Obama Misled America On NSA Spying, Glenn Greenwald Says [Video]
President Obama misinformed the public when he guaranteed that the National Security Agency was not engaging in surveillance of individual Americans’ emails and phone calls.
That is the contention of journalist Glenn Greenwald
Formerly with the Guardian, Greenwald was the reporter who originally broke the domestic NSA spying scandal with his interview of Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker/whistleblower who is now in Russia.
Separately, this week, the British government claimed in court that Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was involved in espionage activity and terrorism when he was detained at London’s Heathrow Airport in August. Miranda is suing over the incident.
When asked by FNC’s Eric Bolling if the president was misinformed or uniformed about the extent of NSA hacking, Greewald responded as follows:
“I think neither. I think he was informed, but chose to tell the public things that he knew to be false. This has really been the nub of the story from the very beginning …”
Continued Greenwald:
Top NSA officials lied to the Congress about what the NSA does in regard to Americans’ communications, and President Obama has repeatedly misled the public by claiming that the NSA does not invade the content of our communications, when in fact in all sorts of ways, even without warrants, the NSA is frequently monitoring the communication of American citizens. That is a major part of this scandal, and article after article has proven that..”
Greenwald added that the agency tries to collect everyone’s communication “without limits” and that more shocking revelations about NSA privacy violations will be soon published.
Bolling noted in passing about how Snowden recently got a web design job in Russia, which prompted Bolling to suggest that he could come back and help fix the broken healthcare.gov website.
With reference to the troubled Obamacare website, Greenwald noted that Snowden is very competent and well-trained in his field and “certainly more so than the people who seem to be running that website,” but he added that “the best part about any news like this is that the Obama administration wants to intimidate whistleblowers, that their lives will be destroyed if they expose the wrongdoing of people in power, so the more Edward Snowden can have a normalized and free life, the more it will embolden future whistleblower to come forward.”
Opposition to NSA spying on ordinary Americans by the Obama administration as revealed by Greenwald and Snowden is one issue that has united both the left and the right of the political spectrum.
