Let Snowden Testify To Congress!

Dear Mr. President,

More revelations by the Guardian yesterday and today Snowden finally got out of the Moscow airport, granted asylum for a year. But as you say, power is patient and maybe power will wait a year and see what happens. If not, assassins are as plentiful in Russia as anywhere else and renditions still happen although it might be more difficult to grab Snowden off a street in Moscow than an Islamic cleric off a street in Milan. Snowden sparked the debate you said you wanted (but until yesterday when you called in leaders of both parties to lobby for the out-of-control unconstitutional NSA surveillance program, you never actually participated in the debate). Yesterday Sen. Leahy pinned down Clapper’s 2^nd in command, John Inglis, about the value of bulk data collection and those 54 plots averted because of it vanished—poof!—first to 13, then 2, then, maybe one. And the transparency you promised? Three “secret” documents released yesterday; the secret reauthorization by the secret FISA court for the NSA to keep collecting bulk phone records for another 3 months—docket number redacted—and 2 letters to Congress saying the NSA only looked at a tiny fraction of the data collected. Still no legal justification, criteria or rules. Other than spectacle and hot air, there’s not much information coming out of Congress. Legislators bluster, intelligence officials obfuscate, spin and lie and the only real information we get is from the Snowden documents. So here’s an idea: why not have Snowden testify before Congress? He’s the only one who actually knows what he’s talking about and willing to tell the truth. Let’s have a real debate! Oh, the latest revelation in the Guardian: the NSA has been funding the Brits’ surveillance program for years—more than $150 million over the past 3 years alone. The NSA calls the shots though, and we get access to a lot of phone calls and internet traffic we otherwise wouldn’t get, like maybe the Brits spy on Americans for the NSA because it’s illegal for the NSA to do that. But here’s what bothers me, Mr. President: the NSA gives hundreds of millions to the Brits to spy and spends billions on a surveillance program that has little or no value; the CIA delivers bags of cash to Karzai every month; the Pentagon just signed a $7 billion deal with Lockheed for 71 more problem-plagued F-35s—and yet, we have no money to help Detroit or Stockton or any of the 9 million underwater homeowners in America. What’s wrong with this picture?