The C.I.A. Torture Cover-Up
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There is a third party that needs to acquiesce to the lawlessness: the voting public. Well, sort of. The current president promised them that there would be accountability for the torture, but that campaign promise went the way of so many others.
So it goes.
That is the part that just kills me. One of the planks in Obama's campaigns (or at least the first) was anti-torture (at least that is how I perceived it at the time, and I believe that is how I was intended to perceive it.) So the public voted for a representative who would curtail torture, but the representative they voted for was a liar.
I don't have much faith that the other major candidate was any more honest, so what really is the general public to do? Vote third party perhaps, but they would still lack any assurance whatsoever that their third party candidate was not a liar. How can a representative democracy function when all the candidate representatives are liars?
They aren't actually representing the people that elect them, so my conclusion is that whatever our system of government may be, it is not actually a representative democracy.
(Yeah yeah, technically we vote for people, not for platforms... except that the unbelievably vast majority of voters have never met these candidates, so they "know" the candidate only through the candidates portrayal of their platform. The reality is that the general public votes for platforms (or cynically, attractive faces...).)
At some point you have to realize that politicians have been reduced to little more than actors and the deep state is now the entity that's really in control. What do I mean by that?
The Affordable Care Act is pretty much the primary political blockbuster over the course of the last several years. Still, it didn't do much beyond establish an online insurance exchange and eliminate discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. Not exactly what I would consider sweeping reform. Despite this, Republicans are constantly shouting to the public "Obamacare is destroying America!" and Democrats are saying "The ACA has made our nation infinitely better off", when the reality is that neither is true.
The grandiose televised presidential debates seem quite indicative that these people are just acting for the public in order to get elected. Romney and Obama tried to paint each other in such a dramatic way that it really bordered on absurdity.
Meanwhile, we have the three letter agencies getting into all sorts of trouble. Spying on the public, starting coups abroad, and all sorts of things that they will never be held accountable for. It seems far more likely to me that Obama was pressured into his present foreign policy by the members of these agencies, rather than him backing out on his promises so extensively. In the case of the NSA, and now apparently the CIA, they are in no way obligated to inform congress of their actions. They pretty much just do whatever the hell they want and then leave the politicians to rationalize it.
So, while Republicans and Democrats may argue over petty issues, there isn't a whole lot behind their talk. The critical decisions about which countries we enter into conflict with, what rights US citizens have, etc., are really being made behind the scenes by completely unelected people.
They're all liars. All of them. Even "your" representative/Senator/guy you backed for President.
Lying is the only way they can get elected.
Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned on not prosecuting torture, but prosecuting Aaron Swartz to death? "If elected I will support any prosecutor who hounds Aaron Swartz to suicide." Because he does support Carmen Ortiz.
Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned on increasing surveillance, foreign and domestic, to the limits of technology?
Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned that "I will support the programs and personnel that cause drone strikes to target, inadvertently or otherwise, weddings, houses, schools and other facilities where innocents and children are killed.
No.
They take all those things, say the opposite (especially if the current occupant is doing those things), and then double down when they get in.
They lie. Oxygen goes in, and lies come out.
My least 'fringey' theory is that those who want to rule are almost by definition unfit to rule.
January 2014 - Obama repeats call to close Guantanamo prison: "With the Afghan war ending, this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay," Obama said in the address Tuesday night. Obama ordered his administration to empty the prison camps in the first year of his first term, by Jan 22, 2010. But Congress steadily thwarted that ambition by imposing escalating restrictions on transfers and blocking civilian trials of the captives.[2]
What he did not do is to aggressively pursue judicial action against the previous administration. Was this right or wrong? I personally wish he did, but I can also see why he chose not to tear the country apart over that.
So I'm curious - did you know about the executive order he signed? What else were you hoping he would do? Where do you think he lied?
[1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInt...
[2] http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/01/30/obama-we-need-...
How is putting a handful of Dr. Mengeles and their thugs into prison going to "tear the country apart?"
You are elevating that decision way beyond what it really is.
I don't think you can have a working democracy without real choice in who to vote for. I would argue that FPP means that you don't have that choice in the US. Witness that people voting for Nader (left of the Dems) split the Dems vote and gave you a right wing government. The system works against anyone having ideas outside the mainstream.
My strong opinion is that if you want a better democracy you must get rid of FPP. STV or MMP are both better alternatives.
I'm happy more people are finally becoming aware of the fallacious nature of labeling it a representative democracy.
