This Is How American Presidents Roll. Who Could Have Predicted?

Benjamin Netanyahu: Not a man of peace, not a partner with the U.S., except, uh...

Edward Snowden is, hopefully, the gift that keeps on giving:

Among [Snowden's] most shocking discoveries, he told me, was the fact that the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was calling whom.

Typically, when such sensitive information is transferred to another country, it would first be “minimized,” meaning that names and other personally identifiable information would be removed. But when sharing with Israel, the N.S.A. evidently did not ensure that the data was modified in this way.

Mr. Snowden stressed that the transfer of intercepts to Israel contained the communications — email as well as phone calls — of countless Arab- and Palestinian-Americans whose relatives in Israel and the Palestinian territories could become targets based on the communications. “I think that’s amazing,” he told me. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.”

t appears that Mr. Snowden’s fears were warranted. Last week, 43 veterans of Unit 8200 — many still serving in the reserves — accused the organization of startling abuses. In a letter to their commanders, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to the head of the Israeli army, they charged that Israel used information collected against innocent Palestinians for “political persecution.” In testimonies and interviews given to the media, they specified that data were gathered on Palestinians’ sexual orientations, infidelities, money problems, family medical conditions and other private matters that could be used to coerce Palestinians into becoming collaborators or create divisions in their society.

The veterans of Unit 8200 declared that they had a “moral duty” to no longer “take part in the state’s actions against Palestinians.” An Israeli military spokesman disputed the letter’s overall drift but said the charges would be examined.

The rule of law in America -- I'm talking on so many levels here -- is quite nearly over, except for the peons (more on that later). The NSA vacuums what they want, through ingenuity, theft, and threats to organizations like Yahoo!, and distributes it where it can do the most damage.

I just wrote about the immorality of not acting on climate change. Our corruption extends way beyond just what will destroy the planet. In the meantime, we corrupt ourselves in ways trivial yet horrifying.

If all that is left is a narrow chance that we can vote these bastards out, then do it. That can only be on the congressional level. Our "heroes," like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- should she win in 2016 -- cannot be counted on to pass up on the corrupt abuse of power. It's the way presidents roll, especially since we've let them get away with it. What fuckers, our fuckers.

Barack Obama in Berlin, when we had a reason to believe.

Note. I'll take Obama, and even Clinton, over anything the other side has got, and I will actively support them. But I'm not blind. We've come a long way, baby, since hope and change. As Atros says, who could have predicted? From now on, all of us can.