Information wars: How will governments deal with the information revolution?
Empire (Al Jazeera)
Information is power and in the age of the information revolution, cyber and satellite communication is transforming our lives, reinventing the relationship between people and power.
New media, from WikiLeaks to Facebook, Twitter to YouTube, is persistently challenging the traditional flow of information, and cyber disobedience is exposing powerful governments.
Websites are now being treated like hostile territories; whistleblowers and leakers as terrorists, and hackers as insurgents.
Governments are scrambling to salvage their influence and take advantage of the new cyber and satellite media. From China to the Sudan, Egypt to Iran, despots and armies are tracking web activity and setting up Facebook accounts to spy on their citizens.
So is this the century of free information and expression as the cyber utopians predicted, or new methods of electronic oppression as the cyber sceptics warned?
Joining Marwan Bishara to discuss these issues are: Carl Bernstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist; Amy Goodman, the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!; Professor Emily Bell, the director of digital journalism at Columbia University; Evgeny Morozov, the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; Professor Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.
Our interviewees are: Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower; Charlie Beckett, the director of Polis at London School of Economics; Jeremy Goldkorn, the founder of Danwei.org, and Pink Ke, the co-founder of antiwave.net
Showing posts with label Terrorist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Terrorist. Show all posts
Friday, February 25, 2011
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Glenn Greenwald: Terrorism -- The Most Meaningless and Manipulated Word
Terrorism: The Most Meaningless and Manipulated Word
by Glenn Greenwald
Common Dreams
Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto. Stack's worldview contained elements of the tea party's anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with "the Left" (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America's poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices:
Despite all that, The New York Times' Brian Stelter documents the deep reluctance of cable news chatterers and government officials to label the incident an act of "terrorism," even though -- as Dave Neiwert ably documents -- it perfectly fits, indeed is a classic illustration of, every official definition of that term. The issue isn't whether Stack's grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act unquestionably comports with the official definition. But as NBC's Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act of Terrorism: there are "a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he's an American citizen." Fox News' Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials: "I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?," to which Herridge replied: "they mean terrorism in that capital T way."
All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: "a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies." That's why all of this confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a Terrorist: he's not a Muslim and isn't acting on behalf of standard Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the "definition." One might concede that perhaps there's some technical sense in which term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized: it's not "terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . . . terrorism in that capital T way." We all know who commits terrorism in "that capital T way," and it's not people named Joseph Stack.
Contrast the collective hesitance to call Stack a Terrorist with the extremely dubious circumstances under which that term is reflexively applied to Muslims. If a Muslim attacks a military base preparing to deploy soldiers to a war zone, that person is a Terrorist. If an American Muslim argues that violence against the U.S. (particularly when aimed at military targets) is justified due to American violence aimed at the Muslim world, that person is a Terrorist who deserves assassination. And if the U.S. military invades a Muslim country, Muslims who live in the invaded and occupied country and who fight back against the invading American army -- by attacking nothing but military targets -- are also Terrorists. Indeed, large numbers of detainees at Guantanamo were accused of being Terrorists for nothing more than attacking members of an invading foreign army in their country, including 14-year-old Mohamed Jawad, who spent many years in Guantanamo, accused (almost certainly falsely) of throwing a grenade at two American troops in Afghanistan who were part of an invading force in that country. Obviously, plots targeting civilians for death -- the 9/11 attacks and attempts to blow up civilian aircraft -- are pure terrorism, but a huge portion of the acts committed by Muslims that receive that label are not.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Glenn Greenwald
Common Dreams
Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto. Stack's worldview contained elements of the tea party's anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with "the Left" (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America's poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices:
I remember reading about the stock market crash before the "great" depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn't it ironic how far we've come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn't have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it's "business-as-usual" . . . . Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn't so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.
Despite all that, The New York Times' Brian Stelter documents the deep reluctance of cable news chatterers and government officials to label the incident an act of "terrorism," even though -- as Dave Neiwert ably documents -- it perfectly fits, indeed is a classic illustration of, every official definition of that term. The issue isn't whether Stack's grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act unquestionably comports with the official definition. But as NBC's Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act of Terrorism: there are "a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he's an American citizen." Fox News' Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials: "I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?," to which Herridge replied: "they mean terrorism in that capital T way."
All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: "a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies." That's why all of this confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a Terrorist: he's not a Muslim and isn't acting on behalf of standard Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the "definition." One might concede that perhaps there's some technical sense in which term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized: it's not "terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . . . terrorism in that capital T way." We all know who commits terrorism in "that capital T way," and it's not people named Joseph Stack.
