includes this passage at the beginning of her article to explain how Panetta was chosen only after Obama's first choice, John Brennan, was rejected:

A friend of Brennan's from his C.I.A. days complained to me, "After a few Cheeto-eating people in the basement working in their underwear who write blogs voiced objections to Brennan, the Obama Administration pulled his name at the first sign of smoke, and then ruled out a whole class of people: Anyone who had been at the agency during the past 10 years couldn't pass the blogger test."

What possible justification is there to grant anonymity to someone to spout these clichéd and factually false insults? First, as I've documented numerous times and as Mayer herself well knows, the case against Brennan was not that he was "at the agency for the past 10 years" or even that he had anything to do with the torture program, but rather that (as she herself documents later in the piece) he explicitly advocated and defended many of the worst torture techniques and other Bush abuses. Second, unlike the individual who is willing to spout these insults only while cowardly hiding behind Mayer's shield of anonymity, the bloggers who led the opposition to Brennan (including myself and the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan) all attached their names to their views and--as Spencer Ackerman notes--are about as far away as one can be from the trite, adolescent cartoons spewed by Mayer's anonymous insulter. Third, one of the principal points of Mayer's long article is that the objections to Brennan have been vindicated, because--as Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser--he has led the way in urging Obama to keep past CIA abuses suppressed and Bush crimes protected from accountability.

While "the anonymous name-calling Mayer passes on appears on the first page of her piece," Greenwald discovers that way down "on page 5, she includes the facts that show how factually false is the characterization of the objections to Brennan"--there Mayer personally admits that "in an interview with me two years ago, Brennan defended the use of 'enhanced' interrogation techniques and extraordinary renditions." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Glenn Greenwald on Torture" (4/24/09).

So that's torture now?... Using the editorial standards of America's journalistic institutions--as explained recently by the NYT public editor--shouldn't this be called "torture" rather than torture--or "harsh tactics some critics decry as torture"? Why are the much less brutal methods used by the Chinese on Fischer called torture by the NYT, whereas much harsher methods used by Americans do not merit that term? Here we find what is clearly the single most predominant fact shaping our political and media discourse: Everything is different, and better, when we do it. In fact, it is that exact mentality that was and continues to be the primary justification for our torture regime and so much else that we do.

Along those same lines, I learned from reading the New York Times this week (via the New Yorker's Amy Davidson) that Iraq is suffering a very serious problem. Tragically, that country is struggling with what the Times calls a "culture of impunity." What this means is that politically connected Iraqis who clearly broke the law are nonetheless not being prosecuted because of their political influence!

Luckily for us, such a scenario could never play out under the press' watchful eye (let alone with its outright endorsement) here in the U.S. where "everything is different, and better."