Getting Federalism backwards

Chris Edwards in his webpage claims:

"Under the U.S. Constitution, the federal government was assigned specific, limited powers and most government functions were left to the states. To ensure that people understood the limits on federal power, the nation’s founders added the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” - See more at:http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/fiscal-federalism

However, looking at the Constitution that might be how Chris E. and most of our cons, interpret it. But I'm not sure that it's intent was t obe "specific" or "limited" or to limit functions to the states. On the contrary in Federalist One Hamilton warns against this view:

"Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government."

Which seems to have been the plan of cons from Aaron Burr, the man who killed Hamilton to Jefferson Davis who led the Confederacy in it's rebellion against the Nation. And it certainly seems to be the attitude of modern cons who resist the will of the people as a whole by appealing to this notion that somehow he "Federal Government" should not be a General Government with the General roles of a general government. Hamilton as an ex Staff Officer of George Washington saw this as a threat. And there is nothing in the constitution about "specific" powers, but instead the preamble says:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

The General Welfare is not advanced by sectarian violence, sectional rebellion, or the misuse of the courts and misinterpretations of the constitution for the "private, separate advantage" [Locke's definity of Tyranny] of contentious oligarchs. The founders, not even Jefferson or Madison envisioned a government that would be ineffectual with only "specific" powers. They would not have created a General Executive with monarchal powers like the President if they had had such a vision. Hamilton wrote his opinion in what gets rendered as All Caps in present day type. He thought it was that important.

"THE UTILITY OF THE UNION TO YOUR POLITICAL PROSPERITY THE INSUFFICIENCY OF THE PRESENT CONFEDERATION TO PRESERVE THAT UNION THE NECESSITY OF A GOVERNMENT AT LEAST EQUALLY ENERGETIC WITH THE ONE PROPOSED, TO THE ATTAINMENT OF THIS OBJECT THE CONFORMITY OF THE PROPOSED CONSTITUTION TO THE TRUE PRINCIPLES OF REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT ITS ANALOGY TO YOUR OWN STATE CONSTITUTION and lastly, THE ADDITIONAL SECURITY WHICH ITS ADOPTION WILL AFFORD TO THE PRESERVATION OF THAT SPECIES OF GOVERNMENT, TO LIBERTY, AND TO PROPERTY."

Now there was a dialogue between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists with the Anti-Federalists later joined to Republicans such as Jefferson and Madison to limit the Federal Government from becoming a tyranny. But that is not the same as intending to emasculate it's role as a general government. Limited Government is achieved best when, contrary to my other Chris, the Federal role is "General" with the specifics left to local government. Which in many case should be much more local than the "partial confederacies" of often tyrannical states.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed01.asp

The Tenth Amendment states:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."[10th Amendment US Constitution]

I believe that Hamilton, Franklin and to a lesser extent even Jefferson and Madison, envisioned a Collaborative Federation. A place where States and the Federal Government worked together, with neither ruling over the people but all exerting their power under the watchful eyes and with the consent of ALL the people. The right forgets that "the people" are as important in the 10th Amendment as the States and that that is why it was not anymore a successful avenue of appeal for State Tyranny than it should be for Federal Tyranny.

The Right wing savants like to make appeals to their own authority wrapping that authority in the Constitution or "Founders" or some other source like it was so much "Fresh Fish."

Disenfranchising people is unconstitutional. State or Federal. And the Constitution is meant to protect people at all levels of government from doing so.

Oh and his article is chock full of misrepresentations. Yes in 1817 President "James Madison vetoed a bill that would have provided federal aid to construct roads and canals" (See more at: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/fiscal-federalism#sthash.KzUyjah8.dpuf)

"Having considered the bill this day presented to me entitled 'An act to set apart and pledge certain funds for internal improvements,' and which sets apart and pledges funds 'for constructing roads and canals, and improving the navigation of water courses, in order to facilitate, promote, and give security to internal commerce among the several States, and to render more easy and less expensive the means and provisions for the common defense,' I am constrained by the insuperable difficulty I feel in reconciling the bill with the Constitution of the United States to return it with that objection to the House of Representatives, in which it originated."

