But Obama expanded them, continuing where Bush left off and the bipartisan national-security consensus became further entrenched on this issue. Obama did not start the drone and mass surveillance programs former president Bush made heavy use of both. While pledging to reform the intelligence agencies and paying lip service to transparency, Obama has used the World War I-era Espionage Act against whistleblowers more than all previous presidential administrations combined. President Obama responded to the growth in leaks during his administration by harshly cracking down. Some have even accused him of being a foreign agent. intelligentsia, Republicans and Democrats alike, has demonized Snowden as a traitor. in what may have been a violation of international law - was so incensed that she compared the Obama administration's mass surveillance program to the work of the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany's former Communist regime. German Chancellor Angela Merkel - whose personal phone calls were monitored by the U.S. His leaks showed that the NSA was not just sucking up information on millions of Americans’ private communications it was also spying on dozens of other countries and even listening to the phone calls of foreign heads of state. Whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed to the world just how much the National Security Agency's mass surveillance program had grown. President Obama has also expanded the surveillance state. The drone program has not been carried out alone. A majority of Americans have consistently expressed support for the use of covert strikes to target extremists, and there has been no dearth of outspoken liberal drone defenders. Under President Obama, the public has come to accept this drone assassination program as inevitable, perhaps even desirable. Drone strikes are known to have been carried out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. citizens (a clear violation of their constitutional rights) and numerous covert drone attacks in nations with which the U.S. Obama set a dangerous precedent for future presidents: invoking the ability to assassinate anyone whom the government deems a threat anywhere in the world - without trial or any semblance of due process. "Obama’s embrace and vast expansion of drone strikes against militants and terrorists will be an enduring foreign policy legacy," wrote Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in The New York Times.Įven "more consequential than the growth in drone strikes," Zenko added, "is the Obama administration’s efforts to institutionalize and normalize the practice." Bush, killing thousands of people, including many civilians. The Democratic president carried out 10 times more drone strikes than his Republican predecessor, George W. Under Obama, the use of targeted assassinations via drone grew enormously. Now, bigoted billionaire Donald Trump - the Republican demagogue who ran a far-right, overtly racist, misogynist and jingoist campaign - will be in control of the very same programs that establishment liberals were so eager to defend. They were met with bile and smears from a liberal establishment invested in shielding their leader from any criticisms. Barack Obama's left-wing critics have for years warned about the drone assassination and mass surveillance programs that the Democratic president had drastically expanded.
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