Obama and Holder Knock Off the 1st Amendment

Dear Mr. President,

“‘We call on the Russian government to cease its campaign of pressure against individuals and groups seeking to expose corruption, and to ensure that the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of all of its citizens, including the freedoms of speech and assembly, are protected and respected,’ said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary. The talk of human rights rang hollow to the Kremlin given the Snowden case. Mr. Putin has suggested that Washington is being hypocritical in complaining about Russian actions while seeking to prosecute a leaker who exposed American surveillance programs.” (Today’s NYT, “Obama May Cancel Moscow Trip as Tensions Build Over Leaker” p. A10) Not only Snowden, but Manning, Kirakou, Drake, Binney and others. And the hits keep coming. The federal appeals court in Richmond, VA, ruled today that reporters have no 1^st Amendment protections when it comes to confidentiality of sources in criminal cases, in this instance, the government’s case against Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent charged with “revealing state secrets”—information about the U.S. cyberattack on Iran—to James Risen of the NY Times. You and Holder must be high-fivin’ it in the Oval Office for knocking off another constitutional guarantee, the 1^st Amendment, to add to your string—the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th,and 8^th Amendments. With the 1^st Amendment gone, no more leaks, no more investigative reporting and no more oversight of government by We the People. The perfect Security State. Mission Accomplished! Also in today’s NYT, (“N.S.A. Imposes Rules to Protect Secret Data Stored on Its Networks”, p. A16) there’s a photo of General Alexander, Director of National Intelligence, in full uniform, a chest full of ribbons and medals, gold stripes up his arms and gold stars on his shoulders, announcing the new 4,000 man-strong cyberteams in the Pentagon’s push for “conducting cyberoffense and –defense operations…” which will be under his command. He also announced new safeguards to prevent another Snowden fiasco. No talk of ending the illegal collection of every phone call, email and mouse click on the internet, though. “Privacy is a kind of power and a right,” Rebecca Solnit said in an open letter to Edward Snowden (http://www.tomdispatch.com/dialogs/print/?id=175726). One by one you eliminate our rights, criminalize assembly and protest, suppress dissent and, at the same time, strip us of any semblance of privacy. That, Mr. President, is called tyranny.

Snowden, Manning and American Justice

Dear Mr. President,

On November 19, 2005 in Haditha, Iraq, 24 unarmed civilians including 7 children, a toddler, 3 women and a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair were gunned down by Marines at close range. None of those Marines spent a single day in prison—charges against 6 of them were dropped, a 7^th was found not guilty and the 8^th was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and reduced in rank. Today Col. Denise Lind refused to drop the “aiding the enemy” charge against Bradley Manning in spite of the government’s failure to show Manning was aware the information he released to WikiLeaks would be read by the enemy, knowledge the defense showed that even his trainers and supervisors were unaware of. Manning has spent more than 3 years in prison, one year under conditions of torture. The military justice system is a travesty. In today’s NYT Op-Ed (“The Drone That Killed My Grandson”), Nasser al-Awlaki says he is filing another suit in federal court demanding the U.S. government explain the justification for assassinating—without evidence, charges, or trial—his American son, Anwar, and his 16-year-old American grandson, Abdulrahman, in drone strikes in Yemen in 2011. In previous attempts to file suit, the court has ruled he has “no standing.” Yesterday a federal appeals court in New York reversed a ruling that prohibited indefinite detention authorized by the 2012 NDAA, ruling that the plaintiffs “lacked standing.” Indefinite detention is now the law of the land. (Today’s NYT, “Challenges To Policies On Terror Are Halted” p. A14) Also yesterday, a federal appeals court in Washington reversed a federal judge’s order to stop groin searches of Guantanamo prisoners. Edward Snowden was right to flee the U.S. He knew if he stayed he’d be locked up, silenced, tortured, never again set foot outside a prison. He knows there is no longer justice in America. The system is rigged, the outcomes whatever the State wants. In our Orwellian system, to spy on the spies is espionage and to reveal criminal activity by the government is treason. In 2008, you said that laws are not subject to the whims of rulers and that justice is not arbitrary and yet, that is exactly the path your administration has taken for the past 4 years, We no longer have a system of justice but a system of tyranny; we are no longer a democracy because democracy requires the rule of law and transparency. Your legacy, Mr. President, what you will be remembered for, is the Man Who Lost Democracy in America.

