We Tortured Some Folks: Obama Defends Brennan and Admits War Crimes

Four words uttered during President Barack Obama's Friday White House press conference sum everything up: "we tortured some folks". It was an admission of how far that America has fallen since the dawn of the twenty first century, the phony war on terror, the real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the coming ones in Europe and the Middle East. The days of America always being the "good guys"  is over. Gone forever is the tremendous amount of global goodwill that came after our fathers and grandfathers saved the world from totalitarianism and suffering under the yoke of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. This is what it can be distilled down to: "we tortured some folks".  The sitting leader of the 'free world' just admitted that this country committed war crimes of the type that had the leaders of the Axis powers hanged for at the post-war tribunals held at Nuremberg and Tokyo. These are dark and terrible days to be an American as lawless charlatans like Obama drag us into what will be a full-blown fascist state in the coming years if something isn't done now to slow the juggernaut.

Obama's presser was largely used to defend his hand-picked CIA Director John Brennan, a vicious thug who was forced to confess to his lies after an investigation found that the agency was indeed spying on a key Senate committee that was investigating torture. Brennan had flat out fibbed about this when called out by the Senate Intelligence Committee overlord Dianne Feinstein and has now been exposed as a liar. Obama is standing by his man. Brennan is however in good company, Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper perjured himself by lying to Congress over the nature of NSA surveillance programs. Obama stood by him too. Both men are still serving in their posts despite being exposed as liars and having covered up unconstitutional activities in the capacity of their jobs. Both men are also defended by the biggest liar of them all: Barack Obama. How far out of control does this all have to go before Americans finally wake up and demand that the rule of law be restored and the criminals in high places held accountable?

The entire system is breaking down with the protection by the government of those who either have the money to purchase influence or who serve as lackeys for the regime. The haughty Obama and the US elite, particularly those in the political class are drunk on hubris and openly flout both domestic and international law. This is the era of the potent intoxicant of American exceptionalism and those in power who have sipped it believe that they are untouchable and able to act with impunity. The American empire though is built upon a foundation of shifting sand and economic fraud. Thanks to Obama's hand-picked finance industry fixer and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the same Wall Street casinos that crashed the economy in 2008 were allowed to not only avoid accountability but have been given and endless supply of low interest money with which to gamble. The too big to fails are now bigger than ever and the next implosion of this house of cards - which is coming - will take the economy down for good. Even almighty Rome fell, it took time but the fall was abetted by the decadence and impunity of a rotten ruling class. The late writer I.F. Stone put it perfectly: "all governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out". The hookah seems to be getting quite a workout at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.

You know that things are spinning out of control when even the beltway propaganda organ and defender of the entrenched power of the surveillance state Gomorrah is even calling for Obama to fire Brennan for his lies. An editorial in The Washington Post, "Obama Should Fire John Brennan" states the obvious:

An apology and an internal review board might suffice if this were Brennan or intelligence leaders’ first offense, but the track record is far from spotless. In 2011, Brennan claimed that dozens of U.S. drone strikes on overseas targets had not killed a single civilian. This remarkable success rate was not only disputed at the time by news reports — even supporters of the drone program called it “absurd” — but as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the New York Times both reported later, President Obama received reports from the very beginning of his presidency about drone strikes killing numerous civilians.

As Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser at the time, Brennan would have received these reports as well, so either Brennan knew that his claim was a lie, or he is secretly deaf. Similarly, Brennan denied snooping on Senate computers six weeks after Feinstein first made the accusation to the CIA in private, which means either that he was lying, or he had ignored a serious charge against his agency for six weeks, then spouted off about it without any real knowledge — hardly the behavior expected of an agency director.

And last year, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to Congress when he told Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and the Senate Intelligence Committee that the National Security Agency did not collect any kind of data on millions of Americans, a claim later disproved by documents leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden. Despite Clapper receiving criticism from both sides of the aisle, the damage to Clapper’s and the White House’s credibility on intelligence and civil liberties issues and, well, the fact that lying to Congress is a crime (though one that’s difficult to prosecute), Obama has not disciplined Clapper in any way.

