He Doesn't Want to Get Involved

Barack Obama sought to distance the White House from the fierce dispute between top senators and the Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday, claiming it would be inappropriate for his administration to become involved the clash over an investigation into the use of torture in post-9/11 interrogations.

  The Guardian

Inappropriate because, the CIA isn’t under the president in the executive branch? The CIA doesn't give the president a daily briefing? And Obama didn’t appoint the current CIA director, John Brennan?   I don't think inappropriate is the word he's looking for.  Suicidal, maybe.

 

Our Mission

Preempt threats and further US national security objectives by collecting intelligence that matters, producing objective all-source analysis, conducting effective covert action as directed by the President, and safeguarding the secrets that help keep our Nation safe.

  CIA.gov

"As directed by the President."

In the executive branch of the government, three different bodies are authorized to oversee the work of the CIA:
• The National Security Council (NSC). The NSC has four members: the president, vice president, secretary of state and secretary of defense. As well as providing "guidance, review and direction" to the CIA, this group focuses on issues of national security and foreign and military matters [source: CIA Web site].
• The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. People from the private sector comprise this body, which evaluates the effectiveness of the CIA's structure and activities.
• The Intelligence Oversight Board. This board ensures that intelligence is gathered properly and legally.

  Discovery

[Emphasis mine]

How's all that "overseeing" going?

With the revelations that the CIA has been aggressively obstructing the work of the Senate Intelligence Committee, even to the point of spying on Senate staff conducting a long overdo review of its "detention and interrogation" program, we see the CIA has not changed its ways.

[...]

It was President Harry Truman who in 1947 signed the National Security Act establishing the CIA in the first place.

A day that will live in infamy.

Throughout the course of its 67-year history, the CIA has perfected the techniques of election rigging, overthrowing governments, arming mercenaries, propaganda, money laundering, "Psy-Ops," sabotage, and, more recently, targeted assassinations and torture. Now we learn that the CIA won't even balk at spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, the nation's only "check" on the Agency's power.

Yeah, I don’t imagine this is something new, either.

John F. Kennedy once said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." He reached that conclusion after CIA officials, including Director Allen Dulles, had misled him on many of the planning details of the disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

  HuffPo

Yes, and we see who got splintered, don’t we?

Then CIA Director Richard Helms had no choice but to admit that in the early 1960s there existed CIA collusion with Mafia hit men to assassinate Fidel Castro. The revelation was so shocking that a public outcry ensued that was loud enough to compel Congress to form the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to look into the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations.

And did they find that the CIA had any involvement in either? Now you’re getting the picture.  Now you're seeing why Obama thinks it would be "inappropriate" for him to get involved in the dust-up.

A congressional investigation into the actions of the CIA officials responsible for this overreach must be done during this session of Congress because the whole matter will be probably dropped if the Republicans win control of the Senate this November.

Not probably. And, call me jaded, but I don’t see anything happening with the Democrats there either. After all, so far, all DiFi has asked for is an apology.

We need new laws to keep up with the new abuses.

Wrong. We have the laws. We need them to be used.

Are the Republicans being especially quiet? It must be awful: a chance to bash Obama, but having to take a side against CIA/torture to do it.