Obama’s “Dirty Wars” — and a soiled presidency

[MNBrewer]

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/09/obamas_dirty_wars_and_a_soiled_presidency/

This is what it’s come to for Barack Obama: Reality has sunk in for many Americans, who at last understand that the guy we elected on the naive expectation that he would undo the excesses of the Bush-Cheney national security state has instead made them much worse. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for Obama to escape this legacy now. He is the drone president, the assassination president, the domestic-surveillance president, whose entire administration has a professionalized passion for secrecy that makes the low-rent paranoids of the Nixon White House look like Keystone Kops. I did not suspect that I would ever again find an occasion to quote a Sarah Palin gag line, but hey: How is that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?

There are numerous ways of understanding this disheartening turn of events. Maybe the secret note that George W. Bush left in the top drawer of the Resolute desk on Jan. 20, 2009, contained a “Manchurian Candidate”-style code word that switched on the programming! Or maybe, somewhat more plausibly, the entire secret apparatus of American counterterrorism at home and abroad has become an independent and self-replicating organism, a Hydra-headed monster that can’t be killed. The president himself indirectly took that tack on Friday, when he tackled questions about the surveillance revelations for the first time, during a supposedly unrelated press conference.

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“What Wyden was saying to me,” says Scahill, “was that whether it’s the kill program or it’s domestic surveillance or it’s certain secret aspects of the Patriot Act, there are laws that the American people can go online and read, and reasonable people will interpret those in relatively the same way. And then there’s a second set of laws, which consist of the way the administration has interpreted what those laws say. So what he’s saying to me is that on any of these issues, if I could tell you how they’ve interpreted what you believe a law to say, it would shock you.”

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We've gone through the looking glass.

"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."