Glenn Greenwald's Climate of Fear: Jim Risen v. the Obama adminstration ought to shock America into standing up and fighting back to preserve our cherished freedom and democracy.
The Obama Administration's campaign to threaten and intimidate journalists, whistleblowers and activists who challenge government actions is intended to create a Climate of Fear that prevents any meaningful review or accountability. It's the basis of an authoritarian state. Here's a synopsis of quotes:
A state can offer all the theoretical guarantees of freedom in the world, but those become meaningless if citizens are afraid to exercise them. In that climate, the Government need not even act to abridge rights; a fearful populace will voluntarily refrain on its own from exercising those rights.
... few things are more effective in creating a Climate of Fear -- one that deters investigation and disclosure and stifles the exercise of basic rights -- than prosecuting prominent people for having challenged and undermined the government's agenda. As Risen documents, that -- plainly -- is what this prosecution and the Obama administration's broader anti-whistleblower war is about: chilling the exercise of basic rights and the ability to challenge government actions.
These actions are hardley unique. Greenwald discusses smears against Seymour Hersh and the warrantless seizing of laptops and cellphones from WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum and Bradley Manning friend David House.
"Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government," Justice Robert H. Jackson, the former chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, wrote in 1949. "Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart."
So why don't more people object?
For someone who has no real interest in challenging government claims or undermining official actions, these policies will have no direct, perceptible effect. It's always true that those who are supportive of institutions of authority or who otherwise have no interest in challenging them are never targeted by measures of this sort; why would they be? That's why supporters of all Presidents -- Republicans during the Bush years and now Democratic loyalists under Obama -- are rarely disturbed by such developments.
But more importantly...
Nobody wants to believe that they have been put in a state of fear, that they are intimidated, so rationalizations are often contrived: I don't perceive any violations of my rights because there's nothing I want to do that I'm not able to do. Inducing a fearful population to refrain from exercising rights -- as it convinces itself no such thing is happening -- is a far more effective, and far more pernicious, means of suppressing freedoms. That's what a Climate of Fear uniquely enables.
A Climate of Fear starts off small and seemingly limited and innocuous and then grows to total oppression.
Read Glenn Greenwald's Climate of Fear piece and, if you can, Jim Risen's affidavit. Refer it to ten people and discuss why we need to stop the growth of an American National Security State.
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