Contrast the collective hesitance to call Stack a Terrorist with the extremely dubious circumstances under which that term is reflexively applied to Muslims. If a Muslim attacks a military base preparing to deploy soldiers to a war zone, that person is a Terrorist. If an American Muslim argues that violence against the U.S. (particularly when aimed at military targets) is justified due to American violence aimed at the Muslim world, that person is a Terrorist who deserves assassination. And if the U.S. military invades a Muslim country, Muslims who live in the invaded and occupied country and who fight back against the invading American army -- by attacking nothing but military targets -- are also Terrorists. Indeed, large numbers of detainees at Guantanamo were accused of being Terrorists for nothing more than attacking members of an invading foreign army in their country, including 14-year-old Mohamed Jawad, who spent many years in Guantanamo, accused (almost certainly falsely) of throwing a grenade at two American troops in Afghanistan who were part of an invading force in that country. Obviously, plots targeting civilians for death -- the 9/11 attacks and attempts to blow up civilian aircraft -- are pure terrorism, but a huge portion of the acts committed by Muslims that receive that label are not.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Friday, January 22, 2010
Mark Hope-Jones: Anarchy in the BRD
Anarchy in the BRD: The Baader Meinhof Complex, shot by Rainer Kalusmann, BVK, details the rise and fall of a German terrorist group.
by Mark Hope-Jones
American Cinematographer
In the summer of 1967, during protests against the Shah of Iran’s state visit to West Berlin, an unarmed student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed by a plainclothes policeman. Ohnesorg’s killing sent shock waves through German society, crystallizing the anger of a youth movement that viewed America’s presence in Vietnam as imperialism and its own government as authoritarian. The Baader Meinhof Complex charts the 10 tumultuous years that followed, as student protests paved the way to organized domestic terrorism. A particularly single-minded group of extremists, led by Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, founded the Red Army Faction to wage war on the state. As the group’s attacks intensified, the West German police were forced to modernize in order to make arrests that provoked new kidnappings and killings. Despite the arrest of several key Red Brigade members, the violence escalated, eventually culminating in the bloody “German Autumn” of 1977.
Although he has worked predominantly in Germany throughout his 28-year career, cinematographer Rainer Klausmann, BVK is Swiss and has always lived in Zurich, so the real events depicted in the film had a limited impact on him as a young man. “I got married in 1970, and I was more interested in my new wife than in political affairs!” he says. “I knew the story a bit from newspapers and television, but it wasn’t really part of me; I was never a student and I wasn’t in Germany at the time.”
Instead of studying film at college, Klausmann learned his skills on the job in the early 1980s. “I was an assistant in Switzerland with [cinematographer] Hans Liechti and then Thomas Mauch, a German director of photography,” he explains. “I was second camera on Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo [1982] with Mauch and then started out on my own. Eventually I was working with directors like Oliver Hirschbiegel and Fatih Akin; the scripts got better and the work got better.”
In 2004, Klausmann shot Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, an Academy Award-nominated study of Hitler’s final days in his bunker beneath war-torn Berlin, for German producer Bernd Eichinger. When Eichinger took on The Baader Meinhof Complex, he coaxed director Uli Edel, an old friend from film school, back to Germany from a successful television career in the States. Neither man had any doubt that Klausmann was the man they wanted behind the camera: “I’ve known Rainer for 20 years, and I’ve always followed his work, although we never had an opportunity to do anything together,” says Edel. “When this movie came along, I knew he would be perfect.”
Though Klausmann had been little affected by the events of the time, he was sensitive to the fact that Edel felt a great emotional connection with the story, having lived through it at close quarters as a student in Germany. “Finding a visual approach to the film was easy because to my mind, you can’t play around with history — you have to go for the facts,” says Klausmann. “Uli didn’t want to present his own vision of that era; he wanted to tell the real stories."
Many of the events from those difficult years, when West Germany was still a relatively young democracy, are so well known that to stray too far from reality would have alienated the film’s domestic audience. “The shooting of Rudi Dutschke [a student activist who narrowly survived an attempt on his life in 1968] was comparable [in cultural impact] to the assassination of John F. Kennedy,” says Edel. “I know exactly where I was when I heard the news. Everybody in Germany does, so you cannot change these things too much.”
The most iconic moments of the story were therefore re-created on set with scrupulous attention to detail; they serve as visual anchor points, punctuating a chronological narrative that links them all together. “Those images were burned into the consciousness of a generation,” says Edel. “The image of a woman leaning over the dying Ohnesorg went around the world, so we wanted to get as close as possible to the reality of that. Most German people remember Ohnesorg and Dutschke without necessarily knowing how they were connected; what I tried to do was to give those 10 years a narrative that lets you understand how it all started and where it went.”
