Lavabit and the Strong Arm of Big Brother USA | 60 comments (60 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Excellent Rant by Juan Cole on Obama (none / 1)

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I expect the American people will realize the present situation of expanded surveillance under the Patriot Act breaches the US Constitution. Obama may try to manage the damage, but with the flight of Snowden he has lost all control. How the White House has handled the issue will get more criticism, hurt Obama's popularity rating and challenges the Democrats in the midterm-election of 2014.

Obama's Reassurances about Domestic Surveillance are not Reassuring
(Informed Comment) - President Obama gave a news conference on Friday in which he addressed the controversy over Edward Snowden's revelations regarding NSA spying on the American people.
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Among the more shameful episodes in the Obama presidency has been his vindictiveness toward whistleblowers and his and Eric Holder's eagerness to use the fascistic 1917 Espionage Act against them. Seymour Hersh, who provoked the last big reforms of US intelligence, would have been charged with espionage by Barack Obama and would either have been executed or would have been given life in prison. In this regard, Obama's record is worse than Nixon's.
The 1917 Espionage Act was enacted just after the US went to war with Imperial Germany. It was twinned with a Sedition Act a year later, as this site explains: "Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a federal offense to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the Constitution, the government, the American uniform, or the flag. The government prosecuted over 2,100 people under these acts."
In other words, the Espionage Act deployed against Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden is a manifestation of war fever and nationalist fascism from the early 20th century, and likely is unconstitutional, just as most of the Sedition Act has been ruled to be. It does not speak well of Mr. Obama that he is using this sort of tool to govern.
Mr. Obama at one point in his press conference called on Edward Snowden to come back to the United States and argue his case. I mean, really. This kind of disinformation and grandstanding can't possibly be necessary, even given the constraints mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Mr. Obama knows very well that if Snowden returned to the US, we would never ever hear from him ever again. He'd go straight to a maximum security prison for the rest of his days on earth and die there.
Bradley Manning was held at a brig by the Marines and was falsely declared a suicide risk so that he could be tortured by being chained naked to his bed for a year and woken up several times a night (sleep deprivation is a torture tactic, as is humiliation via making a prisoner nude. These same techniques were used by the US military on Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib). There is no reason to believe that Snowden would be treated better. Note that Obama's own spokesman, P. J. Crowley, publicly criticized Manning's treatment and was fired for it. Obama had been in a position to stop the torture but did not.
[Links added are mine - Oui]
Under Obama, we have been subjected to a Patriot Act on steroids - 2012