i am really frightened that he is under the 9% [american jew] rule!!

Is that the limit before you can legally advertise him as a “low fat” Jew ?
Speaking of which, Rahm looks like he could use a feed.

That said, an ethically-upright spy agency might not be a bad idea. Couldn’t be much worse than the alternative.

That’s the way to show America won’t tolerate torture, right?

What ? I don’t recall that being a serious proposal. Do you ?
We’re currently in transition between an administration between an administration that has authorised torture and one that has ruled out any prosecutions for those actions internationally recognised as crimes.

What part of that can you describe as “showing America won’t tolerate torture” with a straight face ? I mean FFS, what would “tolerating torture” look like if not this ?

Like I said, we’re in transition now. The mantle that liberals have held of for the past 8 years of strict denial that any such thing ever occurred under their outgoing president (and if it did, that’s all in the past so why bring it up), now passes to the Republicans. Akuna matada.

Dubious invasion, overthrow, counter-insurgency campaign, widespread torture programs, a few low level prosecutions, an investigation designed to result in no high-level prosecutions. This is practically a direct repeat of something you did 100 years ago. Something which everyone carrying on about how “unprecedented” and “un-American” these policies are, conveniently forgot. Surely at this point the memory hole has thoroughly proved its merits at the preferred solution to US tolerance of state-approved torture.

Amy Goodman’s been covering Blair since Tuesday – folks who’ve followed Indonesia closely know just what PEBO is choosing in Blair. Pure evil.

The following’s from my epu’d comment about Blair from an earlier post:

“Watch what we do, not what we say” – John Mitchell, 1969

Whatever PEBO and Blair say about torture and death squads, what Admiral Blair actually did was to conspire with Indonesia’s death squads commanders against the express instructions of the US Government: certainly insubordinate, arguably treasonous.

If PEBO wants an intelligence chief whose shown he’ll prioritize continuing torture, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity over a mere trifle like duly constituted Executive Branch authority, than PEBO’s got his man.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Admiral Blair was involved in supporting the Indonesian armed forces as they were massacring churches in East Timor, as they were killing civilians in 1999 in the run-up to a UN-sponsored free election. That election was due to decide whether East Timor would become independent. The Indonesian army was trying to stop the occupied Timorese from voting for independence, so they set up militias, which went on rampages.

In one incident, they went into a church in Liquica where refugees were hiding. They massacred them with machetes. Their flesh was found plastered to the walls. Two days after that, Admiral Blair went to meet with the Indonesian commander, General Wiranto, and he gave him reassurances that the US was still behind him. He offered him new US military aid. And even though Blair had been told by the State Department and the White House to tell Wiranto to stop the massacres, Blair did not do that. This is according to classified US cables which I obtained in 1999 and reported in The Nation magazine.

After that, when people at the State Department heard about what Blair had done, he was told to talk to Wiranto again. He again spoke to Wiranto, on the phone, and again reassured him, offered him new US military aid. Blair even offered Wiranto aid for the specific unit, the Brimob, the paramilitary police who had gone into that church as they chopped up the refugees and chopped up the clergy who were hiding there. General Wiranto naturally took this as reassurance. He escalated the attacks. Wiranto was later indicted for crimes against humanity. Blair has not been held to account.

Ambitious intel folks take note: now PEBO wants to make him intel chief. Job well done, Admiral Blair! That’s the way to show America won’t tolerate torture, right?

Watch what PEBO does, not what he says.

And watch for the bits of flesh on the walls once Blair’s proteges do the work Blair supports.

This suggests that the CIA’s public failures were failures of tactics rather than of ethics–i.e. they would have been good programs if they had worked, and then we wouldn’t have heard about them.

Which isn’t the case for a great many of the CIA’s publicly known failures. Many of them ethical or strategic failures–things that shouldn’t have been done even if they would work. So if the CIA actually has a larger collection of tricks that actually work–that’s extremely frightening. The CIA’s dangerous enough when it’s ineffective.

I would also point out that among peaceful, nonviolent, and honorable activities, most of them are in the category of tactics that work better when people know that you’re using them.

Moreover, were you correct that the CIA has been employing peaceful, nonviolent, honorable techniques to honorable ends that nonetheless would stop being effective once people found out about them, one would think there would be a collection of techniques formerly in this category that since became public and are now no longer effective. Or techniques that are so old that the CIA ought to assume they are known by potential enemies. The CIA could then reveal these obsolete techniques and their history of using them, and we could use that to reach a conclusion about the agency’s judgment in employing secret tricks.

To sum up, this explanation for a lack (not a complete absence, but a proportional lack) of publicly known CIA good deeds ends up leaving us with even more things needing explanation that we started with. There are, of course, alternative explanations for this shortage.