Obama's Choice

[Joseph Tracy]

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/03/13/president-obama-covering-presidencys-role-torture-4-years/

The president has always been on the side of the CIA. The idea that the chief law enforcement officer of the US can dismiss crimes uncovered by the senate at the Abu Graibh hearings by adopting a policy of "looking forward" makes a mockery of law. there are no future crimes, no electronic means of predicting terrorist acts. Drones ARE terrorism.  The Orwellian nonsense began on the  proverbial day one.

I defy anyone to show a constitutional basis for the CIA NSA. There is no provision for secretly funded global armies able to topple governments and start undeclared wars,  kill, etc. with legal impunity. This is modeled on Hitler's Germany, not the constitution, and relies on perpetual war to keep alive.  Which may be the deeper implications of the mindset that led to Operation Paperclip, the historic conspiracy that kicked this thread off.

On Mar 14, 2014, at 10:24 AM, David Morris wrote:

> http://www.esquire.com/_mobile/blogs/politics/obama-cia-john-brennan-031414
> 
> It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that, in one very important way, the president has lost control of his own government. The current constitutional crisis between the CIA and the Senate committee tasked with investigating its policies regarding torture during the previous administration has only one real solution that is consonant with the rule of law. Either CIA director John Brennan gets to the bottom of what his people were doing and publicly fires everyone involved, or John Brennan becomes the ex-director of the CIA. By the Constitution, this isn't even a hard call. The Senate has every legal right to investigate what was done in the name of the American people during the previous decade. It has every legal right to every scrap of information relating to its investigation, and the CIA has an affirmative legal obligation to cooperate. Period. The only way this is not true is if we come to accept the intelligence apparatus as an extra-legal, formal fourth branch of the government.

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