Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

Octafish

(55,745 posts)
Fri Mar 27, 2015, 03:03 PM Mar 2015

Government Secrecy at All-Time High

The Sunlight is Fading … and America Is Falling Into Darkness

Posted on March 27, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

US Supreme Court Justice Brandeis said:

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.


But there’s no longer much sunlight to disinfect the corruption of the government or the powers-that-be.

More and more commonly, the government prosecutes cases based upon “secret evidence” that they don’t show to the defendant … or sometimes even the judge hearing the case.

As just one example, government is “laundering” information gained through mass surveillance through other agencies, with an agreement that the agencies will “recreate” the evidence in a “parallel construction” … so the original source of the evidence is kept secret from the defendant, defense attorneys and the judge. A former top NSA official says that this is the opposite of following the Fourth Amendment, but is a “totalitarian process” which shows that we’re in a “police state”.

SNIP...

The Department of Defense has also made it a secret – even from Congress – as to the identity of the main enemies of the United States.

CONTINUED w. links...

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/03/secret.html

No wonder the New York Times never mentioned all those old generals and admirals are now millionaires, just like retired politicians.
20 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight: NoneDon't highlight anything 5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Government Secrecy at All-Time High (Original Post) Octafish Mar 2015 OP
Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe Tierra_y_Libertad Mar 2015 #1
Lord Acton was spot-on. Frank Church, too. Octafish Mar 2015 #3
This is exactly what's happening Wella Mar 2015 #2
That article from Greenwald should be front page New York Times. Octafish Mar 2015 #5
Joe Lieberman... no kidding Wella Mar 2015 #6
As if Carlyle Group owned Booz Allen Hamilton... Octafish Mar 2015 #7
You know, at least one of the Americans who died on the German plane was Booz Allen Hamilton Wella Mar 2015 #9
Surest sign of the deep, rotting corruption that rules us now. woo me with science Mar 2015 #4
Evil cowboy movie where the corrupt rancher owns the town and the bank, judge, sheriff... Octafish Mar 2015 #10
Our country is dying... haikugal Mar 2015 #8
I agree. We are seeing the death throes now. L0oniX Mar 2015 #11
We should have known something was up zeemike Mar 2015 #12
K&R. nt OnyxCollie Mar 2015 #13
It's to be expected... KansDem Mar 2015 #14
We are close to seeing the brick wall at the back of the theater... awoke_in_2003 Mar 2015 #15
Half a truth is often a great lie. johnnyreb Mar 2015 #16
kick woo me with science Mar 2015 #17
kick woo me with science Mar 2015 #18
Kicking all of the good ones this morning n/t Oilwellian Mar 2015 #19
kick woo me with science Mar 2015 #20
 

Tierra_y_Libertad

(50,414 posts)
1. Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe
Fri Mar 27, 2015, 03:06 PM
Mar 2015
Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. Lord Acton

Octafish

(55,745 posts)
3. Lord Acton was spot-on. Frank Church, too.
Fri Mar 27, 2015, 03:12 PM
Mar 2015

As you know, Tierra y Libertad:

Frank Church was a patriot, a hero and a statesman, truly a great American.

The guy also led the last real investigation of CIA, NSA and FBI. When it came to NSA Tech circa 1975, he definitely knew what he was talking about:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election a few years later.


And what happened to Church, for his trouble to preserve Democracy:

In 1980, Church will lose re-election to the Senate in part because of accusations of his committee’s responsibility for Welch’s death by his Republican opponent, Jim McClure.

SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1


From GWU's National Security Archives:



"Disreputable if Not Outright Illegal": The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.

Newly Declassified History Divulges Names of Prominent Americans Targeted by NSA during Vietnam Era

Declassification Decision by Interagency Panel Releases New Information on the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Panama Canal Negotiations


National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 441
Posted – September 25, 2013
Originally Posted - November 14, 2008
Edited by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr

Washington, D.C., September 25, 2013 – During the height of the Vietnam War protest movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Security Agency tapped the overseas communications of selected prominent Americans, most of whom were critics of the war, according to a recently declassified NSA history. For years those names on the NSA's watch list were secret, but thanks to the decision of an interagency panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive, the NSA has released them for the first time. The names of the NSA's targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. Also startling is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee).

