Charles Pierce re: CIA-They plot, scheme, lie & bungle & anoint themselves with oil in the aftermath
THE SNOWDEN EFFECT, CONTINUED: A COLLOQUY
By Charles P. Pierce on May 14, 2014
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I grow impatient with the argument that all -- or even most, or even a great deal -- of what Edward Snowden released from his time at the NSA is no big deal because we all knew it before, or because we all should have known it anyway. This is not entirely because I am tempted to use the facile argument that, if it's no big deal, and if we all knew it anyway, then why can't they just immunize Snowden and let him come home? Maybe I'm naive, or stupid, but it's also because the intelligence community -- and the all-too-human, but curiously error-prone heroes therein -- have spent most of my 60 years on this planet proving to be utterly unworthy of my trust, and utterly unworthy of the trust of a democratic society. They lie. They violate their mandates, over and over again. They have developed within themselves a complete disregard for constitutional safeguards because of a messianic sense of mission that insulates them from the rule of law. All of these dangerous elements, of course, were intensified in the wake of the atrocities committed on September 11, 2001.
They plot and they scheme and they bungle, after which somebody else's kid pays the price, and they anoint themselves with oil in the aftermath, and then they go on to the next big idea. They do not believe they are subject to the same rules as anyone else in the government, let alone the rest of their fellow citizens. They've managed to enlist most of the people in Congress who are supposed to be conducting oversight of their activities in giving them the benefits of hundreds of doubts of which they have proven themselves completely unworthy. The only weapon an informed citizenry has is information. Given the choice between knowing something and not knowing something, I choose to know it, whoever the messenger is, because the people who have that information forfeited my trust somewhere between the Bay of Pigs and the white paper on Iraqi weapons. That does not make me free, but it gives me the wherewithal to be free.
(And it's not like I'm making a new argument. John Kennedy wanted to shatter the CIA "into a million pieces" after they gamed him on the invasion of Cuba in 1962. The Moynihan Commission on government secrecy was in 1997, and the Church committee more than 20 years before that. There is no compelling reason to trust the targets of those various enterprises that they have made any substantial changes in the way they do business.)
Governments need their secrets. This is undeniable. But for too long, there has been a presumption in the Congress and in the country that anything the government decides to keep secret is something it needs to keep secret. If we're going to be ruled by secrets, we should have a public debate on that. That's a pendulum that has to swing back, sooner or later. Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald -- and Bart Gellman, and the New York Times, and the Guardian -- gave it a shove. That's all I'm saying.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/snowden-effect-051414
