Newspaper Report Reveals How Secret Police, Military Rule the Nation
(Though the delay was unavoidable, again my apology for the tardy publication of this post.)
Thursday’s edition of The New York Times carries an extraordinary, 4,000-word report on the role of the FBI in the 2016 US presidential election. Whatever the intentions of those who produced, edited and approved this lengthy account, it gives a glimpse of an American political system in which the security services, and particularly the FBI and CIA, play a critical and even decisive role...(in tyrannizing) a deeply class-divided society, in which two political parties of the financial aristocracy do the bidding of a state apparatus of coercion and violence of almost unimaginable dimensions.
"'This was never just about Gina Haspel. This is about a nation that claims constantly to be exceptional and morally superior showing the world in clear terms that it supports torture and will never hold its own accountable.'"
See earlier story for more damning details: "In her testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on May 9, Haspel insisted that the CIA's interrogation program during the Bush administration was legal. Haspel, a 33-year CIA veteran, argued that it could not be determined whether torture was effective to gain intelligence. She refused to state categorically that torture is immoral. And she never condemned the torture program in which she participated."
Plus this: "...the Senate Intelligence Committee has restricted (other senators') access to a classified memo that Democratic staff put together, detailing Haspel's role in advocating for torture and later destroying related evidence."
And this: "Senate confirmation of veteran Central Intelligence Agency operative Gina Haspel to head Washington’s main spy agency is a new milestone in the collapse of American democracy."
Comment: combined with the Trump/Pence Regime's outspoken support for police who murder or torture U.S. citizens, this newest outrage means there's no significant difference between the United States and Pinochet's Chile or, for that matter, Hitler's Third Reich. The Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment" is obviously dead forever -- "forever" because, thanks to The New York Times (for which see above), it is again confirmed our alleged "democracy" is indeed nothing more than a scam, the biggest of Big Lies, with our real overlords -- Torture-Queen Haspel amongst them -- rendered forever untouchable by insurmountable barriers of wealth and bureaucracy. As to Haspel herself, waterboarding obviously gets her wet, and not just from the obscene splatter of the slowly drowning victim's struggles.
"The cost to human lives in our current cycle of U.S.-initiated 'perpetual wars' throughout the Middle East and Africa is unthinkably high. It runs well into millions of deaths if one counts – as do the Nuremberg principles of international law – victims of spinoff fighting and sectarian violence that erupt after we destroy governance structures. Also to be counted are other forms of human loss, suffering, illness and early mortality that result from national sanctions, destruction of physical, social and medical infrastructure, loss of homeland, refugee flight, ethnic cleansing, and their psychological after-effects. One has to witness these to grasp their extent in trauma, and they all arise from the Nuremberg-defined “supreme crime” of initiating...aggressive war."
Comment: in other words, we have been living in the de facto Fourth Reich long before the Trump/Pence Regime made it undeniably obvious. And in contemplating our futures we would therefore do very well to reflect on how the civilized world avenged the Third Reich's still-inadequately counted millions of victims. (The preceding link is to 4.33 minutes of historical film, documentary footage bolstered by intensely accurate dramatizations. All-documentary films on the taking of Berlin are here and here; the RT footage was complied in 2010, hence the outdated crawl.)
U.S. authorities are surveying American military bases for sites for concentration camps to house thousands of children that the government intends to seize from their parents at the US border under a draconian new policy announced by the Trump administration.
See also: "The Trump administration has zealously altered the US immigration system...
(To read the rest, go here.)
