{"id":4295,"date":"2009-08-03T07:05:21","date_gmt":"2009-08-03T11:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=4295"},"modified":"2009-08-03T07:05:21","modified_gmt":"2009-08-03T11:05:21","slug":"f-you-you-whining-f-dont-look-back-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-whining-f-dont-look-back-edition","title":{"rendered":"F*** You, You Whining F***: Don’t Look Back edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post<\/em><\/a>, CIA Director Leon Panetta pulls a Mark McGwire<\/a> and asks Congress to stop looking into the CIA’s role in running secret torture prisons and planning political assassinations:<\/p>\n

I’ve become increasingly concerned that the focus on the past, especially in Congress, threatens to distract the CIA from its crucial core missions: intelligence collection, analysis and covert action.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why should we look to the future? Well . . .<\/p>\n

The CIA no longer operates black sites and no longer employs “enhanced” interrogation techniques. It is worth remembering that the CIA implements presidential decisions; we do not make them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s right! They were just following orders!<\/em> Even the “enhanced” ones!<\/p>\n

Nowhere in Mr. Panetta’s piece is there a “we learned our lesson” moment, because he hands responsibility for the agency’s actions to the office of the President. The closest we get is<\/p>\n

[After 9\/11] Judgments were made. Some of them were wrong. But that should not taint those public servants who did their duty pursuant to the legal guidance provided. The last election made clear that the public wanted to move in a new direction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The thing is, without investigating those actions, we’ll never understand the processes that led<\/em> to them, how that “legal guidance” was formed, and how people who should have been nowhere near the levers of power managed to put grotesque policies like this into place.<\/p>\n

Read the whole thing<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, CIA Director Leon Panetta pulls a Mark McGwire and asks Congress to stop looking into the CIA’s role in running secret torture prisons and planning political assassinations: I’ve become increasingly concerned that the focus on the past, especially in Congress, threatens to distract the CIA from its crucial … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “F*** You, You Whining F***: Don’t Look Back edition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[267,17],"tags":[796],"class_list":["post-4295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-f-you-you-whining-f","category-politics-explicit","tag-leon-panetta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-17h","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4367,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/outsourcing-is-a-hit","url_meta":{"origin":4295,"position":0},"title":"Outsourcing is a Hit!","author":"Gil","date":"August 20, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Three weeks ago, I wrote about CIA Director Leon Panetta's \"I'm not here to talk about the past\" op-ed piece, in which the agency was just following orders for the previous 8 years. Mr. Panetta was writing because of an uproar over a secret \"jihadist\" assassination program that had been\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics (explicit)"","block_context":{"text":"Politics (explicit)","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/politics-explicit"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2279,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-whining-f-82008","url_meta":{"origin":4295,"position":1},"title":"F*** You, You Whining F***: 8\/20\/08","author":"Gil","date":"August 20, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Ann Patchett complains about going on book tours and having to SELL her book and her writer-persona to the public? F*** You, You Whining F***. By the way, if the Iowa Writers Workshop is serious about training writers, then it's idiotic not to have a seminar on promoting one's work.","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4325,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-whining-f-hipster-edition","url_meta":{"origin":4295,"position":2},"title":"F*** You, You Whining F***: Hipster Edition","author":"Gil","date":"August 12, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Hipsters with Condo Shame: \"I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll just have to pull down the brim on my Pabst Blue Ribbon trucker cap hat as I go in and out every day.\"","rel":"","context":"In "F*** You, You Whining F***"","block_context":{"text":"F*** You, You Whining F***","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/f-you-you-whining-f"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4423,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-aimlessly-whining-f-facebook-disillusionment-edition","url_meta":{"origin":4295,"position":3},"title":"F*** You, You Aimlessly Whining F***: Facebook Disillusionment edition","author":"Gil","date":"August 29, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Seriously, I don't even know what this NYT article on people quitting Facebook is supposed to be about. People are leaving Facebook because they didn't read the terms of agreement? Because they were using it too much? Because it's not magically free of copyright restrictions? Save our newspapers (from idiotic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "F*** You, You Whining F***"","block_context":{"text":"F*** You, You Whining F***","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/f-you-you-whining-f"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3204,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-whining-f-1809","url_meta":{"origin":4295,"position":4},"title":"F*** You, You Whining F***: 1\/8\/09","author":"Gil","date":"January 8, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"A lot of these entries have focused on the publishing industry, because I read about it and its constituents tend to whine a lot. I haven't written so much about the financial crisis in that context, so I'll remedy that now. Here's an article about the SEC branch chief who\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "F*** You, You Whining F***"","block_context":{"text":"F*** You, You Whining F***","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/f-you-you-whining-f"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3186,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/f-you-you-whining-f-1509","url_meta":{"origin":4295,"position":5},"title":"F*** You, You Whining F***: 1\/5\/09","author":"Gil","date":"January 5, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Editors and publishers must now learn how to use telephones. (In a bonus piece of cluelessness, this article also focuses on publishers' debilitating problem of returns from bookstores . . . without ever mentioning e-publishing! God forbid you mention a distribution venue that eliminates the cost of physical production, shipping\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4296,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295\/revisions\/4296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}