Ellsberg: Edward Snowden, Saving Us From the American Secret Police

By Daniel Ellsberg, The Guardian (UK)

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material [3] – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago [4]. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the US constitution.

Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.

The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa – but that unconstitutionally sweeping warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, almost totally deferential to executive requests. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it [5]: “It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp.”

For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense – as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time – as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads –they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor. They are also black holes for information that the public needs to know.

[pullquote] Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended. [/pullquote]

The fact that congressional leaders were “briefed” on this and went along with it, without any open debate, hearings, staff analysis, or any real chance for effective dissent, only shows how broken the system of checks and balances is in this country.

Obviously, the United States [6] is not now a police state. But given the extent of this invasion of people’s privacy [7], we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale anti-war movement – like the one we had against the war in Vietnam – or, more likely, if we suffered one more attack on the scale of 9/11, I fear for our democracy. These powers are extremely dangerous.

There are legitimate reasons for secrecy, and specifically for secrecy about communications intelligence. That’s why Bradley Mannning and I – both of whom had access to such intelligence with clearances higher than top-secret – chose not to disclose any information with that classification. And it is why Edward Snowden [8] has committed himself to withhold publication of most of what he might have revealed.

But what is not legitimate is to use a secrecy system to hide programs that are blatantly unconstitutional in their breadth and potential abuse. Neither the president nor Congress as a whole may by themselves revoke the fourth amendment – and that’s why what Snowden has revealed so far was secret from the American people.

In 1975, Senator Frank Church spoke of the National Security Agency in these terms [9]:

“I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

The dangerous prospect of which he warned was that America’s intelligence gathering capability – which is today beyond any comparison with what existed in his pre-digital era – “at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left.”

That has now happened. That is what Snowden has exposed, with official, secret documents. The NSA [10], FBI [11] and CIA [12] have, with the new digital technology, surveillance [13] powers over our own citizens that the Stasi – the secret police in the former “democratic republic” of East Germany – could scarcely have dreamed of. Snowden reveals that the so-called intelligence community has become the United Stasi of America.

So we have fallen into Senator Church’s abyss. The questions now are whether he was right or wrong that there is no return from it, and whether that means that effective democracy will become impossible. A week ago, I would have found it hard to argue with pessimistic answers to those conclusions.

But with Edward Snowden having put his life on the line to get this information out, quite possibly inspiring others with similar knowledge, conscience and patriotism to show comparable civil courage – in the public, in Congress, in the executive branch itself – I see the unexpected possibility of a way up and out of the abyss.

Pressure by an informed public on Congress to form a select committee to investigate the revelations by Snowden and, I hope, others to come might lead us to bring NSA and the rest of the intelligence community under real supervision and restraint and restore the protections of the bill of rights.

Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSA’s surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans’ and foreign citizens’ privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we’re trying to protect.

• Editor’s note: this article was revised and updated at the author’s behest, at 7.45am ET on 10 June

Links:

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/daniel-ellsberg
[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20full-width-1%20bento-box:Bento%20box:Position1
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
[5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/obama-administration-nsa-verizon-records
[6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa
[7] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/privacy
[8] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/edward-snowden
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
[10] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/nsa
[11] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/fbi
[12] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/cia
[13] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/surveillance
[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/snowden
[15] http://www.alternet.org/tags/nsa
[16] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Chronicles of Inequality [TOO MUCH, June 10, 2013)]

