There are two “democracies” where the secret state within
the state is pulling the strings of politicians so hard that their movements
resemble those of puppets. The hidden apparatus is so powerful that to
challenge it is to court accusations tantamount to treason.
We refer, of course, to the United States and Britain, where
yesterday the prime minister issued a veiled threat against the Guardian for continuing to publish
articles based on material supplied by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In Washington, meanwhile, Barack Obama’s spokesman convinced
no one with his denial of the president’s prior knowledge of the National
Security Agency’s bugging of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile for more
than a decade. Somewhere, someone surely has a “smoking gun” email which says
the opposite?
The reality is that neither the NSA nor GCHQ are dependent
on political approval for their insidious activities. Quite the opposite, both
are fiefdoms of the inner state, that part which is hidden below the waterline
and which, like icebergs, can seriously damage your health.
That’s why prime minister Cameron is determined to keep a
lid on GCHQ’s activities. Yesterday he
warned MPS of the dangers of a "lah-di-dah, airy-fairy view" about
the dangers of leaks, and warned that if
the Guardian didn’t “demonstrate some
social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back
and not to act." Naturally, that other poodle, one Ed Miliband, rushed to
praise the work of “our intelligence services”, adding: “It is vital, it keeps
us safe and, by its very nature, it goes unrecognised.”
But this deception won’t wash. The stories that the Guardian have extracted from Snowden’s
files show the methods and scope of the NSA/GCHQ’s activities. It was long
believed that these agencies were intercepting emails and phone, breaking into
the back door of internet providers when necessary. Snowden provided chapter
and verse rather than revealing names of any secret agents or stuff like that.
The truth is that a comprehensive surveillance state has
been established behind our backs through agencies that act with impunity. At
the weekend, the Guardian revealed
how GCHQ feared a "damaging public debate" on the scale of its
activities because it could lead to legal challenges.
Memos in the Snowden files, for example, showed how GCHQ and
the other spy agencies have thwarted plans supported by the three main parties
to make intercept evidence admissible as evidence in criminal trials. The report also revealed how GCHQ helped the
Home Office to find “sympathetic” people to help with “press handling”.
Surprise, surprise they included Liberal Democrat peer and
former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile. Last week, right on
cue, he criticised the Guardian’s
coverage of Snowden’s material.
Meanwhile, in the US, the Washington Post is sceptical of the
claim that Obama did not know about the bugging of foreign leaders. Opinion
writer Eugene Robinson says: “Either somebody’s lying or Obama needs to
acknowledge that the NSA, in its quest for omniscience beyond anything Orwell
could have imagined, is simply out of control.”
Either way, the revelations by Chelsea Manning, when he was
as an army private known as Bradley Manning, and then Snowden, have angered
millions in Europe and America and thrown governments into disarray. In a perceptive article for the US journal Foreign Affairs, Henry Farrell and
Martha Finnemore dismiss the so-called threat to national security and instead talk of the "collapse of hyprocisy" in the US. They add:
This system needs the lubricating oil of hypocrisy to keep its gears turning. To ensure that the world order continues to be seen as legitimate, US officials must regularly promote and claim fealty to its core liberal principles; the United States cannot impose its hegemony through force alone. But as the recent leaks have shown, Washington is also unable to consistently abide by the values that it trumpets. This disconnect creates the risk that other states might decide that the US-led order is fundamentally illegitimate.
Exactly! Calls for better “oversight” of GCQH and the NSA
miss the point. The sponsoring states, as the authors point out, have a “dangerous
dependence on doublespeak”. When that cover is blown, as it has been, the case
for creating an alternative, democratic political system, where surveillance of
the kind we have know, is banned can only grow.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
No comments:
Post a Comment