[Warning: Torture]
I’m not sure why, but psychopaths sure do like to brag, don’t they?
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
The surveillance state has done a great job of conditioning our social response to what amounts to a massive violation of the constitution. Of course nobody cares. The information has been dropped in a way that nobody really understands it, and that is quite deliberate.
When I start hearing the old trope about plucky rebels attempting to overthrow a vicious government, my first reaction is to check and see if the story is being carried by The New York Times and, if it is, I search for “${region} CIA involvement”. I’m sad that we live in such a cynical world, but that’s what it is.
“Blowback” is the CIA’s term for “nasty things that happen because of something we did, which we did not plan for.” I guess that makes it sound a bit like it’s not our fault; it’s just something that happened, gosh, it’s time to move on already isn’t it?
US president Donald Trump has gone to the edge of the cliff defending his right to privacy, although he would never phrase it that way. For Trump, it’s all couched in the language of “executive privilege” – i.e.: the right of the rich and powerful to do whatever they want (especially if it means getting richer and more powerful).
The CIA appears to believe that it has the charter to go anywhere, kill anyone, and overthrow any state that it thinks needs overthrowing. It’s nice to see that sometimes that’s still not true.
This one managed to shock me a little bit, because of what it says regarding authoritarians’ view of what constitutes an acceptable claim. It manages to be worse than some of the worst/flimsiest justifications for torture that I’ve seen.
You’ve probably seen this image: coronavirus expose-ees leaving the cruise ship in Japan, deplaning at an air base in the US.
I came at this one from a weird angle. One of the Pacifica Radio Archive shows I listened to was an interview with Betty Friedan (FTV074) @13:53 during a question period someone asks: [Read more…]
In Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes [wc] he writes at one point that what the US needed was an intelligence agency, but what it got was a “Department of Dirty Tricks.” [Read more…]