Letters to the Editor
Bill Owen
Published Letters: 507 Editor's Choice: 6
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Or you could just delete the files, that's what they do at Langley
[Read the article: If you drive with your iPhone, police can search it]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/15/AR2008011504090.html?sub=AR
"In late 2005, the retiring CIA station chief in Bangkok sent a classified cable to his superiors in Langley asking if he could destroy videotapes recorded at a secret CIA prison in Thailand that in part portrayed intelligence officers using simulated drowning to extract information from suspected al-Qaeda members..."
Every device in the world should come with a "wipe" key, and it should work. Why don't they?
It worked with the White House emails!
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@ nulla
[Read the article: If you drive with your iPhone, police can search it]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So Nulla, what were you on probation for?
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The American Political System is INSANE
[Read the article: Did Hillary Clinton really win in Florida?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Millions of dollars to run for office, then you have this, this, "system": primaries, outlaw primaries, causcauses, the freaking electoral college - whatever that is, and finally paperless Republican "voting" machines.
And after all that, you have an "election", after which Diebold Corporation or the Supreme Court picks the President. Have I got that right?
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Glenn Deklares a Diktatorship
[Read the article: Mukasey's radical worldview is now the norm]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn as been building up to this for some time, as he said in his book, "How Would a Patriot Act?", two years ago, "we are a country in which the president has said -- expressly and repeatedly -- that he has the power to act without restraints, including the power to break the law."
More recently he has used the term "oligarchy" not once but many times. Over the last few months and years he has meticulously detailed the abuses of, not a President - but a dictator.
Glenn's latest post amounts to a declaration that democracy in America has ended, and that it has ended in the sad spectacle of the craven, obsequious, and beaten members of the Congressional Boyar Duma reduced to begging the Tzar's top secret policeman for favors.
Up to this point I agree with everything that Glenn said.
He finishes however, by asserting that "Bush will be gone in 11 months", and wistfully hopes that the next boss will be better than the last boss. "It remains to be seen..." if the next putatively "democratic" President will prosecute any of this sanguinary regime's many crimes. This is where he loses me.
If Bush and his whole grisly gang are in fact planning on packing up and going on the lecture circuit, how to explain their apparent lack of any fear that those new and extraordinary powers of the "unitary executive" will not be used against them? After all the executive can now declare anyone an "enemy combatant", spirit them away to a secret prison and then administer all the EIT units that they care to apply.
But they are not worried. They keep committing crimes. The attack on Iran is still on, despite the latest NIE. They have no fear, no worries. Bush is a textbook extreme sociopath, and for people like him, consequences are an abstraction at best. But what about the rest of them - surely they must be worried? If they are, I see no evidence of that whatsoever.
Look for another attack on America. Wait for the deliberately unspecified "national emergency" that will trigger SPD 51 - which gives Bush out-of-the-drawer dictatorial powers, with "legitimate" primacy over the Congress, the Senate and what's left of the Supreme court.
Glenn is right that Bush is now a functional dictator (a charge that has never before been seriously or credibly leveled at a sitting POTUS). Where he goes wrong is his sadly naive, but admirable, belief that there will be an election and perhaps... prosecutions.
There will be no election and if there is, it will be a Diebold affair. Either way it's more war, and no "freedoms", not in America anyway.
The only question is what are you going to do about it? There is only one answer, there must be impeachment, and it must be now.
Tragically, the quisling Pelosi, with the assistance of her erstwhile collaborator and fellow sonderkommando Reid, have, and continue to keep, impeachment, "off the table".
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@adams
[Read the article: Mukasey's radical worldview is now the norm]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thanks, "naive" is probably not the best adjective I could have used, but please note that I was only referring to his apparent belief (or is it hope?) that there will be another election in America. No, Glenn is most certainly not naive in general, in fact he is one of the most awake commentators out there, and I admire his work very very much.
But I can disagree with him a little can't I?
BTW I am Canadian too, and let me tell you, under our own "decider", Stephen Harper, a bush without the bombs, we are sliding in your direction. The difference here is that their may still be room for optimism. Still, given the choice - give me liberty or give me minus 30 degrees Celsius. So Adams if you are coming, and welcome eh, don't forget your mukluks! Please leave the WMD and the fascism at the door though.
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@glidrith - signing statements
[Read the article: Mukasey's radical worldview is now the norm]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Oh, if it were only so easy. First you would need a Congress that is not bought, paid for, complicit, blackmailed, duped, under control, and/or semi-closeted neo-con Likudniks like that Lieberman creature.
But assuming you could get that, the whole point about signing statements is to indicate the the President is not bound by the bill in question. Its a paradox. Nothing would happen. Nothing ever does. It's called "Democracy in America".
A better course would be for Congress to send over Articles of Impeachment and see if he signs those.