"The Ongoing Torture Fight"

mcjoan (Kos-front page):

The CIA and establishment media push to soften the edges of torture keeps on ticking, in the form of ongoing outrage over the Brennan non-nomination and trying to turn the ire against bloggers.

Here's digby, as usual saying it as well as anyone could:

As hard as it is to believe, this story about liberal bloggers destroying the CIA by tanking the good soldier John Brennan's nomination just won't go away. CNN was running it all day....

First, I have never really bought the idea that bloggers actually tanked this nomination. (If we had that kind of power, do you think we'd be faced with Rick Warrens greasy visage on inauguration day?) So this insistence among the press, and presumably their sources at the agency, is a bit hard to swallow. Indeed, the report itself, which they teased with the headline "was Barack Obama's first choice to be CIA chief torpedoed by bloggers?" all day, pretty much says it's bs.

I would not be surprised if the Obama team told Brennan that was the reason. (They deny it, so there's no clear answer.) But frankly, this story just doesn't make sense no matter how you look at it. If the Obama team wanted to drop Brennan, let's hope they used a more believable excuse than "bloggers" made them do it. If Brennan believed them, then it shows that he is far too gullible to be the head of the CIA. And if people in the CIA are using this as a way to make Obama look weak or foolish, they are being unpatriotic asses.

And then there's the press. They get the story wrong over and over and over again. This is a Fox story which CNN has decided is juicy enough for them to flog with a Fox style misleading headline all day long. There's just no end to it, despite the fact that Glenn Greenwald and others have been very precise in their criticisms of Brennan, never once implying that anyone who was in the CIA during the Bush administration is disqualified.

I have to say that it's more than a little bit disconcerting if anonymous members of the CIA are focusing their ire on liberal bloggers. Considering the vast powers of the agency, it has a tinge of a threat to it. As I pointed out before, liberal bloggers have long defended the CIA's analyses and never held the torture and rendition regime against the rank and file, while the right wing was defaming them at every turn, blaming them for 9/11 and the failure of Iraq.

But Brennan was at the top of the food chain and he made statements after he left the agency indicating he supported some aspects of the program. To those of us who believe that torture, Guantanamo and rendition are serious threats to national security as well as an immoral degradation of American ideals, it's important that Obama not send the wrong signals to the world by appointing someone who has made such public statements.

So you've got the CIA doing their damnedest to intimidate the Obama team. Whether they are doing it to cover their asses and pre-emptively waylay potential investigations into their activities, or actually want to justify these programs to continue them, they've found a willling acomplice in the traditional media, which is spoiling for a fight between Obama and the left base. Unfortunatey, one anonymous Obama transition "observer" is willing to play the game, giving this ridiculous comment to WaPo:

The episode bothered a lot of Brennan fans in the Obama operation, where he still heads the CIA transition team. "If we’re afraid of bloggers," one transition observer quipped, "how can we take on al-Qaeda?" Various names have popped up since for the job, including Washington lawyer and former agency general counsel Jeff Smith

Is it really so hard for "Brennan fans in the Obama operation" to see how appointing a torture apologist to head the CIA is sending precisely the wrong message to the rest of the world? Do they not understand that running a campaign on "change" means, you know, changing things? Particularly the egregious lawlessness of the previous regime?

I agree with digby that it's highly unlikely that pressure from bloggers torpedoed Brennan. It's far more likely that savvy Obama transition leaders recognized that Brennan's confirmation hearings would be ugly, because there are enough members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to oppose him. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprise if Russ Feingold didn't have something to do with Brennan's withdrawl. I'd also like to hope that there's a modicum of moral principle behind the Brennan decision as well, that he was as opposed among members of the transition team because of his defense of torture.

Nonetheless, the intelligence community and their accomplices are going to do their damnedest to keep this story alive, and to make the bloggers the bad guys (as if we're running around waterboarding people). Fine, whatever. We can take the heat, just as long as it means the torture stops. It's a trade-off I can live with. But it would be nice if, just once, the traditional media could get the story right.

Barack Obama