Kudos to my not favorite newspaper the Washington Post by giving us a real Christmas present, an honest interview with Edward Snowden, who makes President Obama and his various assorted mouthpieces look like the moral midgets they are. When the history of these times is written, Snowden and the unhappy Chelsea Manning will be remembered as individuals who dared to expose the crimes of the national security state instead of covering them and perpetuating, as our president and his minions are so wont to do.
There’s no doubt that the president was simply going with the flow on national security issues. Probably not one American in a hundred gave a damn about the unmerited sufferings of the Guantanamo prisoners, not to mention those killed and maimed all around the world as the result of aimless U.S. aggression that had no point other than to demonstrate our capacity for unprincipled ruthlessness. But there is a difference between bending with the wind and institutionalizing the hurricane. At almost every point, the Obama administration has argued for, and, to the extent possible, implemented a security state based on the concept of unreviewable executive discretion.
The real guarantee that we are a nation of laws is the ability of the court system to define the reach of its own authority. But over and over again the Obama administration has argued that the executive has the power to decide which cases the courts will be allowed to hear, that whenever the executive so chooses, our rights simply disappear in a haze of executive discretion, where even to complain is itself a crime.
There has been some backlash against this fascism in Congress. To the extent that it prospers, it will be owing to the bravery of people like Snowden and Manning. One can only hope that this will be strong enough to ultimately wear away the monument of corruption erected by the cowardice of people like Obama and Holder.
