In Glenn Greenwald's recent Salon article, "Some observations after being involved in a Fox News report," he discusses his attempt to set the record straight when it comes to the left blogs' John Brennan critique. I believe he is mostly right when he says:

"Specifically, the case against John Brennan as CIA Director - from the beginning - was based almost exclusively on comments he made on television, after he left the CIA, in which he supported rendition and what he called 'enhanced interrogation tactics.'" [bolding Greenwald's]

That was indeed the basis for the Brennan critique. John Brennan, basically, did this to himself - he was the one who stood up and acted as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration's tactics. The mass media doesn't understand this for some reason. Despite the fact that Brennan's statements are out there for the world to see, the MSM did little to present them to their viewers/readers.  But even if Brennan hadn't put his foot in his mouth, I believe he would've been, by virtue of his former place in the chain of command, disqualifed for the CIA Director position.

Crossposted from Docudharma


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"The Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendements to the Constitution of the United States prohibit cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment."

With that sentence begins the documentary film "Torturing Democracy", a documentary to be aired on PBS television stations nationwide on January 21st, 2009, one day after President Bush leaves office.

One day after President Bush leaves office will be the first day of President-Elect Barack Obama's new administration.

Between today and that day, we have a date with Attorney General-Designate Eric Holder and President-Elect Barack Obama. Everyday.

As netizens reading this at the founding site of the Citizens Petition for a Special Prosecutor to Investigate and Prosecute Bush War Crimes we have a date every day with those two men as we work to generate as many signatures to the petition that we can possibly generate to bring the war criminals in the Bush administration to justice. Principally Mr. Bush himself, Vice President Richard Cheney, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They were the leaders. The instigators. And the approvers. But there are many others as well, and they all deserve fair trials. it is the very least we can do for them, and for the world.

These crimes are being euphemistically referred to as "abusive interrogation techniques" by such respected figures as Senator John McCain. These are euphemisms for torture. Torture is a War Crime. Waterboarding is a War Crime. The CIA has admitted waterboarding detainees. Recently, Vice President Cheney has brazenly admitted authorizing the program that led to waterboarding, other forms of torture too numerous to list, and ultimately, the deaths by homicide of detainees.

As is often the case, we are because of our insatiable interest, curiosity and determination to be as well informed as we can be, much farther ahead of the millions of people who will see Torturing Democracy on January 21st, 2009.

Before the PBS broadcast the documentary in its entirety can be viewed at TorturingDemocracy.org

This short intro video is the first eight and a half minutes of the full documentary. You can watch the full program at the link above.

When Penny Pritzker withdrew her name from consideration for Secretary of Commerce, a typical corporate news report in the New York Times was neutral, to say the least.

"Penny Pritzker, a Chicago hotel magnate whose business transactions could have provoked scrutiny, last week said she did not want to be Commerce Secretary."

One of Penny Pritzker's transactions that "could have provoked scrutiny" was paying herself and her co-conspirators $200 million in dividends on phony profits while they diddled away all the depositors' money deposited in Superior Bank.

Today I want to look at something Joe Biden said on the morning talk circuit about prosecuting Bush officials responsible for our detainee/interrogation policy.  From this morning's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos:

When Congress gave Hank Paulson $700 billion to spend however he wanted to spend it, they also appointed a weak little Congressional Oversight Panel with a suggestive acronym (COP) but no subpoena power. Not surprisingly, the unarmed COP has no idea where most of the money went.

InterPress has a useful overview of this hilarious boondoggle by Adrianne Appel, with some scarifying quotes from the chair-person of COP, Elizabeth Warren:

"We are here to ask the questions that we believe all Americans have a right to ask: who got the money, what have they done with it, how has it helped the country and how has it helped ordinary people?"

Apparently we won't know where the money is going until it's gone. Ms. Appel summarizes the little that's actually known now:

Paulson has since doled out the equivalent of 1,900 dollars per U.S. family to banks and financial institutions, according to Warren's panel. None of the Treasury funds have been aimed at slowing foreclosures.

Paulson gave 40 billion dollars to insurance giant AIG, 165 billion dollars to 87 banks, including Citigroup and eight other of the largest financial institutions in the U.S., plus an additional 20 billion dollars to Citigroup. The nine large banks were required to give the U.S. a limited amount of stock and returns in exchange for the money.

The Treasury bailout programme, run by Assistant Secretary Neel Kashkari, did not require the banks to use the money in any particular way.

So that's the non-story of Congressional "oversight" of $700 billion: Nobody knows who got most of it, nobody knows what whoever got it did with it, and nobody knows if it helped anybody except the same bankers who made this incredible mess.

The US financial system melted down in September, and Congress donated $700 billion to the banks in a useless bail-out.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama was very, very quiet.

"Me too," he whispered, to whatever the Congressional banking lobby dreamed up, and considering that he was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, and already a world-historical figure in his own mind, it's hard to understand all that silence about the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression.