Klausmann’s cinematographic approach was principally dictated by the film’s fast-paced montage structure and the decision to cut original television footage in with the action throughout. “We watched a lot of real footage and there were long discussions about what [clips] to use,” he says. “The color matching of the film was influenced by what we used, because our movie had to fit with the real stuff; we avoided strong reds, blues or greens and we desaturated the image in the DI. Otherwise, it would have looked like two different movies, and that’s not good.”
For the same reason, Klausmann’s camerawork was informed by a newsgathering style that would complement the spontaneous energy of the archival material. “The idea was to make the whole film in this documentary style so it matched the original footage,” says Edel. “I gave the actors a lot of freedom, especially in the bigger scenes with all the extras. It was very important that we could really follow the action; we did not want to create the action through cuts. That’s why there were so many Steadicam and handheld shots.”
This approach suited Klaus-mann well: “Uli knows that I like to handhold the camera,” he says. “The actors like it, too, because they can do what they want and it’s my problem to follow them! I don’t like too much technical stuff, [like] using a lot of cranes and modern gear; I prefer to do it the way I think it was, to make it more real. If you’re nearer to reality, you’re nearer to the story and it’s more likely to work. I never used filters on the film; it was just about the available light and using what was there.”
Klausmann opted to shoot with Arricam Studios and Lites and Arri Master Primes. “I first used the Master Primes when they gave me two or three to try on The Invasion [2007],” he says. “I really liked them then, and I think they’re still the best lenses available. Their speed is good, but mainly I like the way they match with colors, and they’re not as hard as the previous [Zeiss] Superspeeds. To me, they’re perfect.”
To Read the Rest of the Article
by Mark Hope-Jones
American Cinematographer
In the summer of 1967, during protests against the Shah of Iran’s state visit to West Berlin, an unarmed student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed by a plainclothes policeman. Ohnesorg’s killing sent shock waves through German society, crystallizing the anger of a youth movement that viewed America’s presence in Vietnam as imperialism and its own government as authoritarian. The Baader Meinhof Complex charts the 10 tumultuous years that followed, as student protests paved the way to organized domestic terrorism. A particularly single-minded group of extremists, led by Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, founded the Red Army Faction to wage war on the state. As the group’s attacks intensified, the West German police were forced to modernize in order to make arrests that provoked new kidnappings and killings. Despite the arrest of several key Red Brigade members, the violence escalated, eventually culminating in the bloody “German Autumn” of 1977.
Although he has worked predominantly in Germany throughout his 28-year career, cinematographer Rainer Klausmann, BVK is Swiss and has always lived in Zurich, so the real events depicted in the film had a limited impact on him as a young man. “I got married in 1970, and I was more interested in my new wife than in political affairs!” he says. “I knew the story a bit from newspapers and television, but it wasn’t really part of me; I was never a student and I wasn’t in Germany at the time.”
Instead of studying film at college, Klausmann learned his skills on the job in the early 1980s. “I was an assistant in Switzerland with [cinematographer] Hans Liechti and then Thomas Mauch, a German director of photography,” he explains. “I was second camera on Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo [1982] with Mauch and then started out on my own. Eventually I was working with directors like Oliver Hirschbiegel and Fatih Akin; the scripts got better and the work got better.”
In 2004, Klausmann shot Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, an Academy Award-nominated study of Hitler’s final days in his bunker beneath war-torn Berlin, for German producer Bernd Eichinger. When Eichinger took on The Baader Meinhof Complex, he coaxed director Uli Edel, an old friend from film school, back to Germany from a successful television career in the States. Neither man had any doubt that Klausmann was the man they wanted behind the camera: “I’ve known Rainer for 20 years, and I’ve always followed his work, although we never had an opportunity to do anything together,” says Edel. “When this movie came along, I knew he would be perfect.”
Though Klausmann had been little affected by the events of the time, he was sensitive to the fact that Edel felt a great emotional connection with the story, having lived through it at close quarters as a student in Germany. “Finding a visual approach to the film was easy because to my mind, you can’t play around with history — you have to go for the facts,” says Klausmann. “Uli didn’t want to present his own vision of that era; he wanted to tell the real stories."
Many of the events from those difficult years, when West Germany was still a relatively young democracy, are so well known that to stray too far from reality would have alienated the film’s domestic audience. “The shooting of Rudi Dutschke [a student activist who narrowly survived an attempt on his life in 1968] was comparable [in cultural impact] to the assassination of John F. Kennedy,” says Edel. “I know exactly where I was when I heard the news. Everybody in Germany does, so you cannot change these things too much.”
