© Kevin Lamarque/ReutersBarack Obama speaks about the National Security Agency on 17 January 2014 from the Justice Department in Washington.
In response to political scandal and public outrage, official Washington repeatedly uses the same well-worn tactic. It is the one that has been hauled out over decades in response to many of America's most significant political scandals. Predictably, it is the same one that shaped President Obama's much-heralded
Friday speech to announce his proposals for "reforming" the National Security Agency in the wake of seven months of intense worldwide controversy.
The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are "serious questions that have been raised". They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions,
to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic "reforms" so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge.
This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered
surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary "safeguards": a requirement of judicial review for any domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community.
But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government's requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government's lawyers could attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years virtually never said no to the government.
Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were repeatedly installed as the committee's heads, currently in the form of
NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the
New Yorker's Ryan Lizza
put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees "more often treat ... senior intelligence officials like matinee idols".
Comment: So, we're being asked to believe the anti-human, medieval state of Qatar commissioned this 'independent, lock-solid case against Assad' from an elite London law firm, and published it on the eve of peace talks, with absolutely no self-interest in swaying public opinion?
Qatar has invested $4 billion in this war to date and is poised to commit another $20 billion in the 'reconstruction' of the country it's actively annihilating: that is hardly a disinterested party, now is it? The Qatari Emirs are hell-bent on removing the al-Assads.
The London law firm they hired, Carter-Ruck, is about as reliable an 'independent' source as Tony Blair is a 'peace envoy'. Note that The Guardian didn't wanted to be tainted by association and so left the firm's name out of their article! Carter-Ruck was, curiously enough, instrumental in launching the previous propaganda maneuver against Syria (that whole shrill spiel about 'Assad's chemical weapons of mass destruction')...
As SOTT.net editor Joe Quinn pointed out here, Going by the pattern in Syria to date, we have to consider that the real reason these photographs were taken was to produce this 'independent report' for propaganda purposes; specifically, to remind people that they're supposed to perceive Bashar al-Assad as 'the new Hitler', etc.
The victims, like most others held up to Western audiences as victims of Assad's 'regime', were either tortured and killed by the foreign mercenaries funded by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, or they are among the tens of thousands of IRAQI torture victims under the US occupation.
Remember the hysteria generated by images of butchered children from the al-Houla massacre, for example?...
Houla massacre carried out by Syrian 'rebels', says Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Children shot, knifed, axed to death in Free Syrian Army's Houla massacre
The Houla Massacre: US-Sponsored Terrorists "Killed Families Loyal to the Government"
Footage Reveals Terrorists' Role in Houla Massacre