Thanks for the additional context (Mayer does have a word limit – an advantage of cheetoh based commentary over Ensure-ance based efforts)

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I wouldn’t say Obama has been wavering – he’s lied and parsed and when he was faced with what he thought were his thoroughly ground down, under his bootheel “subjects” who “had to” support him in anything bc The bogeymanRepublicans were so much worse and there was no other option – faced with them calling him on his lies, he had to cough up bits of phlegm encased truthiness now and then to keep from having to actually do anything about all the things he promised to do “something” (but nothing all that specific) about. It’s like the mindless yammering about “closing” GITMO from the primaries on, when the “critics” weren’t seeing a flashing neon OPEN sign as the problem with GITMO and yet it allowed him to ever have to pony up and deal with the actual problems. Then we he did – by keeping tribunals, opting for forever detentions, shipping people around the globe without concern for CAT, blocking info with states secrets invocations, etc. he wasn’t technically breaking a promise, just breaking from rhetoric to reality.

I got pretty estranged from some pretty nice people who didn’t want to fess up that their response to Obama’s rhetoric was a lot like Bush’s followers’ responses to his rhetoric. Obama has used transparency-accountability/vote for me a lot like Bush used Iraq/9-11; juxtaposed, but not connectedy by any thread of logic or fact.
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Re the article – So Feinstein fought the battle to make sure Kappes stayed (Senator Feinstein insisted to Obama Administration officials privately that Kappes continue as deputy director; it was a condition of her support for Panetta), because, after all, why not when as Feinstein notes for Mayer:

“There’s no vote that I regret more than the vote to authorize war with Iraq”; her vote was based on intelligence that she describes as “flat wrong.”

Wouldn’t want to get away from the guys who did their masters bidding to bring you the “flat wrong” info. I’m sure that means Feinstein will take her investigation wherever it should go. Or not.

Then there’s Panetta emphasizing to Mayer that he ain’t be supportin no torturers

[Pannetta]said that when he took over the agency he “wanted to be damn sure” that there was nobody on the payroll who should be prosecuted for torture or related crimes

Whew – what a relief to find out that, just like the telecoms and NSA on the wiretap program, there was no one who committed crimes who should be prosecuted for committing crimes. Like, oh, maybe this chick:

The C.I.A. has apparently done nothing to penalize the officer who oversaw one of the most notorious renditions—that of a German car salesman named Khaled el-Masri. He was abducted while on a holiday in Macedonia, and flown by the agency to Afghanistan, where he was detained in a dungeon for five months without charges, before being released. 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.

How super nifty keeno kewl for Obama and Panetta that they don’t have anyone who should be prosecuted to deal with.

How do we know that? Bc of the standard Panetta asked Helgerson to use:

According to Panetta, Helgerson, who is not a lawyer, assured him that no officer still at the agency had engaged in actions that went beyond the legal boundaries as they were understood during the Bush years

This gets to what, IMO, was the problem that Comey had with the “combined” opinion. EW – I saw your earlier comment and I may well have said that, that Comey’s problem might have been the fact that it allowed waterboarding to continue. My big problem with the “combined” opinion, though, I know I have mentioned and I think the emails reveal it was something that likely bothered Comey too.

I’ve stressed the nature of the opinions being given in Bybee II and the Bradbury May 10 opnions as being “reliance opinions” instead of what Bybee I was. What happens in the combined memo, though, is that the full ficitions are abandoned and in a various devious way. Yes, they do dig into some specific fact patterns involving Ghul, but unlike the specifications in Bybee II and the first May 10 opinion, where they at least try to say that the torture is being reserved for those who are “high value Al-Qaeda (morphing after Yoo into a broader grouping) terrorists with “operational” info etc., the “combined” memo does something much worse. Way worse.

In the middle it abandons any pretense of talking about High Value Detainees and says, “hey, since ya know, all this stuff we’re doing isn’t torture and all, and since it doesn’t shock the conscience and since it doesn’t violate the 5th and 8th, we can do it anyone, right?” Anyone. Anyone detained for any reason, without regard to their being a “high value” detainee or not, or having ties to terrorist organizations or not.

