osan
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Entire article here:
https://reason.com/2019/12/09/repor...aign-aide-was-justified-but-badly-mishandled/
More soft-peddling of the evils of "the state". Note the minimally clever spin that denies intent in exchange for bumbling. This wholly excuses the actions taken, for all practical purposes because nobody will be punished with any significance and Theye will continue as they please. The Inspector General has screwed every last one of us in the back-hole with a plunge few Americans will grasp sufficiently.
We are in very deep shit, America, and are heading for the worst of outcomes precisely because idly we sit in tolerance of the intolerable while Theye snicker as they openly mock us.
Theye are swiping the dregs of liberty, such as they may pathetically be, and we allow it. The rotten heart of Orwell's 1984 has been transplanted into the American breast with the sugary skin of Skinner's Brave New World grafted onto our national flesh and we as a nation have fallen for it completely, not just in tolerance, but in some macabre form of welcome.
We are corrupted. We are destroyed. We deserve nothing better than the overt and abject slavery that has been foisted upon us as we watched in idle fascination, refusing to believe that it is what it actually is. We, rather than clamoring for the bracing competition that is true and proper human freedom, demanded the half-measures of pretty slavery, the acceptance of the least tyranny equating to the acceptance of every and all. We wanted, nay demanded, the perceived benefits of liberty while rejecting in ever increasing measure, every cost that is part and parcel with it.
And now we sit yet idle, as the last remains of hope for a better world slips, crumb by slab, from our national and personal endowments of birthright as Freemen. We stare agape as the killer clowns of the "State" make the final mockery of each and every one of us, in the precise manner of the man who, refusing to use the brains given him through nature, is no different from those who have none.
Though my hope is not quite completely exhausted, current circumstances reduce its volume and amplitude to a low I never thought I would experience, and yet here we are.
We doom ourselves with open arms in welcome to the Death Of Liberty and to everything decent about men, and beautiful about life. We do it eagerly, or grudgingly; it makes no matter for the result it the same. The chains Theye have forged, WE have voluntarily stepped into, and now repair seems ever so close to impossibility.
So enjoy ye the shreds of thy prerogative for as long as it may yet last, for once the Tyrant closes the door on thy liberty for real, the changes will come swiftly and as a great and killing torrent, leaving thy status as a free being adash upon the rocks of his political might and will. And when it happens, remember that it was always within our collective grasp to put the Tyrant to his ignominious end, but that you sat idle in the denial of what was happening for the sake of your corrupted sense of convenience.
Then shall ye know that thou dost deserve the chains you place upon thine own ankles and wrists, and had best not dare utter the least complaint of woe before God or the galaxies, lest thou reap the result of rent flesh and spirit that thou shalt surely deserve in mighty heaps and with no mercy.
https://reason.com/2019/12/09/repor...aign-aide-was-justified-but-badly-mishandled/
Report Says FBI Snooping on Trump Campaign Aide Was Justified but Badly Mishandled
The FBI’s screw-ups when wiretapping Carter Page weren’t motivated by political bias. But that’s not exactly good news.
SCOTT SHACKFORD | 12.9.2019 4:00 PM
Carter Page (Korotayev Artyom/ZUMA Press/Newscom)
According to a massive report that the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General released today, the FBI's investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign's possible connections with the Russian government was justified and not driven by political bias—but it was full of blunders and bad omissions.
The report analyzes the circumstances under which the FBI asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment (FISA) courts for permission to secretly wiretap Carter Page, a foreign policy advisor in Trump's campaign. FBI officials were concerned Page might be compromised or working as a foreign agent, and they sought and received permission to wiretap him, permission they renewed three times.
But did anti-Trump bias cloud the attitudes of the officials involved in the decision to open the investigation? Text messages between former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI agent Peter Strzok fueled "deep state" theories claiming that the investigation was launched in order to take Trump down. Their requests to the FISA court relied partly on a dossier alleging that Russian officials had compromising info on Trump—a dossier the former British spy Christopher Steele had developed as a political weapon. That raised the question of whether the FISA court had received adequate explanation about the dossier's roots and credibility.
After a lengthy investigation involving more than 170 interviews with more than 100 witnesses, the Office of the Inspector General has concluded that the decisions to open an investigation and to request renewals of the warrants were not driven by a bias against Trump. But it did not conclude that everything the FBI did was fine. According to the report, the FBI was not as thorough and as accurate as it needed to be as it was requesting permission to wiretap Page:
The IG office found seven problems with the very first FISA warrant application. These included: leaving out the fact that Page in the past had provided the FBI with information about his contacts with Russian intelligence officers; overstating the degree that Steele's prior reporting had been used in criminal proceedings; omitting information from Steele himself that one of his sources was prone to boasting and may have some credibility issues; incorrectly claiming that Steele wasn't the source of a leak of his information to Yahoo News; and even omitting some comments from consensual interviews with Page where he denied having met certain Russian officials. These errors were not corrected in the renewal applications.
Our review found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are "scrupulously accurate." We identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.
More soft-peddling of the evils of "the state". Note the minimally clever spin that denies intent in exchange for bumbling. This wholly excuses the actions taken, for all practical purposes because nobody will be punished with any significance and Theye will continue as they please. The Inspector General has screwed every last one of us in the back-hole with a plunge few Americans will grasp sufficiently.
We are in very deep shit, America, and are heading for the worst of outcomes precisely because idly we sit in tolerance of the intolerable while Theye snicker as they openly mock us.
Theye are swiping the dregs of liberty, such as they may pathetically be, and we allow it. The rotten heart of Orwell's 1984 has been transplanted into the American breast with the sugary skin of Skinner's Brave New World grafted onto our national flesh and we as a nation have fallen for it completely, not just in tolerance, but in some macabre form of welcome.
We are corrupted. We are destroyed. We deserve nothing better than the overt and abject slavery that has been foisted upon us as we watched in idle fascination, refusing to believe that it is what it actually is. We, rather than clamoring for the bracing competition that is true and proper human freedom, demanded the half-measures of pretty slavery, the acceptance of the least tyranny equating to the acceptance of every and all. We wanted, nay demanded, the perceived benefits of liberty while rejecting in ever increasing measure, every cost that is part and parcel with it.
And now we sit yet idle, as the last remains of hope for a better world slips, crumb by slab, from our national and personal endowments of birthright as Freemen. We stare agape as the killer clowns of the "State" make the final mockery of each and every one of us, in the precise manner of the man who, refusing to use the brains given him through nature, is no different from those who have none.
Though my hope is not quite completely exhausted, current circumstances reduce its volume and amplitude to a low I never thought I would experience, and yet here we are.
We doom ourselves with open arms in welcome to the Death Of Liberty and to everything decent about men, and beautiful about life. We do it eagerly, or grudgingly; it makes no matter for the result it the same. The chains Theye have forged, WE have voluntarily stepped into, and now repair seems ever so close to impossibility.
So enjoy ye the shreds of thy prerogative for as long as it may yet last, for once the Tyrant closes the door on thy liberty for real, the changes will come swiftly and as a great and killing torrent, leaving thy status as a free being adash upon the rocks of his political might and will. And when it happens, remember that it was always within our collective grasp to put the Tyrant to his ignominious end, but that you sat idle in the denial of what was happening for the sake of your corrupted sense of convenience.
Then shall ye know that thou dost deserve the chains you place upon thine own ankles and wrists, and had best not dare utter the least complaint of woe before God or the galaxies, lest thou reap the result of rent flesh and spirit that thou shalt surely deserve in mighty heaps and with no mercy.
