Obama Ought to do What JFK Would Have: Fire CIA Honcho John Brennan!

Why doesn't Obama have the same steely nerve as JFK? If he had, he would have handed CIA Director John Brennan his head on a platter instead of opining about what "a tough job" these guys have, and we need to show some compassion for them - and leave out harsh judgments. Sorry, Obama, you may do that but not citizens who respect the Constitution as you should!

The fact this guy's spook organization - now as out of control as the NSA under his watch (he late the lying James Clapper off last year)  - could spy on Senate staffers when the Senate is charged with their oversight is an abomination and affront to everyone. This is especially as the spying involved the Senate's investigation into CIA rendition and torture.

If it had been JFK under whose watch this had occurred, Brennan and likely half his senior staffers would now be taking a hike. But Obama seems to let everything pass, even when the evidence comes out in blinding fireballs of what the spooks are doing.

John F. Kennedy was put on notice from the moment he took office that the CIA believed they were ruling the roost. Without Kennedy's knowledge or oversight, the clandestine services under Richard Bissell had mounted an assassination program to target Fidel Castro. Specifically, the program operated under 'CIA Staff D', a SIGINT or signals intelligence operation run in concert with the National Security Agency or NSA. As pointed out by Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics Quarterly, Jan. 1994): “In 1961, when William Harvey headed Staff D, he was assigned the task of developing the CIA Assassinations Project, ZR/Rifle”

With the Bay of Pigs invasion, JFK was further played, as Ike was with the 1960 U-2 fiasco.  JFK, however, retaliated by firing Allen Dulles, and his deputy Gen. Charles Cabell. (Recall that Cabell's brother, Earl, was Mayor of Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963) JFK also vowed to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" so furious was he at the level of CIA treachery. JFK went further by emulating Ike in setting up a Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board - the express purpose of which was to bring the CIA under the control of the President. Kennedy addressed the group on May 15, 1961 and informed them he was "undertaking a total reassessment of U.S. covert action policies and programs".

Kennedy went further, creating a Defense Intelligence Agency, responsible to him, and soon mandating all overflights of Cuba be done by the Strategic Air Command, not the CIA. He also defined a list of directives on what the CIA could and could not, do.

Of course, this stuck in the CIA's craw - bit time - and the shit really hit the fan after they instigated the coup on the Diems in November, 1963. In an early September, 1963 meeting Kennedy was informed by a David Bell of AID (a CIA cover organization) that the funds from the Commodity Import Aid Program had “already been cut off”,  essentially assuring a coup would ensue with the Diem government in South Vietnam. (James Douglass, 2008,, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Orbis Books, p. 192.   )

Kennedy was evidently livid and directly asked Bell who had told him to do that, to which Bell replied, “No one” (ibid.). The will to power disclosed here indicates the CIA felt it more powerful than Kennedy’s government or his decision-making. If they felt that way, there is nothing that they wouldn’t do to prevent the President from getting in their way. JFK made bold moves to cut the run amuck spooks off at the knees, but the coup went through, and then they took out JFK on Nov. 22, 1963.

 

Perhaps all of this backstory explains why Obama is playing nice with the whole national security state, including the torturing CIA as well as the mass surveilling NSA.

 

While Obama yesterday in a news conference did strongly criticize the CIA saying he could understand why the agency used its controversial "enhanced interrogation techniques" after 9/11, conceding "We tortured some folks", he didn't go far enough in exacting costs to the agency. He employed great rhetoric on how the agency "crossed the line" and he condemned torture, he then undermined all his remarks and moral courage by insisting we ordinary citizens "not feel too sanctimonious" - adding that he believed the spooks responsible were "acting under intense stress and fear".

