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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 7/3/13

The Emerging War Within America: Government Versus Its Own Citizens

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Message Michael Payne


å' å -... Anonymous (Guy Fawkes Mask) / e' æ è æ -è ç e' è ' Hong Kong Rally to Support Snowden (SnowdenHK) / SML.20130615.7D.42258 by See-ming Lee æ Žæ 明 SML
There is a war brewing in American that, in times past, could not have been predicted nor even imagined. A wide net of surveillance has been cast not only on whistleblowers, activists, and dissenters but also across this nation and, specifically, on its people who, in the eyes of this paranoid government, are to be feared and can't be trusted.

 

This is not your typical war that involves invasions and occupations of other nations; it is a war that involves the invasion of American's rights and freedoms and will, if allowed to continue unabated, lead to the destruction of the U.S. Constitution as well as our democracy.

 

It began with the War on Terror that was designed to scare the American people into accepting and condoning a state of perpetual war in order to assure that they could remain safe; and the majority of them bought it hook, line and sinker. But how many of us imagined that all this emphasis on security would lead to "government of the people" being transformed into the "government versus the people?"

 

We are watching the proliferation of a war on whistleblowers, dissidents, activists and anyone else who attempts to sound the alarms about these secret surveillance systems that are now closely monitoring the communications of the American people as well as people around the world. Check out this article by Tom Hintze entitled "5 Ways the U.S. Government Has Built An Architecture Of Oppression." He quotes Brian Jenkins, a counter-terrorism expert and high-level consultant who helped create the first database of international terrorists in 1971 as saying that "What we have put in place is the foundation for a very oppressive state."

 

That's exactly the point: he is apparently saying that the NSA surveillance is merely the foundation of a system that can grow exponentially and have virtually no restrictions or limits on its capability to enter into the lives of the American people. Any future president will have an extremely powerful tool that can be used in a myriad of ways to monitor what each of us is doing and what we are saying.

 

And as dangerous to our freedoms and privacy that this may be, the reaction by the mainstream media has been largely one of indifference. However, there are several media lightweights, including David Gregory of NBC News, that have advanced the premise that Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who broke the NSA spying story, may be guilty of aiding and abetting Snowden in a crime against the U.S. government. This is not the least bit surprising given the politically incestuous relationship between this government and the lapdog mainstream media.

 

These pseudo-journalists should be made to understand that their reckless accusations could have an adverse effect on this nation's Constitutional right of the freedom of speech as exercised by its journalistic community. When we have a situation that is turning activists, dissenters and whistleblowers into an endangered species, the last thing that we can afford to see happen is to have the last remaining real journalists in this country, those who are not afraid to expose serious government abuses, be silenced and muzzled forever. Check out this article about the late Michael Hastings and the email he sent in which he indicated he was concerned about an FBI probe.

 

In this battle brewing in America the key issue should not be the roles of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald the U.K. Guardian newspaper or Wiki leaks involvement. The overriding issue and question should be: did the NSA, at the direction of its officials illegally take actions to monitor the communications of the American people and invade their privacy? And, by these actions, did they intentionally mislead, deceive and lie to the U.S. Congress to cover up their deeds?

 

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