1.  Yet another ‘conspiracy theory’ that, like many, was from the beginning actually a conspiracy fact:

“Pentagon Domestic Propaganda

A DOD Inspector General investigation found no wrong doing on the part of the Pentagon, but that report was later found to be so flawed, it was retracted and removed from the DOD’s website. More recently, RawStory.com has published the results of its own investigation into the program, which has uncovered further evidence, as well as indications that the Pentagon’s efforts to manipulate public opinion are continuing under the Obama Administration”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/21790

2.  No kidding:

“The Media As Enablers of Government Lies

Why do politicians so easily get away with telling lies? In large part, because the news media are more interested in bonding with politicians than in exposing them. Americans are encouraged to believe that the media will serve as a check and a balance on the government. Instead, the press too often volunteer as unpaid pimps, helping politicians deceive the public.

In 1936, New York Times White House correspondent Turner Catledge said that President Roosevelt’s “first instinct was always to lie.” But the Washington press corps covered up Roosevelt’s dishonesty almost as thoroughly as they hid his use of a wheelchair in daily life.

…

The pursuit of respectability in Washington usually entails acquiescing to government lies. Many if not most members of the Washington press corps are government dependents. Few Washington journalists have the will to expose government lies. That would require placing one in an explicitly adversarial position to the government. It is not that the typical journalist is intentionally covering up government lies, but that his radar is not set to detect such occurrences. Lies rarely register in Washington journalists’ minds because they are usually supplicants for government information, not dogged pursuers of the truth. Raising troublesome questions will not help you get any “silver platter” stories.

The vast majority of the media docilely repeated Bush’s claims through most of his presidency. Television networks very likely devoted a hundred times as much air time to peddling government falsehoods as they did to exposing them. The constant barrage of falsehood drowns out the occasional blips of truth. The government only needs the number of people who recognize its lies to be small enough that its latest power play will not be thwarted. The goal is not to prevent well-informed citizens from being nauseated or disgusted by the president’s lies. Instead, it is to neutralize the mass reaction to presidential falsehoods, even those that have catastrophic consequences.

If Americans wish to retain the remnants of their liberty, they cannot trust the media to warn them about government tyranny. In order to recognize government deceit, there is no substitute for more citizens to make more effort to find the truth for themselves.”
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0908c.asp

3.  “Many Afghan women are against a U.S. pullout, but Malalai Joya, who’s been called “the bravest woman in Afghanistan,” says the American occupation must end.

Malalai Joya, a 31-year-old activist and politician, was once called “the bravest woman in Afghanistan” by the BBC. During the Taliban years, she defied her country’s rulers by running underground girls’ schools. After the Taliban’s fall, she helped start an orphanage and a medical clinic, and eventually became the youngest member of Afghanistan’s legislature. She has been fearless in taking on the warlords who populate the government of Hamid Karzai—declared the presidential victor Monday after a runoff election was canceled—so much so that in 2007, her political opponents voted to suspend her from parliament on the grounds that she had “insulted” the institution. Calling for her reinstatement, six female Nobel Peace Prize laureates compared her to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi, describing her as “a model for women everywhere seeking to make the world more just.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-11-04/afghans-bravest-wants-us-out/

4.  But of course they would never do this against their own citizens, would they?

“Air Force: ‘Overwhelm Enemy Cognitive Abilities’ with Bioscience

Resisting stress is good, but destroying your enemy with stress is even better. “Conversely, the chemical pathway area could include methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities,” the Air Force call for proposals notes.”

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/11/air-force-wants-bioscience-to-overwhelm-enemy-cognitive-abilities/

5.  ““The [Head of One of the Biggest Dark Pools Said] the Amount of Money Devoted to High-frequency Trading Could ‘QUINTUPLE Between this Year and Next’”

Senator Schumer echoed this theme at last week’s hearing:

Market surveillance should be consolidated across all trading venues to eliminate the information gaps and coordination problems that make surveillance across all the markets virtually impossible today.

