Remarks by the President on Review of Signals Intelligence
(if he had told the truth)
Department of Injustice
Washington, D.C.
11:15 a.m. EST
THE PRESIDENT: A small, secret surveillance committee of goons and
thugs hiding behind the mask of patriotism was established in 1908 in
Washington, D.C. The group was led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar
Hoover, and during his reign it became known as the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. FBI agents spied upon and infiltrated labor unions,
political parties, radical groups—especially those led by
African-Americans—anti-war groups and the civil rights movement in order
to discredit anyone, including politicians such as
Henry Wallace,
who questioned the power of the state and big business. Agents
burglarized homes and offices, illegally opened mail and planted
unlawful wiretaps. Bureau leaders created blacklists. They destroyed
careers and sometimes lives. They demanded loyalty oaths. By the time
they were done, our progressive and radical movements, which had given
us the middle class and opened up our political system, were dead. And
while the FBI was targeting internal dissidents, our foreign
intelligence operatives were overthrowing regimes, bankrolling some of
the most vicious dictators on the planet and carrying out assassinations
in numerous countries, such as Cuba and the Philippines and later Iran,
Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Throughout American history, intelligence services often did little
more than advance and protect corporate profits and solidify state
repression and imperialist expansion. War, for big business, has always
been very lucrative and used as an excuse to curtail basic liberties and
crush popular movements.
“Inter arma silent leges,” as Cicero
said, or “During war, the laws are silent.” In the Civil War, during
which the North and the South suspended the writ of habeas corpus and
up to 750,000 soldiers
died in the slaughter, Union intelligence worked alongside Northern war
profiteers who sold cardboard shoes to the Army as the spy services
went about the business of ruthlessly hunting down deserters. The First
World War, which gave us the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act and saw
President Woodrow Wilson throw populists and socialists, including
Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, into prison, produced $28.5 billion in
net profits for businesses and created 22,000 new millionaires. Wall
Street banks, which lent $2.5 billion to nations allied with the United
States, made sure Wilson sent U.S. forces into the senseless trench
warfare so they would be repaid. World War II—which consumed more than
50 million lives and saw 110,000 Japanese-Americans hauled away to
internment camps and atomic bombs dropped on defenseless
civilians—doubled wartime corporate profits from the First World War.
Why disarm when there was so much money to be made from stoking fear?
The rise of the Iron Curtain and nuclear weapons provided the
justification by big business for sustaining a massive arms industry,
for a huge expansion of our surveillance capabilities and for more
draconian assaults against workers and radicals. The production of
weapons was about profits rather than logic. We would go on to produce
more than 70,000 nuclear bombs or warheads at a cost of $5.5 trillion,
enough weapons to obliterate every Soviet city several times over. And
in the early days of the Cold War, with Hoover and Joe McCarthy and his
henchmen blacklisting anyone with a conscience in government, the arts,
journalism, labor unions or education, President Harry S. Truman created
the National Security Agency, or NSA.
Throughout this evolution, Americans were steadily shorn of their
most basic constitutional rights and their traditions of limited
government. U.S. intelligence agencies were always anchored in a system
of secrecy—with little effective oversight from either elected leaders
or ordinary citizens. Meanwhile, totalitarian states like East Germany
offered a sterling example of what our corporate masters might achieve
with pervasive, unchecked surveillance that turned citizens into
informers and persecuted people for what they said in the privacy of
their homes. Today I would like to thank the architects of this East
German system, especially Erich Mielke, once the chief of the communist
East German secret police. I want to assure them that the NSA has gone
on to perfect what the
Stasi began.
In the 1960s, the U.S. government spied on civil rights leaders, the
Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement and critics of the Vietnam
War, just as today we are spying on Occupy activists, environmentalists,
whistle-blowers and other dissidents. And partly in response to these
revelations decades ago, especially regarding the FBI’s covert dirty
tricks program known as COINTELPRO, laws were established in the 1970s
to ensure that our intelligence capabilities could not be misused
against our citizens. In the long, twilight struggle against communism,
and now in the fight against terrorism, I am happy to report that we
have eradicated all of these reforms and laws. The crimes for which
Richard Nixon resigned and the abuses of power that prompted the
formation of the
Church Commission
are now legal. The liberties that some patriots, including Daniel
Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, have sought to preserve
have been sacrificed at the altar of national security. To obtain your
personal information, the FBI can now freely issue
“national security letters”
to your bank, doctor, employer or public library or any of your
associates without a judicial warrant. And you will never be notified of
an investigation. We can collect and store in perpetuity all
metadata
of your email correspondence and phone records and track your
geographical movements. We can assassinate you if I decide you are a
terrorist. We can order the military under Section 1021 of the National
Defense Authorization Act to arrest you, strip you of due process and
hold you indefinitely in military detention centers. We can continue to
throw into prison those who expose the illegality of what we are doing,
or force them into exile, as all totalitarian secret police forces from
the SS to the KGB to the East German Stasi have done. And we can
torture.
