From President Obama down to his supposed subordinates, the American public is being subjected to the same mind-numbing drivel about 9-11 and terror that Bush and his cronies used to deflect blame and accountability from their anti-constitutional abuses. The committee findings they're deflecting blame from on behalf of the Bush administration aren't the product of anything the President has done. Those investigations are the work of a diligent and thorough Senate investigative committee which Pres. Obama’s CIA did everything in their power to stall and conceal. All of this 'confidence’ he's falling all over himself to heap on Brennan ignores the amazing and absolutely damning admission by his CIA director that he had, in fact, engaged in surveillance of the very Senate committee which produced the report he's referring to and, incredibly, lifted documents related to their investigation of his agency right out of their computers.
We don't need lectures from Pres. Obama, or anyone else defending his administration, about the dangers of terrorism stemming from 9-11. Aside from the killings perpetrated by bin-Laden and his accomplices, real and serious damage was done to America in the way that Bush, Cheney, Tenet, and others in the past administration took advantage of the nation's fears and embarked on a mission to tear down decades of civil liberties and privacy protections of American citizens; and embarked on an opportunistic war of aggression in Iraq which created even more individuals bent on harming the U.S. and our interests.
No matter how many times he says the word torture with concern and consternation; no matter how the word 'patriots' falls from his lips like some papal absolution, refusing to seek prosecution for the Bush-era torture and rendition abuses amounts to retroactive approval, no matter what lip service the President offers us about his objections.
What about addressing CIA Chief Brennan's attempts to intimidate and discredit the investigators of that report he's explaining away?
John Brennan, an intelligence official under George Tenet, was chosen by Obama early in his presidency to lead the review of intelligence agencies and helped make recommendations to his new administration. Brennan had supported warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition under Bush. It's understandable that he would seek to stifle and obfuscate from anything he and his former employers might have had a hand in.
This administration had already asserted itself in the torture debate by moving ahead of Congress in 2009 by establishing the Executive Order 13491 - Ensuring Lawful Interrogations which outlaws many of the torture policies and practices of the anti-constitutional Bush-era 'war on terror.' Although the directive from President Obama effectively outlaws specific practices, it can be easily undone by successive administrations. That eventuality was demonstrated with reasonable surety by Mitt Romney in his declaration during his presidential campaign that he supported some of the most objectionable practices outlawed by the WH order.
What's not understandable is why President Obama sees a need to cover for the previous administration - not unless you consider that his own might well have engaged in some of the same abuses. In 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder closed without charges the only two cases the Obama administration chose to investigate that involved Bush's torture program. What Holder's decision represented was the last word by the Obama administration on actually bring accountability and consequence to the actions of the Bush-era torturers.
Despite all of the talk from Obama about his own reforms and remedies there have been reports that rendition abuses actually continued under his watch. There are even reports that torture has continued on our nation's behalf in other countries where the law or morality permits. We certainly deserve more than cheap propaganda designed to deflect blame from war criminals and provide cover for whatever this president seeks to preserve from the 'extra-constitutional' policies Bush established after 9-11.
Notwithstanding an act by Congress in revising existing legislation or passing new legislation specifically outlawing the objectionable practices outlawed by President Obama's executive order, those torture policies and practices remain up to the discretion of the person in the White House.
This scandal involves an attempt by the Obama/Brennan CIA to intimidate and chill an active investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee into past practices and criminal abuses by the agency which were committed by Bush administration officials. Not only did the search and removal of documents from the committee computers indicate an attempt to cover-up the corroborating information contained in the Panetta internal review, the attempt to smear committee staffers with criminal charges for obtaining the documents (through the procedures and search tools that the CIA had actually provided them) was an interference and an attempt to intimidate the committee from conducting a thorough investigation of the agency's activities.
Moreover, there was a conflict of interest, in that the acting general counsel attempting to criminalize the efforts of the committee staffers was a lawyer in the very division which carried out the interrogation procedures in question.
Feinstein in her floor speech:
Director Brennan stated that the CIA’s search had determined that the committee staff had copies of the Internal Panetta Review on the committee’s “staff shared drive” and had accessed them numerous times. He indicated at the meeting that he was going to order further “forensic” investigation of the committee network to learn more about activities of the committee’s oversight staff.
Two days after the meeting, on January 17, I wrote a letter to Director Brennan objecting to any further CIA investigation due to the separation of powers constitutional issues that the search raised. I followed this with a second letter on January 23 to the director, asking 12 specific questions about the CIA’s actions—questions that the CIA has refused to answer.
Some of the questions in my letter related to the full scope of the CIA’s search of our computer network. Other questions related to who had authorized and conducted the search, and what legal basis the CIA claimed gave it authority to conduct the search. Again, the CIA has not provided answers to any of my questions.
My letter also laid out my concern about the legal and constitutional implications of the CIA’s actions. Based on what Director Brennan has informed us, I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.
Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance...
As I mentioned before, our staff involved in this matter have the appropriate clearances, handled this sensitive material according to established procedures and practice to protect classified information, and were provided access to the Panetta Review by the CIA itself. As a result, there is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime. I view the acting general counsel’s referral as a potential effort to intimidate this staff—and I am not taking it lightly.
I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center—the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit’s chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.
And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff—the same congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers—including the acting general counsel himself—provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.
One of the questions which need answering concerning Brennan's grudging admission that his agency had, in fact, interfered in the Senate committee's investigation into CIA activities, is what extent these former operators contributed to the process of omitting portions of that report from the public as well as the private version of the Senate's findings?
Whether Obama's CIA chief is presently opposed to the torture policies of his former boss, Tenet, or not, there was a clear conflict of interest in allowing him to direct the crafting of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report - the only public view of the committee findings that's been allowed for public view. That conflict is made even more egregious in the way that former CIA officials, including two other former C.I.A. directors - Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden - were allowed to actively participate in that process of declassification and editing the documents.
I think CIA director Brennan's admission that his agents broke into the computers of the Senate committee investigating his agency (after strenuous and repeated denials) is one of the most potentially explosive revelations since the Nixon WH was discovered spying on Democrats. In that scandal Nixon used the nation's intelligence agencies to spy on Kennedy and Muskie to try and find something to use against them to advantage his political contest. As important as those abuses of power were, and the fact that the president was directly involved, they pale in comparison to Director Brennan's admissions in July.
It's disturbing to hear President Obama actually offering his own justifications for torture practices and policies he's already identified as far outside or constitution or our national conscience. It's chilling to see that even a summary of that report - in effect, itself auguring an inadequate and incomplete accounting to the American people - redacted in such a significant way by one of the partners to those abuses; now an integral partner to this President's representation of the only significant and extensive official accounting of all of that.
With all of the admitted interference by the Obama CIA in the committee investigation, and all of the collusion of the principal subjects in the Bush-era practices in revising and rebutting the investigator's findings, it may well be that we'll need yet another investigation to provide an un-redacted accounting of events and actions and to provide that 'responsibility' for the abuses that President Obama says we deserve.
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, but thus far neither has really done so, AFAIK. The concepts of 'separation of powers' and 'co-equal branches of government,' while of transcendent importance to the functioning of our democratic republic, remain nonetheless fairly abstract to a sovereign people mainly preoccupied with scratching out an ever-more-hardscrabble existence. 