Let me repeat: market surveillance across all the markets is “virtually impossible today.” And none of the industry witnesses disagreed with Senator Schumer”

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/11/chief-executive-of-giant-dark-pool-said.html

6.  “Fear Turns People Into Sheep

An article yesterday in Alternet discussing the Sociological Inquiry article helps us to understand that the key to people’s active participation in searching for excuses for actions by the big boys is fear
…

Reasoned another: “Saddam, I can’t judge if he did what he’s being accused of, but if Bush thinks he did it, then he did it.”

 

Others declined to engage the information at all. Most curious to the researchers were the respondents who reasoned that Saddam must have been connected to Sept. 11, because why else would the Bush Administration have gone to war in Iraq?

…
A large body of evidence shows that momentarily [raising fear of death], typically by asking people to think about themselves dying, intensifies people’s strivings to protect and bolster aspects of their worldviews, and to bolster their self-esteem. The most common finding is that [fear of death] increases positive reactions to those who share cherished aspects of one’s cultural worldview, and negative reactions toward those who violate cherished cultural values or are merely different.”

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/11/investor-psychology-fear-turns-people.html

7.  More government lies:

“Official US Air Force Document Reveals the True Intentions Behind the US-Colombia Military Agreement

An official document from the Department of the US Air Force reveals that the military base in Palanquero, Colombia will provide the Pentagon with “…an opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout South America…” This information contradicts the explanations offered by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and the US State Department regarding the military agreement signed between the two nations this past October 30th. Both governments have publicly stated that the military agreement refers only to counternarcotics and counterterrorism operations within Colombian territory. President Uribe has reiterated numerous times that the military agreement with the US will not affect Colombia’s neighbors, despite constant concern in the region regarding the true objetives of the agreement. But the US Air Force document, dated May 2009, confirms that the concerns of South American nations have been right on target. The document exposes that the true intentions behind the agreement are to enable the US to engage in “full spectrum military operations in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from narcotics funded terrorist insurgencies…and anti-US governments…”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15951

1.  What a fool:

“Chomsky then launches into a diatribe against the notion of a 9/11 inside job before bizarrely declaring the Bush Administration “absolved” of the crimes of 9/11 because it would have been “senseless” for them to use their CIA-created, DIA protected, State Department handled and White House sanctioned Sunni terrorists to carry out an attack they openly called for that Chomsky himself admits they benefited from. He then states that it is “conceivable” that the administration knew about an attack ahead of time and let it happen, but adds dismissively that he doesn’t know of any evidence for the idea.
…
Despite seeming to be singularly uninformed on the relevant names, dates, figures and facts surrounding the issue of government complicity in 9/11, Chomsky apparently sees no intellectual dishonesty in calling this evidence “outlandish” while maintaining that Osama Bin Laden is most likely the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks despite the fact that no solid evidence has ever been presented to suggest such a thing. Of course, the issue of Chomsky’s intellectual dishonesty on 9/11 is by no means new.”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/21782

2.  Saying the Wash. Post is liberal is just silly:

“One of the leaders of The Liberal Media is a leading outlet for right-wing advocacy.

So, to re-cap:  The Post today has two former Bush officials, one former Reagan official, two right-wing politicians, a Fox News neocon, the CEO of America’s largest oil and gas producer, a defender of the right-wing Honduran military coup leaders, and one liberal columnist.  That overwhelming right-wing presence on the Post Op-Ed page is anything but unusual (the day after it fired Dan Froomkin, The Post published Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Hayden, Charles Krauthammer and an Iran-hawkish screed from David Ignatnius, preceded by Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Ramesh Ponnuru).  And that’s to say nothing of the always-pro-war Editorial Page itself, which typically advocates for those same positions.

The Post is obviously free to publish whatever it wants, but, wth some very rare exceptions, its Op-Ed page under Fred Hiatt now really is the leading outlet for neoconservatve and related right-wing advocacy.  It is one of those outlets typically counted as part of the “Liberal Media” by right-wing self-victimizers and their media amplifiers, yet The Post’s claimed devotion to airing a “wide range of views” is scarcely more credible than Fox News’ “fair and balanced” slogan.”

