Month: April 2014

Of Course this is a Part of Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

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The Pentagon is looking at stripping the security clearance for the lead whistle-blower advocate for spies in the US government:

The Pentagon’s inspector general is trying to suspend and possibly revoke the top secret access of the Defense Department’s former director of whistleblowing, triggering concerns in Congress that he’s being retaliated against for doing his job.

If the recommendation is acted on, Daniel Meyer would no longer be able to work in his current job as the executive director for intelligence community whistleblowing at a time when President Barack Obama’s reforms of the system are supposed to be underway .

The controversy over Meyer’s fate comes at an awkward moment for the Obama administration. Meyer, the Pentagon inspector general’s whistleblower advocate until last summer, was well-known for aggressively investigating whistleblower allegations. In his current job, he was supposed to have a key role in the president’s initiative to improve the intelligence whistleblowing system.

The administration pointed to those reforms after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked details on the agency’s then-classified mass collection of Americans’ email and phone records. Snowden has said he was prompted to disclose the details because he believed the whistleblowing system was broken.

“Dan Meyer has been a relentless advocate for whistleblowers in making sure they don’t fall through the cracks,” said one congressional staffer, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the matter. “If action is taken against him, it could have a chilling effect on whistleblowers coming forward.”

This is, of course, a feature, not a bug.

While I do not think that the political appointees in the Obama administration directly authorized this, I think that it is clear that this is a part and parcel on President Obama’s war on whistle-blowers. (He has criminally prosecuted more of them than all of his predecessors combined)

This is happening because this is a part of the culture within institutions like the DoD, the NSA, and the CIA, and because it is a part of the culture of the Obama White House.

Intimidating potential whistle blowers is an implicit goal of all of these policies.

Shades of “Nurse Nayirah”

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Remember her?

She was the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter (and member of the royal family) who testified to Congress that she saw Iraqi troops throwing babies out of incubators.

She falsely claimed to be a nurse’s aid when she had not even been in the country at the time of the invasion.

Well,”Nurse Nayirah,” meet Liz Wahl, the former RT News anchor who resigned on the air:

Liz Wahl’s on-air resignation as a Russia Today news anchor came amid a perfect geopolitical storm. She announced her departure from RT just as tensions escalated between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine.

“I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin,” said the 28-year-old American reporter and show host, who worked at RT America for two-and-a-half years. “I am proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth. And that is why, after this newscast, I am resigning.”

………

Wahl’s Howard-Beale-like moment came just one day after her colleague Abby Martin, host of RT America’s “Breaking the Set,” committed her own on-air indiscretion. Martin denounced Russia’s military occupation of the Crimean peninsula, which had been part of neighboring Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991

Unlike Wahl, however, Martin didn’t quit the network; she is still hosting her daily 30-minute show. Martin’s decision to stay at RT drew criticism from the same reporter who landed the first interview with Wahl after her resignation, The Daily Beast’s Jamie Kirchick.

“Indeed, far from damaging the propaganda efforts of the Russian government, Martin’s momentary act of nonconformity plays right into the Kremlin’s hands,” Kirchick wrote in a March 4 article in Tablet Magazine. “RT will now be able to hold up her 60-second departure from the official script as evidence of its editorial independence.

………

Case in point: The Beasts’ Kirchick—who got the first interview with Wahl and was critical of Martin after she remained at RT—gets his paychecks from the neoconservative Foreign Policy Institute, where he is a Fellow. FPI has been described as a renascent version of the Project for the New American Century, which is in turn often described as one of the well-connected brain trusts behind the launch of the Iraq War.

Note that the Foreign Policy Institute (FPI) was founded by William Kristol, who founded PNAC, and

A source from inside RT, who spoke to WhoWhatWhy anonymously for fear of retribution, had at one point “observed [Wahl] taking pictures of the office over the summer, asking all sorts of odd questions about my experience, and looking at Jamie Kirchick’s website while in the office.”

This led the RT America employee to believe that Kirchick—with the help of Wahl—was planning to write a hit piece on the organization.

A recently published piece by TruthDig goes further, contending that Kirchick and neoconservative allies orchestrated—in TruthDig’s words “stage managed“—Wahl’s resignation right from the start.

………

A large part of TruthDig‘s contention that Kirchick and the Foreign Policy Institute “stage managed” the whole thing relies on FPI’s Twitter feed activity in the minutes leading up to Wahl’s on-air resignation.