Madison vetoed the bill not because he objected to it's object or functionality but because he objected to the fact that the constitution didn't provide specifically for roads and canals. It appears that he intended that the United States would pass a constitutional amendment instead. Something that never happened. As Steve Lackner of the Free Republic notes: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2767135/posts

"Madison continued in his veto message, "and believing that it can not be deduced from any part of it without an inadmissible latitude of construction and reliance on insufficient precedents; believing also that the permanent success of the Constitution depends on a definite partition of powers between the General and the State Governments, and that no adequate landmarks would be left by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the bill, I have no option but to withhold my signature from it, and to cherishing the hope that its beneficial objects may be attained by a resort for the necessary powers to the same wisdom and virtue in the nation which established the Constitution in its actual form and providently marked out in the instrument itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest [i.e., the Amendment process of Article V]."

It was his last act and it through a monkey wrench into the countries modernization programs only for his term. Because the constitution did include the power "To establish Post Offices and Post Roads", that would be the justification for road building for the next 200 years it didn't impede development but the purpose of that veto has been misconstrued ever since. It did make it impossible to create a national canal and railroad system as those systems were privateered instead. The author notes:

"What then could the nation do if it felt it was prudent as a matter of public policy to allow for internal improvements? To Madison, the answer was provided only in Article V of the Constitution. The Constitution would have to be amended to allow for a measure that Madison himself as a matter of public policy actually supported. This may seem perplexing to some, because as Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black famously said, "The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional." I would add that Supreme Court Justices all too often fall prey to this constitutional view as well. But matters of public policy, and matters of Constitutionality are not one and the same and cannot be confounded. Regardless of whether a policy is considered needed or unnecessary, we must always independently ask whether the Constitution permits it. Madison even stated, "I am not unaware of the great importance of roads and canals and the improved navigation of water courses, and that a power in the National Legislature to provide for them might be exercised with signal advantage to the general prosperity."

Many of our problems are due to the fact that our constitution is an imperfect instrument and instead of improving the constitution of our government we've used tricks and cludges to get around it's weaknesses.

Some things I don't forget

I've got a list of lawyers & senior staff who I think need to be held accountable for our opening up of the gates of hell in 2002. It was a long slide that started with "extraordinary rendition" and has wound up with Prison guards routinely pepper spraying prisoners to make them more cooperative.

The ACLU is working to publicize the full extent to which the Bush Administration opened those gates, and our own Obama POTUS has helped them get away with it. The ACLU notes about this:

"Nevertheless, the Obama administration is still fighting to keep the full truth about torture – including photos the public hasn't yet seen – from the American people. But recently the courts and the Senate have been pushing back, resisting the government's claims that it can't reveal its torture secrets. As a result, those secrets may finally be dragged into the light."

A lot of the information has been published from leaks, and of course denied, and I've written about it before. The spigot was actually more open when Bush was still doing it.

"The government is holding back as many as 2,100 never-released images from Abu Ghraib and other detention centers overseas. The ACLU first sued for their release 10 years ago, and in August, District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled that the government must publish the photos unless it can defend withholding them on an individualized basis."

I don't need the images. My imagination fills in the details and they haunt my nightmares sometimes. I've got a list of folks in my head. I'm not going to get revenge. That's up to Divine Causality. But I won't forget either.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/human-rights-national-security/torture-secrets-are-coming

Other things I don't forget:

Corruption in our SEC:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/top-regulator-says-bank-c_b_6021296.html

Rewriting History

I grew up in a world where Christopher Columbus was the hero who "sailed the ocean blue" and "discovered America" too. A world where local Indians saved innocent religious Pilgrims from starvation, and John Smith wooed Pocahontas and she became an English Baroness. It was only later that I learned that it was "more complicated." Nothing has changed much. I walked 5 miles to Harpers Ferry today and saw various paeons to Robert E Lee, a wax image of John Brown that depicted him as a black man, when he was in fact as white as I am. A paeon to some black fellow who resisted the assault on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry. In a world where Robert E. Lee is a hero and John Brown a blood thirsty black person it's no wonder that folks still have delusions of what the South was up to in 1859, much less understand the present. Of course it's "more complicated" than any mythologized narrative. But that is why we need to tell the truth. Columbus wasn't a demon and he didn't "discover" America except from the POV of Christian Europeans looking for loot and slaves. The Pilgrims were indeed saved from starvation by help from local indigenous folks, but they weren't innocent and they were endangered of starvation because they had arrived with dreams of plantation farming or finding gold and silver. Pocohantas did save John Smith from death, and she did marry a gentleman and live in Britain. There is some truth in the legends.

