Dick Cheney on Monday called NSA leaker Edward Snowden a traitor, and Snowden shot back that given Cheney’s own lies about Iraq, it is an honor for any American to be accused of treason by the former vice president.
On Monday evening, Barack Obama came on Charlie Rose and insisted that the NSA would never misuse the telephone records it collects on all Americans because it would be illegal and that there are safeguards against that sort of thing. Obama did not say why he thinks the government has a right to see your telephone records given that you haven’t done anything wrong and the 4th Amendment hasn’t been abrogated. For the first time in his presidency, I felt as though Obama were looking me in the eyes and lying to me a la Cheney. I don’t know what his ulterior motives are in this, but that he has some seems obvious.
So for those who have forgotten, or for the youngsters who’ve come to consciousness since 2008, let us just review the lies of Dick Cheney and his colleagues in the Bush administration that cost so many American and Iraqi lives, and let us just contemplate whether we really just want to trust Obama that the US government wouldn’t act in illegal ways.
Maybe I am naive, but I feel that we, the American people, have to give up some of our rights for the sake of our protection in the current climate of terrorist plots of mass, and disruptive, destruction. If the three branches of government are involved…if Congress has been alerted and a judicial review is in place…that Obama is trying to provide safeguards to protect our freedoms, as much as possible. Much like the Second Amendment arguments for maintaining a militia…that times have changed since the days of writing the Constitution, so, too, the terrorist plots, 9/11 and subsequent plots that have been foiled, have changed the landscape of freedom in this country, such that with proper safeguards, limited invasion in our privacy is warranted. Of course, I could be wrong. I remember thinking when George W. Bush was contemplating war against Iraq, I thought, and trusted, that an intelligent President would never ever start an unjust war. I still remember the sinking feeling when he unleashed ‘shock and awe’ on Iraq, and thereby destroyed much of my faith in the goodness of a President of the United States.
No, Peter, I don’t have to give up my constitutional rights. They are in the constitution. I have a right to them. You can’t even ‘give up’ your constitutional rights. You are stuck with them.
Our rights can be unconstitutionally taken away from us but we cannot give them up.
WOW, thanks this is one a few times we agree;)
I certainly am uninterested in giving up my Constitutional rights, especially for a threat as minuscule as terrorism: more Americans are killed by … well, you name: smoking cigarettes, gun violence, traffic fatalities, cancer, and on and on. If you start giving things up to be safe from terrorists, you lose those rights and you’re still not safe.
Think about it: The US spends more than $500 million per victim on anti-terrorism efforts. Cancer research spending is $10,000 per victim.
In addition, we’ve been fed a soup of lies from Congress and from the Executive Branch. The protections provided by FISA? Well, they never disapprove an application, which sounds a lot like they are not much into protecting the public. And with everything secret, we are required simply to trust. I don’t. The government—ANY government—lies too much: to protect and increase its power.
I know you’re sincere, but really: you should read some history.
Yes, times have changed, Peter-we have an Empire now….the kind our Forefathers despised. And Empires make enemies.
And to protect against enemies you have to have a police state. Maybe you should advocate dismantling the bases in the Mideast and bringing the troops home as the enemies then dramatically decline in number.
PS. You should have had a twinge of discomfort also,if not a sinking feeling, when you heard about Obama’s surge in Afghanistan and perhaps a shiver at the latest Obama drone….
Peter, you don’t need to give up any of your liberties for the sake of security. There’s a much easier way to go about securing our country: Give up our imperialist, expansionist policies and especially in the middle east.
How about an administration that provides the strategic direction and develops a comprehensive set of actions to ensure a vibrant academic, manufacturing and financial base for America’s future? One that produces solutions to national challenges in energy, health, environment and the economy. We need something that offers hope for good jobs, new innovations and a higher standard of living.
It really is that simple. Stop getting involved in other people’s (countries’) business, and focus on our own! Then there won’t be any need for PRISM or any other drastic security measure… not that there already is one.
I really don’t get it. We have educated people, we have all the natural resources we need, we have all the energy sources that we need, we have more than enough food to feed everyone in the country… why can’t we just focus on US? Pun intended.