SNIP...

Another NSA target was Senator Frank Church, who started out as a moderate Vietnam War critic. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Church worried about U.S. intervention in a "political war" that was militarily unwinnable. While Church voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, he later saw his vote as a grave error. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson made decisions to escalate the war, Church argued that the United States was doing "too much," criticisms that one White House official said were "irresponsible." Church had been one of Johnson's Senate allies but the President was angry with Church and other Senate critics and later suggested that they were under Moscow's influence because of their meetings with Soviet diplomats. In the fall of 1967, Johnson declared that "the major threat we have is from the doves" and ordered FBI security checks on "individuals who wrote letters and telegrams critical of a speech he had recently delivered." In that political climate, it is not surprising that some government officials eventually nominated Church for the watch list.[10]

SOURCE: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB441/



I wonder if Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-CT), a liberal Republican, also got the treatment from NSA?

“I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.” — Senator Richard Schweiker on “Face the Nation” in 1976.

Lost to History NOT

Perhaps the whole in their cover story will let in enough light to allow us to see their illusion for what it is.

Octafish

(55,745 posts)
5. That article from Greenwald should be front page New York Times.
Fri Mar 27, 2015, 03:19 PM
Mar 2015
COURT ACCEPTS DOJ’S ‘STATE SECRETS’ CLAIM TO PROTECT SHADOWY NEOCONS: A NEW LOW

BY GLENN GREENWALD
The Intercept, March 26, 2015

A truly stunning debasement of the U.S. justice system just occurred through the joint efforts of the Obama Justice Department and a meek and frightened Obama-appointed federal judge, Edgardo Ramos, all in order to protect an extremist neocon front group from scrutiny and accountability. The details are crucial for understanding the magnitude of the abuse here.

At the center of it is an anti-Iranian group calling itself “United Against Nuclear Iran” (UANI), which is very likely a front for some combination of the Israeli and U.S. intelligence services. When launched, NBC described its mission as waging “economic and psychological warfare” against Iran. The group was founded and is run and guided by a roster of U.S., Israeli and British neocon extremists such as Joe Lieberman, former Bush Homeland Security adviser (and current CNN “analyst”) Fran Townsend, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and former Mossad Director Meir Dagan. One of its key advisers is Olli Heinonen, who just co-authored a Washington Post Op-Ed with former Bush CIA/NSA Director Michael Hayden arguing that Washington is being too soft on Tehran.

This group of neocon extremists was literally just immunized by a federal court from the rule of law. That was based on the claim — advocated by the Obama DOJ and accepted by Judge Ramos — that subjecting them to litigation for their actions would risk disclosure of vital “state secrets.” The court’s ruling was based on assertions made through completely secret proceedings between the court and the U.S. government, with everyone else — including the lawyers for the parties — kept in the dark.

In May 2013, UANI launched a “name and shame” campaign designed to publicly identify — and malign — any individuals or entities enabling trade with Iran. One of the accused was the shipping company of Greek billionaire Victor Restis, who vehemently denies the accusation. He hired an American law firm and sued UANI for defamation in a New York federal court, claiming the “name and shame” campaign destroyed his reputation.

Up until that point, there was nothing unusual about any of this: just a garden-variety defamation case brought in court by someone who claims that public statements made about him are damaging and false. That happens every day. But then something quite extraordinary happened: In September of last year, the U.S. government, which was not a party, formally intervened in the lawsuit, and demanded that the court refuse to hear Restis’s claims and instead dismiss the lawsuit against UANI before it could even start, on the ground that allowing the case to proceed would damage national security.

When the DOJ intervened in this case and asserted the “state secrets privilege,” it confounded almost everyone. The New York Times’s Matt Apuzzo noted at the time that “the group is not affiliated with the government, and lists no government contracts on its tax forms. The government has cited no precedent for using the so­-called state­ secrets privilege to quash a private lawsuit that does not focus on government activity.” He quoted the ACLU’s Ben Wizner as saying: “I have never seen anything like this.” Reuters’s Allison Frankel labeled the DOJ’s involvement a “mystery” and said “the government’s brief is maddeningly opaque about its interest in a private libel case.”

