Barack Obama’s ‘Extreme’ Anti-Terror Tactics Face Liberal Backlash

[Purveyor]

By Paul Harris, The Guardian
Saturday, February 9, 2013 9:17 EST

Drone attacks and new NDAA law under fire as critics fear US civil liberties are being undermined

President Barack Obama is facing a liberal backlash over his hardline national security policy, which critics say is more extreme and conservative than that pursued by George W Bush.

The outrage comes after a week in which Obama’s nominee to be the next head of the CIA, current White House adviser John Brennan, faced a grilling from the Senate intelligence committee over his enthusiastic support of using unmanned drones to strike suspected Islamic militants all over the globe.

It also comes after a court hearing in New York in which numerous liberal activists and journalists argued that a new Obama law – the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) – has dealt a serious blow to civil liberties by allowing American citizens to be detained indefinitely without trial.

MORE...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/09/barack-obamas-extreme-anti-terror-tactics-face-liberal-backlas/

By the comments I'm reading on this issue, indeed this is a growing problem.

[Sunlei]

1. a more transparent Gov. Be easier to go back to the Gov. where people were not informed?

remember Gaddafi with his diamond & gold guns, bombshell blond nurses, picture books of his 'Lizzzaaa' and his New York City tent in Trumps backyard? American citizens were not informed then how many citizens in that country alone we killed for Gaddafi.

[JDPriestly]

2. The internet has not just awakened awareness in the Middle East.

We too want more information and transparency than our parents wanted.

Our government and system just hasn't functioned well without it.

In the early years of our country, and even until WWI and WWII we lived in smaller communities. We knew our neighbors and most of the places we lived we pretty much knew everybody with whom we had contact -- or at least we knew someone who knew someone who knew them. The exception was hobos and hired hands who wandered from job to job.

That all changed - -especially during the 1930s. And now, there are places in which people have no idea who their neighbors are much less who runs city hall.

The news media has replaced our community. Just as we used to exchange gossip about our neighbors and knew very intimate details of their lives, we now want to know everything about our celebrities including our politicians and what they are doing in the world.

Used to be my elderly female relatives gossiped about their neighbors. Now we discuss politics in that same way. That's what we do on DU.

We respect the privacy of those who live near us more than we used to, but we want to know what our government is doing.

The government is going to have accommodate our interest, our desire to be informed or suffer the fate of the families in the Old West who kept too much to themselves -- shunning at the very least.

[Sunlei]

3. we Americans have a right to observe our Gov at work, they work for us.

There are plenty of politicans and federal employees who don't want to share their work with the American people.
We have to drag it out of them using the FOIA, that by the way President Obama mandated improved as soon as he took office. It took 5 years for a federal dept of the Bush admin to release some information when using the FOIA.

The same DOI, DOA, takes less time now about 6 months for a FOIA request. Still when an American wants to observe them at work our DOI will place a mountian between a photographer and the federal 'work' they want to photograph. Or they will use the private land trick, where they lease a bit of land or a house from a local and say the public can't observe because it's not public land.

Americans request info from the department of homeland security and get a stack of blacked out papers.

President Obama has a long way to go with the more transparent Gov. because a lot of his Federal departments are still screwing the American peoples' RIGHT to observe our Gov.

I wish President Obama would get on the ass of his Federal departments and make sure all non need to be secret info is fully transparent. On their websites.

We need a complaint system so Federal employees and Federal contractors can be reported. All they do now is 'self-regulate' and that system doesn't work.

That same 'complaint system' could be used by persons in other countries also. I bet there are plenty of times our military, our diplomats, overstep their duties and gets away with it.

[JDPriestly]

4. Good ideas. It isn't about retribution. It's about information.