A Policy of Lies

I was taken aback to wake up Wednesday to a Morning Edition report about why NPR is not using the word "lie" to "characterize the statements.
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In other words, Trump is literally holding children hostage to get his unpopular border wall. Message at the border: The Trump administration is committing violence against children.

The Trump administration owns its cruel policy of separating families. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon. Post Partisan Opinion Opinion Interpretation of the news based on evidence, including data, as well as anticipating how events might unfold based on past events.

President Trump speaks to reporters at the White House on Friday.

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All the benefits of Digital plus: Join our premium subscribers with unrestricted digital access plus the FT Newspaper delivered to your door. All the benefits of Premium plus: Washington believed intelligence operations were the exclusive province of the executive, a hard-earned lesson taken from the inability of the Continental Congress to protect secrets.

All of the founders would be particularly concerned about the role of the House, since they intended a minimal role for that body in foreign affairs. James Madison, and with it Washington was granted the authority to avoid the usual reporting procedures mandated by Congress — the president was in essence given a blank check to conduct secret operations that he alone deemed to be in the national interest. The spycraft apparatus that Washington built lived on after he left — and grew. No president was more temperamentally inclined to resort to clandestine schemes than Thomas Jefferson.

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The Sage of Monticello is frequently portrayed as a champion of deference to Congress and the patron saint of openness and accountability, but in fact he was a precursor to the imperial presidents of the 20th century. Jefferson utilized the secret service fund to a greater degree than almost any early American president, using it as something of a personal slush fund with which to bribe Native American tribes to cede territory, and funding the first covert operation designed to overthrow a foreign government.

Dating back to his time as an American envoy in France, Jefferson was enamored with clandestine operations, including at one point attempting to covertly acquire a study of a plan from the Spanish government outlining a path for a canal through the isthmus of Panama, and utilizing a source in Holland to acquire information on the inner workings of the Dutch government and plant stories in the Dutch press favorable to Americans interests. All this is left to the President.

In one instance, in , Jefferson used a private citizen to carry a secret letter to an American envoy in France, which contained an elaborate cipher and a statement in support of using private channels for public business. In a sense, early U. Both Jefferson and Madison were drawn to covert operations because they allowed them to project American power on the cheap without having to maintain a large standing military. In a secret letter written in to future president William Henry Harrison — then governor of the Indiana Territory — Jefferson urged Harrison to expand the number of trading houses in Indian-controlled territory so that prominent Indian leaders would accrue large debts and be forced to pay them off with land concessions.

Jefferson would later dissemble about this operation to Congress, particularly regarding his decision to abandon the American-created mercenary army designed to place the disgruntled family member on the throne. The celebrated Lewis and Clark expedition authorized by Jefferson in was more of an intelligence operation than an effort to discover new species of flora and fauna.

One can dismiss the founders as irrelevant to the debate over contemporary intelligence issues by claiming that the United States has evolved beyond their unenlightened ways.

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