Robert Parry — How ‘Looking Forward’ Tripped Up Obama

...the biggest mystery may be why the Obama White House has been so solicitous of the CIA’s desire to keep secret the history of a torture program authorized by President George W. Bush and overseen by Vice President Dick Cheney. As Commander in Chief, President Obama has the ultimate say over what stays classified and what gets declassified....

Obama could simply issue a declassification order that would allow the release of both the Senate’s 6,300-page report and an internal CIA review (with whatever redactions would be appropriate).... 

If every government report required that the party being criticized agree to every detail of the allegations, no report would ever be issued. This idea that secretive CIA officials, who have already obstructed the investigation by destroying videotape of the torture sessions, should now have the right to block the report’s release indefinitely grants the spy agency what amounts to blanket immunity for whatever it does.

So, the question is why. Why does President Obama continue letting holdovers from the Bush administration, including current CIA Director John Brennan, control U.S. national security policies more than five years after President Bush and Vice President Cheney left office?

The Ukraine Crisis

  A similar question arises over the Ukraine crisis in which neoconservative holdovers, such as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, and the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy were allowed to spur on the violent coup that overthrew democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych and precipitated a dangerous confrontation with Russia....

Nuland’s husband, former Reagan administration official Robert Kagan, was a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, which in 1998 called for the first step in this “regime change” strategy by seeking a U.S. invasion of Iraq....

Obama seems to feel that even though he’s been Commander in Chief for half a decade he still must tread softly to avoid upsetting the Bush holdovers and their many influential friends in Official Washington. It’s an attitude that historians may find puzzling. 

Consortiumnews.com
How ‘Looking Forward’ Tripped Up Obama
Robert Parry

See also Sen. Feinstein: Accidental ‘Whistleblower’ by Norman Solomon

Consider the fact that the CIA, under the current Democratic administration, has gone to extraordinary lengths to transgress against a CIA-friendly Democratic-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, in an effort to prevent anyone from being held accountable for crimes of torture committed under and by the Republican Bush administration.

While Dianne Feinstein has a long and putrid record as an enemy of civil liberties, transparency and accountability, it’s also true that thieves sometimes fall out — and so do violators of the most basic democratic safeguards in the Bill of Rights.

Some powerful “intelligence” scoundrels are now at each other’s throats, even while continuing to brandish daggers at the heart of democracy with their contempt for such ideals as a free press, privacy and due process. The responsibility for all this goes to the very top: President Barack Obama.

No way for the White House to put a good spin on this.