Senator Durbin took an oath, hundreds of thousands died [View all]

[Luminous Animal]

By Charles Davis
http://m.aljazeera.com/story/2013711112155573372

"Mr. Snowden broke the law," remarked Senator Dick Durbin, a liberal Democrat from President Obama’s home state of Illinois. "They told him, we will give you access to the most important and delicate classified information in America," he said. "You got to take an oath that you will never disclose it. We take the same oath, members of Congress. He broke his oath. He committed a crime. He needs to pay a price for it."

Loyalty can kill

On April 25, 2007, Durbin took to the Senate floor to reveal a shocking secret: As a member of the Intelligence Committee during the run-up to the war in Iraq, he knew the Bush administration was lying."

"I would read the headlines in the paper in the morning and watch the television newscasts and shake my head because, you see, just a few hundred feet away from here in a closed room, carefully guarded, the Intelligence Committee was meeting on a daily basis for top-secret briefings about the information we were receiving, and the information we had in the Intelligence Committee was not the same information being given to the American public," he said.

....

The thing is, the only thing that stopped Durbin from breaking his oath was not any law, but his own cowardice (Durbin later excused his behaviour by saying that he could have been kicked off the Intelligence Committee or been sent to the prison he wants Snowden housed in).