Anonymous Fear-Mongering About the Patriot Act from the White
House and NYT
By Glenn Greenwald
May 28, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Intercept" - Several of the most extremist provisions
of the 2001 Patriot Act are going to expire on June 1 unless Congress
reauthorizes them in some form. Obama officials such as
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and new
Attorney General Loretta Lynch have been engaged in rank fear-mongering to
coerce renewal, warning that we’ll all be “less safe” if these provisions
are allowed to “sunset” as originally intended, while invoking
classic Cheneyite rhetoric by saying Patriot Act opponents will bear the
blame for the next attack. In
an interview yesterday with the Intercept, ACLU Deputy Legal
Director Jameel Jaffer explained why those scare tactics are outright frivolous.
Enter the New York Times. An
article this morning by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, in the first paragraph,
cites anonymous Obama officials warning that “failing to [strike a deal by the
deadline] would suspend crucial domestic surveillance authority at a time of
mounting terrorism threats.” Behold the next two paragraphs:
“What you’re doing, essentially, is you’re playing
national security Russian roulette,” one senior administration official said
of allowing the powers to lapse. That prospect appears increasingly likely
with the measure, the USA Freedom Act, stalled and lawmakers in their home
states and districts during a congressional recess.
“We’re in uncharted waters,”
another senior member of the administration said at a briefing
organized by the White House, where three officials spoke with reporters
about the consequences of inaction by Congress. “We have not had to confront
addressing the terrorist threat without these authorities,
and it’s going to be fraught with unnecessary risk.”
Those two paragraphs, courtesy of the Obama White House and
the Paper of Record, have it all: the principal weapons that have poisoned
post-9/11 political discourse in the U.S.
We have the invocation of wholly vague but Extremely Scary and
Always Intensifying Terrorism Dangers (“at a time of mounting terrorism
threats”). We have the actual terror threat that failure to accede to
the government’s demands for power will result in your death (“you’re playing
national security Russian roulette”); compare what
Bush officials spewed in 2005 about the few members of Congress who tried to
enact some mild Patriot Act reforms back then (White House press secretary Scott
McClellan: “In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without these vital
tools for a single moment … The time for Democrats to stop standing in the way
has come”).
And we have the New York Times – in the name of
reporting on White House efforts to pressure Congress to act – granting
anonymity to “senior administration officials” to spew their official
fear-mongering script. This isn’t even an instance where some
administration “source” called the paper pretending to leak information that was
really just official narrative; this was a White House-arranged call where
anonymity was demanded as a condition for the honor of stenographically
disseminating their words.
Worst of all, it’s all published uncritically. There’s not a
syllable challenging or questioning any of these dire warnings. No Patriot Act
opponent is heard from. None of the
multiple facts exposing these scare tactics as manipulative and false are
referenced.
It’s just government propaganda masquerading as a news
article, where anonymous officials warn the country that they will die if the
Patriot Act isn’t renewed immediately, while decreeing that Congressional
critics of the law will have blood on their hands due to their refusal to obey.
In other words, it’s a perfect museum exhibit for how government officials
in both parties and American media outlets have collaborated for 15 years to
enact one radical measure after the next and destroy any chance for rational
discourse about it.
* * * * *
Are terror threats ever not “mounting”? It’s now
embedded in the journalistic slogan: Mounting Terrorism Threats.
UPDATE:
Commenter Kitt
argues, quite reasonably, that I omitted what may be the most darkly
hilarious White House claim as helpfully laundered by the NYT, found in
the last paragraph:
“Hot standby“: how they must have congratulated
themselves when they coined that. Note, too, that the last thing the White House
and NYT tells you to make you scared is that if the Patriot Act
provisions lapse, it’d mean they’d have to “obtain a court order” before getting
the records they want: frightening.
Email the author:
glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com