Obama Encapsulated: Admitted Liar Put In Charge Of Maintaining The "Trust" Of The People In Surveillance Programs

Are you worried that your overreaching secret surveillance programs are causing people to question your power grabs? If you're Barack Obama that means saying a lot of lofty things about "trust", "transparency" and "outside experts" to the public. But when it comes time to putting that all together you turn to your Director of National Intelligence, who has already admitted to lying to Congress about the scope of those projects.

This will totally change everything!

And there are other signs that the group won’t turn out quite the way the president described it on Friday. Friday’s speech talked about the need for input from outside experts with independent points of view. The president made no mention of the need for outsiders or independent viewpoints in his memo to Clapper.

The stated mission of the group has also shifted. On Friday, Obama said the group would examine “how we can maintain the trust of the people, how we can make sure that there absolutely is no abuse.” But today’s memo makes no mention of preventing abuses. Instead, it will examine whether U.S. surveillance activity “optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.”

Meet the new boss, literally the same as the old one.

Releated, the NY Times has a big profile up of Laura Poitras who along with Glenn Greenwald has been releasing the information provided to them by Edward Snowden.

It's mostly what you'd expect...brave reporter, bravely reporting...blah, blah, blah.

To me the interesting part is about her experience with the US government after she produced a documentary on Iraq in the midst of some of the heaviest fighting. She was suspected of having ties to Iraqi insurgents. She denies this and the Times found a retired military officer who agrees with her. Still, she was put on a terror watch list for this and routinely interrogated by security whenever she flew anywhere.

Until....she finally agreed to let Greenwald publish a story on it. And then the checks suddenly stopped.

If she was legitimately thought to have ties to terrorists, heightened and even unpleasant attention would be warranted but if what she says is true and it stopped as soon as she went public and became an embarrassment to the government, it's something very different.

Add this kind of thing to Lois Lerner and Obama's faux "trust and transparency" effort and it's pretty clear the government is way, way out of control.

In less than two months it's really going to get extraordinary powers over the health insurance and health care system in this country.

Our economic DOOM isn't our only or biggest problem.

posted by DrewM. at 10:53 AM

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