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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

The reasons for Obama's "we need to move on" are, as nabla9 commented:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7395233

"If Bush & Cheney administration goes down, so goes Clinton & Gore. (...) The CIA was granted permission to use extraordinary rendition (torture flights) in a presidential directive signed by Bill Clinton in 1995. The practice was started by George H. W. Bush in 1993."

The story starts at least 20 years ago. And as Marcy Wheeler suggests, the directive for drones was probably signed by G. W. Bush and Obama still uses them.

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In other words, much of this is the residual stain from having elected a former CIA head as President.

Smart people take a dim view of a former KGB head becoming Russia's president, and for good reason. We should be just as vigilant here. Indeed, it should be illegal for the head of an American intelligence service to become President. After all, it's a position from which he can classify and forgive his own crimes. And as we've seen, every subsequent President who keeps the cover-up going inevitably adds more bodies to the pile.

If it were so simple. Historians know about even older questionable decisions, even the U.S. generals claimed that in 1945 Japan would have surrendered very soon even without the nuclear bombardments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings...

Also see Dulles brothers story. Fascinating interview here: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/16/234752747/meet-the-brothers-wh...

I think this is why all of our recent presidents seem so similar once they are in office. They all have the same dirt on them. As with information revealed in the pentagon papers, I don't think we have much hope of decent governance until the cancer is excised.

Actually there is a good way out for them too, although quite unpopular among the politicians: honesty, integrity, taking the responsibility for their own wrong decisions.

Now that would be a world-shaking example!

Congress has all the power anyone could wish for. But, only now is Diane starting to catch on. Once she does, she and her committee can be as powerful as anyone could wish.

The CIA is sometimes referred to as "the President's private army." Presumably, this provides a counterweight to the Pentagon. But now we've reached a point where Americans need a counterweight to the both of them.

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