Remember when holding terrorists captive in secret “black sites” was the worst thing anybody had ever heard of? Remember that movie Rendition? (Just kidding, nobody saw Rendition. But that’s what it was about, I’m told.) And remember when Obama stopped the bad men from doing the bad things and made it all better?
Yeah, maybe not. As it turns out, Paula Broadwell may have made herself useful for more than… well, I won’t pry. But she just opened up a whole new can of worms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTK67O1VkCcWe originally reported on October 26th, based on conversations with sources in touch with those who were at the annex that night, that the CIA contractors had captured three Libyan prisoners who they handed over to the Libyan authorities when they fled Benghazi. Now, we never knew who those prisoners were. We didn’t know what ended up happening to them. But we have now learned that those three prisoners had been held for a few days at the annex, and more than just Libyan militia members were held there. There may have been prisoners from other African countries, maybe even the Middle East. They were interrogated, allegedly, by CIA contractors.
The CIA denies this, saying the CIA has not had detention authority since January 2009. That’s when the President signed Executive Order 13491. The CIA claims any suggestion that the agency is still in the detention business is “uninformed and baseless.”
Well, of course they’re denying it. And why would they lie? They’re only the bad guys when a Republican is president.
If this is true, it would explain a lot. Mainly, it would explain why the Obama administration blamed a stupid YouTube video for the Benghazi attack. After all, it was only nine weeks before the election.
As for why most of the press has let him get away with it, there’s a different explanation for that. But I’ll spare you the sexual metaphor.
Bush never blamed a YouTube video for terrorists murdering one of our ambassadors. That’s partially because terrorists never murdered one of our ambassadors under his watch. But more importantly, it’s because he’s not cool enough to know what YouTube is.
(Hat tip: John Sexton)
P.S. Feinstein: I’ll subpoena CIA about Petraeus trip to Libya after Benghazi attack.