Especially as knowing anything beyond the first verse will give you away as an outsider right away.
Only immigrants from the States would think that they are expected to know the words to the anthem.
Obama’s alleged “inability” to close Guantanamo can also be interpreted as an unwillingness to pay the price for the Bush administration’s crimes.
The “price” being - if you abduct people from a foreign country and imprison them without trial, you might have to set them free without trial, even if no other country will take them back. If a president, using his executive powers alone, can order people imprisoned and tortured, then the next president can order them set free on US soil. Obama did not want to pay that price for his predecessor’s crimes, so he did not want to close Guantanamo.
It’s always scary how casually perfectly decent people imply that citizens of other nations have no rights.
Now, spying on other countries (governments, important industries) is tradition, completely destroying the privacy of other countries’ citiizens is new. The power to arbitrarily declare foreign citizens to be an enemy actors and murder them even though they’re not even in a country you’ve declared war with is as evil as the power to murder your own citizens.
In the case of spying, there’s also the problem of governments collaborating: The NSA spies on the world minus the USA, GCHQ spies on the world minus britain, the BND spies on the world minus Germany - and then they exchange information.
Just imagine the same thing for assassinations: (“I’ll kill your enemies if you kill mine”). Also, the world is getting smaller, and many politically active people go abroad to meet with like-minded people from different countries. Will they end up as collateral damage, or will the president just threaten to kill their foreign friends if they refuse to cooperate?
So, not only is the power to assassinate foreign nationals as evil as the power to assassinate your own citizens, it should also be considered to be equally scary.
