Government Can't Get Away With Lies

This is compliments of the website What Really Happened and it crystallizes very nicely much of what we've been talking about lately. Government lies can't be tolerated whether they're being told by Democrats, Republicans or little green men from Mars. It doesn't matter whether it's Watergate,WMD, the NSA, Benghazi or anything else. Hitler lied to the Germans; Mussolini lied to the Italians; Stalin lied to the Russians: Mao lied to the Chinese. Once that first lie pops out, the stream of lies will continue.

A GOVERNMENT THAT LIES

The most expensive purchase most Americans will ever make is their own government. Government costs the average American more than their home, more than their health care, more than their childrens' college education. Yet people who would spend a great deal of time kicking the tires before buying a new car spend disastrously little time checking out the government that sucks so much money out of them over their lifetimes. Right now, looking under the hood of that expensive item called "government", we see a unified group of men and women who lied to send your children off to a war of conquest. Across this land there are thousands of families waking up to the knowledge that their sons and daughters were crippled and killed in Iraq for reasons other than what they were told.
First off, let's dispense with this crap about "Intelligence failures". An Intelligence Failure is when something is happening that you don't know about. You miss the evidence. Or you misinterpret the evidence you have.
But with regards to the claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, there was no evidence to miss or misinterpret. There could not be, since in hindsight there were no weapons to leave traces of evidence with. The story about weapons of mass destruction was just made up, and fraudulently manufactured "proof" created to support that lie. The mere existence of Tony Blair's dossier, plagiarized from a student thesis, is proof not only that the claims of Iraq WMDs were lies, but were known and conscious lies. Had their been any real proof, it would have been shared immediately between the various war-mongers. There would have been no need for Tony Blair to concoct his discredited Dossier. But, what the public were offered were mislabeled and blurry photos, made up dossiers, and balloon inflators misidentified as mobile biological weapons laboratories (which the British government knew about since they had sold the balloon inflators to Iraq in the first place).
So, there was no "intelligence failure". There was no intelligence with which to fail. The whole crock about Iraqi WMDs was a made-up fiction.
The government lied.
While only a few people created the lie, mostly connected with the Pentagon's Office of Special Projects and presumably via the Israeli spies since discovered within, coordinated with the similar propaganda group working out of Ariel Sharon's office, the fact is that the entire United States Government and the mainstream media news departments all signed onto that lie with a will. Now, news pundits and some members of Congress have since taken the position they ohgollygeewhiz but they were taken in by the lies as well. But this is just another face-saving deception. There is such a thing as due diligence and checking facts; behaviors expected of both journalists and congresscritters. Months before the invasion of Iraq, internet web sites like this one, using easily available facts, had discredited the claims of Iraq's WMDs, exposed Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier, and correctly identified those trailers as the balloon inflators they were. It must be assumed that Congressional offices and media corporations with large staffs and huge budgets would have had an easy time finding the same facts that web sites operating on spare change were able to find. Therefore, going along with the lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had to be an intentional act of will.
The government lied.
What does it mean to live under a government that lies to you?
Is the war just, moral, and necessary? You cannot know for certain under a government that lies to you.
Are taxes legal and fair? You cannot know for certain under a government that lies to you.
Is the public money being spent wholly on the public? You cannot know for certain under a government that lies to you.
Are you really free? You cannot know for certain under a government that lies to you.
Is life in this nation really better than anywhere else? You cannot know for certain under a government that lies to you.
When you live under a government that lies, you cannot know anything for certain about your lives. All you can know is what you are told. And, because of the lies about the Iraq WMDs, what we know we are told is what the government tells us to trick us into agreeing with whatever their own purpose happens to be. And if, whether you know it or not, are are doing what the government wants, even to the deaths of your own children, then you are a slave.
Americans are the most lied-to people on Earth. The global perception of the "Ugly American" isn't that we are ugly, but that we are so clueless about what is going on in the world, in particular the evils committed by the United States Government using our taxes and children behind our backs. Our government craps on other peoples' nations, while we are told that those people love us, sit up nights to admire us, and lead good moral lives so that when they die, their souls will go to America. And when we visit those countries where the US Government plays their covert games, our delusions run headlong into their reality, and feelings (and if we are lucky, little else) get hurt.
Baby sitters will often give their children a choice of whether to go to bed at 7:30 or at 8:00. The child will choose 8:00 and go to bed happy thinking that he or she had a choice. But the agenda of the baby sitter was to have the child in bed by 8:00 before the arrival of another guest at 8:30. The child has been tricked into doing what the baby sitter wanted, while thinking the choice was theirs. That is how mind control, or brainwashing works; by giving the target ONLY those facts which will lead them to conclude, seemingly of their own free will, that their only course of action was what the government wanted in the first place.
That is what happened in Iraq. The public were all told by the government and media that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed in just 45 minutes. And, based on that claim and the absence of any facts to the contrary (except here on the internet) many Americans decided that the war was necessary and felt that had come to that decision of their own free will. In hindsight, of course, that decision was not of their own free will but was the desired outcome of the manufactured lies about Iraq. Those that doubted the lies at the start were dismissed with the assurance that the mainstream media, serving as a watchdog on government abuse, would expose lies if they existed. Again in hindsight, the media was working hand in glove to sell those very lies to the people whose taxes and children were spent on the sands of Iraq.
The Declaration of Independence declares the principle that government derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. I DO NOT GIVE MY CONSENT TO BE LIED TO, I don't know anyone who gives their consent to be lied to. Moreover, one cannot give consent to be lied to because one cannot know what one is consenting to. No court would enforce a contract where one party does not know the terms of the contract being agreed to.
The Constitution does not authorize the government to lie to We The People. The tenth amendment bars the government from presuming that right. When the government lies, it therefore acts unconstitutionally and illegally. A government that lies to the people breaks faith with the people, violates the contract between the government and the people under which the people consent to be governed. A government that lies to the people delegitimizes itself. A government that lies to the people ceases to be the lawful government of this land. Surely the lies used to initiate a war of conquest into another nation are the worst possible lies a government can commit against its own people. And with such a lie, the United States ceases to be a nation, and becomes a land under occupation by force.

