“The question,” Obama said, “is how do we make the American people more comfortable.” He seemed genuinely puzzled by the distrustful attitude of the public. Why are they not comfortable? After all, he explained, “I am comfortable that the program currently is not being abused. I’m comfortable that if the American people examined exactly what was taking place, how it was being used, what the safeguards were, that they would say, you know what, these folks are following the law and doing what they say they’re doing.” Of course, the American people will never be given the opportunity to examine “exactly” what is taking place. They will be told as little as the Obama administration and the NSA can get away with. But this fact aside, Obama’s invocation of the trustworthiness of the NSA personnel’s democratic commitments, aside from its obvious absurdity, betrayed a staggering ignorance of the intellectual foundations and legal principles upon which the US Constitution is based. He declared: "And let me close with one additional thought. The men and women of our intelligence community work every day to keep us safe because they love this country and believe in our values. They’re patriots." There are two essential objections to this statement. First, as to the matter of the supposedly outstanding caliber of the men and woman who work for the NSA and CIA, which therefore makes them deserving of the uninformed trust of the citizenry, the framers of the Constitution were representatives of a legal and democratic tradition that counseled unflagging and relentless distrust of power. As the historian Bernard Bailyn explained so vividly in his major work, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: "Most commonly the discussion of power [among the colonials] centered on its essential characteristic of aggressiveness: its endlessly propulsive tendency to expand itself beyond legitimate boundaries. In expressing this central thought, which explained more of politics, past and present, to them than any other single consideration, the writers of the time outdid themselves in verbal ingenuity. The image most commonly used was that of the act of trespassing. Power, it was said over and over again, has “an encroaching nature;” “… if at first it meets with no control [it] creeps by degrees and quickly subdues the whole.” Sometimes the image is that of the human hand, “the hand of power,” reaching out to clutch and to seize: power is “grasping” and “tenacious” in its nature; “what it seizes it will retain.” Sometimes power “is like the ocean, not easily admitting limits to be fixed in it.” Sometimes it is “like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour.” Sometimes it is motion, desire and appetite all at once, being “restless, aspiring, and insatiable.” "What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right." wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/20/lect-a20.html
Posted on: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 23:15:14 +0000
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