By Dave Lindorff
Two Men without a country: the fictional Nolan and the real Snowden (
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In Edward Everett Hale's short story "The Man Without a Country," US Army Lt. Philip Nolan, following a court-martial, is exiled from his country, his citizenship snatched away, leaving him doomed to sail the seven seas confined to a Navy vessel, unable to make any country his home. His crime: being seduced by a treacherous leader to betray the US of A, the country of his birth.
Edward Snowden, 30, child of a career Coast Guard officer who signed up in the military after 9-11 to defend his country, later going to work at the CIA and the National Security Agency, was also seduced by treacherous leaders -- first President George Bush, and then President Barack Obama--into participating in actions that betrayed his country, actions that breached the First and Fourth Amendments of the US Constitution that as a military officer and later a CIA and NSA employee he had sworn to "uphold and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.'
At first glance, we have a case of reality mimicking fiction here, with two once promising young military men being led astray and ending up adrift in a pathetic exile. But in truth, fiction and reality diverge greatly from one another at that point.
Lt. Nolan turns on his homeland and then spends the rest of his misearble life -- 55 years -- regretting his youthful action.
Snowden, however, gradually woke up to realize he had been deceived by the vile propaganda of a fake "War" on terror, and, in his position at the NSA, came to see that the two men who had been president during his young and impressionable adulthood were shredding the US Constitution, spreading fear among the public in order to be handed the power and the money to build an unimaginably complex and omnipresent secret surveillance program in service to a national security state that was destroying anything to do with real democracy in the United States.
Where some good people, confronted with this awareness, would have quit their job and refused to participate in this treachery, to Snowden, that was not enough. A true patriot, he felt he had a duty to try to put a stop to the destruction and betrayal of his country, and so he took a job with a company, Booz Allen Hamilton, which was working for the NSA in a private contracting capacity, and used his position there to explore and document exactly how pervasive and invasive the NSA's spying program was...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/