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

3.  “It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”. Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country — unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf.

In Australia, we are not told this. It’s taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.

This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism – the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama’s case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the power he serves. “

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23912.htm

4.  “I was absolutely stunned,” says the British ambassador, who thought that he served a moral country that, along with its American ally, had moral integrity.  The great Anglo-American bastion of democracy and human rights,  the homes of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the great moral democracies that defeated Nazism and stood up to Stalin’s gulags, were prepared to commit any crime in order to maximize profits.

Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up.  He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.  The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan.  To insure this, an invasion was necessary.  The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from “terrorism,”  and the utter fools would believe the lie.

“If you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, its about energy, it’s not about democracy.”  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23906.htm

Guess who the consultant was who arranged with then Texas governor George W. Bush the agreements that would give to Enron the rights to Uzbekistan’s and Turkmenistan’s natural gas deposits and to Unocal to develop the trans-Afghanistan pipeline.  It was Karzai, the US-imposed “president” of Afghanistan, who has no support in the country except for American bayonets.

Amb. Murray was dismissed from the UK Foreign Service for his revelations.  No doubt on orders from Washington to our British puppet.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23908.htm

5.  “Horror at Fort Hood Inspires Horribly Predictable Islamophobia”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23915.htm

1.  “Noam Chomsky’s glaring logical inconsistencies

Academic activist Chomsky is known to the 911 Truth Movement as a denier of the facts of controlled demolition of the three WTC buildings, in spite of the massive amount of
irrefutable evidence (most of us see it as ordinary common sense backed up by hard core science).

As I recall, Chomsky also insisted, as many deniers do, that any conspiracy would have to be too large, that too many people would have to be involved, for it to have occurred. Then he dismissed his challengers with a wave of the hand and said, “What does it matter?”

 

I suspect that when Chomsky did this, he knew his arguments couldn’t stand up, but he couldn’t admit his mistake or the fact that he had been deceived, so he resorted to outright denial and a pretense of apathy; I also believe he still can’t admit that he was wrong but probably knows it deep inside.

…

I wonder how Chomsky reconciles the notion that if 9/11 was a conspiracy involving terrorists, only 19 conspirators are required, but if it was a conspiracy involving government officials, it would require thousands … if terrorists are really that much more competent than government officials, maybe we should employ terrorists to run govt,.. perhaps that’s what’s happening already.
…
Noam is an “official” intellectual and is allowed to officially criticize the empire as part of the “necessary illusion” of our democracy. However, he knows that his international reputation makes any dissent on 911 an “official” problem with severe potential consequences. This is war folks, plain and simple people have been murdered and nothing less than the fate of the empire is at stake. Chomsky is smart enough to know which fights to take on and if he even hints at having an open mind regarding 911 truth his fate could be sealed.

http://www.911blogger.com/node/21779

2.  “Obama Fears Military Revolt

Still, Ellsberg believes Obama will “go against his own instincts as to what’s best for the country and do what’s best for him and his administration and his party in the short run facing elections, which is to avoid a military revolt.”

That means the president will likely authorize a sizable increase of US forces in the region, Ellsberg said, because Obama fears that top US military commanders will stage a revolt if he rejects their requests for additional soldiers.”
http://www.truthout.org/1102096

3.  “75% of Potential Recruits Too Fat, Too Sickly, Too Dumb to Serve “

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/11/75-of-potential-recruits-too-fat-too-sickly-too-dumb-to-serve/

1.  How funny.  Didn’t they say no one could have anticipated such?

“Document Reveals Details of Military Exercise Involving Suicide Pilot Three Months before 9/11″

http://www.911blogger.com/node/21774

2.  Awesome:

“Italian Judge Convicts 23 CIA Officers for Kidnapping

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/11/04/italian-judge-convicts-23-cia-officers-for-kidnapping/

3.  “Who Benefits From the US Trade Embargo of Cuba?