Obama: A Tale of Betrayal and Cowardice

Dear Mr. President,

In Dreams from My Father, you go deep into the psychology of race, of powerlessness, suppression and rage. Your description of how capitalism destroys cultures and then abandons them is brilliant. Your ruminations on black identity in White America is profound; the desperation and hopelessness in the projects of Chicago where you worked as an organizer gives us some insight into the causes of despair and lack of cohesion and community. As I read this section of your book—Chicago—I kept flashing on where you are now, sitting in the White House, a seat of power and playing the game the way it’s always been played—backroom deals and secret handshakes. How you’ve abandoned and betrayed not only all those people in Altgeld Gardens on Chicago’s South Side, but all the people who elected you, who longed for the change you promised to bring—a return to the rule of law, to morality, to the end of unjust wars and the maldistribution of wealth, to a transparent government and to a reining in of the Banksters on Wall Street. But no sooner did you take office than you grew deaf to the voice of conscience and morality, blind to the suffering of others and divorced from your own humanity. When you wrote that book in 1995, you understood and clearly wanted change, but over the intervening years you changed, turned your back on all that and lost your moral compass but kept up the pretense, and it make me angry that you had the talent, the ability, the rare opportunity and the moral obligation to make a difference, to deliver on your promise of Hope that you campaigned on in 2008, and you threw it away, squandered something that may not come around again for decades—if ever—and the desperate lives left in the wake of your betrayal is on your shoulders, on your conscience, on your soul for all eternity. It is the most immoral, most evil kind of betrayal and one label for that is “traitor.” You are the real traitor to America, Mr. President, not Snowden, not Manning, not Drake or Binney or Kiriakou or any of those who stand up for freedom and justice. Compare yourself to Snowden: he risked everything to reveal the truth, gave up everything—a comfortable life, a comfortable job, a secure future—to expose the high crimes and misdemeanors of your government, knowing his life would never be the same. You, on the other hand, have never risked a thing. You play it safe, take the easy way, the path of least resistance. You are not only a traitor, you are a coward.

Snowden's Leaks Are Grounds to Impeach

Dear Mr. President,

Here’s what you said on June 7, two days after Edward Snowden’s first disclosure of illegal NSA surveillance appeared in the press: “I welcome this debate and I think it's healthy for our democracy,” Yeah, right. Like most of what you’ve said over the past 4½ years, it sounded good and that’s what people wanted to hear, but the truth is, your administration has done everything in its power to silence Snowden, trapping him in a Moscow airport so he has no choice but to ask for asylum in Russia until he can travel safely on to Venezuela or Bolivia or Nicaragua. Putin doesn’t want him but it’s a chance to stick his finger in your eye and he’s not going to pass that up. The debate you claimed you wanted will take place, not in the court of public opinion but in federal courts, no doubt including the Supreme Court. As Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU said, the government has been playing a “shell game” with the Constitution, blocking every attempt to stop the NSA’s illegal surveillance, arguing in Clapper v. Amnesty International that the plaintiffs had no standing because they were unable to show that the NSA was spying on them. In other cases, government lawyers invoked the state secrets privilege and that old standby, national security, to avoid revealing anything about the program. But one 29-year-old hacker (your term) brought all the lying and secrecy to a halt by revealing the truth. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit in San Francisco federal court on behalf of many plaintiffs including Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch and the Council on American Islamic Relations, to stop the NSA surveillance program. Last month, the ACLU filed a similar suit in New York federal court and other suits against the NSA have been filed as well. Without Mr. Snowden, none of this would be taking place. Something else you said on June 7: that the two most important commitments you made on taking office were to keep the American people safe and to uphold the Constitution. Clapper, Alexander, Brennan and others in your administration have lied to Congress and the American people. Snowden has sparked a debate that you yourself have described as “healthy for democracy.” Why then, are you charging Edward Snowden with espionage? And why did you not fire Clapper and Alexander who are guilty of contempt of Congress and have undermined the Constitution? You have failed your oath to uphold the Constitution, Mr. President, and that is grounds for impeachment.

