Speaking about the loss of this country's integrity and moral compass....

Another Obama pick, CIA Director Leon Panetta, is doing his despicable best to sway elected representatives and senators on Capitol Hill to ignore CIA crimes.

As Melvin A. Goodman writes at The Public Record: "The ideological partnership between the Washington Post and the Central Intelligence Agency is becoming despicable.  For the past several weeks, the Post has carried a series of editorial and op-eds that were designed to prevent the release of the Justice Department memoranda that permitted the use of CIA torture and abuse and to prevent any rigorous examination of these practices that went beyond the permitted guidelines.

"Today’s Washington Post carries an op-ed by CIA Director Leon Panetta that accuses the congress of seeking “retribution” from CIA officials who were simply implementing “presidential decisions.”

"Panetta’s views are similar to those of former director Richard Helms who, in defending the CIA’s role in overthrowing the elected government in Chile, said that “we are all honorable men.”  The following year, Helms was fined $2,000 and given a two-year suspended prison sentence for lying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"President Obama has made the journey toward an investigation of torture and abuse more difficult by appointing Panetta as CIA director and John Brennan as deputy director of the National Security Council.  Brennan was a major player in the era of cover-up at the CIA, serving as Tenet’s executive assistant and playing a public role in selling renditions and secret prisons to the media, including the Washington Post.

"Panetta, moreover, has retained the ideological drivers of these policies, including Steve Kappes, currently deputy director of the CIA, and Mike Sulick, chief of the National Clandestine Service.  Panetta takes credit in his op-ed for reporting a secret assassination program to the congress, but he has not addressed the fact that Kappes and Sulick kept the program secret from the director for more than four months. All four of these officials tried to stop President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder from releasing the torture memoranda.

"Panetta has not named a new Inspector General for the CIA, although the former IG—John Helgerson—announced his retirement more than six months ago.  Instead, Panetta has relied on a weak acting IG who is not up to maintaining the independence of the office of the IG."

Regarding the torture issue about which the Obama administration talks out of both sides of its mouth, as one writer suggests, instead of the nuances of waterboarding, how about discussing the numerous acts of sodomy in the name of protecting "our" freedom.

From Henry A. Groux's new book excerpted at Truthout: "Nowhere is there a more disturbing, if not horrifying, example of the relationship between a culture of cruelty and the politics of irresponsibility than in the resounding silence that surrounds the torture of children under the presidency of George W. Bush - and the equal moral and political failure of the Obama administration to address and rectify the conditions that made it possible.

"There is an undeniable pathological outcome when the issue of national security becomes more important than the survival of morality itself, resulting in some cases in the deaths of thousands of children - and with little public outrage. For instance, Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, appearing on the national television program "60 Minutes" in 1996 was asked by Leslie Stahl for her reaction to the killing of half a million Iraqi children in five years as a result of the U.S. blockade. Stahl pointedly asked her, "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."(1) The comment was barely reported in the mainstream media and produced no outrage among the American public. As Rahul Mahajan points out, "The inference that Albright and the terrorists may have shared a common rationale - a belief that the deaths of thousands of innocents are a price worth paying to achieve one's political ends - does not seem to be one that can be made in the U.S. mass media."