{"id":48635,"date":"2013-07-08T15:49:39","date_gmt":"2013-07-08T14:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/why-msnbc-defends-nsa-surveillance\/48635\/"},"modified":"2013-07-08T15:49:39","modified_gmt":"2013-07-08T14:49:39","slug":"why-msnbc-defends-nsa-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/why-msnbc-defends-nsa-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"Why MSNBC Defends NSA Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Obama seems more willing to alienate his base of young supporters\u00a0who object to the growing Surveillance State\u00a0than to offend the national security apparatchiks who run it. But Obama\u2019s crackdown on leakers also has found apologists among MSNBC\u2019s \u201cliberal\u201d talkers.<\/em><\/p>\n

I was a young person when I first heard the quip: \u201cHow do you know when the President is lying? His lips are moving.\u201d At the time, President Richard Nixon was expanding the war in Vietnam to other countries and deploying the White House \u201cplumbers\u201d to commit crimes against antiwar leakers.<\/p>\n

Forty years have passed. Sadly, these days, often when I see President Barack Obama moving his lips, I assume he\u2019s lying. Like Nixon, our current president is prolonging an endless, borderless and counter-productive war (\u201con terror\u201d) and waging a parallel war against \u201cnational security\u201d leakers that makes the plumbers\u2019 burglary of Daniel Ellsberg\u2019s psychiatrist\u2019s office look almost quaint.<\/p>\n

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

Photo: Radio and TV host Ed Schultz.<\/em><\/p>\n

The World War I vintage Espionage Act, originally used to imprison socialists for making antiwar speeches, has been used by the administration against whistleblowers with a vengeance unprecedented in history:\u00a0eight leakers have been charged<\/a>\u00a0with Espionage under Obama, compared to three under all previous presidents.<\/p>\n

The Obama administration has prosecuted not a single CIA torturer, but has imprisoned a CIA officer who\u00a0talked about torture with a journalist<\/a>. National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, who was unable to get abuses fixed internally, now has a criminal record for\u00a0communicating with a reporter<\/a>\u00a0years ago about sweeping domestic surveillance.<\/p>\n

So there I was watching Obama\u2019s lips move about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden at a June 27\u00a0press conference<\/a>. Saying he wouldn\u2019t be \u201cscrambling military jets to go after a 29-year-old hacker,\u201d Obama added that he would not \u201cstart wheeling and dealing and trading on a whole host of other issues, simply to get a guy extradited.\u201d I didn\u2019t believe a word of it.<\/p>\n

Given Obama\u2019s war on whistleblowers and\u00a0journalists who utilize them<\/a>, and given the Army\u2019s abusive treatment of military whistleblower Bradley Manning (apparently aimed at getting him to implicate WikiLeaks), it\u2019s inconceivable that Obama was truly blas\u00c3\u00a9 about Snowden. To deter future whistleblowers, Snowden would have to be caught and made an example of \u2014 and probably mistreated (like Manning, in hopes of getting him to turn against WikiLeaks and even journalist Glenn Greenwald).<\/p>\n

As his lips were moving, Obama knew well that he would go to extreme lengths to prevent this articulate young man from securing asylum in some Latin American country, where he could continue to inform the world\u2019s media about the Surveillance State that has blossomed alongside the Warfare State under the Bush and Obama administrations.<\/p>\n

That Obama wasn\u2019t truthful became clear when the U.S. campaign of \u201cwheeling and dealing\u201d led to possible asylum countries retreating in fear one after another (Vice President Biden was deployed to pressure Ecuador\u2019s president by phone). And even clearer with last week\u2019s outrageous,\u00a0international law-breaking<\/a>\u00a0that effectively forced down the presidential plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales.<\/p>\n

And if Obama eventually does scramble jets to force down a plane with Snowden on board, the commander-in-chief will be applauded for taking bold and decisive action by mainstream TV talking heads, \u201cnational security\u201d experts and the opposition he seems most intent on pleasing: conservatives. Criticism from civil libertarian and peace voices (or unions and environmentalists, for that matter) has rarely daunted Obama.<\/p>\n

The bipartisan consensus in support of our bloated Military\/Surveillance State \u2014 which so\u00a0undermines our society as a whole<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 is reflected in Congress and both the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as mainstream media.<\/p>\n

When it comes to issues of U.S. militarism and spying, the allegedly \u201cprogressive\u201d MSNBC often seems closer to the \u201cofficial network of the Obama White House\u201d than anything resembling an independent channel. With a few exceptions (especially\u00a0Chris Hayes<\/a>), MSNBC has usually reacted to expanded militarism and surveillance by downplaying the abuses or defending them.<\/p>\n

Had John McCain or Mitt Romney defeated Obama and implemented the exact same policies, treating whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden as foreign espionage agents, one would expect MSNBC hosts to be loudly denouncing the Republican abuses of authority.<\/p>\n