Sadly, it’s unlikely that this latest incident will encourage Obama to finally induce some accountability in the intelligence community: White House press secretary Josh Earnest called the CIA’s illegal activities mere “misunderstandings.” But as Brennan said when he denied the allegations, “if I did something wrong…he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.” It’s time for Obama to take that responsibility head-on and start to restore in U.S. intelligence agencies some semblance of responsibility to the Constitution and the public.

No amount of public outcry or newspaper editorial writing will compel Obama to do the right thing and give Brennan his walking papers. Nor will it be quietly done through Brenner 'voluntarily' submitting his resignation for the sake of preserving the credibility of the US government. There is no credibility left to preserve and with each passing day, outrageous scandal, revelation of unconstitutional conduct and lies to justify more wars the institutionalized cancer of corruption further eats away at what was once a strong and vibrant system of democracy.

The man of hope and change has turned out to be the man of dashed hope and chump change.

Puppet Show: Obama Hosts 'Leader' Installed by Ukraine Coup d'Etat

In the garden variety state-corporate media friendly greeting of foreign leaders the hand-picked Ukrainian puppet Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk met with President Barack Obama in a heavily publicized visit to the White House on Wednesday. “Yats” as he is endearingly referred to by neocon meddler Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland has come to America, hat in hand to get the money to back his illegitimate, neo-Nazi friendly regime in Kiev. The former central banker, a bespectacled, pencil-necked geek “Yats” is the latest bagman for the global finance mafia who is charged with the task of getting about the gutting of social programs and essential services as well as doling out the natural resources of Ukraine so that the pigs can feast again It is an obscenity, both moral and otherwise that the Obama regime and the criminal Congress will fund the ‘leader’ installed through an obviously western orchestrated putsch that displaced the democratically elected president in Kiev. It is even more outrageous when the US arm of the global gangster syndicate and it’s stooges in Congress cannot even see fit to extend long-term unemployment benefits for the millions that their schemes threw out of work and shipped jobs overseas by the tens of thousands.

The same Congress, having firmly established itself as the preeminent number one enemy of the American people will gladly cough up the dough to back the unelected Yatsenyuk junta and are itching for a rumble with Russia being the back-benching badasses that they are. Despite the ongoing kabuki theater of irreconcilable partisan squabbling preventing anything from getting done that actually benefits American citizens there is always damned near lockstep unity whenever it comes to backing illegitimate overthrows of democratically elected leaders, saving the day for the bloated, bloodsucking Wall Street parasites and their European counterparts to keep the big floating crap game of the ‘global economy’ afloat and filling the coffers of the merchants of death in the armaments business.  The belicosity and posturing that emanates from that reeking whorehouse that is the US Capitol for a confrontation with the reviled Vladimir Putin, ostensibly over the toppling of the legitimate Ukranian government and Russia’s moves in Crimea but truly the festering scorn over Putin’s sinking of the late summer war on Syria as well as saving NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden from one of Obama’s torture chambers. The overthrow of the Yanukoyvch government is just business as usual for the new world order of crushing austerity enforced at the end of a gun that is the now fully mutated version of western finance capitalism.

Wednesday’s public relations scam as Yatsenyuk was trotted out for public consumption is another bright shining example of how regular Americans have gotten the shaft while the ravenous war machine, the deep state and the high-rolling predatory jackals in high finance continue to plunder with impunity. The obvious lies of the big dog and pony show of polishing this latest turd of a tool of the empire is exemplified in this textbook masterpiece of blatant propaganda from the New York Times entitled “Ukraine’s New Premier, the ‘Rabbit,’ Seems to Be in His Element”  written by some dipshit named David Herszenhorn  (with “reporting” by Oksana Lyachynska) from which I excerpt the following gut-wrenching passage:

For three months, throughout the uprising and upheaval in Kiev, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk was one of three political leaders who appeared regularly on stage in Independence Square, but he often seemed out of his element. A former foreign minister, economics minister, speaker of Parliament and acting central bank chief, he is more at home in boardrooms and in the corridors of power than on the barricades.

