Through a PRISM darkly

[thewayne]

"He's a traitor."
-- House Speaker John Boehner on Edward Snowden

"Hero of the Year."
-- Michael Moore

"Treason...Bring back the death penalty."
-- Fox News analyst Ralph Peters

"The man for which I have waited. Earmarks of a real hero."
-- Glenn Beck

"An act of treason."
-- Sen. Dianne Feinstein

"When you have a dictatorship or an authoritarian government, truth becomes treasonous...For somebody to tell the American people the truth is a heroic effort."
-- Ron Paul

I really, REALLY, hate agreeing with Glenn Beck about something! At least it's over something worthwhile.

Comments

[silveradept]

Same lines of attack as PFC Manning. At what point did it become treasonous to point out the illegal things your government is doing, whether in the name of security or not? (W Bush currently leads the poll there, I'm guessing, but it's probably earlier than that, maybe Nixon?)

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Certainly during Dubya's term it became grossly unfashionable to criticize the government. Maybe that became sort of a cloak that encouraged them to continue and expand doing nefarious deeds?

[silveradept]

Possibly, but if that's your line of thinking, I'm still placing the blame earlier, in the Nixon-Reagan sort of era, because things like the Contra scandal or the "plumbers" are predicated on the idea that the government is always right and nobody should be able or allowed to criticize it.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Considering the acts of Nixon in fundamentally committing treason to prolong the Vietnam war prior to his election as POTUS, then followed up by Watergate et al and by Reagan's Iran/Contra shenanigans, we definitely have a need for government transparency.

[silveradept]

Oh, yes. We need a lot of transparency, and fairly quick transparency. Enough of this "national security means we don't say anything at all" bullshit. If you want to say that the public doesn't need to know, then the Intelligence committees need to be able to shut anything down that has even a whiff of being illegal or invasive.