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Comment by foxyv | Hacker News Reader

I kind of hoped that Biden would try and stop this thing from happening anymore. Or Obama... Then I see stuff like this:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/06/cia-torture-...

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Obama ran for office on a pledge to close Guantanamo, and he could have done so by executive order. He didn't, and that should tell you all you need to know about the nature of the American presidency.

There was a HUGE faction in congress (they go by a name that rhymes with schmepublicans) that would have punished him severely if he had done that. The presidency is not as all-powerful as some people think it is, sometimes this is good, sometimes not so much.

Punished him severely how?

Trump did way more extreme things with impunity.

Punished him how? Were the schmepublicans not already turning up the drama dial to 11? What further recourse did they have to make things worse for him?

Early in a new President's first term, "I promised over and over to do X while I was running for President, and the American People very clearly voted for that" is d*mn good political cover for doing X.

Not to mention, who cares? Do the thing or don’t be president.

When President Obama took office, Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. You can't hang this one on Republicans. Both parties were equal participants in keeping the Guantanamo detention facility open.

Congress sets the annual federal budget. The Democrat controlled Congress literally allocated dollars to run that facility. If Democrats actually wanted to close it they could have eliminated funding, but they specifically chose to keep it multiple times.

I'm amazed how 100-to-zero can magically be 50-50.

Didn't the republicans stop him at every turn, no matter what, anyway?

Seems like he didn't really have anything to lose, so why not just do it?

There was an opportunity for Obama to have a much more effective and bipartisan presidency early on. It wouldn't have been a friendly relationship, but certainly a more effective government. He rammed Obamacare through Congress very early in his presidency and that pretty much removed his ability to do anything else in his first term.

That doesn't really answer my question.

Also, and I'm really not trying to be snarky, that statement sounds like something the child of abusive parents would say. If only Obama had been quiet, they would've left him alone. That's a no-win situation, I think.

Either way, it didn't really answer my questions.

I'm answering your question by suggesting that Obama could have gotten much more done if he had not been so extremely partisan from day 1. When it became clear he was not going to negotiate any changes to the monumental Obamacare law and pass it through on a partisan vote, the only natural response for Republicans seeking to effect their own policy agenda was to block as much as possible. In effect Obama, rather than choosing a 90/10 or 80/20 ratio of democrat to republican polciies to be passed, said there was no point in allowing any republican policies through. And so the only natural response was for Republicans, as the minority, to respond in kind until the next election.

A more mathematical explanation would be that if every law was 80% Democrat policy and you were able to pass 100 policies a term, you could get 80 of your policies through in a single term. You might think getting 100% of every policy in a bill would be better but that might mean you only get to pass 50 policies a term because of increased partisan tensions. Even at 100% that's only 50 Democrat policies instead of 80.

By allowing some compromise you can achieve more.

I'm sorry, but you're ignoring the actual things that happened. There were good faith negotiations with the Republicans about Obamacare and post-crash stimulus and the Republicans chose to unanimously vote against them because they saw a partisan advantage to doing so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-A09a_gHJc

I'm not ignoring anything. Obama was successful in his first year, in part because of how much effort he put into being bipartisan. He did not have much success in getting Republicans to vote for his massive landmark policies, but his Supreme Court nominee sailed through confirmation.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/73971-obamas-fir...

Generally, Republicans were very engaged in solving problems in the first year, but faced the reality of a democrat supermajority. Obama made many concessions in the bills he passed despite not getting many Republicans to vote.

There's nothing inconsistent there with a contentious but effective government. Sure it would be nice to have gotten more Republicans to vote yes, but the process was working.

After he passed Obamacare, in which he abandoned all negotiations with Republicans and flexed his supermajority power, the only appropriate response was stonewalling.

It's happening again too. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/are-democrats-just-r...

There was good faith negotiation about the plan. It was very close to what the Republican plan was. The problem was that Mitch McConnell stated publicly that he was going to block everything that Obama did. The Republicans blocked stimulus funding. To claim that the failure of bipartisanship was Obama's is to ignore the facts as stated by the Republicans at the time.

Not to mention, it was a Republican plan in the first place - it was what Mitt Romney implemented in Massachusetts.

Didn't or couldn't?

No president is going to do anything about it because the intelligence agencies almost certainly have blackmail material on them all

Blackmail is for mid-level aspiring politicians who get bigger than their britches. A presidential candidate is a smiling face that carries the decision-makers' platform.

A president was recently elected that had more viable blackmail material released about him than any previous president and instead of launching missiles into Sudan like Clinton did a couple days after his scandal, he just slid past it.

> A president was recently elected that had more viable blackmail material released about him than any previous president and instead of launching missiles into Sudan like Clinton did a couple days after his scandal, he just slid past it.