In theory, government exists to protect those whom it “serves” — to defend their rights at home, and to guard against invasion by the armies of other governments which (once again, in theory) would violate those rights rather than merely becoming the new monopoly provider for their defense.

 

In practice, however, government policy tends toward the opposite. At home, the defense of — or even minimal respect for — rights is routinely sacrificed on the altar of “defense” against foreign enemies; abroad, governments work together to coordinate in support of each others’ rights violations.

 

If two governments are seen cooperating, it’s a good bet that they’re negotiating a treaty to regulate away your right to trade across borders (which themselves are nothing more than imaginary lines on the ground, drawn by politicians to make this kind of thing “necessary”).

…

I say “alleged,” because the real purpose of the embargo from the US standpoint certainly isn’t to “protect” the US from Cuba, which hasn’t represented a significant military threat since the Soviet Union blinked first in the “missile crisis” of the early 1960s. Nor is it to bring down Castro, whose regime has benefited immensely from it. Rather, its real purpose is to pump anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in Florida — held in sway by an “anti-Castro dissident industry” whose principals are far more interested in amassing wealth and influence in the US than in actually liberating Cuba — and subsidy-seeking sugar producers (who don’t want to have to compete with Cuban sugar imports) for campaign money and November votes.

…

The beneficiaries of the embargo are the politicians of both governments and their rent-seeking paymasters. The rest of us take it right on the chin. To understand any government policy, ask the question the Romans asked when looking into lesser criminal matters: “cui bono” (”who benefits”). The actions of the ruling class are seldom undertaken for the benefit of the ruled.”
http://c4ss.org/content/1369

4.  “Wall Street Journal Admits Economists Were Wrong, But Fails to Discuss their INCENTIVE for Being Wrong

The Wall Street Journal admits this week that economists blew it
…
But the Journal makes it sound like the policy-makers and economists who deployed faulty models were innocently ignorant of any larger truths:

The models “were not able to draw up the red flags,” says Tim Besley, a professor at the London School of Economics who served on the Bank of England’s policy-making committee until recently.

Barry Ritholtz has an excellent criticism of the article, pointing out:

There are many areas I would have liked to see the [journal's] article explore: The lack of Scientific Method, the mostly awful performance of economists, its misunderstanding of the value of modeling, the bias inherent in Wall Street variant of economics, and lastly, the corruption of economics by politics...
…
The powers-that-be do not like economists who say “Boys, if you don’t slow down, that bubble is going to get too big and pop right in your face”. They don’t want to hear that they can’t make endless money using crazy levels of leverage and 30-to-1 levels of fractional reserve banking, and credit derivatives. And of course, they don’t want to hear that the Federal Reserve is a big part of the problem.

Indeed, the Journal and the economists it quotes seem to be in no hurry whatsoever to change things:

The quest is bringing financial economists — long viewed by some as a curiosity mostly relevant to Wall Street — together with macroeconomists. Some believe a viable solution will emerge within a couple of years; others say it could take decades.”

http://quiscus.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

5.  “Stephanopoulos and Ledeen: together in the most accountability-free profession

Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one’s conduct.

This was beyond predictable.  Michael Ledeen is one of the most dishonest and ludicrous jokes on the political scene.  Will that stop George Stephanopoulos from using Ledeen as an expert source on Iran?  No, of course not, because once one obtains Seriousness credentials in Washington, they are irrevocable no matter one’s conduct (other than petty sex scandals), and journalism is the most accountability-free profession that exists (which is how the person who did this, this and this can still be considered one of the nation’s leading ”experts” on the Middle East).  If I spend the next 20 years announcing every six months that super-secret sources have confirmed the death of Kim Jong-il, will I be celebrated as a prescient and well-connected expert on North Korea once it finally happens?”

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

1.  “Article about Who Really Calls the Shots

The internal battles between American presidents and their national security establishments are not much reported. But if it is an invisible game, it is also a devious and even deadly one. Our civilian leaders end up mirroring the chronically nervous chiefs of state of the fragile democracies to our south.

