The Obama Officials Blocking Accountability for Bush Crimes

The battle against baseless, worthless grants of anonymity by
journalists is, at this point, probably futile, since even many of the
nation's best and most valuable reporters -- such as The New Yorker's Jane Mayer -- seem helplessly addicted to it. In an otherwise solid and at times enlightening article
on CIA Director Leon Panetta and his resistance to investigating past
CIA abuses, Mayer includes this passage at the beginning of her article
to explain how Panetta was chosen only after Obama's first choice,
John Brennan, was rejected:

A friend of
Brennan's from his C.I.A. days complained to me, "After a few
Cheeto-eating people in the basement working in their underwear who
write blogs voiced objections to Brennan, the Obama Administration
pulled his name at the first sign of smoke, and then ruled out a whole
class of people: anyone who had been at the agency during the past ten
years couldn't pass the blogger test."

What possible justification is there to grant anonymity to someone to spout these cliched and factually false insults? First, as I've documented numerous times and as Mayer herself well knows, the case against Brennan was not
that he was "at the agency for the past ten years" or even that he had
anything to do with the torture program, but rather that (as she
herself documents later in the piece) he explicitly advocated and defended many of the worst torture techniques and other Bush abuses. Second,
unlike the individual who is willing to spout these insults only while
cowardly hiding behind Mayer's shield of anonymity, the bloggers who
led the opposition to Brennan (including myself and The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan) all attached their names to their views and -- as Spencer Ackerman notes -- are about as far away as one can be from the trite, adolescent cartoons spewed by Mayer's anonymous insulter. Third, one of the principal points of Mayer's long article is that the objections to Brennan have been vindicated,
because -- as Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser -- he has led the
way in urging Obama to keep past CIA abuses suppressed and Bush crimes
protected from accountability.

The anonymous name-calling Mayer
passes on appears on the first page of her piece, but on page 5, she
includes the facts that show how factually false is the
characterization of the objections to Brennan:

Brennan's
supporters have argued that he had no operational control over the
interrogation program, and point out that his tenure as Tenet's chief
of staff ended in March, 2001, before the Al Qaeda attacks. But he was
subsequently named deputy executive director, and served in that position until March, 2003-the period when the most brutal detainee treatment occurred.

In
addition, Brennan often briefed President Bush about daily developments
in the war on terror. Brennan has described himself as an internal
critic of waterboarding-a position that friends, such as Emile Nakhleh,
a former senior officer, confirm. Yet, in an interview with me two
years ago, Brennan defended the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques and extraordinary renditions,
in which the C.I.A. abducted terror suspects around the globe and
transported them to other countries to be jailed and interrogated; many
of those countries had execrable human-rights records. He also
questioned some people's definition of "torture." "I think it's torture when I have to ride in the car with my kids and they have loud rap music on," he said. Asked if "enhanced" interrogation techniques were necessary to keep America safe, he replied, "Would
the U.S. be handicapped if the C.I.A. was not, in fact, able to carry
out these types of detention and debriefing activities? I would say
yes."

That - his
comments defending "enhanced interrogation techniques," making light of
torture, and justifying other Bush-era abuses (such as rendition) --
was the crux of the campaign against Brennan's being named CIA
director. So why pass on the false anonymous attack at the start that
purports to define the case against Brennan in such a misleading way?

Far
more important than that, Mayer documents that precisely the principal
concern of Brennan objectors has already materialized -- namely, he has
become Obama's most forceful advocate for shielding those Bush-era
crimes from investigation and protecting the wrongdoers, at the very
same time that, as Mayer notes, he has a direct personal interest in
blocking accountability:

[Brennan] has reportedly lobbied hard to maintain secrecy on past abuses.
According to Newsweek, Brennan recently persuaded Panetta to join him
in protesting Obama's plan to release four shocking Justice Department
memos about the interrogation program. . . .

Panetta's
resistance to public disclosure seemed out of character to some
longtime colleagues. . . . Panetta's advisers may have had a personal stake in opposing transparency. Another former C.I.A. official, who knows Brennan well, noted that, if
the Bush torture program were to be further investigated, "potentially,
both Brennan and [Deputy CIA Director Stephen] Kappes could have a lot
to lose.

The argument Brennan made
against release of the CIA torture memos is the same argument made to
justify suppression of the torture photos: namely, "that exposing such
details could spark an anti-American backlash." Precisely because
Obama has retained so many people involved with or otherwise linked to
Bush abuses, he is surrounded by people actively working to block any
investigation into or accountability for those crimes. The most
egregious example Mayer describes is the CIA official responsible for
the abduction and rendition-for-torture of German citizen Khaled
el-Masri, who turned out to be completely innocent:

From
the start, the rendition team suspected that his case was one of
mistaken identity. But the C.I.A. officer in charge at Langley-the
agency asked that the officer's name be withheld-insisted that Masri be
further interrogated. "She just looked in her crystal ball and it said
that he was bad," a colleague recalls. Masri says that he was chained
in a freezing cell with no bed, and given water so putrid that he could
smell it across the room. He was threatened and stripped, and could
hear other detainees crying all around him. After several weeks, the
C.I.A. officer in charge learned that Masri's German passport was not a
forgery, as was originally suspected, and that he was not the terror
suspect the agency thought he was. (The names were similar.) Even so, the officer in charge refused to release him.

Eventually,
Masri went on a hunger strike, losing sixty pounds. Skeptics in the
agency went directly over the officer's head to Tenet, who realized
that his agency had been brutalizing an innocent man. Masri was
released after a hundred and forty-nine days. But the officer in charge was not disciplined; in fact, a former colleague says, "she's been promoted-twice." Masri, meanwhile, has been unable to sue the U.S. government for either an apology or damages, because
the courts consider the very existence of rendition a state secret-a
position that the Obama Justice Department has so far supported.

And
there are numerous other instances in which Panetta is battling to keep
evidence of Bush-era crimes suppressed, including his fight against an
ACLU lawsuit for disclosure of documents relating to the (almost certainly illegal) destruction
of interrogation videotapes. In many cases, the very same people who
defended these abuses are the same ones succeeding in blocking any
accountability for them. Those who defended Bush-era abuses are the
last people who ought to be making intelligence decisions going
forward. That was the primary objection to Brennan's becoming
CIA Director, and his becoming Obama's top intelligence advisor has
obviously vindicated those concerns.

Mayer notes Panetta's
efforts (and Obama's) to reverse some of the polices that led to these
abuses, including the ban on torture techniques, but the central
question is the one posed by her headline: "Can Leon Panetta move the
C.I.A. forward without confronting its past?" Ultimately, there is a
real irony to the Obama administration's active, concerted efforts to
prevent accountability for past crimes: namely, the greater the
suppression efforts, the greater the focus on past Bush abuses will be,
since evidence of Bush crimes will seep out slowly and in increments,
and there will be constant controversies concerning the Obama
administration's suppression efforts themselves (as can be seen with
his continuous invocation of the "state secrets" privilege to keep
torture and eavesdropping victims out of court; the pressure exerted on
Britain to do the same; and his extraordinary efforts to suppress
photographic evidence of detainee abuse).

There are far too many
proceedings -- from the prosecutions in Spain to the investigations
in Britain to the ongoing (and increasingly successful) civil lawsuits
in the U.S. -- to have any hope of preventing full-scale disclosure for
much longer. The only question is whether Obama will be seen as one
who worked to conceal the wrongdoing and protect the wrongdoers. Thus
far, at least, the answer is quite clear. Mayer's new article --
highlighting who is behind these decisions and the personal stake they
have in their outcome -- sheds some light into why this is taking place.