Obama Is Walter White (Or Why I Miss Bush)

Just days after 9/11, Bush launched a “War on Terror,” broadly defined and poorly conceived. The problem with launching a war on a tactic, especially a nebulous and cheap one, is that there’s no real way to end that war.

And that’s how we ended up with the Summer of Snowden, where we’ve started to finally learn how far the intelligence community, the executive branch and the Congress are willing to go to in the never-ending quest to catch a terrorist.

There’s no existential threat to the nation as there actually was in the Cold War.

But both the Bush and Obama administration allowed and encouraged the nation’s military to infiltrate and subvert the nation’s communication infrastructure—far beyond anything that happened in the Cold War.

The phone companies turn over records of all our domestic calls to the government on a daily basis. The internet’s backbone has been shot through with indiscriminate spy gear and backdoors. Secret demand letters accompanied by First Amendment-violating gag orders are delivered on a regular basis to the nation’s internet companies.

Congress and the American people have been lied to without penalty.

The law has been twisted beyond meaning with secret rationales, classified court rulings, and a liberal use of the state secrets privilege, which prevents any citizen from actually contesting the legality of the government’s actions.

The U.S. government has built a domestic spying apparatus with a reach and scope that’s the envy of dictators and repressive regimes everywhere, even as the government lectures China on its Great Firewall.

This is the legacy of 9/11. John Poindexter’s fevered dream of an all-knowing government system to predict terrorism did not die when the Total Information Awareness project was shut down. It grew long-hidden tendrils and sprouted codenames.

It’s now a dozen years after a cabal of death-worshipping, religious fanatics managed to hijack four planes, destroy the World Trade Center and kill nearly 3,000 civilians.

I almost hate to say it but it has to be said: I miss the Bush administration.

The Bush administration never pretended to be the Good Guys. They were straight-up chest thumping, flag waving, carrier-landing nationalists.

When Bush declared a War on Terror, he did get Congress to bless it, but that was simply about rallying the country.

Bush and Cheney believed in one thing: Executive Power. They had it. They were voted in. Fuck what constitutional lawyers say, fuck Congress (if it dared say anything). Fuck the U.N. Lying, manipulating, manufacturing evidence. 220, 221. Whatever it takes. But the administration never thought it was white hat pure — it just did what it thought needed to be done for the Homeland — like Vin Deisel channelling Keifer Sutherland in 24.

The Obama Administration’s War on Terror tactics aren’t much different, substituting drone strikes for CIA torture sites.

But Obama clings to the belief that he’s different from Bush. His War on Terror, he’s convinced, is lawful and inherently good and well-intentioned, because he’s running things now — which is even more terrifying.

Bush barely pretended the torture and warrantless spying was legal.

Cheney and his sidekick David Addington basically decided, Nixon-style, that anything was legal so long as a wartime president did it.

They figured rightly that the courts would be too meek to confront them and Congress critters would be too scared of being branded soft on terror in primary campaigns to stand up to the administration.

At least the Bush Administration was honest about it. Wartime president in a flight suit with a bulging codpiece. Debate Constitutional law against that.

With Obama, it’s like the whole administration imagines itself back in Harvard Law School trying to show off how clever they can be, whether that’s justifying shooting missiles from drones at American citizens or agreeing to let the nation’s intelligence service collect all the records of innocent Americans’ phone records.

It’s all legal, Obama tells us, and not because he’s the decider. It’s because he’s got excellent lawyers who have reasoned it out, albeit in secret legal papers that are much too classified to be shared with a regular court judge, let alone the public.

This isn’t the Obama that many voters thought they’d chosen.

There was a moment after Obama was elected in 2008 when some of the privacy watchdogs dared to openly dream of a change come inaugration day and of a flood of whistleblowers pouring forth to cleanse the land. The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh gloated about the sources that were just waiting to drop dirt on Bush’s illegal spying.

I know. I wrote a story about it.

“I’d bet there are a lot of career employees in the intelligence agencies who’ll be glad to see Obama take the oath so they can finally speak out against all this illegal spying and get back to their real mission,” says Caroline Fredrickson, the ACLU’s Washington D.C. legislative director.