 

Please, Mr. President! Don't treat us like puerile idiots.  It's not a case of "sanctimony" when we hold the spooks (and YOU!) up to constitutional standards. It's our discernment that this isn't a fascist state (yet) and we expect our officials and the security apparatus that proposes to keep us safe to follow the rules. Those rules are most specifically established in the Constitution itself, which one of my ancestors fought to make a reality during the War of Independence.  So don't tell a guy with such ancestors not to be "sanctimonious" over a bunch committing misdeeds you yourself earlier  condemned.

 

But this is typical Obama, and we've seen it before when he gave a pass to the NSA in its overbearing spying, including on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as Brazil's President., Dilma Rousseff.

 

Giving a pass for torture is one thing, but Obama overstepped the bounds of  legal propriety by not holding these fiends to account when he let Brennan remain on his perch - even after lying about spying on the Senate. There is simply NO justification for the actions of Central Intelligence Agency officials who intentionally and surreptitiously hacked into a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee.  Worse, Brennan lying his ass off about it afterwards and declaring it never, ever could have happened.

 

Only a nitwit on the Constitution or historical fool would fail to see Brennan's Agency's antics are a breach of the separation of powers (as Sen. Mark Udall noted)  and not merely a crime. Hence, those who perpetrated - as well as those under whose watch it took place - have violated their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution as well as the trust of citizens. Worse, those who did it certainly knew it so are doubly accountable. IF it had happened under JFK, he'd have handed them all their proverbial heads.

 

But Obama gives them a pass, and this is a guy who supposedly had been a Constitutional law professor.

 

Given all this, the take of the Denver Post's editors is applicable:

 

"Heads should roll, starting with CIA Director John O. Brennan.  And it shouldn't end with the firings of those who should have known better."

 

Brennan especially needs to be sent packing after his March outburst where he put on his indignant face and warned that no one should accuse his agency about improper snooping. At the time, I felt he did protest too much, and thus there was much to hide, at least as much as NSA top spook James Clapper a year earlier - who insisted to the Senate Intelligence Committee that his bunch would never, ever do mass surveillance on Americans.

 

Oh no, perish the thought! The spooks are totally on our side and doing their best.

 

The Denver Post again (Editorial, Aug. 1):

 

"It makes us wonder about Brennan's character and competence. If he didn't know CIA employees were improperly searching computers used by congressional staffers.

 

At the very least he should have found out before denouncing the possibility."

 

Again, let's bear in mind that Brennan's   extraordinary apology was induced after the CIA Inspector General found that the Agency's personnel had improperly monitored computers set aside by Senate staff.

 

In many ways this CIA Inspector general's report reminded me of the one released on the Bay of Pigs invasion - and how it cleared JFK and blamed the Agency instead.

  As per a Baltimore Sun piece ('Internal Probe Blamed Bay of Pigs Fiasco on CIA', p. 6A, Feb. 22, 1998), it was noted:

"The 150-page report, released after sitting in the CIA Director's safe for nearly three decades, blames the disastrous attempt to oust Fidel Castro not on President John F. Kennedy's failure to call airstrikes, but on the agency itself.

The CIA's ignorance, incompetence, and arrogance toward the 1,400 exiles it trained and equipped to mount the invasion was responsible for the fiasco, said the report, obtained by the Associated Press yesterday.

The document criticized almost every aspect of the CIA's handling of the invasion: misinforming Kennedy administration officials, planning poorly, using faulty intelligence and conducting an overt military operation beyond 'agency responsibility as well as agency capability'."


Some things never change. Unfortunately, other things and people do. Kennedy didn't tolerate the Bay of Pigs engineers - firing CIA Chief Alan Dulles as well as his second, Cabell.

If Obama wants to walk in the steps of JFK, as opposed to being a wimp, then he needs to do what Kennedy did.

At the very least, he needs to stop making stupid statements, like:

 “I have full confidence in John Brennan"

And:

“Keep in mind though that John Brennan was the person who called for the [inspector general] report and he’s already stood-up a task force to ensure that lessons are learned and mistakes are resolved.”

