A Black Nobel

Barack Obama became president of the United States by being a handsomely dressed black man, moderately well-educated and extremely ambitious, despite never setting foot in the continental United States until he was 12.

He did not have to have an exceptional academic record or a more meritorious resume than his white competition. His included a few modest months of community service in his neighborhood and only half of a congressional term. His only experience as a negotiator had been to haggle over the rights to the book about his life. Beyond that, with Obama, as they say there [in the United States], “What you see is what you get.” Without the support of a large fortune or political machines, like Clinton or Bush, Obama managed to gather the vote of those who wanted to see a candidate who was “running against Washington,” a vision that sooner or later ends up betraying the voter.

It was considered extraordinarily meritorious — a man of color had won the election in the most discriminatory country in the world! — that the Norwegian Academy felt obligated to award Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. And to be frank, this has been a basis for controversy.

Obama hasn’t been able to satisfy the most concerned people in regard to respecting democracy, human rights and the freedom of expression, using the inspiring role he can exercise as the president of the United States and projecting it across the world.

One of the biggest complaints about his unfulfilled promises has been his inability to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. Fifteen days ago, over 100 prisoners on a hunger strike began and continue to be force fed by nasal tubes. They are low-level combatants, apparently not innocent, but only seven of the 779 prisoners have been successfully convicted of major crimes. Yet they all continue to be held incommunicado inside the Guantanamo Bay “spa” prison.

And without resolving this major problem involving human rights, last week three more scandals sprouted around Obama, all related to privacy, freedom of expression and the freedom of press.

Militant North American conservative donors from the Republican Party complain that for ideological reasons the Obama government went on a rampage against their tax-exempt status. The incident was heating up when another abuse came to light: Intelligence officials seized two months of phone records between editors and reporters from the AP press agency in order to investigate a leak.

But it seems that the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize continues to lose track of the line between public interest and the freedom of expression. United States intelligence has, for the past eight years, supposedly gathered information about foreigners through Google, Facebook, Apple and YouTube through the PRISM program, a tracking system that was invented after Sept. 11 but has been expanded under the Obama administration to include U.S. nationals. Email, chats, pictures, videos and archives are collected with the protection of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. An individual suspect is not needed for the United States government to feel authorized to find out who called one of its citizens, for how long and from where.

The possible reason why he is committing these abuses is graciously explained by California senator and member of the Senate Intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein: “If it isn’t done this way, how are we going to know if someone might become a terrorist in the future?”*

Because of this, those who feel that it is absurd that the next Nobel Peace Prize winner will come from the Colombia-Cuba-Venezuela axis shouldn’t laugh so much. More absurd things, like Obama, have happened.

Where there’s smoke … The new payroll of the Good Government Foundation must either go on vacation during the re-election, or because of their high profile, implode.

*Editor’s note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified. Feinstein did tell reporters, “Terrorists will come after us if they can, and the only thing we have to protect us is good intelligence.”