	June 10, 2013
THIS WEEK
So how are average Americans doing so far in 2013? The latest indicator: Hourly wages, the Bureau of Labor Statistics informed us last week, fell at a 3.8 percent annual clip in the year’s first quarter, the largest quarterly drop ever recorded.Average Americans today are making less, after inflation, than they made in the early 1970s. Something has gone fundamentally wrong. American workplaces are simply no longer working for those who punch timecards — or play violins.Musicians who play violins — and every other instrument of a modern world-class orchestra — spend years perfecting their craft. They bring great joy whenever they perform. But the musicians of one great American orchestra have done no official performing since October 1. Local plutocrats have silenced their music.These plutocrats have demonstrated yet again why the United States has become, as sociologist Salvatore Babones points out, the world’s only major nation with inequality both high and rising. More on the new report that incited that observation — and class war with a cultured face — in this week’s Too Much.	About Too Much, a project of the Institute for Policy StudiesProgram on Inequality and the Common Good Subscribe to Too MuchJoin us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter
GREED AT A GLANCE
The executives at the Japanese financial giant Daiwa Securities have had a fairly spectacular last 12 months. This past February, Global Finance magazine namedDaiwa the world’s “most creative global investment bank.” Then last week came the news that pay last year for Daiwa’s top 12 execs nearly doubled over the year before. The dozen execs averaged $674,000 each. But better not let the Daiwa execs see what their U.S. rivals are making. At Goldman Sachs, the top five execs last year averaged $18.5 million each. Daiwa CEO Takashi Hibino and the rest of Daiwa’s top dozen execs together took in $8.1 million, over 11 times less than the combined $92.5 million that Goldman’s top five collected . . .Over the last decade, CNN calculates, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left over 50,000 U.S. and allied service men and women wounded and scarred for life. But one celebrated U.S. warrior seems to have survived the long conflicts in fine fettle. That would be David Petraeus, the former four-star Army general and CIA director who has just joined, as a high-ranking executive, one of the nation’s most notorious private equity firms. No word yet on the pay deal Petraeus has inked with KKR, his new employer. But the compensation figures to be generous. KKR top execs Henry Kravis and George Roberts each collected over $100 million last year in dividends, on top of over $35 million each in annual pay. Whatever the 60-year-old Petraeus pockets from KKR willcome on top of his over $200,000 annual Army pension . . .Eighty percent of success, Woody Allen once quipped, “is showing up.” Would America’s wealthy agree? Wealth analysts at the Spectrem Group asked a cross-sample of high-net-worth entrepreneurs — affluents with at least $5 million in assets above the value of their primary residence — to explain the secret to their “success.” Many responded with one or another predictable response: hard work, frugality, education. But 79 percent of the entrepreneurs also seemed to be on Woody’s wavelength. They listed “being in the right place at the right time” as a key to their fortunes. “Waiting for lady luck to find you,” says Spectrem’s Adriana Reyneri, may be an essential part of any recipe for entrepreneurial success.	Quote of the Week“A country that cannot force wealthy and corporate taxpayers to pay their share of the tax burden is a country that will fail.” Linda Beale, The Boom and Bust Cycle of Tax Shelters and Intimidation of the IRS, June 7, 2013
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK
In yachting’s grandest competition, the America’s Cup, each race’s winner gets to set the next race’s rules. What bloated-ego billionaire could resist such an opportunity? Certainly not Oracle software billionaire Larry Ellison, who won the last Cup in 2010, then set out to glamorize the competition. He set this year’s race in San Francisco Bay, not the open seas, and limited the field to high-tech, ultra-fast catamarans. Ellison predicted 15 boats would open the race this July. But the cost of competing under Larry’s rules — over $65 million per boat — has narrowed the field to four. Also depressing the field: safety concerns. One sailor has already died in America’s Cup training. San Francisco now figures to lose millions hosting the race. Ellison’s reaction? No comment.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend
IMAGES OF INEQUALITY
Wealth managers are rushing to set up shop in China, where an exploding “high net worth” population, the Swiss bank Julius Baer reported last week, now “sees luxury as a way of life, not just the occasional purchase of a good or service.”	Web GemPatriotic Millionaires/ An egalitarian action center for Americans of means without a mean streak.
PROGRESS AND PROMISE
Time to Make Plutocrats Choose?Dean Machin, a political philosopher at University College London, would like to remind us that wise people have been worrying about how the wealth of the wealthy can distort our politics ever since Aristotle hit Athens. What can we do, in our contemporary democracies, to keep grand fortune from making more of a grand mess? Machin has a “simple proposal.” Give the super rich a choice: Either pay a 100 percent tax on the wealth that makes them super rich or lose their political right to lobby, bankroll think tanks and political parties, or control media outlets. The choice, says Machin, would let “the super rich who value money over politics keep their wealth.” These rich could even continue to vote.	Take Action on InequalityHow can Wal-Mart workers survive on their lowly wages? They can’t. Government support programs have to take up the slack — while Wal-Mart execs take home mega millions. Add your voice to the struggle against the Wal-Mart gravy train!
INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS
	Stat of the WeekThe number of New York Times articles that mention inequality, notes University of California at Berkeley sociologist Claude Fischer, has increased from an average about 90 a year in the 1990s to 840 a year in the 2000s to about 2,700 a year since the start of 2010.
IN FOCUS
