Andrew Pincus is a lawyer representing Blackwater in its appearance before Judge Ellis in the Eastern District of Virginia.

That said, it’s not my choice, nor would it be my preference. I’m more in favor of the dogged Waxmanian approach to public servants doing their duty.

http://www.perrspectives.com/b…..001606.htm

One day after Newt Gingrich, no friend of the CIA, called on Attorney General Eric Holder to resign over his plan to investigate the agency, former Vice President Dick Cheney pronounced he was “offended as hell” by the probe. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported “Ex-Intelligence Officials Cite Low Spirits at CIA.” To make its case, the Post turned to one A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard. That would be the same Buzzy Krongard who until recently sat on the advisory board of Blackwater.

But reading the Washington Post analysis of the CIA’s supposed morale problem, readers would never know the former number three man at the agency had close ties to Xe, the mercenary firm previously known as Blackwater and secretly contracted by the Bush Administration for a now-cancelled program to carry out targeted assassinations of terrorists worldwide.

For its part, the Washington Post on Sunday included statements from John Helgerson, author of the recently released 2004 CIA Inspector General Report on detainee interrogation abuses. Helgerson, the Post noted, “said that the release, though painful, would ensure that the agency confronts difficult issues head on, instead of ignoring or trying to bury them.”

Which is exactly what the Post itself did about Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard’s checkered past.

I’ve just spent much of the day reading and reflecting on The Facts Speak for Themselves, the preliminary report of Honduras’ Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights, issued in 1994. It examines the epidemic of “disappearances” that began with CIA-FBI training of 25 Honduran military intelligence officers in August 1980, and continued with CIA assistance over the next decade, mostly but far from entirely in the next five years (during which U.S. military and “economic” aid to Honduras soared).

Hundreds of men and women were spied on, followed, kidnaped, and tortured in the 1980s in Honduras. Most of those captured were murdered and buried in secret. The book is the result of the very first effort by the Honduran government, after years of fake “investigations”, impunity, and popular agitation, to undertake an honest investigation into these crimes.

Anyone who believes the line CIA spinners have put out (through Jane Mayer and many lesser reporters) that the Bush II-era excursion into torture was the result of a “lack of expertise in interrogation” at the CIA needs to read this report. What happenened to those torture- and death-squad-promoting members of the Directorate of Operations between 1993, when the Reagan-BushI era came to an end, and 2001? Did they all develop amnesia or retire?

This report by Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick is already generating criticism as yet another installment in the Washington Post’s repulsive effort to build public support for Dick Cheney’s defense of abusive interrogations. I think something more subtle is going on in today’s piece. Pincus and Warrick are airing Cheney’s argument that the investigation of CIA abuses damage morale at the Agency, only to cut it down by showing repeatedly that any complaints at the CIA are limited to those few officials who took part in the abuse and now stand to be held accountable for it.

http://www.unbossed.com/index.php?itemid=2739

http://www.news-journalonline.com/ColEssays.htm