Keeping Brennan as CIA Director = Triumph of Secret Government

[Octafish]

30. Why this matters: ''Horticulture.''

During a drinking game among literati, Dorothy Parker was challenged to use the word in a sentence:

''You can drag a horticulture, but you can't make her think.”

The CIA spying scandal and the disintegration of American democracy

Tom Carter
wsws.org, 14 July 2014

Last Thursday, the US Department of Justice quietly announced that it would not launch a criminal investigation following the revelation in March that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had spied on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. News of this decision—which concerns one of the most significant constitutional breaches in modern American history—was barely reported in the establishment media and prompted no significant response from any section of the political establishment.

The Obama administration’s decision and the acquiescence of the rest of Washington underscore the reality, behind the trappings of democracy, of de facto rule by an unelected and authoritarian military-intelligence apparatus. The military and intelligence agencies that preside over a vast global enterprise of violence and deceit operate in secret without any accountability or restraint, no matter which party controls Congress and the White House.

Obama himself—whose first job after graduating from college was as an analyst at Business International Corporation, an institution with well-documented CIA connections—functions in practice as a front man for the military and intelligence bureaucracy. Just last week he responded to the crisis in US-German relations triggered by the revelation that the CIA had recruited operatives to spy on the German Secret Service by declaring he had no knowledge of the CIA operation, raising the question of who runs the country. (See: Obama and the CIA—who runs Washington? )

Obama elevated John Brennan, who presided over the illegal spying on Congress, to head the CIA. As a high-level CIA official in the Bush administration, Brennan had defended the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (i.e., torture) against people accused of being terrorists.

Obama himself, from the moment he took office, worked to shield Bush-era criminals from investigation or prosecution.

The CIA’s spying on Congress is a flagrant violation of the US Constitution’s bedrock principle of separation of powers. As American high school students were once taught in civics classes, the basic theory of American constitutional government is that tyranny can be prevented only by dividing state power among three independent branches—the legislature, executive, and judiciary—each with its own limited powers regulated by a system of checks and balances.

The CIA spying scandal is particularly striking because the CIA’s target is not just any congressional committee—but the very Senate committee charged with oversight of the CIA.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/07/14/pers-j14.html

PS: WSWS is not mainstream. I think it's not well known because 1.) socialism sounds to capitalists just like communism and 2.) they tell don't dance around the truth.