Why We the People No Longer Trust Obama

Dear Mr. President,

An editorial in today NY Times (“Details on Spying, Not More Assurances”) is about your “reassurance offensive” in the wake of the NSA surveillance scandal. Monday night you were on the Charlie Rose show: “His promises lacked specificity and some of his descriptions of domestic spying work verged on the misleading… Asked whether the process should be more transparent, Mr. Obama responded with this astonishing statement: ‘It is transparent, that’s why we set up the FISA court.’ ” As the editorial points out, it may be transparent to you but not the public—everything about the FISA court is top secret. Either you’re so cocooned in your delusional world of secrecy that you actually believe this or you’re a blatant liar, neither of which is reassuring. Your credibility is shot, Mr. President, and so is the credibility of your administration. Clapper openly lies to Congress and nothing happens. General Keith Alexander (NSA) and Sean Joyce (FBI) give examples of terrorist plots foiled by the NSA surveillance program and those examples prove nothing (today’s Times, p. A18). The NYC subway plot has been proved over and over to have been the result of Scotland Yard police work, not NSA surveillance. And Joyce had the audacity to claim that a plot to blow up the NY Stock Exchange was foiled due to NSA data, yet no defendants were ever charged with that plot. When Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) asked Gen. Alexander why the FBI couldn’t just get the information they needed through the normal process, he said he “was open to doing it that way,” and when Rep. Jim Hines (D-CT) asked how many attacks were actually stopped by the NSA database, Joyce replied that it was “an almost impossible question…” Right. Meanwhile, in a Senate hearing, Mueller admitted that the FBI has used drones for surveillance in the U.S.; even Feinstein was alarmed at that revelation. And in another article on page 1 of the Times, the FBI’s internal investigation process, over the past 20 years and 150 shootings, has never found an FBI agent to have wrongfully shot anyone in spite of the fact that the FBI paid one victim $1.3 million. Do you wonder why We the People no longer trust you or the government? Do you wonder why foreigners no longer trust you? Easy answer, Mr. President: lack of transparency and abuse of power. Secret spying, secret hacking, secret laws, secret wars, secret deals, all lead to loss of faith, loss of hope, loss of belief. Your words are as hollow as your soul.