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US national security empire functions on secrecy: Analyst

A US district court blocked ACLU efforts to force the CIA to release secret records about its torture program.

A political commentator believes the United States government operates under a veil of “secrecy” and “manipulation” on the pretext of national security concerns.

“The question is about national security and secrecy, and it goes to the heart of how an empire functions and how a national security state and a police state functions,” Daniel Patrick Welch told Press TV on Thursday.

“Scrutiny is anathema to the elites who actually run things behind the scenes,” he added.

“The American people have no idea what their government is doing, and to the extent that they do, their consent is manufactured by all sorts of media manipulation, false stories, fear mongering, these false low level terrorist attacks that  are foiled because they are actually FBI plots,” the antiwar activist noted.

Welch, who is an outspoken critic of the US government, made the comments when asked about a ruling by a judge on the US District Court of Colombia to block the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) efforts to obtain secret records on CIA torture program.

In December 2014, the US Senate Intelligence Committee released a drastically redacted summary of its voluminous report on the CIA’s torture program during the George W. Bush administration. But, the full 6,900-page version remains classified.

“What they do in this case… is they produce this heavily redacted review of 6,900 pages and they release 500 pages, so 6,400 pages are still top secret because it pertains national security,” Welch said. 

“The larger issue… is that the system is set up so that these ‘checks and balances’ are actually more or less fraudulent or they prop up a system of a supposed democracy, but there really is no oversight and there is no control from below,” he explained.

The CIA's interrogation of suspected terrorists was far more brutal than the spy agency had disclosed, according to the Senate report.

“They (US officials) use national security as their basis for anything so that they can hide Gitmo (Guantanamo Bay prison), they can hide rendition sites, and they can hide black sites, and black operations,” Welch said.

The analyst concluded that nothing would change in the United States “unless people know what their government is doing and object to it strongly.”

SB/HRJ


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