DAVE LINDORFF: Just Gimme Some Truth!

[babylonsister]

Just Gimme Some Truth!
Submitted by dlindorff on Fri, 2007-12-07 21:08. Criminal Prosecution | Impeachment | Media


The New York Times called Mitt Romney a liar today, but not CIA Director Michael Hayden.

What was Romney’s big one? He ran an ad in New Hampshire this week saying Sen. John McCain had called for allowing illegal workers in the US to collect Social Security, and the the paper of record said he was lying. That’s not what McCain had said. But When Gen. Hayden told a much bigger whopper, saying that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of the “interrogations” of two suspected Al Qaeda leaders because of concerns that the tapes might disclose the identities of CIA agents, thus exposing them and their families to danger, the Times, in the same issue of the paper, let it pass.

Near the end of the lengthy half-page, one-jump article, the paper did quote Tom Malinowski, director of the Washington office of Human Righst Watch, as saying that Hayden’s explanation “wasn’t credible,” which indeed it wasn’t. But you’d have to read a lot of verbiage to get to that gentle challenge.

The truth is that the CIA is full of documents that if leaked would disclose agents’ identities, and the CIA doesn’t destroy those records.

The truth is also that if the CIA wanted to keep the tapes, and even make them available if asked to, it has the means to easily wipe away the identities of any agency assets or agents who appear in the film, and even to mask their voices. News programs do that all the time. So the excuse doesn’t wash.

The reason the Agency destroyed those tapes is not because of concerns about agent safety, but because those tapes are the CIA’s Abu Ghraib moment. They are incontrovertible documentary evidence of the CIA’s blatant use of torture, which it was authorized and instructed to use against terror suspects by President Bush after 9-11, in what is clearly an impeachable act. And in Hayden’s view, and the view of the agency heads before him, it was better to break the law and destroy the evidence than to turn it over to Congressional investigators, defense attorneys for terrorism suspects on trial, and the 9-11 Commission, all of which groups had asked about the existence of such tapes, and about those tapes in particular. And all of which were lied to by the Agency.

So let’s at least call a lie a lie.

more...

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/29211

[Toots]

1. Does it really matter any longer?

Nobody is going to do anything about it..They are all protecting each other and complicit in everything. It is too late for America, it is a Nation of LIARS and Crooks and the "Culture of Corruption" runs very deep indeed....

[babylonsister]

2. While I'm breathing, it HAS to matter. nt

[malaise]

3. Great read

This is an administration of crooks and liars.