{"id":122741,"date":"2014-06-04T17:52:45","date_gmt":"2014-06-04T17:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=122741"},"modified":"2014-06-04T17:52:45","modified_gmt":"2014-06-04T17:52:45","slug":"forging-secret-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/forging-secret-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Forging a Secret Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emily Schwartz Greco and William A. Collins<\/em><\/p>\n

Edward Snowden is trying to set the record straight about what exactly he was doing before he blew the whistle on widespread government snooping.<\/p>\n

Back when he made headlines by sharing his revelations and\u00a0opting to stay stuck in Russia<\/a>\u00a0rather than serving time in a U.S. prison, most journalists described the 29-year-old computer jock as some kind of geeky peon engaged in government contracting work. He says he was higher up the national security food chain.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover overseas \u2013 pretending to work in a job that I\u2019m not \u2013 and even being assigned a name that was not mine,\u201d Snowden told NBC News in a recent interview.<\/p>\n

Secretary of State John Kerry<\/a>\u00a0prefers to label Snowden as a \u201ccoward\u201d and a \u201ctraitor.\u201d That leaves little doubt regarding the guy\u2019s fate if he were to follow Kerry\u2019s demand to \u201cman up\u201d and return to the United States.<\/p>\n

After all, consider what happened to Chelsea Manning. She\u2019s currently serving 35 years. Meanwhile, where\u2019s the prosecution of the helicopter crew she exposed on video? Theygunned down Iraqi civilians<\/a>\u00a0in 2007 without garnering attention over here. Thanks to Manning\u2019s actions, WikiLeaks brought the footage of that incident to light in 2010.<\/p>\n

John Kiriakou may lack Manning\u2019s fame, but the whistleblower\u2019s punishment for exposing wrongdoing in the ranks constitutes another good reason for Snowden to steer clear of his native country.<\/p>\n

The former CIA investigator began serving a 2.5-year sentence in February 2013. What did Kiriakou do? He identified to his superiors two fellow agents who had waterboarded prisoners. You can read what he\u2019s up to behind bars in\u00a0hand-written letters Firedoglake publishes<\/a>\u00a0on its website.<\/p>\n

Wouldn\u2019t it be nice to find out why\u00a0he<\/em>\u00a0landed behind bars instead of the\u00a0waterboarders<\/a>? Don\u2019t count on getting any answers soon. Those matters tend to be secret. And our government makes secrets classified information. Plus, any federal employee who knows anything about these things is deemed sensitive.<\/p>\n

These are important words. Anyone in a job defined as \u201cnational security sensitive\u201d can be fired without cause and without\u00a0protection of the Civil Service Act<\/a>. This punishment typically arises from reporting illegal government actions. And if one reports on \u201cclassified\u201d wrongdoings, one usually goes to jail.<\/p>\n

The more evil the act being reported, the longer the whistleblower\u2019s sentence.<\/p>\n

How can this be happening during Barack Obama\u2019s presidency? The former\u00a0professor of constitutional law<\/a>\u00a0promised a new era of open government during his 2008 campaign. He didn\u2019t deliver.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe administration\u2019s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I\u2019ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>\u2018s investigation of Watergate,\u201d Leonard Downie Jr. says. None of the veteran journalists he interviewed for a\u00a0Committee to Protect Journalists<\/a>\u00a0report on this secrecy can \u201cremember any precedent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Obama administration is also failing to keep its pledge to expedite\u00a0the declassification of old government secrets<\/a>. That backlog has grown by 33 million pages since 2010, theBoston Globe<\/em>\u00a0reports.<\/p>\n

Simply put, the White House is playing hardball to keep reporters from divulging anything embarrassing. It\u2019s also going overboard to avoid embarrassment through other means.<\/p>\n

Many prominent journalists complained about the corrosive impact of this culture in Downie\u2019s report, but it\u2019s impossible to know what this means in terms of news stories that aren\u2019t getting reported and the erosion of public confidence in both the government and the media.<\/p>\n

Government secrecy, even when it\u2019s invoked in the name of national security, poisons our democracy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of\u00a0OtherWords<\/a>, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies\u00a0@ESGreco<\/a>.\u00a0OtherWords<\/a>\u00a0columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut. OtherWords.org. Republished<\/a> with permission.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emily Schwartz Greco and William A. Collins Edward Snowden is trying to set the record straight about what exactly he was doing before he blew the whistle on widespread government snooping. Back when he made headlines by sharing his revelations and\u00a0opting to stay stuck in Russia\u00a0rather than serving time in a U.S. prison, most journalists […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1614],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-122741","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news","7":"category-surveillance-big-brother"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}