Leon Panetta Says That There Will Be No Extraordinary Rendition & No Torture!

Leon Panetta is the man that President Obama wants to head up the CIA.Today at his confirmation hearing,he stated that waterboarding is torture & that extraordinary rendition will cease.He also made clear that those who tortured at the behest of the Bush administration should not be prosecuted.Well,who should be prosecuted? Here's more on why it may be extremely difficult to even investigate,let alone prosecute,the Bush administration from The Washington Independent:

"Obama’s appointment of Panetta, the tactful former White House chief of staff known for his diplomatic and managerial skills, signalled a clear desire to go outside the ranks of the agency to establish new management.Like the FOIA(Freedom of Information Act)order, Panetta’s nomination arises from Obama’s conviction that democratic self-government requires accountability for government officials engaged in legitimate, secret government activities.

The last two incoming Democratic presidents also had the same impulse—and both were thwarted. In 1977 Jimmy Carter wanted Ted Sorenson, former speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, to head the agency. A vocal rebellion in the ranks of the clandestine service killed the idea. In 1993, Bill Clinton wanted to put dovish career national security bureaucrat Anthony Lake in charge in Langley. Same rebellion. Same result.

The sheer fact that Panetta’s nomination has gotten further than either Sorenson or Lake is testament to changing times and Obama’s political skill. As Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent has reported, the clandestine service has been placated by the retention of career officer Mickey Kappes. As the son of a career CIA officer, Kappes was literally born and bred in the Agency. If Panetta has paid his taxes, Obama may get the independent leadership he seeks.

But history shows that Obama’s commitment to open government, while rhetorically appealing and politically popular, also carries a real political price and nowhere more so than Langley, where secrets are the coin of the realm and not willingly surrendered.

As Ackerman has noted, one of the toughest issues facing Panetta is the question of releasing the tightly held CIA inspector general reports on torture and rendition. Disclosure of the reports would likely heat up the already simmering debate about whether Bush administration officials should be investigated for their role in the implementing the torture regime.

Rush Limbaugh has said he worries that Obama’s FOIA order might make it easier to investigate Bush and his colleagues, a prospect he called “un-American.” The under-informed talk show host was mistaken about the potency of FOIA. The law exempts the operational files of intelligence agencies from disclosure under most circumstances. Investigators of the Bush era will have to use other tools to get the full story. But Limbaugh was right to recognize Obama’s open government instincts as a threat to those government officials who use secrecy to hide illegality.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan hailed Obama’s FOIA order saying, “his campaign talk about ‘a new era of open government wasn’t just rhetoric; it’s for real.” Obama’s order countervened a much more restrictive order, issued by John Ashcroft in October 2001. FOIA, Obama said “should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.”

But the reality remains that secretive government agencies retain the upper hand over the public and the Congress, even when it comes to records that more than 30 years old.

Case in point: CIA lawyers are actively seeking to block FOIA appeals for disclosure of antique records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, even as the agency’s own statements raised new questions about the its actions in the tragedy’s aftermath. Full disclosure. I am the plaintiff in the lawsuit which seeks records of a deceased CIA officer named George Joannides.

The new questions arise from a sworn declaration, filed in November, by Delores Nelson, chief of CIA information programs, in which she acknowledged that the agency, unbeknownst to Congress, had assigned an undercover officer to work with investigators looking into the Kennedy’s murder. Joannides had worked on two “covert projects” in his 28-year CIA career, Nelson stated. One was running covert operations in Miami in 1963. The other was serving as the agency’s liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.

“Joannides served undercover in both of these assignments,” Nelson asserted.

The CIA did not respond to questions about Joannides’ undercover mission with the HSCA for this piece. The nature and purpose of that mission, if there was one, remain unknown.

The Agency did not inform Congress of Joannides’ undercover status, said G. Robert Blakey, a Notre Dame law professor and former federal prosecutor who ran the HSCA investigation. In an email, Blakey said CIA officials only told him that Joannides would “help facilitate the committee’s work.”

“I was not told that he had an undercover role with the committee,” Blakey wrote. “I would not have dealt with him in any capacity that was not fully open.”

In 1963, Joannides served in Miami as the chief of the agency’s psychological warfare operations against Fidel Castro’s communist government in Cuba. Declassified CIA records show that Joannides secretly funded an anti-Castro student front group that generated propaganda about Oswald’s pro-Castro activities both before and after JFK was killed.

Blakey says the CIA did not tell him about Joannides’ psychological warfare assignment in Miami in 1963 either.

“Had I know that he would not have been a facilitator,” Blakey wrote, “he would have been under oath as a material witness.”

The CIA’s determination to keep the whole matter buried is clear. Nelson’s declaration revealed for the first time that the CIA retains 295 documents concerning Joannides’ secret operational activities in 1963 and 1978 that it will not release in any form. Their release would threaten the national security and foreign policy interests of the U.S. government, Nelson asserted."(END OF EXCERPT)Read the article in it's entirety here.

The Bush administration will get away with authorizing torture.Hopefully,President Obama will bring in a new,lasting era of open government.Transparency was a bad word to the Bush administration.Now you know why.