{"id":47881,"date":"2013-07-05T04:45:20","date_gmt":"2013-07-05T03:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/focus-on-the-villains\/47881\/"},"modified":"2013-07-05T04:45:20","modified_gmt":"2013-07-05T03:45:20","slug":"focus-on-the-villains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/focus-on-the-villains\/","title":{"rendered":"Focus on the Villains"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n by Glenn Greenwald
<\/span>The
\n Guardian<\/a><\/i><\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n \"\"<\/a>
\n <\/p>\n

The NSA<\/a>
\n revelations continue to expose far more than just the ongoing operations
\n of that sprawling and unaccountable spying agency. Let’s examine
\n what we have learned this week about the US political and media
\n class and then certain EU leaders.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first NSA
\n story to be reported was our
\n June 6 article<\/a> which exposed the bulk, indiscriminate collection
\n by the US Government of the telephone records of tens of millions
\n of Americans. Ever since then, it has been undeniably clear that
\n James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, outright
\n lied to the US Senate<\/a> \u2013 specifically to the Intelligence
\n Committee, the body charged with oversight over surveillance programs
\n \u2013 when he said “no, sir” in response to this question from
\n Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden: “Does the NSA collect any type of
\n data at all <\/em>on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”<\/span><\/p>\n

That Clapper
\n fundamentally misled Congress is beyond dispute. The DNI himself
\n has now
\n been forced by our stories<\/a> to admit that his statement was,
\n in his words, “clearly erroneous” and to apologize. But he did this
\n only once our front-page revelations forced him to do so: in other
\n words, what he’s sorry about is that he got caught lying to the
\n Senate. And as Salon’s David Sirota adeptly
\n documented on Friday<\/a>, Clapper is still spouting falsehoods as
\n he apologizes and attempts to explain why he did it.<\/span><\/p>\n

How is this
\n not a huge scandal? Intentionally deceiving Congress is a
\n felony<\/a>, punishable by up to 5 years in prison for each offense.
\n Reagan administration officials were convicted of misleading Congress
\n as
\n part of the Iran-contra scandal<\/a> and other
\n controversies<\/a>, and sports
\n stars have been prosecuted<\/a> by the Obama DOJ based on allegations
\n they have done so.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond its
\n criminality, lying to Congress destroys the pretense of oversight.
\n Obviously, members of Congress cannot exercise any actual oversight
\n over programs which are being concealed by deceitful national security
\n officials. <\/span><\/p>\n

In response
\n to our first week of NSA stories, Wyden issued a
\n statement<\/a> denouncing these misleading statements, explaining
\n that the Senate’s oversight function “cannot be done responsibly
\n if senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions”,
\n and calling for “public hearings” to “address the recent disclosures,”
\n arguing that “the American people have the right to expect straight
\n answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked
\n by their representatives.” Those people who have been defending
\n the NSA programs by claiming there is robust Congressional oversight
\n should be leading the chorus against Clapper, given that his deceit
\n prevents the very oversight they invoke to justify these programs.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Clapper
\n isn’t the only top national security official who has been proven
\n by our NSA stories to be fundamentally misleading the public and
\n the Congress about surveillance programs. As an
\n outstanding Washington Post article by Greg Miller<\/a> this week
\n documented:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

“[D]etails
\n that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously
\n classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about
\n these programs by senior US officials have also often been misleading,
\n erroneous or simply false.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Please re-read
\n that sentence. It’s not just Clapper, but multiple “senior US officials”,
\n whose statements have been proven false by our reporting and Edward
\n Snowden’s disclosures. Indeed, the Guardian previously
\n published<\/a> top secret documents disproving the claims of NSA
\n Director Gen. Keith Alexander that the agency is incapable of stating
\n how many Americans are having their calls and emails invaded without
\n warrants, as well as the oft-repeated
\n claim from President Barack Obama<\/a> that the NSA is not listening
\n in on Americans’ calls without warrants. Both of those assertions,
\n as our prior reporting and Miller’s article this week demonstrates,
\n are indisputably false.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond that,
\n the NSA got caught spreading falsehoods even in its own public talking
\n points about its surveillance programs, and were forced by our disclosures
\n to quietly
\n delete those inaccuracies<\/a>. Wyden and another Democratic Senator,
\n Mark Udall, wrote
\n a letter to the NSA <\/a> identifying multiple inaccuracies in their
\n public claims about their domestic spying activities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Defending the
\n Obama administration, Paul Krugman pronounced<\/a>
\n that “the NSA stuff is a policy dispute, not the kind of scandal
\n the right wing wants.” Really? In what conceivable sense is this
\n not a serious scandal? If you, as an American citizen, let alone
\n a journalist, don’t find it deeply objectionable when top national
\n security officials systematically mislead your representatives in
\n Congress about how the government is spying on you, and repeatedly
\n lie publicly about resulting political controversies over that spying,
\n what is objectionable? If having the NSA engage in secret, indiscriminate
\n domestic spying that warps
\n if not outright violates legal limits<\/a> isn’t a “scandal”, then
\n what is?<\/span><\/p>\n

For many media
\n and political elites, the answer to that question seems clear: what’s
\n truly objectionable to them is when powerless individuals blow the
\n whistle on deceitful national security state officials. Hence the
\n endless fixation on Edward Snowden’s tone and choice of asylum providers,
\n the flamboyant denunciations of this
\n “29-year-old hacker”<\/a> for the crime of exposing what our government
\n leaders are doing in the dark, and all sorts of mockery over the
\n drama that resulted from the due-process-free revocation of his
\n passport. This<\/em> is what our media stars and progressive
\n columnists, pundits and bloggers are obsessing over in the hope
\n of distracting attention away from the
\n surveillance misconduct of top-level Obama officials<\/a> and their
\n serial deceit about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

What kind of
\n journalist \u2013 or citizen \u2013 would focus more on Edward Snowden’s
\n tonal oddities and travel drama than on the fact that top US officials
\n have been deceitfully concealing a massive, worldwide spying apparatus
\n being constructed with virtually no accountability or oversight?
\n Just ponder what it says about someone who cares more about, and
\n is angrier about, Edward Snowden’s exposure of these facts than
\n they are about James Clapper’s falsehoods and the NSA’s excesses.<\/span><\/p>\n

What we see
\n here, yet again, is this authoritarian strain in US political life
\n that the most powerful political officials cannot commit crimes
\n or engage in serious wrongdoing. The only political crimes come
\n from exposing and aggressively challenging those officials. <\/span><\/p>\n

How is it anything
\n other than pure whistleblowing to disclose secret documents proving
\n that top government officials have been systematically deceiving
\n the public about vital matters and\/or skirting if not violating
\n legal and Constitutional limits<\/a>? And what possible justification
\n is there for supporting the ability of James Clapper to continue
\n in his job despite what he just got caught doing?<\/span><\/p>\n

Read
\n the rest of the article<\/b><\/span><\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

July
\n 5, 2013<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Copyright
\n \u00a9 2013 <\/span>The
\n Guardian<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span>
\n
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Glenn GreenwaldThe Guardian The NSA revelations continue to expose far more than just the ongoing operations of that sprawling and unaccountable spying agency. Let’s examine what we have learned this week about the US political and media class and then certain EU leaders. The first NSA story to be reported was our June 6 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-47881","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}