There he goes again.
In recently proclaiming Hillary Clinton free of any national security breach
— even as the FBI was continuing its investigation of her use of a potentially
risky private email server for official business while she was Secretary of
State — President Obama continued his disturbing pattern of rendering
his personal verdict ahead of legal proceedings in high-profile cases involving
classified government information.
From Private Chelsea Manning to General David Petraeus to Edward Snowden and
now to Hillary Clinton, the president has sounded off with his opinions on guilt
or innocence — and on any alleged damage to national security —
in advance of either a trial, or an indictment, or completion of an investigation.
Short version: whistleblowers Manning and Snowden clearly guilty; former high
government officials Petraeus and Clinton — no problem.
In April 2011 — two years before court martial proceedings began and almost
two years before Manning acknowledged being a source for hundreds of thousands
of classified documents released by WikiLeaks — Obama proclaimed Manning guilty.
The materials Manning provided to WikiLeaks exposed diplomatic secrets and U.S.
military abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, including showing greater numbers of
civilian casualties than admitted publicly by US officials. Among the most shocking
was the classified “collateral murder video” that showed US military personnel
in an Apache helicopter in a Baghdad suburb indiscriminately firing on and killing
more than a dozen people — including rescuers and two Reuters employees — and
wounding others, including two children.
Likewise, exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden was excoriated in absentia by
Obama in January 2014 for providing to journalist Glenn Greenwald, filmmaker
Laura Poitras and others a trove of frightening National Security Agency documents.
The documents showed that the Big Brother State had indeed arrived via the NSA’s
worldwide, dragnet surveillance and data collection programs.