As evidence mounts, it’s getting harder to defend Edward Snowden

[The Traveler]

9. The flawed premise

The flawed premise of this sort of argument is that getting Al Qaeda or other elements hostile to the US is the top priority of the US military and intelligence apparatus. It is not. Upholding and defending the Constitution is the specifically defined mandate of the US military.

In the case of the US surveillance apparatus we now know, in large part due to Mr. Snowden, that ultimate mandate has been subordinated (and indeed violated) in support of other tasking. The tasking itself ("get Al Qaeda", for example) is of course valid and within Constitutional scope. At least some of the methods employed evidently are not.

States have legitimate secrets, and there is no doubt that some legitimate secrets have been compromised in the course of these disclosures. That is the inevitable cost of revealing over reach by the intelligence community. One would think the intelligence community would at long last learn that lesson, and seek to remain with the ample scope of action allowed by the Constitution. Their insistence on doing otherwise gives reasonable persons grounds for questioning their actual motives and objectives.

Trav