http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6260
By John W. Whitehead
Whistleblower Magazine, March, 2013
Four years after Barack Obama was elected on a platform of
“change you can believe in,” he’s now promising America that the “best
is yet to come.” However, on almost every front — fiscally, militarily,
politically, socially — the country is in a state of disarray.
Most troubling, however, is the state of our freedoms.
Indeed, during Obama’s first term, our civil liberties were utterly and
completely disemboweled. The great irony, of course, is that this
happened with a self-proclaimed constitutional law professor at the helm
— a man who was supposed to understand and respect the rule of law as
laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
Not only did Obama continue many of the most outrageous abuses of the
George W. Bush administration (which were bad enough), including
indefinite detention and warrantless surveillance of American citizens,
but he also succeeded in expanding the power of the “imperial
president,” including the ability to assassinate American citizens
abroad and unilaterally authorize drone strikes resulting in the deaths
of countless innocent civilians, including women and children.
Obama has a lot to account for over the course of his first four
years in office, particularly in terms of the erosion of our civil
liberties. Just consider some of the assaults on our freedoms that took
place under Obama’s watch, either as a result of his continuing Bush’s
policies, enacting his own misguided policies or simply because he did
nothing to counter them.
In March 2009, only two months after being elected, Obama defended
Bush’s unconstitutional National Security Agency spying program in
court. Obama went so far as to insist that actions authorized by the
president, including illegally spying on American citizens, should be
free from any judicial scrutiny whatsoever.
In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security launched a
program, Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of
military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing
them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they
may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological
effects of war.” Coupled with the DHS’ report on “Rightwing Extremism,”
which broadly defines right-wing extremists as individuals and groups
“that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor
of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority
entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the
government — whether it be an Occupier, Tea Party supporter or a free
speech protester.
In July 2009, Obama threatened to veto an oversight bill that would
have required the president to inform lawmakers about covert CIA
activities.
In December 2009, Obama, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize,
announced his intention to ramp up the military industrial complex’s war
in Afghanistan and subsequently followed through on his plan.
In February 2010, the Department of Defense issued a U.S. Army field
manual detailing the prospective internment and resettlement of American
citizens in the event of another terrorist attack or natural disaster
on U.S. soil. The leaked document confirmed the fears of many government
critics, “from the Patriot movement on the right to Occupy on the left
to Anonymous, anarchists, organized racists, survivalists, and plain old
conspiracy theorists in between.”
In March 2010, the Department of Homeland Security began rolling out
controversial full-body scanners to American airports. Despite an
initial outcry about the invasive nature of the scanners and the
enhanced pat-downs of American citizens, government officials continued
to tout the machines as safe and effective. A year later, an
investigative report by ProPublica/PBS NewsHour, revealed that six to
100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the
machines, which were purchased with Obama’s stimulus funds.
In July 2010, the Obama administration arrested 23-year-old Army
soldier Bradley Manning on charges that he leaked classified military
and diplomatic documents to the anti-secrecy website, Wikileaks. Held in
maximum solitary confinement for close to a year, treatment normally
reserved for the most violent or dangerous of criminals, Manning has yet
to be put on trial. His treatment was intended to send a clear warning
to all those who would challenge the military empire: “Don’t even
consider it.”
In May 2011, Obama expanded the war effort, with bombings in Libya,
Somalia, and Yemen. Later that month, Obama signed a four-year extension
of three controversial provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act that authorize
the government to use aggressive surveillance tactics — even against
American citizens — in the so-called war against terror. That same
month, the U.S. Supreme Court in an 8-1 ruling in Kentucky v. King
effectively decimated the Fourth Amendment by giving SWAT teams more
leeway to break into homes or apartments in search of illegal drugs when
they suspect the evidence might be destroyed. The Court, at the urging
of the Obama administration, sanctioned warrantless raids, saying that
police had acted lawfully and that was all that mattered.
In June 2011, a Department of Education “SWAT team” forced their way
into the home of a California man, handcuffed him, and placed his three
children in a squad car while they conducted a search of his home,
allegedly over falsified student loans. Raids of this type are becoming
increasingly common — more than 50,000 such raids occur every year in
America — with federal agencies such as the State Department, Department
of Energy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park
Service laying claim to their own SWAT teams. Also in June 2011, the FBI
granted its 14,000 agents expansive additional powers, allowing them to
investigate individuals using highly intrusive monitoring techniques,
including infiltrating suspect organizations with confidential
informants and photographing and tailing suspect American citizens,
without having any factual basis for suspecting them of wrongdoing.
In September 2011, two American citizens were killed during a drone
attack in Yemen as part of a government “kill list” operation in which
Obama personally directs who should be targeted for death by military
drones. Drone strikes, a signature policy of the Obama administration,
have tripled since Obama took office.
In December 2011, the Senate passed the National Defense
Authorization Act of 2012, which mandates that anyone suspected of
terrorism against the United States be held in military custody
indefinitely. This provision extends to American citizens on American
territory. It was quietly signed into law by Obama on New Year’s Eve.
In February 2012, Obama signed the FAA Reauthorization Act, which
opens up American skies for the domestic use of armed surveillance
drones, a $30 billion per year industry. Incredibly, no civil liberties
protections for Americans were included in the legislation. By 2020, it
is estimated that at least 30,000 drones will be crisscrossing the
nation’s skies equipped with anti-personnel weapons and surveillance
devices.
In March 2012, Congress overwhelmingly passed and Obama signed the
anti-protest “Trespass Bill” — legislation that makes it a federal crime
to protest or assemble in the vicinity of protected government
officials. The bill’s language is so overly broad as to put an end to
free speech, political protest and the right to peaceably assemble in
all areas where government officials happen to be present. That same
month, Obama issued an executive order stating that in the case of a war
or national emergency, the federal government has the authority to take
over almost every aspect of American society.
In April 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court — again at the urging of the
Obama administration — declared that any person who is arrested and
processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her
offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic
offense), can be subjected to a strip search by police or jail officials
without reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is carrying a weapon or
contraband.
In July 2012, the Obama administration began allowing the National
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to store and “critically assess”
information on innocent Americans for up to five years. Data recorded by
the NCTC includes “records from law enforcement investigations, health
information, employment history, travel and student records,” among
other things.
In September 2012 and in the months preceding it, in major cities
across the country, including Boston, Miami, Little Rock, and Los
Angeles, the U.S. military carried out training exercises involving Black Hawk helicopters and uniformed soldiers.
The exercises occurred in the middle of the night, with the full
cooperation of the local police forces and generally without forewarning
the public.
In October 2012, it was revealed that the Obama administration has
been “secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a
next-generation targeting list called the ‘disposition matrix.’” The
matrix goes beyond the president’s kill list to detail suspects beyond
the reach of American drones. This disposition matrix is also overseen
by the NCTC.
So what does the future hold? Unless President Obama changes
course — and drastically so — freedom as we have known it will become
extinct.
John W. Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written,
debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law and human
rights. Whitehead’s aggressive, pioneering approach to civil liberties
has earned him numerous accolades and accomplishments, including the
Hungarian Medal of Freedom.
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