The fall of the Soviet Union left America without a competing
superpower. This threatened to delegitimize our massive spending on war
and state security, now more than 50 percent of our budget. But a group
of Islamic radicals who had never posed an existential threat to our
country emerged to take the place of the old communist bloc. The
politics of fear and the psychosis of permanent war were able to be
continued. The war on terror placed new and in some ways more
complicated demands on our intelligence agencies. Our illegal and
disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and our indiscriminate
bombing of other countries, along with the war crimes Israel is carrying
out against the Palestinian people, are driving people in the Muslim
world into the arms of these militant groups. We are the most hated
nation on earth. At the same time, globalization—our corporate policy of
creating a worldwide neofeudalism of masters and serfs—means we must
spy on citizens to prevent agitation and revolt. After all, if you are a
worker, things are only going to get worse. To quash competitors of
American companies, we spy on corporations in Brazil, including Brazil’s
biggest oil company, Petrobras, and on corporations in Germany and
France. We also steal information from the leaders of many countries,
including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose personal cellphone we
tapped. However, Ms. Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, should not, as
she has done, accuse us of being the Stasi. We are much more efficient
than the Stasi was. We spied successfully on U.N. Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon, in addition to Pope Francis and the conclave that elected him
last March. Senior U.N. officials and Roman Catholic cardinals are
highly susceptible to recruitment by al-Qaida. The reasons are
classified. I won’t share them with you. Believe me.
Threats to the nation raised new legal and policy questions, which
fortunately our courts, abject tools of the corporate state, solved by
making lawful everything from torture to wholesale surveillance. I would
like to take a moment to thank our nation’s compliant judges, the
spineless deans of most prestigious law schools and most law professors
and lawyers for refusing to defend the Constitution. They have been
valued partners, along with the press, in our campaign to eradicate your
civil liberties.
The horror of September 11th was masterfully manipulated by the
security state and our for-profit military-industrial complex. These
forces used the attacks as an excuse to increase the massive pilfering
of taxpayer dollars, especially by the Department of Homeland Security,
which has a public budget of $98.8 billion. The truth, however, is the
system of internal security is so vast and so secret no one in the
public has any idea how large our programs are or how much we spend. It
is true that our 16 intelligence agencies missed the numerous signs and
evidence leading up to the 9/11 attacks. In short, they screwed up, just
as they did when they failed to anticipate the fall of the Shah of Iran
or the collapse of the Soviet Union, or when they told us Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But we have a rule in
Washington: Never reform failed bureaucracies or hold government
officials accountable; rather, give them more money. Keep failure
secret.
It is a testimony to the hard work and dedication of the men and
women of our intelligence community that over the past decade we’ve
taken enormous strides in making the Middle East a caldron of rage. New
capabilities and new laws have turned us into the most efficient killers
on the planet. Relationships with foreign intelligence services have
expanded, creating one immense, global corporate system of surveillance
and security that obliterates the rights of people at home and abroad.
Taken together, these efforts have killed hundreds of thousands of
innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. We have
terrorized whole countries from the sky and forced millions to become
refugees. This will ensure endless war, which ensures endless profits
for those who make war—which is the point.
Over the last six months, I created an outside Review Group on
Intelligence and Communications Technologies to make recommendations for
reform. This group is led by the same intelligence chiefs who carry out
the abuses. The chancellor of Germany has, like many of our other
allies, demanded we stop spying on citizens of that nation. But,
unfortunately for the chancellor, as well as for you, my fellow
Americans, we will continue to do whatever we want.
The folks at the NSA and other intelligence agencies are our nation’s
voyeurs and peeping Toms. They read your electronic bank and medical
records. They know what you and your kids post on Facebook and
Instagram. They have all of your emails and text messages. They track
your movements through the GPS on your cellphone. They are not alone.
Corporations of all kinds and sizes track your online searches and what
you buy, then they analyze and store the data and use it for commercial
purposes; that’s why those targeted ads pop up on your computer and your
smartphone so often.
Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to
say “trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect.” History has too many
examples of such trust being breached. Our system of government is
built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good
intentions of those in power; it depends on the law to constrain those
in power. And that is why Congress and our courts have rewritten our
laws, from the NDAA to the
FISA Amendment Act, to strip you of legal protection.
I would not be where I am today were it not for the courage of
dissidents like Martin Luther King Jr. who were spied upon by their own
government. But I, like Bill Clinton, have sold out those true patriots
and gutted those government programs that made possible my own education
and ascent into systems of elite power. As president I understand, as
do Bill and Hillary, that political power is about us, not about you. I
know where power in this country lies. It does not lie with the citizen.
