The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. – The Fourth Amendment
Where is Edward Snowden? Who is Edward Snowden? Traitor? Hero? ?Every day there seems to be a new story about him or his whereabouts. There have been countless pages devoted to “Is he a hero or a traitor?” ?Personally I am in the Team Edward category. But what I don’t understand is how the majority of the articles written about him tend to make him “the story.” ?He is not.
?Before that unjust Tribunal, there was little or no order of procedure, ensuring to any accused person any reasonable hearing. There could have been no such Revolution, if all laws, forms, and ceremonies?had not first?been so monstrously abused, that the suicidal vengeance of the Revolution was to scatter them all to the winds. ? – A Tale Of ?Two Cities
The story we need to be talking about is the rise of a secret government within our own. John Tirman has a piece on The Huffington Post that lays out an argument showing the rise of this secret government since 9-11. ?He is wrong. ?Where he is wrong is when he says, “for a dozen years we have??the growth of a parallel state that operates by its own rules, in secret, and in ways?that would be considered unconstitutional.” And while I agree with his conclusion I disagree with his history. This Stazi government or ours has been growing since the dawn of the FBI. From the beginning this Federal agency had programs where they secretly and without warrants would copy the outside information (sender/receiver/ where sent from) on US Mail. When possible they would also copy contents without a warrant. Getting a warrant was always a last resort. ?Starting in the thirties the FBI began copying all the outside information on every piece of mail it could get access to. Usually without a warrant. ?When it could, they would also copy the content of mail without a warrant. When telegrams became widely available after 1844 the government began collecting those. That is where the word “wiretap” originated. It is not an accident that Edgar J Hoover was a trained librarian. The FBI needed organizational specialists to keep track of all the information they were collecting and ?collect they did.
People today either don’t know or don’t remember the domestic terrorism that Mr. Hoover engaged in. At one point the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide. He did not. He died anyway. Much like both Kennedy brothers and Malcolm X. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe that once the government decided to ignore the 4th Amendment everything else becomes a slippery slope. Voltaire was right: the person who can make you believe absurdities (that you are protecting America by violating the rights of Americans, or killing Americans, or imprisoning people for free speech) can make you commit atrocities.
Everyone remembers Carl Bernstein because of Watergate. However his article in Rolling Stone about the ties between the CIA and the press is one of the most disturbing reads a free citizen will ever have. ?If half of what he says is true we have been propagandized as a country at a level that would give Orwell nightmares. Common sense tells us that the truth is probably twice as worse as what information was allowed out.
Watching the news, you occasionally hear someone mention the Church Commission from the 1970’s. The name was actually the?United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.?Yes it’s a mouthful and Church Commission is easier to print and say but it also makes it easier to ignore what the committee was founded for. Much like it’s easy to forget what ?Snowden is telling us rather than the “Where’s Waldo” drama the nightly news is treating us to. ?The committee found that our nation’s leading newspapers, broadcasters, magazines, and radio stations had CIA operatives on the payroll writing stories the way the CIA wanted them written.
So ?history is a lie.
Our collective memory has been twisted by misinformation and obfuscation and our “experiment in Liberty” is dead.
If Edward Snowden makes the news tonight, don’t listen to the story. It isn’t important. Think about the fact that he believes, as does Julian Assange, that the only thing keeping him alive is the documents he didn’t release. He has already told us and proven to us that the government collects our phone data, our emails, and everything it can get and store. How much worse can it be? That is the terrifying question.
A writer said that 9-11 represented the “end of history.” No. History hasn’t ended. It has simply not been told. Your history is a lie.
Watch Oliver’s Stone on the topic.
Edited/Published by: SB
