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Obama Worse Than Bush
14 July 2013
(LPAC)—Filmmaker Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, a professor of history at American University make the case, in a July 10 op-ed published in the Financial Times, that, in crucial respects "Obama is actually worse than his predecessor" George W. Bush. While they tend to give Obama the benefit of the doubt—they say he has halted torture, withdrawn troops from Iraq, paid lip service to nuclear abolition and so on—they note that Obama "now embraces some of the ideas he attacked." "We know, from the recent revelations made by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, what panoptic capabilities the more than 1 million Americans with security clearances have," Stone and Kuznick write. "This army is deployed to monitor domestic and foreign populations on a scale hitherto unimaginable." They point out that Obama has claimed that the stored records produced by this army won’t be abused, but the fact is, if he doesn’t someone else will," as J. Edgar Hoover famously did. "Furthermore, if subtle force fails and force is required, Mr. Obama and his successors will have the wherewithal to target anyone, anywhere, with the utmost precision and the deadliest means." Obama poring over his weekly "kill lists" is one way this is taking form. In the name of national security, Obama "is laying the foundation for a frighteningly dystopian future by combining full spectrum surveillance with full spectrum military dominance," Stone and Kuznick warn, and Obama’s shameful pursuit of Edward Snowden is only the latest case in point. "Mr. Obama. Under whom hunger strikers are force fed and whistleblowers prosecuted with unparalleled ferocity, needs to recalibrate before he drives the final nails into the coffin of a once-proud American republic," they conclude. [cjo] |