Why was Barack Obama so quiet about the meltdown?

The answer is Penny Pritzker, Obama's crooked muse, and sometimes she inspires him with psychologically invasive but meaningless slogans (by hiring the finest handlers and speechwriters that $2.8 billion can buy) and sometimes she inspires him with silence.

Way back in 2002, Barack Obama was a nobody, a mediocre state senator who had been crushed in a Democratic primary for the House of Representatives, crushed 2-to-1 by Bobby Rush, and if you get crushed by Bobby Rush in 2000, how do you suddenly develop enough momentum to get yourself elected to the US Senate in 2004?

The answer was Penny Pritzker and her humongous fortune, hundreds of millions of dollars of it extracted from deposits in Superior Bank, where elderly depositors discovered that their life-savings had disappeared into worthless sub-prime repackages, while Penny Pritzker had been paying herself and her co-conspirators hundreds of millions of dollars in dividends on phony profits.

Penny Pritzker and her co-conspirators walked away from Superior Bank with a net profit of $343 million, while the FDIC paid out $500 million in bank insurance to depositors up to the limit of $100 thousand per account, and anything beyond that was just gone.

How did Penny Pritzker get away with this monstrous scam?

Nobody knows, and nobody wants to know.

The FBI didn't investigate, the newspapers ran a few little articles on page 843, and Penny Pritzker adopted a nobody state senator from the South Side of Chicago, wrote him a blank check, hired an all-star team of handlers and speech-writers, and now bankers and real-estate speculators like Penny Pritzker have a reliable little friend at the top of the food chain.

"I'll turn you into a Senator, you nobody, and keep pouring on the millions until you get all the way to the White House, but in return..."

"You keep your big mouth shut about the biggest payoff in the history of the world."

Tim Shorrock is one of the most well-informed and fascinating writers on the intelligence world (check out his interview with Glenn Greenwald here). His recent book, "Spies for Hire," uncovers the extremely cozy relationship between the official CIA and its corresponding "trade association," the INSA (Intelligence and National Security Alliance). You can read some more about that relationship, especially as it relates to John Brennan, in a diary I wrote here. Brennan was until mid-Nov of this year the chairman of the INSA.

Shorrock and Frank Naif recently wrote two really excellent articles for the Huffington Post that describe the problems a post-Bush intelligence agency is going to face as well as the skills and attitudes that are going to be needed to face them.

The FBI had wiretaps all over the Democratic Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, and the Democratic Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer.

Why?

How?

Nobody cares!

The most corrupt and anti-Constitutional Justice Department since Richard Nixon installed electronic eavesdropping equipment directly in the Governor's office in Illinois.

So what?

David Broder says

"Unaware that Fitzgerald had obtained court orders allowing him to tap Blagojevich's phone and bug his office, Blagojevich indulged himself in obscenity-laden talk about how he would use the Senate appointment to enrich himself and his wife."

No big deal! Right, Dave? Bug the Governor's office! Why not?

"Fitzgerald began to close in on Blagojevich. A number of the governor's pals, including developer Tony Rezko, were indicted and convicted."

Blago knows Rezko! And that's all it takes to bug the Governor of Illinois, according to the Dean of the Washington Press Corps, and "high priest of political journalism" David Broder!  

Remember Watergate?

Maybe somebody in that famous office knew somebody who was convicted of something, just like Blago knew Rezko.

Maybe somebody in those Watergate offices fooled around with a high-priced call-girl, once upon a time, just like Eliot Spitzer.

Bug them all! Tap their phones! Install cameras in their underwear drawers! It's all okay, according to the Dean of the Washington Press Corp, and the networks, and even the so-called "liberal" blogosphere.

But for some strange reason, Richard Nixon didn't get a free pass for Watergate.

Reporters in Washington investigated. Senators were enraged! And one fine day, Richard Nixon waved goodbye from a helicopter on the White House lawn.

But that was then, and this is now: All it takes is a little blather about "national security" and you can bug anybody!

Separately, the NSA was also able to access, for the first time, massive volumes of personal financial records--such as credit-card transactions, wire transfers and bank withdrawals--that were being reported to the Treasury Department by financial institutions. These included millions of "suspicious-activity reports," or SARS, according to two former Treasury officials who declined to be identified talking about sensitive programs. (It was one such report that tipped FBI agents to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer's use of prostitutes.) These records were fed into NSA supercomputers for the purpose of "data mining"--looking for links or patterns that might (or might not) suggest terrorist activity.

Now you can put a "national security" wiretap on the Governor of New York, for calling a call-girl.

Does that sound like "national security" to you?

Maybe David Broder, "Dean of the Washington Press Corps" and "high priest of political journalism" could devote one of his syndicated columns to this peculiar question:

What was Eliot Spitzer's weenie doing in an NSA supercomputer?

