After Scrutiny, C.I.A. Mandate Is Untouched

[kentuck]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/us/politics/after-scrutiny-cia-mandate-is-untouched-.html?_r=0

<snip>

But the Obama administration has made clear that it has no plans to make anyone legally accountable for the practices described by the C.I.A. as enhanced interrogation techniques and the Intelligence Committee as torture. The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. this week asking him to appoint a special prosecutor to examine the report’s allegations, but the request will almost certainly be rejected.

And while Senator King called the Intelligence Committee’s report “Church Committee II,” he, like many other Democrats on the Intelligence Committee, remains a broad supporter of the C.I.A.’s paramilitary mission that Mr. Obama has embraced during his time in the White House.

During the presidential campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama railed against the agency’s use of torture and secret prisons during the Bush administration, and shuttered the detention program during his first week in office. But he has empowered the agency in other ways — including allowing its director, not the White House, to make the final decisions about drone strikes in Pakistan.

“Many presidents tend to be smitten with the instruments of the intelligence community. I think Obama was more smitten than most,” said one former senior Obama administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified intelligence matters. “This has been an intelligence presidency in a way we haven’t seen maybe since Eisenhower.” The C.I.A. had shifted from capturing and interrogating terrorism suspects to targeting them with armed drones even before Mr. Obama came to office. It was a tactic championed by Congress at the same time that lawmakers were beginning to criticize the agency’s detention and interrogation program.

....more

[WillyT]

1. Huge K & R !!! - Thank You !!!