adminGuardian and the Washington Post for publishing “reckless exposures” of programmes run by the Pentagon-based National Security Agency.
These programmes collect on a daily basis the telephone records of virtually every American and capture millions of Internet communications, including e-mails, chats, videos, photos and credit card receipts.
Reuters cited Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials who said the government is expected to open a criminal investigation into the leaks.
As far as the Obama administration is concerned, the crime is not the flagrantly unconstitutional invasion of the privacy rights of Americans, but the exposure of these acts before the public.
Obama’s remarks last Friday in defence of the NSA programmes, in which he characterised the media reports as “hype” and called pervasive state surveillance of the population a “modest encroachment” on the Bill of Rights, reflect a complete abandonment of any conception of democratic rights.
This former professor of constitutional law articulates the outlook of a ruling class that has severed any serious connection to the constitutional framework upon which the US was founded.
Obama presides over a country in which the president can — and does — unilaterally order the extra-judicial assassination of people all over the world, including US citizens; where entire cities, such as Boston, can be placed under de facto martial law; where the government seizes the phone records and emails of investigative journalists; where those who expose US war crimes, such as Private Bradley Manning, are tortured and prosecuted for treason; where the president can order alleged terrorists to be detained indefinitely and without trial in military prisons.
The question posed by these developments is: Who rules America?
In defence of his violations of the Constitution, which he is sworn to defend, Obama insists that Congress has been consulted and has given its approval.
That is true. He also points accurately to the sanction provided by the courts.
Yet everyone knows that the American people have never been consulted and have been lied to and kept in the dark about the destruction of their democratic rights.
Even the term “bourgeois democracy” becomes something of a misnomer for a political system in which the threadbare trappings of popular sovereignty are so wholly contradicted by the realities of political life.
The secret collaboration of the military, the intelligence and national security agencies, and gigantic corporations in the systematic and illegal surveillance of the American people reveals the true wielders of power in the US.
Telecommunications giants such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, and Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter, provide the military and the FBI and CIA with access to data on hundreds of millions of people that these state agencies have no legal right to possess.
Congress and both of the major political parties serve as rubber stamps for the confluence of the military, the intelligence apparatus and Wall Street that really runs the country.
The so-called “Fourth Estate” — the mass media —functions shamelessly as an arm of this ruling troika.
The cowardice and duplicity of Congress, above all, the Democrats, and the subservience of the media, exhibited in their response to the exposure of the NSA spying programs, encourage the military and intelligence agencies to go even further in their drive toward dictatorship.
Mark Udall, the Democratic senator presented as the most “outspoken” critic of the spying programmes, began his interview on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” programme by pledging his support to the “war on terror” and denouncing leaks of classified information.
Not a single major newspaper or media outlet has demanded an end to the spying, the closure of the NSA, the prosecution of officials responsible for the illegal spying, or impeachment proceedings against Obama, whose “high crimes and misdemeanour’” in violation of the Constitution surpass anything committed by Nixon.
The New York Times on Saturday published a front-page lead article headlined “Mining of Data is Called Critical to Fight Terror.”
The article citied former intelligence officials to unabashedly defend the NSA surveillance programmes.
The Obama administration itself, more than any previous US administration, embodies the consolidation of power by the military and the CIA in alliance with the financial elite.
The ever-increasing power of what Eisenhower in 1961 called the “military-industrial complex” has found a certain consummation in the merging of the executive branch with the national security apparatus under Obama. — wsws.
Online Reporter