President Barack Obama on Friday seemed to acknowledge that the determined effort by the White House and Congress to demonize Edward Snowden has not exactly worked. The White House has put pressure on many people in this town to make clear that Snowden is not to be praised in the media or by members of Congress. Various reporters and new organizations have held the line in mocking Snowden or refusing to call him a “whistleblower” rather than a “leaker.” After all, the fear seems to be that Snowden has to be a traitor or Obama would look like a tyrant. Even high-ranking members have been frog walked back before cameras for uttering a work of praise for Snowden. The problem is that it has convinced few people, even with alteration of Wikipedia and other sites to maintain the party line. Now Obama has come forward to assure people that Snowden is no patriot. No, I guess that title belongs to Obama and others who have engaged in warrantless surveillance and continue to mislead the public on the erosion of privacy and civil liberties. Those patriotic souls include John Clapper who lie under oath to mislead the public about the programs. He is not a perjurer but a patriot in America’s New Animal Farm. Notably, however, not a single reporter asked Obama about the perjury by Clapper. Instead, Obama laid out another set of meaningless measures designed to lull the public back into a comfortably and controllable sleep.
Obama seems to be going through the stages of Kübler-Ross from denial to anger to bargaining to depression to acceptance. Last week, he was in denial and assuring the public that they are not being spied upon even as more stories appeared revealing even broader surveillance programs. He then attacked Snowden and now insists that he is no patriot for throwing away his life to disclose these massive surveillance programs. He ended the week with bargaining, telling the public that he would create a committee of hand-picked experts to review such surveillance — just like his committee ratifying his killing of citizens without charges or convictions.
Obama clearly wants to have unchecked power but not be thought of as authoritarian. He returned to the theme that he can create the due process and review within his own Administration that is obviously lacking in Congress or the courts. He went as far as to say that a simple committee of his making would have avoided the Snowden affair because the public would have accepted his word for the status of their rights and privacy. “There’s no doubt Mr. Snowden’s leaks triggered a much more rapid and passionate response than if I had simply appointed this review board.” In other words, I messed up by not first creating a screen for the programs to give my allies cover. In the meantime, his Administration is moving to remove the greatest danger to their warrantless surveillance programs: people.
What was particularly galling was Obama’s statement that “[g]iven the history of abuse by governments, it’s right to ask questions about surveillance, particularly as technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives.” However, his administration has been classifying even legal argument to prevent such questions from being asked and has pursued both reporters and their sources for any stories informing the public. His Administration is the most anti-whistleblower government in modern history and has abused national security laws in the pursuit of leakers to an extent that would make Richard Nixon blush.
Obama added as one of his great reforms on Friday that he would consider making the legal rationales for these programs more public despite the view that such classification was always ridiculous. So he will make legal arguments public and appoint his own committee to review his own policies.
Finally, he got away with telling the media that Snowden is not a whistleblower because he had “other avenues” to oppose the programs. Maintaining a straight face (and again without serious challenge from the press corp), Obama noted that “he can appear before a court with a lawyer and make his case.” First, by that definition, no one would be a whistleblower since they could all take the suicidal act of filing a public complaint or seeking judicial review. Second, if Snowden revealed the programs to an attorney, he would have been immediately charged. This is an Administration that put reporters under surveillance for speaking with leakers. It is also the Administration that has forced courts to dismiss dozens of public interest lawsuits by classifying the evidence needed to establish standing or the merits of the case. This includes the greatest victory of his Administration in killing the Clapper challenge (that’s right the same guy who lied to Congress recently). The Obama Administration succeeded in getting the Court to reject the standing of civil liberties groups and citizens to challenge the Obama Administration’s surveillance programs. President Obama has long been criticized for his opposition to such lawsuits and his Justice Department has continued a successful attack on the ability of citizens to challenge the unconstitutional actions of their government in the war on terror. The 5-4 opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. insulated such programs from judicial review in yet another narrowing of standing rules. (After claiming that such surveillance programs were too classified to be discussed in courts, they then a few months later discussed such programs in the public only after Snowden’s disclosures).
The level of disingenuous arguments coming out of the Administration now amounts nothing short of open contempt for the public and its intelligence. With both parties working to support the effort, it could well succeed. However, the degree to which Obama feels free to make such transparent arguments show how little he has to fear from contradiction in the media or in Congress. It is simply a problem of optics with a public that still feels uncomfortable with the expanding Imperial President established in the last decade. It is hard to get a public back to sleep when they wake up in a nightmare. That is when you have to tell them soothing stories.