Liberal Fascism

We see folks rewriting history everywhere. Jonah Goldberg wrote a book "Liberal Fascism" which is a prime example of rewriting history. Yes, there were common ideological elements between 20's and 30's liberalism and 20's and 30's Fascism. But Goldberg's thesis of identity involves rewriting (or at least spinning) the actual record. He's not the only one.

Alternet notes:

"Jonah Goldberg that contends that Hitler and Mussolini were committed left-wingers, and that today's liberals are fascism's natural intellectual heirs. While this may sound like yet another Coulteresque quickie aimed at prying some money out of Dittohead Nation, Goldberg insists that it is actually a Very Serious Work that "isn't like any Ann Coulter book" because it presents an argument that "has never been made in such detail or with such care. Goldberg also goes to great lengths from the start of the book to say that he's not really saying liberals are fascists, but hey, here are 400 pages of similarities between liberals and fascists, and if you start associating the two of them by the end of the book, then that's not his fault."[http://www.alternet.org/story/72960/jonah_goldberg's_'liberal_facism'_brings_historical_revisionism_to_comical_new_heights

Brad Reid continues later:

"But what in the world do Hitler's Germany, Soviet Russia and America under the Roosevelts all have in common, you ask? For one thing, Goldberg contends that all of these regimes gained popular support by using sinister populist rhetoric that painted wealthy capitalists in a negative light. Through sheer ignorance or ideological blindness, Goldberg never explores why trashing wealthy plutocrats during the Gilded Age and the Great Depression had become both politically profitable and morally sound. Rather, he deems all populist rhetoric as a key piece of the anti-individualist "totalitarian political religion" that American liberalism shares with Communism and Fascism.">

"While a lot of this stuff is easy to laugh off, some of Goldberg's historical revisionism is downright sickening. In one particularly grotesque passage, he tries to obfuscate the Nazis' treatment of homosexuals by calling their attitudes toward homosexuality "a source of confusion." Oh sure, he writes, "some homosexuals were sent to concentration camps," but it's also true that the early Nazi party was "rife with homosexuals." I'm sure the 100,000 men who were arrested for being homosexuals in Nazi Germany, as well as the thousands more who died in concentration camps, were proud to see their brethren so well-represented in the SS."

What is funny (not in the nice way) to me is the observation that many publicly homophobic individuals in the modern anti-Homosexual movement among the Far Right in our own country are also "rife with" closet cases who keep getting outed by folks in the gay movement. From Roy Cohn in the late 40's and 50's to "Mister spread my legs" Congressman. It's not a new thing that the vanguard of any angry movement is replete with folks who hate themselves; women who are misogynistic, gays who are homophobic, minorities who are self hating, etc... So again "it's complicated.

If Goldberg were the only one engaging in revisionism we could sigh and laugh a little. But of course he's joined by Amity Schlaes, who wrote "The Forgotten Man" with the primary objective of rewriting the history of the Great Depression. The author of one mostly positive review notes that aside from trying to paint Calvin Coolidge and Hoover as heros the book turns economic history on it's head. David Warsh writes;

"What then /did/cause cause the Great Depression? According to Shlaes, an overheated market, culminating in the October Crash of 1929, had something to do with it. So did bad banking policy and protectionism. "But the deepest problem was the intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace. Government management of the late 1920s and 1930s hurt the economy... Fear froze the economy, but that uncertainty itself might be a cost was something the young experimenters simply did not consider." But for the air of emergency fostered by "the world of theory, the world of the pilgrims," the economy would have quickly equilibrated by itself, with wages and share prices quickly "marked to market." The Depression would have gone into the history books as no more severe than the short, sharp "liquidation" that began the '20s -- a "quarter-hour" in the history of the American republic in Andrew Mellon's memorable phrase." [http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/07/david-warsh-on-.html]

In short her argument is the true believer argument that insufficient "faith" in free markets drove the great depression; the idea that somehow letting the economy completely crash would enable debts to be discharged and businesses to get rid of excess industry and get back to the work of making things. A theory that is not economics or ethics, but ideological dogma. As the author notes:

