by Glenn Greenwald
The
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 article which exposed the bulk, indiscriminate collection
by the US Government of the telephone records of tens of millions
of Americans. Ever since then, it has been undeniably clear that
James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, outright
lied to the US Senate – specifically to the Intelligence
Committee, the body charged with oversight over surveillance programs
– when he said “no, sir” in response to this question from
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden: “Does the NSA collect any type of
data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
That Clapper
fundamentally misled Congress is beyond dispute. The DNI himself
has now
been forced by our stories to admit that his statement was,
in his words, “clearly erroneous” and to apologize. But he did this
only once our front-page revelations forced him to do so: in other
words, what he’s sorry about is that he got caught lying to the
Senate. And as Salon’s David Sirota adeptly
documented on Friday, Clapper is still spouting falsehoods as
he apologizes and attempts to explain why he did it.
How is this
not a huge scandal? Intentionally deceiving Congress is a
felony, punishable by up to 5 years in prison for each offense.
Reagan administration officials were convicted of misleading Congress
as
part of the Iran-contra scandal and other
controversies, and sports
stars have been prosecuted by the Obama DOJ based on allegations
they have done so.
Beyond its
criminality, lying to Congress destroys the pretense of oversight.
Obviously, members of Congress cannot exercise any actual oversight
over programs which are being concealed by deceitful national security
officials.
In response
to our first week of NSA stories, Wyden issued a
statement denouncing these misleading statements, explaining
that the Senate’s oversight function “cannot be done responsibly
if senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions”,
and calling for “public hearings” to “address the recent disclosures,”
arguing that “the American people have the right to expect straight
answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked
by their representatives.” Those people who have been defending
the NSA programs by claiming there is robust Congressional oversight
should be leading the chorus against Clapper, given that his deceit
prevents the very oversight they invoke to justify these programs.
But Clapper
isn’t the only top national security official who has been proven
by our NSA stories to be fundamentally misleading the public and
the Congress about surveillance programs. As an
outstanding Washington Post article by Greg Miller this week
documented:
“[D]etails
that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously
classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about
these programs by senior US officials have also often been misleading,
erroneous or simply false.”
Please re-read
that sentence. It’s not just Clapper, but multiple “senior US officials”,
whose statements have been proven false by our reporting and Edward
Snowden’s disclosures. Indeed, the Guardian previously
published top secret documents disproving the claims of NSA
Director Gen. Keith Alexander that the agency is incapable of stating
how many Americans are having their calls and emails invaded without
warrants, as well as the oft-repeated
claim from President Barack Obama that the NSA is not listening
in on Americans’ calls without warrants. Both of those assertions,
as our prior reporting and Miller’s article this week demonstrates,
are indisputably false.
Beyond that,
the NSA got caught spreading falsehoods even in its own public talking
points about its surveillance programs, and were forced by our disclosures
to quietly
delete those inaccuracies. Wyden and another Democratic Senator,
Mark Udall, wrote
a letter to the NSA identifying multiple inaccuracies in their
public claims about their domestic spying activities.
Defending the
Obama administration, Paul Krugman pronounced
that “the NSA stuff is a policy dispute, not the kind of scandal
the right wing wants.” Really? In what conceivable sense is this
not a serious scandal? If you, as an American citizen, let alone
a journalist, don’t find it deeply objectionable when top national
security officials systematically mislead your representatives in
Congress about how the government is spying on you, and repeatedly
lie publicly about resulting political controversies over that spying,
what is objectionable? If having the NSA engage in secret, indiscriminate
domestic spying that warps
if not outright violates legal limits isn’t a “scandal”, then
what is?
For many media
and political elites, the answer to that question seems clear: what’s
truly objectionable to them is when powerless individuals blow the
whistle on deceitful national security state officials. Hence the
endless fixation on Edward Snowden’s tone and choice of asylum providers,
the flamboyant denunciations of this
“29-year-old hacker” for the crime of exposing what our government
leaders are doing in the dark, and all sorts of mockery over the
drama that resulted from the due-process-free revocation of his
passport. This is what our media stars and progressive
columnists, pundits and bloggers are obsessing over in the hope
of distracting attention away from the
surveillance misconduct of top-level Obama officials and their
serial deceit about it.
What kind of
journalist – or citizen – would focus more on Edward Snowden’s
tonal oddities and travel drama than on the fact that top US officials
have been deceitfully concealing a massive, worldwide spying apparatus
being constructed with virtually no accountability or oversight?
Just ponder what it says about someone who cares more about, and
is angrier about, Edward Snowden’s exposure of these facts than
they are about James Clapper’s falsehoods and the NSA’s excesses.
What we see
here, yet again, is this authoritarian strain in US political life
that the most powerful political officials cannot commit crimes
or engage in serious wrongdoing. The only political crimes come
from exposing and aggressively challenging those officials.
How is it anything
other than pure whistleblowing to disclose secret documents proving
that top government officials have been systematically deceiving
the public about vital matters and/or skirting if not violating
legal and Constitutional limits? And what possible justification
is there for supporting the ability of James Clapper to continue
in his job despite what he just got caught doing?
July
5, 2013
Copyright
© 2013 The
Guardian
Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell