When do we start calling this a 'cover-up' by the Obama White House?

[bigtree]

81. I don't think anyone would be seriously talking about the President's responsibility in any of that

. . if he hadn't inserted himself into the debate so overtly in several ways.

One of the more obvious is his refusal to move forward with any accountability beyond 'allowing' the publicizing of the Senate Intelligence report. Even at that, under President Obama's ultimate authority, the CIA has foot-dragged and outright obstructed the intelligence committee's attempt to investigate and report their findings.

Instead of fumbling through my own understanding of events, let me offer some accounts that I believe are credible:

Marcy Wheeler was a high profile journalist reporting on the Scooter Libby trial. In 2013, Newsweek published an article about Wheeler titled "The Woman Who Knows The NSA's Secrets.

here's Marcy in March:

____ We can be sure about one thing: The Obama White House has covered up the Bush presidency’s role in the torture program for years. Specifically, from 2009 to 2012, the administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep a single short phrase, describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program, secret.

Some time before October 29, 2009, then National Security Advisor Jim Jones filed an ex parte classified declaration with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in response to a FOIA request by the ACLU seeking documents related to the torture program. In it, Jones argued that the CIA should not be forced to disclose the “source of the CIA’s authority,” as referenced in the title of a document providing “Guidelines for Interrogations” and signed by then CIA Director George Tenet. That document was cited in two Justice Department memos at issue in the FOIA. Jones claimed that “source of authority” constituted an intelligence method that needed to be protected.

. . . The White House’s fight to keep the short phrase describing Bush’s authorization of the torture program hidden speaks to its apparent ambivalence over the torture program. Even after President Obama released the DOJ memos authorizing torture – along with a damning CIA Inspector General Report and a wide range of documents revealing bureaucratic discussions within the CIA about torture – the White House still fought the release of the phrase that would have made it clear that the CIA conducted this torture at the order of the president. And it did so with a classified declaration from Jones that would have remained secret had Judge Hellerstein not insisted it be made public.

As Aftergood noted, such White House intervention in a FOIA suit is rare. “The number of times that a national security advisor has filed a declaration in a FOIA lawsuit is vanishingly small,” he said. “It almost never happens.” But as ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer noted of the finding, “It was the original authority for the CIA’s secret prisons and for the agency’s rendition and torture program, and apparently it was the authority for the targeted killing program as well. It was the urtext. It’s remarkable that after all this time it’s still secret.”

President Obama’s willingness to go to such lengths to hide this short phrase may explain the White House’s curious treatment of potentially privileged documents with the Senate now – describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program and its seemingly contradictory stance supporting publishing the Torture Report while thwarting its completion by withholding privileged documents. After all, the documents in question, like the reference to the presidential finding, may deprive the President of plausible deniability.

Furthermore, those documents may undermine one of the conclusions of the Torture Report. According to Senator Ron Wyden, the Senate Torture Report found that “the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House.” Perhaps the documents reportedly withheld by the White House undermine this conclusion, and instead show that the CIA operated with the full consent and knowledge of at least some people within the White House . . .
_______________________

Now, you might respond that this is still mostly about the actions of the previous administration. That's correct, but there's obviously some institutional reason for resisting disclosure of their activities in court and in outright refusal to comply with information requests from interested parties in the legislature. Most notably is the drone program which has the same authorization structure that the Bush-era actors practiced and are presently defending against this report.

That's an area (and several others like GITMO) where I believe, and many others believe, is where the President's desire to protect his prerogative is influencing his foot dragging on a complete accounting of the previous administration's conduct. If that speculation seems obtuse and hard to confirm, it's because it's designed to by the administration, many believe, to hide the fact that it is his own order which allows these objectionable, and possibly illegal, programs to operate or continue.

Certainly all of those policies can be debated and resolved in some way through making those actions available to the legislature to mitigate and judge. That's not a course this administration has chosen to take on a number of remnants from Bush's 'war on terror;' like renditions, torture-friendly nations, 'extra-judicial killings, and the like. Authorization on all of these may well be successfully mitigated through Congress, but the President has made a determination to hold back accountability for whatever authority he's assumed to carry out these policies and actions(to order them).