 

Those who do not kowtow to the spies and generals have had a bumpy ride. FDR and Truman both faced insubordination. Dwight Eisenhower, who had served as chief of staff of the US Army, left the White House warning darkly about the “military industrial complex.” (He of all presidents had reasons to know.) John Kennedy was repeatedly countermanded and double-crossed by his own supposed subordinates. The Joint Chiefs baited him; Allen Dulles despised him (more so after JFK fired him over the Bay of Pigs fiasco), and Henry Cabot Lodge, his ambassador to South Vietnam, deliberately undermined Kennedy’s agenda. Kennedy called the trigger-happy generals “mad” and spoke angrily to aides of “scattering the CIA to the wind.” The evidence is growing that he suffered the consequences.

 

In the 1950s, the late Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, a high-ranking Pentagon official, was assigned by CIA Director Allen Dulles to help place Dulles’s officers under military cover throughout the federal government. As a result, Dulles not only knew what was happening before the president did, but had essentially infiltrated every corner of the president’s domain. One Nixon-era Republican Party official told me that in the early 1970s, there were intelligence officers everywhere, including the White House. Nixon was unaware of the true background of many of his trusted aides, particularly those who helped drive him from office. Remember Alexander Butterfield, the so-called “military liaison,” who told Congress about the White House taping system? Years later, Butterfield admitted to CIA connections.

 

In December 1971, Nixon learned of a military spy ring, the so-called Moorer-Radford operation, that was piping White House documents back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Chiefs were wary of secret negotiations the president and Henry Kissinger were conducting with America’s enemies, including North Vietnam, China and the USSR, and decided to keep tabs on this intrusion upon their domain. Jimmy Carter came into office as revelations of CIA abuses made headlines. He tried to dismantle the agency’s dirty tricks office, but wound up instead a victim of it – and a one-term president.

 

Those who avoided problems – Johnson, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Jr. – were chief executives that made no problems for the Pentagon and intelligence chiefs. All embraced military and covert operations, expanded wars or launched their own. The agile Bill Clinton was a special case – no babe in the woods, he focused on domestic gains and pretty much steered clear of the hornets’ nest.

 

As for the Bushes, their ascension represented a seizure of power by the national security state itself. Their family had profited from arms manufacturing for decades. The patriarch, Prescott Bush, monitored US assassination plots against foreign leaders as a senator; and records indicate that the elder George Bush had been a secret agency operative for decades before he became CIA director – and then, 12 years later, president.

…

None of this is likely to change soon, and not without a huge fight. Half a century after Ike’s famous admonition, conflict and intrigue remain the engine of our economy, and everyone from private equity firms to missile makers to car and truck manufacturers count on that to continue. The homeland security industry, the most recent head to grow on this hydra, is now seeking permanency.

 

So Barack Obama is boxed in. But so are the American people, and so, really, is democracy itself. Bringing this inconvenient truth out in the open is the essential first step toward taking back control of our government – and our future. For all the reasons laid out here, Obama will need help. He may, in the rote formulation, hold “the most powerful office in the world.” However, the extent to which he controls the government he heads, is another matter.

…

In broad outline, I can’t disagree with Baker’s depiction of the state of the US government. However, I have to pause when I read him say, ‘Obama will need help.’ And I am reminded of how I felt about Obama supporters a year ago–that they were like young children lost in fantasy, projecting onto him whatever they wanted to see. Baker seems to want readers to see Obama as wanting what they themselves want. But I beg to differ. If free to maneuver, a president might well turn out to pursue better policies than those desired by entrenched national security bureaucrats. But how much better? Do they really seek a world that isn’t managed by wealthy elites? Does Baker honestly think that Obama (and the powerful donors to his campaign) at any point wanted to end US militariazation of the Middle East and Central Asia? To repeal the Patriot Act or do away with the homeland security apparatus? Damned if I’ve seen any evidence of this, and it’s not logical at all to suppose, ‘Oh, he seems so nice, I’m sure he wants to change all of these things, he just can’t.’ To me, Obama’s supporters represent a line of thought according to which we, the masses, should opt for one type of elite governance over another type. But what we should have learned is that the only antidote when a country is descending into fascism is democracy. Yet democracy–government that truly takes its marching orders from the mass of average citizens–is precisely what Washington doesn’t want–ALL of them. And so, they continue to hope that the more extreme elements among them can be reined in without cuing the people into what’s really going on, continuing to keep us in the dark.