They Can’t Stop Beethoven, Can They?For the grasping managers of Corporate America — and the institutions their wealth dominates — no workers deserve dignity, not even the most amazingly accomplished.What do bank executives who make $19 million a year do in their spare time? They do the same thing they do in the hours they spend in their executive suites. They squeeze America’s middle class.That’s not, of course, what the flacks at U.S. Bancorp, the nation’s fifth-largest bank, will tell you. They’ll inform you that the CEO of their Minneapolis-based banking giant, Richard Davis, graciously gives of his spare time to serve on the board of the nationally renowned Minnesota Orchestra.True enough. But CEO Davis brings to that board much more than a fondness for fugues. He brings the same corporate executive arrogance that has shoved labor’s share of the nation’s economic output down to modern-day record lows.This redistribution — from worker to boss — has been rushing ahead now for over three decades. Since 1980, as analyst David Cay Johnston noted last week, “corporate pre-tax profits have grown at almost twice the rate of pre-tax wages.” Behind this massive redistribution: a relentless corporate offensive to minimize labor bargaining power by any means necessary. Including “lockouts.” Richard Davis chairs the negotiating committee at the nonprofit responsible for the Minnesota Orchestra. Last October 1, Davis and his fellow corporate managers who run the nonprofit “locked out” the orchestra’s musicians after theyrefused to accept a contract offer that would have cut musician pay by up to 50 percent and jumped annual health care premiums by up to $8,000. Ever since then, the Minnesota Orchestra’s near 100 symphony musicians have gone without salary, health insurance, and pension contributions, the basic building blocks of middle class security. These musicians are not striking. Quite the contrary. They offered to keep working while bargaining negotiations continued. They also offered to submit “to impartial, final and binding arbitration under the guidance of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.” U.S. Bancorp CEO Davis and friends rejected these offers. They chose instead to keep the musicians from working — and wait for them to cave. Back in America’s middle class golden age, in the middle of the 20th century, such management behavior would have been unthinkable. Back then, any corporate chiefs who locked out their employees in the middle of a labor dispute risked becoming pariahs in their communities, the sort of shady operators who would never be invited to sit on the board of a prestigious nonprofit like the Minnesota Orchestral Association. But elite attitudes toward lockouts started changing in 1975 when an ostensibly liberal pillar of the business community, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, replaced striking workers with “replacement workers” and lived to tell the tale. Six years later, a newly elected conservative President, Ronald Reagan, fired and replaced striking air traffic controllers. A new anything-goes corporate management approach to labor relations soon took hold. Lockouts, in this atmosphere, would become simply another option in the modern American management toolkit — and the federal regulator created to safeguard the right to good-faith collective bargaining, the National Labor Relations Board, would prove too feeble to offer up much resistance. U.S. Bancorp CEO Davis has had an up-close chance to see how effective a management tool lockouts could be. Nearly two years ago, another major enterprise in Minnesota, American Crystal Sugar, locked out 1,300 workers. The unionized workers at Crystal, the nation’s largest beet sugar producer, had solid middle-class jobs that averaged $40,000 a year, plus overtime. But in 2011 contract negotiations Crystal management demanded huge health care cuts and work rule changes that would undercut the job security of long-term workers. The workers voted not to accept the offer Crystal labeled “final.” In August 2011, Crystal then locked them out. The workers never struck. Crystal replaced them anyway. Last month, the worn-out workers, their unemployment benefits exhausted, voted to accept the same management attack on their middle-class contract they had rejected four times earlier. Crystal management had won a total victory. U.S. Bancorp’s Davis expected total victory when his lockout began, too. But the musicians have hung tough, buoyed by widespread community support. Still, the hostile environment management has created has taken a toll. About a quarter of the orchestra’s 98 musicians have taken jobs elsewhere or retired. Like this article? Sign up to receive the Too Muchweekly in your email inbox. “This lockout is destroying the Minnesota Orchestra, musician by musician by musician,” viola player Sam Bergman told the audience at one benefit concert late in April. Richard Davis personally took home $18.8 million in 2010 for his U.S. Bancorp labors, several million dollars more than the annual wage and benefit cost of the entire Minnesota Orchestra. Since becoming Bancorp CEO over six years ago, Davis has averaged about $10 million annually. Imperial CEOs like Richard Davis owe their grand fortunes, in large part, to the grand squeeze American workers have suffered over the last generation. These execs have been squeezing so long they simply cannot operate any other way. Even music, turns out, cannot soothe the savage beast. Aficionados of fine music — and advocates for a more equal America — can now support the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra online.	New Wisdom on WealthMark Bittman, Welfare for the Wealthy, New York Times, June 4, 2013. The mega millionaires of agriculture continue to prosper off the tax dollars of ordinary Americans.Bill Black, How Elite Economic Hucksters Drive America’s Biggest Fraud Epidemics, Naked Capitalism, June 6, 2013. A University of Missouri-KC expert on financial crime lays bare the M.O. of our plutocrats.What Is Net Worth Really Worth? The Drucker Institute, June 7, 2013. What we need more than more wealth for the wealthy.Asawin Suebsaeng, The Purge: A Horror Flick about . . . Income Inequality?!,Mother Jones, June 7, 2013 A new fright flick has as much to say about inequality as swinging axes into amoral, wealthy college kids trying to kill your family. Looking for an ace summer read? Check out this new history of America’s first — and so far only — triumph over plutocracy.
NEW AND NOTABLE
A Close Look at Where Our Inequality LurksWorld of Work Report 2013: Repairing the economic and social fabric, International Labor Organization, Geneva, June 3, 2013.This latest annual survey from the United Nations agency that addresses labor matters explores today’s most pressing economic realities in 57 major nations, 26 of them developed and 31 developing.Of all these nations, only one currently has a level of inequality that qualifies as both high and rising. This one nation: the United States.You’ll find the data that backs up this striking reality in the new International Labor Organization World of Work Report. You’ll find plenty more, too. Unfortunately, this dense document has too many pages of officalese to ever attract a general audience.Sociologist Salvatore Babones, on the more fortunate side, has remedied that deficiency with a highly accessible rundown of what ILO researchers have to tell us. The new ILO data, he explains, reinforce a crucial point that all of us should take to heart: We need not consider high and rising inequality inevitable.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend who might want to subscribe
ABOUT TOO MUCH
Too Much, an online weekly publication of the Institute for Policy Studies \| 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036 \| (202) 234-9382 \| Editor: Sam Pizzigati. \| E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org \| Unsubscribe.