When the implementation of a system is providing massive amounts of power to a tiny group of people, in exchange for non-binding promises. In the rare event someone is held accountable for lying, they get replaced by another politician who over time is indistinguishable from the last one.
But everyone keeps trumpeting the idea that voting and replacing politician x with politican y is the solution to a broken democracy. I'm not buying it.
(This democracy/autocracy contrast recurses to population subsets, cf: the civil rights era.)
It's worse than that. You can replace every politician in Washington DC and you'd still be left with a massive bureaucracy of unelected officials who will go right on doing what they're doing, oblivious to the needs of the voting public. Their numbers are legion, they have a great deal of power, and they are entrenched beyond comprehension.
Not wait until there is a candidate President to be presented to them, but join the parties they are interested in, and push and vote themselves for the kind of candidate they want to have?
If people only vote at the last minute (just who will be president from 2 ready made choices by the Republican or the Democratic party) then it's not really a democracy, it's merely a popularity contest about two people put in front of you.
There's no "representative democracy" without mass active participation. Voting every 4 years and the ocassional "letter to your Senator" doesn't count at all.
>Yeah yeah, technically we vote for people, not for platforms...
Well, in a democracy you're supposed to vote for the platform, not for the people. It's not about chosing a random leader that seems nice, it's about picking the representative to best move forward the kind of policy change (platform) you'd like to see.
Making elections about individual people and their character (and even personal morals or looks) is, to my European eyes, a regression to non political attitudes.
In a country of 300million people, I don't think that "get to know the person that you want to be president, so that you can personally endorse them" is a scalable solution.
For most citizens, that would play out as "join a party, receive the newsletters in the mail, feel good about the direction the party is going, and get lied to every two years."
It's not about getting to know them as people. It's about getting to know their platform, and pushing for this or that platform inside party processes.
>For most citizens, that would play out as "join a party, receive the newsletters in the mail, feel good about the direction the party is going, and get lied to every two years."
Well, then you ain't gonna have a democracy. It's an off the couch thing. You cannot have a democracy if you're not concerned with whats going on and voicing that as part of a power process every day.
I certainly didn't believe Obama by the 2012 campaign, but I didn't have a huge choice. I blame the other major party for nominating an obvious empty suit of clothes, and you should, too.
There were plenty of defensible policy or character reasons to vote against Romney, for Obama, or both, but it's disingenuous to describe Romney as anything but a perfectly plausible president. And of course, not much would have been different if he'd been elected: Some vocal folks on HN may wish otherwise, but the range of American political consensus is narrow, and our system requires consensus to change anything.
This IRS scandal should have the press howling at the stonewalling of the administration and the suppression of the rights of Americans trying to participate in the election process. Instead, it's crickets. After all, they're only a bunch of "tea baggers".
Which IRS scandal? This one[1]?
"Further investigation revealed that certain terms and themes in the applications of liberal-leaning groups and the Occupy movement had also triggered additional scrutiny, though possibly at a lower rate.[3][4][5][6][7] The only known denial of tax-exempt status occurred to a progressive group."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_IRS_scandal#FBI_Investigat...
As recently as last week, the president of the Landmark Legal Foundation (Mark Levin) - the Foundation that triggered the original Treasury Inspector General's inquiry into this abuse of the IRS made the statement on his radio program that not a single Tea Party group had been interviewed by the FBI in its "investigation".
If you want to claim that the audits were balanced across political groups, you'll have to contend with the information that we have that 10 times as many conservative groups were targeted and when conservative groups were targeted they were asked 10 times as many questions.
http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2013/08/01/study-100-pe...
So there's no equivalency there. Maybe a couple of progressive groups were swept up or maybe they were even targeted so that someone could have some kind of story of fairness.
But declaring that any candidate fielded by the opposing party must by definition be bad, you give your own team license to be bad. As long as they're just slightly less evil then the opposition, you'll be willing to continue voting for them.
Since we've seen ample evidence that continuing to play this game leads to the very problems we're seeing today, consider changing your strategy. Perhaps a better approach would be to place a higher value on the observed bad behavior of the incumbent and throw the bum out, rather than obsess over the speechifying of the challenger, since that's likely just hypocrisy and pandering anyway.
Romney is an empty suit: that doesn't mean that Ron Paul is. Ron Paul was the only serious anti-war candidate. Given a chance, I would have voted for him.
