![Obama-confused[1]](https://antiwar.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Obama-confused1-1024x700.jpg)
When the Iran-Contra scandal broke out, President Reagan went on national television and played dumb. He claimed he had no knowledge that high-level members of his administration were illegally selling arms to the Iranian regime and using the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, despite legislation prohibiting such aid. It was dubious at best, but he decided that being an incompetent president who doesn’t even know what’s going on in his own administration was better than being blamed for willfully breaking the law.
I can’t help but wonder if that scenario is playing itself out again. According to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, President Obama didn’t know anything about the Justice Department’s nefarious snooping on Associated Press journalists. I find that extremely hard to believe.
According to the AP, the Justice Department monitored the work and personal phone records of more than 20 reporters and editors for months. From the very beginning of the Obama reign, there has been a war on whistleblowers, an effort to strike fear into those who might leak information to the press, a fight to make the Imperial Presidency more secret than it has ever been. Until now, the administration seemed to brazenly parade its achievement of prosecuting more people under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations. But with this latest fiasco, the administration seems to have crossed the line: now, they are too embarrassed to admit it.
“This investigation is broader and less focused on an individual source or reporter than any of the others we’ve seen,” said Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists told The Washington Post. “They have swept up an entire collection of press communications. It’s an astonishing assault on core values of our society.”
Jacob Heilbrunn at The National Interest writes that “leaks have always plagued presidents” and that “they are a function of a national security state that has always aspired to total control in the post-World War II-era.”
“It is no small irony that Obama, who declared that he would halt the George W. Bush administration’s violations of personal freedoms, has exceeded the mendacity of his predecessors in creating a new star chamber to hunt down his detractors and enemies,” Heilbrunn adds.
The government would not say why it sought the records. Officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an Al Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.
In testimony in February, CIA Director John Brennan noted that the FBI had questioned him about whether he was AP’s source, which he denied. He called the release of the information to the media about the terror plot an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.”
…The May 7, 2012, AP story that disclosed details of the CIA operation in Yemen to stop an airliner bomb plot occurred around the one-year anniversary of the May 2, 2011, killing of Osama bin Laden.
The plot was significant both because of its seriousness and also because the White House previously had told the public it had “no credible information that terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, are plotting attacks in the U.S. to coincide with the (May 2) anniversary of bin Laden’s death.”
…Brennan talked about the AP story and investigation in written testimony to the Senate. “The irresponsible and damaging leak of classified information was made … when someone informed The Associated Press that the U.S. government had intercepted an IED (improvised explosive device) that was supposed to be used in an attack and that the U.S. government currently had that IED in its possession and was analyzing it,” he wrote.
It’s unsurprising that the spying program was done in response to a leak on a foreign policy issue. No area invites secrecy and spying like “national security.” After all, the crowning foreign policy achievement of the Obama presidency has been, in the words of Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, “the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals.”
Last year, the government rejected an unprecedented amount of Freedom of Information Act requests. “The administration cited exceptions built into the law to avoid turning over materials more than 479,000 times, a roughly 22 percent increase over the previous year,” The Associated Press reported in March.
“We’ve seen a meteoric rise in the number of claims to protect secret law, the government’s interpretations of laws or its understanding of its own authority,” Alexander Abdo of the ACLU told the AP. “In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration.”
However “irresponsible and damaging” the leaks were in John Brennan’s mind, the sweeping seizure of journalists’ phone records is a far greater scandal. This was a witch hunt to enforce the Obama administration’s demands for total secrecy. And after the leaking of internal White House and State Department emails revealing an effort to cover-up terrorist involvement in the Benghazi attacks as well as the just-released information on IRS policy of giving “special attention” to taxpayers who “criticize how the country is being run,” Obama’s second terms looks like its the biggest scandal of all.
