What happens to a conspiracy revealed?
David Morris
fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed Mar 12 14:35:56 CDT 2014
At least after the ACA was passed.
On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 2:09 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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