This is a great example of how the Constitution and our system of laws is meaningless as long as two branches conspire to make it so. In this case, the executive branch allowed the torture to go unpunished, and the legislative branch allowed the executive branch to do so.
There is a third party that needs to acquiesce to the lawlessness: the voting public. Well, sort of. The current president promised them that there would be accountability for the torture, but that campaign promise went the way of so many others.
> The current president promised them that there would be accountability for the torture, but that campaign promise went the way of so many others.
That is the part that just kills me. One of the planks in Obama's campaigns (or at least the first) was anti-torture (at least that is how I perceived it at the time, and I believe that is how I was intended to perceive it.) So the public voted for a representative who would curtail torture, but the representative they voted for was a liar.
I don't have much faith that the other major candidate was any more honest, so what really is the general public to do? Vote third party perhaps, but they would still lack any assurance whatsoever that their third party candidate was not a liar. How can a representative democracy function when all the candidate representatives are liars?
They aren't actually representing the people that elect them, so my conclusion is that whatever our system of government may be, it is not actually a representative democracy.
(Yeah yeah, technically we vote for people, not for platforms... except that the unbelievably vast majority of voters have never met these candidates, so they "know" the candidate only through the candidates portrayal of their platform. The reality is that the general public votes for platforms (or cynically, attractive faces...).)
At risk of being called a crazy conspiracy theorist:
At some point you have to realize that politicians have been reduced to little more than actors and the deep state is now the entity that's really in control. What do I mean by that?
The Affordable Care Act is pretty much the primary political blockbuster over the course of the last several years. Still, it didn't do much beyond establish an online insurance exchange and eliminate discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. Not exactly what I would consider sweeping reform. Despite this, Republicans are constantly shouting to the public "Obamacare is destroying America!" and Democrats are saying "The ACA has made our nation infinitely better off", when the reality is that neither is true.
The grandiose televised presidential debates seem quite indicative that these people are just acting for the public in order to get elected. Romney and Obama tried to paint each other in such a dramatic way that it really bordered on absurdity.
Meanwhile, we have the three letter agencies getting into all sorts of trouble. Spying on the public, starting coups abroad, and all sorts of things that they will never be held accountable for. It seems far more likely to me that Obama was pressured into his present foreign policy by the members of these agencies, rather than him backing out on his promises so extensively. In the case of the NSA, and now apparently the CIA, they are in no way obligated to inform congress of their actions. They pretty much just do whatever the hell they want and then leave the politicians to rationalize it.
So, while Republicans and Democrats may argue over petty issues, there isn't a whole lot behind their talk. The critical decisions about which countries we enter into conflict with, what rights US citizens have, etc., are really being made behind the scenes by completely unelected people.
The primary factor underlying these issues is that congress and the executive are beholden more to those who fund their campaigns than those who vote for them. Nothing gets through congress or is signed by the president without the approval of the top 100 campaign donors.
> So the public voted for a representative who would curtail torture, but the representative they voted for was a liar.
They're all liars. All of them. Even "your" representative/Senator/guy you backed for President.
Lying is the only way they can get elected.
Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned on not prosecuting torture, but prosecuting Aaron Swartz to death? "If elected I will support any prosecutor who hounds Aaron Swartz to suicide." Because he does support Carmen Ortiz.
Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned on increasing surveillance, foreign and domestic, to the limits of technology?
Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned that "I will support the programs and personnel that cause drone strikes to target, inadvertently or otherwise, weddings, houses, schools and other facilities where innocents and children are killed.
No.
They take all those things, say the opposite (especially if the current occupant is doing those things), and then double down when they get in.
Well, ideally candidates that neither lied nor campaigned with those positions would be great. For reasons that I can only speculate about, they don't seem to exist.
My least 'fringey' theory is that those who want to rule are almost by definition unfit to rule.
January 2009 - Executive Order 13491 - Obama restores policy on interrogations to pre-Bush norms (i.e., rolling back the instructions that resulted in US soldiers torturing prisoners) [1]
January 2014 - Obama repeats call to close Guantanamo prison:
"With the Afghan war ending, this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay," Obama said in the address Tuesday night. Obama ordered his administration to empty the prison camps in the first year of his first term, by Jan 22, 2010. But Congress steadily thwarted that ambition by imposing escalating restrictions on transfers and blocking civilian trials of the captives.[2]
What he did not do is to aggressively pursue judicial action against the previous administration. Was this right or wrong? I personally wish he did, but I can also see why he chose not to tear the country apart over that.
So I'm curious - did you know about the executive order he signed? What else were you hoping he would do? Where do you think he lied?
