That is unless we can say that someone else ordered you to torture or kill. Then you are “above the law”

Where have we heard this horseshit before. I was just following orders

“the most threatening issue”?

Does he not realize that Nebraska is in America and America is a brink shot
away from a greater economic depression? America is in 2 Wars, it needs energy security, Health care is in a crisis, Climate change, Constitutional rights and the Bill of Rights need restored to post Bush levels? That no where in history have I ever heard or seen the feat of stimulating a “service economy” back to health?

Yet the EFCA is most threatening?

The Plame episode actually proves my point, because how dare does one of them speak out (or have their husband speak out) against his rule? Cheney was personally offended, because in his mind he runs the CIA, just like he runs the rest of the country. If there is a war inside CIA, it’s between its covert and intelligence-gathering wings. Wilson was doing intelligence gathering, and it stepped on the toes of the covert sides Iraq operations to “game” the intelligence. Cheney knew how to smack that down.

This country is so far from coming to terms with the degree in which the intelligence agencies have warped governance that it isn’t funny.

I was responding, too, to the general comment thread, without wanting to call anyone out. Because the speculations about what Panetta means or what the CIA is going to do or not do have no relevance unless one realizes that the CIA already has figured out what to do, and they’re doing it. And Obama is facilitating acceptance of the AFM torture program, and the mainstream press and most of the blogging world (including people I otherwise admire, like Scott Horton, or Glenn Greenwald) continue to ignore it. While the president of the National Lawyers Guild agrees with me, she appears to be unable to move her own organization to take a public position on it. Meanwhile, the ACLU speaks out of both sides of their mouth about it. Even prominent anti-torture writers, authors of well-known books (whose identity I will not reveal here), have told me to my face how important and right this issue is, but will not publicly write about it or include it in their own analyses. Perhaps they are only placating me, but since I’m a nobody, really, and they have nothing to gain by so doing, I suspect, and the psychologist in me tells me, they are being genuine.

Someone, I’m not sure who, said that if you’re going to have a secret, it’s best to have one right out in the open. The AFM is there for anyone to read. So are the earlier AFMs. Anyone could do the comparison. Anyone could read what is actually said and put two and two together.

It is similar, I suppose, to those who become incensed, as I do, too, at the massive amount of public evidence over use of torture itself (just ask Craig Murray), or the frame up and lies that led to the invasion of Iraq (just ask David Swanson over at After Downing Street), and still it’s as if none of this makes sufficient impact.

So I’ve taken to reposting Carl Bernstein’s article from the 70s on the CIA and the Media, because I just can’t understand otherwise how a society could be so compliant, so incurious, so accepting and passive. The social psychologist in me says, what do you expect? This is how human beings are.

So I’m reduced to ranting in a blog article and offending those who best believe and support the issues I’m pushing. Forgive me for that, and know it’s the end of a long, long day.

Like Woody Allen’s joke in Annie Hall, I will, I suppose, end up an old man hanging out in Manhattan delis, carrying shopping bags full of old articles about the Army Field Manual and Bush-era memos, or old Obama DoJ decisions, and screaming about “torture.” And people will look at me like I’m nuts (if they don’t already).