Now, two weeks after his colleagues in Parliament named him acting prime minister — a job he called “political suicide” even before Russia invaded Crimea — Mr. Yatsenyuk, 39, is in a role that suits him better than that of street revolutionary, but that has thrust him to the center of the crisis.

On Wednesday, he met in Washington with President Obama and other top officials to plead for economic and political assistance.

Among Ukrainians who like to talk politics, Mr. Yatsenyuk is often known as “Rabbit” because of an uncanny resemblance to the character in the Soviet cartoon version of “Winnie the Pooh” — lanky, bald and wearing a distinctive pair of eyeglasses. Derided as an uninspiring technician during a failed presidential campaign in 2010, Mr. Yatsenyuk is now said by some Ukrainians to be the right man at the right moment.

And that is only the beginning of over 1,100 vomit inducing words of one of the most transparent and dishonest pieces of dreck that I have run across lately which says one hell of a lot considering the daily fusillade of horseshit that has been churned out of the presstitutes and wordsmiths over the illegal coup in Kiev.  The “Winnie the Pooh” comparison says it all in that the “Rabbit” or as “Yats” as the adoring Ms. Nuland  (suspiciously sounding as though she wants to blow the guy) refers to him bears absolutely zero resemblance to the famous and beloved children’s character created by British author A.A. Milne but acquired by the unscrupulous mega-money machine Disney Corporation. You would think that such a prominent outlet of the dead tree media in the NYT could at least hire reliable hacks with a fucking clue when it comes to churning out puff pieces on US installed tinhorn dictators. Christ only knows what endearing comparisons could have out of thugs like the avuncular Saddam Hussein had he not gone off the reservation and pissed off the Bushes. The important sentence to take away though is "A former foreign minister, economics minister, speaker of Parliament and acting central bank chief, he is more at home in boardrooms and in the corridors of power than on the barricades” - scumbags like "Yats" don't bother with their own wetwork as there are always ample amounts of goons for hire.  

The ones manning the barricades - and you will never get the truth about it out of the New York Times or any other state-corporate media organ - are fascists, extremists and full blown neo-Nazis and Mr. Obama and the US Congress are about to shower them and “Yats” with billions of dollars in money. This is money that has been stolen  away from the American people to reinforce a corrupt system that enriches only those who can afford to buy their way into the rigged game as well as those who do their dirty work for their thirty pieces of bloody silver. There is an ongoing and desperate attempt by the in the bag media to paint all accounts of the neo-Nazi filth in Ukraine as nothing other than Putin propaganda but that is all just so much state distilled sturm and drang to be peddled to the rubes. When a hugely influential US Senator such as John McCain is photographed in Kiev right before the shit hit the fan posing next to a vile seig-heiling piece of human excrement such as Oleh Tyahnybok of the extremist Svoboda party the pin the tail on the Putin devil evaporates like a fart in a stiff wind. The history of US alliances with Nazis in the interest of big money and the always convenient excuse of fighting communism as as long as it is sordid with the documented instances of Operation Paperclip where Nazi war criminals were welcomed to America with open arms as well as the CIA assimilation of Hitler's top Eastern European intelligence guy General Reinhard Gehlen while not widely known are matters of historical fact. Hell, thanks to the pathologically degenerate wanton criminality of such influential figures in the post-WW II years as the famed Allen Dulles supporting Nazis is about as American as apple pie.

Obama is a serious war criminal - the breaking news that his White House has been complicit in covering up CIA torture programs suddenly brought to national attention by the ranting of hypocritical Senator Dianne Feinstein on the floor of the Senate this week proves that beyond any benefit of the doubt of the 'good intentions' of one of his drone strikes. It should not surprise anyone who truly pays attention to the flagrantly illegal ongoing actions of the psychopaths who have slithered their way into power in this once great country that every last one of the bitches and bastards are as corrupt as their illicit Ukraine counterparts and in throwing in with neo-Nazis and immoral high-finance pirates they have permanently stained all of that which we once stood for, pissing away for profit and self-aggrandizement of the sacrifices of those who died fighting the real Nazis for that now permanently defiled Orwellian term that is "democracy".

How is that apple pie smelling these days?