I live in New Zealand. We have an MMP parliament, which means that you get lots of different voices in government. IMO, the problem with the US is the FPP system - it lends itself to being monopolised by two large parties. When NZ had FPP, that is what happened here, also.
I don't think you can have a working democracy without real choice in who to vote for. I would argue that FPP means that you don't have that choice in the US. Witness that people voting for Nader (left of the Dems) split the Dems vote and gave you a right wing government. The system works against anyone having ideas outside the mainstream.
My strong opinion is that if you want a better democracy you must get rid of FPP. STV or MMP are both better alternatives.
> How can a representative democracy function when all the candidate representatives are liars?
I'm happy more people are finally becoming aware of the fallacious nature of labeling it a representative democracy.
When the implementation of a system is providing massive amounts of power to a tiny group of people, in exchange for non-binding promises. In the rare event someone is held accountable for lying, they get replaced by another politician who over time is indistinguishable from the last one.
But everyone keeps trumpeting the idea that voting and replacing politician x with politican y is the solution to a broken democracy. I'm not buying it.
Democracy happens, it's just rather indirectly related to voting. The coin of political power is public passivity - a resisting public will seriously ruin a politician's day, democratic or autocratic. Elections have the effect of forcing politicians to rely on public opinion to create passivity, because using terror in the authoritarian style would get them ejected. Therefore democratic politics consists of efforts to push (or be pushed by) public opinion.
(This democracy/autocracy contrast recurses to population subsets, cf: the civil rights era.)
by another politician who over time is indistinguishable from the last one
It's worse than that. You can replace every politician in Washington DC and you'd still be left with a massive bureaucracy of unelected officials who will go right on doing what they're doing, oblivious to the needs of the voting public. Their numbers are legion, they have a great deal of power, and they are entrenched beyond comprehension.
By the end of the first term it was clear that Obama ignored a lot of his promises. What really surprised me that people still believed him enough to elect for the second term.
eople still believed him enough to elect for the second term.
I certainly didn't believe Obama by the 2012 campaign, but I didn't have a huge choice. I blame the other major party for nominating an obvious empty suit of clothes, and you should, too.
Try to objectively describe the life history and experience of President (then-Senator) Obama in 2008 vs. the life history and experience of Mitt Romney in 2012 in a way that makes Romney the clear "empty suit"[1].
There were plenty of defensible policy or character reasons to vote against Romney, for Obama, or both, but it's disingenuous to describe Romney as anything but a perfectly plausible president. And of course, not much would have been different if he'd been elected: Some vocal folks on HN may wish otherwise, but the range of American political consensus is narrow, and our system requires consensus to change anything.
At very least, it would have been worth voting for Romney to get the media to do something like its job.
This IRS scandal should have the press howling at the stonewalling of the administration and the suppression of the rights of Americans trying to participate in the election process. Instead, it's crickets. After all, they're only a bunch of "tea baggers".
> This IRS scandal should have the press howling at the stonewalling of the administration and the suppression of the rights of Americans trying to participate in the election process
Which IRS scandal? This one[1]?
"Further investigation revealed that certain terms and themes in the applications of liberal-leaning groups and the Occupy movement had also triggered additional scrutiny, though possibly at a lower rate.[3][4][5][6][7] The only known denial of tax-exempt status occurred to a progressive group."
As recently as last week, the president of the Landmark Legal Foundation (Mark Levin) - the Foundation that triggered the original Treasury Inspector General's inquiry into this abuse of the IRS made the statement on his radio program that not a single Tea Party group had been interviewed by the FBI in its "investigation".
If you want to claim that the audits were balanced across political groups, you'll have to contend with the information that we have that 10 times as many conservative groups were targeted and when conservative groups were targeted they were asked 10 times as many questions.
So there's no equivalency there. Maybe a couple of progressive groups were swept up or maybe they were even targeted so that someone could have some kind of story of fairness.
The scandal wasn't over denial of tax-exempt status, it was about using the threat of denial as a form of political repression. It's similar to police harassment: the fact that they let you go eventually doesn't excuse the abuse.
But declaring that any candidate fielded by the opposing party must by definition be bad, you give your own team license to be bad. As long as they're just slightly less evil then the opposition, you'll be willing to continue voting for them.
Since we've seen ample evidence that continuing to play this game leads to the very problems we're seeing today, consider changing your strategy. Perhaps a better approach would be to place a higher value on the observed bad behavior of the incumbent and throw the bum out, rather than obsess over the speechifying of the challenger, since that's likely just hypocrisy and pandering anyway.
Not at all, you're reading way too much into what I wrote.
