el Presidente
Feb. 8th, 2006 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ebonlockAllow me to direct you to this post at Sadly No! A quick reminder why everyone should be paying attention to the NSA wiretap hearings:
If you were a brash right-wing billionaire, for instance, or a GOP party zealot, or a Straussian neoconservative, or any of a number of such characters, and you wanted to set up an apparatus of political repression in America in order to push your opponents permanently off the political map, how
would you go about it? It's both a legal problem and a logistical one -- these things don't simply happen on their own; they require planning and hard work. Purely instrumentally, you'd need either to change the Constitution in a way that would be quite difficult to achieve, and that people would tend to notice with all sorts of attendant mess and fireworks, or you'd need to find very specific ways around its protections.
Your to-do list would lack the shock of the unfamiliar. It's the standard panoply of generalissimo powers, issued in emergency decrees after every Latin American coup or African power-grab. You'd want to be able to conduct widespread surveillance on people of your choice without probable cause that they'd committed a crime, and if you decided to arrest and detain someone, you'd want to do it without judicial oversight and away from public scrutiny. There'd need to be some kind of setup for secret interrogations, with or without torture, and you'd have to be able to indefinitely 'disappear' people, if and when you felt it necessary, whether in prisons or (under your authority) by means of execution. This program didn't get off the ground, but it shows the kind of playbook you'd be using (it might have read better in the original East German edition). There's also the sticky, little-assimilated detail that Bush's NSA surveillance program was apparently authorized before 9/11 -- sticky details abound; it's quite a jam-smeared, sticky world in which we now live. But in any case, if you wanted to set up
something like that, with all the legal claims properly paper-trailed and all the operational links in their proper places in the chain, it would take time, canny lawyering, and a certain admixture of restraint and boldness, and you'd probably want to have a huge propaganda apparatus constantly pumping out fog so that America didn't understand (or believe) what kind of government you were striving toward. It might take several presidencies to get your 'permanent majority,' but you'd move forward with due alacrity when you were able.
But they wouldn't do that, would they? And as Katherine asked, at what point are we going to take their claims seriously?
And on a lighter note, our newest winner of the "Heckuva Job" award goes to:
George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.
What, an up and coming GOP fundie rising star lied on his resume? Why it's unthinkable! After all this administration's appointees have all been the picture of competence, honesty and...oh hell, I just can't keep it up any longer. Excuse the immaturity here, but BWAHAHAHAHAHAH!
If you were a brash right-wing billionaire, for instance, or a GOP party zealot, or a Straussian neoconservative, or any of a number of such characters, and you wanted to set up an apparatus of political repression in America in order to push your opponents permanently off the political map, how
would you go about it? It's both a legal problem and a logistical one -- these things don't simply happen on their own; they require planning and hard work. Purely instrumentally, you'd need either to change the Constitution in a way that would be quite difficult to achieve, and that people would tend to notice with all sorts of attendant mess and fireworks, or you'd need to find very specific ways around its protections.
Your to-do list would lack the shock of the unfamiliar. It's the standard panoply of generalissimo powers, issued in emergency decrees after every Latin American coup or African power-grab. You'd want to be able to conduct widespread surveillance on people of your choice without probable cause that they'd committed a crime, and if you decided to arrest and detain someone, you'd want to do it without judicial oversight and away from public scrutiny. There'd need to be some kind of setup for secret interrogations, with or without torture, and you'd have to be able to indefinitely 'disappear' people, if and when you felt it necessary, whether in prisons or (under your authority) by means of execution. This program didn't get off the ground, but it shows the kind of playbook you'd be using (it might have read better in the original East German edition). There's also the sticky, little-assimilated detail that Bush's NSA surveillance program was apparently authorized before 9/11 -- sticky details abound; it's quite a jam-smeared, sticky world in which we now live. But in any case, if you wanted to set up
something like that, with all the legal claims properly paper-trailed and all the operational links in their proper places in the chain, it would take time, canny lawyering, and a certain admixture of restraint and boldness, and you'd probably want to have a huge propaganda apparatus constantly pumping out fog so that America didn't understand (or believe) what kind of government you were striving toward. It might take several presidencies to get your 'permanent majority,' but you'd move forward with due alacrity when you were able.
But they wouldn't do that, would they? And as Katherine asked, at what point are we going to take their claims seriously?
And on a lighter note, our newest winner of the "Heckuva Job" award goes to:
George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.
What, an up and coming GOP fundie rising star lied on his resume? Why it's unthinkable! After all this administration's appointees have all been the picture of competence, honesty and...oh hell, I just can't keep it up any longer. Excuse the immaturity here, but BWAHAHAHAHAHAH!
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 07:50 pm (UTC)I had not heard this before. Do you know of any reference points?
I'm curious as to how this stacks up to people like Gonzales claiming 'if only we had wiretaps before 9.11 we could have saved them and so it's really all your fault'.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 08:30 pm (UTC)http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011306Z.shtml
The declassified document they're referencing is available here:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB24/nsa25.pdf
no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 09:10 pm (UTC)Goddamn stupid evil fucking bastards. Combining the worst of the Harding and Nixon administrations - that's a bloody hard act, but one they seem to be achieving with remarkable fervor. Please, O Divines, let this be an all-time low in American public life - please help us find someone to do better than this in a good way...
no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 09:22 pm (UTC)...with just a pinch of incompetance, a dollop of religious extremism, and a dash of bigotry.