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Health & Fitness

Public Debate?

The media is having a party with the story of the secret-leaking former Booz Allen employee, Edward Snowden. That's because the media has a center-stage position in the story. Snowden decided to take his story to a British news outlet, The Guardian, then hole-up in Hong Kong, a former British colony, to watch the sparks fly around Washington. Why didn't he take his story to the Post in Washington? Or the New York Times? Well, whistleblowers work best with illegal actions by companies, or something that is dangerous to the public. Cigarette manufacturers putting chemicals in cigarettes to make you smoke more, dumping toxic waste in a canal near where children might play, or a wiretap that actually destroys another's reputation. Stuff like that. Edward Snowden wasn't sure he qualified as a whistleblower. I mean, if you have a matter-of-conscience that you simply must divulge, you should go directly to the public in question, Americans, or confront the violator, the U.S. government. You need to wear the uniform of the crusader in order to be recognized, trusted, believed, and followed by others. Makes sense? Mr. Snowden, in another time, would be called a traitor, not a hero. He was hired and trained by our government and entrusted with procedures and methods and the confidentiality of gathering intelligence for our government. Incidentally, none of this intelligence gathering was, or is, illegal. Most of it is a prismatic structure to help our government intercept possible threats from internal or external forces: Something we let slip through the cracks in the Boston Marathon bombings, the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center, probably September 11, and certainly Pearl Harbor. CNN, msnbc, and nearly all of the Sunday talk shows provide us with carping politicians playing it safe and meekly giving lip-service to the leaker, Snowden, saying he has at least opened the possibility for public debate. This is ridiculous. You cannot have public debate when classified matters-of-state are at stake. You cannot compromise a country's ability to conduct intelligence gathering and surveillance, security, covert operations, defense systems development, military operations, etc. with public debate. Leadership must lead, and in some instances, all of us must follow. Our ability to find and cultivate good, strong, trusted leaders will be severely crippled by public disclosure and debate about everything. It isn't feasible. It isn't smart. Edward Snowden's 29-year-old idealism about what his government does to secure the homeland is misplaced. It's naive, and he has laid bare many thousands in the community of intelligence gathering to a dangerous vulnerability. He knew this. Why else would he run-off to Hong Kong, to The Guardian, if what he had to divulge would not be injurious to the very network of people who depended upon him? We elect our officials. Our elected government officials must conduct security programs and secret systems to protect the greatest number of Americans possible. This is what we have elected them to do. If they are not breaking the law, moral or civil, we must allow these programs to produce positive results. We cannot take a vote on them, expose them, dilute them. When these systems fail, there is a public outcry. Four people are dead in the Boston area who could be alive today, and we, the public, might never have known how. The pressure-cooker bombs might never have gone off. If only someone had decided that two immigrants, two Chechen brothers, and their travel and communications deserved a closer look, things today might be very different for hundreds of innocent people around Boston. And no one asked me to vote on it.

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