CONTINUED...

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/26/new-low-obama-doj-federal-courts-abusing-state-secrets-privilege/

It's not "We the People" who enjoy the "right to know." Even knowing who holds the secrets is classified secret. Seeing how whistleblowers are treated explains doesn't explain all the cowardice of of those in media and government. They also want to get paid.

Octafish

(55,745 posts)
7. As if Carlyle Group owned Booz Allen Hamilton...
Fri Mar 27, 2015, 03:47 PM
Mar 2015
...even if only a minority interest these days.



Behind the Curtain: Booz Allen Hamilton and its Owner, The Carlyle Group

Written by Bob Adelmann
The New American; June 13, 2013

According to writers Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer at the Washington Post, The Carlyle Group and its errant child, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), have a public relations problem, thanks to NSA leaker and former BAH employee Edward Snowden. By the time top management at BAH learned that one of their top level agents had gone rogue, and terminated his employment, it was too late.

For years Carlyle had, according to the Post, “nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries”; but now the light from the Snowden revelations has revealed nothing more than two companies, parent and child, “bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.”

And have they ever. When The Carlyle Group bought BAH back in 2008, it was totally dependent upon government contracts in the fields of information technology (IT) and systems engineering for its bread and butter. But there wasn't much butter: After two years the company’s gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the company’s financial statement. In 2012, however, BAH grossed $5.8 billion and showed earnings of $219 million, nearly a nine-fold increase in net revenues and a nice gain in value for Carlyle.

Unwittingly, the Post authors exposed the real reason for the jump in profitability: close ties and interconnected relationships between top people at Carlyle and BAH, and the agencies with which they are working. The authors quoted George Price, an equity analyst at BB&T Capital: " got a great brand, they've focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience."

CONTINUED w Links n Privatized INTEL...

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15696-behind-the-curtain-booz-allen-hamilton-and-its-owner-the-carlyle-group

Seems in a police state the banksters and warmongers would fix the game to make mention of their criminality illegal. Oh. Right.
 

Wella

(1,827 posts)
9. You know, at least one of the Americans who died on the German plane was Booz Allen Hamilton
Fri Mar 27, 2015, 04:05 PM
Mar 2015

As was Edward Snowden.

woo me with science

(32,139 posts)
4. Surest sign of the deep, rotting corruption that rules us now.
Fri Mar 27, 2015, 03:16 PM
Mar 2015

Both parties, all three branches of government, and an entire growing secret, fascist government that is utterly unaccountable to us.

It's a steady, malignant, brazen process now: increasing the secrecy of government while simultaneously stripping all privacy of citizens to prevent resistance:

White House office to delete its FOIA regulations
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141040901

Octafish

(55,745 posts)
10. Evil cowboy movie where the corrupt rancher owns the town and the bank, judge, sheriff...
Fri Mar 27, 2015, 04:11 PM
Mar 2015

...except it's a country.



Two quotes to consider:

"Money trumps peace." -- George Walker Bush, describing commercial interests and prospects for war on Iran at a press conference.

"You both went to the same country?" -- John F. Kennedy, upon being briefed by Pentagon and State Department officials just returned from Vietnam.



Maybe it's a Catch-22 meets Dr. Strangelove, without the democracy.

Jack Ruby tried to bring it up.

zeemike

(18,998 posts)
12. We should have known something was up
Fri Mar 27, 2015, 04:56 PM
Mar 2015

When Obama promised the most transparent administration...even though he may have meant it he does not get to make those decisions.
Our security state decides that not him...and they have made that promise Orwellian.

KansDem

(28,498 posts)
14. It's to be expected...
Fri Mar 27, 2015, 05:07 PM
Mar 2015

As more and more of the commonweal is bought by oligarchs, we will lose a government "of, for, and by the people."

 

awoke_in_2003

(34,582 posts)
15. We are close to seeing the brick wall at the back of the theater...
Fri Mar 27, 2015, 05:25 PM
Mar 2015

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” Frank Zappa

Latest Discussions»General Discussion»Government Secrecy at All...