Source: CNN
George Orwell — unsurprisingly — has a great essay on the difference between patriotism and nationalism. See “Notes on Nationalism.” Along with “Politics and the English Language,” and “The Prevention of Literature,” one of his greatest analytic contributions to our intellectual history. Easily located on-line at any number of Internet venues.
Jamal, You must be likin’ Harry Reid. He just said today opposition to Obamacare is racism.
Where I come from, calling someone a ‘patriot’ is an insult
http://ucblibrary3.berkeley.edu/goldman/Writings/Anarchism/patriotism.html
If being a “Patriot” means signing the NDAA and Patriot Act 2, summarily executing anyone without trial or “Due Process,” eavesdropping on anyone at anytime continuously without court order or probable cause, then the definition for Patriotism has changed! It sounds a lot like Orwellian “Doublespeak,” when up is down, go is stop, wrong is right, and the idea that blowing the whistle on government malfeasance is somehow NOT patriotic, then I must be living in another country!
Obama, more than any other president has persecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act. Manning, Assange, and Snowden are NOT spies! The crime here isn’t espionage, but unwarranted government intrusion into our privacy, the illegal arrest and indefinite confinement of anyone (including Americans on U.S. soil) and spying on American citizens.
If turning America into a totalitarian police state, with dictatorial powers residing in the Executive is PATRIOTIC, then someone needs to seriously read the Constitution! Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize when he hadn’t even done anything positive for peace! If anything, the award should go to whistleblowers, not a president who believes he has a right to have a “Kill List” and summarily execute anyone (including U.S. citizens) anywhere.
Any other country that goes along with the NSA conducting such surveillance operations is being naïve, if they want to keep their country’s financial stability intact. The spying is not to find terrorists, but to control and dominate the market, and to get a one-up on any type of diplomatic transaction. This “two faced” policy has been seen in the recent release of State Department communications by Wikileaks. The U.S. (at the UN, and elsewhere) will say one thing publicly up front, and do an entirely different thing behind the scenes. Read “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.”
This whole Neo-Con concept in the New American Century, of U.S. hegemony in the world as a lone superpower, based upon the Wolfowitz Doctrine, is scary and appears to be Neo-Fascist at its roots!
What we are doing domestically with the NDAA, and creating the largest data warehouse in Utah, as well as the summary executions by UAV & JSOC SS Assassination Teams, Extraordinary Rendition & torture, preemptive strikes, all seem to be taken out of the Nazi playbook used in their occupied countries.
Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder has said that those on the president’s kill list and being executed are in fact receiving “Due Process.” SINCE WHEN? I am no lawyer, but I know what Due Process means, and it does NOT mean executing someone without probable cause, charge, trial by a jury of one’s peers (not a military tribunal), right to counsel, right to face one’s accusers, and access to ALL evidence. It also doesn’t mean being held indefinitely, but the right to a speedy trial (no long delays).
Good catch, Evelyn.
To be fair most people who scream at the top of their lungs that they’re patriots are just as statist as Obama. Alot of them only complain about the government jackboot because they or their supporters are the ones feeling it now. For those type of people being against one particular statist is a means to an end for them.
Snowden believes in liberty not jingoistic patriotism
I think someone commented about this in an earlier posting but I think it bears repeating. Jennifer Hoelzer penned a great piece about this issue.
It’s on TechDirt here: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130810/09240524136/jennifer-hoelzers-insiders-view-administrations-response-to-nsa-surveillance-leaks.shtml
I think she stated my concerns eloquently.
The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet
Technology companies have to fight for their users, or they’ll eventually lose them.
Elaine:
That would be glorious. Imagine the perpetual embarassment the U.S. Gov’t would endure for imprisoning a Nobel Laureat, relegating it to the reputation of Myanmar with and its treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi in the eyes of the world.
If that happened, there would be intense pressure on the office of the president to pardon Bradley Manning, or at least commute his sentence.
You people are all a bunch of racist that can’t stand the fact that a black man is president of the United States. Bunch of Tea Baggers. All this is Bush’s fault and you know it. Whitey always trying to bring the black man down. When is the last time you seen a black man smuggling tons of cocaine into the country ? Pounds of weed ? but that shit end up in our community all in an effort to control the black population through the prison system. Ya’ll need to leave brother Obama alone and let the man do his job. White ass crackers
Off Topic:
Bradley Manning’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination backed by 100k petition-signing supporters
Published time: August 12, 2013
http://rt.com/usa/bradley-manning-nobel-prize-410/
The Nobel Prize committee has received a petition that endorses awarding the peace prize to US Army Private Bradley Manning, who is convicted of espionage and facing up to 90 years behind bars for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks.
