Attitudes Shift Against Snowden; Fewer than Half Say NSA is Unjustified

[thucythucy]

100. "Our government in the last decade

has engaged in criminal abuses of power."

So did the government under JFK, LBJ, and most especially Richard Nixon.

As in: contracting with the mafia to assassinate foreign leaders (Castro)
supporting clandestine paramilitary organizations to overthrow foreign governments (Bay of Pigs)
outright military invasion to suppress popular uprisings (Dominican Republic)
destabilizing foreign politics and politicians (Guyana, Congo)
plotting with military leaders to overthrow and assassinate corrupt puppets we no longer supported (South Vietnam, Diem)
plotting with military leaders to overthrow and assassinate democratically elected governments (Chile, Allende),
illegal bombing of Cambodia
illegal invasions of Cambodia, Laos
assassinations of political opponents of the RSV (Operation Phoenix)...
and on and on and on...

As for domestic abuses:
COINTELPRO--FBI program to infiltrate and disrupt antiwar activism
RNC efforts to disrupt Democratic primaries (re: Muskie campaign, 1972)
illegal wiretaps on Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and hundreds if not thousands of other civil rights and antiwar activists
blackmail by the FBI against Martin Luther King, threatening to release illegal recordings of his sex life
harassment and killing of Black Panther Party members and leaders
break-ins to the Democratic National HQ to place illegal wiretaps (no warrants)
break-ins to Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to dig up dirt on him (no warrants)
operation of a secret White House extra-legal group of crazies to harass leakers (White House "plumbers&quot
use of the IRS against Nixon's political enemies
use of the IRS to blackmail George Wallace into abandoning his third party ticket in 1972
and on and on and on...

I have no idea how Snowden would be treated today, but to imply that the governments of the '60s and early '70s were somehow not engaging in outrageous and highly illegal abuses of power "is delusional." It is revisionist history, nostalgia for an era that never was.

It also minimizes what Ellsberg went through, and the tremendous courage he showed going public, and staying and fighting the massed power of the highly corrupt Nixon administration, which included a Justice Dept. so out of control the Attorney General himself was eventually tried and convicted of abuses of power.