Relevant sections from the Close Guantanamo
NOW message published May 23, 2013, in The New York
Times:
“Obama
promised to restore the rule of
law. Instead he has claimed
and exercised unchecked executive powers beyond what George Bush used. He refuses to prosecute
officials for their use of
torture, yet aggressively prosecutes any whistle-blowers who expose war crimes, most flagrantly in the
torture, slander and draconian legal charges against
Bradley Manning. By signing the National Defense Authorization Act of
2012, Obama made
indefinite detention, based on merely an accusation, the law of the land. These actions amount to
institutionalizing and, in important respects, escalating the “Bush
Doctrine.”
 Donate to publish this
message internationally.
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Alfred,
This afternoon we learned that
Edward Snowden, an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton (a private contractor for the
National Security Agency), claimed responsibility for the biggest intelligence
leak in U.S. history. In an interview with The
Guardian, Snowden
said,
 “I really want the focus to be on these documents and
the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about
what kind of world we want to live in.” He added: “My sole motive is to
inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done
against them.”
This past
Wednesday, via Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian, we learned that the
National Security Agency has been monitoring business phone traffic on Verizon
lines and gathering all that metadata in bulk. On Thursday the story got much
bigger with revelations that the NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple,
Google and others. Also
from the
Guardian:
“On Saturday, the Guardian reported the existence of an NSA datamining
program called Boundless
Informant that helps analysts track and sort the voluminous electronic
surveillance the agency collects, including by country. Top secret information
published by the Guardian detailed that NSA harvested nearly 3bn pieces of
intelligence from US computer networks in just 30 days.”
Barack Obama
responding to the revelation that the NSA vacuums up data on everyone:
“in the abstract, you can complain about Big
Brother and a program run amuck, but when you actually look at the details, I
think we've struck the right balance.”
More on
PRISM and the National Security Agency
at Ft. Meade MD (where
Bradley Manning is being court martialed).
From the Guardian interview with
Edward Snowden:
Q: Why did you decide to become a
whistleblower?
A: “The NSA has built an
infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this
capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested
without targeting.”
Q: What about the response in general to the
disclosures?
A: “I have been surprised and pleased to see the
public has reacted so strongly in defence of these rights that are being
suppressed in the name of security.”
Today at
the Left Forum in NYC, World Can't Wait sponsored a discussion on “the National
Security State, Whistle-blowers and Bradley Manning” with Jesselyn Raddack,
Thomas Drake and Kevin Gosztola. We discussed the need for protest and
resistance to the a lack of privacy for the people, and secrecy for the
government. Thomas made a case to people who say “if you have nothing to hide,
you shouldn't worry” by saying things remarkably similar to what Snowden
said:
“You don’t have to have done anything wrong, you
simply have to have eventually fall under suspicion... and then they can use
this system to go back in time and... derive suspicion from an innocent
life”
 Hours after today's event, we learned about
Edward Snowden. The Guardian reported tonight,
“Thomas Drake, a former NSA executive who famously
leaked information about what he considered a wasteful datamining program at the
agency, said of Snowden: ‘He's extraordinarily brave and
courageous.’
“Drake was investigated so intensely by the justice
department that the longtime analyst was reduced to working at an Apple store
until the Obama administration abruptly dropped
charges that could have landed him in jail for 35 years.
"‘It's an
extraordinarily magnanimous act of civil disobedience to disclose the Pandora's
Box of the Leviathan state,’ Drake told the Guardian as he returned from
a weekend appearance in New York at the Left Forum, where he spoke about
whistleblowing and national security.”
In
“Has the US become the type of nation from which
you have to seek asylum?”
the Washington Post says,
“Snowden wasn't crazy to question whether he'd be
treated fairly by the American justice system.”
► It's really up to us to create a
political situation where the government is forced to back down in defending and
pursuing police-state levels of surveillance, justified by “national security.”
Tomorrow,
we're gathering at noon at Union Square in NYC to support Edward Snowden
(details on Facebook event).
When asked about the personal risks he took to make
this information public, Snowden told Glenn Greenwald,
“The greatest fear that I have regarding the
outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.”
What are
you willing to risk for real change? |
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