Obama Needs to Come Clean on NSA

 All right kiddies, read this and then compare to the statements that President Obama and others in the administration have been making about the NSA activities. Either the President is woefully out of touch with what is going on (not too likely), or he just can't or won't come clean on what is really happening. I don't doubt that in the wake of 9/11 we had to resort to different methods to protect the country, but that doesn't give the NSA the right to do as it pleases particularly after getting its' hand slapped by the court. Obama really needs to man up on this because the steady drip of information that contradicts what he has been saying isn't doing him any good.  And by the way, if the courts' decision was in 2011, how come the "transparent" administration didn't release it until now? Might not have been too cool to release it before the elections in 2012.

Secret Court Rebuked N.S.A. on Surveillance

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — A federal judge sharply rebuked the National Security Agency in 2011 for repeatedly misleading the court that oversees its surveillance on domestic soil, including a program that is collecting tens of thousands of domestic e-mails and other Internet communications of Americans each year, according to a secret ruling made public on Wednesday.

The 85-page ruling by Judge John D. Bates, then serving as chief judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, involved an N.S.A. program that systematically searches the contents of Americans’ international Internet communications, without a warrant, in a hunt for discussions about foreigners who have been targeted for surveillance.

The Justice Department had told Judge Bates that N.S.A. officials had discovered that the program had also been gathering domestic messages for three years. Judge Bates found that the agency had violated the Constitution and declared the problems part of a pattern of misrepresentation by agency officials in submissions to the secret court.

The release of the ruling, the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, was the latest effort by the Obama administration to gain control over revelations about N.S.A. surveillance prompted by leaks by the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

The collection is part of a broader program under a 2008 law that allows warrantless surveillance on domestic networks as long as it is targeted at noncitizens abroad. The purely domestic messages collected in the hunt for discussions about targeted foreigners represent a relatively small percentage of what the ruling said were 250 million communications intercepted each year in that broader program.

While the N.S.A. fixed problems with how it handled those purely domestic messages to the court’s satisfaction, the 2011 ruling revealed further issues.

“The court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding N.S.A.’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program,” Judge Bates wrote.

One of the examples, was redacted in the ruling. Another involved a separate N.S.A. program that keeps logs of all domestic phone calls, which the court approved in 2006 and which came to light in June as a result of leaks by Mr. Snowden.

In March 2009, a footnote said, the surveillance court learned that N.S.A. analysts were using the phone log database in ways that went beyond what the judges believed to be the practice because of a “repeated inaccurate statements” in government filings to the court.

“Contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, N.S.A. had been routinely running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the standard for querying,” Judge Bates recounted. He cited a 2009 ruling that concluded that the requirement had been “so frequently and systematically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall ... regime has never functioned effectively.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free speech and privacy rights group, sued to obtain the ruling after Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, fought last summer to declassify the basic fact that the surveillance court had ruled that the N.S.A. had violated the Fourth Amendment.

In a statement, Mr. Wyden — an outspoken critic of N.S.A. surveillance — said declassification of the ruling was “long overdue.” He argued that while the N.S.A. had increased privacy protections for purely domestic and unrelated communications that were swept up in the surveillance, the collection itself “was a serious violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

Mark Rumold of the Electronic Frontier Foundation praised the administration for releasing the document with relatively few redactions, although he criticized the time and the difficulty in obtaining it. But he also said the ruling showed the surveillance court was not equipped to perform adequate oversight of the N.S.A.

“This opinion illustrates that the way the court is structured now it cannot serve as an effective check on the N.S.A. because it’s wholly dependent on the representations that the N.S.A. makes to it,” Mr. Rumold said. “It has no ability to investigate. And it’s clear that the N.S.A. representations have not been entirely candid to the court.”