How the CIA gets away with it: Our democracy is their real enemy - Salon.com

On March 11, 2014, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein stepped to the well of the Senate to deliver a speech exposing in stark terms a struggle between congressional investigators and their oversight subject: the Central Intelligence Agency. Feinstein was an unlikely critic of the practices of the intelligence community. The wife of investment banker Richard C. Blum, who managed enormous capital investments in corporations serving the American defense and intelligence communities, Feinstein had distinguished herself among Senate Democrats as a staunch CIA defender. In her long service on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which she had chaired since 2009, Feinstein established close personal ties with key senior agency figures—championing the candidacy of former deputy director Stephen Kappes to head the agency after Barack Obama was elected.

Patiently and meticulously, Feinstein unfolded the string of events that led her committee to launch the most exhaustive congressional probe of a single CIA program in the nation’s history. “On December 6, 2007, a New York Times article revealed the troubling fact that the CIA had destroyed video tapes of some of the CIA’s first interrogations using so-called enhanced techniques,” she stated.

CIA director Michael Hayden had assured congressional overseers that they had no reason to be concerned: routine written field reports, what Hayden called CIA operational cables, had been retained. These documents, Hayden said, described “the detention conditions” of prisoners held by the CIA before it decided to shut down the program as well as the “day-to-day CIA interrogations.” Hayden offered the senators access to these cables to prove to them that the destruction of the tapes was not a serious issue. Moreover, he reminded them that the CIA program was a historical relic: in the fall of 2006 the Bush administration ended the CIA’s role as a jailer and sharply curtailed its program of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs)—specifically eliminating techniques that most of the international community, including the United States in the period before and after the Bush presidency, had viewed as torture, such as waterboarding.

Nevertheless, the Senate committee had never looked deeply into this program, and Hayden’s decision to offer access to the cables opened the door to a careful study, which was accepted by then-chair Jay Rockefeller. Early in 2007, two Senate staffers spent many months reading the cables. By the time they had finished in early 2009, Feinstein had replaced Rockefeller as committee chair, and Barack Obama had replaced George W. Bush as president. Feinstein received the first staff report. It was “chilling,” she said. “The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us.”

This first exploration of the dark side of CIA prisons and torture led committee members to recognize a serious failure in its oversight responsibilities. The committee resolved with near-unanimity (on a 14–1 vote) to launch a comprehensive investigation of the CIA program involving black sites and torture.

Complete story at - How the CIA gets away with it: Our democracy is their real enemy - Salon.com

The Day After: Say Good Bye To What Was Posing as American Democracy | Opinion | teleSUR

New York, New York: In North America, we call these election “cycles” as the two main parties battle each other, not by mobilizing voters or building political movements but mostly through desperate fund raising pitches and sloganizing.

The Democrats go after small change while the Republicans rely on billionaire funders and their political action committees. Politics is seen as an investment, a way to control the resources of the state and the lucrative appropriations process. It’s about money as much as mission.

The Republicans have been waging a NO campaign over at least seven cycles characterized not by offering a program for change or better policies but systematic denigration, holding President Obama personally responsible for every problem, flaw and error. It's gang-up politics driven by simple message points to undermine trust. The message: its all his fault, and frankly some of it is.

In many ways this approach mirrors the 60 year campaign of trying to demonize Fidel Castro in Cuba or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela over years. Find a “bad guy,” give him no credit and heap every every bit of sarcasm and conspiracy theory that you can “credibly” deploy to discredit him. Truth is never a criteria.

This year, as Tom Engelhart writes, "Escalation" or amping up minor threats to public safety, is the new toy of the political class for manipulating voters. Making these small threats loom large in the public eye also conveniently diverts attention from bigger issues, like inequality, high unemployment, and the rise of McJobs.”

Complete story at - The Day After: Say Good Bye To What Was Posing as American Democracy | Opinion | teleSUR

Article: Why The US Endgame for Russia Means the Death of American Democracy | OpEdNews

Authors note: Democracy and fascism cannot occupy the same space. A country is either one or the other. People are either one or the other. The article is long because the documentation needs to reflect that gravity.

Background:

When we think of a coup or regime change there is usually a face or a group to peg it on. Ukraine was taken over by Ukrainian nationalists; we can see them. What I am going to describe is a faceless, nameless takeover that was based on ideology only. What if it didn't matter who the next leader was but the ideological foundation was forever changed?

With the beginning of the Cold War, then president Truman partially legitimized the OUN. Had Truman known the turn this would soon take, would he have done it?