Romney is an empty suit: that doesn't mean that Ron Paul is. Ron Paul was the only serious anti-war candidate. Given a chance, I would have voted for him.
Liars are often good at relatively convincingly excusing their own failures. The amount of "congress wouldn't let him do..." or "he can't do [...] until his second term so that he can get reelected" I heard in 2012 was absolutely stunning.
Name a worse candidate than Romney in the history of the Republican party. Not a worse President, a worse first-term candidate. Even GWB looked better in 2000 than Romney in 2012.
I'd have to go back to Goldwater who looked poised to annihilate the human race before I could find a worse Republican presidential candidate.
>I don't have much faith that the other major candidate was any more honest, so what really is the general public to do?
Not wait until there is a candidate President to be presented to them, but join the parties they are interested in, and push and vote themselves for the kind of candidate they want to have?
If people only vote at the last minute (just who will be president from 2 ready made choices by the Republican or the Democratic party) then it's not really a democracy, it's merely a popularity contest about two people put in front of you.
There's no "representative democracy" without mass active participation. Voting every 4 years and the ocassional "letter to your Senator" doesn't count at all.
>Yeah yeah, technically we vote for people, not for platforms...
Well, in a democracy you're supposed to vote for the platform, not for the people. It's not about chosing a random leader that seems nice, it's about picking the representative to best move forward the kind of policy change (platform) you'd like to see.
Making elections about individual people and their character (and even personal morals or looks) is, to my European eyes, a regression to non political attitudes.
> "Not wait until there is a candidate President to be presented to them, but join the parties they are interested in, and push and vote themselves for the kind of candidate they want to have?"
In a country of 300million people, I don't think that "get to know the person that you want to be president, so that you can personally endorse them" is a scalable solution.
For most citizens, that would play out as "join a party, receive the newsletters in the mail, feel good about the direction the party is going, and get lied to every two years."
>In a country of 300million people, I don't think that "get to know the person that you want to be president, so that you can personally endorse them" is a scalable solution.
It's not about getting to know them as people. It's about getting to know their platform, and pushing for this or that platform inside party processes.
>For most citizens, that would play out as "join a party, receive the newsletters in the mail, feel good about the direction the party is going, and get lied to every two years."
Well, then you ain't gonna have a democracy. It's an off the couch thing. You cannot have a democracy if you're not concerned with whats going on and voicing that as part of a power process every day.
The "fourth estate" is traditionally the press. Unfortunately most of the press does a shit job in keeping the various elites accountable. Imagine if reporters could ask the kinds of questions we want them to ask: "Mr. President, should James Clapper be prosecuted for lying to congress, which is a felony?", "Mr. President, did you authorize waterboarding at Guantanamo Bay?", "Did the USA incite a coup in the Ukraine?"
Unfortunately nowadays if someone asks questions like these, their access to these people will be promptly removed, and they're likely to get fired from their news outlet for pissing off news sources.
While I agree with your sentiment the real world isn't so simple.
The primary qualification of a good reporter is access. Access to sources, access to documents, access to hints from people in power and access to confront and interview people in power.
For a reporter there's a fine line between gaining and keeping access and using it to do reporting. Access relies on trust, reporting often relies on breaking it.
Since people in power have the ability to cut you out of the loop you need to be very careful about what you write else you'll find that your calls aren't being returned, you aren't being invited to press conferences and can't get interviews. Which makes you useless as a reporter.
Source: A lot of my friends work in media, and quite a few of them have relations to the political game, have interviewed heads of state, etc. Most of them are truly troubled by this state of affairs, but what can they do?
This reminds me so much of the book Manufacturing Consent. One sounds like a crazy person when they say elite powers (indirectly) control the mass media, but after reading most of that book, the conclusion is inescapable.
Of course news outlets self-censor, they don't want to get shut out. Of course they play up victims of atrocities caused by our enemies, and largely ignore victims of atrocities caused by the United States and its allies. Of course media sources shy away from reporting on stories that would harm their owners or advertising dollars. Of course they use official press advisers and PR people, who they talk to every day and who understand how the industry works. Of course they use neatly packaged press releases when they're on tight budgets and deadlines. Of course they don't take the time to report all sides of a complex issue, if some sides are neatly presented, and opposing sides take days of research.
[edit] - sillysaurus edited his comment slightly - I hope this rely still makes sense...
I think your'e giving good reporters too little credit (note the good, which is unfortunately a minority). My experience is that these people are aggressive in their search for truth and the uncovering of corruption. Their problem is that to do their job they often need inside knowledge, secret sources and the ability to confront the potential perpetrators. So they need friends in the very places they are trying to dig up dirt. It's a very fine line.
