David Ignatius: The Mainstream Media’s Chief Apologist for CIA Crimes

[laststeamtrain]

David Ignatius: The Mainstream Media’s Chief Apologist for CIA Crimes

By Melvin A. Goodman
The Public Record
Jul 16th, 2009

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius has become the mainstream media’s apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency.

In Thursday’s column, he has lambasted Attorney General Eric Holder for even considering the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate possible war crimes by CIA officers; congressional Democrats who want to conduct genuine oversight of the CIA; and President Obama who perhaps now understands that an investigation of the CIA is not merely about “petty grievances.”

Ignatius disingenuously argues that the Justice Department learned about CIA’s criminal actions five years ago and decided that no prosecution was warranted. But Ignatius knows the the politicized Justice Department was always part of the problem and never a part of the solution to the torture and abuse, the secret prisons, and the extraordinary renditions that have hurt U.S. credibility around the world.

Ignatius presumably also knows that Obama and Holder were never willing to investigate, let alone prosecute, CIA actions that followed the dubious legal authority to torture al Qaeda captives. We now know, however, in gruesome detail that sadistic CIA operatives went far beyond the so-called legal authority in their interrogation of these captives, and that there was the conduct of torture and abuse against captives who were never interrogated at all.

Obama never made a “grand bargain” with the CIA, as Ignatius alleges, and he certainly never intended to ignore criminal behavior. But just as CIA director Leon Panetta never learned about a CIA assassination scheme until three weeks ago, five months after he was confirmed as director, President Obama was presumably late to learn the ugly details of CIA abuses under three CIA directors, George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden.

Both Obama and Holder now know that there has been a cover-up of these activities by the senior CIA leaders who never should have been retained by Panetta.

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http://pubrecord.org/david-ignatius-mainstream/

[ControlledDemolition]

1. K&R. Continuing to cover up the past will eventually doom the country completely. n/t

[Gabi Hayes]

2. thanks for this. I was looking up Ignatius' CIA ties today, but couldn't find much.

wonder if he's tied in with Mockingbird...just thought of that. will check