Befehl Ist Befehl

The Director of National Intelligence, a gent named Dennis Blair, released two statements yesterday regarding the release of the torture memos and the revelation that the NSA was engaged in broad spying on Americans. You can read the statement to the press here and the letter to the intelligence community here. Both are PDFs.

Both, frankly, are deeply self-serving pieces of shit. The first one ends with this corker:

What we must do is make it absolutely clear to the American people that our ethos is to act legally, in as transparent a manner as we can, and in a way that they would be proud if we could tell them the full story.

Note that is another way of saying "yes, we did bad things, but if you knew what we know, you'd agree."

I say to that: Bullshit. You will explain, sooner or later, why your people engaged in acts of torture and murder by torture. You can justify yourselves to us, now, or you can justify yourselves to a skeptical war crimes tribunal down the road. But you will give a full explanation.

The second statement basically restates the first one and additionally sidesteps the allegations that the NSA was grossly overbroad in its eavesdropping.

Both statements reiterate the whiny-ass excuse of "we were told to do this and the lawyers working for those who told us to do it said it was legal." Which is a fancy way of restating the old German excuse of "befehl ist befehl", or "orders are orders."

That excuse didn't play very well in the Nuremberg Tribunals. I doubt if it will play very well now.

(Thanks for the memos)