George W. Obama

Barack Obama lied when he promised to defend the right to privacy and the values of transparency on which his predecessor trampled.

The last two weeks have been perhaps the most enervating for the image of the president of the United States since he assumed office, because his hypocrisy has been laid bare. Barack Obama, who during the 2008 elections presented himself as a candidate who would correct the totalitarian offenses of George W. Bush, once in office, opted to expand the most controversial policies of his predecessor.

The hardest hitting were the revelations of Edward Snowden, a systems technician who worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency. Snowden revealed that, through two secret programs, the NSA collects data communication of hundreds – or thousands – of millions of people around the world.

During his 2008 campaign, President Obama said that George W. Bush “put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand.” When he made his only public commentary with respect to these espionage programs, over the weekend, he said Americans “are going to have to make some choices” between greater security and the right to privacy.

What Snowden’s revelations show is that, once in power, the Barack Obama administration adopted the espionage programs of the Bush administration, and Obama strengthened them on an internal and external scale. They have also exposed the repeated lies the Obama administration has told Congress and the public regarding the scope of these programs.

The crisis that the Obama administration’s obsession over private information has sparked is international. The commissioner for the protection of privacy of Germany, Peter Schaar, has stated that it is unacceptable for the United States administration to violate German citizens’ right to privacy.

The kindest interpretation of Barack Obama’s inconsistency would be that, once president, he recognized the need to amplify the espionage programs to protect the country against terrorists attacks. However, the Obama administration bypassed the supervision that Congress should have had over the program, hence why the NSA lied when they said they were not storing the information of millions of Americans.

So far the government’s response has been shadowed. While dismissing the importance of the revelations and making invitations to have public debates, an unrestrained persecution is mounting against the informants who leaked classified information.

A few days before the publication of the first reports of the secret espionage programs of the U.S. government, the trial of Bradley Manning began. Manning is the young soldier who leaked documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the reports on Guantanamo and the cables of the U.S. Department of State on WikiLeaks.

Bradley Manning was jailed for more than 1,000 days before the trial began. Of these, he spent a year and a half in maximum security under “surveillance to prevent suicide.” The harsh conditions of reclusion during the lapse implicate that he was unable to be out of his cell for more than an hour a day, he could not lay in his bed unless he was sleeping and the rest of the time he should be sitting up straight in a chair, and he had to respond every five minutes to a guard asking him if he was alright.

The prosecutor accuses Manning of having given classified information that helped the enemy and the penalty would be life in prison. If Edward Snowden is captured by the U.S. government, he may suffer a similar future.

It does not speak well about a president that his most prosecuted public enemies are two young idealists who risked their well-being and perhaps their lives to strengthen democratic values. This is not what Barack Obama said during the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. As Ron Fournier, National Journal commentator, said, “the Bush-Obama era will long be remembered for curbing the Constitution.”