El Snowden Watch

At last report? Nobody knows but Snowden’s on the run, maybe to Iceland, maybe to Ecuador, maybe he’s headed for the three peaks. Quien Sabe?

In Praise of Robert Scheer, Truthdig

Last night I listened to Robert Scheer, a columnist, editor, and reporter, discuss the Snowden watch. Scheer covered Vietnam from the beginning and wrote about the lies, cover-up, and absurdities of that war, including the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and how hundreds of government operatives lied to congress and other officials. See Fog of War, Robert McNamara’s mea culpa about Vietnam.

Some things never change. Daniel Ellsberg embarrassed the Nixon et al when he released the Pentagon Papers. Bradley Manning embarrassed the Obama administration and Clinton state department, when he released videos, which indicted American troops with war crimes—shooting and killing innocents and journalists, not to mention memos, detailing hyper hypocritical deals with dictators. Subsequently Manning was subjected to torture and is being tried by a kangaroo court–military style.

Now comes Edward Snowden, who has embarrassed liberals like Sen. Diane Feinstein, President Obama, and James Clapper, National Intelligence head, who recently lied to congress about NSA surveillance of American domestic communications. Clapper, pictured, thanks to an AP photo, reminds me of the protagonist in Breaking Bad, a meth maker and drug dealer, one-time LANL chemist and chemistry teacher in high school, whose health problems created the impetus for the plot in Breaking Bad. Establishment journalists and administration officials, who demonize Snowden, dare not look in the mirror lest they see Clapper staring back.

There is precedence for disobeying government orders: it’s called the Nuremberg trials, which Scheer quotes from below. When I was in the U.S. Army Basic Training program at Fort Knox in 1967, we watched instructional videos and were told by our drill sergeants that Americans did not torture, break the laws of the Geneva Convention, and/or follow “illegal orders.”

Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld set the precedent for the “Savage American Century,” of the  Gitmo and Orwellian named “Enemy Combatants.” Folks like Obama, Clinton, Obama, Petraeus, Feinstein have followed in their footsteps.

Robert Scheer speaks for a generation of journalists, who have seen the way government and the military operate. He points out how President Eisenhower warned against the “military-industrial complex.” More fundamentally, he refers to George Washington’s Farewell Address, who warns against empire and asks, “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?” Though President George Washington speaks of Europe, one can extend the analogy to the Middle East or Far East.

Washington continues:

“It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.”

Pre 9’11 back in 1776, when America was a whisper in comparison to Imperial Britain, Washington led the troops not only against the Red Coats but against Tory Loyalists in America, who supported the British crown. The Father of Our Country displayed courage in the face of overwhelming odds and stood for a Constitution, a Constitution sanctified by blood and  the right to be safe in one’s home from the King’s troops: see 4th, 5th, and 14th amendments, amendments discarded today by America’s “outlaw” lawmakers in the senate and house, not to mention the tribune of the people in the White House.

Here’s Scheer on whistle blowers.

“Yes, Snowden has admitted that he violated the terms of his employment at Booz Allen Hamilton, which has the power to grant security clearances as well as profiting mightily from spying on the American taxpayers who pay to be spied on without ever being told that is where their tax dollars are going. Snowden violated the law in the same way that Daniel Ellsberg did when, as a RAND Corporation employee, he leaked the damning Pentagon Papers study of the Vietnam War that the taxpayers had paid for but were not allowed to read.

“In both instances, violating a government order was mandated by the principle that the United States trumpeted before the world in the Nuremberg war crime trials of German officers and officials. As Principle IV of what came to be known as the Nuremberg Code states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him (my bold)”

“That is a heavy obligation, and the question we should be asking is not why do folks like Ellsberg, Snowden and Bradley Manning do the right thing, but rather why aren’t we bringing charges against the many others with access to such damning data of government malfeasance who remain silent?”

When governments are corrupt they pursue the whistle blowers or set loose the vigilantes against the protesters, even as the Mayor has done in Taos–turning a blind eye to thugs who would steal from the sign man. It’s a sign of the times.