 

Obama sought the job with a pretty good idea that he was going to be working for some big players. His job is to sell whatever Washington and Wall Street have to offer to the American people, and try to pass it off as somehow representing the people’s will. And if he ‘needs help’ in doing so, he won’t get any from me.

…

I believe those who supported Obama need to find an excuse for his actions. However Obama is a sociopath, like the majority of American presidents. That’s why he seems ‘nice’. The way to deal with a sociopath is to avoid them, or at least judge them by their actions. They are very good at manipulating people as they have practised it their whole life. They literally have no conscience. Other people are like pawns in life’s great chess game. See Brzezinski, Obama’s foreign policy adviser, here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Grand-Chessboard-American-Geostrategic-Imperativ…

Sociopaths rise to the top of institutions because they can lie and manipulate emotions without fear of guilt.

 

There is no evidence to suggest Robert Gates was kept on because Obama was blackmailed. Likewise, it should not be seen as evidence of blackmail when the ‘white house’ is upset because pro-war documents are leaked.

 

At any point in time Obama could address the nation, describe the situation, and stop the war. He would find huge support from the public if he did this. He does not, and will not, because he doesn’t want to.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21761

2.  “Cheney Failed to Answer 72 FBI Questions

Documents from Interview in Valerie Plame Case Show Vice President was Unclear on Many Points, Big and Small”

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/02/politics/main5491257.shtml

3.  Afghanistan:

“Meanwhile, it turns out that Canadian and probably US military interpreters of Pashto sometimes mistranslate statements of detainees, causing them to be branded Taliban and sent to prison! The CBC says that Thomas Hammes, a retired US Marine colonel who also was in Afghanistan told it: “We’re willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure ice cream and steak is there . . . And I would trade all of that for my entire tour if I could have one decent translator . . . Many times I’d trade body armour for a translator.”

http://www.juancole.com/

4.  “Tortured in far-off Countries: Obama Resuming G. W. Bush’s “Extraordinary Renditions”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15907

5.  “A court decision that reflects what type of country the U.S. is

Even when government officials purposely subject an innocent person to brutal torture, they enjoy full immunity.

In other words, government officials are free to do anything they want in the national security context — even violate the law and purposely cause someone to be tortured — and courts should honor and defer to their actions by refusing to scrutinize them.

Reflecting the type of people who fill our judiciary, the judges in the majority also invented the most morally depraved bureaucratic requirements for Arar to proceed with his case and then claimed he had failed to meet them.  Arar did not, for instance, have the names of the individuals who detained and abused him at JFK, which the majority said he must have.  As Judge Sack in dissent said of that requirement:  it “means government miscreants may avoid [] liability altogether through the simple expedient of wearing hoods while inflicting injury“
…
I want to add one principal point to all of this.  This is precisely how the character of a country becomes fundamentally degraded when it becomes a state in permanent war.  So continuous are the inhumane and brutal acts of government leaders that the citizens completely lose the capacity for moral outrage and horror.  The permanent claims of existential threats from an endless array of enemies means that secrecy is paramount, accountability is deemed a luxury, and National Security trumps every other consideration — even including basic liberties and the rule of law.  Worst of all, the President takes on the attributes of a protector-deity who can and must never be questioned lest we prevent him from keeping us safe.
…
Surely that’s true, but it isn’t only the Arar majority that is guilty of that.  It is the nation as a whole — drowning in infinite claims of “state secrets” and executive immunity and war necessity and the imperatives of “looking forward” — that has meekly acquiesced to the pernicious idea that the President in an allegedly national security context must never have his actions disclosed, let alone judicially scrutinized and held accountable, no matter how criminal, brutal and inhumane those actions are.”

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/