I'm not sure how a scandal during one presidency is comparable in your example to scandals that happened before a presidency. Further, you might recall that there was a 'strategic strike' attack in Africa as well as a contentious immigration ban in the first weeks of the Trump presidency, which, if I am following your logic, would actually suggest an attempt to distract from unsavory past deeds.

The Sudan+Afghanistan thing was two days after the scandal broke. I am curious if there were any similar actions by any of the following presidents but launching stuff right after entering office doesn't appear to be the same kind of action.

(Perhaps there is another cynical explanation for the Africa thing but it is probably not to distract from an, as you say, decades-old scandal.)

One of my friends from college is now a Poli Sci professor. He researched the effectiveness of “wag the dog” techniques and found that they were ineffective. I don't think his paper on the topic is available online though.

Indeed, the last 4 years presented a very unique (maybe even a once-in-a-country’s-lifetime) opportunity. It’s a shame he squandered it.

I think that the CIA carries a lot of value for sitting presidents. The organization gives them a lot of power, similar to the military but with less accountability. So far we haven't seen a president that was willing to give up that power for any reason of simple morality. There is something appealing about being able to send an organization out to kill, steal, and spy for you with zero accountability.

I don't think the CIA would need to or even be able to blackmail a sitting president. They are too busy being his second most powerful tool. Like a really good hunting dog. It doesn't matter if it bites some peasants so long as he does a good job for its master.

We most certainly did see a president who was willing to give up that power to destroy the CIA, and they killed him in public to make sure everyone got the message.

How does that work exactly?

CIA: If you don’t let us torture people just because then we’ll make a scandal of you.

President: Oh no. I guess I have to let you. I have no power whatsoever. Can’t get the FBI on it, because they’re blackmailing me too!

The US government and intelligence agencies is not like what you see in the movies.

> How does that work exactly?

Jeffrey Epstein. Do you think it was coincidence that he had power of attorney over Les Wexner, who was involved with the notorious Southern Air Transport? There are many other intelligence connections, for instance Maxwell and her father.

The CIA is really the worst institution in the US government.

You speak as though Epstein and Maxwell were _American_ intelligence.

Obviously, the (mountains of) circumstantial evidence suggests some sort of intelligence connection, with Maxwell's father having known ties to MI6, Mossad and even the KGB. But I don't think you'd be able to run around bribing billionaires like Leon Black under the guise of "tax advice" without the US authorities' involvement.

Also, Southern Air Transport was a CIA front company.

Presumably bogantech is thinking of the likes of J. Edgar Hoover - who had his federal agency spy on political leaders, and "amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten others, including multiple sitting presidents of the United States." according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

More like: "Hey boss, remember JFK? It would be a real shame if something like that happened to you. Or your family."

How long do you think the CIA would remain as a legitimate organization if something like that happened? All it would take is one public statement by a president that CIA had threatened them and the organization would come down like a house of cards. The entire leadership would be in handcuffs and trying to explain away treason to the FBI who would happily hand them over to military intelligence organizations to rendition their asses to their own prisons.

There are tons of competing military intelligence organizations that would be happy to take over from there. The CIA as we know it would cease to exist in a matter of days.

> How long do you think the CIA would remain as a legitimate organization if something like that happened?

It has been about seventy years so far.

You are saying this in a thread for an article about how the CIA uses human beings as torture testers, where do you think the line is for them? lmao

Given that most presidents have huge egos that is a huge gamble for the CIA. All it takes is one tape to get out and then you've just started a civil war.

Obama was very bad. Made the use of robots to do extra judicial killings, state sanctioned murder, routine.

What a shame.

They are all part of the same system, a system which has only the trappings of a democracy, but in no practical sense is the government from the people, by the people to the people. It is just a giant gang warfare between warring plutocratic and bureaucratic factions. Trump, Biden, Bush, Obama. They all tortured, they all bombed, they all let people die without healthcare while spending billions in the biggest military machine of the world, for "defense". It is about time people wake up and stop letting those criminals divide us in their fictional turfs.

They were good at stopping us from prosecuting it, or the destruction of the evidence of it.

Well considering the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, said the information should not be disclosed because it would do significant harm to national security. The mention of national security makes me think the issue here is multi faceted.

National security is not a get-out-of-democracy-free card. There has to be some way for public opinions about the CIA to loop back around to the congresspeople on the security council, otherwise the system won't work.

The likely possibilities are, they all agree it’s necessary for reasons we don’t understand so they condone it—or, the power of the executive branch is diffuse and doesn’t always emanate from the Oval Office. I.e., the so called deep state, career bureaucracy and momentum hold more sway.

The case the Supreme Court used to uphold the State Secrets privilege was, in retrospect, a coverup with no genuine national security issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Reynolds

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