Worst since Watergate? President Obama has used the Espionage Act six times to criminalise reporting, more than any predecessor
By Andrew W Roberts
When the two leaders of the world's superpowers met
in the Californian desert for the much-heralded Sino-American summit in
June, one of them was being credibly accused by the internal opposition
of serious civil liberties violations, the secret seizure of
journalists' phone and email records, the illegal use of the state tax
authorities to harass citizens, a full-scale government cover-up over
the circumstances of four murders and the "systematic targeting" of news
organisations. The other leader was Xi Jinpeng.
All
administrations — indeed almost all Western governments — have their
high-profile scandals. Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra, Margaret Thatcher
had Westland, Bill Clinton had Whitewater and Lewinsky, George W. Bush
had Scooter Libby, Tony Blair the sexed-up Iraq dossier. Silvio
Berlusconi's "bunga bunga" is still dragging through the courts: in
Italy, as in France or Spain, a scandal is almost a prerequisite of
office.
Yet this
summer Barack Obama has no fewer than four separate scandals pending,
which are collectively referred to as "Obamagate". Astonishingly, less
than a year after his re-election, we may be witnessing the unravelling
of the Obama presidency.
Three
well-placed whistleblowers have come forward to contradict the
administration's version of the events that led to the death by
asphyxiation of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi on the night
of September 11, 2012, and the murder of another State Department
official Sean Smith and two former Navy Seals working as CIA
contractors, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
With
the election campaign in full swing last September, the administration
obfuscated the motive behind the attacks for as long as it could, hoping
to present it as a spontaneous act of rage against an American-made
anti-Muslim video, rather than what it really was: a well-planned
terrorist assault by a Libyan offshoot of al-Qaeda. Obama's re-election
campaign constantly repeated that he had "decimated" al-Qaeda, and so
the death at its hands of the first US ambassador on active service
since 1979 was decidedly off-message.
When
Hillary Clinton runs for the White House in 2016, she will be hoping
that her actions — and, even worse, her inaction-during and immediately
after the attack on Benghazi will either be considered as ancient
history or, more likely, as too complicated and controversial for a
clear picture to emerge. Yet the report of the Accountability Review
Board convened by Clinton herself and chaired by Ambassador Thomas
Pickering, with no less a figure than former Joint Chiefs chairman
Admiral Michael Mullen as its vice-chairman, found "systemic failures
and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels" and a
"grossly inadequate [security posture] to deal with the attack that took
place". This was ultimately Mrs Clinton's fault. The phrase she used at
the Senate hearing on the attacks — "What difference, at this point,
does it make?" — ought to be hung around her neck by the Republicans in
2016.
The fact that
the then UN ambassador Susan Rice went on five Sunday morning TV shows
five days after the attack to repeat the talking points given her by the
CIA after several (possibly administration-led) rewrites to blame the
video makes her, as Senator Lindsey Graham put it, "an essential player
in the Benghazi debacle". But it was Hillary Clinton who testified under
oath that the talking points had not been substantially changed. And it
was Clinton and Obama — not Dr Rice — who kept on arguing that the
video was a factor in the Benghazi attack after they knew that it
wasn't. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Dr Rice was used as a
(probably willing) lightning conductor for the criticisms that ought to
be laid at Clinton's door.
President
Obama's recent decision to appoint the famously abrasive Dr Rice as his
new national security adviser was, along with some other controversial
appointments he has made in the judiciary, a typically aggressive stance
to take against the Republicans, especially while continuing to mouth
his standard platitudes about "bipartisanship". As Susan Rice was not
going to be confirmed by the Senate as secretary of state after her
Benghazi performances, the NSC was the next best thing.
Obama's
other appointment, of Samantha Power as ambassador to the United
Nations, is a fascinating one. She has long been the foremost
administration voice for liberal interventionism, which Obama has set
his face firmly against in Syria. Power, Rice and Clinton all urged
action in Syria before at least 90,000 people died there, but were
overruled by Obama as leader of the so-called "consequentionalists", the
group that believes that because intervention in Syria would have
unforeseen consequences it would be better to do nothing there. "We are
all consequentialists now," Dr Power has been heard saying recently.