Edward Snowden: Profile in Courage

Whistleblowing in the Name of the Constitution

by CHRISTOPHER H. PYLE

Edward Snowden may go down inhistory as one of this nation’s most important whistleblowers. He is certainly one of the bravest. The 29-year-old former technical assistant to the CIA and employee of a defense intelligence contractor has admitted to disclosing top secret documents about the National Security Agency’s massive violation of the privacy of law-abiding citizens.

Like Daniel Ellsberg, who disclosed the Pentagon Papers, Snowden is a man of principle. “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to,” he told interviewers. “There is no public oversight. The result is that [NSA employees] have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.” For example, he said, he could have accessed anyone’s e-mail, including the president’s.

[pullquote] The government—all branches of it— is complicit in attacking the Constitution it is supposed to protect, so now citizens are beginning to take matters in their own hands. [/pullquote]

This is not the first time that the American people have learned that their intelligence agencies are out of control. I revealed the military’s surveillance of the civil rights and anti-war movements in 1970. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washigton Post disclosed the Watergate burglary by White House operatives, which led Congress to created two select committees to investigate the entire intelligence community.

Among other things, the committees discovered that the National Security Agency had a huge watchlist of civil right and anti-war protesters whose phone calls it was intercepting. The FBI had bugged the hotel rooms of Martin Luther King and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide rather than accept the Nobel Peace Prize. The CIA had tried to hire the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. President Richard M. Nixon used the Internal Revenue Service to audit the taxes of his political enemies. His aides tried to destroy Daniel Ellsberg for leaking a history of the War in Vietnam, both by prosecuting him and by burglarizing his psychiatrist’s office for embarrassing information. The FBI opened enormous amounts of first-class mail of law-abiding citizens in direct violation of the criminal law.

Since then the technology has changed. The old Hoover vacuum cleaner has been redesigned for the digital age. It is now attached to the Internet, where it secretly collects the contents of everyone’s “audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs” from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. It also siphons billions of telephone communications and Internet messages off the fiber optic cables that enter and pass through the United States. None of us has a reasonable expectation of privacy any more.

Discount every word this man utters.

The Fourth Amendment used to require specific judicial authorization before the government could undertake a seizure. No longer, according to the secret FISA court. Secret seizures of “metadata” now precede individualized searches. Starting this fall, this information will be stored in a huge warehouse at Camp William, Utah, where it can be searched by computers whenever the military decides to re-label one of us a “person of interest,” like a reporter, a suspected leaker, or a Congressman it doesn’t like.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), claims not to be worried, but he should be. Before Watergate, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had 24 file cabinet drawers full of dirt on politicians just like Graham. Hoover let each politician know that the Bureau had found the compromising information while on some other search, but promised not to reveal it. Not surprising, Hoover’s abuses of power were not challenged until he died. New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who used to prosecute Wall Street swindlers, was driven from office when data miners at the U.S. Treasury Department leaked news that he had laundering money to pay call girls. If General David Petraeus, the CIA director, could not trust the privacy of his own e-mails, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Instead of combating “Communism,” the government now claims to be protecting us from “terrorism.” Maybe. But what it is also protecting is its ability to invade anyone’s privacy and to use that power, if it wishes, for good or ill and without supervision. From his position at NSA, Snowden says, he and his colleagues could wiretap just about anyone.

Now that the story is out, President Barack Obama “welcomes” a “conversation” about them. Baloney. The function of secrecy is to prevent conversation, not welcome it. The Obama administration is a great supporter of privacy, but only for itself.

That’s why it prosecuted former NSA executive Thomas Drake for trying, first through channels, and later through the Baltimore Sun, to stop an earlier data mining project. Operation Trailblazer was not just a gross invasion of privacy; it squandered a billion dollars, mainly on private contractors, and never worked. But rather than give Drake a medal, the government shut the program down, classified reports confirming his claims, and prosecuted him under the Espionage Act. The trumped up charges failed; he had been careful not to disclose classified information. But the prosecution saddled him with $100,000 in legal unpaid bills. Snowden can expect similar treatment but, like Bradley Manning, might actually get more popular support.

The president insists that no one is listening to our phone calls, but Snowden said he could. Of course, we now know that President George W. Bush lied us into the War in Iraq, and falsely denied authorizing a massive program of warrantless wiretapping, then a felony under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The NSA and FBI both denied their illegal wiretapping and mail opening programs in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2004, the Justice Department assured the Supreme Court that our government did not torture people, just a few hours before the torture photos from Abu Ghraib were broadcast on national television. Why should we believe such people now?

Secret government was curbed in the 1970s. President Nixon was driven from office. The NSA’s watchlist was shut down; the FBI was returned to law enforcement. Wiretapping was brought under the supervision of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Assassinations were forbidden by executive order, and the campaign to punish leakers ended when White House aides were caught trying to suborn Ellsberg’s judge. Both Houses of Congress created intelligence committees to oversee our secret agencies.

Unfortunately, these efforts at oversight have largely failed. Judge Vinson’s order to Verizon proves beyond cavil that the secret FISA court is a rubber stamp for the indiscriminate seizure of all sorts of personal records. President Obama would have us believe that all members of Congress have been properly briefed, but even Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, admits that she does not know how the data being siphoned off fiber optic cables and out the side doors of Internet servers is actually being used. Classified briefings, of course, are the perfect way to silence critics. Once briefed, however vaguely, committee members are bound to secrecy. They can’t talk about what they learned, even with members of their own staff.

Seventy percent of the federal government’s intelligence budget now goes to private contractors. Far from overseeing the agencies, members of Congress court them, hoping to obtain business for companies that contribute generously to their campaigns. House Intelligence Committee member Randy “Duke” Cunningham and CIA Executive Director Kyle Foggo both went to prison for illegally steering government contracts to the same defense contractor. Senator Feinstein was embarrassed in 2009 when one of her fundraisers invited fellow lobbyists to lunch with her and boasted — in writing, on the invitation — that the intelligence committee’s work would be “served up as the first course.”

Americans can no longer trust the President, Congress, or the courts to protect them, or the reporters, whistleblowers, and politicians on whom our democracy relies. Our government has been massively compromised by campaign contributions and executive secrecy.

