Clapper says this; Clapper says that. Clapper says things that may be true. Or not.
These people need to be dragged onto the kerb and be summarily dealt with.
Obama’s “Dirty Wars” — and a soiled presidency
One eerie episode in “Dirty Wars” that hit me especially hard amid this week’s headlines is set not in Yemen or Afghanistan or Scahill’s especially terrifying journey to Somalia (you need “kidnap and ransom insurance,” and it’s not easy to get) but in the Senate Office Building in Washington. He interviews Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a strong critic of the Bush-Obama national security state and almost the only member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who’s ever willing to talk about these issues on the record. Wyden clearly wants to explain to Scahill how the Obama administration interprets the laws it uses to conduct national security operations both at home and abroad. But an aide, sitting nearby but off camera, keeps reminding the senator that those legal interpretations are classified, and he can’t talk about them.
“What Wyden was saying to me,” says Scahill, “was that whether it’s the kill program or it’s domestic surveillance or it’s certain secret aspects of the Patriot Act, there are laws that the American people can go online and read, and reasonable people will interpret those in relatively the same way. And then there’s a second set of laws, which consist of the way the administration has interpreted what those laws say. So what he’s saying to me is that on any of these issues, if I could tell you how they’ve interpreted what you believe a law to say, it would shock you.”