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.

Malala Yousafzai, Edward Snowden, Hope for the Future

Dear Mr. President,

Yesterday was Malaladay at the UN, honoring and celebrating Malala Yousafzai’s 16^th birthday. She spoke to a gathering of the Youth Assembly about the importance and power of education—“One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world”—and called for world leaders to provide free compulsory education for all children. (Her call puts us to shame as we dismantle our public education system.) She spoke about human rights and her belief and faith in nonviolence, a belief learned from her parents, from Mohammed, from Jesus, from Martin Luther King, from Gandhi and others—“I do not even hate the Talib who shot me,” she said. “Even if there was a gun in my hand and he was in front of me, I would not shoot him.” The power of education, the power of love. She was poised, eloquent and certain, and as I write this I am reminded of something you wrote at the end of Chapter 9 in Dreams from My Father: “…in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man’s certainty always threatened another’s.” Reagan’s Freedom Fighters in the 1980s are your terrorists today, which goes back to the Arabic proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Malala’s speech and her call for education and nonviolence put the lie to that proverb however, and she shames all who live by that dictum, who preach and practice hatred and violence, who call whistleblowers traitors, who reward torturers and assassins, who operate in secret, ignore laws and trample human rights, who cannot distinguish good from evil and no longer care. Malala Yousafzai gives hope in this angry, fearful, ignorant world deaf to the cry for peace and common humanity. Edward Snowden, like Malala, also gives us hope. Hope that not everyone has sold out or been cowed by the power of the state. Like Malala, he has defied power to call for education—in this case, education of the public about the excesses and deceit of our government—in hopes of starting a dialogue about whether this is the kind of world we want. And like Malala’s enemies, Snowden’s enemies are doing everything in their power to silence him. I hope there will also be a Snowdenday at the UN to honor this courageous American patriot who believes in democracy and the power of truth and transparency, who believes that a government operating in secrecy is a danger to us all. Edward Snowden and Malala Yousafzai, a new generation of voices for justice and freedom. Listen to them, Mr. President, they are the future.

Snowden and Manning, Obama Untethered

Dear Mr. President,

At Ft. Meade on Wednesday, the defense rested in the Bradley Manning trial after only 3 days and 10 witnesses. The government’s case is so weak that there’s not much to defend against. Few reporters covered it and few papers bothered to report on it—more news not fit to print I guess. Nevertheless, the heart of the government’s case—that Osama bin Laden read WikiLeaks and therefore Manning knowingly provided information to the enemy—was blown out of the water by Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor and WikiLeaks expert who testified that bin Laden didn’t know about WikiLeaks until your administration went hysterical over Manning’s leaks. Zero evidence of the most serious charges, zero case against Manning. Meanwhile, the Moscow airport was a media circus today when Ed Snowden met with human rights activists and Russian officials. Reporters ran up down escalators to get ahead of the crowd, cameramen came to blows and Jay Carney accused Russia of providing a ‘propaganda platform’ for Snowden. One of the meeting’s attendees, Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch, said the US embassy contacted her en route to the airport urging her to tell Snowden that “he is not a human rights defender, he is not a whistleblower, and that he violated the law and should be held responsible” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/12/edward-snowden-accuses-us-illegal-campaign). What hypocrisy! Snowden hurt no one and put no one in danger. He performed a crucial service for democracy by exposing criminal activity and abuse of power, the partnership between government and corporations, and the seamless lies they use to hide it. A few weeks ago you said you were not going to “wheel and deal” to get Snowden but you pressured France, Spain, Portugal and Italy to prevent the Bolivian president’s plane from flying over their countries on the rumor he was on board; Uncle Joe in the Vice’s office was working the phones; today’s NYT reports that every country in Latin America has been warned not to grant him asylum; and you’re calling Putin tonight. I call that wheeling and dealing. For 4½ years you have betrayed the Constitution and the American people and disregarded human rights. In this topsy-turvy Obamaworld, whistleblowers are traitors, murder and torture is humanitarian and people are guilty until proven innocent. You’ve become untethered, Mr. President; you can no longer distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, justice from injustice. And that’s scary.