Its a sad day in America when those who commit war crimes walk free, and those who try to expose said crimes are locked up.

Originally posted by benrl
Its a sad day in America when those who commit war crimes walk free, and those who try to expose said crimes are locked up.

It seems most days are sad in America nowadays.

The question is, what are we going to do about it? Sit and lament about it on an internet forum, and go back to our daily lives?

What enables these kinds of immoral things to happen is people's fear of discussing direct action. If you want to see change, DO something about it; take it upon yourself to enact said change, or as Gandhi said, be the change you wish to see in the world.

If I'm not mistaken, Bush & Co. somehow justified waterboarding enemy combatants overseas and it never really was illegal (at least in their minds). Had it been illegal at the time (again in their minds) I suppose people would have been prosecuted. That would be a tough case to prosecute because they use the technique for training in the US military, or at least have in years past.

If this guy revealed the identity of a CIA Operations Agent to a non-CIA, non-cleared individual then no doubt he was violating a security agreement that he would have had to sign as a CIA employee.

So, unfair as it may seem, he really never had a 'whistleblower' leg to stand on. He may have viewed the technique as being illegal, but if it didn't pass the litmus test of the court system, then he wasn't really outing any crime.

Now waterboarding people to extract information. Define torture. Define what the objective is (information). Has the US tortured people? I think so. I think it's a crime to humanity, but then again I thought torching the cabin at Big Bear was a crime (and yes it was deliberate) and a lot of people don't agree with me. If it's not law, it certainly ought to be. If we didn't have our farking noses in the business of so many other countries and if we weren't trying so hard to keep so many countries oppressed and in economic collapse in order to serve our own purposes, then we would never need to torture people in the first place.

Originally posted by lynxpilot
If I'm not mistaken, Bush & Co. somehow justified waterboarding enemy combatants overseas and it never really was illegal (at least in their minds). Had it been illegal at the time (again in their minds) I suppose people would have been prosecuted. That would be a tough case to prosecute because they use the technique for training in the US military, or at least have in years past.

If this guy revealed the identity of a CIA Operations Agent to a non-CIA, non-cleared individual then no doubt he was violating a security agreement that he would have had to sign as a CIA employee.

So, unfair as it may seem, he really never had a 'whistleblower' leg to stand on. He may have viewed the technique as being illegal, but if it didn't pass the litmus test of the court system, then he wasn't really outing any crime.

Now waterboarding people to extract information. Define torture. Define what the objective is (information). Has the US tortured people? I think so. I think it's a crime to humanity, but then again I thought torching the cabin at Big Bear was a crime (and yes it was deliberate) and a lot of people don't agree with me. If it's not law, it certainly ought to be. If we didn't have our farking noses in the business of so many other countries and if we weren't trying so hard to keep so many countries oppressed and in economic collapse in order to serve our own purposes, then we would never need to torture people in the first place.

Here ya go buddy, yer gettin it.....
Every time the goverment is threatened from without or within......they will see to punishing those who stand for the people....anywhere, anytime, everytime........

I'm surprised they didn't kill him to 'send a message".

Go against the status quo and you end in jail or dead.

You mess with the bull, you get the horns, is what you're seeing here.

If you want to whistleblow on these guys, you have to be like Cæsar's wife. This guy had a skeleton in the closet they were able to find and exploit.

I know there are a lot of people on ATS who are not fans of liberals, or especially MSNBC. However, they are going to have a special on at 9pm on Monday 2/18/13 that people reading this thread might be interested in. As I understand it from the clips I have seen, they are going to go back to the lead up of the Iraq war and on through, to do a timeline of everything that was done by the administration to get that war going. Sort of a hind-sight organization of the facts that have been uncovered since that time. It looked pretty interesting. I plan to watch.

Guaranteed whistleblowers are being persecuted for their voice. Better get prepared for it. Know your rights if you decide to blow the whistle.

One of the things you cannot do, even if you know it really really bad, is to reveal who is a CIA agent. You can keep the secret to yourself, you can say that Mr. So-and-so did a crime like this and that, but you can't reveal that So-and-so is in the CIA. Okay, well, you can tell the world, if you're an idiot and like lawyers and lawsuits, and big money fines that you can't pay off in a lifetime unless you are a multi-millionaire and have 20 years of spare time to spend in jail.

It's just one of those taboos that the CIA wrote into the system, where they get to be wealthy and take the perks and fame but their identity is as secret as Batman, because if it gets blown, so does their edge in the international political games that they are playing. It has something to do with their trade craft, because if you were a meanie, you could take that intelligence to another country and disclose identities, and so when Covert Agent So-and-so visits a country as a tourist, he gets killed by the natives because you told them he was a spy.

Then it gets uglier for you because there are international courts. Maybe after that, a USA attorney wants to have you arrested for acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign country, a violation of the FARA, or Foreign Agents Registration Act.

It's unfair. How come neighbor Jack gets to tell whoever he wants that he's in the CIA, but then you are pressured by law to not reveal things the same way Jack does? It does feel like a break of the freedom of speech.

Oh the irony, revealing identity to a freelance reporter, who kept it to himself. I imagine that the reporter, in theory, has the potential for being a CIA agent too, which may have been the reason why Kiriakou chose that reporter to talk to in the first place.

What is the big surprise? I think the CIA is the biggest national employer of sociopaths. Normal doesn't occur in a group like that.