Hayden: No One Ever Warned Us Against Overreacting to 9/11
After the Senate released its torture report, Michael Hayden, who formerly led both the CIA and the NSA, granted an interview to NBC News. Under questioning by Brian Williams, he provided no persuasive rebuttal to the report's findings. But he did offer a defense of America's intelligence community that doubles as an unwitting indictment of the country's leadership in the post-9/11 era. Here's what Hayden said as if it reflects well on the people who were in charge:
I was in government for ten years after 9/11, and let me tell ya, a phrase I never heard from anybody in any position of authority: 'Whatever you guys do about this terrorism threat, please, please don't overreact.' Never heard it, Brian.
Video at link
Like so much of what Hayden says, this is factually false. Members of Congress were in a position of Constitutional authority, and some pleaded with the Bush Administration to avoid overreacting to 9/11, as Russ Feingold and Barbara Lee can attest. But let's suppose Hayden was speaking of executive branch authority figures, in accordance with the dangerous but common view that the executive is all powerful in emergencies. It's believable that neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney nor Don Rumsfeld warned bureaucrats beneath them against overreacting to the terror threat.
What's staggering is that Hayden still hasn't figured out what a catastrophic misstep that was. Overreacting to the terrorist threat caused the U.S. to launch a war of choice against Iraq that killed thousands more Americans than Osama Bin Laden did at a cost expected to reach $6 trillion, plus thousands of lost limbs and PTSD cases. Overreacting to terrorism caused intrusive ethnic profiling of New York City Muslims that led to zero terrorism leads and intrusive surveillance on the phone calls of American citizens that stopped zero terror plots.
Read More: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/michael-hayden-no-one-ever-told-the-cia-or-the-nsa-to-avoid-overreacting/383601/
Malraiders
(444 posts)self-serving individual who feels he is immune from the laws.
And remember the murder at Abu Ghraib of a detainee by being suffacated in a a sleeping bag - at the hands of the CIA interagator - and then the cover up attempt afterward by packing the body in ice!
Decent people do not see their job as murder nor would they desire to get paid for that crime.
If the truth were known, then we would know that it was policy that there were no limits.
grasswire
(50,130 posts)Important stuff here!
Gidney N Cloyd
(19,842 posts)General Hayden at work protecting America's interests:
Oops, sorry, this is really General Hayden. Management regrets the error.
Mnemosyne
(21,363 posts)PeoViejo
(2,178 posts)Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)react..you were suppose to know.
How they're scrambling now, like vermin.
RussBLib
(9,022 posts)...and I paraphrase....something like....
"As bad as this report is, and as bad as our actions were, if every nation in the world adopted our procedures and policies, this would be a much better world."
Oh, really? Yeah, we fucked up, but EVERYBODY ELSE IS WORSE!!!! Waaaaaahhhh!
What a fucking idiot.
The Stranger
(11,297 posts)Neocon traitors.