"There is very little support for this idea among professional economists. Consult Essays on the Great Depression by Ben S. Bernake, for example, and you will learn that a majority of macroeconomists have concluded in recent years that prolonged adherence to the gold standard played a dominating role in determining the worldwide monetary contraction of the 1930s. "We do not yet have our hands on the grail by any means," he writes, but countries that left the gold standard early were able to reflate their monetary supplies and price levels, while countries that remained on gold were forced into further deflation. In other words, some approaching a consensus exists among economists that poorly-designed institutions and short-sighted policies were at the heart of the Great Depression. ... (About this considerable volume of work, Shlaes has very little to say. ...) ..."[http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/07/david-warsh-on-.html]

But of course Krugman gets on her for going after (Our hero) Keynes with pure BS spin:

Grr. Keynesianism says that deficit spending can help create jobs when the economy is depressed. The Great Society wasn’t deficit spending, it wasn’t intended to create jobs, and the economy of the 1960s wasn’t depressed. It was social engineering; we can talk about how well or badly it worked, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with Keynesian economics."

When Roosevelt did his efforts to alleviate the Great Depression Keynes hadn't even made a name for himself. Instead the Chicago School of Economics and economists in our own country had to discover the principles that Keynes would later talk about by trial and error. Krugman continues:

"Now, LBJ did engage in some Keynesian economics: namely, he imposed a contractionary fiscal policy in the form of a tax surcharge in an effort to cool an overheating economy."

And unfortunately such measures do "work" somewhat. Even con economists have discovered that monetary policy rarely impacts the economy the way theoreticians predict (Mostly because banks are privateering institutions and not agencies of good government). But hte whole prupose of rewriting history is to substitute myth (lies) and legends (half truths and exaggerations) for concepts that someone doesn't like. Krugman continues:

"Alas, pretty soon we’ll have all the usual suspects saying that the Great Society proves that Keynesian economics doesn’t work — after all, the “experts” told them so."[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/amity-shlaes-strikes-again/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0]

So Secessionist traitors like Lee are painted as heros. The Generals who fight them are portrayed as drunks. Causality is turned on it's head and modern Neo-Fascists call their opponents fascists because young folks have been groomed to rewrite history.

All this is intentional. Whether it's Schlaes, Anne Coulter, Goldberg, or Dinesh D'Souza, these rewrites give license to folks for whom "free enterprise", "oligarchy" and "markets" are a religion. The right recruits, grooms and trains intellectuals who will carry on family tradition and spread convenient propaganda. As he notes about Goldberg, William Krystal and Podhoretz:

"William Kristol and John Podheretz, Goldberg was raised by prominent figures within the right-wing movement and was trained from the start to be an influential public "intellectual." And just as Kristol and Podheretz's writings closely mirror the neoconservative views espoused by their parents, Goldberg's penchant for attacking liberals in the most shameless and slimy ways imaginable is unsurprisingly similar to the style of his mother Lucianne, a right-wing literary agent who first came to national prominence when she helped Linda Tripp break the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the press." [http://www.alternet.org/story/72960/jonah_goldberg's_'liberal_facism'_brings_historical_revisionism_to_comical_new_heights]

That might border on being "ad-hominem" except that the author has already shown the misrepresentations, spins and outright lies of his targets.

And it "works" -- if repeating easily avoided policy mistakes is your definition of "working."

Website Progress

I've finally back to work on my artscommunity.com website. I've been too distracted by other things to get really dug into it, but now I'm fleshing out my vision for what it should look like. It's been a while and I'd forgotten some things about basic syntax, so the execution takes longer than I expected. I'm mocking it up on my computer. It's going to, ultimately, consolidate a lot of stuff, but to start with I need the interface and a few elements to support some of my volunteer projects and create materials I can show to potential customers. I hate sales but I love developing marketing materials. I've been having fun building the elements. I should have done much of this a year ago. I haven't been procrastinating. It just takes longer than I expect to do anything. This is not an announcement, just a status report.

We Dance on the Second Law of Thermodynamics

As long as the sun shines with light and earth radiates infrared into the night

we dance on the second law of thermodynamics.

We are fossil sunstuff born in long ago cataclysms of dying suns.

Our lives dance due to things made from the chaos of spreading space and time.

 

Our eyes should be wide with wonder,

at the massiveness,

the mysteriousness of it all.

We live in a moment of creation and destruction,

and the more we feel it we realize we are in it's thrall...

We who are here are here because of ancient dreams and bursting things.

As if a single word were spoken saying "breath" from a single spot.

And you can hear the sound, the sound of creation all around.

It is in every moment, and we should hear it and sing along.

