Our Christian Soldiers

Today the newspaper tells us that the Senate Judiciary Committee is bamboozled by the question of whether or not to grant immunity to the telecommunications companies that aided BushCo in setting up a system of domestic surveillance. They just can't decide whether or not they might risk national security if they opened the companies up to legal action. Bush also asserts that in investigation might bankrupt the companies.

The only risk to the Senate in all this is that their bill might be vetoed if they don't exempt the companies from suit. This doesn't seem like much of a dilemma to me. If our Senators can't see that they need to have the right to investigate whether or not something already done was illegal, they can't see the nose on their own faces.

I don't see a national security risk here at all. The risk to BushCo is that someone might finally and legally call their hand on the invasion of citizen privacy by learning just how far they have overstepped their legal bounds. Not long ago I received a message that contained a story or a link to a story a telephone company executive about the huge effort that had gone into setting up the equipment and staffing necessary to operate the governmental spying program. I tried to find that reference for you this morning, but was unable to locate it. Sorry. All I can say is that this fellow was deeply upset by the size and nature of this program.

Henry Kissinger once said that it was a mistake to think that governments should be held to the same moral behavioral standards as individuals. He held that the business of government called for breaches of such standards for the well-being of the national community. I've never believed that at all. I think that kind of thinking is just a rationale that let him off the "guilty" hook his conscience would otherwise have imposed on him for all the murder and mayhem his policies caused.

Lawbreaking by governmental figures is often condoned under Dr. Kissinger's creed, though. His beliefs enable people like dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush to rationalize their actions under the old Al Capp saw of "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the country."

The bottom line to me, though, is that leadership that operates outside the bounds of individual decency drags the nation it represents into the gutter with it. The gains from such behavior are always short term. In the long run we all suffer from the world's perception of us as a people who cannot be trusted, and even in the short run many individuals among us suffer because they live by a higher moral standard and refuse to participate in the resulting misdeeds. Many of those people end up in prison because of their resistance to the immorality of the state. Daniel Berrigan comes prominently to mind in that regard.

We should demand of our leaders that they live up to the high standards of the religions they so loudly claim to espouse. As part of that process, we should ask our Senators today to refuse to vote for immunity to telecom companies. Let suits go forward. Let an investigation begin and let the chips fall where they may. We would know then that we had done the right thing regardless of the outcome. Isn't that what our moral code asks of us?

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle