Sliding Down the Slippery Slope of Tyrrany

Dear Mr. President,

It’s no surprise that the NSA collects massive amounts of data on Americans. The secret spying on AP and Fox reporters are the tip of the iceberg. Today we learn Verizon turns over phone logs, tomorrow it’ll be AT&T and all the others. According to Senator Love-Them-Drones Feinstein, this is nothing new; it’s been in place for the past 7 years. I think you’re counting on the Facebook generation’s indifferent to this latest invasion of privacy. After all, Facebookers put all kinds of personal stuff out there for people to see. “No problem,” they say. Until it is. I suppose we’ll learn that not only are phone logs collected on business users but also residential users and that, oh, by the way, so are the conversations. After all, there’s that new billion dollar million square foot data center in Utah ready to collect and sift everything we do and say in their search for terrorists at home and abroad. It’s clear that the NSA snoops regard everyone—Islamists, Christians, Afghans, Americans, Uzbeks—as a threat to national security. That’s the way it works sliding down the slippery slope of tyranny. Today I watched John D. McHugh’s short film, “Afghanistan: Drawdown” (http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2013/05/2013529133226564418.html). It follows a company of U.S. soldiers and their Afghan counterparts on patrol in Kandahar province. McHugh filmed there in 2006 and returned to see how well-prepared the Afghans are to take over when we leave at the end of 2014. Anyone watching the film can see that the tens of billions we spent recruiting, equipping and training the Afghans to fight off the Taliban when we leave was a total waste of money. They’d see that the Taliban is still strong, that Afghanistan is as much a disaster as was Iraq, and that when (if) we leave, the fighting will continue, the bloodshed and misery will continue and the Taliban will take control. As for Al Qaeda, they too, won. The fall of the Twin Towers was just the beginning. Look at America pre-9/11 and today. We live in a National Security state where we’re searched and spied on, where speech is no longer free and our rights no longer taken for granted, where the bulk of our budget is spent on war and social services and the social safety net is diminishing. We live in a state of fear bordering on tyranny where the president makes secret laws and secret deals and decides who will live and who will die. Welcome to the new world order. Welcome to Obamaworld.