By Cliff Montgomery – June 11th, 2013
The London Guardian perfectly stated the matter last week.
“Under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk,” declared the news source, “regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.”
The Obama Administration therefore claims it has a simple means to keep every American safe: Trample on every citizen’s natural rights, and all will be well.
The administration spies on every one of us, all in the name of protecting our right to privacy.
It acts without an ounce of meaningful democratic oversight, all in the name of preserving democracy.
The president assumes the unchecked power to kill any American without trial, the moment that American steps outside the borders of this country…all in the name of protecting our lives.
No one person or group may wield such absolute power and rightly claim to be preserving a democratic state. Absolute, unchecked force is the calling card of a dictator – and no one is ‘safe’ when his life and liberty depend solely upon the unchecked whim of another.
Like all tyrants, Obama believes democracy to be a danger, and his tyranny the only safety.
Consider this: Recent media articles have shown that for over a year, officials at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) blatantly abused their authority by targeting conservative organizations for extra scrutiny. The IRS debacle has proven that this White House cannot even handle the limited constitutional powers of a functioning democracy, yet Obama continues to claim that we are only safe under his benevolent dictatorship.
Or consider the following quote:
“A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks [terrorists] operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”
It sounds eerily like President Barack Obama as he rationalizes his spying activity on most Americans. But the above statement is from September 16th, 2001 – the politician who said those words was none other than Vice President Dick Cheney. The Vice President was discussing the need for such procedures as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ which likewise were executed without independent legal oversight.
The rationale of Obama and Cheney for their actions are startlingly similar. America is at war, we fight an enemy who possesses no moral scruples, the ordinary procedures of democracy and civil rights are too weak and unwieldy to combat such a horrid threat, our actions are virtuous because we save innocent lives.
In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly provided a simple answer to the tyrannical impulses of career politicians like Cheney and Obama. That year, the General Assembly adopted its Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, which pointed out that “effective counter-terrorism measures and the protection of human rights are not conflicting goals, but [instead are] complementary and mutually reinforcing.”
A full recognition of every human being’s natural and civil rights is the only path to safety in a free world. Dictatorship only serves the dictators – world history provides ample proofs of that perennial truth.
If President Barack Obama cannot understand that clear fact, then we at The American Spark submit that it’s time for him to go.