But with Obama in power, a number of MSNBC talking heads have reacted to the Snowden disclosures like Fox News hosts did when they were in hysterical damage control mode for Bush \u2014 complete with ridiculously fact-free claims andnational chauvinism<\/a>\u00a0that we\u2019ve long come to expect from the \u201cfair & balanced\u201d channel.<\/p>\n

As Snowden arrived in Russia from Hong Kong, MSNBC host\u00a0Ed Schultz blustered on<\/a>\u00a0about Snowden as a \u201cpunk\u201d and \u201ccoward.\u201d Railing about the \u201csecurity of the country\u201d in tones Sean Hannity would approve of, Schultz questioned Snowden\u2019s patriotism and credibility, asking: \u201cIf the United States of America is doing something so egregiously wrong in its surveillance program, how come he\u2019s the only one speaking up?\u201d<\/p>\n

In Bill O\u2019Reilly-like blissful ignorance, Schultz seemed unaware of the three NSA whistleblowers who\u2019d loudly spoken up way earlier than Snowden \u2014 and gathered for an illuminating\u00a0USA Today\u00a0<\/em>interview<\/a>\u00a0a week before his tirade.<\/p>\n

I watched\u00a0one MSNBC host<\/a>\u00a0function as an auxiliary prosecutor in Obama\u2019s Justice Department, going after Snowden \u2014 while trying to link WikiLeaks and journalist Glenn Greenwald to criminal flight.<\/p>\n

MSNBC\u2019s Melissa Harris-Perry has been\u00a0condemning Snowden<\/a>\u00a0by contrasting him with civil disobedients who \u201clove their country\u201d and submit to arrest \u2014 while Snowden just wants to \u201csave his own skin<\/a>.\u201d She proclaimed: \u201cThis is different. This is dangerous to our nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Should we similarly dismiss Dan Ellsberg, who leaked the top secret Pentagon Papers to a dozen newspapers in 1971 by going on the lam from the FBI. Or Watergate\u2019s \u201cDeep Throat,\u201d who saved his own skin by hiding his identity for 30 years after leaking secrets that helped crash the Nixon presidency? [See, for instance, Ellsberg\u2019s op-ed in The Washington Post, \u201cSnowden Made the Right Call When He Fled the US<\/a>\u201d]<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0bizarre monologue<\/a>\u00a0attacking Snowden (who\u2019s risked plenty, in my view), Harris-Perry hailed those who engage in civil disobedience for being willing \u201cto risk your own freedom, your own body in order to bring attention to something that needs to be known. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested, attacked, smeared.\u00a0Nelson Mandela went to prison for 27 years.<\/em><\/strong>\u201d (My emphasis.)<\/p>\n

Nelson Mandela? He wasn\u2019t a civil disobedient who gave himself up. He was a fugitive, fleeing the apartheid police. He was on the lam domestically, like Snowden is now internationally. And some reports indicate that South African authorities were able to nab Mandela\u00a0thanks to the U.S. CIA<\/a>\u00a0(one of the agencies now working to apprehend Snowden).<\/p>\n

MSNBC\u2019s Rachel Maddow has also disappointed. After doing a typically thorough presentation on the force-down of President\u2019s Morales\u2019s plane, she\u00a0ended her report<\/a>\u00a0by expressing displeasure only that Washington had apparently gotten allies to go out on the limb \u201cfor nothing.\u201d Her objection to the harassment seemed to be: it hadn\u2019t succeeded. I didn\u2019t hear opposition to the action had Snowden actually been on board and apprehended.<\/p>\n

The Snowden\/NSA story\u00a0proves once again<\/a>\u00a0that \u2014 especially on so-called \u201cnational security\u201d issues \u2014 we need strong, independent media not enmeshed with the corporate\/political power structure and not allied with one of the two corporate parties.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t count on MSNBC to heed the lesson taught by legendary independent journalist I.F. \u201cIzzy\u201d Stone, after\u00a0years reporting from Washington<\/a>: \u201cAll governments lie and nothing they say should be believed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jeff Cohen<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>was an MSNBC pundit and senior producer in 2002-3 until being\u00a0terminated<\/a>\u00a0for political reasons, along with Phil Donahue, on the eve of the Iraq invasion. He is director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group\u00a0FAIR<\/a>, and author of\u00a0Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media<\/a>. He cofounded the online action group\u00a0RootsAction.org<\/a>, which has petitioned for Snowden.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

President Obama seems more willing to alienate his base of young supporters\u00a0who object to the growing Surveillance State\u00a0than to offend the national security apparatchiks who run it. But Obama\u2019s crackdown on leakers also has found apologists among MSNBC\u2019s \u201cliberal\u201d talkers. I was a young person when I first heard the quip: \u201cHow do you know […]<\/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-48635","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\/48635","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=48635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}