President Obama on Not Overreacting to Terrorism

by Gerard Emershaw

While yucking it up with NBC's Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show," President Obama said:

One thing I've tried to do as President is not overreact, but make sure that as much as possible the American people understand that there are genuine risks out there. What's great about what we've seen with America over the last several years is how resilient we are. So after the Boston bombing, for example, the next day folks were out there, they're going to ball games. They are making sure that we're not reacting in a way that somehow shuts us down. And that's the right reaction. Terrorists depend on the idea that we're going to be terrorized. And we're going to live our lives. And the odds of people dying in a terrorist attack obviously are still a lot lower than in a car accident, unfortunately.

By "unfortunately," President Obama meant, of course, that it is unfortunate that so many Americans are killed in automobile accidents, but it is not difficult to imagine that it was a Freudian slip and that he was expressing that he is upset that more Americans aren't killed by terrorists. 

President Obama claims that he has not overreacted to the threat of terrorism. He hasn't overreacted? He has continued with and enlarged President Bush's neocon plan to turn the United States into a police state. President Obama has continued the Stasi provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, continued and enlarged Bush's NSA warrantless spying program, signed the NDAA which makes the United States into a battleground and gives the government the power to declare any American an unlawful combatant and detain him or her indefinitely, and declared that he has the power to kill Americans without due process. In addition, President Obama has broadened the Orwellian War on Terror by widening the war into Libya, Yemen, and—perhaps soon—Syria. 

President Obama has the NSA monitoring the communications of Americans, yet he does not consider this to be “overreacting.” He won't even admit that it is a “domestic spying program”:

We don't have a domestic spying program. What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat. And that information is useful. But what I've said before I want to make sure I repeat, and that is we should be skeptical about the potential encroachments on privacy. None of the revelations show that government has actually abused these powers, but they're pretty significant powers.

President Obama plays a “Newspeak” word game by claiming that the NSA spying programs are simply “mechanisms” and not “a domestic spying program.” He also attempts to portray himself as a civil libertarian by claiming to be “skeptical about the potential encroachments on privacy.” He is also quick to point out that there is no proof that the government has abused the powers of the NSA spying leviathan. Of course, the reason for this is that these programs are top secret and those who dare even reveal that they exist must live in exile in order to avoid being railroaded into federal prison on bogus espionage charges. 

While President Obama fully believes that Edward Snowden should be dragged in chains before a criminal court and forced to answer these bogus espionage charges, he toots his own horn as a defender of whistleblowers:

I can tell you that there are ways, if you think that the government is abusing a program, of coming forward. In fact, I, through executive order, signed whistleblower protection for intelligence officers or people who are involved in the intelligence industry. So you don’t have to break the law. You don’t have to divulge information that could compromise American security. You can come forward, come to the appropriate individuals and say, look, I’ve got a problem with what’s going on here, I’m not sure whether it’s being done properly. If, in fact, the allegations are true, then he didn’t do that. And that is a huge problem because a lot of what we do depends on terrorists networks not knowing that, in fact, we may be able to access their information.

The fact that President Obama was able to claim to be a friend to whistleblowers and say it with a straight face indicates that he may have missed his calling as a Hollywood actor—or as a spy. The truth is that President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined. How can anyone believe that whistleblowers can properly inform Americans of the abuses of the surveillance state through the official channels of which the President speaks? Does anyone believe that if Mark Felt—a.k.a. “Deep Throat”—had simply expressed his concerns to J. Edgar Hoover instead of leaking information to Woodward and Bernstein that the machinations of the Nixon administration would ever have been revealed? Does anyone believe that if Edward Snowden had simply expressed his concerns about the unconstitutional NSA spying programs to his boss that we would be talking about the issue now? President Obama provides bogus protections to lip service whistleblowers who are only pretending to blow the whistle on government corruption. Real whistleblowers like Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden will be thrown in prison by the Obama administration.

While one might be tempted to give President Obama credit for admitting that more Americans die in automobile crashes than die in terrorist attacks, his admission was true but misleading. According to the National Security Council, approximately 36,200 Americans died in car accidents in 2012. Thus, up to 36,199 Americans could have died in terrorist attacks last year, and President Obama's statement to Jay Leno would still be true. The truth is that far fewer than 36,199 Americans have died in terrorist attacks per year. In 2011, 17 Americans were killed worldwide by terrorists. However, a comparable number of Americans were crushed to death by their televisions or their furniture that year.

Since 9/11, terrorist attacks have killed a grand total of three Americans within the United States. This number increases to sixteen if one includes the Fort Hood shootings—which still seems more a matter of an unstable federal employee who happened to be a fundamentalist Muslim going “postal” than a premeditated terror attack. Why didn't President Obama point this out? Why didn't the President tell the American public that one is 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist? Why didn't he tell the American public that one is 9 times more likely to choke to death on one's own vomit than to die at the hands of a terrorist? So far this year, more Americans have been killed in the United States by toddlers (5) than by terrorists (3). Why didn't President Obama say “the odds of people dying in a terrorist attack obviously are still a lot lower than being fatally shot by a toddler, unfortunately”?

If the actions of the Obama administration both at home and abroad concerning the War on Terror are not overreacting, then it would be frightening to see what overreaction would look like. If the NSA spying is not a “spying program,” then it would be frightening to see what an actual “spying program” would look like.