Tulsi vs. The Duopolistic Blob: Senate Showdown Notes

“He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this.”
-Albert Einstein

Blind deference to authority, especially when it comes to waging war for the benefit of nefarious multinational puppet masters, rightly appalls the conscience of any decent man or woman — and all the more so when it’s universal across the allegedly diverse ideological spectrum represented in this wonderful representative Democracy™.

Tulsi had already been reduced to repeating the line that “Edward Snowden broke the law” and that he shouldn’t have released classified intelligence as he did, even though it showed the United States government breaking the law in egregious fashion — a betrayal of her former public position, but one that she is aware is necessary to have any hope of getting confirmed.

She had already been reduced to saying that the secretive and egregiously unconstitutional Section 702 of the FISA court was a wonderful tool of spycraft that keeps American babies safe and happy in their cribs at night.

Via Electronic Frontier Foundation (emphasis added):

“A federal district court held that backdoor searches of databases full of Americans’ private communications collected under Section 702 ordinarily require a warrant. The landmark ruling comes in a criminal case, United States v. Hasbajrami, after more than a decade of litigation, and over four years since the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that backdoor searches constitute “separate Fourth Amendment events” and directed the district court to determine a warrant was required. Now, that has been officially decreed.

In the intervening years, Congress has reauthorized Section 702 multiple times, each time ignoring overwhelming evidence that the FBI and the intelligence community abuse their access to databases of warrantlessly collected messages and other data. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which Congress assigned with the primary role of judicial oversight of Section 702, has also repeatedly dismissed arguments that the backdoor searches violate the Fourth Amendment, giving the intelligence community endless do-overs despite its repeated transgressions of even lax safeguards on these searches.

This decision sheds light on the government’s liberal use of what is essential a “finders keepers” rule regarding your communication data. As a legal authority, FISA Section 702 allows the intelligence community to collect a massive amount of communications data from overseas in the name of “national security.” But, in cases where one side of that conversation is a person on US soil, that data is still collected and retained in large databases searchable by federal law enforcement. Because the US-side of these communications is already collected and just sitting there, the government has claimed that law enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to sift through them. EFF argued for over a decade that this is unconstitutional, and now a federal court agrees with us.”

None of that was good enough, though, for the Intelligence Committee goblins or their masters.

Like a tortured political prisoner having his confession extracted, she was admonished, again and again, to utter the words: “Edward Snowden is a traitor.”

Every one of these creatures issued the same two demands: admit Edward Snowden is a traitor and that the unconstitutional FISA court is awesome and democratic.

But we shouldn’t be surprised at their performance; that’s what they’re there to do, after all: shill for the Deep State under the guise of “national security.” These senators are allowed — for the sake of their dignity and continued cooperation with the program as well as for the sake of keeping up the façade of Democracy™ for the rubes in the audience — to maintain the pretense of having actual oversight power in the context of berating presidential appointees.

But they have no real power; they’re marionettes on strings dancing to the tunes of their puppet masters. Chuck Schumer admitted as much on national television with top cable news lesbian kingpin Rachel Maddow.

One question never asked:

What kind of a Democracy™ requires 50 million classified documents that the peasants aren’t entrusted to read themselves?

Via The Hill (emphasis added):

“By some estimates, there are as many as 50 million documents that are classified each year. Another major factor is over-classification, which includes classifying documents that should never have been classified and stamping “Top Secret” on reports that warrant only a “Confidential” tag. In addition, the number of officials and agencies that have the power to classify material is also huge. It’s not limited to the president’s office, and obvious agencies like Defense, State and the CIA, but extends to every federal agency and far down their organization charts.

But the biggest problem is that once documents are classified, they almost never lose their classification label. There is an executive order that supposedly automatically declassifies documents after 25 years, but it has exceptions, and the order alone and the passage of time do not remove the classification stamp or make the records publicly available.”

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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