WASHINGTON, District of Columbia – I have decided to make it a habit of publishing info. Especially really good info. So I went online to our United States Department of Justice and in fact through the Freedom of Information Act & Privacy Act Offices as well as the Inspector Generals Office for the same I got hooked into an absolute wealth of information and understanding.
Like it or not it is true that under Barack H. Obama, II, as President of the United States of America, we have had the most ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ government in our history, IF ONLY, to a certain degree, BECAUSE and after all we can’t have all our secrets revealed now can we?
Or can we?
Prior to his death Aaron Swartz was working on exactly that. Prior to her wrongful incarceration so to was Chelsea Manning. Then after those heroes comes Edward Snowden and even long before these heroes their were folks like William Binney, Thomas Drake and the Pentagon White Paper Man Himself Mr. Daniel Ellsberg.
We owe these men and women such as Darlene Fitzgerald Price an eternal debit of gratitude and thanks until the Good Lord of Hosts pays them far better.
And with that in mind yours truly moving forward has decided to do all in can to honor these few brave souls who do and have done so much in public service to their country and for their fellow countrymen.
After all, IF we really and truly are to be as John Adams said in part, “..a nation of laws and not of men…” Then it is our first best duty to kiss and tell wherever and whenever we see an injustice or an unrighteous or and perhaps an even unholy act in your and my good name.
You say well the link below, via the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspectors Generals Office is just that a link to a near partial reveal. Perhaps. But I say its something more. It’s the means by which I can and you can do your part to share the wealth of information enclosed. This is what your and my government has been up to of late. Especially in the nature of Homeland Security.
Therefore it would serve you and others well to kiss and tell the nature enclosed. Grow from LOVE. Joy. Peace. Happiness. In the knowledge that you did something invaluable in public service to your country and for your fellow countrymen to be better informed.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — I just finished reading an article from MSN News Services, via Reuters and the AP on the so-called Bush-era torture programs/enhanced interrogation techniques during the early days of the War on Terror and I must say I am experiencing and have been experiencing a myriad of emotions, a veritable roller coaster ride of feelings on this pending report for the last two weeks.
I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what, respectfully, Mr. Obama & Co. are hiding? Why the need to delay, and deny the American people, their right to know? Additionally why the need to provide cover for the Intelligence Community? Finally why, in this article I read, was a pending report from out of the White House, “accidentally emailed” to an Associated Press reporter?
These are but some of the many questions some of the many points of emotion I have been wrestling with, and again, for the last two weeks.
And so it goes…
I learned something this week and I also want to correct, publicly now, a record of standing I have long-held against a former President of these United States, Dwight Eisenhower. I contended that it was former President Eisenhower who started the C.I.A., it was not. It was in fact Harry Truman who started the C.I.A., BUT and his later years he, like so many of us do, had a change of heart on all things Central Intelligence Agency. Here, is where the change of heart began.
And so it goes…
I said all that to say this. The White House, more importantly this President, Barack H. Obama, II., and the honorable, had better come clean. He has but two whole handfuls of months left in his presidency to serve. He has a real opportunity. A real chance to level the playing field to correct the record as it were for the good of all mankind. To become something far more than what I have titled him under this #blogpost as, an ‘ACCIDENTAL’ Statesman.
President Barack H. Obama, II, 2012 Democratic National Convention…
Because, and I will close with this. Comments such as these from online news articles, though good and very informative, WILL NOT suffice,
“The report does not draw the legal conclusion that the CIA’s actions constituted torture, though it makes clear that in some cases they amounted to torture by a common definition, two people who have read the report said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the still-classified document publicly by name.
The Senate report, the State Department proposes to say, “leaves no doubt that the methods used to extract information from some terrorist suspects caused profound pain, suffering and humiliation. It also leaves no doubt that the harm caused by the use of these techniques outweighed any potential benefit.”
Those methods included slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold, sleep deprivation and the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The White House document is significant because it also reveals some of the State Department’s concerns about how the CIA’s tactics will be portrayed around the world.”
COMMENTS like these, for me at least, add up to duck and cover, run and hide, that age-old game of cat and mouse, that has been played throughout history both time and memorial by our fathers, grandfathers and forebears. The Cold War is over folks!
Yet Barack Obama, it appears wants to do nothing more than allow the Intelligence Community to play with the lives, fortunes and sacred honors of We The American People. It would appear to me, in the very least, that ,his attitude and actions of late, the Constitutional Law Professor has an obligatory disdain for the Rule of Law. It says, by his actions, that the Intelligence Community could give a fat rat’s rectum less about the Rule of Law OR that they only care about the Rule of Law when it is more than conveniently necessary for them to do so.
Such an attitude, such an approach toward governance and toward the everyday people who elected him to high office amounts to what Hollywood calls, “creative license”. And creative license will not cut it Mr. President! Respectfully.
Peace.
–Rhett.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER, SHARE! PLEASE? THANK YOU. COME AGAIN.
