James Rosen

It seems my friend Dan at Pruning Shears and I are having a disagreement. I don’t think we’re actually as far apart on the government surveillance of the media as he does. I think I made rather clear in my earlier post on James Rosen and also on the AP records grab that I don’t condone secret government surveillance on the media — or anyone. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that the government conducted these investigations illegally. The laws that make it possible have been creeping into our judicial system long before the Obama administration arrived. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that Rosen isn’t being charged with a crime regardless of the dicey allegations made by the government to get its authorization for his records.

Booman and I differ on that point. I don’t consider Rosen a criminal. I think he’s an irresponsible journalist. Rosen’s email to his source made clear his main interest was in scooping his competitors, not in changing any policy. However, his piece was written in a way that revealed our intelligence operation. If he had simply done the usual anon source says N. Korea will blah, blah blah… without revealing we had an inside source in N. Korea and had lost track of their missiles, I wouldn’t have seen it as damaging.

While Dan Ellsberg would probably disagree, I don’t see any comparison between the Pentagon Papers and what Rosen did. The Pentagon Papers revealed serious government misconduct. Our government lied to the people and to Congress. Big lies that resulted in tens of thousands of lost lives. That was whistleblowing in the service of public interest. I’m wondering what government wrongdoing Dan sees as having been revealed by Rosen.

I don’t suggest we blindly accept every government claim of acting in the interest of national security while they abridge our civil rights. We need to look no further than the odious NSLs the Bush administration was so fond of to see the danger in that. But neither do I trust the motives of our present day media so much that I’m willing to unequivocally defend them. Surely Jon Karl and his anon source who provided altered emails to perpetrate a false GOP narrative would suggest our skepticism should go both ways. What good is a free media if they lie to us too, or jeopardize our intelligence assets, simply to drive traffic? As far I’m concerned neither secret surveillance nor irresponsible journalism should be defended. We deserve better from both sides.

Sometimes it seems like we aren’t accomplishing anything, progressive websites don’t have very many readers, Republicans ridicule us, Democrats ignore us, and tens of millions of Americans don’t even know we exist. The following words reflect how many of us feel . . .

It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out.

I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions.

Many of us feel this way, but those words weren’t written recently by a progressive diarist, they were written by this diarist . . .

Like so many of us, Anne Frank had doubts and fears, she felt the weight of despair and disillusionment and depression, but she didn’t give up, she didn’t let the darkness overwhelm her, she knew where she wanted to be and let her words take her there, she let her words take all of us there, she kept writing . . .

I still express my ideals because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. When I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come out right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how much you can love. What you can accomplish. And what your potential is.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.

Imprisoned in a slave labor camp, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote every day on scraps of paper and hid them away so they wouldn’t be confiscated by the guards and vanish forever. He didn’t know if he would ever be released, he didn’t know if anyone would ever read his words, but he was determined to bear witness to the inhuman cruelty tens of millions of people were being subjected to, he became their voice and the world heard them.

The words Aleksandr wrote on those scraps of paper became The GuLag Archipelago, they became One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, millions of people ultimately read his words.

Anne didn’t know if anyone would ever read her words, Aleksandr didn’t know if anyone would ever read his words, but they wrote them anyway, they resisted injustice because resisting injustice matters, it has always mattered, it always will matter.

Your resistance matters, FDL matters, MyFDL matters, what we’re doing here matters. The value of our words cannot be measured by Site Meter statistics, the Truth has timeless value. Affirm it, never let it be overwhelmed by the darkness of deceit, don’t ever stop telling it.

Keep the faith. Write what your heart tells you to write. Let your words take you where your heart wants to go.

I just submitted this petition to the White House niche, We the People:

We petition the Obama Administration to Invite Medea Benjamin to the White House for a beer.

On May 23, 2013, President Obama gave an important address at the National Defense University. Near the end, indefatigable peace activist, Medea Benjamin, pled with the President to consider important issues he had not addressed directly in his speech. The President stated, “The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to.”

We the undersigned believe the same. We encourage President Obama to invite Ms. Benjamin to the White House for a beer or two, so that he may redeem his pledge.

It needs 150 signatures before it goes up on their front page.

For anyone unfamiliar with the subject, here are two excerpts from the May 24th edition of Democracy Now:

The relevant parts of Obama’s speech: