{"id":227992,"date":"2016-02-29T23:04:49","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T23:04:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=227992"},"modified":"2016-02-29T23:04:49","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T23:04:49","slug":"clinton-bush-hardliner-attacks-congress-for-blocking-invasion-of-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/clinton-bush-hardliner-attacks-congress-for-blocking-invasion-of-syria\/","title":{"rendered":"Clinton-Bush Hardliner Attacks Congress for Blocking Invasion of Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/b>Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In a\u00a0Huffington Post interview on February 23rd,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0the Clinton-Bush former head of the NSA and CIA, and defender of their use of waterboarding<\/span><\/a>, and of their violating the 4th Amendment<\/span><\/a> to the U.S. Constitution (both of which types of legal violations he says are necessary in order to keep Americans safe), accused Congress of being gutless: \u201cCongress didn\u2019t step up and\u00a0authorize the use of military force<\/span><\/a>\u201d to invade Syria.<\/span><\/p>\n

Michael Hayden<\/a><\/span> said this in a video clip at Huffington Post Live, where the context of what he was saying was left ambiguous, but it concerned only the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, so his comment there was gratuitous: he asserted (at 23:00 in the complete<\/i>\u00a0 interview<\/span><\/a>) that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are prisoners of war and thus can legally be kept imprisoned for the rest of their lives without there being any need at all for them (and there were 775 of them<\/span><\/a>) to be heard in any court \u2014 he said they\u2019re prisoners of war and not prisoners of any legal system at all; and, so, even if they were actually captured in error (as many of them were found to have been<\/span><\/a>), they\u2019ve got no legal rights at all. Innocence or guilt is legally irrelevant to their continued imprisonment, says this former chief of America\u2019s CIA and of the NSA.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush hired people like that to run U.S. intelligence. Are America\u2019s CIA and NSA merely the U.S. version of the Soviet Union\u2019s KGB? What, in principle<\/i>, differentiates the two\u00a0dictatorships<\/span><\/a>?<\/span><\/p>\n

The only scientific study of whether the U.S. has been a dictatorship, or instead a democracy, in the period from 1980 onward, found that it\u2019s a dictatorship \u2014 an \u201coligarchy\u201d<\/span><\/a> controlled by only the very wealthiest Americans, not a national government that reflects the policy-preferences and priorities of the citizens who economically are in the lower 99% of the population, but instead the preferences of the people who are in some stratum within the top 1%, if not within the top 0.1% or even higher. The study finds that this government is actually a dictatorship \u2014 that the desires of the lower 99% don\u2019t affect its policies unless those desires are consistent with the desires of the billionaires.<\/span><\/p>\n

Michael Hayden reflects this oligarch-directed culture. However, within the U.S. national-security Establishment, especially the CIA and NSA, this aristocratic or \u201coligarchic\u201d control has been operating at least ever since the CIA overthrew the democratically elected and progressive President of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953. Furthermore, even Britain\u2019s own BBC documented in a classic TV documentary<\/span><\/a>, the creation of the oligarchic CIA, from the moment that Dwight Eisenhower became President in 1953. The CIA was clearly pro-fascist ever since Eisenhower appointed Allen Dulles to lead it.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Michael Hayden is, is a recent example of the Republican Party\u2019s tradition in this matter, but something that\u2019s even worse \u2014 its becoming trans-partisan, a reflection now of both of America\u2019s political Parties. This is now a bi-partisan oligarchy, in which the billionaires are so remote from the voting-public whose minds they control, that \u2014 at least within our national-security circles \u2014 the oligarchs are free to ignore the public\u2019s desires and values, ignore them altogether. This government is theirs. The U.S. Constitution now holds sway only to the extent that they want it to.<\/span><\/p>\n

But even worse than that: as the BBC documentary shows, this is an international oligarchy. Though the CIA has been the chief global center of its enforcement-operation, it entails aristocrats from all of the NATO countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hayden\u2019s testimony displays the dropping-away of the \u2018democratic\u2019 restraints upon the oligarchy\u2019s operations. It\u2019s less and less necessary to keep up the pretense that we live in a \u2018democracy\u2019: now, we live in a society that \u2018does what it must to keep the people safe.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n

Here<\/a><\/span> is how \u2018safe\u2019 they have been keeping us.<\/span><\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t start with 9\/11<\/span><\/a>. It merely has intensified since then.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is basically a\u00a01984<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0 world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org In a\u00a0Huffington Post interview on February 23rd,\u00a0the Clinton-Bush former head of the NSA and CIA, and defender of their use of waterboarding, and of their violating the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (both of which types of legal violations he says are necessary in order to keep Americans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":227993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[30,27,32,96,535,698,14045,57,524,754,92,51,523,49,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-227992","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire","8":"tag-big-brother","9":"tag-bush","10":"tag-cia","11":"tag-cover-up","12":"tag-global-news","13":"tag-hillary-clinton","14":"tag-michael-hayden","15":"tag-nsa","16":"tag-russia","17":"tag-syria","18":"tag-terrorism","19":"tag-torture","20":"tag-ukraine","21":"tag-usa-news","22":"tag-warfare","23":"tag-white-house","24":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}