We are a nation of immigrants. Even the Native Americans immigrated, coming here some 12,000 years ago. To be perhaps peremptory or impertinent, the land was actually given to all of us by the universe, an almost 14 billion year process, perhaps precipitated by the Big Bang which was implemented by – well the jury is still out. Curiously some, who have accumulated great wealth and who hold the reins of power, increasingly treat us and the land like chattels – items of use and exploitation.

I have this vision of the George W. Bush administration doing a fire sale of our land on December 19, 2008 just before Bush left office. He was selling parcels to over 130,000 acres of oil and gas parcels alongside or within view of Arches National Park and two other redrock national parks in Utah: Dinosaur and Canyonlands. In February of the following year President Obama cancelled them.

I also have another nightmare, this after Edward Snowden revealed the giant siphoning of metadata by our government, of being relentlessly pursued by drones, unable to evade the omniscient shadows of Predator aircraft in a slow-moving hover over my head, Hellfire missiles at the ready. Maybe Snowden has this nightmare as well, considering Obama’s pursuit of him.

Paranoid? In 2004, we could well say “No.” In 2013, with a reasonable leader, we would have to say, “Yes.” In 2017 – well, I don’t really know.

I survived the “You are either with us or against us!” swagger. It seemed unlikely that this frat boy president would turn into a tyrannical swaggering cowboy, but we become frightful caricatures to compensate for inadequacies, and in our inadequacies, we delegate deadly power to those not afraid to use it, like certain vice presidents.

Perhaps the young don’t really know what I’m talking about. Even some who lived through it have forgotten or didn’t care to know. But it is real and it is possible.

Thanks to Snowden, we know that unknown volumes of metadata have been extracted from Verizon, AT&T, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. We can be watched and listened to.

You might say that rights have been violated before, but we came out of it. Correct, but that was when our government functioned and protected us, when we had a system of checks and balances – three branches of government and a media that informed us. That’s no longer the case. The three branches of government are fused, not checking each other’s power and not protecting our rights.

We elected a president who taught constitutional law, whose platform spoke of stopping civil liberties abuses, and he now has authored new abuses. Yes, I feel safer with Obama than with “The Swagger,” but the means are there and growing for abuse against us. Nevertheless, the Obama executive branch claims the right to kill Americans and foreign citizens who provide a potential to commit future acts of terror.

Dirty Wars, written by Jonathan Cahill is a long and somewhat cumbersome read, but is stark in its description of the Bush administration’s secrecy, guile, arrogance and waste of our resources. And it is frighteningly straightforward in describing the Joint Special Operations Command’s (JSOC), under the control of Cheney and Rumsfeld, which had a global reach of war against perceived enemy combatants, something Obama continued.

It describes the birth of destructive drone technology with precedent-setting missile strikes against an American citizen in 2002, Ahmed Hijazi (Kamal Derwish from Buffalo). Obama followed suit against Samir Kahn, Anwar Awlaki and his 16 year old son, Abdulrahman, all three in 2011 but the latter on a later date along with young Yemen relatives. By all accounts, Abdulrahman and his young relatives were totally innocent, only looking for Abdulrahman’s father, Anwar, who himself was seeking to evade a drone strike somewhere in Yemen.

It took 12 attempts against Anwar before he was killed. Dirty Wars gave an overall example of the drone carnage involved in Yemen alone, Yemen government officials saying that a series of drone strikes between December of 2009 and May of 2010 killed over 200 civilians and 40 associated with al Qaeda.

Unlike George W. Bush, Obama personally signs off nominations for Predator strikes on what is called “Terror Tuesday.”

In spite of President Obama’s background, his apparent reasonableness, and his serious demeanor, he appears to have abused power. How much less safe would we feel with a president less reasonable, presiding while the other branches of government continue to be dysfunctional and unresponsive?

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