 Not good enough, Mr. Prez! His head still needs to roll and I think you know it! At the very least he's shown himself incompetent and his character questionable. You would be impeached for less so don't make light of it.

We, the citizens, expect you to act - even if it might mean taking some "T".
 

 Clapper kept his job after his lying before the Senate, this should not be a repeat! Show the same respect for the Constitution as when you taught it, sir!

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/kevin-zeese/57350/demand-that-clapper-and-brennan-be-fired

And:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/weldon-berger/57366/folks-torturing-folks-obama-plants-his-flag-firmly-on-the-wrong-side-of-nuremberg

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/57357/the-fourth-branch-the-rise-to-power-of-the-national-security-state

Feinstein Now Gets What 4th Amendment 'Extremists' Were All About - Will She Act?

"I don’t understand this being bamboozled into thinking that you have to do this to find bad guys. That’s false. There’s very simple principles you can use to find out who is the bad guy and who isn’t and you can do this without violating anybody’s privacy”. -   Bill Binney, former NSA code breaker on CBS Early Show, June 19, 2013

Senator Dianne Feinstein is now learning it's real easy to chirp and posture about the national security state  having "to protect the country" by mass surveillance,  especially when your own 4th amendment 'ox' isn't being gored. It was convenient for her, way back in November,  when she was hell bent to disembowel all fourth amendment protections for Americans by pushing on congress a "FISA Improvements Act" which would, in fact,  have gutted all remaining protections of privacy and basic rights for Americans - by legalizing a loophole known as the "backdoor search provision". I already went into some of this in previous blogs and the reasons why it's a terrible idea. One can  start with the statement of the 4th amendment itself - which evidently Feinstein has no clue about:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

What we conclude then is the NSA, government mass surveillance, mass warrants that Ed Snowden revealed, disclosed a rejection not only of citizens’ fundamental right to privacy but any right to be secure in one’s person, papers, effects. So, screw the citizen, the gov’t has arrogated to itself the right to seize anything deemed personal or private once it’s within its purview – whether a phone record, an internet communication, email or whatever. The powers -that- be may really argue they’re doing this for our own good, but in reality they are acting the part of a fascist dictatorship in denying any right of privacy or recognition of individuality at all.

According to Michelle Richardson, the surveillance lobbyist for the ACLU:

"For the first time, the statute would explicitly allow the government to proactively search through the NSA data troves of information without a warrant.   It may also expand current practices by allowing law enforcement to directly access US person information that was nominally collected for foreign intelligence purposes. This fourth amendment back door needs to be closed, not written into stone.”

Section 6 of Feinstein’s bill blesses what her committee colleague Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat and civil libertarian, has called the “backdoor search provision, which the Guardian revealed thanks to a leak by Edward Snowden, has revealed.  Feinstein’s bill passed the committee on an 11 to 4 vote on 31 October. An expanded report on its provisions was released by the committee the last week of November, and  added details about the ability of both intelligence and law enforcement to sift through all foreign communications databases that it accumulates under section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008. (This is the specious law that legalized ex post facto Bush's warrantless wiretaps. Rather than hauling the Bushies over the coals, our traitors in congress found it easier to legalize the misdeeds).

All this is backstory to what's now unfolding on Capitol Hill. That is, The CIA  (according to Feinstein,  in a forty minute tirade two days ago),  breaking into the Senate Intelligence Committee computers and eliminating the key files of the Panetta Report. In this report, the Senate  Intelligence Committee  had the goods on just how vile the CIA torture and rendition program really was.   What we do know now, in retrospect,  is that it was in early December when the Central Intelligence Agency began to suspect it had suffered what it regarded as an embarrassing "computer breach."

Investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in the basement of a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, had obtained an internal agency review summarizing thousands of documents related to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Parts of the C.I.A. report cast a particularly harsh light on the program, the same program the agency was in the midst of defending in a prolonged dispute with the intelligence committee. In other words, exposure of the secret internal report would have exposed the spooks as being duplicitous and excessive (and likely unlawful) in their methods of extracting information (well depicted in the film Zero Dark Thirty, btw, which saw the spooks blowing a gasket when it came out, asserting things never went down like that. Now we know they likely did!)