I’m pretty sure this was at least one thing Comey mentioned, and definitely on thing that stuck with Ullyot, given the email references to Ullyot’s observation that he understood Comey was worried that the Combined memo might set the boundaries for “prototypical” interrogations. (Comey indicates that is only one thing he’s concerned about)

So that is how you get Helgerson and Panetta able to say that there is no one at the CIA who should be prosecuted for anything, even in a story that mentions the multiple promotions of someone who should directed the kidnap and disappearance and torture of a man while his family fell apart – even while knowing him to be wholly innocent.

Again, combine that May 10 memo on what is acceptable for any detainee, bc it is not “torture” and doesn’t shock the conscience etc. (per the May 30 memo) for other standards, and you tell me what that does to something like Fitzgerald’s allegations in the Burge case, that Burge lied about *torture* What do we know about how Fitzgerald’s boss has defined torture? You know that OLC thingy? The “mini-Sup Ct”

And apparently Panetta’s concern is not whether there is anyone to prosecute, even under the Bush “anything goes” standards (with the torture deaths that Mayer points out, which hardly seem to be things that can be argued as not-torture under things other than Bybee I’s “killing while interrogating isn’t like, *real* killing dude” non-intent fiction.) but instead whether torture murders etc. are “still at” the CIA.

So someone like this guy is not a big deal, if he’s not still working for the CIA:

In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets … By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death
…
the guards buried the Afghan, who was in his twenties, in an unmarked, unacknowledged cemetery used by Afghan forces, officials said. The captive’s family has never been notified; his remains have never been returned for burial. He is on no one’s registry of captives, not even as a “ghost detainee

Unmarked, unacknowledged cemetery – umm, is that what Sadaam called his war crimes burial sites too? Unacknowledged cemeteries?

Mayer talks about that killing and others in the Panetta article, but not in the context of specifically asking Panetta what he is doing about them – or how Panetta could give Helgerson credibility if Helgerson was saying that those torture killings were authorized.

Umm, that “high value detainee” aspect that supposedly Bybee II and Bradbury I required? From the Priest story:

The Afghan detainee had been captured in Pakistan along with a group of other Afghans. His connection to al Qaeda or the value of his intelligence was never established before he died. “He was probably associated with people who were associated with al Qaeda,” one U.S. government official said. Probably knew someone who knew someone, so it must be ok to torture him to death, ghost him and dump the body in an “unacknoweldged” war crimes site.

That agent, back at the time of Priest’s story, was getting promotions as was the CIA agent in charge of the Italian debacle. I don’t know if they are still there, but certainly nothing in Panetta’s standards would prevent them from being there. All the CIA rapist really needs to come up with is how he was softening up his rape victims with rape as one of his “preliminaries” to later questioning and blackmail and he’s off the hook under Panetta’s “standards” too. Thank God for standards.

Oh, and from the earlier thread, I have to wonder looking at the CIA briefing list which of those briefings on EITs informed the ranking members about the guy that was frozen to death and dumped in a war crimes pit? Bc Priest says they were told:

Shortly after the death, the CIA briefed the chairmen and vice chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees, the only four people in Congress whom the CIA has decided to routinely brief on detainee and interrogation issues. But, one official said, the briefing was not complete.

Was that the Feb briefing? Or one not on the list (3 mos could be “shortly” but so could something shorter). And why was the death not filled in to the full committee if it was a the result of an “intelligence gathering” operation? And if it wasn’t – if it was a “covert action” were was the finding allowing for disappearing someone with no proven al-Qaeda ties and torturing them to death? And was it the early torture murder, coupled with the CIA memo that a big chunk of the GITMO detainees were innocent (both occuring in the later half of 2002) that set a big part of the secrecy stage? Bc you really might want a war in Iraq and diversions at that point, esp with the CIA already tied to the killing of an American infant and his mother in Latin America.

/ramble

Did you get the message yesterday?