FPI’s feed that day telegraphed “something big might happen on RT” and teased “you’re really going to want to tune in to RT” within 19 minutes of Wahl’s stepping down. Then, as soon as Wahl made her announcement, FPI tweeted, “RT Anchor RESIGNS ON AIR. She ‘cannot be part of a network that whitewashes the actions of Putin.’”

Asked about the feed and timing of the tweets by WhoWhatWhy, Kirchick responded, “I am an employee of FPI. Liz called me [while I was] at work. I told everyone in the office to watch. We did.”

Wahl corroborated Kirchick’s account of how events unfolded.

The prevalence of this kind of sh%$ in the political and media landscape is why I try to get as much of my news as possible from overseas sources.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

Mozilla Cuts Its Losses

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Brendan Eich is out as Mozilla Corporation CEO:

Less than two weeks after drawing controversy over his appointment as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, Brendan Eich has resigned from the position.

In a post at Mozilla’s official blog, executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker confirmed the news with an unequivocal apology on the company’s behalf. “Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it,” Baker wrote. “We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.”

The action comes days after dating site OKCupid became the most vocal opponent of Eich’s hiring. Mozilla offered repeated statements about LGBT inclusivity within the company over the past two weeks, but those never came with a specific response from Eich about his thousands of dollars of donations in support of Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that sought to ban gay marriage in the state.

Eich’s bigotry has been an issue before, and for some reason known only to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, they decided to make him the face of the organization.

It was further compounded when Eich refused to offer anything vaguely resembling a sincere apology, and instead offered platitudes about how tolerant people needed to validate his bigotry.

Don’t let this door hit your ass on the way out.

F%$# Andrew Cuomo

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Remember when I wrote that Bloomberg approved charter school plans would have disabled kids getting therapy in the hallway?

You should, it was only 5 days ago.

I noted that New York mayor Bill DiBlasio rejected a few charter co-location applications because of these issues.

Well, Governor Andrew Cuomo hates disabled kids:

Mayor Bill de Blasio has mapped out an ambitious agenda for education in New York City. He wants to reinvigorate schools on the verge of shuttering, open 100 schools with health clinics and therapists at their core, and train more students for careers in science and technology.

But the budget deal announced by state leaders on Saturday, which would require the city to find space for charter schools, may cut into Mr. de Blasio’s priorities.

………

With classroom seats in short supply across the city, Mr. de Blasio may find it difficult to accommodate charter schools and find space for some of his own programs.

Mr. de Blasio has said he is willing to work with charter schools, so long as they do not disrupt programs run by traditional public schools. He named a committee of district officials and charter school leaders last week to help mediate disputes over space and overcrowding.

………

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Republicans in the State Senate seized on the momentum, and on Saturday they announced an agreement that would provide charter schools in New York City some of the most generous protections in the country.

Under the deal, the city would be required to find space in public buildings for charter schools, which operate independently of the school district but receive public funds. If the city could not, it would have to cover the cost of renting private space, up to $40 million. Charter schools could challenge the city’s selection of space through an arbitration process.

You know that warehouse that they used to hold all those protesters in the 2004 Republican National Convention?

I would suggest locating them there

As Diane Ravitch notes, “The bottom line is that when billionaires talk, the New York legislature and Governor Cuomo listen. Actually, they sit up, bark, and roll over.”

The political reality in New York state is that a primary challenge to Cuomo is practically impossible, so it’s time to see if he is banging a hooker.

I really hope he is.

If there is anyone out there willing to take one for the team, it would be appreciated.

We are All Koch Suckers Today

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The court ruled in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court gutted campaign finance reform:

Back in October, when the Court heard oral argument in a challenge to the overall caps – known as “aggregate limits” – on how much an individual can contribute to candidates for federal office, political parties, and political action committees, there wasn’t a whole lot of suspense.  Given the Court’s recent campaign finance rulings, it seemed clear that a majority of the Justices would vote to strike down at least some of the caps; the only real question was whether they would strike down them all.

Today we got our answer from the Court, and it was a decisive “yes”:  all of the aggregate limits must go.  Let’s talk about today’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission in Plain English.

As I explained in my preview of the case in October, there are (at least until today) two kinds of limits on campaign contributions.  The first is what is known as the “base limits” – the maximum that you can contribute to a candidate, political party, or political action committee in an election.  The aggregate limits are the second kind:  in a two-year period known as an “election cycle,” you can donate no more than $48,600 to all candidates combined and no more than $74,600 to political parties and political action committees.