To some degree I think media has always been like this, but it's gotten worse over the last 10 years. I see 2 obvious reasons for this:
1) The political game has moved, and there is much more emphasis on controlling the agenda than there was before. In the modern media world there is no way you'll get access to a high-standing official before having been vetted by media consultants, spindoctors and aides of all sorts. An impenetrable layer of spin between the reporter and the official has sprung up, and without some cooperation on the reporters side he won't get the interview/tip/story. This is a huge problem for truth and democracy. It also shows itself in how the news is being reported, since this layer of spin consumes so much attention. Note how the news is less and less about the story and more and more about the process. It's not "Why did Putin invade Crimea", but "Is Obama weak because Putin invaded Crimea". The layer of spin uses their power to throw dirt at the other side of the aisle.
2) Traditional media is in decline. This has some fairly serious consequences for the news landscape. Less and less time (money...) is allocated to producing more and more stories, and as an obvious result the quality suffers. Ironically this also means that often reporters know they are being fed a story by the spin machine, but they don't have the time to disassenble it or be critical of it if they are to meet their daily qouta of X articles. The editors also require more and more sensational stories, based on less and less research to keep readership and clickrates high. The recent story in Newsweek where they claim to have found the founder of Bitcoin is a good example.
Note that I'm from Europe, and the dynamics here are a bit different - namely that we often have public radio and TV (like PBS) that don't have a political agenda or affiliation, and that we often don't have the media conglomerates that you do in the UIS that try to push a political agenda. This is a very serious problem b.t.w.
I don't know what Obama's campaign promise was, but I am certain he never promised to go on a witch hunt arresting people in the prior administration. I know that is standard operating procedure in many countries, I am just glad I don't live in one of those countries.
The current allegations are against his own administration. He is obligated to investigate the claims or he should be impeached by his own party.
Given that the alleged torture they would be trying to cover up is widely regarded as happening under the previous administration, I see no reason why Obama would be directing their staff to cover anything up. It's much more likely that the folks who stay around across administrations would be responsible, since they have more to lose.
The CIA destroying tapes of torture interrogations is probably one of the most blatant examples of intelligence agencies operating lawlessly, with the executive branch in full knowledge of them operating in that fashion, but choosing not to do anything about it.
> Under President Obama, prosecutors exonerated the officials who ordered those tapes destroyed.
Agreed, I'm not attempting to downplay the NSA leaks, my point was that the NSA operates under pseudo-law rubber stamped by the intelligence committees, congress, and FISA. The CIA combined with executive branch blatantly disregard even the oversight committees. Another example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency#Co...
"Ms. Feinstein said that when Senate staff members reviewed thousands of documents describing those interrogations in 2009, they found that the C.I.A.’s leadership seriously misled the committee when it described the interrogations program to the panel in 2006, 'only hours before President Bush disclosed the program to the public.'"
Am I understanding this right? They found gross violations in 2009 and only raising concerns now.
Everyone absolutely must read Feinstein's full statement. Most of the press coverage is woefully lacking in the details and context that move this into really serious political/constitutional shitstorm territory
Significantly, Robert Eatinger, the CIA lawyer who threatened Feinstein's staffers was the same person who OK'ed the destruction of the torture tapes, and who knew that the torture was way out of bounds in at least two specific ways: Waterboarding was widely used and used repeatedly, and that sleep deprivation was also used beyond the parameters that were OK'ed, never mind that both are torture in the first place. And what are the odds that the known crimes are the tip of the iceberg? In other words, he OK'ed the destruction of evidence of very serious crimes.
The editorial linked-to is worth a read: short, to the point, and harsh, almost as if they had summoned Hunter S. Thompson from the dead to write it. The editorial does miss out on naming the CIA's acting general counsel, whose name is mentioned 1,600 times in the (unreleased/still classified) Senate Committee Report. To be clear, the current CIA general counsel is one of the torturers, and also apparently fighting tooth and nail to not release the report.
“the C.I.A.’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the C.I.A. from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.” -Sen. Feinstein
Yet, the NSA is not prevented from domestic searches and surveillance? How is this possible or consistent with EO 12333, let alone the U.S. Constitution?
Methinks Senator Feinstein doth protest too much. She supported NSA's massive and unconstitutional domestic surveillance. Now she knows what it feels like to be spied upon, eh?
If the Executive branch is being investigated by the Legislative branch then the security of the documents should be assured by the Legislative or better yet Judicial branch. The process sounds broken.
There is a third party that needs to acquiesce to the lawlessness: the voting public. Well, sort of. The current president promised them that there would be accountability for the torture, but that campaign promise went the way of so many others.
So it goes.