Dan Rather: NSA "Is Demolishing The Trust In The Government"
Dan Rather speaks with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about the role of the NSA in a free society.
DAN RATHER: As reporters we get paid not to be cynical, but to be skeptical and I am at least somewhat skeptical that this was all just ineptitude, the keystone cops, as you say. And I think the public at-large, certainly a large percentage of it, is also very skeptical. This is one of those situations where I think when you look at the Snowden case, you look at the manning scandal, and we’ll call it that, what's happening with NSA, for a lot of Americans this is demolishing the trust in the government. And we know in our society, a constitutional republic based on freedom and democracy that it's absolutely imperative for there to be a high degree of trust between the leadership and the led. These cases including this most recent information, the new information by the NSA leads more and more Americans to distrust their government. This is not healthy for us. And we immediate to slow down, step back and have an ongoing dialogue about what kind of country we want. Because deciding what our country has become in the post-9/11 era and what we want it to be in the future is one of the overriding questions of our society. We need to engage. A lot of people are on different sides of this.
With the Manning verdict, I think 50% see him as a hero and 50% as a traitor. We can't get locked into these positions. You and I will probably get targeted on twitter for having this discussion but this is the kind of thing we need to be talking about. What’s happened to us post-9/11? Where are do we want to go in the future? What kind of country should we become? What should the government be allowed to do? One person’s opinion: The national security state has gone far too far. You can argue in the first weeks, months, maybe the first years after 9/11 we needed to move to some extreme national security state position but now in 2013, it's going too far and I think there's a sort of sinking feeling with a lot of people that that's the case.
Email
Share