BERLIN, GERMANY–Pictured above is Mr. William Binney, former NSA Chief turned 2001 whistleblower going in to testify before the Bundestag, a German Parliament Accountability Committee, alongside another famed NSA whistleblower, Mr. Thomas Drake, one week ago, exactly, today.
As the fallout from the Binney-Drake testimony continues and new more revealing information has been released through Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitars’s, “The//INTERCEPT” Magazine we now know that a second spy has been captured trying to funnel secret blueprints of Germany’s NSA-like Bundesnachrichtendienst ,anewly minted Berlin headquarters, to the Russians and the NSA itself back home in the states, one just has to wonder though when comes the end and what has, in the eyes of the Obama Administration, German P.M. Angela Merkel (and the German Government itself) done to warrant being spied upon?
Is it her cozy yet watch-filled eye relationship with Putin? Or and perhaps it is her visits with the so-called ‘Butcher of Damascus’ Bashar al-Assad that has Mr. Obama like a robin red breast in a cage that just puts all heaven in a rage?
I for one don’t really know BUT, I would care to speculate.
My conspiracy theory is this: It is all the above and then some. Because and remember the free world at one time was calling the Obama-Merkel relationship, “Ronnie-Maggie 2.0” (Ronald Wilson Reagan and Lady Margaret S. Thatcher for all the under informed out there in Rio Linda and Palm Beach County but I digress).
The free world just couldn’t get enough of the new power (“IT”) couple. And it was, and in many respects still is, a great working relationship. But, and of late several not-less-than mitigating circumstances have begun to ware at the once polished political edges and with the so-called ‘Snowden Revelations’, the formation of The INTERCEPT and the new wind placed firmly in the sails of the likes of Drake, Binney, Ellsberg and the rest-WELL, you can see where I’m going with this.
It is CLEAR: Barack H. Obama, II, and the Honorable, does not like leaks or leakers. In fact he loathes them contrarian public opinion be damned. He wishes them and there’s the ills of ill wills, secretly, and even more secretly wants Eric H. Holder, Jr., the U.S. Attorneys General of the United States of America, to prosecute all to the fullest possible extents of the law. Respectfully.
We have seen this movie before. Both time and memorial. If anyone who that is no one talks and Obama catches you. Well, you best give your soul to Jesus cause your blessed ASSurance belongs to him. Bottom line.
And so it goes….
QUESTIONS: Is it not knowledge that gives us power though? Are we not that much more of a better society, as a whole, when information is shared rather than concealed? Are we not that much farther down the road of progress when secrets are revealed? ‘Mistakes were made’ admitted?
Confession, after all, is good for the soul. Is it not?
SO, we have to decide both as a nation and as a free world collective are we a better people with or without secrets? With or without spying on ourselves and each other?
Put me down in the latter and not the former categories.
As the fallout continues from the PCLOB 2014 report on Thursday an ex NSA chief called the organization ‘totalitarian’ before a German Parliament Panel on Security and International Affairs.
William Binney testified today before something called the German Bundestag, a German State Security & Privacy panel, tasked with answering 3 key questions about the NSA.
Testifying, Binney accused the NSA of having a “totalitarian mentality” and wanting “total information control” over citizens in breach of the US constitution. It was an approach that until now the public had only seen among dictators, he added.
Mass collection was “senseless” and did not help in counterterrorism, and actually hindered the agency’s capabilities, Binney said.
The NSA represented the “greatest threat” to American society since the US Civil War of the 19th century, Binney added.
Besides Mr. Binney another former NSA chief testified before the panel today, Mr. Thomas Drake, Drake is a member of the so-called, “Thin Thread 5”. And is himself a pronounced whistleblower who avoided eternal damnation in 2010 from the federal government with simple civil defense, proof, fair and just adjudication in a court of law.
Thomas Drake, who left the NSA after trying to use official complaint channels, told the inquiry that almost all data that transmitted Germany was accessed by the NSA and Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service — or the NSA alone.
The US government was exercising the ultimate form of control, Drake said, adding that the German BND’s silence on the issue was “terrible.”
“The public has a right to know what the NSA does,” he said, according to a quote from the hearing delivered by the German DPA news agency in German.
Drake said the United States would soon become a “real surveillance” nation in which the private lives of individuals were becoming more and more the property of the state. …
The inquiry committee’s leading Social Democrat (SPD) Christian Fliesek demanded the German federal prosecutions service immediately begin a probe into the alleged “mass surveillance of German citizens.”
Mihr demanded that Merkel’s coalition government end its tactic of trying to “sit out the NSA scandal” and excluding areas of inquiry.
Inquiry committee chairman, Patrick Sensburg (pictured above center) of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat conservatives, began Thursday’s hearing in Berlin by claiming his committee knew little about the NSA’s internal structures and practices.
This is truly an amazing story and one that I will stay on and keep you all informed. Until then, be well…
We’re just inviting you to take a timeout into the rhythmic ambiance of our breakfast, brunch and/or coffee selections. We are happy whenever you stop by.
Say What News?! 