With President Obama set to call on Congress to overhaul to NSA’s surveillance programs, it’s important to understand what he’s up against. He is not messing with people you want to be messing with.
Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30 year-old leaker.
“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”
That violent hostility lies just beneath the surface of the domestic debate over NSA spying is still ongoing. Some members of Congress have hailed Snowden as a whistleblower, the New York Times has called for clemency, and pundits regularly defend his actions on Sunday talk shows. In intelligence community circles, Snowden is considered a nothing short of a traitor in wartime.
“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas Intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”One Army intelligence officer even offered BuzzFeed a chillingly detailed fantasy.
“I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”
We’d like to think that our intelligence services are filled with do-good patriots who only want to keep America safe, and that is for the most part true. But their ranks include no shortage of what you and I would consider homicidal maniacs. Cross them in the wrong way, and even if you are an American, some will want you dead.
We have no problem understanding this phenomenon in Russia or Syria or Egypt, that intelligence services have the final say on who rules the country, but we’ve been fed on myths about the virtues of American democracy that make it hard for us to understand (pdf) how difficult and risky it can be for an American president to rein in the intelligence services.
You may have your own theories about the JFK assassination, but one thing is clear. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy said that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” He began that process, and he didn’t get to stand for reelection. Whether a faction within the CIA played or role in his death or not is still hotly disputed, but no president can feel comfortable that they can cross the intelligence community with impunity.
I suspect that most progressives will feel that the president’s proposals don’t go far enough. I anticipate that I will feel that way, myself. I am also a realist. No one wants to be put on the same list as Edward Snowden.
