The President doesn’t think Snowden is a patriot. Okay, he can’t be right all the time. But when he says that he was already lining up his ducks to look into the same stuff that Snowden leaked, he is actually saying, whether he realizes it or not, that Snowden did the right thing, just without official sanction.
We all know that without the Snowden’s revelations nothing would ever have been done about NSA and its theft of our privacy and our freedom; at least not until another Snowden showed up and did exactly what he did. The reason Snowden did what he did, the way he did, was that if he had gone though channels the whole story would have been buried and Snowden would now be rotting in a cell accused of every crime that the intelligence community could invent.
Obama speaks about sitting down with congress and talking the whole thing through. Yeah, that’s worked fine on everything else hasn’t it? I guess if your head is far enough up your butt you might believe that it would work fine on this. I don’t know what Barak is smoking to think up this ridiculous scenario, but I wish I had discovered when I was writing fiction.
During what has already passed for as public debate on the whole phone security mess, NSA Director James Clapper lied outright to congress and nothing happened. What chance does any real investigation or any logical conclusion have of solving a problem that everyone in government is petrified of solving. Governments talk about transparency but they are actually terrified of it. No one wants anyone else, let alone the public, to know what they are doing because like it or not, there are always two sides to every story and the side that doesn’t agree with any decision can always cause trouble.
I was doing research on something the other day and I stumbled on the dirtiest word in weaponry – depleted uranium. I’m not going to go into the technical aspect of depleted uranium here, there just isn’t enough room, but, suffice it to say that it is the most dangerous, most horrible element of weaponry available to man on a usable basis. And it is and has been used, despite the fact that scientists and military men have known about its positive aspects as a weapon and its ghastly negative aspects as a health hazard ever since its first use on the battlefield and before.
It creates a bomb that can burrow through almost any armor and then explode inside spreading radiation that has a half life of a hundred thousand years, over everything in sight. It poisons people, animals, vegetation and even the soil and makes them dead and useless virtually forever. We have deployed this weapon in the Balkans, against Croats, Serbs and just about everyone else there, both combatants and civilians. We have used it in Iraq and before the war in Iraq in Kuwait against Iraqi’s. It is the basis of “Gulf War Syndrome” that dread disease that decimated our own troops and is still affecting the health of those who managed to survive it.
We have always known about the negatives of depleted uranium but we have used it knowing those negatives and we continue to do so. Of course there are two sides to the story. It’s a great weapon and it’s a curse on humanity and there are men who support both sides and those men who support the, it’s a great weapon side, don’t want anyone to know just how horrible a curse it is because what they have basically created is a war crime every time they use it.
That’s why transparency is so hard to achieve for any government. Yes, the government is killing our enemies but it is also killing untold civilians and also many of our own soldiers. Of course no one wants that story to get out. The same is true for the NSA phone tap mess. Yes, they think they are protecting us from terrorists but they are also stealing our liberty. How do you defend that? Better not to have to. Better to just sweep it under the rug.
But then along comes a Edward Snowden and there it is, all over the table and then we begin to find out all the little extras, like the fact that they are using one FISA decision to cover hundreds of thousands of calls; like the fact that somehow the NSA phone files have magically turned up in the DEA’s possession and are being used by them, completely without any kind of authority.
We understand and applaud efficient law enforcement but when it goes overboard and starts making up its own rules and its own laws then it must be stopped because that’s when it starts taking away our freedoms. That’s when it becomes totalitarian.
Our law enforcement and security agencies, in their zeal to succeed at their missions, seem to have forgotten about the concept of justice. I have been in many courtrooms in my life and I have heard a great deal spoken about the law but I have never, not even once, heard anyone officially refer to a concept of justice.
Justice was what Barak Obama sold to the American people to get elected, twice. It seems to be what he is trying to avoid delivering in the America he is trying to lead. Justice, privacy and freedom are far more important to the nation as a whole than the sacrifice of a few lives to terrorists. Of course the murder of anyone has a devastating effect on the lives of those who know and love them but the death of freedom, privacy and justice will crush a while nation.