Samantha
Power will be adored at the United Nations for her remarks in 2002
equating Ariel Sharon with Yassir Arafat-"Sharafat", as she put it-and
her article in the New Republic of March 2002 equating the
Holocaust with "the role US political, economic and military power has
played in denying freedom to others". "When Willy Brandt went down on
one knee in the Warsaw Ghetto his gesture was gratifying to World War II
survivors," she wrote, "but it was also ennobling and cathartic for
Germany. Would such an approach be futile for the United States?" Such
trite, liberal, self-hating, historically illiterate, anti-American
bilge will go down a treat over in the big building on the East River
and 45th Street.
If
Benghazi was the only scandal besetting Obama he might well be able to
ignore it, but Obamagate doesn't stop there. The administration
originally claimed that the role of the Internal Revenue Service in
deliberately targeting Tea Party groups was confined to some
over-zealous low-level workers in the IRS's Cincinnati office. Now two
IRS whistleblowers have proved that the orders to harass the
conservatives came directly from Washington, although we still don't
know precisely who gave them. The IRS attacks on the conservative groups
have been described by the National Review as "a going-over
that makes a colonoscopy look like the observation of the moon with a
telescope", and were certainly unethical if not also illegal. Some
perfectly innocent conservative groups even had the FBI set on them by
the IRS. Many millions of dollars that were earmarked for use against
Obama stayed tied up throughout the election by pending IRS
investigations.
Just
as with Benghazi, the timelines of the election cycle are vitally
relevant here. For every time Obama denounced "attack ads run by shadowy
groups with harmless-sounding names" — which proliferate on the
Democratic side too — the IRS ramped up its campaign against
Republican-supporting groups, but never began them against pro-Democrat
ones. The whole affair stinks, yet because the key figure, Lois Lerner
of the IRS, has invoked her Fifth Amendment right against
self-incrimination, the investigation seems stalled. What we do know is
that the head of the IRS, Douglas Shulman, visited the White House 157
times, most often during the period that his organisation was conducting
its attacks on the conservative groups.
In
May the US Justice Department was revealed to have been "systematically
targeting" Fox News correspondent James Rosen and some Associated Press
correspondents in order to try to track down yet another whistleblower.
Rosen was secretly named under the Espionage Act as a "criminal
co-conspirator" and also as a flight risk so that the authorities could
monitor his phone and emails. In targeting as illegal what a former
judge has surely correctly described as "ordinary, reasonable,
traditional, lawful reporter skills" the Obama administration crossed a
line.
The Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist Judith Miller has gone on record as saying:
"Investigative reporting is dangerous and hasn't been as bad as it is
now with the Obama administration since Watergate. The Espionage Act has
been used six times by Obama, he has used this act to criminalise
reporting more than any other president in history and he gets away with
it because he is a Democrat and an African-American, which we're proud
of." Even the leftwing New Yorker magazine, normally a stalwart
defender of Obama, has editorialised that the secret subpoena of 20 AP
phones "was the most aggressive known federal seizure of media records
since the Nixon Administration".
The
latest news that a secret court has ordered the telecoms giant Verizon
to hand over the phone records of millions of Americans to the National
Security Agency has upset many civil libertarians, who associate such
behaviour with George W. Bush rather than their hero Barack Obama. In
May reports surfaced that the Secretary of Health and Human Services,
Kathleen Sebelius, has been attempting to solicit financial
contributions for the smoother implementation of Obamacare from
precisely the organisations, including insurance companies and
healthcare providers, that her own office oversees. It's been described
as a totally unethical "shakedown", and small wonder.
So
far none of these prima facie abuses of power have been connected
personally to the President, however much his senior staff must have
known they were going on, largely because of the lamentable lack of
interest shown by the major TV networks, four out of five of which are
firmly on the Left. Although the administration is polling its
lowest-ever numbers for honesty, only 50 per cent of Americans support
congressional Republicans' investigations which are trying to get to the
truth about the Benghazi cover-up, the IRS scandal, the Sebelius
shakedown, and the Justice Department's seizing of journalists' phone
and email records.*
Of
course it may be that the real reason why Obamagate is stalling is
because Americans simply take it for granted that their
democratically-elected politicians are untruthful, self-hating
hypocrites. In which case, Mr Xi, your ultimate victory is assured.
* SoRo: Actually...
Should Congress should continue to investigate?
73%: The IRS targeting of conservative groups
71%: Administration’s handling of Benghazi
71%: The NSA collecting the phone and Internet records of Americans
70%: The Justice Department's monitoring of certain journalists
http://tinyurl.com/pkgdmnp
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