Last week, in an interview with The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake, James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, the same James Clapper who lied to congress under oath, when he told them that NSA was not collecting large quantities of American’s phone records, admitted that the government should have told the American people about the NSA’s bulk collection methods.
That Clapper would make such a statement is amazing, because in doing so he is, in effect, admitting that he committed perjury in his appearance before congress. The big question is why did he give this interview. Is he actually saying, “I’m too big to take down; I can do anything I want and no one can touch me?” Does he really see himself as the omnipotent Big Brother of Orwellian prediction?
Clapper could have stopped, slowed or entered into negotiations over this piece had he chosen. It is established policy for the government to do so with the editors and publishers of most printed media. But he didn’t and why he didn’t is crucial to the freedoms of every American.
We elected a president who we thought would be into defending the constitution but we ended up with that president signing the National Defense Authorization Act, which empowered men like Clapper and other intelligence gangsters to steal the rights of ordinary people through the dissolution of the right of habeas corpus. When Obama signed a bill that said that the military could enter American citizen’s homes and arrest them without due process, he sold out the entire nation and put power hungry men like James Clapper in charge.
This is the trap that is set by the unlimited collection of data on all of us. This is what allows Clapper and his minions to grab up anyone off the street or in their home, based on the most insignificant piece of information that they have accumulated in this unconstitutional manner and hold them without trial, representation or communication for as long as they wish. This is not America. This is some third world dictatorship.
Even Putin’s Russia doesn’t go that far. The Pussy Riot trial may have been a farce, (maybe not as much of a farce as Chelsea Manning’s), but at least it was done in public, as opposed to what NSA and the American intelligence and justice organs have organized for us.
The interesting thing is the depth of hubris that Clapper and his minions display in flaunting his system in the face of the public wrath. He is completely comfortable that neither congress nor the judiciary will hold him to the constitution, nor even to the laws of perjury. Why? Could it be that like J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, his agency has something on everyone? That no one has the guts to go against him because they all fear losing their cushy jobs and actually having to work again? What a pathetic government we have, what a despicable judiciary.
Clapper seems to have no worries about the myriad stories being published decrying his agency’s actions. Why not? Maybe because the fact that it’s against the law to publish classified material, and the fact that the government classifies almost everything it has, down to toilet paper and fountain pens is a huge obstruction to truth telling, especially for major organizations that have much to lose.
But that doesn’t seem to stop brave men of conscience like Snowden, Ellsberg and Manning, nor will it stop others that will inevitably follow them.
Even Clapper recognizes this fact and has spoken to it. The US intelligence agencies employ hundreds of thousands of workers. You can’t shut down the consciences of all of them and it’s those others, the ones who will come later that make it so important that Snowden remains free, that he does not succumb to the ensured fate of people like Manning, Julia Davis, Richard Levenier, Thomas Drake, Brad Birkenfeld, John Kinakou and droves of others who have suffered the wrath of the United States Government because of the their moral convictions.
But it isn’t the government that hates whistleblowers, it’s individuals in government who draw their power and their funding from the veil of secrecy that surrounds them and keeps them free of our constitution. A successful whistleblower means the loss of that secret veil and thereby the loss of their power. Those people hide the facts of everything they do because the revelation of their deeds could cause a revolution more traumatic than anything we have experienced in this country since the Civil War,
But do their current actions justify the ends? Is their ability to gather everything available consistent with their ability to work it into a functioning security scenario?
The government has no idea how many documents Edward Snowden has actually taken. The, by now, almost standard number revealed by “sources” is 1.7 million but the reality is that it could be a thousand times that number or only 1% of it. Why does this situation exist? Because the government, despite its ability to gobble up every phone call, email or fax, every app you open on our computer, almost every bit of internet or electronic communication on the planet, doesn’t have the ability to monitor them or know what they have, or more important possess the ability to use them in any kind of constructive manner.
What the NSA and most of the other government intelligence organs are doing is grabbing up American’s freedom and privacy – just in case. The intelligence community is like the Florida gun nut who shoots the man walking past his house to keep him from robbing him, just in case he was planning to do so.
I was looking at a picture of James Clapper today. He bears a fleeting resemblance to Joseph McCarthy. What is it about short, fat, bald, white guys and power?