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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

They got caught lying under oath to Congress, about hacking Congressional computers (to delete files to cover up their torture program) and nothing happened. This is a string argument for the US being no more a country with the rule of law than China or Russia.

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It gets far more sordid than that if you're willing to look back to times long enough for classified material to have been declassified. Operation Northwoods [1] is something that somehow was formulated, discussed, and made its way all the way to the top. It was stopped only because one man refused to sign it into action - JFK. Then there was the FBI trying to get MLK to commit suicide [2], and much more.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...

> This is a string argument for the US being no more a country with the rule of law than China or Russia.

As somebody who has lived in the soviet bloc I get goosebumps every time I hear something like this. "Corruption is everywhere", yeah, sure. But how much? This like saying the pacific ocean has water, the sahara desert has water, so there's no difference.

> "Corruption is everywhere", yeah, sure. But how much?

www.lobbyfacts.eu

A lot.

That's nowhere near Soviet Union or modern-day Russia. For starters, there's virtually no reliable economic stats for the Soviet Union, because every level fudged numbers and no-one knew then and even knows today what the actual ground truth was. The TV series Chernobyl illustrates that very well when a high-tech German robot breaks down because Soviet authorities had told Germans "propaganda numbers" instead of true radiation values at the damaged reactor. There was so much lying at every level that eventually no-one knew the truth anymore.

Such level of dysfunction is simply incomprehensible to an average western citizen. The latest documentary series TraumaZone by Adam Curtis gives perhaps the best impression that is possible without personally experiencing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDA3hIsf7LA&list=PLSjQL8MYni...

The current Russian military fiasco is also a symptom of the same deep dysfunction. Before the invasion began, military units positioned near Ukraine sold their fuel to local population and then ran out of what they had left on the way to Kyiv. Many units were understaffed because they had "dead souls": commanders listed non-existing soldiers and embezzled their pay, thus no-one knows how many actually attacked Ukraine. Latest military radios turned out to be cheap Aliexpress junk that relied on civilian 3G/4G cellular network. Many missiles failed before reaching target because they were unmaintained: a small amount was kept in order for military drills, money for maintaining the rest was embezzled. Body armor is filled with cardboard, helmets can be cracked with bare hands.

Imagine this in every facet of your life. Everything is shit, but if you go around saying it, then you'll eventually get locked up in a psychiatric hospital, because "it's been scientifically proven that Soviet communism is the best system in the world and anyone who doubts it must be mentally ill".

The United States has one of the most fertile grain growing regions in the world. The Russian wheat belt is far inferior. The system of government in USSR and USG at the same time were not that different at the core, but the same bureaucratic decision makers in USG had a lot more flexibility and did not need to exploit the native resources to the same intensity as the USSR was forced to by lack of resources.

We will never know for sure whether these agencies (the NSA especially) do what they want because the elected officials like the idea of getting illegal shit done OR because no sane official can cross them and live. Or rather what the mix is between those two motives. They really are parallel power structures...

The best way to describe the government of the US, and as far as I've read any powerful ruling organization, is they end up running like a mob in that people might disagree with how something was done, boss might not like what enforcers are doing, people are getting politically whackes or punished for doing not exactly what boss told them, but above all else, they will be damned before someone outside the family knows about it. I believe the US IC is no different.

Congress doesn’t care about how strictly any agency follows its mandate. Its kind of fortunate that the agencies follow it so closely at all.

When agencies learn how to make their own money, there is even less accountability because they don’t have to beg Congress.

Things would be different if this funding and mandate enforcement process was also delegated to an agency, or maybe better: a court.

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