Beyond a Joke... After some fantastic springtime fakery from the Guardian, Independent and Telegraph this morning, its even more depressing when one discovers a true story we only wish had been an April Fool. This was my overriding feeling as I read the latest revelations of systematic, violent abuse and repeated torture of prisoners at the hands of the CIA. Although primarily concerned with atrocities committed during the years of the latter Bush Administration, one cant help but wonder in the light of recent, concurrent reports of extraordinary rendition by US agencies or their proxies, well-documented missile incursions into Yemen and Pakistan or the machinations of the now-infamously long-fingered Joint Special Operations Command, whether and to what extent these things are still going on in corners of the world where cameras and notebooks cant reach? Excuse my cynicism but even given the apparently candid nature of the long awaited senate report revealed today in the Washington Post, I find it hard to believe any of these things ever really stopped, or that this story will end up changing anything in an already division-crippled house with the grubby fists of the US covert agencies and their financiers wedged so deep into the congressional waistband I wouldnt be surprised if Harry Reid and Joe Biden are already able to taste the polonium. It seems staggering to me that collectively speaking, were still broadly accepting of the notion put forward by the PR lackeys of these unregulated, hammer-happy spooks that Snowden and Assange are somehow the bad guys because they dared to be disgusted by (and refused to be complicit in) the daily abuses of power, sovereignty and humanity they were forced to witness. Worse still by allowing statements of this nature to be reported as legitimate opinion, our media tacitly implies that somehow it is the very exposing of these acts of evil (and they are precisely that) which represents the real threat to national security and risks increased radicalisation or escalations of anti-western hatred rather than in fact the torture and abuse itself. Shame on them. Whats truly terrifying though is that these new reports, in tandem with their all-too-familiar counterparts concerning the NSA and GCHQ among others make it perfectly clear that our security services, and the paramilitary assets they control are effectively a law unto themselves. It says a lot that the Senators who complied this latest dossier mentioned both publicly and casually that they havent decided yet whether to even show the report to President Obama. If thats not an indictment of a fatally broken and corrupted political system then I dont know by what criteria one could ever evaluate an effective and successful democracy.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 21:11:27 +0000
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