{"id":177844,"date":"2019-05-25T18:58:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-25T23:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/05\/25\/the-blithely-stated-terrifying-statement\/"},"modified":"2019-05-25T18:58:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-25T23:58:00","slug":"the-blithely-stated-terrifying-statement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/05\/25\/the-blithely-stated-terrifying-statement\/","title":{"rendered":"The Blithely Stated Terrifying Statement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s clear that Donald Trump, and his <strike>poodle<\/strike> Attorney General William Barr, are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/24\/us\/politics\/trump-barr-declassify-intelligence.html\">attempting a purge of of the the US state security apparatus in response to the Mueller report<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Needless to say, the ability of Donald Trump to use this to mold the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. into his own image.<\/p>\n<p>This is not to say that they status quo is a good thing.<\/p>\n<p>In the lead paragraph of the article, there is a very chilling sentence, and it is the sheer banality of the statement that terrifies:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">President Trump\u2019s order allowing Attorney General William P. Barr <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/23\/us\/politics\/trump-barr-intelligence.html\">to declassify any intelligence<\/a> that led to the Russia investigation sets up a potential confrontation with the C.I.A. <b><span style=\"font-size: 100%; font-variant: small-caps;\">It effectively strips the agency of its most critical power: choosing which secrets it shares and which ones remain hidden. <\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(<i>emphasis mine<\/i>)<\/p>\n<p>If there is any organization in the US government that should not have the absolute power to choose which secrets it shares, it is the CIA.<\/p>\n<p>Considering the record of the CIA, with its long history of failures, support for authoritarian regimes, assaults on democracy, and spreading misery, if there is any agency which needs aggressive scrutiny from civilian government, they are it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s clear that Donald Trump, and his poodle Attorney General William Barr, are attempting a purge of of the the US state security apparatus in response to the Mueller report. Needless to say, the ability of Donald Trump to use this to mold the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. into his own image. This is not &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,364,481,407,501,454],"class_list":["post-177844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-intelligence","tag-justice","tag-secrecy","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177844"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}