I'd have to go back to Goldwater who looked poised to annihilate the human race before I could find a worse Republican presidential candidate.
This should be all one needs to understand to pull back the veil of US propaganda.
Unfortunately nowadays if someone asks questions like these, their access to these people will be promptly removed, and they're likely to get fired from their news outlet for pissing off news sources.
The primary qualification of a good reporter is access. Access to sources, access to documents, access to hints from people in power and access to confront and interview people in power.
For a reporter there's a fine line between gaining and keeping access and using it to do reporting. Access relies on trust, reporting often relies on breaking it.
Since people in power have the ability to cut you out of the loop you need to be very careful about what you write else you'll find that your calls aren't being returned, you aren't being invited to press conferences and can't get interviews. Which makes you useless as a reporter.
Source: A lot of my friends work in media, and quite a few of them have relations to the political game, have interviewed heads of state, etc. Most of them are truly troubled by this state of affairs, but what can they do?
Of course news outlets self-censor, they don't want to get shut out. Of course they play up victims of atrocities caused by our enemies, and largely ignore victims of atrocities caused by the United States and its allies. Of course media sources shy away from reporting on stories that would harm their owners or advertising dollars. Of course they use official press advisers and PR people, who they talk to every day and who understand how the industry works. Of course they use neatly packaged press releases when they're on tight budgets and deadlines. Of course they don't take the time to report all sides of a complex issue, if some sides are neatly presented, and opposing sides take days of research.
I think your'e giving good reporters too little credit (note the good, which is unfortunately a minority). My experience is that these people are aggressive in their search for truth and the uncovering of corruption. Their problem is that to do their job they often need inside knowledge, secret sources and the ability to confront the potential perpetrators. So they need friends in the very places they are trying to dig up dirt. It's a very fine line.
To some degree I think media has always been like this, but it's gotten worse over the last 10 years. I see 2 obvious reasons for this:
1) The political game has moved, and there is much more emphasis on controlling the agenda than there was before. In the modern media world there is no way you'll get access to a high-standing official before having been vetted by media consultants, spindoctors and aides of all sorts. An impenetrable layer of spin between the reporter and the official has sprung up, and without some cooperation on the reporters side he won't get the interview/tip/story. This is a huge problem for truth and democracy. It also shows itself in how the news is being reported, since this layer of spin consumes so much attention. Note how the news is less and less about the story and more and more about the process. It's not "Why did Putin invade Crimea", but "Is Obama weak because Putin invaded Crimea". The layer of spin uses their power to throw dirt at the other side of the aisle.
2) Traditional media is in decline. This has some fairly serious consequences for the news landscape. Less and less time (money...) is allocated to producing more and more stories, and as an obvious result the quality suffers. Ironically this also means that often reporters know they are being fed a story by the spin machine, but they don't have the time to disassenble it or be critical of it if they are to meet their daily qouta of X articles. The editors also require more and more sensational stories, based on less and less research to keep readership and clickrates high. The recent story in Newsweek where they claim to have found the founder of Bitcoin is a good example.
Note that I'm from Europe, and the dynamics here are a bit different - namely that we often have public radio and TV (like PBS) that don't have a political agenda or affiliation, and that we often don't have the media conglomerates that you do in the UIS that try to push a political agenda. This is a very serious problem b.t.w.
The current allegations are against his own administration. He is obligated to investigate the claims or he should be impeached by his own party.
And it seems that it's the executive branch maliciously deceiving the legislative which is calling them out on it.
> Under President Obama, prosecutors exonerated the officials who ordered those tapes destroyed.
No one was held accountable. Charges were quietly dropped in 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_tapes_d...
This example is such a clear disregard for the law, even more so than most NSA leaks.
Instead of minimizing their disregard for the law in the case of illegal spying, please consider your wording.
Am I understanding this right? They found gross violations in 2009 and only raising concerns now.
you'll never hear the word "lied" because it's politically incorrect when referring to those in power.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2014/03/11/transcript-...
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
The ones that got caught were probably extraordinarily renditioned.
Yet, the NSA is not prevented from domestic searches and surveillance? How is this possible or consistent with EO 12333, let alone the U.S. Constitution?
Methinks Senator Feinstein doth protest too much. She supported NSA's massive and unconstitutional domestic surveillance. Now she knows what it feels like to be spied upon, eh?
Sounds like the Senate review committee needs to work on their opsec and move the files to a safer location after receiving them.
Why this procedure is flawed is left as an exercise for the reader