According to two US Senators who are both Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Eric Holder Justice Department has made misleading public statements about its “secret interpretation” of the Patriot Act that “allows” law enforcement to gather any kind of intelligence they want, on anyone inside the U.S., whether or not there’s any evidence of connection to terrorism or espionage. Apparently, no “domestic intelligence gathering” activity is off-limits under this “secret interpretation”…
But the real kicker is… it’s secret. So we don’t even know what we’re dealing with.
The two Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have written a letter to Eric Holder, asking him for public clarification. Here’s a petition you can sign in support of their request.
The Justice Dept. maintains that the law is public and denies that it’s doing anything in secret… even while acknowledging that its “interpretations” of this public law are in fact classified.
The interpretations of the public law are classified. Is that Orwellian enough for you?
Maybe you’re wondering why Obama’s hand-picked Justice chief is running his organization this way rather than scaling back the Patriot Act as he should be doing. I’m wondering too. Our “friends” in the Obama administration are not just continuing Bush policies, they’re intensifying them. We now have an “always and forever war against terror” with literally no end in sight, ever. The “war on terror” — which, of course, involves U.S. state-sponsored terror — has already given us a soft police state in which we are paying a literal fortune every year to have ourselves spied on without limit. And our nation’s illegal overseas activities (including an official assassination policy and attacks on the citizens of sovereign countries with unmanned drone planes flown from military computer workstations) are seriously damaging our relationships with other countries.
We don’t have to run our foreign policy this way. We have caused our problems in the world. Nobody is “doing” anything to the USA. We’re doing it to ourselves. And we (along with Israel) are becoming increasingly isolated and defensive, as shown by our recent reaction to the Palestinian UN statehood bid. You hardly need to wait for the perspective of history to see that our credibility and influence in the world are collapsing rapidly, and that we will engage in increasingly dangerous, destabilizing activity. We’re throwing good money after bad to prop up misguided policies rather than re-think them. That’s the Obama presidency in a nutshell.
Feel free to post a comment explaining how I can justify voting for a second term for Barack Obama. Credible recent estimates are that the major Presidential candidates will spend $1B each to win the White House in the next election. They’ll get that money from wealthy special interests, and those interests will expect a worthwhile return on their investment. And this is how our government is being run.
I might vote for Buddy Roemer: he’s refusing all PAC money and limiting his campaign contributions to $100. He wants to talk about Congressional corruption but the Republican party won’t let him participate in any debates.