The Spymaster-in-Chief.
James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, is a desperate liar caught with pants down, shoes off, and socks and undies tossed in a ball in the corner.
Everything the United States once stood for, and retains today only in the exhausted rhetoric of politicians or old Superman comics, has been betrayed by this man and his contempt for the truth.
A few months back, Clapper was asked by the congressional committee which oversees the National Security Agency (NSA), whether the agency gathered information on Americans without warrants — including their telephone calls and emails.
Clapper said it didn’t. This lie was repeated by Keith Alexander, the chief of the NSA. Just a few months later, secret court orders came to light which clearly showed that Verizon, a huge U.S. telecommunications company, had been ordered to turn over the phone records of millions of Americans to the NSA on a daily basis for 90 straight days.
When asked about his whopper to Congress, the impertinent little fascist, Clapper, replied in part that he had given “the least untruthful answer.”
Stephen Harper might be impressed with that kind of logic. But Barack Obama? The guy who was dead against warrantless wiretaps while running for president? The wanna-be closer of Guantanamo? The constitutional law expert?
Yes, that guy. Obama has given his “full support” to his director of National Intelligence. And that’s with full knowledge that NSA analysts can listen in to domestic U.S. telephone calls.
That means that the most powerful man on earth accepts lies (surely the laconic version of “least untruthful answer”) as best practice.
You can lie to citizens after violating their most basic constitutional rights and this president will back you.
Congress has been fully misinformed, so things are A-OK.
With this disgraceful endorsement, Obama accepts that the tarnish that has besmirched his once-great country is beyond the power of Brillo pads and caustic acids.
For as it also turns out, the U.S. government has not just been lying to, and spying on, Americans under a program called Boundless Informant — a name sure to give every police-state-patriot a woody — they have been lying to and spying on their friends and allies.
Soon President Obama will be going to Germany. They have a question or two over there they would like answered before he gets down the gangplank of Air Force One. WTF is the United States doing with information on German citizens — and why are the Americans spying on Germany more than on any other EU nation?
As one German official put it, the NSA tactics come right out of the playbook of the Stasi — the former East Germany’s ruthless secret police. Editors at the Guardian were listening. Does Obama now preside over the United Stasi of America, the paper asked?
European Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding had the same, outraged question: “What is the United States doing with personal information about Europeans?”
And then there is China. The Obama administration, with his band of travelling hypocrites who used to go by the name of diplomats, has been kicking the stuffing out of Beijing for years as the world’s worst practitioner of cyber-espionage and hacking.
It turns out that the Big Hoover does not belong to the Chinese, but to a bunch of techno-sneaks who work in a billion-dollar building in Mormon country deep in Utah. Talk about power. From behind this high-tech duck-blind, they can listen in on their own grandmothers.
What makes this situation worse is that after the NSA gave a special briefing to belatedly inform U.S. legislators about what they’d been surreptitiously up to, only 47 out of 100 senators bothered to attend. But when Democratic Representative Loretta Sanchez got a briefing, she was aghast — noting that the spying was “broader than most people even realize.”
Even without the constitution-killing proof that the United States has been spying on its own people, the place hasn’t been your father’s America for quite a long time.
A few markers.
Trust in Congress has fallen to single digits in recent national polling. The most popular group with Americans? The military, at 76 per cent. In the Marines We Trust.
Detroit, which in living memory was the industrial heart of the U.S., is now officially defaulting on its $18.2 billion worth of bonds. It’s gone from “See the USA in your Chevrolet” to taking a few cents on the dollar from your Motor City bonds.
Then there is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes’ book Garbology. In it, he makes the point that America’s biggest export is not what you might think. “America’s biggest export is trash, the scrap paper and metal we throw away … The Chinese buy it, make products out of it, sell them back to us at enormous profit and we turn it into garbage again.”
Who would have thought that George Washington’s country would come down to world garbage king and planetary sneak?
James Clapper and Keith Alexander should be fired, not cuddled under a bad president’s protective wing. That won’t happen.
Instead, whistleblower Edward Snowden will be given a cell next to Bradley Manning — preferably for life. In America these days, patriots go to jail and fascists rise faster than flames up the dining room curtains.
That is assuming, of course, that Snowden, like Julian Assange, will eventually be extradited — an event that might spare them both an unexpected encounter with a remote-controlled death-toy directed by some soulless geek in Utah thinking that he’s doing God’s work.
With Stephen Harper sweating through his shirt over a new war he may have to participate in, and a free-trade deal he may not get, he is probably not giving much thought to the fact that Canadians have undoubtedly been spied on by the United States.
Harper is always talking about “protecting” us. Now would be a good time for him to ask Obama, between pints of Guinness in Northern Ireland, if the NSA has snagged our phone calls and emails, eh?
And when the PM gets home, he should do something else. He should prove to Canadians that what the United States is doing to its citizens — grossly, massively, and illegally spying on them — is not being done by the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in this country.
I know, I know — we have Peter MacKay’s word on it that even though he recently gave the green light to the CSE to gather ‘metadata’ in Canada, the spooks were also given strict instructions not to snoop. Canadians need to see the legislation and the regulations the Harper government has put in place to prohibit and prevent such fascist erosions of our freedoms.
As for Peter Mackay’s word — he was the guy who once said that no Conservative would ever be thrown out of caucus for voting his conscience on the budget. Minutes later, his former colleague Bill Casey was orbiting Pluto, well and truly thrown out.
Mr. Harper, have the Americans spied on us or not?
And oh yes, are you spying on us?
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