Yes, Peter, you ARE naive. No. peter. Bush was NOT an “intelligent” president.
If he’s naive then you’re being intentionally ignorant. I surely don’t agree with his politics and what went down in Iraq but you can’t deny that was intelligent. link to keithhennessey.com
“If he’s naive then you’re being intentionally ignorant. I surely don’t agree with his politics and what went down in Iraq but you can’t deny that was intelligent.”
I’m not sure what this means. Peter is charged with being naive, but judging by the link you offered you switched to talking about G W Bush being intelligent. Are you saying that Bush’s invasion of Iraq was intelligent? Do you have the slightest clue of the horrors inflicted on that nation since shock and awe and the horrors that will endure for decades – civil strife, birth defects from depleted uranium, limbs lost to unexploded cluster bombs, etc.?
If you ask our Responsible Historians, everything is in the text of certain documents and how you parse and syntactify the definitions of the terms. “Treason” under the Constitution is simply these few words:
With some expansion in the US Code, at link to law.cornell.edu
There is a whole literature, with varying degrees of cogency and accuracy, showing that Cheney lives in a very fragile glass house regarding his disparagement of Snowden, albeit very well guarded by phalanxes of “security forces,” including of course lifetime Secret Service protection.
Here’s a few examples that hit the salient points of actions that warrant the charge that CHENEY is the traitor, in the worst possible way:
link to georgewashington2.blogspot.com
link to oneifbyland.blogspot.com
I guess I we should just leave it to Bill and Joe to tell us what actually is, what and who is guilty of what, in this swamp of perversion and venality that is the postnational-corporatized, privatized-profit, socialized-loss Great Game, the one that’s killing our children’s planet so the Few can ‘live large’ now… and maybe worry that Cheney might actually live to darken our counsels and plague us essentially forever, thanks to Innovative Technology: link to forbes.com
I don’t know about Bill, but I am honored to be included in the fascinating cosmology that is the topic of your every comment.
Larry Wilkerson has suggested that the NDAA was always more about civil unrest than “terrorism.” Any thoughts?
Your use of quotation marks in referring to “Terrorism,” tells the tale. It means whatever the authorities want it to mean, as Snowden would say, “as a matter of policy.”
Sure, it’d be great to have awareness of malcontents worldwide that might conceivably grow into “some sort of threat” (a plausible definition of terrorism), but wouldn’t it be smart to be aware and prepared for threats closer to home?
That would be me and you, regardless of what you have done or even intend to do….its a matter of YOU as a POTENTIAL terrorist, which strictly speaking, each and every one of us is.
The government doesn’t “see” your phone records without a warrant. That’s the point.
The data files get dumped into a metaphorical box, but they aren’t allowed to look into the box without a warrant.
Anyway, “George Bush did it so therefore everybody does it” is not a terribly compelling argument.
You went to the passive mood. My phone records didn’t ‘get dumped.’ They were stolen by the government, which then stored them permanently. Snowden maintains that the analysts all have direct access to them at will, and he would know.
“Snowden maintains that the analysts all have direct access to them at will, and he would know.”
Don’t be too sure that Snowden “knows” everything of which he speaks. Snowden is beginning to sound a little bit full of himself. In Snowden’s internet Guardian Website interview yesterday he claimed that the US Government has “openly declared me guilty of treason.” The US Government has done no such thing. The US Justice Department is trying to determine what charges to bring against him, but it has not declared him “guilty of treason.”
A second example of Snowden flattering himself over his perceived self-importance was his statement that the US Government cannot cover things up by “jailing or murdering me.” This is self-important drivel. No one is going to murder Snowden. The man fantasizes.
His third whopper was his statement that his “leaving the United States was an incredible risk” because “there was a distinct possibility I would be interdicted en-route.” While he clearly violated policy by not submitting a travel request in advance, no one was going to “interdict” him en-route. More self-flattering fantasies.
Snowden was a relatively low-level technical employee who had, or gained access to, some material that probably was not even in his portfolio. I doubt that Snowden possesses any intelligence information that the Chinese don’t already know more about than he does. It would be in China’s interest (and China has the ultimate say in what Hong Kong does) to turn such a self-flattering and bloated purveyor of perceived self-importance over to US authorities.
