Leon Panetta Revealed Classified SEAL Unit InfoFormer CIA Director Leon Panetta is the bonehead who revealed the name of the Navy SEAL unit that carried out the Osama Bin Laden raid and named the unit’s ground commander at a 2011 ceremony attended by Zero Dark Thirty filmmaker Mark Boal, according to a draft Pentagon inspector general’s report obtained by a watchdog group.
Panetta also disclosed information - classified information - information that was designated as “top secret” and “secret” during his presentation at the CIA awards ceremony, says the draft IG report published Wednesday by the Project on Government Oversight.
The report does not make clear whether Panetta was aware that Boal was present at the ceremony, held under a tent at the CIA complex on June 24, 2011. “Approximately 1300” people from the military and the intelligence community were on hand for the event, according to a CIA press release issued the following week.
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(Ahem...) but when Valerie Plame was revealed to be a CIA employee it was yelling and hollering and wall to wall coverage from the press for months! Treason, they screamed! However, naming the unit that killed Osama Bin Laden? Every soldier in SEAL Team 6 a marked man by Al Qaeda hit squads? Meh. So little press, that I have to report it
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I'll probably get downvoted to hell for this, but please at least hear me out before you all do it.
I really believe electing Obama (in 08) may be the biggest mistake we ever made as far as protecting civil liberties. He said all the right things in the campaign. He seemed genuinely upset about the things the Bush administration was doing. He was a Harvard educated constitutional law professor. He seems to have a deep understanding of the risks to democracy posed by the security state. That makes what he has done and is doing so much more dangerous than what Bush did.
When the Bush administration started ramping all this stuff up people were concerned. Bush seemed entirely too comfortable with it and that worried people a lot more than Obama who seems to struggle with it, yet keep going the security route anyway. Dick Cheney having this sort of power was nothing short of terrifying. He was a frothing at the mouth authoritarian straight from the Nixon administration. What Obama has done is take away the boogeyman we could easily point to to demonstrate why the government shouldn't have this sort of power. Obama is the sugar coating on this poison pill to our republic.
By continuing and expanding domestic surveillance he has solidified it as a part of the American government. The democrats in congress have largely actively supported these actions or remained silent on them. Now blood is on everyone's hands. Neither party can effectively use it as a campaign issue without it being thrown right back at them. Now neither side has anything to gain by bringing it up. So they won't.
There is another aspect to this that usually gets ignored that is even more disconcerting to me; that the courts have let them get away with all of this. Fourty years ago most of this would have been struck down as soon as people becsme aware of it and brought it to the courts. Back then the courts were filled with honest to the god liberals that had the balls to stand up to the executive and legislative branches. Now our courts are filled with appointees from Reagan and Bush 1 &2 and Clinton. If Daniel Ellsburg had faced the courts we have today he would still be in prison. If Nixon had the congress and courts we have today he would have barely even took a hit in the polls over watergate. Back then the CIA assassinating foreign political enemies was a huge scandal. Now people don't bat an eye when they kill American citizens.
I wish I saw a way out. I wish I saw a way to restore the previously accepted limits to power of the federal government, but I don't. The streets should be filled with people outraged over this spying. They should have been filled long before now. If you didn't know this was going on before today you had your head in the sand. But now, even though its in plain site, nothing will happen. It will be a story for a day or 2 and then the corporate media will move on to the next human interest story. People will carry on as they did the day before. We are like frogs being boiled. The water seems a little warmer than a few years ago, but it doesn't seem to be affecting us yet. So we will ignore it. And when we are old and our granchildren ask us why we let things get so out of control, I wonder what we will say.
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