At this stage, the only remedy is for more employees of the NSA, CIA, and FBI to undertake Thomas Drake’s kind of whistleblowing. This is what Edward Snowden has done: “I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

No doubt the Obama administration will come after Snowden, as it did Drake. If it is going to defend our corrupt system of secrecy, it has to. But if it does, it will further discredit itself, again proving Justice Louis Brandeis’s dictum that, in politics, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Christopher H. Pyle teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics and Getting Away with Torture. In 1970, he disclosed the U.S. military’s surveillance of civilian politics and worked as a consultant to three Congressional committees, including the Church Committee.

Turkish protests grow as Erdogan calls counter-demonstrations

By Alex Lantier, wsws.org

Protests against the Islamist government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan grew over the weekend, as Erdogan called counter-demonstrations by his supporters next weekend and warned that his ability to tolerate the protests “has a limit.”

On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters filled Taksim Square in Istanbul, a week after police withdrew from the square after a failed attempt to crush protests against Erdogan’s plans to remodel the historic area in downtown Istanbul. Fans of the Besiktas and Fenerbahce football clubs had called on their supporters to join the demonstration, one of the largest so far on Taksim Square. Protesters chanted, “Erdogan, resign!”

Police and protesters clashed in the western Istanbul neighborhood of Gazi, however, with police firing water cannon after protesters reportedly taunted police.

In the capital, Ankara, police attacked a group of approximately 5,000 protesters Saturday night around 10:30 p.m. in Kizilay Square with barrages of tear gas and water cannon. There were reports of at least two injuries yesterday, after clashes continued in Ankara through the night and into early Sunday morning.

Turkey’s national doctors’ union said the protests had left two protesters and one policeman dead, and almost 4,800 people injured across the country. This figure includes approximately 600 injured police officers.

Protesters held another major rally on Taksim Square yesterday afternoon, as protests continued in cities throughout the country. They chanted, “Erdogan, resign!” and organized songs and dances in various locations on the square.

The Taksim Square rally was called by the Taksim Solidarity Platform—a group of academics, architects, environmentalists, and members of the opposition CHP (Republican People’s Party), who have tried to lay out conditions for a deal with Erdogan to wind down the protests.

The maneuvers of the Taksim Solidarity Platform—and those of the union bureaucracies, pseudo-left groups, and nationalist parties like the CHP—point to critical issues of political perspective confronting the protest movement.

The protests have become the focal point of broader hostility to Erdogan’s policies, including attacks on democratic rights, rising social inequality, and support for the reactionary US-led war in Syria. Numerous commentators have compared the Taksim Square protests in Turkey to the 2011 Tahrir Square protests in Cairo, which launched revolutionary struggles against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Stark differences exist between the two struggles, however. Above all, in February 2011, the working class in Egypt intervened, launching a series of powerful mass strikes that brought down Mubarak. These were directed against Egypt’s state-controlled unions and escaped the control of its opposition parties.

The only way forward for opposition to austerity, war, and democratic rights in Turkey is a fight to similarly mobilize the working class in struggle against the Erdogan regime, independently of and against the unions and the bourgeois opposition. To the extent that the Turkish protests have not advanced such a perspective, they have remained under the political influence of reactionary forces in the union bureaucracy and the CHP. They are seeking a deal with Erdogan to avert a revolution and increase their weight in Erdogan’s maneuvers with imperialism.

Erdogan is seeking to exploit this situation to rally supporters of his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) for a crackdown against the protests. Yesterday the AKP called pro-government counter-demonstrations in Ankara and Istanbul for next Saturday and next Sunday, respectively, as Erdogan went on a three-city tour to Mersin, Adana, and Ankara.

In Adana, where a policemen allegedly fell to his death from a bridge while chasing protesters, Erdogan denounced protesters for having “martyred” the policeman.

He also attacked calls for police involved in brutal repression of the protests to resign, slandering protesters as terrorists: “We won’t sacrifice our police to their wishes. We cannot leave the streets for anarchists and terrorists to roam.”

Pro- and anti-Erdogan protesters had clashed the night before, the second such clash after Erdogan supporters attacked a group of protesters in Erdogan’s home city of Rize on Thursday.

Speaking in Ankara as police attacked protesters, Erdogan said: “We remained patient, we are still patient, but there’s a limit to our patience. Those who do not respect this nation’s party in power will pay a price.”