US officials like Representative John Boehner, as well as V.P. Dick Cheney (Hello – the subject of Cole’s post?), and others have called him a traitor. How is that not being “openly” declared a traitor? He has justification for what he says. He did not say it was official or legally declared by an act of Congress, executive order, or specific Justice department charges, which may be pending anyway.
Is he fantasizing being jailed?
When you send drones to kill American citizens deemed terrorists without a trial to defend themselves, or the government to prove its claims against them, he has reason to be worried he would be targeted in some murderous way. He’s not so much fantasizing here as having an over-active paranoia, but it is based on established precedents or policy.
Had NSA and/or FBI officials known he left, why he left, and that he may have sensitive, if not classified, information on him, they could easily have put an “APB” out on him to interdict him before he got away. How is that not an unreasonable possibility or concern?
Reduced to picking nits and petty personal denigration and disparagement by way of impeaching the dude? Here, of all places? What purpose does that serve, in the greater Manichaean madness? Sad.
Yeah, “the Government” hasn’t charged him with treason. Well, no public actual legal indictment yet. But on the other hand, a google quickey yields stuff like this, from U.S. News
“Feinstein calls Snowden a traitor” — link to upi.com What’s her position in government, again?
And of course from the sneaky-pete, evil end of our shadow government, you got Dick Cheney (see this very blog) and John Bolton, link to thegatewaypundit.com, a fella who can actually say with a straight, well, florid face,
You go, Bolton. Preferably far, far away…
And for somebody who is constantly implying long, deep involvement in Important Serious Stuff and things, it’s interesting that one would cast doubt on the potential for someone in Snowden’s circumstances to be disappeared. Granted that our sneaky-petes have shown some clumsiness in their tradecraft over the years, as with Castro’s beard and cigars, and that whole Afghanistan-bin Laden thing…
Further to my reply to Chris M. and Mr. McPhee above, it occurs to me that a basic civics lesson is in order here. Regarding Snowden’s spurious claim that the US Government has openly declared him a traitor, and both of your statements supporting said spurious claim, let’s examine your examples.
Former V/P Dick Cheney is just that, a former vice president. He in no way represents the US Government today.
John Boehner represents the 8th Congressional District of Ohio and is Speaker of the House. As such, he speaks for his congressional district and, when authorized as Speaker, for one half of the legislative branch. He in no way speaks for the US Government.
Diane Feinstein represents California in the Senate. She speaks only for California or, when authorized by Harry Reid, for one half of the legislative branch. She in no way speaks for the US Government.
John Bolton, former State Department official and UN Ambassador is no longer in government. He in no way speaks for the US Government.
No legitimate representative authorized to speak for the “US Government” has declared Snowden “guilty of treason.”
I’m increasingly less interested in Snowden (aside from the drama of the thing, which cannot be denied), and more interested in seeing the substance behind his assertions. THAT, and only that, are what is important.
The substance may be released so as to finesse the predictable responses from people like Clapper, who can then be serially unmasked, leveraging their impact. I have no way to know, but guys like Snowden are, in fact, generally pretty detail-oriented and methodical about things, and if the Powers That Be could with a nod and wink see his disappear I’m sure they’d do it. He’s beginning to look like WAY too much of a hero and role-model.
The reality is that Manning is being made an example of, so all those other E-3’s don’t forget their place. Snowden, would, in the culture of CIA, indeed be considered a Traitor and referred to as such internally and in operational terms. One way or the other, there is a huge and massive imperative for him to be made an example of.
The more he speaks up for himself with the eloquence he has shown so far, the more weight will need to be brought down on his putative example. Still, like I said, this thing is just starting to play-out, and that appears to be the intent of GG, LP, and Snowden. This really is the way they need to play their hand, but they are in very, very deep water, and are going up against the most sanctimonious gang of elite liars this country has managed to produce.
The “treason” talk is ridiculous. Snowden was on a political crusade, not working on behalf of the enemy.