We create our present moment.

 

Dancing on the moment of creation we ride a wave coming from the past.

We have to live in the moment though not one moment ever lasts.

Born, awakening, sleeping, dying. Seven days in every moment.

You may see a book of paper. I see a book of life.

You may see a frozen dictation. But I see a blowing wind.

Christopher H. Holte Today, 10/16/2014

My Hypothesis confirmed -- Thomas Duncan died due to substandard treatment and now Nurses getting sick

The Nurses at the Presbyterian Hospital tell a horror story of how the late patient Duncan was given substandard treatment that probably contributed to his death. They make 5 allegations, which I extracted from a CNN report:

"A nurses' union is sounding the alarm about the lack of safety protocols at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas after two nurses there apparently contracted Ebola from a patient who later died of the virus."

This is a follow on post to an earlier post: http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/10/ebola-or-why-medicaid-expansion-matters.html

1. Duncan wasn't immediately isolated
2. The nurses' protective gear left their necks exposed
3. At one point, hazardous waste piled up
4. Nurses got no 'hands-on' training
5. The nurses 'feel unsupported - fear retaliation for talking

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/15/health/texas-ebola-nurses-union-claims/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

The nurses tell horror stories of how during his initial admitting process he was left in the hall and treated by Nurses wearing minimal protective gear. They then go on to say that when he was finally placed in an isolation ward the gear they were given wasn't much better. Thus it's only a surprise that only two nurses have tested positive for Ebola. And it remains to be seen if they will get the kind of first class care that is necessary for them to survive.

More details:

"The nurses' statement alleged that when Duncan was brought to Texas Health Presbyterian by ambulance with Ebola-like symptoms, he was “left for several hours, not in isolation, in an area” where up to seven other patients were. “Subsequently, a nurse supervisor arrived and demanded that he be moved to an isolation unit, yet faced stiff resistance from other hospital authorities,” they alleged."

They also note:

"Duncan's lab samples were sent through the usual hospital tube system “without being specifically sealed and hand-delivered. The result is that the entire tube system … was potentially contaminated,” they said."

They deny that Presbyterian understood or passed on CDC guidelines:

"The statement described a hospital with no clear rules on how to handle Ebola patients, despite months of alerts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta about the possibility of Ebola coming to the United States."

“There was no advanced preparedness on what to do with the patient. There was no protocol. There was no system. The nurses were asked to call the infectious disease department” if they had questions, but that department didn't have answers either, the statement said. So nurses were essentially left to figure things out on their own as they dealt with “copious amounts” of highly contagious bodily fluids from the dying Duncan while they wore gloves with no wrist tape, flimsy gowns that did not cover their necks, and no surgical booties, the statement alleged."

All this has policy implications. I'd like to think that what we need is a National Health Militia that is more like the Founders would have constituted it had they known what we know now. Further Reading:

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-we-need-national-health-service.html

Source for second half of article:http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-ebola-dallas-20141014-story.html#page=1

What is wrong with our attitude towards Ebola is now coming back to bite us:

http://mic.com/articles/100618/one-powerful-illustration-shows-exactly-what-s-wrong-with-media-coverage-of-ebola

Private Manning and Years of Tradition of Keeping Secrets

One reason why many folks of my Generation and older were shocked and angry when Private Manning "did his thing" is that we come from a long tradition of secrecy. I had friends and family members with clearances who'd sworn a blood oath to keep secrets and took that oath seriously. I was one of them. Sometimes I'd been let in on some of the secrets (illegally since the law doesn't let relatives let relatives in on them) but it was always with the implicit understanding we'd keep them for the family member. Most of the time a relative would point to an article in Science or Popular Mechanics and say "that's what I was working on." They were forbidden to talk about it, kept that promise, and suddenly this joker spills an entire database of secrets out to the press. I never read Manning's material first hand. I was offended by his action. I knew people who wanted to "take him out" for breaking the silence that millions of American men and women had been keeping on what our government was doing. We really believed that "loose lips sink ships" and that most of what we were doing was honorable (even the dishonorable parts) and for the sake of our country and even mankind as a whole. We thought we were the good guys.

In fact I was working with Military Medical ID secrets and had worked on Pay and Personnel, news releases, and other non-classified but equally private information. I took pride in keeping appropriate secrets and also agreed with that "oath keepers" notion that we would never obey an illegal or immoral order. But the reality began to set in even before Private Manning did his thing. And as time goes by I'm realizing that the secrets we were keeping were not good for our country, that such secrets sink ships even more than loose lips about them, and that we really need to rethink this whole "secrecy thing.

