What the heck has happened in America lately? (it’s not confined just to America, after all...)

Leaks and allegiances: 

The line between hero and traitor

by Sheila Liaugminas

Identifying the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ used to be a function of political alignment with the left or right back in the days of, oh, about a month or two ago. Then the leaks and scandals that had been building out of sight for months and years seemed to suddenly erupt. Practically all at once. Skipping past Benghazi, the IRS, the Justice Department and the initial NSA revelations, we’re now at a point where Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and Bradley Manning are being talked about in the same sentence with an odd sense of disorientation.

What the heck has happened in America lately?

That’s too difficult and tricky to answer, and it requires defining ‘lately’ and maybe even ‘happened’ and it’s not confined just to America, after all.
So, to reset. Bradley Manning was in the US military and smuggled secret national security documents to Julian Assange who posted them on WikiLeaks and has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for about a year, because public revelation of classified documents compromising national security is criminal.

Now, National Security Agency program details have been leaked by a contractor who believed they posed an abuse of power and a hazard to citizens’ privacy rights, and he has willingly identified himself through international media, accepted the consequences, and - though that action is illegal and therefore criminal – he is considered a hero by many people but a traitor by others. And this time, the lines have blurred, and both camps contain Democrats and Republicans, the left and the right, conservatives and liberals.

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Read more: www.mercatornet.com/