Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Udall’s public release of this letter, addressed to President Obama, invites the question of
why didn’t Udall hold the letter back long enough to obtain co-signatures from Committee members like the following?
• CIA & NSA sympathizers Dianne Feinstein (chair) and Susan Collins (“moderate” Republican), and/or
• CIA & NSA critics Ron Wyden & Martin Heinrich (who have previously coordinated statements with Udall)
Feinstein has publicly confirmed CIA resistance to oversight, by predicting
“Our oversight role will prevail,” which raises the related question:
What is “oversight”?
Answers and more questions below the jump.
What is “oversight”? While perfect oversight may be difficult to define,
absence of oversight is easy to spot by hints like
the subject of oversight being free (even many years after embarrassing conduct reportedly ended) to:
• Equate its own embarrassment with the nation’s security
• Destroy and withhold evidence of its embarrassments
• Negotiate and restrict overseers’ access to its embarrassments
• Hack and monitor findings of overseers, to enable the subject to selectively admit only things that have been proven, while denying everything else
• After a majority of overseers have finally agreed on the text of an oversight report, then delay and seek to prevent public release of the report, while publicly lying about its contents
With these hints in mind, please re-read Udall’s letter and ask yourself the following questions:
• Did Udall fear that, if he spent weeks seeking signatures from Feinstein or Collins, or even a day or two seeking signatures from Wyden or Heinrich, then his public release of the letter might be prevented?
• Is Udall the only official needing to be rescued? Is Udall trying to alert the public that President Obama is partly in the same boat?
• Is the last chance to start such a rescue in the balance right now, in 2014 Senate races that could do the following?
re-elect Udall, and thereby empower Udall, Wyden and Heinrich,
defeat Collins, and replace her with civil libertarian challenger Shenna Bellows, and
educate – on the direction of public opinion – Obama, Feinstein and other surveillance “moderates”, including candidate and President Hillary Clinton
As for readers skeptical of changing too much too fast, please ask yourself in what direction we can expect things to move in coming years if Obama, Feinstein and Hillary Clinton observe that the 2014 elections have:
• cost Udall his purple-state seat in the Senate (thus reducing the Committee’s skeptical bloc by 1/3), and
• not cost Collins her blue-state seat (thus demonstrating that voters don't care much about failing Senatorial oversight,
...even in this
year of ever-more shocking disclosures?
What happens if Hillary follows Obama into being implicated in, and further cements as a bipartisan consensus, the no-accountability torture and no-oversight surveillance trends inherited from W & Cheney?