…An Obama administration is less likely than Bush to devise convoluted legal end-runs around the Constitution, according to Marc Rotenberg, the head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“Keep in mind that Obama is a constitutional scholar and has a deep understanding of checks and balance,” says Rotenberg. “It’s hard to imagine that an Obama administration would support … warrantless wiretapping.”

Not anymore, it’s not.

Instead of welcoming whistleblowers, the Obama administration prosecuted them more vigorously than any previous administration dared. Journalists became legal targets. Bush-era lawsuits against warrantless wiretapping were fought as if the sins were their own.

Obama, it seems, fell in love with the NSA. The difference is Obama got cleverer lawyers to justify expanding the military’s spying on American citizens and the invasion of American telecom infrastructure and communications providers.

After 9/11, the Bush Administration made it very clear it wanted blood-for-blood, that it had no inclination for diplomatic niceties and was uninterested in big-picture, egg-headed root cause analysis or long-term thinking.

This was going to be a war. Missiles would be shot. Necks would be snapped. Laws would be stretched or outright ignored. Vice President Dick Cheney famously told Tim Russert, five days after the attacks, that the Bush administration would work the “dark side”.

“We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

Fault the Bush Administration for many things, but Cheney was true to his word. The world got wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; we got Gitmo, CIA black torture sites and Abu Ghraib. We got warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ phone and internet communications — justified through dangerous legal fictions waxing rhapsodically about the power of a wartime president.

It turns out that Obama was only slightly different from Bush; the project of turning the world’s and the nation’s communication infrastructure into a giant antenna was taken over by an administration in love with its own good intentions.

Now, a dozen years after 9/11, the country has spent the last 2 months trying to keep up with the Snowden effect, which has led to a dizzying array of revelations about the NSA and its power and reach.

The Obama administration sees no shame in its hypocrisy. No shame in being worse on transpareancy and secrecy than its predecessor because it believes in its worthiness, motives and moral compass.

Obama’s reaction to Snowden revelations was typical of this mindset — punish the traitor and mansplain the scandal.

Bush was a Rambo. Rambo knew he was over the line and didn’t care. But in the end he knew his rampages had a limit.

Obama is worse. He’s a Walter White who refuses to acknowledge he’s gone rogue. He’ll always be the good guy, in his own head. And that’s even more dangerous.

Like W.W., Obama thinks if we would just understand his intentions, everything will be just fine. To that end, he appointed a wiretapping oversight panel full of insiders to come up with an anodyne report that accepts and affirms the premise of the wiretapping, and throws in some unobjectionable recommendations for tweaks.

That’s not going to change anything. It’s not meant to.

The only way to stop Obama’s team is the Snowden way. Mercilessly pummel the administration with damning revelation after damning revelation. Put paid to the lies and “least untruthful” statements the Administration has served to Congress and the American people. Expose the surveillance state architecture Obama embraced and extended.

Bush eventually caved to political pressure and submitted its legal rationale for wiretapping Americas to a secret court, where it was promptly shot down.

Bush’s minions then did their best to scare the American people with phantoms of lost surveillance, and eventually got Congress to legalize much of the program just before Obama won the presidency.

But in March 2009, the secret surveillance court that’s supposed to rein in the NSA got fed up with Bush’s and Obama’s tactics. We didn’t know it, since the decision remained classified for more than 4 years. It was only made public on Tuesday, due to pressure from Sen. Ron Wyden, in the wake of Snowden’s revelations.

The court was troubled that the FBI had initiated a grand total of 3 preliminary investigations as a result of the NSA’s efforts collecting every phone record in America for 3 years.

“In any event, this program has been ongoing for nearly three years. The time has come for the government to describe to the Court, how, based on the information collected and analyzed during that time, the value of the program to the nation’s security justifies the continued collection and retention of massive quantities of U.S. person information,” the court said.

It’s long past time for that case to be made to the American people.

If as we all suspect, there’s no real benefit and no threat big enough to justify collecting every American’s phone and internet records, it’s time to demolish the domestic spying machine built of good intentions.

It’s no thanks to Obama that we’re getting started on that project. There’s just one person who deserves that credit: Edward Snowden.