Ethics

The Obama Administration's Torture Apologists

By Ed Brayton

Jane Mayer has a very important article in the New Yorker that focuses a lot of attention on Leon Panetta as CIA director, but also discusses the many people with torture blood on their hands from the Bush administration who are still in position at the CIA and elsewhere in the Obama administration. Those people include John Brennan, who was Tenet's chief of staff and is currently Obama's chief adviser on such matters, as well as several CIA higher ups just below Panetta. I think it helps to explain a lot of what has happened (or not happened) in the last few months in regard to truth commissions, prosecutions of Bush administration officials or CIA operatives and the release of memos and pictures about torture. Here's a long excerpt:

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on July 02, 2009 (boomark / email).