An Alabama businessman named Shaun McCutcheon went to court to challenge the aggregate limits.  He didn’t ask for the right to give more money than the base limits to any particular candidate; instead, he wanted to give money to many more candidates, but the aggregate limits prohibit him from doing so.  That, he argued, violates his free speech rights under the First Amendment.

Although a lower court disagreed with McCutcheon, he found a more receptive audience in the Roberts Court, which has consistently voted to overturn campaign finance regulations.  Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the Court, which was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel A. Alito.  (Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his own opinion saying the Court should go even further, but the Chief Justice’s opinion is the controlling one.)

………

Breyer’s dissent lamented that the Court’s decision “eviscerates our Nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.” In his view, “corruption” is not limited to scenarios involving a quid pro quo, which he described as “an act akin to bribery.” Instead, it includes exactly the kind of efforts to use money to obtain influence and access to elected officials that the Chief Justice’s opinion characterized as “a central feature of democracy.” This is so, Breyer explained, because if people believe that elected officials only pay attention to big-money donors, they may lose faith in the political process altogether.

Breyer next contended that the Court is just wrong when it asserts that, even if the aggregate limits are removed, there is still no way to get around the base limits. Here the dissent painted a very different picture from the rest of the Court, predicting that “donors can and likely will find ways to channel millions of dollars to parties and to individual candidates.”

Whose vision of the future of campaign finance will prevail – the dissent’s apocalyptic one or the Chief Justice’s more optimistic one? You can be sure that journalists and election law experts will be paying close attention over the next few years. We can also be confident that the decision today will spawn new campaign finance challenges – including, in all likelihood, to the “base limits” themselves. Stay tuned . . . .

And if this is not bad enough, it looks like SCOTUS will overturn bans on corporate donations to candidates:

The Supreme Court, fresh from its new ruling expanding the political donation options of private individuals, faces a choice this week about its current view on campaign contributions to candidates by corporations.  For weeks, the Court has been sitting on a case that would test a state’s flat ban on corporate donations, and is now set to look at that case in the wake of Wednesday’s ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.

The Court, according to its electronic docket, is scheduled to consider at its private Conference on Friday the case of Iowa Right to Life Committee v. Tooker.  That case has been ready for the Court, technically, since November, but so far no action has been taken.

If the Court’s usual practice is followed, it will have at least three options: agree to hear the case to test the constitutionality of Iowa’s ban on corporate donations, deny review and thus leave intact a federal appeals court ruling upholding that ban, or tell the lower courts to reconsider based on the McCutcheon ruling.

In 2003, in the case of FEC v. Beaumont, the Court upheld the long-standing federal ban on corporations, at least so far as that provision applied to non-profit corporations.  In the new case, the Iowa Right to Life Committee urged the Court to overrule the Beaumont decision, arguing that it cannot be squared with the Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

Needless to say, we can expect another 5-4 decision allowing rich people to double down on their influence.

We ……… are ……… f%$#ed.

I Love this Wifi ID Ever

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LuLu’s Anal Bleaching:

CITIZEN’S ARREST! A person who controls a wifi near the “combination hair salon and toy store on the increasingly stylish Fifth Avenue strip of Park Slope” called LuLu’s has given his or her network a positively vulgar name. It is a name that threatens to sully the posh and sophisticated reputation of a shop that charges $26 to give your child a new lease on life via his or her tresses ($10 for just a bangs job). It is a name that is not good for kids.

On the Google Group bergenbtwn4and5, LuLu’s owner Brigitte Prat (or someone posing as her using the handle brigittelpratt) shares the story of how her brand is being attacked (probably by a high person who thought it would be funny to satirize the presumed bourgieness of the children’s salon): ………

That is f%$#ing brilliant!!!!

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Why the USAF Should Be Folded Back into the US Army, Part CLXIX

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A current active duty colonel in the USAF is deploying F-22s to the Ukraine is all that is needed to protect them from a potential Russian incursion:

On March 31, U.S. Air Force Col. Robert Spalding III argued in The National Interest that a “purely defensive deployment” of Air Force F-22 stealth fighters “is just one possible solution” to the Ukraine crisis, which has seen Vladimir Putin’s Russia annex the strategic Crimean peninsula and threaten the rest of Ukraine.