Enraged that their 'cover' was blown, Agency officials began scouring the digital logs of the computer network used by the Senate staff members to try to learn how and where they got the report. Their search not only raised constitutional questions about the propriety of an intelligence agency investigating its congressional overseers, but has also resulted in two parallel inquiries by the Justice Department — one into the C.I.A. and one into the committee.

Feinstein, for her part, has maintained the documents were given to the Committee, not pilfered from computer networks, which I am inclined to accept.  And while Obama officially ended the program  — which began in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks and expanded into a network of secret prisons in Thailand, Romania, Lithuania and elsewhere — he never followed up by prosecuting the ones that did it.  It was left to Leon Panetta to drive an internal review of exactly how far the spooks stepped over the line.

Feinstein, therefore,  ought to be vigorously defending  and demanding the full disclosure of this report - which ALL Americans have a right to know about-  given representatives of their nation did it. But sadly, she appears more indignant at the  violation of the sacred propriety of her Committee. In other words, as NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd observed yesterday, she's more aggrieved at having her 4th amendment rights trashed (and those of her Committee) than protecting the same rights of fellow Americans.


And what of the Obama White House?  According to a New York Times report:

"there was little appetite inside the White House to accede to the committee’s request for all classified C.I.A. cables related to it."

But never mind 'little appetite', the separation of powers is supposed to ensure that the Committee's demands are met.   Hence, the Times quotation of  "a former senior American official" that this  release would "cross a fairly significant threshold" is irrelevant. Separation of powers, also evident during the Nixon Watergate era, meant that threshold should have been complied with.  Anyway the Times goes on:


A deal was struck between Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the intelligence committee’s Democratic chairwoman, to make millions of documents available to the committee at a C.I.A. facility near the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va. The documents covered roughly five years: from the inception of the program until September 2006, when all of the C.I.A.’s prisoners were transferred to the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

At the same time, Mr. Panetta ordered the C.I.A. to conduct its own review of the documents, a move designed to help the agency better understand the volumes of the material it had agreed to hand over to its congressional overseers.  This review, a series of memos that in recent days has come to be called the “Panetta Review,” is the internal study now at the center of the dispute between the C.I.A. and Congress.

(snip)

Some people who have read the review memos said that parts of them were particularly scorching in their analysis of extreme interrogation methods like waterboarding, which the memos described as providing little intelligence of any value.
------------------------------

Meanwhile, Sen. Mark  Udall (CO) has said it was his understanding that the internal review “is consistent with the intelligence committee’s report” and “conflicts with the official C.I.A. response to the committee’s report.” He said the existence of the report “raises fundamental questions about why a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee study.”

What is clear to the deep politics educated person is that the C.I.A. - as it was inclined to do with its internal report on the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion (which put the entire onus and responsibility on the Agency) - doesn't want these new conflicts (between what they really did in torturing and said they did) revealed to the public. Hence, the aggressive response to Feinstein's Senate Committee.

But, as in the case of the JFK assassination, the American people deserve to know the truth and not have it concealed from them. To an extent, as Chalmers Johnson ('Blowback') has noted, we are responsible (as voting citizens) for our leaders' policies. If these policies are contrary to our Constitution or International law  (as the CIA torture program most certainly was) then we have a right to know about them. In the end, we will be held as accountable as our leaders.

Hopefully, Dianne Feinstein will bear this in mind when she next endorses another NSA enabling law that takes 4th amendment rights from ordinary citizens.

See also:  http://www.denverpost.com/editorials/ci_25330216/public-deserves-see-cia-torture-report?source=nav

And:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/54745/how-looking-forward-tripped-up-obama

    And:

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/13/the_true_politics_of_the_cia_senate_spat/