Americans Should Hear What Chris Hedges Had To Say At Oxford Last Month. They Won't

Chris Hedges, in making the case that Edward Snowden is a hero: "With moral courage comes persecution. It is always defined by the state as treason." His presentation, which I beg you to watch above, is only 8 minutes, 8 minutes of brilliance. Mike Lee-- no, not that Mike Lee, a student at Oxford-- covered it for the student paper and reported that the vote of the assembled students after the debate found that Snowden, as Hedges asserted, merits the title "hero."

Hedges said that a hero “shows moral courage and disobedience to higher authority even at the risk of persecution” and drew parallels between Snowden and soldiers who stopped the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Hedges stated: “There is no free press without the ability of newspapers to protect the confidentiality of their sources” and “the relationship of tracking and being tracked by the state is the relationship between a master and a slave.” He ridiculed the NSA for collecting data on “the UN Secretary General, cardinals at the papal conclave, American companies, and NSA agents’ ex-lovers.”

Mr Hedges made an analogy between the situation of Congressional oversight committees being knowingly lied to by intelligence agents and that of the March Hare offering wine to Alice while knowing there is none.

…Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst for CNN and the New Yorker who spoke second in opposition, characterised the proposition’s view as one where “the ends justify the means” and that “the rules of society don’t apply to moral zealots.” He downplayed the significance of government data collection, arguing that governments now have records that phone companies already have. Toobin also drew laughter in stating: “It’s a dangerous world out there; there are people who are willing to kill us for our freedoms.” Toobin questioned if the world was safer “with Russia and China knowing the information that the US has collected.”

The day after the team debate at Oxford, Nick Mutch interviewed Hedges, whom he referred to as "among the last of a dying breed: the war correspondent that has spent his life with society’s outcasts and the faceless victims of conflcit." He questioned Hedges about his relationship with his former employer, the NY Times, which he quit in 2003 over their refusal to countenance his opposition to the Iraq War.

“The New York Times is in a very strange position vis-à-vis its relationship to power. On the one hand, it is an elitist paper, and so much of its publishing power comes from its intimate access to politicians and those in positions of power. So it can’t go around openly opposing the agenda of those who give it the access it craves. “It attracts careerists who are intoxicated by power and influence; I was not a particularly good careerist. But this does not make it a propaganda outlet. So you’ll see it try and square the circle in strange ways. With the Wikileaks cables for instance, it couldn’t not take such a huge story without looking ridiculous, but it had to keep it at arm’s length. They were at the forefront for instance, of smearing the character of Julian Assange and his organisation.”

And at the forefront of painting an unsympathetic picture of Ed Snowden, one that makes it facile to view him as a traitor, especially when a clod like Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) asserts as much, unchallenged, on national television whenever he has the opportunity. At some point, someone may ask, in fact, why Steve Israel and the DCCC have decided to give Rogers-- in a blue-leaning district-- electoral immunity when he could be beaten far more easily than almost any of the DCCC targets this year. Strange how that works, isn't it?