http://www.nytimes.com/...
As many of you are aware, I am a strong supporter of this President. I believe most people in this country have only the faintest sense of the unprecedented economic challenges he had to face when he took office. I don't believe any President has faced a more vitriolic, wrongheaded and coordinated disinformation campaign directed towards his Administration, and I probably support more than ninety percent of what he has done in terms of policy, foreign and domestic. I worked hard to see him elected and re-elected, and I have a picture of him with his arm around my wife on my bookshelf. No one on this site or anywhere despises the Republican Party more than I do.
That said, the President, a large contingent of the Democratic Party, and I part company on the issue of the NSA--or any governmental or private organization--spying or indiscriminately collecting "metadata" or any other data on me, my family, or anyone else, without probable cause. Maybe that's because I have no political skin in the game, unlike the Schumers, the Feinsteins and others in my Party who insist I'm utterly naive but in reality I suspect just don't want the prospect of another 9/11 hanging over their heads.
So when the New York Times takes the President to task on this issue, yeah, damn right I'm going to highlight it.
President Obama, who seems to think the American people simply need some reassurance that their privacy rights are intact, proposed a series of measures on Friday that only tinker around the edges of the nation’s abusive surveillance programs.
He said he wants “greater oversight, greater transparency, and constraints” on the mass collection of every American’s phone records by the National Security Agency. He didn’t specify what those constraints and oversight measures would be, only that he would work with Congress to develop them.
He'll work with "Congress" on them? Please. Meanwhile, the spying will continue.
[I]n the meantime, the collection of records will continue as it has for years, gathering far more information than is necessary to fight terrorism.
Fundamentally, Mr. Obama does not seem to understand that the nation needs to hear more than soothing words about the government’s spying enterprise. He suggested that if ordinary people trusted the government not to abuse their privacy, they wouldn’t mind the vast collection of phone and e-mail data.
Bizarrely, he compared the need for transparency with showing his wife that he had done the dishes, rather than just telling her he had done so. Out-of-control surveillance is a bit more serious than kitchen chores. It is the existence of these programs that is the problem, not whether they are modestly transparent. As long as the N.S.A. believes it has the right to collect records of every phone call — and the administration released a white paper Friday that explained, unconvincingly, why it is perfectly legal — then none of the promises to stay within the law will mean a thing.
Here's the
White Paper they've offered. It's really an Apologia. Read it and try not to think of John Yoo as it parses out the meaning of "relevance" and the "Fourth Amendment."
And ask yourself why they had to make this argument in the first place.
A while ago (it seems like an eternity) William Greider wrote an excellent piece in The Nation warning us what would happen to this country if we didn't get over our 9/11 fixation.
When President Bush called Americans to enlist in his "war on terror," very few citizens could have grasped the all-encompassing consequences of the proposition. The terrifying events of 9/11 were like a blinding flash, benumbing the country with a sudden knowledge of unimagined dangers. Strong action was recommended, skeptics were silenced and a shallow sense of unity emerged from the shared vulnerabilities. Nearly three years later, the enormity of Bush's summons to open-ended "war" is more obvious. It overwhelmed the country, in fact deranged society's normal processes and purposes with a brilliantly seductive political message: Terror pre-empts everything else.
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My advice for Americans is also an urgent warning: Get a grip, before it is too late. Take a hard look at your own fears, reconsider the probabilities of danger in the larger context of life's many risks and obstacles. The trauma of 9/11 stimulated infinite possibilities for worry - some quite plausible, but most inspired by remote what-if fantasies. A society bingeing on fear makes itself vulnerable to far more profound forms of destruction than terror attacks. The "terrorism war," like a nostalgic echo of the cold war, is using these popular fears to advance a different agenda - the re-engineering of American life through permanent mobilization. The transformation is well under way. The consequences, if left unchallenged, will be very difficult to reverse.
Yeah. We're there.