{"id":18927,"date":"2013-11-05T15:46:03","date_gmt":"2013-11-05T22:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=18927"},"modified":"2013-11-05T15:46:03","modified_gmt":"2013-11-05T22:46:03","slug":"obama-incompetent-and-a-liar-without-snowden-he-would-of-never-known-nsa-misdeeds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=18927","title":{"rendered":"Obama incompetent and a liar – without Snowden he would of never known NSA misdeeds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Without Snowden leaks, the president wouldn\u2019t even know that the NSA spies on world leaders.<\/em><\/p>\n

President Obama: Incompetent or Liar?<\/strong>
\n4 November, 2013 – By Steven Hill<\/p>\n

If what they are saying is true, then President Obama is either lying or his top aides did not inform him and they are not stepping forward to take responsibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat did he know, and when did he know it?\u201d A firestorm is gathering under the Obama presidency that imperils its future. First there was the fiasco over his HealthCare.gov web site \u2013 which the president was unaware of until after its launch, it has been claimed. Now the most recent case of \u201cnot in the loop-itis\u201d is over the revelation that the National Security Agency has been spying on the telephones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and 34 other world leaders.<\/p>\n

This is in addition to previous leaks that the U.S. government spies on the phone logs, Internet activity and credit card transactions of virtually every U.S. citizen, of Spanish and French citizens, and that the United States has bugged European Union offices as well as the United Nations and world leaders at international conferences of the G-20.<\/p>\n

It is a startling admission to say that President Barack Obama was in the dark on this one. If that\u2019s true, does he realize that means that even the President of the United States needed leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden in order to know what his own top spies are doing?<\/p>\n

But hold on\u2014current and former U.S. intelligence officials are saying that, in fact, top-ranked officials in the White House and State Department signed off on the surveillance of phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders. If what they are saying is true, then President Obama is either lying or his top aides did not inform him and they are not stepping forward to take responsibility. It also raises troubling questions about how honest\u2014or informed\u2014Obama has been in his previous defenses of the surveillance state.<\/p>\n

So while the chief executive and the nation’s top spies engage in a \u201che said, she said\u201d spat over who knew what when, the rest of the nation is left puzzling over whether their president didn’t know what he should have known, or is lying. No matter how one answers that question, it reflects badly on Obama. And for U.S. stature on the world\u2019s stage.<\/p>\n

Upping the ante, the Washington Post\u2019s Dana Milbank has invoked that notorious echo of Watergate, \u201cWhat did President Obama know, and when did he know it?\u201d Because it’s just not credible to claim, as White House officials are trying to do, that the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn\u2019t have been practical to brief the president on all of them. How could it possibly make national security sense that the man in the Oval Office did not have to approve or at least be informed about a decision on bugging the phones of most of the free world\u2019s leaders?<\/p>\n

But let’s keep our bafflement bipartisan, shall we? Thanks again to the whistleblower Snowden, it was reported in the German publication Der Spiegel that the monitoring of Merkel\u2019s cell phone began back in 2002, when President George W. Bush was chief of the spies. What did he know, and when did he know it?<\/p>\n

Congressional \u201cDimwit of the Season\u201d award has to go to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein. As chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was established in 1976 as a result of the Church Committee investigation into CIA abuses to provide oversight and serve as a restraint on such espionage activities, Feinstein has been chief Democratic Party cheerleader of the national security state. She has previously insisted that the NSA is subject to stringent congressional oversight and monitoring from the executive branch.<\/p>\n

Yet now even she\u2019s backtracking. Recently she stated, \u201cIt is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary. \u2026 It is clear to me that certain surveillance activities have been in effect for more than a decade and that the Senate Intelligence Committee was not satisfactorily informed.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the same clueless Senator from my home state of California who in June condemned Snowden as a traitor, saying, \u201cI don\u2019t look at this as being a whistleblower. I think it\u2019s an act of treason. \u2026 He violated the law. It\u2019s treason.\u201d And yet if it wasn’t for his \u201ctreasonous\u201d acts, Chairwoman Feinstein would still be clueless.<\/p>\n

So flip a coin: heads Obama is incompetent, tails he\u2019s a first-rate liar. My coin flip says he\u2019s incompetent, but he also has terrible judgment over the danger posed by his national security policies and priorities. He\u2019s advancing the instruments of surveillance that future presidents will use. Imagine a Dick Cheney in the Oval Office, with an even more developed nest of zealous spies. The current moment has some of the same feel as the out-of-control days during the Reagan administration, when Lt. Col. Oliver North and his accomplices ran gun- and drug-running operations to support the Contras in Nicaragua, and co-authored with Attorney General Edwin Meese a plan for imposing martial law during national emergencies, called Rex 84 (Readiness Exercise 1984). It seems the off-the-shelf rogues, goons and spooks are back. Regardless of which party has the presidency, they lurk in the White House basement, making vital decisions regarding the nation\u2019s foreign policy and remaining unaccountable to the nation\u2019s elected leaders. The promise of Obama\u2019s election in 2008 has been replaced by \u201cYes We Scan.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Obama truly wants to regain his footing, he must reverse not just specific policies but also his direction. He can partially redeem his tattered reputation by firing whichever of the head spooks that gave these orders. But that seems unlikely. White House spokesman Jay Carney has said that \u201cthe president has full confidence in General [Keith] Alexander and the leadership at the NSA.\u201d …more<\/a><\/p>\n

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Without Snowden leaks, the president wouldn\u2019t even know that the NSA spies on world leaders. President Obama: Incompetent or Liar? 4 November, 2013 – By Steven Hill If what they are saying is true, then President Obama is either lying or his top aides did not inform him and they are not stepping forward to more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[2917],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18927"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18927"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18928,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18927\/revisions\/18928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}