The most iconic moments of the story were therefore re-created on set with scrupulous attention to detail; they serve as visual anchor points, punctuating a chronological narrative that links them all together. “Those images were burned into the consciousness of a generation,” says Edel. “The image of a woman leaning over the dying Ohnesorg went around the world, so we wanted to get as close as possible to the reality of that. Most German people remember Ohnesorg and Dutschke without necessarily knowing how they were connected; what I tried to do was to give those 10 years a narrative that lets you understand how it all started and where it went.”
Klausmann’s cinematographic approach was principally dictated by the film’s fast-paced montage structure and the decision to cut original television footage in with the action throughout. “We watched a lot of real footage and there were long discussions about what [clips] to use,” he says. “The color matching of the film was influenced by what we used, because our movie had to fit with the real stuff; we avoided strong reds, blues or greens and we desaturated the image in the DI. Otherwise, it would have looked like two different movies, and that’s not good.”
For the same reason, Klausmann’s camerawork was informed by a newsgathering style that would complement the spontaneous energy of the archival material. “The idea was to make the whole film in this documentary style so it matched the original footage,” says Edel. “I gave the actors a lot of freedom, especially in the bigger scenes with all the extras. It was very important that we could really follow the action; we did not want to create the action through cuts. That’s why there were so many Steadicam and handheld shots.”
This approach suited Klaus-mann well: “Uli knows that I like to handhold the camera,” he says. “The actors like it, too, because they can do what they want and it’s my problem to follow them! I don’t like too much technical stuff, [like] using a lot of cranes and modern gear; I prefer to do it the way I think it was, to make it more real. If you’re nearer to reality, you’re nearer to the story and it’s more likely to work. I never used filters on the film; it was just about the available light and using what was there.”
Klausmann opted to shoot with Arricam Studios and Lites and Arri Master Primes. “I first used the Master Primes when they gave me two or three to try on The Invasion [2007],” he says. “I really liked them then, and I think they’re still the best lenses available. Their speed is good, but mainly I like the way they match with colors, and they’re not as hard as the previous [Zeiss] Superspeeds. To me, they’re perfect.”
To Read the Rest of the Article
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Glenn Greenwald: Criminal convictions of 22 CIA agents in Italy
(Courtesy of Laura W.)
Criminal convictions of 22 CIA agents in Italy: The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon
...
For many Americans -- probably most -- the word "terrorist" conjures up images of the people responsible for the 9/11 attack. For that reason, labeling someone a "suspected terrorist" can justify doing anything and everything to those individuals (after all, other than civil liberties extremists, who could object to the "seizing of a suspected terrorist" -- or their indefinite detention or torture?). It's therefore unsurprising that the U.S. Government would use the term "terrorist" so promiscuously and selectively (see John Cole's excellent contrast between what we deem to be "terrorism" when it happens to the U.S. versus what we deny is "terrorism" when done by the U.S.). It's a powerful term that can justify almost any government action.
But the U.S. media's willingness to mindlessly apply the term "terrorist" in exactly the subjective, self-serving way the U.S. Government dictates -- starkly contrasted with their refusal to use the far more objective term "torture" on the ground that the term is in dispute (i.e., disputed by the U.S. Government torturers) -- illustrates the establishment media's principal function: to serve American political power and justify whatever our government does. That's a major reason -- perhaps the primary one -- why the U.S. Government has been able to get away with everything it's done over the last decade. Those unseen victims of torture, rendition, indefinite detention and other government crimes are all just "terrorists," so who cares? In reporting on these convictions, CNN immediately and helpfully proclaims Nasr to be a "suspected terrorist" in a way that guts any meaningful definition of that term and -- in many minds -- justifies whatever was done to him, no matter how illegal.
It's worth asking this question: which sounds more like actual "terrorism": (a) kidnapping people literally off the street and shipping them thousands of miles away to be tortured with no legal process, or (b) what Nasr is "suspected" of having done?
Second, this incident underscores -- yet again -- that our political and media elite simply do not believe in the rule of law or accountability for high government officials. To the contrary, they explicitly believe that such officials should be entitled to break the law and be exempt from consequences. As but one example, here's a discussion on CNN last night about this matter between Wolf Blitzer and Jeffrey Toobin:
TOOBIN: This is a real criminal conviction in a country where we tend to honor reciprocal legal arrangements. So they are in a -- they are in no jeopardy as long as they are inside the United States, but, if they were to leave, they are potentially at risk for being jailed and brought to Italy.
