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Did anyone else notice the beautiful play the Obama Admin. pulled on the Senate Intelligence Committee? It was one of the most beautiful political cons I can remember ever witnessing. Releasing the OLC determinations to the Committee just prior to the Brennan hearing completely neutered the Committee’s ability ask any substantive questions. Here’s how the con went down…
1. The Administration leaks “White Memo”to NBC. This was, roughly speaking, the first official recognition that the drone program and extrajudicial targeting of suspected terrorist existed and that there was indeed a memo from the OLC outlining the legal justification and precedent for these actions.
This triggered the dog-whistle cry’s of outrage for “TRANSPARENCY” and the release of these memos to the Senate “Intelligence” Committee.
2. The Administration releases the OLC memos to the Senate “Intelligence” Committee just hours before the Brennan hearing. This gives the Obama Administration the political cover of transparency. It also binds the Senators to silence on any public discussion of anything in those memos due to national security.
3. During the Brennan hearing, Ron Wyden and other Senators are now legally prohibited from asking any substantive questions in the hearing regarding extrajudicial targeting and assassination and the secret CIA drone war.
I also would not be surprised if the Administration and, at least, the Chair and Asst. Chair were all in on the planning and the only con perpetrated here is on the American People.
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It’s not the public conversations in the hearing that are important to me. It’s how the memos shape the internal politics of the SSCI and the pressure it’s willing to put on getting real oversight of the program. The push for public disclosure must come from those outside the little club of the SSCI. Sen. Blumenthal for example wants to see the memos to assert the prerogatives of the club of US Senators outside the committee to participate in oversight.
Of course the administration, chair and ranking member planned the kabuki. “No drama” and his administration are pretty thorough with the details of public information.
But releasing the white paper as a limited hangout might have put more momentum to criticism than the Village expected.
But the Senators were not limited in asking questions that the public was asking. And somehow none of them did ask some of the more relevant questions.
Wyden did say that he was not convinced that he got all of the information that he requested. The violation of the oversight prerogative of at least one Senator on the SSCI continues. And hell hath no fury like a Senator scorned.
Like this FDL diary premise amghru. It is well titled. Recommended.
B.H.Obama is not a unskilled politician. Obama plays one when it suits Obama’s need(s) to look unable,incapable and outplayed. Obama gets and does what Obama wants.
Too bad Obama seems to want what he was not being honest about in 2008 about. But that again plainly shows how good at politics Obama is.
POTUS Obama has been able to suggest and toss leads when it suits POTUS Obama and Obama WH politics tales to be told that Obama is a weakling who bumbles and stumbles and tumbles alot. That B.H.Obama is easily played as a “cave in” guy. Not so. Obama is likely more alike Terry Benedict in Oceans 11 as to how Obama plays / is playing being POTUS. The well known Obama “cave-ins” likely all well scripted politics cleverly made to look that way.
Obama is no bumbler and whatever John Brennan has been doing and CIA have been doing they are doing it at Barack Obama’s pleasure. This is plainly evident now.
It is not only ObamaBush with this guy but as seen in this example it is ObamaCheney too. Cheney was good at playing / gaming Capitol Hill.
Obama does ObamaCheney quite well. This episode as good an example as any.
The 2009 HC political kabuki act(s) POTUS Obama and Obama WH conducted exhibited Obama’s political competency quite well.
ACA is no accidental happenstance outcome. It is what AHIP wanted and what Obama wanted to do.
B.H.Obama gets what he wants done and not done. AHIP got what it wanted with Obama WH.
Bush/Cheney GWOT continues with Obama WH.
SS/MC getting / being made weak is Obama’s politics being done seen / unseen.
No one should still be doubting what POTUS Obama is doing / how it is being done.
Time and time again.
A clever title and great post! My first reaction to the Brennan confirmation hearings: “Where is Justice William Brennan now that we need him?” He might have a few comments about “due process”!
The “White Paper” is fairly standard, and follows one convention: when there is discussion of targeted assassination (aka murder), the victim is somehow described as a “senior” officer or commander in al-Qaida. This seems to be a standing tradition, with the new element being the doctrine that U.S. citizens are also fair game.
And the White Paper borrows some familiar “logic” to justify murder by executive fiat. The argument for the “Vietnamization” campaign in Vietnam, which around 1969-1973 to withdraw U.S. ground troops and keep up intervention through the air war and “electronic battlefield” surveillance, was that ground intervention meant both more U.S. casualities and a higher political cost.
Similarly, the suggestion now seems to be that assassinating people remotely with drones is more politically “cost-effective” than actually capturing them and bringing them to trial. So it’s mostly the same old logic, but now removed from the anonymous veneer of traditional military targeting and from the “cloak and dagger” cover of past assassination campaigns of the kind that the Church Committee addressed in 1975 and were accordingly banned.
It’s somewhat grimly humorous to imagined “classified” legal arguments to uphold a President’s say-so on a killing as “due process of law.” What part of the Fifth Amendment would some secret argument persuade us not to understand? But as this diary neatly points out, sometimes allowing members of the Houses of Congress access to secret documents can be a very effective way of shutting their lips.