Way to go, Obama. The proletariat is angry over your destruction of the economy and your bumbling foreign policy, so there’s no better time for a distraction.
The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended to Attorney General Eric Holder that a number of alleged CIA prisoner-abuse cases that were closed under the Bush administration be reopened, FOX News confirms.
Holder is considering the guidance as his department is set to make public a 2004 report by the CIA’s inspector general detailing allegations of prisoner abuse.
Several details in the review have already been reported. FOX News confirmed over the weekend that the report includes claims that interrogators threatened at least one prisoner with a power drill and also conducted mock executions to scare detainees.
In a memo to the agency Monday morning, CIA Director Leon Panetta urged his staff to stay focused in the face of the “politicized” debate the report is expected to stir up, and defended the way the agency has handled allegations of abuse over the past several years.
“This is in many ways an old story,” Panetta wrote, saying many of the techniques have already been made public. He wrote that the CIA obtained intelligence from high-value detainees “when inside information on Al Qaeda was in short supply,” and that his role now is to “stand up” for officers who followed the legal guidance given to them.
But a source with knowledge of the Office of Professional Responsibility’s recommendations suggested that as many as 10 cases could be reopened.
The move would reverse the policy of the Bush administration and could expose CIA employees and agency contractors to criminal prosecution for the alleged mistreatment of terror suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In another development, President Obama signed off on setting up a special interrogation team that would be placed at the FBI but report directly to the White House-based National Security Council.
……For his part, Holder is considering whether to appoint a special criminal prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s interrogation practices, a controversial move that would run counter to Obama’s wishes to leave the issue in the past.
But Holder reportedly reacted with disgust when he first read accounts of prisoner abuse earlier this year in a classified version of the IG report.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/24/justice-dept-advises-pursuing-cia-abuses/
“Disgust”. More disgusting than the possibility of those types of interrogations stopping an attack like 9/11?
But get this, he’s creating his very own “special terrorism-era interrogation unit”:
Obama has approved creation of a new, special terrorism-era interrogation unit to be supervised by the White House, a top aide said Monday, further distancing his administration from President George W. Bush’s detainee policies.
The new unit does not mean the CIA is now out of the interrogation business, deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton told reporters covering the vacationing Obama at Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
Burton said the unit will include “all these different elements under one group,” and it said that it will be situated at the FBI headquarters in Washington. The unit would be led by an FBI official, with a deputy director from somewhere in the government’s vast intelligence apparatus, and members from across agencies. It will be directly supervised by the White House.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Obama-to-create-White-House-supervised-interrogation-unit-54548157.html
I wonder what the methods will be, now that THE ONE has declared “the U.S. is no longer engaged in a war on terrorism.” Nor are we fighting “jihadists in a global war.”
Until 2012 when hopefully, a new president with balls gets elected, don’t expect much progress in the war on Islamofascism or the effort to gain valuable information.
This whole thing is a charade. It’s nothing but bluster on Obama and Holder’s part to appease the Left’s need for revenge. They’re still reeling over Nancy Pelosi getting caught in a big, fat lie about ‘not being briefed’ on CIA interrogation techniques in 2002, and they’re frustrated that the despised George W. Bush actually fought back against Islamic terrorists and used the necessary methods to stop them.
Obama won’t prosecute anyone, because he can’t. Politicizing this instead of just admitting the interrogations worked, will blow up in Jug Ear’s face. The CIA needs to hand the Left a big mug of ‘shut the fuck up’. Simply produce the documents that show the information we obtained from interrogating Al Qaeda operatives; the networks, plots, facilitators, financial ties, and supporters. In other words, that harsh interrogations work. It saved American lives.