Obama: More Orwellian than Machiavellian

Dear Mr. President,

I watched a video with clips of Candidate Obama in 2008 juxtaposed against clips of a President Obama press conference after Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tok4s-VM7U4&feature=youtu.be) Here’s what you said in 2008:“No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens, no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime, no more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war, no more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.” After Snowden revealed the scope of illegal surveillance and bald-face lies to Congress and the American public by Clapper, Alexander and others, here’s what you said, picking and choosing your weasel-words carefully: “The relevant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs. These are programs that have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006.” That statement was refuted by numerous legislators and one author of the Patriot Act said they never intended it to be interpreted as you have. Intercepting phone calls and internet traffic is not just illegal, it’s creepy. Here’s what else is creepy: a secret FISA court with no oversight; secret laws that can’t be revealed; assassination of American citizens (and foreigners) without legal recourse; Kill Lists (now called a “disposition matrix”); indefinite detention; force-feeding hunger strikers in Guantanamo. More lies: an article in The Guardian, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/14/obama-secret-kill-list-disposition-matrix) reveals that we still run black sites in east Africa, we still render suspected terrorists to prisons run by Allies in the Middle East and Central Asia, and we still ‘rendition to justice”—the latest euphemism for kidnapping a suspect, hooding him and flying him to the U.S. for trial (Mahdi Hashi, for example). The Obama legacy is more Orwellian than Machiavellian, more Kafkaesque than Alice in Wonderland, and it proves you were not the lesser of two evils in 2012 but the more effective evil. Romney would have been a disaster but the Democrats and the Left would have been forced to come out of their somnolent trance and oppose the evil rather than keeping their eyes closed to it. I read today in the NYT (“Documentary Film is Planned On Schoolgirl Shot by Taliban” p. B3) that Malala Yousafzai has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Edward Snowden should also be nominated. And yours should be rescinded.