America’s Burgeoning Secret Government Intentionally Plays Us against Our Frequently Ignorant, Reflexively Partisan, and Fear-Filled Selves

01 July 2013

All the signs are here, but virtually no one is paying attention

As a former historian, I try to be alert to History’s more important currents. We are in a rapidly progressing one now. Its flow is going to wreck liberty-loving America, unless our cattle-like population stops grazing long enough to look up and see how it is being fenced in.

Warning flags blow at gale force

Although geopolitical realities inevitably meant that America’s temporarily dominant global influence would decline, History did not mandate that we throw Freedom’s Light away in the process. Yet, we are eagerly exchanging autonomy for authoritarianism’s promise of elevated security — blindly, foolishly, and wastefully.

Bradley Manning, Julian Assange (WikiLeaks), Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald have served as gale force warning flags.

These people’s alleged treason and enablement are not the primary issue

Instead, what they — and the American media’s toadying response to their revelations — have exposed about America’s secret government is.

It would, however, take an old school patriot to see this. Which is my point. Somewhere along the line, most of America has gone off 1776’s liberty-initiating rails.

Consider these elements of Government behavior

One the one hand:

It appears to be okay with most Americans that the National Security Agency spies on everyone’s communications in Obama Administration’s manifest un-writing of the Fourth Amendment.

And, equally, that the Federal Government can pretty much lock up and torture whomever it wants at Guantánamo or any other place of extraordinary rendition.

In this vein of authoritarian abuse, it also appears to be acceptable that King Obama splatter people, including American citizens, all over foreign landscapes with drone strikes. Subsequently announcing — in cavalier self-justification for this warrantless process — that any blasted male of military age was assuredly a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer.

Equally casually, two successive presidential administrations have branded anyone else killed or maimed by drone strikes as collateral damage in the War on Terror — meaning that those unfortunate people just got in the way of the American Potentate’s potency.

On the other hand — given the Federal Government’s metamorphosis into the Cosmic Butterfly of Absolute Secrecy:

We brand anyone, who provides tangible evidence of these historically un-American policies, as a traitor or quasi-traitor.

By my camouflage ye shall know me

Partial proof of the regalization of American takes form of the juxtaposition of two Government behavioral elements:

(1) People who “leaked” what King Bush II and King Obama wanted them to are patriots.

(2) And those who ventured beyond and into matters that Americans needed to know, but did not, are destroyed.

Establishment journalist Barbara Starr is an example of the first bit of governmental hypocrisy.

She wrote recently, without a whisper of Administration disapproval, that:

The U.S. intelligence community says terrorists are trying to change the way they communicate because of what they learned from Edward Snowden's admitted leaks of classified information about government surveillance programs.

"We can confirm we are seeing indications that several terrorist groups are in fact attempting to change their communications behaviors based specifically on what they are reading about our surveillance programs in the media," a U.S. intelligence official told CNN.

As for whether that poses an immediate threat to national security, "I am not telling you people are dying, I am telling you terrorists are already trying to change their behavior," he said.

The administration official offered an example of one concern:

Terrorists may be less inclined to communicate via "clean" e-mail accounts that have no links to them because they believe the U.S. government can track those.

In contrast, we need merely recall how the American government continues to hound and prosecute leakers of information that it wants to suppress:

Bradley Manning,

Julian Assange (founder of WikiLeaks),

Edward Snowden,

journalist Glenn Greenwald,

and

retired Marine Corps (4 star) General James Cartwright — whose story is, as yet, less well known.

This contrast in approach — depending on whether you please the Royal Court or not — oozes intentionally liberty-squashing hypocrisies

King Obama is effectively saying that:

(a) Edward Snowden’s revelation that the Feds were tracking people’s phone calls and emails

was worse than

(b) Barbara Starr’s published leak that American intelligence has discovered that terrorists are now adjusting to post-Snowden surveillance — by abandoning their “clean” email accounts for alternative ways of communicating.

In other words, Mr. Snowden’s revelation (that the Government was snooping on everyday forms of communication) was news to terrorists — despite the fact that they have seen all manner of their violent folk (including Osama bin Laden himself) killed by their cell phone and presumably email lapses.

But, according the same Administration, it obviously does not matter that Barbara Starr quoted an anonymous government source to the effect that the Feds are now counter-reacting to the terrorists’ alleged change in communication practices.

You see just how little the Administration thinks of Americans’ ability to reason and prioritize. According to the President’s actions, leaking what the terrorists already knew is traitorously worse than leaking what they can only surmise.

In this regard, Journalist Chris Hayes’ comment on the trend toward secret government is worth watching

Mr. Hayes said — after contrasting the differing ways the Obama Administration has treated journalist Glenn Greenwald and Barbara Starr:

There is a vast and growing web of secret government in this country.

It is not acceptable that the only things we know about it are the things the members of that secret government want us to know.

Because at the end of the day, it is on us. It is on all of us what our government does in our name.

The moral? — Autocrats thrive on the public’s need to feel safe from all manner of easily exaggerated threats

Liberty is not for cowards. And power corrupts.

In regard to both, and for the second time within just a few weeks, I quote Pastor Martin Niemöller’s (1892-1984) famous World War II line:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller, Martin Niemöller : First they came for the socialists . . .”, Holocaust Encyclopedia (11 May 2012) (reformatted)

The America I grew up in would never have traded a secure life in the gulag for Liberty’s obvious dangers.

Have terrorists so easily overcome the United States’ purported values?

Our penchant for blaming others for our often significant shortcomings was recently subject of a partially related comment from geopolitical analyst James Traub:

The United States does have a formidable enemy -- but we can see it in the mirror.

China's aggression toward its neighbors in the South China Sea, or its assault on the computers of U.S. companies, poses less of a threat to U.S. interests than does[:]

America's own failure to educate its citizens or build and repair vital infrastructure –

both of which China is doing, legally and openly, at an astonishingly rapid clip.

The United States doesn't really have enemies any more. It has rivals -- lots and lots of rivals.

And right now, it's defeating itself.

We are exclusively the ones doing ourselves in.

Assaulting history’s timely Messengers of Warning —however disguised they are by alleged reprehensibilities of personal character — is unwise. In my lexicon of American personal and political virtue, toadying to the Wannabe King and his Court is much worse.

PeteFree.com

America’s Burgeoning Secret Government Intentionally Plays Us against Our Frequently Ignorant, Reflexively Partisan, and Fear-Filled Selves