The Falcon and the Snow-Man

Our friends Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are nothing but a couple of useful idiots. Regardless of your politics and whether you consider them traitors or heroes, both of these knuckleheads basically prostituted themselves to what they considered a version of the truth, despite the fact that whatever info they planned on releasing (not withstanding any debate as to whether it jeopardized our national security) will prove to be definite embarrassments for the United States Government.

With Manning, it was Wikileaks and Julian Assange, an individual who had an axe to grind, not only with the US of A, but with western society as a whole. What came out of it all was a series of documents that did very little to jeopardize our personnel in the field or give away our methods, but cast doubt on our ability to keep secret, things that could prove potentially embarrassing to our friends and allies. As a result, they had little incentive to tell us anything in confidence, knowing what could possibly happen to that information.

Snowden’s revelations as to what the NSA and the government by default, were collecting on American citizens, is breathtaking in its scope. The idea that he would seek refuge in Hong Kong due to the fact that it had a record of defending individual liberties is laughable. Hong Kong is a Chinese possession and as such takes its marching orders from Beijing. The idea that even Russia was willing to offer him asylum should speak volumes as to what both of these countries want out of him. Most of us would guess it was intelligence or national secrets, not so. Snowden is a PR/propaganda “dream come true” for both the Russians and Chinese. They can do much more damage pointing to what Snowden has to say about our programs and the hypocrisy that the United States is guilty of when it uses the bully pulpit to promote the democratic process and the rule of law. As we used to say in the military, a mission kill is as good as a hard kill any day of the week.

Now, on with the rest of this sorry story.

There have been and will be those who claim that Snowden should have used official channels to air out his gripes, but then again we’ve seen what happens to whistleblowers at the federal government under this administration. The counter-argument here will most likely be that he was a contractor and not a civil servant. So what? All that it would have taken would have been a well-placed phone call to his employer to try and cut him off at the knees and that would have been that. More to the point, there have been previous NSA whistleblowers under the George W Bush Administration who did file a complaint against the agency about the very program that is making headlines now. They had put together a smaller, less intrusive, less costly program that did everything necessary to keep us safe. That went nowhere as well. Too many of the powers that be at the NSA wanted a bigger piece of the pie that was getting divvied up in the post 9/11 world we came to live in. To them, as with most government agencies, a bigger rice bowl meant more relevancy.

We’ve seen that as the size and scope of government grows, so do the opportunities to abuse that corresponding power. Think IRS personnel targeting conservative and Tea Party groups. Think leaking donor lists from an organization’s tax returns (a criminal offense). Think DOJ targeting AP and FOX news reporters, including going to a judge for warrants based on scant information. Think a health care law so encompassing and unwieldy that we are now only starting to discover all of its ramifications.

I’m thinking that we’ve finally hit that saturation point where even the average citizen who’s been caught up in their own little world has to sit up and acknowledge in the words of Buffalo Springfield, “there’s something happening here”.