Culture of Corruption

At the end of Philip Girardi's interview with Sibel Edmonds in the American Conservative magazine, he asks her, "What do you think the chances are that the Obama administration will try to end this criminal activity?" And this was her response:

Well, even during Obama’s presidential campaign, I did not buy into his
slogan of “change” being promoted by the media and, unfortunately, by the naïve
blogosphere. First of all, Obama’s record as a senator, short as it was, spoke
clearly. For all those changes that he was promising, he had done nothing. In
fact, he had taken the opposite position, whether it was regarding the NSA’s
wiretapping or the issue of national-security whistleblowers. We whistleblowers
had written to his Senate office. He never responded, even though he was on the
relevant committees.

As soon as Obama became president, he showed us that the State Secrets
Privilege was going to continue to be a tool of choice. It’s an arcane executive
privilege to cover up wrongdoing—in many cases, criminal activities. And the
Obama administration has not only defended using the State Secrets Privilege, it
has been trying to take it even further than the previous terrible
administration by maintaining that the U.S. government has sovereign immunity.
This is Obama’s change: his administration seems to think it doesn’t even have
to invoke state secrets as our leaders are emperors who possess this sovereign
immunity. This is not the kind of language that anybody in a democracy would
use.

The other thing I noticed is how Chicago, with its culture of political
corruption, is central to the new administration. When I saw that Obama’s choice
of chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, knowing his relationship with Mayor Richard
Daley and with the Hastert crowd, I knew we were not going to see positive
changes. Changes possibly, but changes for the worse. It was no coincidence that
the Turkish criminal entity’s operation centered on Chicago.