But can the United States avoid morphing into a monster if its slide into executive lawlessness is not arrested?
Everywhere you look, governments are systematically becoming more and more authoritarian and ultra-secretive. It is as if what they fear most in their citizenry is the old habit of liberty — that quaint passion for discussion, dissent and information it engenders. In a democracy, people put limits on the government. Somehow, that has been turned upside-down. Whatever that topsy-turvy world may be, it isn’t one regulated by the rule of law.
Under normal circumstances, and in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the U.S. government’s master-state illegalities, the U.S. president would be facing impeachment for failing to uphold the Constitution — in particular the First and Fourth Amendments. Barack Obama has turned America into a giant, bugged motel room. No amount of presidential bullshitting or basking in the aura of office will change that.
Obama is now the opposite of Pinocchio — the more he lies, the smaller he gets. His legacy could be the complete disappearance of the man mistakenly elected president in 2008 as an anti-war candidate, and elected again in 2012 as civil libertarian and constitutional expert. Minus the speech glow, he has proven to be an artful deceiver.
Obama behaves like a totalitarian dictator, no matter how many “g’s” he drops from his participles. It was Obama who went on PBS and told host Charlie Rose that the mass surveillance of Americans was “transparent” because it was subject to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). Even Dick Nixon would have sniggered at that one.
It might have helped if Obama had added that FISA itself is an ultra-secret court working with secret laws and utterly without any level of legal challenge to its decisions. It hears one side of the story and gives one side of the story back. And it was on the legal laboratory slab of FISA, deep in the shadows, that the NSA twitched into life based on the body of secret law enacted there.
The people who think this is unfair to President Obama, or — to use the favorite phrase of dutiful dullards — “over the top”, should give a moment’s thought to Obama’s imperial assault on another part of the Constitution, the Fifth Amendment. You know, the one that promises that someone can’t be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. Consider the words of Rosa Brooks, professor of law at Georgetown University:
“When a government claims for itself the unreviewable right to kill anyone, anywhere on earth, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals, it undermines the rule of law.”
Professors are so diplomatic. Whether you do the deed with a drone, a Saturday Night Special or a baseball bat, when you act like that there is no law. Unless, like Al Capone, you think you are the law.
Under Obama, the U.S. is using secret forces within the U.S. military to mount what the Congressional Research Service calls “highly sensitive combat operations” on a world-wide basis in war and non-war zones alike.
Like the massive NSA domestic spying effort, these wars and black-ops are all but unknown to the American people and are happening without the authorization of Congress. They occur like insider-trading, opaque, self-interested and illegal — unless one subscribes to the notion that a secret legal memo for the president trumps the Constitution.
That explains why Obama is the secrecy president, except when working the pop-star circuit with fatuous television hosts for whom the whole universe is a photo-op. He is not what he appears to be. In fact, no president has gone after citizens who leak classified documents more than Barack Obama has. When the Executive Branch is making 92 million classified decisions a years, how can secrecy not be your watchword? And how long will it be before the flow of unclassified information gets shut off by a government whose favorite mode of entry is through the back door?
The unkindest cut of all? Despite the president’s bare-faced lies about the NSA’s hoovering of information from the phones and emails of U.S. citizens, that’s not even the ground floor of the horrible deception Obama has worked on his own people, his allies and the world.
A special unit within the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Special Operations Division, has been handing over NSA intelligence to other agencies like the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service for use in their investigations. The shared information is given with the proviso that the receiving agency conceal where it came from. In court, that means the prosecution begins by making up the facts about how their case was built, thereby removing the accused’s right to an informed defence.
So much for the confidentiality of the NSA program. So much for the rule of law.
The extent to which once-free people have become subject populations is captured by the fact that so many people have been left unmoved by the colossal heroism of Edward Snowden. Demonizing stories about this remarkable American are as routine as they are cheap and nauseating — the specialty of columnists with million-dollar vocabularies and 29-cent hearts. You don’t have to be James Joyce to understand the difference between the words “espionage” and “whistleblower” — and to figure out this court is full of kangaroos.
For a long time, but beginning in earnest after 9/11, democracy has simply been getting too burdensome to maintain, too difficult to think about, too inconvenient for the purposes of the network of oligarchs now running the planet. Between elections, everyone is in the gulag of authoritarian government wherever they live. As for elections these days, they are pulled off, not contested — mere exercises in crowd-control and grade D propaganda, devoid of national debate or mature legitimacy.
As a result, leaders everywhere are off the leash. Vladimir Putin just put a dead man on trial and convicted him. Obama was up on network television last week to tell the biggest lie in U.S. history — that Uncle Sam wasn’t spying on his own citizens. A billionaire Bilderberg-er now owns the newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein. David Cameron has proclaimed that the way to deal with the Murdoch phone-hacking fiasco is to regulate the entire press.
The cancer of the surveillance state, which has metastasized since 9/11, is out of all proportion to any threat it was once designed to thwart. The decade of fear has turned into the industry of permanent fear. We once were intelligent enough to understand that presidents and generals who break the law and lie to the people have no role in a democracy. We once were wise enough to regard the people who tipped us to those things as national heroes — Ellsberg, Woodward, Bernstein.
Now, Assange is holed up in an embassy, Bradley Manning is rotting in prison, and Snowden is the temporary guest of his native country’s former great enemy — until a treacherous extradition order or a CIA hitman enters the drama.
And oh yes — Congress voted not to defund the NSA.
What do they call it when you’re not a democracy anymore?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Michael Harris
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