Snowden, Manning & the Entrapment of Oaths

There was a senator the 1950s who gained inexplicable power and gave his name to what is called “the McCarthy era”. It was a period of “red scare” during which legions in government, universities and unions were accused of being “communist sympathizers” by Wisconsin’s Joseph McCarthy and his doctored “evidence” and by the sinisterly-named House Un-American Activities Committee. Careers were destroyed, thousands in industry lost their jobs at the hands of employers fearful of challenging the senator. There were purges at universities for the first time in our history. And in the entertainment industry, where the one accused the other, no one dared hire anyone placed on the resulting “blacklist”. The cloud of fear was so pervasive that when the journalist Edward R. Murrow dared to air a television exposé of McCarthy, it was thought an extraordinary, career-risking act of courage.

At the root of this sorry moment of our history was the “loyalty oath”. That was not a McCarthy invention and even now is a lingering requirement in some states for government employment, but its imposition was never so widespread as under “McCarthyism”. In the induced paranoia of that time, one was made to swear allegiance to the country and to never having had ties to communist-thinking groups.

With the trial of Bradley Manning and the NSA leaks of Edward Snowden, “oath” again was at center stage. Apart from their being accused and convicted of crimes, they are guilty of betraying the oath they swore when entering upon military and government service. Among the many saying this were Senator John McCain (R-Az) who asked, “Do we have to find these things out from Mr. Snowden, who violated his oath to the United States of America?”. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, “I think it’s important to note that individuals who take an oath to protect classified information are bound by it”. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca) said, “He took an oath — that oath is important. He violated the oath...It’s an act of treason in my view”.

An oath is entirely one-sided. You have no say in the language used, no freedom to amend it with your own contractual terms. And most important, you have no knowledge of what awaits on the other side. You are made blindly to swear to keep the secrets of the organization whose portals are about to be opened to you before you have any notion of the secrets you have just sworn to keep.

Oaths can be seen therefore as quite sinister, potentially used to lock in wrongdoing from private view — and with the threat of prosecution if the wrongdoing is classified, as is most everything by this government (which classifies 1.83 million documents every week; Manning's release in excess of 700,000 communications was less than 1% of what the government classified in 2010).

Critics of leaking have often spoken of Snowden and Manning “acting on their notion of what the law is”. That lofty view assumes no one in the public sphere is capable of knowing the law. But we certainly do know enough law to realize when it clearly has been broken or when the government has violated the Constitution.

Manning in Iraq “started to question the morality of what we were doing” when he became aware of the military killing innocent civilians and burying the truth wrapped in the all-purpose national security winding sheet. He exposed the “collateral murder” video taken from an Apache gunship that killed civilians and two Reuters correspondents. He knew of torture by Iraqi authorities while the U.S. military looked the other way. And he exposed much more. “We have forgotten our humanity”, he wrote.

As for Snowden, one oath he took was of the blindfold sort described above. In contrast, the other was a pledge to uphold the Constitution — a text available to all. It didn't take any more than his high school education to tell him that Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permitted examining “tangible things” including “books, records, papers, documents, and other items”, did not permit the wholesale violation of the Constitution’s 4th Amendment by capturing and storing for years the phone records of everyone in the United States. Yet we have present and former "leaders" such as Feinstein, House Speaker Boehner and former Vice President Cheney calling Snowden a "traitor" — as well as Obama, who called Cheney's pronouncement "music to my ears" — for honoring that oath by exposing NSA's violations of the Constitution.

What further proof could there be of the rectitude of Snowden's courageous act than the cascade that has since poured forth to amplify what he had first reported: the revelations of NSA's spying on Internet, e-mail and cellphone traffic of Americans and heads of foreign governments; the exposure of a Congress that doesn't even know that it isn't doing its oversight job; and a President shown to be naïvely clueless — repeatedly contradicted in his assurances that the government is not doing what the next news cycle reports it is doing?

Those who believe that one must never violate an oath effectively swear to leave their own conscience and ethics at the door. That says we should abdicate any higher morality than some oath of secrecy an institution or government body has devised. It says that the oath is paramount and is an agreement that the organization one has joined should be allowed to continue whatever illegalities that may be uncovered. Just what is the virtue of keeping an oath if you find that the organization to which you have sworn fealty has betrayed you by acting illegally?

Manning acted because the military was violating the laws of war. Snowden knew the NSA had broken its vow to uphold the Constitution. If a government succeeds in indoctrinating or intimidating its citizenry that obedience to oaths and pledges is inviolate, it knows it is secure to trample laws in perpetual secrecy. It will have cynically hoodwinked us into our spinning a web in which we trap ourselves. The truth would never come out.