US anti-war activist Normon Soloman, one of the organizers of the petition, gave the 5,000-page document to Nobel committee member Asle Toje on Monday.
However, Toje said the annually awarded US$1 million prize is “not a popularity contest,” adding that such campaigns do not influence the Nobel Committee in its choice.
“Remaining in prison and facing relentless prosecution by the US government, no one is more in need of the Nobel Peace Prize,” states the petition, which garnered more than 100,000 signatures.
“No individual has done more to push back against what Martin Luther King Jr. called ‘the madness of militarism’ than Bradley Manning,”…
US Army whistleblower Bradley Manning, 25, was found guilty on 20 of his 22 charges for sharing thousands of classified US documents with the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks in late 2009 and early 2010. Among other charges, he was found guilty of espionage, theft, and embezzlement of government property.
According to Solomon, awarding the soldier the Nobel Prize would underline the important role of whistleblowers in promoting peace and democracy.
“Unless we can speak the truth, then peace-making becomes a hollow exercise of rhetoric rather than reality,” Solomon told reporters before submitting the petition.
Former Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Corrigan-Maguire formally nominated Manning in June, saying, “I can think of no one more deserving.”
She believes that his leaks “helped end the Iraq War” by hastening foreign troop withdrawals and “may have helped prevent further conflicts elsewhere.”
Solomon has also stated that Manning’s revelations on America’s views of the Iraq War “stiffened the resolve of Iraq’s government to seek jurisdiction over American troops for criminal actions.”
In his article published by USA Today on July 30, Solomon wrote that “It’s easy to insist that Bradley Manning must face the consequences of his actions. But we badly need whistleblowers like Manning because US government leaders do not face the consequences of their actions, including perpetual warfare abroad and assaults on civil liberties at home. No government should have the power to keep waging war while using secrecy to cloak policies that cannot stand the light of day.”
Here you go professor. Given the nearly completed “privatization” of the “public” government (i.e., public money in private pockets), I thought you might appreciate:
Animal Firm
(From The Triumph of Strife: an homage to Dante Alighieri and Percy Shelley)
Like Squealer with his brush and can of paint
He changes the commandments late at night
Anticipating logical complaint
When animals observe the rueful sight
Of pigs in pants on two legs swilling milk
And playing cards with men to start a fight
Then sleeping in a bed with sheets of silk
Napoleon sells Boxer off for glue
The animals he later plans to bilk
Of that retirement promised as their due
When memories have faded of the past
And snarling packs of dogs enforce his view
That liberties unguarded never last
And promises made glibly vanish fast
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2006
Ross – How are you so prescient to know that the GOP would have been any worse? It’s double damnation for the Democratic party for re-electing this individual when much was known in the first term. Y’all just go back and drink your Kool-Aid, and live in your denial.
He’s truly personified the old saw, “Elect me twice, shame on you.”
Gee whiz. Look what happens when the people let their government keep secrets from them — about anything. I can hardly wait for the inevitable next development in this humiliating farce: namely, the Secret Speech.
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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/31-2
Published on Wednesday, July 31, 2013 by The Guardian/UK
Revealed: NSA Program Collects ‘Nearly Everything a User Does on the Internet’
XKeyscore gives ‘widest-reaching’ collection of online data; NSA analysts require no prior authorization for searches; Sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history
by Glenn Greenwald
Which essentially means that Snowden is protecting Americans against an out of control power sweep by excess political control fraud. He is not just a patriot…he is an authentic HERO!
The more interesting facts is that Snowden was employed by a private outsourced corporation named Booz Allen Hamilton. The”PARENT” corporation to Booz Allen Hamilton is none other than CARLYLE. Carlyle, of course, is an international predator private equity firm with a host of international owners, operating (among other places) out of Dubai these days.
The details of this reality should be a bigger scandal then Snowden’s revelations… It is difficult to believe that this is the core outsource for National Security and there are major questions raised just by the nature of how this ever was put into place, let alone how much authentic National Security is compromised and in the wrong hands…for questionable reasons! PASS THIS AROUND
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton
Manufactured Mendacity and Managed Mystification.
A speech by President Obama.
But I repeat myself.
Snowden’s old man seems to be a pretty good ally. However, he looks like a powder keg, ready to explode, when interviewed. His barrister is smart enough to be @ his side during interviews and pulling on the leash when needed.
Obama IS a Tyrant. He needs to be removed from office. Congress wont do it. Perhaps its time the people do it.
When Sweden and the World gives Snowden the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama can give his back in protest! Then we can break diplomatic ties with Sweden and put the entire country under surveillance until we can instigate a Swedish Spring Revolution and send in CIA weapons to overthrow their Socialist government.