Which is also why the claim that he has reason to fear a drone strike is equally ridiculous. Has he joined al Qaeda? Is he even suspected of joining al Qaeda?
You went to the passive mood. My phone records didn’t ‘get dumped.’ They were stolen by the government, which then stored them permanently.
Well, no. For one thing, you don’t own your phone records. If we’re going to have an intelligent conversation about what’s going on, we need to use words that are accurate, not merely emotionally gripping.
(What am I to make of this deflection, anyway? Suddenly we’re out of the arena of privacy rights and searches, and into pseudo-llibertarian intellectual property rights flights of fancy? What does that say about the privacy/search issues?)
For another, “the government” in your first usage is a computer program that operates automatically. The passive voice is the right one to use here, because it accurately conveys the very lack of active involvement in going through and storing the records that is the actual case. It is when the FBI or NSA looks into the box that the active case becomes appropriate.
Snowden maintains that the analysts all have direct access to them at will, and he would know.
Just as every cop on the beat, with his flashlight and slim-jim, maintains the capacity to look in windows and enter cars when he shouldn’t be doing so. Do we take away flashlights and slim-jims, or do we build legal protections to their usage?
According to the 4th amendment my personal effects are safe from unreasonable search and seizure, and who I call on my phone is a personal effect.
They have been unreasonably and unlawfully searched and seized, which is a form of theft.
Since the NYT was told by CIA whistleblowers that there were people in the agency attempting to discredit me by surveillance, I suspect the records were examined by more than a computer program. I suspect a Snowden type analyst snooped into them.
You are being terminally naive if you think the government can store all those records and that there won’t be abuses of our rights.
No, professor, who you call on your phone is not a “personal effect.” You work at a university. You must know someone at the law school. Kindly run that theory by him, and let us know what he says.
No, professor, an unwarranted search is not a theft. Again, run this by any of your law-school friends.
You seem to be making quite a leap from “surveillance” to “snooping into my phone calls.”
You are being terminally naive if you think the government can store all those records and that there won’t be abuses of our rights.
…and exactly which part of my question, “…or do we build legal protections to their usage?” struck you as being naive about the possibility of abuses?
This may date me, but my English teacher illustrated the passive voice by quoting Reagan on the Iran-Contra scandal: “Mistakes were made”. It’s used when you want to obscure the subject of the sentence. WHO made mistakes???
And are we 100% confident that “???” will not make any more mistakes and will follow all the applicable laws and safeguards and the intend of the Constitution, whoever they are?
“Mistakes” like hiring people like Edward Snowden, who Dick Cheney is his own words clearly thinks is a traitor, and giving his system administration privileges so he has master keys and unfettered access to NSA computer systems and can do anything he wants no matter what the rules are?
We are LUCKY that the NSA made the mistake of giving Edward Snowden the keys the the kingdom, and he “betrayed” our country by informing its citizens what its government was hiding from it, instead of simply spying on his ex-wife, or selling secrets to North Korea.
You are a fool to trust the reassurances of the government that they (OR ANYONE THEY HIRE, OR ANYONE THEY CONTRACT) will not abuse the information they’re gathering.
Mistakes were made. Not only by the government, by the NSA, by the government contractors, but by people like YOU for trusting them.
Don, could you kindly quote anything I said in which I trusted the reassurances of the government?
I specifically wrote in my comment that we needed to create legal safeguards to prevent abuses by those in authority. If that strikes you as too trusting, I really don’t know what to tell you.
Noting glaring logical and factual holes in one side’s case does not, in fact, commit me to an unquestioning acceptance of the other side’s case. I thought we would have this concept pretty well understood after all of the “You love Saddam” nonsense a decade ago.
Sad to say, it was not long into his first term that I began to believe that Obama was looking me in the eyes and lying to me. Though the Bush and Obama styles are distinctly and deliberately different, there has been so much policy continuity between them that I have begun to think of the last 12 years as the Bush-Obama era.
“Sad to say, it was not long into his first term that I began to believe that Obama was looking me in the eyes and lying to me.”