PETITION URGENTLY REQUESTING THAT CONGRESS LAUNCH AN INDEPENDENT AND COMPREHENSIVE INVESTIGATION INTO UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND IMPEACHABLE OFFENSES ON THE PART OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
To: All members of the U.S. Congress:
Whereas, top constitutional attorneys from across the political spectrum now agree that Barack Obama has committed certain specific offenses that unquestionably rise to the level of impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors”;
Whereas, one of these offenses – that of illegally conducting war against Libya – has been deemed by a bipartisan panel of constitutional experts to be “clearly an impeachable offense” and “gross usurpation of the war power”;
Whereas, Obama’s policy of targeted assassinations of U.S. citizens without any constitutionally required due process – including the drone assassination of an American-born 16-year-old as he was eating dinner – is unanimously deemed by experts, both liberal and conservative, as “an impeachable offense”;
Whereas, Obama’s Justice Department has presided over the disastrous “Fast and Furious” operation in which approximately 2,000 firearms were directed from U.S. gun shops across the U.S.-Mexico border and into the hands of members of Mexican drug cartels, resulting in the deaths of as many as 100 people, including U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry – a scandal that constitutional experts agree constitutes, at a minimum, clear grounds for impeaching Attorney General Eric Holder;
Whereas, Obama has – in clear-cut violation of his oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” imposed by Article II of the Constitution – refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed into law in 1996 under President Bill Clinton;
Whereas, Obama usurped the authority of Congress by issuing an executive order in June 2012 declaring that illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. before they turned 16 and who are younger than 30 would not be deported – essentially duplicating the DREAM Act which failed to pass in Congress;
Whereas, Obama made several recess appointments in January 2012 while the Senate was still officially in session, actions the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently ruled violated the Constitution because they weren’t made when the Senate was in recess;
Whereas, the Obama administration’s multi-faceted scandal in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the murder of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, is not only proof of what legal experts call tremendous “deceit” on the part of Obama and his top team, but a serious constitutional violation as well;
Whereas, numerous other constitutional outrages characterize Obama's presidency – from his administration’s abuses of citizens’ civil rights under cover of the PATRIOT Act; to the Obama Justice Department’s refusal to prosecute the worst case of voter intimidation in modern times, perpetrated by club-wielding New Black Panthers; to Obama’s appointment of more than 30 unelected “czars” to positions in federal agencies when the Constitution requires such appointments be vetted by Congress; and other instances of clear contempt for Congress, the Constitution and the American people:
SIGN THE PETITION
Therefore, we the undersigned urge Congress to immediately undertake a full and impartial investigation into the many blatantly unconstitutional actions of Barack Obama, with particular focus on the illegal war against Libya and the illegal “kill list” of U.S. citizens – offenses universally condemned by top constitutional experts as both unprecedented and unquestionably impeachable. For members of Congress, who have also sworn solemn oaths to uphold the Constitution, to allow a president to routinely flout the Supreme Law of the Land without being held accountable is equally repugnant to a free country and a free people.
SIGN THE PETITION URGING CONGRESS TO IMPEACH PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA…
http://www.wnd.com/wnd_petition/petition-urging-c…
Any chance the left wing Obama media cultist will wake up from their stupor? It's not much fun anymore when you're the victim, is it? I have no hopes though for them becoming cured of their extreme fanaticism and their belief that Obama is infallible because he's a Democrat and half-black on top of that. Is there any chance at all of that piece of excrement of Holder being removed from his position already? Coitus, what will it take?
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Given the pathetic nature of the AP's coverage of this country's predations, I find it hard to believe they found 20 writers and editors actually working on Yemen for the AP, much less that many to bother to snoop on.
Whereas, Obama’s Justice Department has presided over the disastrous “Fast and Furious” operation in which approximately 2,000 firearms were directed from U.S.
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Maybe now that the AP's ox has been gored it will redouble its investigative efforts and this time open a floodgate of legitimate whistleblower leaks. It's time that the people know what their government is doing so that they can take action to ensure it is fixed.
IT'S NOT OBAMA FAULT HE IS JUST ONE MAN
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Given the pathetic nature of the AP's coverage of this country's predations, I find it hard to believe they found 20 writers and editors actually working on Yemen for the AP, much less that many to bother to snoop on.
I think Obama is an honorable personality who gives more importance for secrecy. For that he has been using good quality technologies and also few important policies. He has been looking forward with good visions.
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