Tag: constructive criticism

    The Obama Justice Department (on April 15th 2010)* announced that it has secured a ten-felony-count indictment against Thomas Drake, an official with the National Security Agency during the Bush years.  

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    (T)he DOJ alleges “that between approximately February 2006 and November 2007, a newspaper reporter published a series of articles about the NSA,” and it claims “Drake served as a source for many of those articles, including articles that contained classified information.”

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    Although the indictment does not specify Drake’s leaks, it is highly likely (as Shane also suggests) that it is based on Drake’s bringing to the public’s attention major failures and cost over-runs with the NSA’s spying programs via leaks to The Baltimore Sun.

salon.com

Bold text and some editing* done by the diarist

   The indictment of Thomas Drake has NOTHING to do with the illegality of the Bush warrantless wiretapping program, rather, it has to do with Drake’s uncovering of major failures and cost over-runs within the domestic spying program. As Greenwald writes . . .

    I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct.  But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush’s term (though several were threatened ).  It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Drake.

salon.com

Bold text added by the diarist

    Wait, wait, wait! If Obama’s DoJ is prosecuting crimes from the Bush era isn’t that an act of “Looking backwards, not forward”? ( and yes, revealing state secrets, even if done for the good of the public as whistleblowers do, is still illegal. )

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This morning I spoke at meeting to deliver a vocal ministry that, once it had fully formed in my consciousness, I knew would likely not be received with accolades.  Because I believe that the only way to keep forward progress and to foster growth is to at times make light of hard truths, I did not sugarcoat my message.  Having been raised in a Christ-centered tradition that was decidedly not Quaker, I recall many sermons over the years designed to call out the congregation when they had gone astray.  As such, I am a firm believer that criticism can be constructive and is not uniformly destructive in nature, even when the words themselves make waves and challenge assumptions.  This may have been my background, but I came to understand that it was not the reference point that many fellow Friends in attendance understood.  I fault them not for this.      

Perhaps I should qualify that I use as my guide the words, wisdom, and intent of Jesus.  They are, as I understand them, rarely, if ever, composed of feel-good platitudes or self-congratulatory statements.  Some of them were highly inflammatory in their day and when one contemplates the sum of their impact, one can hardly fail to recognize why Jesus was eventually crucified.  He had quite a knack for enraging the powers that be and making absolutely no attempt to smooth over his lessons and teachings with anything resembling tact or diplomacy.  Though we, in my humble opinion, ought to consider him a hero, he was a rabble-rouser in his day and in our time, those who threaten the establishment enough usually pay for it with their very lives.  Jesus did not coddle anyone and neither do I.