Spalding is wrong—F-22s are not the answer. The colonel’s assertion is yet another example of air power hubris, which has come to define the Air Force. “Without firing a shot, such a deployment [of F-22s] would immediately change Putin’s invasion calculus,” Spalding insists.

Russian aircraft wouldn’t survive a confrontation with American stealth fighters and thus couldn’t support a Russian ground invasion, in Spalding reasoning. Ukrainians would feel more confident about their ability to defend their country, since any Russian invasion would be subject to attack by Ukrainian aircraft protected by F-22s.

This essay does not evaluate the wisdom of Washington extending a security guarantee to Ukraine, an issue that remains fundamentally political in nature. Rather, it challenges the argument that the fielding of F-22s could decisively tip the military balance in favor of the Ukrainian military.

First, F-22s could only destroy the Russian air force if the latter engaged, which of course it would not. The Russians know that the F-22 can defeat any fighter flown by their air force. The Kremlin would respond to a “purely defensive” deployment of F-22s by only operating their own aircraft in conditions of overwhelming superiority.

At best, the F-22s could deter Russia from using its air force to support advancing Russian army spearheads.

But what about using Ukrainian aircraft to attack Russian army formations? Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missile system, pictured above, can identify, track and fire on targets at ranges of up to 250 miles.

Even if we assume that the F-22 can evade multiple, overlapping S-400 batteries—a deadly proposition we have never tested—Ukraine’s Su-25 attack aircraft cannot.

Moscow can deploy the S-400 such that it provides cover over advancing Russian troops everywhere in eastern or central Ukraine. The Russian army possesses additional, mobile SAM systems that can render any Ukrainian air attacks suicidal.

An F-22 deployment would be similarly problematic, because, as I noted a number of years ago, stealthy is not invisible, and the basic laws of physics, which dictate detection range as a factor of the 4th root of the radar cross section, which gives us this table for the S-400 (SA-21):

Range
RCS
     Type
400 km
10m2
B-1, F-15
336 km
5m2
F-16
225 km
1m2
F-18E, Rafale
189 km
0.5 m2
Typhoon
48 km
0.00200m2
F-117 (WAG)
40 km
0.00100 m2
F-35
23 km
0.00010 m2
F-22, B2

Note that the distance at which the targeting radar might reasonably be expected to lock on to the target, but SA-21 also has a very low frequency search radar which should be more effective in determining the general location of a stealthy target.  (To say nothing of targeting AWACS, tankers, etc., for which the limiting factor of the system would be the aerodynamic performance of the missile)

The F-22s would by no means be clay pigeons, but it is also likely that they would not be able to operate with the sort of impunity that has been the norm for recent US campaigns.

So Not Surprised: Hedge Funds as Slumlords

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Hedge funds have gone big time into small and single family rentals, and in turn, they have illegally ignored their responsibilities as landlords:

The yawning gap between private equity landlord sales talk and what they are delivering is finally being exposed.

One of the reasons many investors have been skeptical of the way private equity firms have gone full bore into buying distressed single family homes is that property management is a hands-on business even when it’s done it the most favorable possible setting, an apartment building. Individuals who have invested in single family home rentals almost without exception report that even when they found it to be an economically attractive proposition, it was still oversight-intensive. Admittedly, there are some private equity firms who have bought rental properties who actually do seem to be targeting markets and renters in such a way that they might be able to do a decent job of property management, for instance, by buying homes where they can rehab the kitchen and bath plumbing using the same fixtures, screening tenants in person, and then inspecting the properties monthly and giving the tenants points for passing that they can convert into credits against a purchase or take in cash.

But the biggest fish in this ocean, Blackstone, is clearly taking the opposite approach, of doing as little as they can to maintain the houses and trying to fob off the responsibility onto the tenant, even when local regulations clearly prohibit it. So managing dispersed homes is no problem if you never planned to do the job in the first place.

Blackstone tries to evade this duty formally, through lease terms, and informally, by making themselves inaccessible. And because Blackstone is the largest and highest profile player in this space, they may be hoping that if enough PE landlords follow their lead, communities will accept the new finance-dictate bad standards, just as they have with foreclosure abuses.

But the difference here is while stressed borrowers were the ones that were hurt in foreclosures, and foreclosures and bankruptcies are seen as shameful event, there’s no reason for a victim of a bad landlord to be seen as unsympathetic. Moreover, deliberately negligent PE landlords like Blackstone traditionally have hurt the value of neighboring properties. If this trend continues, abused tenants and their neighbors face a common threat.

