. . . details that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about these programs by senior U.S. officials have also often been misleading, erroneous or simply false.
The Washington Post reporting on the government’s multitude of misleading statements and bald face lies about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs.The government has trouble getting its story straight because there is no viable defense for the NSA’s massive domestic spying operations that sweep up and store data on millions of innocent Americans.
Since its actions are indefensible from a constitutional, legal, and moral perspective, the government instead has focused on the messenger. Despite Obama’s claims that he welcomes a debate on civil liberties and his dismissal as Snowden as “29-year old hacker,” the Obama administration has launched a worldwide manhunt for Snowden, brought a sealed Espionage Act complaint against him, pressured allies to deny Snowden asylum, and fear-mongered in the media with overblown and unproven claims of “national security,” ironically and hypocriticallycommunicated through anonymous leaks.
Yet, much of the mainstream media has lapped up and regurgitated the government’s misstatements. (Such as during my appearance yesterday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos).
Here are just a few of the “inaccuracies” -a.k.a. lies – highlighted in WaPo:
NSA quietly removed from its Web site a fact sheet about its collection activities because it contained inaccuracies discovered by lawmakers.
President Obama, in a television interview, asserted that oversight of the surveillance programs was “transparent” because of the involvement of a special court, even though that court’s sessions and decisions are sealed from the public.
Backtracking from his first explanation that in sworn congressional testimony he gave “the least untruthful answer” possible, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper came up with another reason for being the “least untruthful” he could be under oath:
Acknowledging the “heated controversy” over his remark, Clapper sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 21 saying that he had misunderstood the question he had been asked.“I have thought long and hard to re-create what went through my mind at the time,” Clapper said in the previously undisclosed letter. “My response was clearly erroneous — for which I apologize.”
“What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your e-mails,” Obama said in his June 17 interview on PBS’s “Charlie Rose Show.”But even if it is not allowed to target U.S. citizens, the NSA has significant latitude to collect and keep the contents of e-mails and other communications of U.S. citizens that are swept up as part of the agency’s court-approved monitoring of a target overseas.
The government will certainly try to claim that these are simple “mistakes,” but they are “mistakes” that all bolster the government’s claims:
For now, the crumbling secrecy surrounding the programs has underscored the extent to which obscuring their dimensions had served government interests beyond the importance of the intelligence they produced.
If the government is so confident that its actions are solely to protect national security, then why must the government mislead the public about its actions?