On November 20, 2013
In the wake of this summer’s revelations about the unprecedented scope of the United States government’s massive covert surveillance of Americans (and countless others), the nation’s purportedly ‘liberal’ president, Barack Obama, had the shameless temerity to say that the state apparatus over which he presides is showing commendable “restraint” in wielding its unconstitutional police-state powers and that we should therefore simply ‘trust’ its countless (and nameless) minions not to abuse those unwarranted powers. Those nefarious powers include the power to intercept all of the telephone calls and emails of every person on the continent — without a search warrant, let alone any ‘reasonable and probable grounds’ to believe that those being indiscriminately eavesdropped upon have committed any criminal offense whatsoever. And, lest we forget, there’s the power to hold prisoners without charge or trial (in flagrant violation of our most basic legal guarantees); to implement assassination by aerial drone as a routine part of state practice; and to ignore the law (and common decency) by torturing prisoners.
The post-9/11 world is one of all-pervading state surveillance of its own law-abiding citizens and an ill-conceived, open-ended ‘war on terrorism’ that is being used to justify every manner of lawless encroachment on fundamental human rights. Sadly, in that world of egregious state misconduct, most of us have chosen to ignore the relentless attack on our supposedly cherished rights and freedoms. Into that moral and legal vacuum come the few who still feel inclined to act on their conscience — people like whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and freedom of information advocates Julian Assange and Birgitta Jonsdottir.
For his part, Snowden did the world an immense favor by revealing the clear and present danger posed by security state apparatus in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere in the supposedly free West, an apparatus that began, soon after 9/11, to intercept our telephone calls and emails at the alarming rate of 60,000 per second, turning every citizen into a potential suspect and crushing any semblance of privacy or due process. We have shamefully allowed ourselves to be cowed by the threat of terrorism into accepting the relentless erosion of the very freedoms and rights and sacred principles upon which our very civilization is founded. In much the same way, we accepted untold oppression and war abroad in years gone by on the equally flimsy basis of our struggle against the malign ideology of communism.
There’s courage, heroism even, in those who seek, often at considerable risk to themselves, to inform the public of what every free people has an absolute right to know. For, surely, a free people has the right to know the real costs of the wars being waged in our name — witness the infamous “Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter gunship mowing down innocent civilians in error in Iraq. And, if we are to vouchsafe our precious liberty, it is imperative that a bold, unflinching light be shone upon the deliberate efforts to spawn nascent police-states in the very heart of the free world.
Whistleblowers and truth-tellers, like those named above, are nothing more or less than men and women of conscience. They are too few in number. But they serve a vital public interest. Only an informed public can make informed decisions. Only an informed public can hope to hold its own government (and private sector power brokers) accountable. By their determined undermining of fundamental rights, our own governments have rendered themselves untrustworthy. So, “Shame on you, Mr. President,” we say to President Obama, and far too many other, like-minded leaders of the increasingly less ‘Free World.’ It is not their so-called “restraint” that we must rely upon, but rather our own zealous, ever-vigilant scrutiny of their covert actions that will safeguard our liberty and our battered democratic way of life. As George Orwell said, “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
Copyright © 2013 by John Arkelian.
The author is an international law and international relations analyst, a former diplomat, and a public interest journalist.