about the Obama administration’s unprecedented mass surveillance system
have been at once boringly predictable and incredibly revealing. They
are so revealing, in fact, that we are left with a troubling question
that a civilized society should never even have to ask: Namely, who are
the true criminals — those who violate the law, or those, like
Before getting to that monumental query, let’s first review officialdom’s reactions to the NSA story that are leading to it.
by Obama officials that the NSA spying system has made us safer by
thwarting the New York subway bombing plot. Such a talking point is
designed to halt the conversation about civil liberties entirely by
insisting that any action that makes us safer is laudable, even if it
runs roughshod over the Fourth Amendment. In addition to the argument’s
generally questionable logic, though, the problem for the White House
was that the specific claims were thoroughly debunked by
There
has also been the attempt to marginalize the messengers — and thus
marginalize the message — via the cheap smear. We’ve seen this a lot
lately, most grotesquely, as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi points out, in
the
. In the NSA spying case, it’s much the same thing.
For instance, there were the declarations by one of the most prominent Obama
officials-turned-corporate-mouthpieces, Tommy Vietor. Using the same xenophobic tactic that famously saw
John Kerry derided as French, the president’s former National Security spokesman derided the Guardian America as a
“foreign” organization (which, by the way,
it isn’t). There was also a horrifying
report from the Atlantic’s Steve Clemons
of intelligence officials reportedly discussing the idea of
“disappearing” Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald and his source as
retribution for the disclosures.
Meanwhile, the New York Times issued a damning-with-faint-praise profile of Greenwald. As
Yves Smith
notes, the Times loaded it up with vapid ad hominem rhetoric from
Greenwald’s ideological opponents — and, as important, made sure to
focus far more on scrutinizing the journalist than on either evaluating
the implications of the news he broke, or even
whether the NSA program ever should have been secret in the first place. No doubt, the Guardian’s source,
Snowden, will be treated in much the same way.
Finally, and most illustrative of all, there was also the attempt to shift the focus of outrage away from the potentially major
crimes against the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment and to channel the outrage instead at the affront to the Obama administration’s political interests.
We’ve seen, for example, news from the
New York Times that the NSA whistle-blowing is ”expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department.”
Reuters followed that up with a report that “a U.S. intelligence agency formally requested a criminal probe (of) the leak.” Vietor
chimed in
by declaring his shock that “people aren’t more concerned about the
systematic leaking of Top Secret U.S. national security information.”
Government contractor
Booz Allen Hamilton,
which employed Snowden, said the disclosure is “a grave violation of
the code of conduct and core values of our firm.” And, of course,
President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued
the obligatory
tough-talking statement calling the revelations “reprehensible.”
Here is where the entire definition of crime starts becoming blurry.
Notice
that, according to the Times and Reuters, the Justice Department and
the unnamed national security agency are pursuing an investigation into
the whistle-blowing but not into the potential crimes against the
Constitution. Same thing for Booz Allen Hamilton: The company declared
that the “grave violation” of its “core values” is the disclosure of the
potentially unconstitutional mass surveillance, not the mass
surveillance itself. Same thing for Clapper; what’s “reprehensible” to
him is the disclosure, not the NSA’s potential crimes. Notice, too, that
neither Clapper nor Justice officials are calling for an investigation
into Clapper committing
one of recent history’s most explicit acts of perjury when answering congressional questions about surveillance (and yes,
perjury before Congress is a criminal act).
In other words, the only acts being discussed in a criminal context are those that
expose the Obama administration’s
possible crimes,
not the administration’s possible crimes themselves. In this distorted
worldview, Edward Snowden’s decision to expose the NSA’s potentially
unconstitutional behavior is somehow presented as a bigger crime than
the NSA’s behavior itself.
In forwarding such a skewed criminal
justice ideology, the Obama administration is, first and foremost,
violating its pledge to voters. After all, in 2008, Obama ran for
president
promising to respect whistle-blowers.
Back then, he declared that “often the best source of information about
waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government
employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out.” He
added that “such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes
save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather
than stifled.”
But there’s more than just hypocrisy at work here.
To construct such an Orwellian definition of crime — one in which
crime-exposers are depicted as the most dangerous criminals — the
administration and Permanent Washington are employing a marvelously
deceptive double standard about information itself. Whether it is the
WikiLeaks cables,
disclosures about unlawful torture
or the recent NSA revelations, those who reveal facts that are
inconvenient to the national security establishment are now portrayed as
criminal “leakers” requiring prosecution. Yet, whether
publicly promoting its cyber-warfare operations, selectively disclosing
skewed (and
factually inaccurate)
information about torture to sympathetic filmmakers, or providing
top-secret “kill list” information to help the New York Times publish
election year hagiography,
the same national security establishment is regularly disclosing
classified information that serve its political and ideological
interests.
For those of us who believe information should be as
free as possible in a democratic society, the latter kind of disclosures
aren’t necessarily objectionable unto themselves because even if they
are politically skewed, they at least offer a bit more governmental
transparency. What’s objectionable is the double standard whereby we
hear calls to prosecute politically inconvenient whistle-blowers like
Manning,
John Kiriakou and Snowden, but don’t hear the same kind of superheated rhetoric aimed at, say, those like
Leon Panetta
or any of the officials quoted in the Times “kill list” story. It is
objectionable because it suggests that the Obama administration isn’t
respecting the fundamental American notion of equal protection under the
law; it is instead applying different standards to its political
enemies and its political friends.
“The reality is the Obama
administration has either authorized or acquiesced to the leak of
information that is deemed politically beneficial, while relentlessly
investigating and prosecuting those who reveal information that reflects
poorly on his administration and the U.S. government,” says
American University professor Jeff Bachman.
To
see this double standard in action, go back to Vietor’s statements
about the NSA snooping. Because that disclosure embarrasses his old
boss, he derides “the systematic leaking of Top Secret U.S. national
security information.” Yet, while he was the White House’s national
security spokesman, he was part of the administration’s communications
apparatus that orchestrated the systematic leaking of top-secret U.S.
national security information to the New York Times to help that paper
publish its “kill list” encomium about Obama the War President. He was
also in the government when the administration was leaking information
to the director of “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Where’s Vietor’s worry
about those latter leaks, you ask? It’s nowhere, because the new
definition of crime and wrongdoing has less to do with a dispassionate
analysis of the Constitution than it does with a political vendetta
against ideological opponents.
In his
writeup of the Manning trial, Taibbi sums up what is really at stake in the reaction to all of these information disclosures.
“If
you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government
doing the punishing is itself criminal,” he writes. “Who’s the right
kind of person to be let in the know about the fact that we
systematically turned academics and other ‘suspects’ over to the Iraqi
military to be tortured? We want people who will, what, sit on this
stuff? Apparently the idea is to hire the kind of person who will
cheerfully help us keep this sort of thing hidden from ourselves.”
The
same can be asked about the NSA surveillance revelations. Do we really
want to criminalize public officials who expose possible violations of
the Fourth Amendment? Do we really want those public officials to
witness such crimes and say nothing? Doesn’t that make them complicit in
crimes that are far bigger than the alleged crime of blowing the
whistle?
The answers are, of course, obvious; after all, our own government tells us that
“if you see something, say something.”
Doesn’t that principle apply to those like Snowden and others when they
believe they’re witnessing crimes against the Constitution?
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