Truest statement of the week

If you go back to the huge story which was delayed a year by the New York Times but did break in late 2005 revealing the NSA spying on Americans the wiretapping and so forth -- remember the huge uproar that was under President Bush?  And then we had candidate Obama for president saying, "I am opposed to  illegal infringement upon people's privacy rights.  I am opposed to illegal  wiretapping."   We didn't understand what he was saying.  We had a tendency to believe that, in 2008, what Obama was saying was he didn't want that kind of surveillance to go on because it was illegal.   What we now know and it's very clear is that President Obama does not want that surveillance to be illegal he wants it to be legalized, in fact he voted for that the FISA legislation in the middle of 2008 as a senator that's where we are now.  These surveillance measures, no matter what secret hand picked court says, they are unconstitutional they are fundamental violations of our rights.



-- Norman Solomon, Tuesday on KPFA's Flashpoints, speaking with Dennis Bernstein.