For as long as I can remember, people have whispered about massive governmental conspiracies designed to undermine and subjugate the American people. I would snigger at the suggestion. These were the paranoids, who saw a conspiracy under every rock. Lunatics. The people who would wear hats made of tin foil to stop the government from shooting gamma rays into their heads to steal with most intimate thoughts.
What’s troubling is that our government appears hellbent on meeting their worst nightmares. From Balko :
The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they’re still too secret to reveal.
The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to “unprecedented collection activities” by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks…
The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday…
So what was our cabal up to?
The exact nature of the program remains a mystery. This official hinted that the secret program involved assassinations overseas but declined to provide further details.The old joke is that even paranoids have enemies. I’m beginning to wonder whether there’s anyone out there who manufactures tin foil hats. Maybe they’re on to something? Or maybe you don’t need a tin foil hat if you can hide your head in the sand instead.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
As you noted, hiding heads in the sand is the preferred approach to the unofficial coup that overthrew our constitutional republic.
The secrecy thing is pretty amazing, though. Because we believe that national security requires it, we prevent OURSELVES from knowing when and how our government subverts the very principles that our national security is supposed to preserve for us.
I was reading some comments to a post by Vokoh the other day where one commenter, clearly on a bender, was ranting about how if people knew what our government was doing, even within the government itself, we might as well be broadcasting our covert ops to the enemy. It’s another perfect Catch-22 argument, the solution to which simply depends on where you want to rest your faith.