Erdogan also made empty attacks on major banks or governments in North America and Europe, in response to fears that they might place pressure on him to compromise with the protesters, for instance by holding up lending and threatening to increase interest rates on Turkish debt.

He said, “The interest lobby should better behave itself. This lobby exploited my people for years. We have shown patience for a long time. I am not saying this only for one bank or two, but for all whoever is making this lobby. Those who have started this fight against us, you will pay the price heavily. Those who tried to let the stock exchange collapse: Tayyip Erdogan has no money there; if it collapses you will also collapse with it. The moment we discover stock exchange speculation, we will ram it down your throat.”

This is, however, bluster from a government whose foreign policy is closely aligned on Washington’s Middle East wars, above all in Syria, and which depends on international banks to fund Turkey’s current account deficit.

At the same time as Erdogan made these remarks, other Turkish officials cynically sought to dampen down conflicts with the protesters, in line with demands in the Western press.

Istanbul Governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu, under whose orders the police brutally attacked protesters last week, issued absurd messages on Twitter to protesters on Taksim Square and nearby Gezi Park: “Young people, I hear you spent a peaceful morning in Gezi Park with bird songs, the buzzing of bees, and the smell of linden trees. I would like to be with you…. Even if we cannot agree with one another, it is obligatory for us to share our problems by looking into our eyes humanely and with justice; every individual is worthy and special.”

Turkish officials also criticized the New York Times ’ decision to run a full-page ad from the Gezi Democracy Movement criticizing Erdogan in its Friday edition. In a letter responding to questions about the ad from the Turkish daily Hurriyet, the Times wrote: “We publish this type of advertising because we believe in the First Amendment, which affords us the right to publish news and editorials, but just as important, guarantees the public’s right to be heard.”

The Times ’ invocation of constitutional rights and freedoms—as it supports the Obama administration, which is escalating domestic spying and building up the apparatus of a police state—is empty and cynical. There can be no question that the Times posted this ad in line with the calculations of sections of the US foreign policy establishment, who hope to use pro-imperialist elements within the protest movement for their own purposes.

As Turkey’s EU Minister Egemen Bagis, a former lobbyist in the United States, sarcastically noted: “When I read the New York Times’ answer with a mention of the First Amendment, I had tears in my eyes, I was really touched.”

Bagis noted that when the Times was approached with plans to carry an ad denying the Armenian genocide in Turkey, it declined to do so.

Who rules America?

Barry Grey, wsws.org

Clapper: willing point man for an illegitimate system of rule. Who is the “un-American” now?

President Barack Obama’s defense of secret government programs to spy not only on the American people but also countless millions all over the world has been followed by threats from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to prosecute those involved in leaking information about the massive surveillance operations.

[pullquote] The cowardice and duplicity of Congress, above all, the Democrats, and the subservience of the media, exhibited in their response to the exposure of the NSA spying programs, encourage the military and intelligence agencies to go even further in their drive toward dictatorship. Mark Udall, the Democratic senator presented as the most “outspoken” critic of the spying programs, began his interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program by pledging his support to the “war on terror” and denouncing leaks of classified information. [/pullquote]

In a statement issued Saturday, Clapper denounced the British Guardian and the Washington Post for publishing “reckless exposures” of programs run by the Pentagon-based National Security Agency (NSA). These programs spy on the US and world’s population on a daily basis and capture hundreds of millions of Internet communications, including emails, chats, videos, photos and credit card receipts.

Reuters cited Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials who said the government is expected to open a criminal investigation into the leaks. As far as the Obama administration is concerned, the crime is not the flagrantly unconstitutional invasion of the privacy rights of the American people, but the exposure of these acts before the public.

Obama’s remarks last Friday in defense of the NSA programs, in which he characterized the media reports as “hype” and called pervasive state surveillance of the population a “modest encroachment” on the Bill of Rights, reflect a complete abandonment of any conception of democratic rights. This former professor of constitutional law articulates the outlook of a ruling class that has severed any serious connection to the constitutional framework upon which the United States was founded.

Obama presides over a country in which the president can—and does—unilaterally order the extra-judicial assassination of people all over the world, including US citizens; where entire cities, such as Boston, can be placed under de facto martial law; where the government seizes the phone records and emails of investigative journalists; where those who expose US war crimes, such as Private Bradley Manning, are tortured and prosecuted for treason; where the president can order alleged terrorists to be detained indefinitely and without trial in military prisons.

