Late last year I reported on how the Department of Justice refused to reveal the legal justification for the United States’ highly secretive drone-based targeted killing program in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the New York Times.
After that failed attempt, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has stepped up to the plate in an effort to get the Obama administration to actually live up to their promises of transparency.
However, the government continues to nonsensically claim that the program is indeed so incredibly secret that they cannot even confirm or deny the existence of the program itself.
Even more illogical is that Obama himself comes out boasting about the program whenever it is politically beneficial for him to do so.
The same goes for officials from the administration who perpetually remain behind the cover of anonymity in speaking of the program while still attempting to justify it and in doing so confirming its existence.
In a typically spot-on article published today by Green Greenwald, writing for Salon, he outlines just how ludicrous this contradictory practice really is.
In the article, he even lays out what I see as Obama making the case for himself to be arrested for the same crimes as Bradley Manning.
Since Obama claimed that Bradley Manning was guilty, and that he too could be arrested for releasing classified information, while Obama himself released classified information on the drone program, it only makes sense that Obama should call for himself to be arrested.
But, of course, this will never happen and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney essentially claimed that Obama can do whatever he wants when confronted with this issue.
This represents the greater problem, which Greenwald highlights in his article: they claim secrecy to cover up their actions from legal scrutiny, while publicly boasting about the supposedly secret program whenever it is beneficial to do so.
This way they can continue to scare the world into subservience, strike fear into the hearts of innocent people across the Middle East and the world, keep killing people with no oversight whatsoever, all while never having to answer to anyone, while still being able to boast about the “success” of their efforts.
All of this can be done without any legal challenges by leveraging the supposed secrecy of the program when needed, allowing all of this to occur in plain sight while not actually having to prove that they can legally do such a thing.
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| Comment: Here is yet another example of the terra-nepenthe at work. It can be felt by how the propaganda is delivered from the government. |
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