COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY EDWARD SNOWDEN IN THE
GUARDIAN
‘Governments can
reduce our dignity to that of tagged animals’
Yes, indeed, Edward Snowden, but I fear recent developments
mean a great deal more.
The United States is building a national security state.
This will serve the establishment by means of America’s vast network of
security organizations and military, reducing the rest of us to stats on a
screen or page.
Much like an arms race, this kind of thing has no limits as
to how vast or comprehensive it becomes. There is no genuine accountability,
and the people have no tribunes.
Already the United States – where I was born and grew up –
runs programs to kill people in half a dozen countries. Names are taken off
computer screens and given to buzz-cut thugs who work somewhere in the
basements of CIA also at computer screens, playing computer games with real
lives. It is appalling.
There is no significant difference between this and the way
the old Argentine military junta used to make what they regarded as undesirable
people disappear in the night, activity which of course America’s security
services knew about and had no trouble with. Obama signs off from “kill lists”
which are now rumored to go beyond just suspected terrorists, including drugs
people.
These killings have no legality, and there is no accounting
for them. The victims are completely innocent under law, and all the others
often killed along with them are not even suspects.
It’s all as though the Enlightenment and all that followed
had never happened. It doesn’t take long for all sense of human rights simply
to dissolve away.
Obama - who by the way is often rumored to be CIA, as was
George Bush senior, and who is in any case an almost psychotic man, one who
dislikes openness and explaining himself, possessing a charming smile and a
keen willingness to kill in secret - and the intelligences services are building
a future dark society George Orwell could not have imagined.
A final word of gratitude for the blow you struck for human
freedom, but I do fear things are going to run completely beyond control, there
being, I am sure, programs and weapons and secret organizations of which you
are not even aware. And the rapid approach of artificial intelligence and
capable robots – all in the control of the same folks – does not signify a
bright future for humanity.
