By Michael Krieger: Before I get started, I want to put my cards on the table. I don’t trust Republicans like Devin Nunes for a moment. He doesn’t care about the civil liberties of Americans, and it’s become clear to me the whole “release the memo” thing is largely a political stunt. I’m not claiming there isn’t anything important in there, but rather that they don’t have the best interests of the U.S. citizenry in mind. Nevertheless, I’m very much in favor of it being released for a variety of reasons.First, I want to offer a little advice. It’s always tempting to immediately take a side on whatever issue happens to be dominating the news cycle at any given moment, but this is typically a poor decision. One thing I’ve learned over the years is you should always wait at least a few days before coming to any sort of conclusion on most big stories being aggressively hyped by partisan pundits in the media.
From my seat, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are being dishonest about the memo, which makes perfect sense because the vast majority of politicians in Washington D.C. are corrupt liars who pretend to hate each other while consistently passing bipartisan legislation to abuse the American public. If that’s not obvious to you by now, I don’t know what it’ll take.
Devin Nunes and other Republicans in the House of Representatives have been attempting to portray their push to release the memo as some sort of civil liberties crusade. They claim it’ll expose the criminality of the deep state and how it abuses its unconstitutional surveillance powers. Perhaps it will, but that’s not at all what’s driving the effort.
Here’s the problem. The exact same people who are now complaining about FISA and intelligence agency abuse (which is certainly happening) just voted to give the U.S. government more surveillance power. If you think this sounds extremely shady, you’re absolutely right.
With that in mind, take a listen to what Judge Andrew Napolitano had to say about the matter during a recent appearance on Fox News.
All that said, I still want the memo released since I think some good could inadvertently emerge from it. Just because the GOP isn’t coming from an honest or decent place with this move, doesn’t mean it can’t result in a snowball effect which leads to serious and important revelations about how unaccountable intelligence agencies really operate.
What really got me thinking along these lines was a series of tweets by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden last evening. I found the following to be of particular interest.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) 1 February 2018
As whistleblowers have gone to prison, Ron Wyden has been playing this game for years where he hints, winks & coyly offers clues of what he claims is massive, serious, high-level surveillance abuses - as though it's a game of charades - but refuses to tell the public what it is. pic.twitter.com/a9wklwXNco— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) 1 February 2018
This is precisely the sort of pressure all of us should be putting on Congress.
As Julian Assange accurately noted last summer:
The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) 4 August 2017
Enough secrets, we deserve to know just how lawless our government is.
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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