(2PM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)
Spiegel interviewed Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers. The interview, ‘Obama Deceives the Public’, touches on a subject close to Ellsberg, which is whistleblowers. He explains:
For instance, the Obama administration is criminalizing and prosecuting whistleblowers to punish them for uncovering scandals within the federal government.
Ellsberg gives the example of the indictment of Thomas Drake by the Obama administration as an example of how “Obama is continuing the worst of the Bush administration”. Drake provided information to reporters about the shortcomings in the NSA. By indicting Drake, Ellsberg thinks it shows a double standard by the U.S. president.
For Obama to indict and prosecute Drake now, for acts undertaken and investigated during the Bush administration, is to do precisely what Obama said he did not mean to do — “look backward.” Of all the blatantly criminal acts committed under Bush, warrantless wiretapping by the NSA, aggression, torture, Obama now prosecutes only the revelation of massive waste by the NSA, a socially useful act which the Bush administration itself investigated but did not choose to indict or prosecute!
Bush brought no indictments against whistleblowers, though he suspended Drake’s clearance. Obama, in this and other matters relating to secrecy and whistleblowing, is doing worse than Bush. His violation of civil liberties and the White House’s excessive use of the executive secrecy privilege is inexcusable.
Ellsberg doesn’t “even listen anymore” to Obama’s rhetoric. For him, Obama has demonstrated that “his actions are totally uncoupled from his public statements… He has turned 180 degrees.”
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and then there are war criminals. Good to know where our president’s sympathies sit.
Why the fuck would anyone be surprised by anything he does as opposed to what he says. He may have been his own man in the past but he is pwned by The Establishment-Oligarchy.
Or as they would say in Hawaii, “That hapahaole is pau.”
is that most ‘debate’ in the democratic party all deals in the rhetoric and not the reality. I too quit listening when it became apparent that the rhetoric was completely unhinged from what this administration was doing. It’s hard to get people to stop supporting what they hear and believe when they prefer the illusion rather then the reality. Even when confronted with the continuation of the worst they wiggle the truth around to fit the narrative they prefer. if that doesn’t fly they take to the ‘two legs better’ mind set and drag out a litany of lame excuses and turn the Democratic perps into victims. Hard to maintain this as we watch the country morphing into a cesspool created by and for the profits of the criminals.