By Steve Rhodes
Worse than Bush.
1. It’s Fucked Up.
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2. Unrestrained Savagery.
After all, what kind of terrorist monsters would bomb a funeral?
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3. Bradley Manning.
TRUTHDIG: And the only comment that Obama has on the subject is that Bradley deserves to be imprisoned and tortured because “he broke the law.” Obama’s cowardice on the issue is beyond heartbreaking.
GRAHAM NASH: Of course, no military judge is going to go against his commander-in-chief. Manning doesn’t stand a chance because WikiLeaks and Julian Assange cannot be allowed to win. That’s why you’ll hear very little about this trial. Nobody will report on how [the Obama administration] is railroading this guy and making sure he’s in jail for the rest of his life.
TRUTHDIG: And Daniel Ellsberg is left to run around and wave the Pentagon Papers in the air, begging people to recognize the importance of whistle-blowing and nobody will pay attention.
NASH: The strange thing is that the documents that Ellsberg released were really top secret. None of the documents that Manning released were top secret. Some were secret and some were “for your eyes only,” but none were top secret. But the game is different now. The new game is to kill these fucking whistleblowers now!
4. Warrantless wiretaps.
“The federal government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a decision reversing the first and only case that successfully challenged President George W. Bush’s once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program,” Wired reports.
Obama ordered his Justice Department to defend the Bush program, which he has extended, in court.
5. “A number of journalists I know believe the Obama administration is the most secretive administration yet,” Xeni Jardin writes for Boing Boing.
“When I read news like this, I am inclined to believe them: the Naval Criminal Investigative Service is going after our pals at Danger Room, over a 5-year-old leak about a weapon that was never built.”
6. “In its first year, the Obama administration vowed an increase in transparency across government, including through the Freedom of Information Act, the proactive release of documents and the establishment of an agency to declassify more than 370 million pages of archived material,” the Washington Post reports.
“Three years later, new evidence suggests that administration officials have struggled to overturn the long-standing culture of secrecy in Washington. Some of these high-profile transparency measures have stalled, and by some measures the government is keeping more secrets than before.”
7. ACLU to Obama: You Can’t Just Vaporize Americans Without Judicial Process.
8. Flawed Analysis of Drone Strikes Is Misleading Americans.
9. How Obama spends his Tuesdays.
* The President’s Kill List.
* Obama The Pioneer.
* The President’s Press Problem.
10. Secret prisons, torture and the national security state.
* ProPublica: The Best Reporting On Detention And Rendition Under Obama.
* ProPublica: The Best Reporting On Obama’s National Security Policies.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on August 8, 2012