President Obama’s trusted sidekick, the confirmed liar James Clapper, whines in a softball interview with Eli Lake of The Daily Beast (these people never agree to give interviews to people they know will ask hard questions) about how actually he is the victim and how his family suffers when they read the bad things people say about him.
The charges against his integrity bother Clapper. “I would rather not hear that or see that,” he said. “It’s tough on my family, I will tell you that. My son is a high school teacher and he has a tendency, or he is getting over it, to internalize a lot of this.”
The self-pity of these people is incredible. Clapper and his agency and his superiors such as president Obama abused the massive powers of government to severely harass whistleblowers and others with absolutely no regard for the devastation caused to those people and their families. And then they whine piteously merely because people criticize them.
But while pleading for sympathy, he also reveals his nasty side, issuing veiled threats to Edward Snowden by responding this way to senator Rand Paul’s suggestion that if Snowden ends up in jail, then perhaps Clapper belongs in the same prison cell for his perjury.
“Well Senator Paul says I should get to know [Snowden] by being in the same prison cell with him, which I don’t think is a good idea,” Clapper told The Daily Beast last week. “Probably wouldn’t be in Mr. Snowden’s best interest.”
These people talk tough because they have the national security state behind them. They would be pathetic if they were not so malevolent.
Astoundingly, he admits that the NSA cannot stop another leak on the scale of Snowden.
Clapper also acknowledges that the very human nature of the bureaucracy he controls virtually insures that more mass disclosures are inevitable. “In the end,” he says, “we will never ever be able to guarantee that there will not be an Edward Snowden or another Chelsea Manning because this is a large enterprise composed of human beings with all their idiosyncrasies.”
So the government wants to scoop up every bit of information about all of us but even after the Snowden exposures still cannot guarantee that it can hold on to it securely. Snowden did not take the information to enrich himself or destroy people. But the next person may not have such scruples.
Glenn Greenwald and Conor Friedersdorf elaborate on what this interview tells us about the mindset of Clapper and the national security establishment.
Clapper’s not in jail yet for lying to congress!?
Fuck it, too important for a tumbril, hit him with a hellfire of his own.
0.1 credit to Clapper for using Manning’s proper name.
Clapper’ll get a summerhouse in the hamptons from the Booz Allen shares he’ll get. He won’t be a full-fledged member of the elite but his grandkids will go to Princeton and they will be.
Fuck all ‘yall.
Next person? How about all the people before Snowden who we don’t know about? Hell, who even knows if the NSA knows about them?
Clapper is wrong on the last point. The fact is: do we really think Snowden would have done what he did if NSA wasn’t doing bulk collection or whistleblower harassment? Not doing bad things is a way to protect information. Providing meaningful oversight and whistleblower protections also protects information.
And bringing up Chelsea Manning is strange in that context. She could have been prevented with just better security. It wasn’t nearly the kind of insider threat that Snowden was.
It’s tough on my family, I will tell you that.
If Clapper were all that concerned with his family’s welfare, he could stop being a lying liar and obstructing democracy every chance he gets. Hell, he could even decide to promote real democracy himself by exposing all the dirt that even Snowden and Manning never learned.
Yeah, it sucks that his family has to suffer because he’s a fuck, but he could resolve that by quit being a fuck.
AMEN to thaqt Chirotera!