Notice that contracts that violate local law are almost certain to fail a legal challenge. In New York, which has more extensive tenant protections than other cities, landlords sometimes try to include provisions that are impermissible, like prohibiting a tenant from having a roommate. Housing court judges exhibit a bit of zeal in smacking down landlords when challenges to those leases come before them.

………

Now to the update on Blackstone’s latest escapades, via some original reporting at In These Times. The article, Game of Homes, makes for good one-stop shopping if you want to get friends and colleagues up to speed on this topic. For NC readers, the first two-thirds of the article covers familiar terrain. Here are the sections that discuss how Blackstone, which is using “Invitation Homes” as its brand for its single-family rentals, is trying to evade its duties as landlord:  ………

If you thought Wall Street was bad as a lender, just imagine how badly they can f%$# you up as a landlord.

As an FYI, I was in a dispute with a landlord and property management company in Texas, one of the less tenant friendly jurisdictions, we lawyered up and won, because even the professional property management firm did not grasp the actual rights of tenants.

Here’s hoping that we will see some major court losses for the hedge fund pukes.

Why the Catholic Church Should Be Out of the Hospital Business

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A Catholic hospital in (where else) Oklahoma has forbade its doctors from prescribing birth control:

Doctors affiliated with a small Catholic hospital in Bartlesville, Okla., are no longer allowed to prescribe contraception for the purposes of birth control, according to a report from the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise.

Administrators at Jane Phillips Medical Center are reported to have held a meeting last week to inform doctors of the new directive barring them from prescribing contraceptives as birth control; according to the Examiner-Enterprise, doctors are allowed to prescribe contraceptives for non-birth control purposes, such as cramps, menstrual pain or endometriosis.

“I have spoken to my doctor about my birth control options,” one patient impacted by the directive told the Examiner-Enterprise. “I was told that my physician has been instructed that they can no longer write prescriptions for birth control as birth control. This effects me because I take birth control as birth control. There are other ways to receive birth control, for example headaches, cramps, excessive bleeding — but I have none of those symptoms.

Note that this is not just employees, or on the hospital premises, this is a directive given to any doctor with admitting privileges.

The Catholic Church has been engaging in a massive hospital buying binge, and they are using it to make not just abortion, but birth control, unavailable across the nation.

Nope, no Fascists Here

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The Ukrainian parliament is rushing to pass anti-gay legislation:

Kiev is getting back to normal. Downtown streets that just one month ago looked like battlefields are now full of busy crowds and tourists. In one of the newly revitalized city squares, I met Olena Shevchenko, an LGBT-activist-turned-revolutionary. I had heard a lot of about her—an openly gay woman who managed to form a female-only military unit. Some call them the “Maidan Amazons.”

Olena joined the revolution in its very first days, but the idea to form a women-only “sotnya” (a Cossack term for a group of one hundred fighters) came a bit later, as a response to rising sexism within Maidan (Independence) Square. The women in Maidan Square were being asked to make sandwiches; meanwhile, they had been building the barricades.

At the start, Olena had only eight women in her military unit (mostly human rights activists from feminist or LGBT groups). But thanks to social media, the number rose to 500 people in Independence Square and more than 1,500 at other locations. (For comparison, the right-wing Right Sector, had around 2,500 fighters in downtown Kiev on a regular basis.) “It was amazing, because ‘feminism’ is still a dirty word in Ukraine,” she says, “the same as ‘gay.’”

………

First, many open homophobes are still among the country’s top-officials. Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov (also a Baptist preacher) famously said, back in 2007, “If a man has normal views, then you label him a conservative, but those who use drugs or promote sodomy—you label them a progressive person. All of these are perversions.” Several leaders from the far-right Ukrainian nationalist party, Svoboda, have been given ministerial posts in the post-revolution government, including the vice-prime minister position. In fairness, Svoboda has toned down its anti-gay rhetoric in recent months. One of the party’s MPs, Yuriy Syrotyuk, called the first gay pride parade in Kiev “an act of aggression” against Ukraine in 2012, but now presents a more moderate, if still limited, position. “We respect rights of all minorities, but LGBT legalization will blow up this country,” he stated in an interview. “If we take this discussion to the parliament, not only Crimea will secede, but Ukrainian provinces will also start to leave the country.”