Something struck me today while catching up on my blog headlines.  Remember the WSJ article BTD blogged about that set off an online firestorm?  We were all supposed to sit tight and dismiss the article until Obama appointed someone like Brennan to the CIA.  Then we could complain.  Then we would find out if Obama had changed his policy.

As I continue my research into Obama's reported CIA and DNI candidate fields, I am finding it remarkable that among the candidates there is such dissent when it comes to what they believe is right/acceptable in interrogation policy and information collection. It's really quite amazing.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.  Right now, there is a really ridiculous op-ed in the NYT about rendition that promotes the deepest Bushisms we are fighting against - and the ones that make Rand Beers and other cosigners of the Campaign to Ban Torture such great choices.  

It is a demonstration of how difficult it can be to dominate the narrative.  Never expect the MSM to agree with you.

And watch when they forward something you hate - Newsweek has Mark Hosenball publishing an article that I considered completely improbable - on Obama keeping Steve Kappes.  I thought this was some AP joke.

In the comments on my previous blog about Obama's muse and main backer Penny Pritzker, that "big stinking kahuna among the certifiable "Butt-Hole Surfers of Ameriican banking," a nasty commenter who knows just enough about banking to spell eff-dee-eye-see impugned my summary of the facts about the FDIC settlement with depositors in Penny Pritzker's failed Superior Bank.

Unfortunately, the annoying commenter was right and I was wrong.

The settlement negotiated between Pritzker and the FDIC was unimaginably worse than I had assumed it was, based on common sense extrapolation from reports in the New York Times and elsewhere.

I assumed that depositors (who lost more than the limit of federal bank insurance) would receive at least a dribble of the money recovered by legal action against the owners of Superior Bank and the giant accounting corporation that failed to detect so much sub-prime skullduggery before Pritzker and her friends had totally emptied the vaults.

I was so wrong, but it wasn't easy to figure out how wrong I was.

There wasn't enough substance in the few newspaper reports about this gigantic bank robbery to understand more about it than a vague outline. Courthouse reporters are usually among the first victims of newspaper downsizing, and general-assignment reporters can't even find the relevant federal court filings, much less understand those typically huge documents, and neither can I.

This would have been a dead-end except for the incredibly lucky circumstance that a professor of business law at Loyola in Chicago, Christian A. Johnson, wrote an full-tilt academic survey of the Pritzker-FDIC deal, which is available online here.

And so I learned yet another miserable truth about Barack Obama and his closest friends.

The FDIC sued the humongous accounting company Ernst & Young for the humongous sum of $2 billion, and promised to share $500 million of it with...

Guess who?

Was it the retirees who deposited their life-savings in Superior Bank, and lost everything beyond the $100,000 limit of FDIC insurance?

Was it the Superior Bank's creditors, who got stiffed when Superior Bank went bankrupt?

Or was it Penny Pritzker and her partners, the same mob that diddled away Superiors assets on worthless sub-prime repackaging while paying themselves $200 million in dividends on phony priofits?

Yes indeedy! The FDIC promised to pay Penny Pritzker and her pals $500 million out of their settlement with Ernst & Young!

"In the event that the FDIC recovered two billion dollars, the Pritzkers and the Dwormans would have been entitled to a payment of approximately $500 million under their settlement agreement with the FDIC."

Flush your depositors money down the sub-prime toilet, pay yourself quadruple what you paid for the bank in dividends on phony profits, and then...

Buy your way out of jail and collect $500 million!

Some elderly depositors with their life savings at Superior lost more than half their retirement nest-eggs in Penny Pritzker sub-prime wheeling and dealing, and how much did the FDIC offer them out of the Ernst & Young bonanza?

Nothing.

Unfortunately for the Pritzkers, the FDIC's suit against Ernst & Young was thrown out of court, along with the depositors suit against the Pritzkers, and the final score is...

For the Pritzkers and their partners in sub-prime repackaging the Dwormans:

$200 million in dividends, plus




$645 million in "cash, tax incentives and promissory notes" from the FDIC just for taking over Superior Bank in the first place...

Total benefits:




$845 million, minus

$42 million purchase price of Superior Bank and...




$460 million to be paid to the FDIC over 15 years.

Net profit for the Pritzkers and Dwormans for bankrupting Superior Bank:

$343 million!

$343 million net profit for diddling away all the deposits in the bank on worthless sub-prime repackaging while paying yourself $200 million in dividends on phony profits!

$343 million net profit for cheating elderly depositors out of half their life savings!

And that's without the $500 million that the FDIC promised to pay the Pritzkers and Dwormans if they won their suit against Ernst & Young!

Professor Johnson asks a very reasonable question about this beautiful deal with the owners of Superior Bank: "Did the FDIC act unjustly or unfairly to other depositors and creditors when it gave preferential treatment to its wealthy stockholders?"

You decide.