Converse on Covert's Converts.

Give credit where credit is due, which apparently is everywhere in the OECD countries. But what about the rest of the world? Other than the BRIC's, and the Arab Spring, from the vantage point here in the USA, there simply isn't one. Unless a war breaks out, such as the one in Mali, the rest of the world may as well be in Timbuktu as far as USAryans's mass media is concerned. The exception to this is of course, America's greatest spectator sport, mass-killings of any kind, but especially popular are foreign wars, with high-casualty weather events pulling a close second.

Perhaps it's the same in other countries, but watching the American version of everything, CNN, BBC, even RT (Russian Times), and DW (Deutsche Welle (Journal), one gets the feeling of sanitized news, everything cleared through and cleaned by the US censors before airing it to the hapless, feckless masses. As if to buttress my suspicions, today George Soros sent out an e-mail containing a video detailing, "Ghost flights, black sites, and stories of appalling abuse. In which he asks readers to:

Please take a minute to watch Amrit Singh of the Open Society Justice Initiative describe the grim realities of the CIA’s post-9/11 campaign of secret detention and torture.

The fact that he uses the word secret is illuminating. Because, as Garry Wills pointed out in his book, "Bomb Power",  torture, abuse of secrecy, illegal covert operations, and signing statements, are all used and kept secret, not from the USA's enemies, for which purpose the OSS, the CIA's predecessor, was founded, but to keep certain US government actions, of which our enemies are completely aware, secret from US citizens. Something they would be unable to do if we had a truly free press.

But both of theses authors express an outrage that is felt only by themselves. They write as though they are ferreting out and presenting to the US public facts that are unknown to them. Which, in an overarching sense, is true: the individual atrocities are in fact usually unknown. But the general carte blanche the US public has given these agencies, both in their latitude to perform whatever indecencies they see fit, and in the amount of dollars they spend in order to carry our their various "Mission Implausibles", implies a willingness to admit they prefer not to know the details of what is done in their name.

In both the unitary executive Whitehouses of the Nixon and Reagan administrations, criminals carried out illegal programs, the details of which, both Chief Executives made clear beforehand, they preferred to be kept in the dark. This was a manifestation of a policy of plausible deniability: no matter how implausible the denial, nor how incompetent the denial makes the executives (who stoically maintain complete ignorance of crimes done in their names and right under their noses) look. 

This policy the GW Bush administration raised to such a level of virtuosity, it now pervades every aspect of private as well as public institutions. How else explain how CEO's such as Kenneth Lay, Corzine, and a host of others, can 'earn' millions, even billions, of dollars, yet have no idea of the financial shenanigans, carried out on such a monumental scale? Shenanigans undertaken with the full co-operation of executives in high places in other corporations, such as JPMorgan, and Arthur Anderson, one of the "Big Five" accounting firms, whose lower level employees would never have dared carried out the illegalities they did for their clients without the express permission, even encouragement, of their own bosses.

Entire corporations (in the case of Enron bringing down others in their wake) came crashing to the ground as the executives scurried behind the scenes to shred evidence and steal the last nickel, lest it end up in an employee's 401k (and who's on the board, but GW Bush?). Yet they can insist they had no idea how the corporation they're pillaging makes its money. Like the wife of a Mafia boss, what do they care how the money's made, as long as the furs and diamond necklaces are forthcoming, and their liability's zilch?

And now another George is all upset because, lo and behold, the CIA tortures people. Let's see, is that the same George whose billions were made betting on, and some say, precipitating, the collapse in the currency of an entire country? Well, so sorry, Soros, the USAryans know full well what is done in their name, but so long as the powers that be keep their Wars waging everywhere but here, as long as the tanks aren't in our streets and the planes are strafing, the drones are striking, in lands far away, the carte blanche remains in effect and the news of new atrocities will get the same treatment by the populace that the executives give their company's illegalities: a big shrug, and maybe a phony intake of breath and rehearsed exclamation that "I had no idea". And, unlike under those evil 'Socialistic' regimes, where people were actually punished for crimes (in fact that was the crime: getting caught. Not anymore. Yea Capitalism: NSA! NSA!).  Plausible deniability ("We never discussed planes flying into buildings") now exonerates everyone. Trickle down Realpolitic: We may have low educational standards, but we're still fast learners.