According to Jonathan Levy (The Intermarium-Wilson, Madison, & East Central European Federalism), a member of the International Criminal Bar in the Hague who holds a Ph.D in political Science and has taught terrorism and diplomatic thery at Norwich University:

In 1949, CIA Director, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter in a letter to the Chairman of the Displaced Persons Committee made official a change in policy towards the OUN. He acknowledged that while the organization had collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War, its members were to be considered solely as anti-Soviets able to "find common ground with new partners." The CIA Director did warn, however, that the Bandera faction was made up of extreme nationalists. This reclassification as anti-Soviet (better known as anti-communist) paved the way for a quiet nationalist invasion of the United States .

Bandera is a term I use loosely these days. In reality there were over 2,000 groups that worked under the auspices of Bandera's ABN (Anti-Bolshevik Nations), and today in America 'Bandera' is the UCCA (Ukrainian Congressional Committee of America) . Far flung groups today in Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, and the greater horn of Africa have long been part of the greater ABN community. Many of these groups, because they are so many and varied, don't even recognize each other at first sight. The Muslim Brotherhood is just one example. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are two more. All of these were helped by Yaroslav Stetsko's Bandera ABN through the UCCA in America. The common bond appears when the religious veneer is stripped away. Take away the Muslim part and you are left with an ultra nationalist (fascist) politics.

The problem with the ABN, according to the CIC (Command Intelligence Center, or Army Counter Intelligence), was that it was a tool of the Bandera faction of OUN (Organization of UKrainian Nationalists). An April 1946 extract by the CIC found OUN/B or "the Bandera gang" to be nationalistic, anti-Soviet and anti-American as well as anti-Semitic and involved with criminal activity and espionage. It was noted that many former SS men were members.(ibid)

If this conclusion could be reached as part of American history, in which an emigre group gradually assimilated into our democratic society, that would be one thing. They never did. According to their own documents: In 1980, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America was taken over by theOUN(B) and thus ceased to represent the Ukrainian community as a whole. The power and influence of the OUN factions have been declining steadily due to assimilation pressures, ideological incompatibility with the Western liberal-democratic ethos, and the increasing tendency of political groups in Ukraine to move away from integral nationalism.

It is clear that by 1980 the OUN-ABN-UCCA had set their sites on larger things than Ukraine. They accomplished what General John Hackett, Commander of NATO's Northern Army Group, and good friend of Yaroslav Stetsko envisioned in 1988 could be done to the Soviet Union, doing it to the USA instead: infiltrate and conquer.

Complete story at - Article: Why The US Endgame for Russia Means the Death of American Democracy | OpEdNews

Dumbocracy’s Demise: How “Fake Democracy” Destroys “Real Democracy” | Global Research

“Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything Better than you.”— song from Annie Get Your Gun

The conventional wisdom is that democracy is the best form of government. As the imperialist demagogue Winston Churchill, put it, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.” But such conventional wisdom comes by default. No one has ever offered any evidence in support of it. In fact, no one even knows what such evidence could be. No established criteria exist for the comparative adjectives worst, worse, bad, good, better, and best when they are applied to governments.

Furthermore, that democracy is the best form of government has not always even been the conventional wisdom. Plato, who founded his Academy in Athens around 400 BCE, where democracy is said to have originated, writes, “Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy.” And at least some of those who wrote the American Constitution in the 1700s were well aware of democracy’s pitfalls and that no democracy had endured for any length of time. John Adams writes, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” Despite their knowledge, the Constitution’s writers persisted, believing that they could build a nation that avoided the faults that had destroyed earlier democracies. But they were wrong!

In fact, no genuine democracy has ever existed. The citizens of no nation have ever governed themselves. Lincoln’s “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is pure bombast. What has passed for democracy has always been some form of representational oligarchy. But no one can represent two different ideologies at once. Even the word ‘democracy’ has never been adequately defined. If you read the Wikipedia article, you will find numerous different forms of government described, all of which are named democracies but differentiated by a qualifying word. There is representative democracy, constitutional democracy, people’s democracy, etc. As George Orwell says, “It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.” Talk about an unqualified democracy is nonsense.

Democracy’s weaknesses are well known. Electorates are poorly educated and inadequately informed. Politicians are corrupt. People are diverse; diversity leads to factions; factions are combative; the combativeness requires a resolution; oppression resolves it. As Mahatma Gandhi understood, “The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires a change of heart.” As present day India demonstrates, changes in heart seem to be impossible to achieve.

Complete story at - Dumbocracy’s Demise: How “Fake Democracy” Destroys “Real Democracy” | Global Research

This Modern World - Tom Tomorrow

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