Those are areas where the Bush-era abuses and the present activities of the Obama CIA collide. Those are the prerogatives of President Obama which he shares with the former administration that he's fought to obscure and keep secret through many questionable moves.

That obstruction, that collusion with the prerogatives of the Bush administration's 'war on terror' may well have withstood legislative attempts to delve deeper and demand more public accountability, but the Senate was spurred to investigate the CIA activities under Bush because of deliberate, and admitted destruction of key evidence. having been confronted about that by Congress. the agencies involved agreed to provide dual paperwork which they claimed contained the same evidence that had been discarded. That's where the present investigation took over, first under Jay Rockefeller, then under Sen. Feinstein in 2009.

In the course of that investigation, there was systematic and blatant interference, obstruction, surveillance, and intimidation of committee staffers by the Brennan/Obama CIA. It was first denied by the director when confronted in March; later admitted to last week.

Added to that, the president put this same interfering and obstructing CIA in charge of editing the 'executive summary' of the Senate Intelligence Committee findings which is to be the ONLY public accounting of the actions of the former administration.

Right after the President addressed reporters on the torture report Friday, it was revealed by senate committee members that the documents they submitted to the White House, to the President, for approval for release had been heavily redacted and had "eliminated and obscured key information" which supported the report's conclusions.

That editing process was/is being led by Brennan, who admitted his agency's role, the agency he oversees, in obstructing those findings. Further, an effort to rebut the report is reportedly being directly aided by all three former CIA directors under Bush and others who participated in or ordered the activities and abuses in question in the report's findings.


Let's go back to the questions I asked in the op:

What did the President know about the CIA's obstruction, interference, and intimidation of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers investigating the agency's activities?

What role did the President have in what Sen. Feinstein terms 'eliminating or obscuring key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions?'

I'm asking DUers, at what point do we conclude that there's enough evidence that the Obama White House is unlawfully obstructing the Senate investigation's report? Do we wait for the Senate committee members to say so? (they've come very close to that conclusion)

I'm all for waiting to see what the White House ultimately decides to leave in and leave out of it's 'executive summary' of the investigation's findings, but there's already enough interference, obstruction, intimidation, and 'redacting' on the record for me to conclude that something major is being perpetrated - even if someone in or out of the WH can rationalize us away from calling it a 'cover-up.'

I would further ask or seek to uncover, what role the Obama CIA has played in not only protecting or defending the prerogatives of the Bush-era abuses, but how many of those have been continued or perpetuated in this administration and into the future for other Presidents to advantage their own actions?

In all of that, I see serious questions of obstruction of justice; violations of the Fourth Amendment; violations of the separations of powers, including the Speech and Debate clause; and as Sen. Feinstein put it, actions which may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.

As in all important and consequential inquires, they are just that: inquiries. That is, if and up until something is revealed in that inquiry which is found to be illegal, unethical, or out of the bounds of what Congress is willing to allow. The process of inquiry isn't necessarily a determinative one. Nor does a prosecution effort necessarily mean a conviction.

What most people are asking for is due process of law, and a responsiveness to the oversight responsibilities of our legislature. that is the area where this administration has, I believe, inserted itself in an overt and questionable manner. I wonder why?

What is is about the prerogatives of the present Obama CIA that is preventing them from being as open as the Senate Intelligence Committee desires and expects? That's the pretext the President is giving critics and investigators to tie him to the abuses and activities of the Bush-era tortures; the cover-up. That's what has been the sticking point in most 'scandals' involving the Executive Branch. I happen to believe that most of the obstruction is unnecessary, but obviously, this administration, this President, feels there's something in that process for him to defend.

The manner in which it's being defended by the administration is the subject of debate, as it should be. This isn't inadvertent obstruction, it's deliberate and highly questionable behavior which is trampling on more than a few laws. I happen to think the President would be better served to order all relevant information be revealed. I think he would disagree with that. So, there we are.

Let's see how far President Obama is willing for his CIA to bend to the wishes of the Senate investigators in the coming weeks, but I don't think we should lose sight of, or refuse to seek accountability for the obstruction from those offices, over which he has ultimate authority, that's already occurred.