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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 7/23/13

MONDAY MORNING SKEPTIC: Is Snowden The Criminal -- Or Is It The System?

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Establishment urges: Focus on Edward Snowden's girlfriend -- Please!

The late, great scientist and author Carl Sagan once observed that...

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

Thus, after the highly disturbing revelations from Edward Snowden about the extent to which our government is totally out of control, monitoring us like right out of Orwell's 1984, we get...an effort to shift news coverage away from the outrages themselves, to the messengers who warn us.

For example, watch ABC's George Stephanopoulos spend almost his entire time in this interview with Julian Assange and Jesselyn Radack trying to demonize whistleblowers -- rather than focus on the things they're blowing whistles about.

As Stephanopoulos might have said, who cares about tyranny when you have a great (and, frankly, easy) job, earn around $10 million dollars a year and live in a $6 million apartment? What sorts of complaints could you possibly have that would risk bringing the iron fist down on you?

Notwithstanding this, GS gets credit for even allowing these alternative voices to be heard. The rest of the media is generally worse. They're apparently happy to go to their creator having generated decades of inconsequential blather -- rather than do the right thing and make the powerful (and their own bosses) uncomfortable.

Who's the Traitor?

Around the mediascape, we hear a lot of talk about Edward Snowden being a criminal, and needing to return home to face "justice." But what about the possibility that people like Snowden actually are the forces of justice, while the criminals are the ones in charge of the system?

Not criminals, you say? How about creating or exacerbating "security threats," then cruelly panicking the public into approving increasingly intrusive measures to bolster security? Isn't that something like mobsters who throw a brick through a store window, then offer to provide "protection" against future brick-throwers?

No one wants to be at ground zero for another 9/11. But if we are to believe that those who expose the mega-surveillance system are themselves creating harm, then why not ask the government to document just how all this spying on us is making us safer?

If we are to accept the declamations of various agitated senators and congressmembers about how they're effectively monitoring the monitors and everything was just fine until Snowden came along -- well, how about asking them to prove to us exactly how effective they have been at keeping the keepers of the secrets in line?

What about asking the government to tote up all the great successes from spying on Americans, but first to subtract all those "terrorism cases" where participants were FBI informants or CIA assets or had other connections to the state? What about asking them to show us, plain and simple, an accounting of what the civil-liberties sacrifices and billions upon billions spent on "security" get us.

See GRAPHIC info here.

Read the rest of this article here.

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Author, investigative journalist, editor-in-chief at WhoWhatWhy.com

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