BLITZER: Because even if they went to a third country, like England, let's say, or France, Interpol could have a warrant out for their arrest. They have been convicted by an Italian court.
TOOBIN: That's why this is such -- so troubling. It would one thing if they only had to stay out of Italy, but, because of Interpol, because of the reciprocal nature of these agreements, they are potentially at risk almost anywhere they go.
So according to Toobin, this is all "so troubling." Why? Because the people who were found by a duly constituted court to have committed a serious crime are faced with the risk that there might actually be consequences. After all, these are Americans who were part of the U.S. Government, and consequences for lawbreaking are simply not meant for them. Echoing Joe Klein's infamous Orwellian claim that torture shouldn't be prosecuted because the CIA is "asked to behave extra-legally for the greater good of the nation," Toobin added that "one of the things you do when you are a CIA agent, at least in part, is break the law of other countries" -- Toobin says that as though they have the right to do that without accountability, and without mentioning that causing people to be tortured is also a violation of U.S. law (after Nasr's kidnapping, the chief of the CIA's Milan office traveled to Egypt for three weeks to participate in his "interrogation").
To Read the Entire Article
Criminal convictions of 22 CIA agents in Italy: The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon
...
For many Americans -- probably most -- the word "terrorist" conjures up images of the people responsible for the 9/11 attack. For that reason, labeling someone a "suspected terrorist" can justify doing anything and everything to those individuals (after all, other than civil liberties extremists, who could object to the "seizing of a suspected terrorist" -- or their indefinite detention or torture?). It's therefore unsurprising that the U.S. Government would use the term "terrorist" so promiscuously and selectively (see John Cole's excellent contrast between what we deem to be "terrorism" when it happens to the U.S. versus what we deny is "terrorism" when done by the U.S.). It's a powerful term that can justify almost any government action.
But the U.S. media's willingness to mindlessly apply the term "terrorist" in exactly the subjective, self-serving way the U.S. Government dictates -- starkly contrasted with their refusal to use the far more objective term "torture" on the ground that the term is in dispute (i.e., disputed by the U.S. Government torturers) -- illustrates the establishment media's principal function: to serve American political power and justify whatever our government does. That's a major reason -- perhaps the primary one -- why the U.S. Government has been able to get away with everything it's done over the last decade. Those unseen victims of torture, rendition, indefinite detention and other government crimes are all just "terrorists," so who cares? In reporting on these convictions, CNN immediately and helpfully proclaims Nasr to be a "suspected terrorist" in a way that guts any meaningful definition of that term and -- in many minds -- justifies whatever was done to him, no matter how illegal.
It's worth asking this question: which sounds more like actual "terrorism": (a) kidnapping people literally off the street and shipping them thousands of miles away to be tortured with no legal process, or (b) what Nasr is "suspected" of having done?
Second, this incident underscores -- yet again -- that our political and media elite simply do not believe in the rule of law or accountability for high government officials. To the contrary, they explicitly believe that such officials should be entitled to break the law and be exempt from consequences. As but one example, here's a discussion on CNN last night about this matter between Wolf Blitzer and Jeffrey Toobin:
TOOBIN: This is a real criminal conviction in a country where we tend to honor reciprocal legal arrangements. So they are in a -- they are in no jeopardy as long as they are inside the United States, but, if they were to leave, they are potentially at risk for being jailed and brought to Italy.
BLITZER: Because even if they went to a third country, like England, let's say, or France, Interpol could have a warrant out for their arrest. They have been convicted by an Italian court.
TOOBIN: That's why this is such -- so troubling. It would one thing if they only had to stay out of Italy, but, because of Interpol, because of the reciprocal nature of these agreements, they are potentially at risk almost anywhere they go.
So according to Toobin, this is all "so troubling." Why? Because the people who were found by a duly constituted court to have committed a serious crime are faced with the risk that there might actually be consequences. After all, these are Americans who were part of the U.S. Government, and consequences for lawbreaking are simply not meant for them. Echoing Joe Klein's infamous Orwellian claim that torture shouldn't be prosecuted because the CIA is "asked to behave extra-legally for the greater good of the nation," Toobin added that "one of the things you do when you are a CIA agent, at least in part, is break the law of other countries" -- Toobin says that as though they have the right to do that without accountability, and without mentioning that causing people to be tortured is also a violation of U.S. law (after Nasr's kidnapping, the chief of the CIA's Milan office traveled to Egypt for three weeks to participate in his "interrogation").
To Read the Entire Article
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