If you and others enamored of candidate Obama had been paying more attention, you would have been more skeptical of anything he said before he was elected. He once spoke compassionately of the Palestinians, but after the Reverend Wright got enormous flack over that an other issues, Obama dumped him and the Palestinians and headed for an AIPAC conference where he told the Israeli lobby all they wanted to hear, including giving Israel’s right-wing government $30 billion in arms. Then there was his promotion of nuclear energy and “clean coal” indicating he was Big Energy’s guy. If those didn’t cause people to be skeptical some of his votes as Senator Obama should have done the trick – like instantly supporting the bank bailout that in its original form was an open checkbook for Wall Street.
Yep, thanks Bill
I wouldn’t say that I was “enamored” of candidate Obama. In fact, he wasn’t my first choice among the Democratic field. But I do confess that when he was elected, I suspended political disbelief and bought into the hope that the Obama campaign’s mantra of “change” actually meant something. And God knows how much change truly was greatly needed.
But as I noted above, it was not very long before I was disabused.
It must be somewhat surreal to be called a traitor by a lying, torture-enabling war criminal like Cheney.
“On Monday evening, Barack Obama came on Charlie Rose and insisted that the NSA would never misuse the telephone records it collects on all Americans because it would be illegal and that there are safeguards against that sort of thing.”
It is understandable why Obama would say this. He was selling (to put it charitably) this program. But it would call for enormous naivety to believe there are enough safeguards to prevent someone inevitably abusing this trove of information. The fact that Edward Snowden revealed so much about this NSA program makes it obvious anyone with access to the database can use it for his or her purposes – for good or for ill.
……anyone with access to the database can use it for his or her purposes – for good or for ill.
And with thousands (or is that tens of thousands?)now parked in the unregulated security/military/corporate/politico revenue manipulation stream, and thousands more sure to join one of America’s few ‘growth industries’, you can be absolutely certain they will. For good, and particularly for ill.
Like these opportunities:
link to nsa.gov
link to nationaldefensemagazine.org
link to workingmother.com
link to indeed.com
Opportunity everywhere!
A disturbing aspect of all this was brought to my attention today by German novelist Juli Zeh, writing in the Guardian
link to guardian.co.uk
It’s that you change your behaviour when you know you’re being watched (business schools call it the Hawthorne Effect – if a worker is aware that a manager is around they stop looking at Facebook and get on with some work). I’ve known for as long as I’ve used email that it’s unwise to use it for anything confidential. Any more than such common-sense restrictions is oppressive.
And this level of surveillance is altogether wrong – the government (of any country) has no business knowing what books I buy from Amazon, who my Facebook friends are, or what I choose to Google.
Some people defend widespread government surveillance on the grounds that finding the bad guys is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Speaking for myself, if I want to find a needle, I look in the sewing-box.
I do take some comfort in the fact that instituting such widespread data-mining is probably a sign that the NSA are pretty incompetent, wasting their time building a huge haystack in the hope that there will be some needles in it.
There may even be some blowback – I could go back to visiting bookshops and buying books in the old non-traceable way. Unless of course someone matches my credit card details to their stock records. Oh well, at least I can make it difficult for them.
war makes money for the leaders and the people poor the very bigggest and worst part… many of our people die.but to suply arms for syria is not doing anything but making the whole world in grat danger. and they eat the organs of their kill.who would wannt their son,their daughte,their father,their mother,their cousin,their uncle,their aunt killed but cut open to have their heart eaten.we do not need to get into this. we need to realize we had 4 men killed in benghazi only 9 months ago and they were denied help so why should we help these people who can turn on us or other countries with arms we have given.we should be kept safe and not have our men killed in a war of terror.and the winds have not shifted and you can read between the lines.
Apart from circumventions of the 4th Amendment, questions can be raised as to whether, on balance the NSA and its accompanying ‘National Security State’ is not itself a net security risk.
