Last week, the “House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence” (talk about an oxymoron!) proved yet again that though its members live in the most fragile of glass houses, they throw stones with gusto. These mass murderers, thieves and congenital liars slandered Edward Snowden as a “criminal” as well as a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” with a “pattern of intentional lying.” If that doesn’t describe Our Rulers rather than their nemesis to the proverbial T, I’ll vote for Hitlary this November.
We all know why the Feds viciously hate poor Ed: he outsmarted, outwitted, and shamed them before the world. A lone, principled, 29-year-old geek revealed beyond a shadow of any doubt DC’s criminality, despotism, double-dealing, hypocrisy, and unspeakable arrogance. It’s as though the six-year-old kid next door not only caught you in flagrante with his five-year-old sister but filmed your predation so quietly you never suspected. Then, with simple brilliance, he posted his video to Facebook. (Yeah, I know: the analogy doesn’t hold since you’d be doing serious time while not a single federal sociopath suffered so much as a slap on the wrist.)
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Predictably, then, the Committee released its smear a mere two days before Oliver Stone’s “biopic” of Heroic Ed debuted at theaters. Even more predictably, most of Our Rulers’ hit-job, which they dignified as “an investigative report” and “the result of a two-year inquiry,” is “classified,” i.e., withheld from us chumps who paid for it.
Why? Where else but the State does such perversity reign? “Hello, Bankster? I want 3 trillion dollars but I’m not saying for what.” “Yeah, Boss, I’ll work for you, but it’s a secret, OK? Just give me my paycheck without knowing what I did.” “Honey? You got a spare billion? Nope, I won’t say why I need it. You should trust me.”
Only lunatics give or lend money—and stunning amounts of it, too—under such circumstances. Yet the Feds for decades have cloaked the atrocities they commit on our dime in deepest darkness.
Even an “investigative report” as silly, false and petty as the committees is reserved for “members of the House of Representatives”; they alone may peruse its 36 pages and 230 footnotes. We peasants must content ourselves with “an unclassified executive summary” of this trash. I daresay said “summary” contains every juvenile insult launched at Ed. Nice try, but their target probably isn’t too worried: in America’s celebrity-obsessed, “I-saw-it-in-a-movie,-so-it-must-be-true” popular culture, a dry précis in Congressional doublespeak will never even come close to trumping Hollywood’s hagiography.
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Meanwhile, the Committee’s reasoning about Heroic Ed and our reaction to him shows how out-of-touch and absurd its tyrants are. They seem to think that we, too, will hate our benefactor if we realize that he “stole…documents…pertain[ing]” to “national security,” not just to the NSA’s trashing of our privacy: “Mr. Snowden stole 1.5 million classified documents from National Security Agency networks. The vast majority of the documents had nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests, but instead pertain to the military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s enemies.”
To be fair, the Committee—and the rest of the central government—aren’t alone in this supposition. Many of Leviathan’s lovers, especially “conservative” ones, claim to despise our hero because he disclosed “national security secrets.” Even the Washington Post, which not only published Snowden’s revelations but won Pulitzers for doing so, now condemns him in one of the most craven, staggeringly hypocritical betrayals in journalism (be sure to catch the readers’ comments on this editorial. They’ll renew your faith in your fellow man).
Yet Ed’s exposure of “national security secrets” should endear him to us even more.
First, search the Constitution over, but nowhere does it authorize the Feds to create or keep secrets from the peons footing the bills. If we’re paying for it, we have an inviolable right to know.
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Furthermore, given DC’s penchant for designating everything from “airport Screening Management SOPs” (translated from the Jargon, that’s “the TSA’s gate-rape”) to the BATF’s control of our guns as “sensitive security information,” most of what the government does either to us or in our name remains obscure. How, then, can the citizenry inform itself as a Constitutional republic requires?
Second, the secrets of which the Amerikan Empire is inordinately fond are without exception horrifically evil: experiments in mind-control; barbaric medical “research” on unwitting patients; “black sites” and torture; assassinations, both at home and overseas; false-flag attacks, again both at home and overseas; etc., ad infinitum.
“National security” is a handy cover for such wickedness and skullduggery. It implies that the “secrets” protect us, that if Al Qaeda or the Chinese discovered them, they’d immediately exploit them to attack the ol’ Homeland. In reality, “national security secrets” have nothing to do with protecting us and everything to do with advancing government’s interests and those of its cronies at our expense; no wonder, then, that the Feds dub such assaults on the Constitution, liberty and us as the NSA’s PRISM a “national security secret.” We should never permit government at any level, local, state, or federal, to hide even the smallest of its details or proceedings.
“Even when we’re actively at war?” you minarchists, libertarians and conservatives out there are protesting. Especially then! Think of all the unjust, unconstitutional conflicts we’d have avoided by prohibiting bureaucrats and politicians from suppressing any of their machinations. For starters, if Franklin Roosevelt’s administration hadn’t clandestinely manipulated the country from its pacifism, Pearl Harbor’s nearly 2500 American casualties might have survived, let alone the additional 416,800 Americans sacrificed on Word War II’s battlefields. Ditto for the “military actions” in Korea, Vietnam, and so many other killing fields.
The only just war—and, by happy coincidence, the only sort most taxpayers are willing to fight—is defensive. A government whose people refuse to countenance its secrecy cannot embroil them in offensive wars of conquest.
Ergo, we owe Heroic Ed another huge debt of gratitude. May he and a multitude of patriots continue leaking each and every one of Leviathan’s “national security secrets.”
