The Obama Administration continues with its effort to duck responsibility for the growing NSA surveillance scandal today, with Secretary of State John Kerry telling the BBC that it was unfair to blame Obama because he didn’t “personally” order all that surveillance.
This narrative of the feckless president bumbling unawares into major scandals is in keeping with past White House comments, which insisted Obama didn’t even know about a lot of what the NSA does.
Yet the NSA is part of the executive branch, and directly under the president purview. Even if he delegated a lot of the decision-making for the agency to underlings, he’s clearly responsible for it.
Indeed, while this argument is gaining currency in the administration as a catchall responsible to various government misdeeds, it’s not even clear that a president who lets major violations of privacy go on under his putative watch is any better than a president who orders those violations directly.
Even if President Obama in fact didn’t know about the NSA’s actions until he read about them in the Guardian, he didn’t seem particularly bothered by them, and has defended the NSA publicly at every opportunity.
Nixon didn’t ‘personally’ order the break-in.
That is rubbish talk.
That is rubbish talk.
Is Kerry for real.
The buck never stops there.
Hey, maybe it's the truth. Saying that Obama didn't know or have anything to do with anything is an admission that the US run by a shadow government. Woodward already pretty much announced it as well.
It shouldn't be news really. Obama from the beginning was an empty suit who had little or no say in "his" administration. Now it's time for the American people to come to terms with that reality, that their elected presidents are powerless. It's time to reclaim the US government from whoever really runs things.
Perhaps he ordered it impersonally – in keeping with that cool, aloof intellect of his.
Wait a minute- I thought Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were held accountable unto death for their actions as well as the actions of their underlings. I thought that's what the Nuremberg trials were all about. I thought Assad was being held accountable for his actions of his troops.
But now Obama isn't held accountable for his actions and the actions of his administration? Methinks something is rotten, and it's not in Denmark this time.