Consider this extended quote from the Dana Priest and William Arkin book on our current dependence on private contractors working for profit both in and out of the ‘system’:
“What started as a clever temporary fix has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal government is still even able to stand on its own. Consider the following: At the Department of Homeland Security, the number of contractors equals the number of federal employees. The department depends on more than three hundred companies for essential services and personnel, including nearly twenty staffing firms that help DHS find and hire even more contractors. At the office that handles intelligence, six of every ten employees are from private industry. The National Security Agency, which conducts worldwide electronic surveillance, hires private firms to come up with most of its technological innovations. The NSA used to work with a small stable of firms; now it works with at least 480 and is actively recruiting more. The National Reconnaissance Office cannot produce, launch, or maintain its satellite surveillance systems, which photograph countries such as China, North Korea, and Iran, without the four major contractors it works with. Every intelligence and military organization depends on contract linguists to communicate overseas, translate documents, and make sense of electronic voice intercepts. The demand for native speakers of target languages is so great, and the amount of money the government is willing to pay for them is so huge, that fifty-six firms compete for this business. Each of the sixteen intelligence agencies depends on corporations to set up its computer networks, communicate with other agencies’ networks, and fuse and mine disparate bits of information that might be indicative of a terrorist plot. More than four hundred companies work exclusively in this area, building classified hardware and software systems.”
Priest, Dana; Arkin, William M. (2011-09-06). Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (pp. 182-183). Hachette Book Group. Kindle Edition.
Just curious, it would be nice to hear from the Deep People here, with their undisclosed Deep Histories, where on the spectrum of information-gathering from Humint to Elint this NSA “Hoovering” (multiple puns intended) of All Available Data might be said to lie (also pun intended).
Since it seems us dumbshi_ USA-ans, especially the Security-State and MILINT careerists who couldn’t or wouldn’t connect the pre-9-11 dots, have this cybernetic notion that Elint, with all its expensive bits and pieces and contractors and crap, is so much better and perfectible than Humint or, to put a size-14 gumshoe square in the middle of the poop pile, plain old police work which, yes, involves electronic stuff too, but maybe if the militarization and securitization hasn’t metastasized too far already, some actual people using their meatbrains to sift and sort.
Thank the Lord of Goodness that there are people with consciences who see the craphole we are all being slid down into. From, yes, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, who was also called a traitor by bigger creeps than Cheney even, to the more recent brave souls who have tried to play the part of white blood cells, policing up at least a few of the teeming cancer cells that are circulating, circling, draining the life…
…and the next really cool story is in the wind:
link to guardian.co.uk
Tell me again why the US, that piece of it that does the foreign stuff, gets to have a say in “Afghanistan’s future?”
Gee, have we all seen this before? “Vietnamization?” Who plays Henry Kissinger, and who plays Le Duc Tho? What do the Afghans have in the way of Asian Tiger genes that will have them exporting nice moderately priced, slave-made clothing and crap to fill the shelves of Walmart? Oh yeah, they’re sitting on “rare earths” and pipeline routes. And cultivating poppies.
And speaking of fast-disappearing stories, and speaking of treason, how about that Nixon guy, huh? Sabotaging the ending of the Vietnam war? link to outsidethebeltway.com
So here we go again: the Neo-b__tards run a huge Racket — excuse me, “war” — that transfers trillions of dollars to their fellow thieves, kills and maims and displaces millions, sets the stage for more and worse of the same in the next round of all this stupid Great Game sh__. And so many of us just go along.
“The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind — the answer is blowing in the wind.”
Stupid effing humans.
Just “don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters” and “you won’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows”
;)
Wonderful and sobering compilation. A few suggestions to round it out a little -some shots showing grieving Iraqis next to coffins of their loved ones. Perhaps some shots of the devastated cities would also be in order. And something on birth deformities, and electricity and water shortages.
I quit trusting the government during the Vietnam War.
I can’t see believing any politician again, ever.
That would seem to be the end of democracy in America, leaving only the illusion…
So which part of the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution prevents the NSA from monitoring every communication originating or ending in Gaza? Or from pulling files or webcam shots from Gazan computers?
What stops the NSA from passing everything to Israeli intelligence tohelp with arrests and planned killings?
Foreigners have no protection.T his isn’t a domestic story, it is about the global reliance on US technology and how we foreigners must move away from it. The cloud is a poisoned chalice.