It lies with Wall Street and corporate boardrooms. And since my vanity
demands that I be famous, wealthy and powerful, I work hard for these
centers of power. None of these centers of power want to see any curbs
on the security and surveillance state. And so I will make sure there
are none.
As a senator, I was critical of practices such as warrantless
wiretaps. But as president I have carried out a far more extensive
assault on civil liberties than my predecessor, George W. Bush. I have
used the Espionage Act eight times to charge patriots such as Edward
Snowden who exposed crimes of the state. And I have lied to you often,
as I did in the original version of this speech, to defend the right of
our security and surveillance apparatus to spy on you without judicial
warrants.
As a presidential candidate in 2008 I promised to “reject the use of
national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a
crime.” I promised to close our detention center in Guantanamo Bay. I
said I would revisit the Patriot Act. I told you I would overturn
unconstitutional executive decisions issued by the Bush administration. I
said I would shut down our
black sites. And I promised an end to
extraordinary rendition.
I told you as president last summer that the NSA “cannot target your
emails” and that all of our surveillance programs were subject to the
full control of Congress. I have, along with our Congress and our
highest courts, eradicated the Fourth Amendment, which once protected
citizens from government intrusion into their persons, homes, papers and
effects. And, to be frank, the only reason I am talking to you today
about spying is because Edward Snowden has, through his leaked
documents, illustrated that everything I and others in government have
promised to do or told you about domestic and international surveillance
is a lie.
Today I am announcing a series of cosmetic reforms that my
administration intends to adopt administratively or will seek to codify
through Congress.
First, I have approved a new presidential directive for our signals
intelligence activities both at home and abroad that sounds impressive
but means nothing.
Second, we will institute a few bureaucratic programs and procedures
to give you the illusion of greater transparency while we continue to
sweep up and store your personal information, including your telephone
metadata.
Third, I propose more amorphous and undefined protections for government activities conducted under Section 702.
Fourth, the FBI’s national security letters will not be touched. But
we could and should be more transparent in how government uses this
authority. We really should. But we won’t. To make you feel better,
however, I have directed the attorney general to amend how we use
national security letters so that this secrecy will not be indefinite,
so that it will terminate within a fixed—though unspecified—time unless
the government demonstrates a need for further secrecy. That need might
last forever.
This brings me to the program that has generated the most controversy
these past few months—the bulk collection of telephone records under
Section 215.
Why is this necessary? It is necessary because in a totalitarian state
the secret police must gather information not to solve crimes but, as
Hannah Arendt
pointed out, “to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a
certain category of the population.” We need all of your emails, phone
conversations, Web searches and geographical movements for “evidence”
should we decide to seize you. And my
apologies to Sen. Bernie Sanders,
but we can’t make exemptions for members of Congress, especially when
they come from Vermont. If you think you are innocent, or that you have
nothing to hide, you do not understand what is happening. Justice, like
truth, is no longer relevant. Ask Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange or
Edward Snowden, along with whistle-blowers like
Thomas Drake,
where justice and truth got them. One of the main tasks of any security
service is blackmail, a tactic the FBI used to try to get Martin Luther
King to commit suicide. So if you have any dirt we want to know about
it.
I will propose turning over the storage of all your data to a third
party, perhaps a private corporation. This will offer you no protection,
but it should provide a good government contract to one of my major
campaign donors.
The cosmetic reforms I’m proposing today will, I hope, give the
American people greater confidence that their rights are being
protected, even as our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, along
with our courts, continue to eviscerate those rights. I recognize that
there are additional issues that require further debate, such as your
constitutional right to halt the wholesale capturing and storing of your
personal information and correspondence and evidence of your
geographical movements. But don’t expect me to help. I sold out long
ago.
The bottom line is that people around the world, regardless of their
nationality, can be assured that the United States follows everything
they do or say. It does not matter if they are ordinary people or
foreign leaders. I am not going to apologize for monitoring the
communications of friends and allies. We know what we are doing. We know
why this is important. The effects of declining incomes for working men
and women, the massive debt peonage that keeps people trapped, the
slashing of government assistance programs, the chronic, long-term
unemployment, and the effects of climate change will eventually trigger
volatile unrest. We are ready. The likelihood of totalitarianism no
longer comes from fascism or communism. It comes from corporations.
Corporations, for which I work, fear those who think and write and speak
out and form relationships freely. Individual freedom impedes their
profits. And the surveillance system I am protecting today is designed
to keep these corporations in power.
Our democracy is a fiction. We seek to maintain this fiction to keep
you passive. Should you wake up, we will not shy away from draconian
measures. I believe we can meet high expectations. Together, let us
chart a way forward that secures your complete subjugation, the iron
rule of our corporations and our power elite—at least until we make the
planet wholly uninhabitable—while we continue to snuff out the liberties
that once made our nation worth fighting for.
Thank you. May God bless you. May God bless Corporate America.
© 2014 Truthdig, LLC.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com.
Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two
decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author
of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
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