God yes. He has "full confidence in John Brennan"? What a tremendously stupid thing to say.
I SEE BARACK OBAMA IS STILL APOLOGIZING FOR AMERICA.
So, um, I guess this means the US government is knowingly in breach of the torture convention by not prosecuting the torturers?
This is kind of obvious, and I'm sure others have pointed it out before and will point it out after me, but the reason Obama will never point fingers at his predecessors is that Obama himself has committed various gross violations of international law (the kill list, the spying programs, Guantanamo and Bagram [at which prisoners are still being tortured], etc.), and if for no other reason than self-interest, he's not going to break that old gentleman's-agreement-among-monsters that says that presidents look the other way for one another.
In brighter news, as of a few weeks ago at least, one of the nurses at Gitmo has refused to force-feed the prisoners there. He was replaced pretty quickly, but still, there's your bit of basic humanity for the day.
I suppose it's something for Obama to acknowledge it.
On the other hand, fuck a bunch of this:
And it's important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had.
He's asking us to put ourselves in the torturers shoes? Call me sanctimonious, but I think our sympathy could reasonably be directed elsewhere.
Likewise:
And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that, hopefully, we don't do it again in the future.
And how does Obama propose to take responsibility? I imagine he believes he just did so. Fuck that, too.
This is as good as we're going to get. There will be no accountability or the people who ordered the torture for the reasons given in 5.1. At least finally someone in power is willing to use the word 'torture.'
Even if there's no real accounting for the torture, there has to be an accounting for public conduct in the 2010-2014 period.
F'rex, every single person involved in the bogus CIA Senate staffer referral to the DOJ needs to be fired now. Every single one.
Huh, I was just reading about this: Booman's response got my attention:
While he's doing his best to uphold the taboo against torturing people, he's doing it in a way that makes him just look terrified of his own intelligence apparatus, and that is not comforting to watch.
Of course, there is also a taboo in many quarters against being, or at least appearing to be, sanctimonious. An accusation of such amounts to checkmate, a conversation-ender, a trump card (I speak from experience, having been on the receiving end of it here); it's difficult to know how to do an end-run around it.
Of course, there is also a taboo in many quarters against being, or at least appearing to be, sanctimonious.
Only about some things, though, politically driven. Nobody lost their job for too sanctimoniously condemning illegal drugs or the "culture of poverty".
From Bady's/zungu?/New Inquiry's vast vaster than empires Sunday Reading List
Human Rights and Selective Amnesia ...mostly about Gaza, but mentions post-2001 US policy, but I love like this quote:
The long-standing paradox of human rights is that the declaration to observe them is a hollow scream that follows their loss
And oh. Fuck Obama.
Aw, this shit's so good
Vast Time-Wasting New Inquiry Sunday Reading List
cause of this (already re-read for the nth time Arendt 85 on violence)
This sentimentality, this angst, this emotional labor is legitimate political work. Our turn toward our families of origin is part of a strategy of intimate organizing - a type of political work that often gets erased or dismissed by dominant white and masculine standards of queer visibility. In a political climate where radicalism is increasingly being attributed to individual activists developing individual political theory and finding individual liberation, our turn back to the blood family is a form of critique. It suggests a commitment to a type of collective liberation and a practice of solidarity where we refuse to allow our people to be disposable in our movement work.
It's double plus sad this is the best we can expect from any president in our lifetime.
DN
it's difficult to know how to do an end-run around it.
Dick jokes, of course.