It is a rare treat to see such a contrast of views in one television news segment. It is the contrast that makes our point at RPI as well as it could be made. Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald debating former spokesman of former President George W. Bush Ari Fleischer on revelations that the US government has become a total surveillance state that past totalitarian regimes could have not even fathomed.
Watch the video here.
For any of us who, faced with the current administration’s breathtaking acceleration of the worst of President Bush’s domestic and foreign abuses, might be tempted to look back a bit more fondly on the Bush administration, Ari Fleischer here is a welcome slap in the face back to reality. His still-polished lines and the mendacity therein are vivid reminders of the mountains of lies shoveled at us daily by Fleischer and the president and regime he served.
Here is Fleischer, in full strawman mode, responding to the assertion that too much secrecy leads to abuses:
“If you take that argument to an extreme there should be no classified information in the government whatsoever, the military, the CIA. There should be no secrets when the SEALs go to get Bin Laden, it should be publicly reported when the helicopters take off. There is a legitimacy to government secrecy. It’s how we keep ourselves safe.”
But thankfully Greenwald does not let Fleischer get away with this one, scoring the knockout punch of the debate:
“The Verizon program which is the one that you just referenced is a one in which the government collects all of our phone records so that we can — they will always know with whom we’re speaking, where we are when we’re having those conversations, and really, the ultimate question is we have a society, a government, that operates almost entirely in the dark while knowing virtually everything about us.
“When governments can operate almost entirely in the dark, what you get is a government full of Ari Fleischers who can go before the world and spew falsehoods. There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam Hussein has an alliance with Osama Bin Laden. When government officials operate in secret, they abuse their power.”
