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by res0nat0r 4575 days ago
I find it perfectly acceptable to lie during an open session hearing about top secret programs if those doing the questioning are doing it to be politically motivated, ie to embarrass the President.

If your hearing is actually looking for the truth and not looking to out top secret programs because you have an ideological reason against that, then fine do it in a closed door hearing, where I would think something like this should be done in the first place as to not harm national intelligence.
3 comments
kbenson 4575 days ago
We are then going down the rabbit hole of who gets to decide when it's appropriate to lie, and when not. IMHO, the only appropriate action to take in a case like this is to stop the open hearing as soon as possible, or refuse to answer any questions on the grounds that answering some and not others could be used to determine top secret information. At least then the public can decide whether they feel that is acceptable and lawmakers can decide what that means for them.

Instead, what we had was an official lie while under oath for political expediency.

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shard972 4575 days ago
> I find it perfectly acceptable to lie during an open session hearing about top secret programs if those doing the questioning are doing it to be politically motivated

As opposed to what other kind of motivation? The only kind of questions they ever get are political so it seems like you think that people at the NSA can just lie about just about anything and it's just fine.

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res0nat0r 4575 days ago
The issue is here:

> There is an added wrinkle here, however, is that it is not clear to me whether Clapper could have given a direct (and truthful) answer in a public hearing, as such an answer would have required him to disclose the existence of a then-classified government program. Even a non-answer or evasion could have revealed the existence of operations the NSA was trying to keep secret.

http://www.volokh.com/2013/06/11/did-james-clapper-lie-to-co...

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rosser 4575 days ago
...ie to embrace the President.

Yeah, because Wyden's motivation in asking the questions he asked was totally to buddy up to Obama.

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res0nat0r 4575 days ago
Oops typo. That was supposed to be embarrass. Fixed.
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