The question posed by these developments is: Who rules America?

In defense of his violations of the Constitution, which he is his sworn to defend, Obama insists that Congress has been consulted and has given its approval. That is true. He also points accurately to the sanction provided by the courts.

Yet everyone knows that the American people have never been consulted and have been lied to and kept in the dark about the destruction of their democratic rights. Even the term “bourgeois democracy” becomes something of a misnomer for a political system in which the threadbare trappings of popular sovereignty are so wholly contradicted by the realities of political life.

The secret collaboration of the military, the intelligence and national security agencies, and gigantic corporations in the systematic and illegal surveillance of the American people reveals the true wielders of power in the United States. Telecommunications giants such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, and Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter, provide the military and the FBI and CIA with access to data on hundreds of millions of people that these state agencies have no legal right to possess.

Congress and both of the major political parties serve as rubber stamps for the confluence of the military, the intelligence apparatus and Wall Street that really runs the country. The so-called “Fourth Estate”—the mass media—functions shamelessly as an arm of this ruling troika.

The cowardice and duplicity of Congress, above all, the Democrats, and the subservience of the media, exhibited in their response to the exposure of the NSA spying programs, encourage the military and intelligence agencies to go even further in their drive toward dictatorship. Mark Udall, the Democratic senator presented as the most “outspoken” critic of the spying programs, began his interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program by pledging his support to the “war on terror” and denouncing leaks of classified information.

Not a single major newspaper or media outlet has demanded an end to the spying, the closure of the NSA, the prosecution of officials responsible for the illegal spying, or impeachment proceedings against Obama, whose “high crimes and misdemeanors” in violation of the Constitution surpass anything committed by Nixon. The New York Times on Saturday published a front-page lead article headlined “Mining of Data is Called Critical to Fight Terror.” The article citied former intelligence officials to unabashedly defend the NSA surveillance programs.

The Obama administration itself, more than any previous US administration, embodies the consolidation of power by the military and the CIA in alliance with the financial elite. The ever-increasing power of what Eisenhower in 1961 called the “military-industrial complex” has found a certain consummation in the merging of the executive branch with the national security apparatus under Obama.

Obama’s personal background appears to have made him the ideal vehicle for this process. It is well known that after his graduation from college he worked for a year for Business International, whose founder acknowledged providing cover for CIA agents in several countries.

Obama’s personal biography, however, should not detract from the more basic social processes at work in the emergence of dictatorial forms of rule in the United States. No one can seriously deny today that the “war on terror” is and always was a war on the American people—a cover for imperialist war internationally and an unrelenting assault on democratic rights within the US.

The massive scale of the spying—targeting every man, woman and child in the country—raises the question: What are they afraid of?

The ruling class is haunted by the sense that it is socially and politically isolated, that the policies it is pursuing lack any serious base of support. Even as it escalates its assault on the conditions of the vast majority of the people—driven by the crisis of the capitalist system—the corporate-financial elite feels itself threatened by the consequences of the crisis. It knows that the financial house of cards it has constructed can come crashing down at almost any point, provoking revolutionary social upheavals.

But the ruling class has ultimately only one answer to this dilemma—violent repression. Hence the inexorable buildup of the police powers of the state. They are directed not against terrorists, but against the working class.

No section of the political establishment and no official institution will fight the assault on democratic rights.

The Democratic Party and the so-called “liberal” establishment once again reveal that they have no serious commitment to democratic rights. They are joined by the coterie of left-liberal and pseudo-left forces, represented by theNation magazine and the International Socialist Organization, which have remained largely silent on the latest exposure of Obama’s deeply reactionary and anti-democratic policies. Without the support these ostensibly “left,” in reality right-wing, groups provide Obama and the Democrats, it would not be possible for the state to mount such far-reaching attacks on democratic rights.

These rights, however, resonate deeply in the working class. They were achieved in the first place through revolutionary struggles. The fact that the ruling class today is determined to destroy them is an expression of the historical bankruptcy of American and world capitalism. The defense of these rights now falls to the working class.

What must be developed is an independent political movement of working people and youth. The defense of democratic rights is inseparable from a struggle against capitalism and the capitalist state. The key to the waging of this struggle is the building of the Socialist Equality Party as the new revolutionary leadership of the working class.

Barry Grey writes political analysis for wsws.org., an information arm of the Social Equality Party.