Is Obama Breaking His Word? Will People Still Be Dragged off to Foreign Prisons for Torture?

One point I'd like to make before we start about the LA Times report on Obama supposedly keeping rendition and torture as a tool in the war on terror is that  The Clinton administration used rendition, and using Hilzoy's definition of extraordinary rendition, they used extraordinary rendition when they "snatched" the bomber of the CIA headquarters from Pakistan.  (When Clinton was unsure whether to go into Pak and grab the man without permission VP Gore told him to "Snatch his ass!" which the FBI proceeded to do.  See Richard A. Clarke's "Against All Enemies"). There is a difference between rendition, even extraordinary rendition, and delivering people to be countries with the understanding that they will be tortured.  The new orders linked below from the Obama administration expressly ban sending people to other nations that may torture them.  

Now about the Obama administration and the continuance of "rendition":

A report by Greg Miller at Sam Zell's LA Times "Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool" insinuates that Barack Obama has a dark side and he's keeping on Dick Cheney's evil rendition program. 

It's amazing how lots of words and sly winks can make a report on nefarious deeds mostly out of thin air.

But all you had to do was read the order by our new president on what is allowed and what is not allowed in the Obama administration.  It was linked right in the web version of the LA Times report, but from what I'm seeing most people going hyper aren't reading the order or doing so very perfunctorily. Here is a link for you: "EXECUTIVE ORDERS January 21, 22, 2009 .  

I was going to report on it last night, but got busy on other projects and by late night someone had found that the Political Animal at the Washington Monthly had done a pretty good job of it in "The LA Times On Rendition".

 Now I wish like the insightful Hilzoy I could believe in the mainstream news, but I don't.   The analyst writes:

So what accounts for the LA Times' story? The Times cites "Current and former U.S. intelligence officials" in support of its thesis. I don't take the statements of former administration officials as evidence of anything in this regard, since they would not be privy to the Obama administration's thinking. Moreover, there have been a whole lot of "former administration officials" wandering around saying that once Obama got into office and saw how tough things really were, he would be forced to adopt their policies, only to discover that -- surprise, surprise! -- he doesn't. I don't see much reason to take their opinions as probative this time.

Obama officials, of course, are a different story: they would know, and they have no vested interest in believing that the previous administration's policies are somehow inevitable. The Times quotes only one official, who says: "The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. (...) if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice." It's important, here, to note that extraordinary rendition is not the same as rendition proper. Rendition is just moving people from one jurisdiction (in the cases at hand, one country) to another; includes all sorts of perfectly normal things, like extradition, which are not problematic legally. Extraordinary rendition is rendition outside these established legal processes: e.g., kidnapping someone abroad so that s/he can be brought to the US to stand trial, or delivering someone to another country to be tortured.

Hilzoy has too much faith in our government.  In fact we have had other problems with 'career' administration folk.  Remember someone named Linda Tripp?   

Oh, I'm not trying to equate this with a sad woman who tried to game a president by spying on a young lady who had relations with the big cheese.

But behind Ms. Tripp was Lucianne Goldberg, the mother of right wing political commentator Jonah Goldberg and a person with political activism under her belt, which, since the 70s was clearly was for the right wing. Some of what she did, even in the early years, would be considered political spying.

According to Media Matters' David Brock and other sources the Republican party excels in making up stories for the news media and passing them through anyone they can to get them into mainstream and 'career' people in the White House  are just as likely or, right now even more likely since the Bush administration broke the law to favor their own kind for hiring.

There has been admissions before that lots of dirty tricks news is fed to the mainstream and other "journalists".  If Greg Miller wanted to do a real story he could do one on how he got scammed by the Republicans, again.

 But that would be an Inconvenient Truth for the political people with money, with Sam Zell's heart, and with the power to make any journalist's career better or worse.

I have found reports showing that the Republicans have an entire systems to get news that would embarrass Democrats or support Republicans.  Lazy reporters use them quite often.  And as we see here, the facts don't even have to line up.  It doesn't even have to be the truth!  Just use what they give you to make a scenario where it makes the president look bad.  Our nation is in a world of trouble, and we have the Repulicans still playing war games against the other half of our government (whether in or out of power both parties are actually part of our government).

Looking around for a short while I see

Glenn Greenwald "The L.A. Times, Obama & renditions "

The Brad Blog LA Times 'Punked': Obama NOT Continuing Bush 'Extraordinary Rendition' Program

Andrew Sullivan-- The Daily Dish: The Rendition Canard

Greg Miller has done other reports, two I know of on Valerie Plame in which the CIA buddies he thinks are his friends and honest brokers (I get the feeling he thinks he's Bob Woodward to their Deep Throat skulking around parking garages getting secrets) tell him that Valerie Plame NOC was not that important.  The one I was able to find to day is (at this moment) still currently available at the Baltimore Sun.  In this one his CIA friends have told him that, because Ms. Plame had visited headquarters.

Excerpt Baltimore Sun "Plame case shines a light on the value of CIA operatives' cover":

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said it's unlikely that Plame is in any danger as a result of being identified. And an internal review at the CIA concluded that her exposure caused minimal damage, mainly because she had been working at headquarters for years, former officials familiar with the review said. 

Still, other comments from Miller do show that CIA ops in that report were very upset at the exposure.

I can't find the other report by Miller on Plame in 2007 or 2008  in which he said his CIA sources had told him that the NOC program that Ms. Plame worked for had been dismanteled years earlier and therefore her NOC was useless.  No harm.  No foul. And I know that Libby was convicted on lying during the investigation, but I'm sure Fitzpatrick did not create a huge investigation for the outer of a CIA agent who's cover had been was useless before being outed.

But whether Miller has been a good reporter or is looking for sensational reports that he knows will spread his name and become a huge hit with the right wing commentators, I think he needs to be more careful about his sources.  They are not serving him well.

Okay I went to yahoo to hopefully find the other Miller report the mitigated Plame's outing and found a blog post by an weird old blogger, but at least the link from his blog still works to get to the Miller report.

See .Common Sense "Praise Cheney and Libby for Outing Valerie Plame. They Just Got the Ball Rolling on Doing Away with a Bad CIA Program"

In the older post I wrote that what I took away from Greg Miller's Feb 2008 report was that Cheney and Libby:

They didn't just out NOC CIA agent, Valerie Plame.   They presciently closed down a CIA covert organization in a program that the Bush administration later decided wasn't working.  

(That is if you don't believe that the Bush administration makes up news to feed to mainstream and conservative journalists, like, um, they fed Valerie Plame's name to various reporters before finding one vile enough to actually blow her cover in front of the world.)

I went on to excoriate Miller, and I still think he's not as upright as he could be in his reporting or maybe he's just a stooge. 

Here's the link to Miller's 2008 report (in archive called simply "Archive for Sunday, February 17, 2008"

Originally the title was "CIA's ambitious spy plan falters".

tags: rendition  torture  cia  clinton  obama administration  obama  extraordinary rendition  mainstream news media  

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