By Glenn Greenwald

From The New York Times | Original Article

President Obama has expended extraordinary efforts to protect from accountability all Bush-era officials responsible for torture, rendition and warrantless eavesdropping, programs that numerous human rights groups have insisted constitute war crimes and violations of U.S. criminal law.

The result is that support for those war crimes no longer carries any real stigma. By blocking any form of criminal and civil accountability for these acts, President Obama has transformed what were once universally unspeakable and taboo beliefs into little more than respectable, garden-variety political disagreements.

The president's nomination on Monday of John O. Brennan, a Bush-era C.I.A. official, to head the C.I.A. illustrates how complete this disturbing process now is. In late 2008, when Brennan was rumored to be Obama's leading choice as C.I.A. director, a major controversy erupted because of Brennan's overt support for Bush's programs of rendition and torture.

Brennan's pro-torture-and-rendition views were clear and amply documented. In 2007, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker described Brennan as a supporter of the "C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program.''

In a Dec. 5, 2005, "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" appearance, Brennan admitted he was "intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition" -- the practice used by the Bush administration to abduct terrorism suspects and send them to other countries to be tortured -- and praised rendition as "an absolutely vital tool." In a November 2007 interview with Harry Smith of CBS News, Brennan defended what he euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation tactics" (other than waterboarding, which he opposed) by claiming that "a lot of information has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists. It has saved lives."

Once Brennan's statements became publicized in late 2008, the ensuing outrage from Obama's supporters and the civil liberties community forced him to withdraw his name from consideration.

Yet just a little over four years later, Obama obviously believes that Brennan's involvement in and/or support for these programs is no bar to his confirmation as C.I.A. director. And he's almost certainly right about that. While Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel as Pentagon chief has stirred up substantial controversy, Brennan's nomination has prompted very little.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday demanded that the Senate not move forward with the nomination "until it assesses the legality of his actions in past leadership positions in the C.I.A. during the early years of the George W. Bush administration and in his current role in the ongoing targeted killing program," but it's virtually impossible to imagine anything approaching the level of opposition triggered by Brennan in 2008.

That's because, following Obama's lead, the country has decided to ignore the fact that it committed grievous crimes as part of the "War on Terror." Obama's Orwellian decree that we must "look forward, not backward" has convinced huge numbers of citizens to sweep this all under the rug and pretend it never happened. That is what explains how Brennan went from radioactive and unconfirmable in 2008 to uncontroversial in 2013.