Snowden Speaks, Obama Should Listen

Dear Mr. President,

“The secret continuance of these [NSA surveillance] programs represents a far greater danger than their disclosures.” Edward Snowden quoted in today’s NYT (“Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia” p. A1). And right there’s the nub of the whole scandal. He’s got it right and all your intelligence nabobs who express “grave concern” got it all wrong. Democracy cannot exist in an all-encompassing surveillance state with secret laws and secret courts, for that leads to corruption, abuse and tyranny. You’ve done a full court press to grab Snowden and put him away where he cannot be heard, but this 30-year old “hacker” as you called him, managed to elude all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Edward Snowden is not only smart but he has more ethics, more morality and more American values than all those king’s horses and all those king’s men combined. He said in the interview with James Risen (the journalist who broke the initial story on warrantless wiretapping and who your boy Holder is threatening to throw in jail if he doesn’t reveal his sources) that he carried none of the secret files with him from Hong Kong and that the NSA knew it: “NSA has not offered a single example of damage from the leaks.” He also points out another obvious fact—that whistleblowers can’t possibly work through the internal system because “You have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.” Well, duh! He explains how he was told to drop it when he reported a security gap in the CIA’s personnel system and then punished for persisting and how he witnessed others being punished for “rocking the boat” as well. “If the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing punishment or even any repercussions at all,” he said, “secret powers become tremendously dangerous.” Why is truth and transparency so dangerous? Because the perceived power and fiefdom of petty and not-so-petty bureaucrats in our ever expanding intelligence community is lost. But is that worth the loss of freedom and democracy? Not to me and not to many of us outside the bubble, it isn’t. Are you so wedded to the business-as-usual warmongers that you cannot see (or care about) the obvious? Can you not see the traitors in our midst? Not Edward Snowden but the Clappers and Alexanders and Feinsteins and Rogers who willfully lie or look away and ignore the real danger. Bring Snowden home and award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. There is no one more deserving.