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Obama has said—and I’ll come back to this—that Snowden should have made his revelations by name.
He said that Snowden had not done it the right way, that he created more heat than light. In reality, no
aspect of his speech on January 17 would have been a matter of public debate or public discussion
without Snowden having done what he did in exactly the manner he did it. It is absurd to say that there
were other methods to bring this out.
As a matter of fact, four former high-ranking NSA officials who I met personally, whose average
service was thirty years, were attacked for revealing information in an inappropriate manner when in fact
they had revealed the information in exactly the way that Obama suggested Snowden should have. Each
one of them had revealed information to the inspector general of the NSA. They didn’t give testimony to
Congress because no committee has ever to this day called in any of these senior people. No committee
has answered their request to testify in front of them under oath. But they did speak to staff and for that
each one of them was subject to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raids and the taking of all their
computers—most of which have not been returned. In one case, William Binney, a thirty-year veteran of
the NSA, heard some commotion in his house while he was in the shower. He opened the shower curtain
to find an FBI agent pointing a gun at his head. He was allowed to come out and dry himself off, and then
they interrogated him for eight hours.
In December 2005, an article was published in the New York Times in which they reported that
there had been warrantless wiretaps happening under the NSA since 2001. The FBI suspected that Binney
was the leak, since he had previously complained internally about the NSA’s unconstitutional behavior.
the New York Times got the Pulitzer Prize, which they deserved, even though they brought it out in
December 2005, having had this story fully ready to go since October 2004—just before the election. If
that story had been published in 2004, it would have revealed that then-president George W. Bush had
said to the public face-to-face on television that there was no listening to Americans without a warrant
from a court. This was a flat lie, which Bush knew. If the revelation that the president had been lying to
that extent about such a crucial constitutional matter had been made when it was first known, it could
have easily swayed enough votes to move that very close election. So I do think we have to thank the New
York Times for their part in giving us another four years of George W. Bush. You all will have different
opinions on that. The story was finally revealed because James Risen was about to reveal it in a book, and
they didn’t want to be scooped by their own reporter, so they finally broke the story in 2005. Bill Keller,
the editor for the New York Times at that time, should have been fired or “impeached” for holding back
that information from the public for a year.
However, there were no documents revealed at the time the article was published. The
administration officials totally stonewalled Congress and refused to answer any significant questions,
such as how many Americans were being listened to and whether or not they were opening citizens’ mail.
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