'Hypnotized' Western Public Wakes Up to Obama Abuses (Frankfurter
AllgemeineZeitung,
Germany)
"These are attacks on freedom of the press and vendettas against
reporters who haven't stuck to the agenda and 'storyline' preferred by Obama’s
people and the White House. ... Is it a coincidence that a reporter from Fox News appeared in the crosshairs of
FBI agents? ... Is it a coincidence that the Obama Administration has pursued
twice as many violations of the anti-espionage law of 1917 than all previous
governments combined?"
President Obama is shielded from the rain by a U.S. Marine, at a press conference last week with Turkey Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. With the onset of scandal, the image has been parodied by cartoonists across the world.
With drones and
spies: The White House is leading a secret war against its opponents. It also
has journalists in the crosshairs. They are persecuted as 'co-conspirators.'
It
has taken months, even years, for the apparently collectively-hypnotized
Western public to want to notice, never mind want to question, the secret drone
war waged by President Barack Obama. Didn’t the politician with the messianic
rhetoric promise that, under his leadership, America’s wars would abate, and
that through dialog - especially with the Muslim world, he would restore the
superpower's tarnished image across the globe? Not to mention that Obama, who
portrayed himself as a figure of great historical transformation, was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year in office.
It
is now known that by December 2009, when Obama accepted the Nobel Prize in
Oslo, he had already ordered more secret drone attacks than his predecessor
George W. Bush during his entire eight years in office. After three years of
the White House under Obama’s command, twice as many terrorist suspects (and
hundreds of innocent civilians listed as "collateral damage") had
been killed by drones as had been imprisoned in Guantanamo under Bush. Meetings
between Obama and his top advisers, during which the president uses a "Kill
List" prepared for him by the intelligence agencies and approves whether
or not to pull the trigger on the next suspects in the Hindu Kush, the Arabian
Peninsula, or the Horn of Africa, are held on "Terror Tuesday," in the
jargon of the White House. That Obama’s drone war will free or even secure
America and the world from the lash of Islamist terrorism is something hardly
anyone believes anymore.
A threat to
national security
In
the United States there is talk of Obama’s second secret war. In the online magazine
Slate, Fred Kaplan specifically gave
his most recent "War Stories" column the title Obama's
Other Secret War. This campaign on the domestic front is directed
against political opponents associated with the right-wing grassroots Tea Party
movement, targeted by the federal tax agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and
also against journalists, whose investigative work is being spied upon by the Justice
Department. There is no evidence that the president himself is brooding over a
symbolic "Kill List" and then releasing various agencies and
departments against his opponents in the domestic arena.
The
president repeatedly asserts that when it comes to knowing about the recent
scandals, he "just learned from the press." Initially, Obama acts
angry about the targeted harassment of organizations and foundations associated
with the Tea Party, whose applications for tax exempt status were singled out
by IRS officials and subjected to delays in processing for approval; and then
the president fires the current head of the IRS. Soon later, however, the White
House stonewalls and rejects accusations of deliberate spying on unfavorable journalists
by the Justice Department and hides behind the argument that the disclosure of
secret information through media threatens national security and could endanger
the lives of employees and informers working for the intelligence services. And
then Jay Carney, Obama’s overworked press secretary and former bureau chief of
the weekly magazine Time, declines
further comment about "ongoing investigations."
Telephone
records and private e-mail traffic
But
cases of spying that became public in recent days, which involve the Associated Press (AP) news agency and James
Rosen, Washington bureau chief of conservative Fox News, were not investigations of government employees having
anything to do with treason. These are attacks on freedom of the press and
vendettas against reporters who haven't stuck to the agenda and "storyline"
preferred by Obama’s people and the White House. The accessing of AP employee phone records from April and
May of 2012 occurred because AP investigated
and reported on a botched terrorist attack on a passenger aircraft that was
planned by the Yemen branch of al-Qaeda in May 2012 - on the occasion of the first
anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. This contradicted Obama’s 2012
presidential campaign message, which was that after the killing of bin Laden, al-Qaeda
was no longer be capable of catastrophic terrorist attacks against America. The
Department of Justice supported accessing information on more than twenty AP office phone line as well as from
business and private phone lines of several journalists based on the argument
that AP employees were
co-conspirators in betraying state secrets.
The
Justice Department followed the same pattern in the case of James Rosen of Fox News. The reporter was targeted by
government spies because he was accused of being a co-conspirator of a State
Department employee, who had been identified as having leaked classified information.
Rosen had received
information taken from a classified report dated June 2009 from Stephen
Jin-Woo Kim, a former North Korea expert at the State Department, according to
which renewed international sanctions against Pyongyang might result in new
nuclear tests. The CIA, the U.S. intelligence agency that operates abroad, allegedly
received the information from sources inside North Korea. As the
Washington Post reported,
FBI investigators obtained information on the journalist’s State Department
electronic security badge as well as his telephone records. In addition, they
examined Rosen’s personal e-mail records. In an FBI document, it says that
Rosen coaxed the information out of Kim "through the use of flattery and
playing to Mr. Kim’s vanity and ego."
Reporters and
Spies
No
one has questioned the agencies’ authority to take legal action against a
government employee when the latter is suspected of having broken his oath of
secrecy. Even more a cause for outrage is that this excessive spying on
journalists was in part based on criticism of attempts to obtain confidential
or secret information by taking advantage of the "ego" of a
government "co-conspirator." Media and civil rights organizations as
well as countless politicians from both parties have denounced the spying on
the Associated Press and James Rosen
as an attack by government on the constitutional right to freedom of the press.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
Add
to that the fact that Obama's closest associates in the White House repeatedly
fed reporters from leftist liberal media - The
New York Times, for one - secret and confidential information when such "leaked"
stories coincided with the president’s agenda. Information on the commando
operation to kill bin Laden in early May 2011 or on the successful cyber virus "Stuxnet" on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2010
didn’t just leak - they literally flowed.
Is it a coincidence that a reporter
from Fox News appeared in the
crosshairs of FBI agents? And that the regime in Pyongyang tends to react to
the passing of banal "secret information" on stricter sanctions with
additional provocations like a nuclear or missile testing? Is it a coincidence
that the Obama Administration has pursued twice as many violations of the anti-espionage
law of 1917 than all previous governments combined? In the past, agents of
foreign intelligence services and traitors motivated by greed were condemned by
the Espionage Act of 1917.
