For years now, we have been multiply bamboozled by the élite
“Wassyer prarblem, huh?”
In the US, it is rapidly becoming clear (see this report from Reuters) that the preferred method in the Obama White House for covering up how covert surveillance was used to obtain evidence illegally is to….um, falsify the source of the evidence. It seems that spooks stumble across stuff while about their merry task, and then call up the local cops to tip them off.
You have to kind of hold your breath when reading about something like this. Illegal surveillance of the citizens of a free country is denied, and then covered up. But then, when it produces illegally obtained evidence, where that evidence came from is also covered up. So it’s a cover up of an illegally falsified cover-up. What was a one-dimensionally perverse hobby for Haldeman and Ehrlichman has become the 3-D norm of Executive Action for Barack Obama. The black dude really is a piece of work.
There are no limits as to where this could go next. Indeed, I would guess it’s already on its way there. I bet the Met Police are investigating the possibilities as I tap away at this keyboard; thank God that Mr Plod doesn’t have much imagination.
However, it’s nothing new. Take State murder in the UK. You kill some bloke because he knows that your reason for going to war is pure bollocks. When the Attorney General says you don’t have any grounds for war anyway, you almost break his arm and threaten that, if he so much as dares to suggest this in public, something permanently unpleasant will happen to him. Then you falsify the case for war, sign a secret agreement with an ally that sends thousands of your citizens to their deaths, lie to Parliament about it, while in the background plotting to give the very religion behind your enemy legal rights that put it above the law in your country. And then you cover the whole thing up.
Now, to bring that one up to Obamacity…hmm, let me see. Right, we’ve got the illegal, the falsified, the duplicitous, and the secret: but the secret hasn’t been erased…because your ally is an arsehole who’s kept it just in case you decide to back out of any future wars. No, what you’d have to do is go into the Foreign Office and lay some MI5 blackmail on two senior Mandarins to ensure it at least got erased at your end. Which, I’m here to tell you, is what Blair did in relation to his sleazy contract with Dubya.
The point of this rather obscenely sad history is to remind everyone that what Obama’s been at since the day he was elected is nothing new at all. To reiterate that here in the UK – under the Home Secretaryship of Jacqui Smith four years ago – GCHQ was handed an initial £13 billion to liaise with Telcoms companies, IT suppliers and ISPs to ensure complete 24/7 surveillance capacity upon anyone the security services deem a risk to the Realm. To remind you all that she then lied about it to Parliament. And to point out that, within ten days of being in office, the Cameron Administration ratified it…and little Willy Hague was on a plane to Washington to lick his masters all over.
The budget for this operation now costs Britain more every year than Osborne has thus far saved in ‘austerity’. It is covered up (not known to the Public Accounts Committee), denied when suggested, spent at will, and every source of information falsified when used in a Court of Law. And if it is deemed likely to help the media prove that this is the case, then the trial is held in secret. And that, unless I’m very much mistaken, is the full set.
I had two trolls here earlier in relation to the piece about deregulation. One I banned because he was obviously a pro, but mainly because he broke every rule of threading here in the first four lines. The other one I’ve left alone. Surveillance, you see, can be a two-way street. But like it or not, Zirp is an illegal attack on every senior citizen in the West, Gold manipulation has illegally cheated investors out of trillions, the Libor rate f**ked the institutional investor at every level, Hank Paulson took Congress’s money, and QE has tried to save bankers at the expense of public services. Once you start doing this sort of stuff, all bets are off.
The Slog 