What happens to a conspiracy revealed?
rich
richard.romeo at gmail.com
Wed Mar 12 14:09:28 CDT 2014
if there has been one major failing of the Obama presidency it was the
rather lame credo to let's move on w/r/t to black sites, torture and the
whole sorry story and look to the future and not the past when he entered
the Oval Office
On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 2:35 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a good answer, and the right question to ask:
>
> http://www.esquire.com/_mobile/blogs/politics/dianne-feinstein-cia-031214
>
> But the offenses against the Constitution here are not isolated merely to
> the clear violation of separation of powers that plainly occurred. That's
> bad enough. But the deeper offense against the Constitution is found in
> what the Senate and the CIA are fighting over. The whole hooley is about
> torture, and it is about public accountability, and it is -- or should be
> -- about identifying what precisely was done in our names for the purpose
> of shaming the people responsible for it so permanently and profoundly that
> they are disqualified from public life for the rest of their days.
> ------------
> *The dueling claims exposed bitterness and distrust that have soared to
> new levels as the committee nears completion of a 6,000-page report that is
> expected to serve as a scathing historical record of the agency's use of
> waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods on terrorism suspects
> held at secret CIA prisons overseas after the attacks of Sept. 11,
> 2001. Displaying flashes of anger during her floor speech, Feinstein said
> her committee would soon deliver the report to the White House and push for
> declassification of a document that lays bare "the horrible details of the
> CIA program that never, never, never should have existed."*
> ----------
> [...]
> The point is the report and the point is torture and the point is the
> absolute right of the American people to know the full history of what was
> done in our name. Every horrible bit of it. Keeping that report secret is
> nothing more than allowing the cancer with which the Avignon Presidency
> infected the government to further metastasize, and to cover the asses of
> the criminals who committed the crimes. What this controversy needs is
> another Otis Pike, another Dan Schorr. What it needs, seriously, is its own
> Edward Snowden.
>
> On Wednesday, March 12, 2014, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> how would you suggest we deal with these people? Has the government,
>> particularly Cheney and Co., taken advantage of the situation to marshall a
>> brutal, illegal and rather unsubtle political strategy? Of course. But
>> dudes like Awlaki are still there, and some of them won't be playing nice.
>>
>> I'm all for proper oversight. I doubt these decisions are made lightly.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 12:01 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Mar 12, 2014, at 8:19 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
>>
>> > Luc Herman & Steven Weisenburger, _Gravity's Rainbow, Domination &
>> Freedom_, p. 197:
>> >
>> > . "It's eminently fair," says Roger Mexico to Jessica Swanlake early in
>> the novel. "Everyone's equal. Same chances of getting hit. Equal in the
>> eyes of the rocket." Roger is riffing on the phrase "equal in the eyes of
>> the law," signifying on how the rocket has become the law, sovereign unto
>> itself.
>>
>> I had written this earlier: The largest consequence of conspiracies
>> revealed and ignored is the replacement of law with violence and the
>> replacement of original accountable individual language with ideological
>> propaganda, self congratulation, passive acquiecence or social pleasantries.
>>
>> This Weisenburger quote has me further considering this issue of language
>> and violence particularly in light of the way the individualized
>> programmable robot bombers have become an actuality in the drone. Wow. The
>> language that is deployed here is Orwellian, but the principle has been
>> used by Nazis Romans and many others. The most effective violence is
>> violence that goes unchallenged and gets internalized in the minds of the
>> population as 'safety' and is seen as only relevant to distant anonymous
>> shady dangerous people from an unpopular group.
>> Law is no longer seen as the product of Jeffersonian ideas about the
>> consent of the governed but the internal imperial deliberations of a benign
>> but angry God.
>>
>> > The idea of this, as Pynchon well understood in 1973, involves other
>> magnitudes of inquiry. The questions at stake are not only legal and moral
>> but ontological, involving an order of quasi-beings, or programmable
>> (even, decision-making) robots, to do Their killing. Thus also at stake are
>> matters of political theology, entailing what if anything a sovereign
>> power may not do, a question of just whom executive authority may count as
>> having reached a degree-zero of humanity, a rightsless condition warranting
>> enslavement or killing. The matters at stake are also theological, as new
>> practices of utterly inescapable and seemingly random "death from above"
>> tend to signify. The Calvinist Jonathan Edwards, who famously sermonized
>> on "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), understood quite well the
>> holy terror of such a death.
>> >
>> >
>> > On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 3:31 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> > Sure, countries have their reasons. Why judge them? If British
>> intelligence thinks they've spotted an al Qaeda cell in my neighborhood,
>> and accidentally drops a bomb on my house, why judge them? Hey, it was a
>> judgment call. Average people around the world have good reasons for doing
>> what they do. Why judge them for murder, for rape, for torturing babies?
>> They have their reasons. Who are we to judge? Law is a ridiculous
>> imposition of some people's morality on someone else. Why even bother with
>> it?
>> >
>> > Laura
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: rich
>> > Sent: Mar 10, 2014 3:05 PM
>> > To: kelber
>> > Cc: "pynchon-l at waste.org"
>> > Subject: Re: What happens to a conspiracy revealed?
>> >
>> > when you know they have been or are actively engaged in planning
>> terrorist operations like Awalaki? i have no problem with that frankly.
>> russians have been doing it so has iran iraq, the UK, Israel, etc. thats
>> what cover ops is about. is it moral? can we judge what countries do in
>> moral terms? i'm not so sure
>> >
>> >
>> > On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 2:47 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> > It is all out in the open. See: Jeremy Scahill's book (or documentary
>> version) Dirty Wars. That was my original point: it doesn't change anything
>> when these clandestine activities are aired.
>> >
>> > So, Rich, when the US perceives someone's rhetoric as a threat, it's OK
>> to go into whatever country houses them and murder them, collateral damage
>> be damned? I assume then, that this response is also OK for Russia, for
>> Iran, for North Korea, etc.?
>> >
>> > Laura
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: rich
>> > Sent: Mar 10, 2014 2:33 PM
>> > To: Monte Davis
>> > Cc: kelber
>> > Subject: Re: What happens to a conspiracy revealed?
>>
>>
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