[Peace-discuss] Why Obama made Edward Snowden the world's most wanted criminal

[David Johnson via Peace-discuss]

  Noam Chomsky: Why Obama made Edward Snowden the world's most wanted
  criminal

Noam Chomsky 02 June 2014. Posted in News <http://stopwar.org.uk/news>


        Power remains strong when it remains in the dark. Snowden's
        crime, says Noam Chomsky, is that he has exposed power to the
        sunlight, where it will evaporate

234 
<http://stopwar.org.uk/news/noam-chomsky-why-obama-has-made-edward-snowden-the-world-s-most-wanted-criminal#> 

Obama and Snowden

In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive 
lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state 
policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated 
concept of transparency.

The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents 
about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the 
courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized 
and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, "No 
Place to Hide."

The documents unveil a remarkable project to expose to state scrutiny 
vital information about every person who falls within the grasp of the 
colossus - in principle, every person linked to the modern electronic 
society.

Nothing so ambitious was imagined by the dystopian prophets of grim 
totalitarian worlds ahead.

It is of no slight import that the project is being executed in one of 
the freest countries in the world, and in radical violation of the US 
Constitution's Bill of Rights, which protects citizens from 
"unreasonable searches and seizures," and guarantees the privacy of 
their "persons, houses, papers and effects."

Much as government lawyers may try, there is no way to reconcile these 
principles with the assault on the population revealed in the Snowden 
documents.

It is also well to remember that defense of the fundamental right to 
privacy helped to spark the American Revolution. In the 18th century, 
the tyrant was the British government, which claimed the right to 
intrude freely into the homes and personal lives of American colonists. 
Today it is American citizens' own government that arrogates to itself 
this authority.

Britain retains the stance that drove the colonists to rebellion, though 
on a more restricted scale, as power has shifted in world affairs. The 
British government has called on the NSA "to analyse and retain any 
British citizens' mobile phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses, 
swept up by its dragnet," The Guardian reports, working from documents 
provided by Snowden.

British citizens (like other international customers) will also 
doubtless be pleased to learn that the NSA routinely receives or 
intercepts routers, servers and other computer network devices exported 
from the United States so that it can implant surveillance tools, as 
Greenwald reports in his book.

As the colossus fulfills its visions, in principle every keystroke might 
be sent to President Obama's huge and expanding databases in Utah.

In other ways too, the constitutional lawyer in the White House seems 
determined to demolish the foundations of our civil liberties. The 
principle of the presumption of innocence, which dates back to Magna 
Carta 800 years ago, has long been dismissed to oblivion.

Recently /The New York Times/ reported the "anguish" of a federal judge 
who had to decide whether to allow the force-feeding of a Syrian 
prisoner who is on a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment.

No "anguish" was expressed over the fact that he has been held without 
trial for 12 years in Guantanamo, one of many victims of the leader of 
the Free World, who claims the right to hold prisoners without charges 
and to subject them to torture.

These exposures lead us to inquire into state policy more generally and 
the factors that drive it. The received standard version is that the 
primary goal of policy is security and defense against enemies.

The doctrine at once suggests a few questions: security for whom, and 
defense against which enemies? The answers are highlighted dramatically 
by the Snowden revelations.

Policy must assure the security of state authority and concentrations of 
domestic power, defending them from a frightening enemy: the domestic 
population, which can become a great danger if not controlled.

It has long been understood that information about the enemy makes a 
critical contribution to controlling it. In that regard, Obama has a 
series of distinguished predecessors, though his contributions have 
reached unprecedented levels, as we have learned from the work of 
Snowden, Greenwald and a few others.

To defend state power and private economic power from the domestic 
enemy, those two entities must be concealed - while in sharp contrast, 
the enemy must be fully exposed to state authority.

The principle was lucidly explained by the policy intellectual Samuel P. 
Huntington, who instructed us that "Power remains strong when it remains 
in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate."

Huntington added a crucial illustration. In his words, "you may have to 
sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create 
the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. 
That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman 
Doctrine" at the outset of the Cold War.

Huntington's insight into state power and policy was both accurate and 
prescient. As he wrote these words in 1981, the Reagan administration 
was launching its war on terror - which quickly became a murderous and 
brutal terrorist war, primarily in Central America, but extending well 
beyond to southern Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

 From that day forward, in order to carry out violence and subversion 
abroad, or repression and violation of fundamental rights at home, state 
power has regularly sought to create the misimpression that it is 
terrorists that we are fighting, though there are other options: drug 
lords, mad mullahs seeking nuclear weapons, and other ogres said to be 
seeking to attack and destroy us.

Throughout, the basic principle remains: Power must not be exposed to 
the sunlight. Edward Snowden has become the most wanted criminal in the 
world for failing to comprehend this essential maxim.

In brief, there must be complete transparency for the population, but 
none for the powers that must defend themselves from this fearsome 
internal enemy.

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