The new government is also actively trying to block an anti-discrimination law that would protect LGBT people in workplaces. This piece of legislation, pushed as part of integration talks with EU is, frankly, the only progressive thing to happen for the local gay community since 1991, when Ukraine became the first post-Soviet country to decriminalize homosexuality. (Some opponents of the law argue that support for it would give Russia a cart-blanche; in the past, the Kremlin has showed amazing capabilities to organize quickly and effectively against any kind of gay movement inside Ukraine.) Now, a law similar to the Russian’s “gay propaganda” law—which criminalizes even discussion of gay rights—is pending in the Ukrainian parliament.

(emphasis mine)

These are the folks that our foreign policy and intelligence allied with to drive out Yanukovych.

This is the Wrong Way to Do this

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We now have a report that the US is having discussions with Israel about having Jonathan Pollard released as a way to move along the Middle East peace process:

The United States is talking with Israel about the possibility of releasing convicted spy Jonathan Pollard early from his life sentence as an incentive in the troubled Mideast peace negotiations, a person familiar with the situation said Monday. Such an extraordinary step would show the urgency of U.S. efforts to keep negotiations alive.

The person cautioned that a Pollard release — which would be a dramatic turnaround from previous refusals — was far from certain and that discussions with Israel on the matter were continuing. The person spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the negotiations on the record.

In return for such a release, Israel would have to undertake significant concessions to the Palestinians. Such concessions could include some kind of freeze on Israeli settlements in disputed territory, the release of Palestinian prisoners beyond those Israel has already agreed to and a guarantee that Israel would stay at the negotiating table beyond an end-of-April deadline.

First, this is stupid on the part of the US.

Netanyahu really does not care about Pollard beyond the political benefits he can derive from securing his releases.

More importantly, there is a protocol to such things.

Even among those most opposed to his release, there is acceptance of his release as a part of a spy swap, as this is the socially acceptable way to do this within the intelligence community.

Maybe Because They do not Want to be Revealed as Sociopathic Sadists?

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This would explain why the CIA has consistently lied about both the effectiveness and the extent of its torture program:

A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.

The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.

“The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”

Current and former U.S. officials who described the report spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue and because the document remains classified. The 6,300-page report includes what officials described as damning new disclosures about a sprawling network of secret detention facilities, or “black sites,” that was dismantled by President Obama in 2009.

Classified files reviewed by committee investigators reveal internal divisions over the interrogation program, officials said, including one case in which CIA employees left the agency’s secret prison in Thailand after becoming disturbed by the brutal measures being employed there. The report also cites cases in which officials at CIA headquarters demanded the continued use of harsh interrogation techniques even after analysts were convinced that prisoners had no more information to give.

(emphasis mine)

Also, the techniques used were far worse than previously revealed.

We now understand why the CIA has bee pushing back against the Senate Intelligence Committee. 

It’s one thing to argue that it was a necessary evil that yielded results, it’s another that the policies were prosecuted out of nothing more than a sadistic need to prove how macho they are.

Truth be told, I am not surprised.  This sort of narcissistic cruelty is something that I would expect to have originated from the mind of one Richard Bruce Cheney.

The problem is that for the entire Bush-Cheney years, being a sadistic torturer, or at least pretending to be one, was the only way for advancement in the CIA, and Obama has done nothing to clean house since then.

This means that the upper echelons of the CIA need to cover up this at all cost, or they will be sidelined.

Torture comes home, nu?

The Stupidest Political Scandal of the Season (So Far)

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Seriously, why the hell does anyone care if a candidate for the US Congress in Florida does vampire LARP?

An attorney challenging first-term Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) moonlights as a live-action vampire role-player, according to a Florida political news site.

 SaintPetersBlog on Tuesday detailed Jake Rush’s involvement in the Mind’s Eye Society, a national community of live-action role-players. Rush played a host of supernatural characters — “Chazz Darling” and “Staas van der Winst” were just two of his alter-egos — and kept up an active presence on the Camarilla Wiki Project, a Wikipedia-like website that allowed role-players to share content.

 Business Insider also reported that Rush appears to have held a prominent position with a Florida-based group called the “Covenant of the Poisoned Absinthe,” which stages “an assortment of games from White Wolf’s selection, including Vampire: The Masquerade, Changeling: The Lost, and Mage: The Awakening.” White Wolf publishes live-action role-playing games for the Mind’s Eye community.

Seriously.

Why does anyone give a f%$# about this?

Linkage

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Hugh Jackman can sing?