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The Sunlight is Fading and America Is Falling Into DarknessPosted 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 theres 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 dont 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 were 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.
Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)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:
I dont 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:
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.
Wella
(1,827 posts)K & R
Octafish
(55,745 posts)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 courts 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 Restiss 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 Timess 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 ACLUs Ben Wizner as saying: I have never seen anything like this. Reuterss Allison Frankel labeled the DOJs involvement a mystery and said the governments 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.
Wella
(1,827 posts)It's like an outsourced intelligence program.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)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 companys gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the companys 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)As was Edward Snowden.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)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:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141040901
Octafish
(55,745 posts)...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.
haikugal
(6,476 posts)I remember the campaign promises...
3, 2, 1.....Greenwald!!!
Thanks Octafish.
L0oniX
(31,493 posts)zeemike
(18,998 posts)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.
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)KansDem
(28,498 posts)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)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