What IF? By Murray Polner “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot” President Obama said at a recent press conference, suggesting perhaps that the leaker should have taken the legal route and faced the threat of punishment, presumably like Thoreau, Gandhi and King. Aside from defining who is and isn’t a patriot, it’s a pleasant sentiment, echoing the three saints of civil disobedience and now by Thomas Friedman, the Times’ eternal sermonizer- in-residence who urged Snowden to come home and prove he is a whistleblower and not a “traitor,” ignoring for the moment his misinterpretation of the constitutional definition of treason as defined in Article 3 Section 3, which would not implicate Snowden. Quitting Putin’s authoritarian Russia and returning home to face the music “would mean,” Friedman warned, “risking a lengthy jail term, but also trusting the fair-mindedness of the American people, who, I believe, will not allow an authentic whistle-blower to be unfairly punished.” Tell that to eight whistle-blowers indicted by the Obama administration for allegedly violating the 1917 Espionage Act, a loathsome law enacted by a bigoted Wilson administration, which was designed to protect America from real and imagined Reds, IWW rebels, and infuriating iconoclasts who refused to be drafted for a war between European empires. Perhaps Friedman needs to take some time off from his perpetual global wanderings and schedule some interviews with our latest Espionage Act indictees Thomas Drake, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, James Hitselberger, Shami K. Leibowitz, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, and of course Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and hear how they view the “fair-mindedness of the American people.” Put another way, now that the Manning trial is coming to an end, and Snowden will probably not be coming home soon to confront all our leading thinkers and important people in Washington who have already convicted him, a question must be posed: What if a Manning-Snowden type had been around when Bush, Cheney and all their neocon propagandists and sycophantic pundits were shouting wolf about Saddam’s WMDs and instead revealed that what they were promoting was untrue? So who did the actual damage? Pfc. Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, or all those commanding, controlling and unaccountable liars who forced an Iraq War on us? Had such a blessed whistleblower existed then he or she might have saved tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqi lives. -