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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

It's like watching Lance Armstrong just before his fall. You know where it's going to go and just wish they'd come clean and quit breaking the Constitution instead of insisting on their innocence.

Too many scandals that went similarly ended up revealing cover-ups to expect the Executive Branch to come out clean. It looks like it's trying to make the most of a bad situation. Tylenol's 1982 recall remains the gold standard for disaster recovery -- http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/23/your-money/23iht-mjj_ed3_..... Doing something like that could salvage something and get people on the White House's side.

But it only works if you act with sincerity.

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Remember when Obama said right after he became the president that "we need to move on" from what Bush did during his mandates?

That should've been the first serious flag for everyone. How do you start a war on false assumptions, create a torture base, keep the torture base, and then you just say "we need to move on" (from the accusations, presumably)?

What's US' credibility in the world when you just do that? It's almost like Germany not admitting the holocaust happen. US may have not killed millions, but it did kill over 100,000 Iraquees.

The reasons for Obama's "we need to move on" are, as nabla9 commented:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7395233

"If Bush & Cheney administration goes down, so goes Clinton & Gore. (...) The CIA was granted permission to use extraordinary rendition (torture flights) in a presidential directive signed by Bill Clinton in 1995. The practice was started by George H. W. Bush in 1993."

The story starts at least 20 years ago. And as Marcy Wheeler suggests, the directive for drones was probably signed by G. W. Bush and Obama still uses them.

I think this is why all of our recent presidents seem so similar once they are in office. They all have the same dirt on them. As with information revealed in the pentagon papers, I don't think we have much hope of decent governance until the cancer is excised.

Actually there is a good way out for them too, although quite unpopular among the politicians: honesty, integrity, taking the responsibility for their own wrong decisions.

Now that would be a world-shaking example!

Congress has all the power anyone could wish for. But, only now is Diane starting to catch on. Once she does, she and her committee can be as powerful as anyone could wish.

The CIA is sometimes referred to as "the President's private army." Presumably, this provides a counterweight to the Pentagon. But now we've reached a point where Americans need a counterweight to the both of them.

In other words, much of this is the residual stain from having elected a former CIA head as President.

Smart people take a dim view of a former KGB head becoming Russia's president, and for good reason. We should be just as vigilant here. Indeed, it should be illegal for the head of an American intelligence service to become President. After all, it's a position from which he can classify and forgive his own crimes. And as we've seen, every subsequent President who keeps the cover-up going inevitably adds more bodies to the pile.

If it were so simple. Historians know about even older questionable decisions, even the U.S. generals claimed that in 1945 Japan would have surrendered very soon even without the nuclear bombardments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings...

Also see Dulles brothers story. Fascinating interview here: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/16/234752747/meet-the-brothers-wh...

And like Lance Armstrong, they'll hold out until the bitter end. In a sense, the only thing that can be done to shorten that rope is to publish more information, either by leaks or otherwise. I'd love to see an ad campaign (billboards in DC, Virginia and Maryland, for instance) imploring government and intelligence workers to leak.

> "I'd love to see an ad campaign (billboards in DC, Virginia and Maryland, for instance) imploring government and intelligence workers to leak."

Would that possibly run afoul of "inciting imminent lawless action"? I would also love to see such an advertising campaign, but I suspect you would get some pretty fierce and heavy-hitting push-back on it.

> fierce and heavy-hitting push-back

You mean, the media would start running your ads for free?

Great point, the Streisand Effect would definitely be working for you.

Here is a somewhat related ad campaign, encouraging people with jury duty to refuse to convict people for crimes without victims: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/metro-billboard-ad...

They tried to get this guy for jury tampering: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/nyregion/indictment-agains...

Those campaigns managed to ruffle some feathers, and got lots of media attention because of it. I imagine that this propose whistle-blower campaign would raise even more.

I've seen hundreds of pointless protests in front of the Federal building in LA (where policymakers generally do not hang out) and one reasonable one, where the protesters out front had signs praising snowden and encouraging the workers inside to come clean about what their employer was up to.

There already is in the DC area. These ads have been all over Metro at the Pentagon station and areas where lots of other defense/government workers get on/off: http://oathkeepers.org/oath/

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