Recent revelations regarding the excesses of the NSA and its gratuitous spying on our own allies, such as tapping German chancellor Angela Merkel's personal cell phone, proves Snowden was right! (What could we have learned about global terrorists from that phone tap? ) The NSA under Gen. Alexander ( the man who began his career hoovering up war data in US-occupied Iraq, who carried those very same procedures and polices home to the USA , and one who it has been recently revealed spent tens of millions of tax dollars creating a goldfinger-like Star Wars fantasy "spy command center" at NSA headquarters in Washington) is obviously out of control. Let's bring that young man Snowden back from Russia and award him with a whistleblower's medal.
We are a great nation, which on one level leads the world because of our immense wealth, and military power. But on another, our world stature comes from our moral authority and the trust other nations have in our system of justice and the adherence of our leaders to legal standards. That trust is also derived from our our past behaviors in which we worked to foster a world in which all nations including the USA exists within a frame work of mutually acceptable laws. We are at our core a nation of laws...our own and those we have help foster internationally. Too often in recent decades, since 9-11 and the Bush-Cheney debacle, we have become the world's law breaker, engaging in illegal invasions, occupations, wars, torture, renditions, extrajudicial assassinations, and setting up off-shore gulags, like Guantanamo....in short a "do what we say and not what we do" nation---all to our own detriment and to the detriment of our businesses and to that of the world as a whole.
It's time for President Obama, who is down deep a decent, intelligent man and a leader who respects the law, to rise up and assert his authority. Firing General Alexander might be a good first bold step. That should be followed by retreating from the undeserved attempts at arresting and punishing Mr. Snowden, without whom all of this mess would still be festering under the national carpet.
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