Departing Sen. Mark Udall took to the Senate floor this morning to tell the CIA to shut its lying face and disclosed classified information to do so.
He should be immune from prosecution for this because he was speaking in formal congressional session.
Where’s the transcript and the documents dropped in “extended remarks”?
Are there any?
Without the beef, this becomes a non-event of “Udall calls for Brennan to resign” and “Brennan says will refuse to resign when President tells me to”.
Yeah, without introducing the still secret 5,000+ pages in the Senate report, this falls far short of a “profile in courage” from Udall. Dangerous to his well being? Possibly. But that’s what separates courageous acts from grandstanding.
So when does John Brennan resign?
Obama Avoids Taking Sides on Effectiveness of C.I.A. Techniques
Soon. (High official scapegoats do remarkably well in the private sector in their retirement.) Not that anyone more acceptable to lefties that expect government officials first to apply law and order to themselves and departments they head up to stand a chance of being confirmed by the GOP Senate.
Off Topic
http://grist.org/people/we-want-democracy-but-we-dont-have-the-theory-or-skill-to-do-it/
Really good article the problems with occupy and internet anti organization ideals.
Yes — absent what I prefer to call an organizing principle than institution, issues protest energy gets squandered and little to nothing is accomplished.
This IMHO is correct:
Institutions, regardless of how rotten they are, ultimately defeat anarchy and much is damaged during the fight.
Hierarchies are unfortunately necessary but are also problematical enough that formal structures to avoid a tyranny by those at the top are required. Of course the framers of the US Constitution were aware of all that and all things considered they didn’t do a bad job at devising a structure for a relatively small and low population nation.
Here’s the difficulty with organization ideas that the people were trying to deal with. (1) The easiest way to shut down a protest movement is to do it with its leaders–co-opting is one way, arresting and detaining is another, and if they are too good assassination is a possibility. (2) Democratic consensus methodology is organization; all Occupy locations had some form of facilitation team to conduct meetings. The danger is when the facilitators drive the agenda instead of the assembly. That’s where the folks with hidden agendas seek to seize power. (3) The mass media was trying to destroy dissent by ignoring it; use of the internet and mass media provided a way of getting the the news that was actually going on beyond the Iron Curtain of the Wall Street media. (4) Dissent is often shut down by the permitting process; without an organization there was no one who was empowered to seek a permit. And the best the authorities could do was seek some sort of arrest for not having a permit, which provides the framework for non-violent civil disobedience.
What has come out is those who are most highly organized enough to have professional staff can be manipulated by threats of withdrawal of support not to carry out effective strategies.
What has also happened is a lot of discussion about extending the theory of democratic movements and institutions to figure out how they should be minimally structured and more involving.
The problems are not as much of Occupy as the disconnection of ordinary people from the political process, which has been corrupted by big money–the issue that Occupy Wall Street was making visible.
Similar organizational issues are arising in the #blacklivesmatter protests, but the mobilization of this second wave is much more widespread and the leadership is much more agile. And there is leadership and rudimentary organization, but there is still a swarm-like structure to what is happening. And coordination is happening on and off the internet, just as it was around Occupy Wall Street and the protests in Madison, WI that preceded it.
The article has not caught up to the issues that the people who were in Occupy Wall Street have been discussing about democratic structures.
As awful as it sounds, non-violent protests really only work when people are brutalized and killed, over and over. Only then does it reach a wide enough audience that people who are busy crushing candy and checking facebook take notice.
Or when their lives are inconvenienced by a sit-in or a shutdown of an expressway or street. The key players are not the general public support but the elites who can make things happen. Across the South in the 1960s, the segregation in public accommodations fell in place after place because the Chamber of Commerce pressured the public accommodations industry into changing. And the reason was that protests were bad for tourism and for pitching plant relocation prospects. In a lot of places, just announcing a sit-in was sufficient to cause change without actually having to do one.
The situation is different now, but the principle of finding the pressure points on the elite decision makers remains.
Protests are a tactic within a broader strategy. Too often, like the ANSWER protests against the Iraq War and an incoherent laundry list of other issues, they become the only tactic and nothing happens.
What the protests in New York City show is that a lot of the 70,000 people who filled the Brooklyn Bridge from end to end in 2011 are still active, willing to shut down every transportation entrance to Manhattan (in the middle of the night at least) and able to coordinate multiple protests at once. And to build new leadership and broaden the movement. Today a bunch of medical schools and hospitals conducted die-ins in solidarity with the #blacklivesmatter and #ICantBreathe actions. And the international solidarity in places like London puts diplomatic pressure on the US government even if the UK government acts as a shield.
But the Madison protests also accomplished nothing.
Panetta Review CIA’s brutal Bush-era interrogation techniques …
○ CIA lawyer at center of computer snooping clash
○ First Female Head of CIA’s Clandestine Service Signed Off on Destruction of Torture Tapes | FDL Kevin Gosztola |
Cross-posted from my diary – What Feinstein’s Report Doesn’t Reveal Found Here.
“He should be immune from prosecution for this because he was speaking in formal congressional session.”
We’ll see what Chief Justice John “lawless” Roberts has to say about this, after he consults the CSA constitution and some ideas he just pulled out of his butt.
Are you suggesting “rectal feeding” of ideas in the conservative majority of the Supreme Court?