who say homosexual relations are morally acceptable. (All of this via Gallup). So civil rights are cool and neato if you're black, but not if you're gay? Lovely. Based on a 4-word quote in the New York Times, Glen Greenwald (who I generally find to be a very good ...

Feinstein Issues Statement on Torture
The Caucus — ... among the most outspoken critics in Congress of the Bush administration’s embrace of harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which creates a feeling of suffocation and was prosecuted as a war crime by the United States after World War II. Congress passed a bill she sponsored to ban coercive tactics by requiring the Central Intelligence Agency to use only the noncoercive methods listed in the Army Field Manual, but President Bush vetoed that measure last March. But in an interview with The New York Times this week, twice said, “I think that you have ...

Obama Still Mulling Over CIA/DNI
The Atlantic Politics Channel — ... Sources say that Obama's team is having trouble finding a potential CIA director who lacks politically incriminating links to controversial Bush Administration policies and yet commands the respect of the agency's rank and file. Potential nominees include John Gannon, a Bush era Homeland Security official and Clinton-era intelligence officer and Jami Miscik, former chief of the CIA's directorate of analysis. The New York Times reported that New York crisis management consultant Jack Devine, a former CIA chief of operations, is also a potential candidate. ...