Freelance

One of these Obama speeches working with half-truths, a lot of hot air and frank propaganda had been delivered yesterday right in the Department of Justice in Washington.

“The horror of September 11th brought all these issues [America left without a competing superpower, emerging threats from terrorist groups, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, globalization and the internet, erasure of borders] to the fore.  Across the political spectrum, Americans recognized that we had to adapt to a world in which a bomb could be built in a basement, and our electric grid could be shut down by operators an ocean away.  We were shaken by the signs we had missed leading up to the attacks — how the hijackers had made phone calls to known extremists and traveled to suspicious places.  So we demanded that our intelligence community improve its capabilities, and that law enforcement change practices to focus more on preventing attacks before they happen than prosecuting terrorists after an attack.” (Emphasis added.)

This is of course complete nonsense. Obama claims that “taken together, these efforts [the transformation of America’s intelligence community] have prevented multiple attacks and saved innocent lives — not just here in the United States, but around the globe.” But as a matter of fact, even mass spying on their own citizens, let alone “pinpoint[ing] an al Qaeda cell in Yemen or an email between two terrorists in the Sahel [sic]”, have not prevented any domestic terrorist attack in recent years  and Obama’s drone war, a global assassination campaign, has evidently produced far more enemy “combatants” in countries like Pakistan or Yemen than killed targets. NSA’s mass surveillance is, of course, just a direct consequence of endless war, something which has in fact begun after the end of the Cold War and which turned, in the absence of true antagonists, into a war against certain individuals who hate the U.S. for one reason or the other. The world had expected in 2009 that the young and charismatic, now disenchanted, constitutional law professor in the White House would eventually end George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, not to perpetuate it, refine it, extend it to whistle-blowers and a free press.

There is a lot of admitted skepticism in Obama’s speech (“I have often reminded myself I would not be where I am today were it not for the courage of dissidents like Dr. King, who were spied upon by their own government”), be it to pretend his own and his citizens’ reservation towards mass surveillance to get them finally aboard, be it to signal that this is essentially not his own decision to just make some cosmetic reform of the NSA. Obama is smart enough to assume both propaganda and denial of responsibility, a hostage of uncontrollable Alexander, Clapper, Hayden and the likes. That spying is done by each country, that members of the intelligence community are our family and neighbors and “[c]orporations of all shapes and sizes track what you buy, store and analyze our data, and use it for commercial purposes” cannot justify NSA mass suveillance.

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