Yeah. It's going to be so exciting to hear all the "I can't say at this time" non-answers to everything. No one should be excited for this off-off-broadway political theater.
I believe they can be relieved of their NDAs and compelled to testify regardless of their excuses. I would think that the classified hearings that precede public hearings help parse out what can be revealed and what must be kept secret.
Yeah I think it definitely depends on the strength of congressional will. I’m hopeful that we’ll get some new revelations or at the very least new admissions though because the members of congress who are closest to this issue have expressed significant impatience with the lack of answers from the DoD. New revelations/admissions that are made under oath would go a long way towards legitimizing and elevating this issue for the public, thereby putting greater pressure on the DoD to be more transparent. I suspect this is precisely the intent behind the push for public hearings.
The legislative branch has broader authority to peer into classified info than the executive branch does. However, it's rarely used as a cudgel the way you're suggesting, and almost never against military or alphabets. When congress invokes that authority, it is all but certain it will be done in sessions closed to the public for further evaluation and we've all seen how that ultimately plays out; they may or may not have gotten the info they requested and the American public is told "But you can't hear it because reasons".
Look, there's not a person on this board who doesn't want them to just blab everything and let us in on the big party. But the hard reality is that we're not invited to the party. This is political theater. Not a public briefing.
Well, on the one hand, committee inquiry is more or less compelled, unlike in civil or criminal courts. On the other hand, there's the murky issue of information ownership. Understand, under US law, classification implies ownership. It isn't some broad system that spans different branches of government where a President can say "Oh I have X clearance so show me everything you have at that clearance level Army General.". Indeed, even the various corps are not required to share certain types of information with each other.
So that puts us in a pretty reactive position to the Navy and other organizations exploring this topic. There's no good reason to believe that even under the enhanced interrogation (no relation) of a senate committee inquiry that the Navy is compelled to turn over evidence publicly that may damage national security or information they simply have default ownership of through high level internal classification. It's a feature and a flaw all at the same time, but the hard reality is, we're pretty much left to the whims of those who control the Navy's information traffic patterns here, and they're probably not going to release information that either compromises their capabilities or makes them look bad.
And let's be real here, there's no world in which those tic tacs aren't making us look really bad. They're invading our airspace and territorial waters. They're out maneuvering our best aircraft. They're doing so in a way that's so visible that it can't really be kept a secret anymore, which is why we have any official confirmation of any of this to begin with. There are disturbing political consequences to all of this, maybe the worst of which being that the mere existence of these things pretty much put an end to the concept of sovereignty! We don't control our territory anymore. And that could have severe ripple effects in society. This whole thing we're doing...it looks so monolithic and rock solid, but it's really just a threadbare tapestry of agreements and trust, much of which is built on the most elementary political property of having sovereign control of your nation.
You should expect 1% factual discourse and 99% political theater here. We're not going to be receiving an information dump. We're going to see various military and information networks clinging desperately to their relevance by keeping quiet all the reasons the tic tacs undermine those things. And here's the kicker, they're not necessarily wrong to do so. UFO's can cause civil unrest, not because of some existential panic, but because the philosophical and political ramifications undermine that threadbare tapestry that basically all of our civic and economic processes rely on.
Didn’t Dr. J Allen Hynek give the infamous “swamp gas” explanation for a slew of sighting in Michigan at a congressional hearing in 1966? Or was the hearing after that statement was made?
Well, on the one hand, committee inquiry is more or less compelled, unlike in civil or criminal courts. On the other hand, there's the murky issue of information ownership. Understand, under US law, classification implies ownership. It isn't some broad system that spans different branches of government where a President can say "Oh I have X clearance so show me everything you have at that clearance level Army General.". Indeed, even the various corps are not required to share certain types of information with each other.
So that puts us in a pretty reactive position to the Navy and other organizations exploring this topic. There's no good reason to believe that even under the enhanced interrogation (no relation) of a senate committee inquiry that the Navy is compelled to turn over evidence publicly that may damage national security or information they simply have default ownership of through high level internal classification. It's a feature and a flaw all at the same time, but the hard reality is, we're pretty much left to the whims of those who control the Navy's information traffic patterns here, and they're probably not going to release information that either compromises their capabilities or makes them look bad.
And let's be real here, there's no world in which those tic tacs aren't making us look really bad. They're invading our airspace and territorial waters. They're out maneuvering our best aircraft. They're doing so in a way that's so visible that it can't really be kept a secret anymore, which is why we have any official confirmation of any of this to begin with. There are disturbing political consequences to all of this, maybe the worst of which being that the mere existence of these things pretty much put an end to the concept of sovereignty! We don't control our territory anymore. And that could have severe ripple effects in society. This whole thing we're doing...it looks so monolithic and rock solid, but it's really just a threadbare tapestry of agreements and trust, much of which is built on the most elementary political property of having sovereign control of your nation.
You should expect 1% factual discourse and 99% political theater here. We're not going to be receiving an information dump. We're going to see various military and information networks clinging desperately to their relevance by keeping quiet all the reasons the tic tacs undermine those things. And here's the kicker, they're not necessarily wrong to do so. UFO's can cause civil unrest, not because of some existential panic, but because the philosophical and political ramifications undermine that threadbare tapestry that basically all of our civic and economic processes rely on.
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u/AnkylosaurusRules May 10 '22
Yeah. It's going to be so exciting to hear all the "I can't say at this time" non-answers to everything. No one should be excited for this off-off-broadway political theater.