Trouble is

Trouble is, when we live in a society where we can trust each other but not those outside our own group that is a dangerous place to be. And we do. Russians, Israelis, Arab Nations, Vatican, French, British, emerging nations, ancient Nations, Chinese and even little countries like Rwanda, all have people keeping secrets. And "loose lips" really do "sink ships." The Pueblo was sunk to protect North Korean secrets. And the USS Liberty was sunk to keep Israeli secrets. We remember these transgressions because they illustrate the "great" (actually it's not great at all) "game" that is international spying, covert operations and terrorism. Folks die to keep secrets. Folks commit suicide, are murdered, are jailed, are defamed and blacklisted, suicided, labeled crazy or otherwise sidelined to keep secrets. And the law gives officials and judges power to keep secrets that shouldn't be kept. And the nature of the release of secrets is such that their release kills people, shocks Wall Street, brings down governments, and hurts people. Truth hurts. Untruth hurts more.

Keeping Crimes Secret Hurts a Lot more.

But keeping crimes secrets hurts a lot more. I had no trouble keeping my secrets because I understood them, was hiding nothing that shouldn't be kept secret, and it was my honor and duty to "fermé le bouche" about them. And I'm hyper-sensitive about such things, so I don't think I have the wisdom to decide which secrets ought not to be kept. But I'm out of government work because I no longer believe that much of what we are doing is right. There is a lot of crime committed in "secret-land" and it needs to be stopped. I believe the Congress needs to amend it's whistle blower and secrecy laws to make it easier to declassify information about crimes and harder for courts and the Government to use secrecy to cover them up.

Legacy of Ashes

Right now I'm reading "Legacy of Ashes" by Tim Weiner, and it is like all books on the CIA, FBI, etc... Told by authors who depend on professional liars for their source information. So it has a lot of tantalizing clues in it, and some areas that contradict what other books on the CIA tell me, and stories I've heard from some of those friends and relatives I mentioned. But it points to the fact that we don't get a straight story, even when the authorities are pretending to come clean. The meat of the story is how the CIA deflected the Church Committee and avoided prosecution after years of violating it's own charter, and that alone makes the book a good read. It's not definitive. Not sure there ever will be a definitive book on the CIA, spycraft involves regularly recording misinformation, disinformation and lies within lies. But it does have it's clues. For example on page 336 it discusses how Colby tried (mostly successfully) to dissemble, deflect and hide CIA domestic spying. Ultimately Colby let himself be a scapegoat too, but first he:

"by laying the issue of illegal domestic surveillance at the doorstep of Jim Angleton, who had been opening first class mail in partnership with the FBI for twenty years."

He then notes the treasonous attitude of Angleton (and by implication most of the CIA) when he quotes Angleton:

"It is inconceivable" he said "that a secret arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government."

Anyone familiar with the CIA and it's 17 fighting, struggling, rival and different internal agencies, or the Special Ops community, to any degree will recognize this quote as part of a "protecting the President" [from knowledge] attitude of many folks in our Security forces. It is dangerous to play with Special Ops. Unemployed Special Ops people formed the Nucleus of Mussolini's Fascist party in the 1900's and they are very dangerous folks to any civilian government. Anyone wondering how Obama can be continuing programs he criticized for reaching office need only hear this quote from Angleton and a few more to understand how hard it is to reign in a security state once it's formed.

More likely they'll quietly remind officials like Presidents where the real power is.

So I'm not onboard with keeping all the secrets that some of our officials want to keep in a democracy. I don't see Snowden the way I saw Manning, though I wish he'd focused on just the "bad secrets" and not spilled the beans on the huge spying capabilities I've known about for years. What switched me is that Angleton's words applied in 1975 and they never stopped spying domestically. And they not only kept secrets but lied. And not only lied, but lied for the private gain of a cabal. That is what hurts most. I innocently helped them betray my country. Snowden is nominally a traitor and were I forced to sit on a jury trying him I'd find him guilty. But so are the folks at NSA and the FBI who are undermining our democracy and subverting our countries basic principles. Like Angleton they assert impunity.

Legacy of Ashes: http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-The-History-CIA/dp/0307389006