Manning, Crowley, and Obama

When Obama was asked on Friday about Manning's treatment, he said in part:  "I've actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures . . . are appropriate.  They assured me they are."  When George W. Bush, in his book, attempted to justify his torture regime, he wrote, as summarized byNewsweek's Jacob Weisberg: "When [Bush] asked 'the most senior legal officers in the U.S. government' to review interrogation methods, 'they assured me they did not constitute torture.' Case closed. You can't argue with the choices Bush defends in this book, because he doesn't argue them himself. He describes, asserts, and cites any authority handy, usually the authority he hired to defend his decisions". (Greenwald)

It only makes sense at this point to be angry at Obama if you believe he has any real power. We're way past that. It should be clear now that has as little control over national security as Bush did, and his excuses for the government's unconscionable policies are therefore equally and predictably moronic. Both just say whatever goofy thing the  permanent security establishment tells them to say--they don't have any choice. The praetorian guard is running the palace, not defending it.

Comments

[DMD]

Modest proposal if Obama really cared: Pardon Manning.

[Jack Whelan]

That's the point. It doesn't matter if he cares or not. There's nothing he can do--It's not his shop. Presidents come and go, but the entrenched security state interests are dug in and they know how to play hard ball.

[Jack Whelan]

I'll just say as a footnote here that I don't think Obama is a puppet of the Security State, but that he's mostly irrelevant to its decision making processes. It's a world unto itself that no outsider politician can influence, and it has the power to make a world of trouble for him if he doesn't play along. Obama realizes this and accepts it as reality. He stays on script because there is nothing else he can do, and when someone like Crowley goes off script, the security state must by its own internal logic, spit him out, and Obama must go along.