Mitch McConnell: WikiLeaks Chief 'A High-Tech Terrorist' (VIDEO)

Former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd writes:

As I was sitting with my three grown sons over the post-Thank­sgiving weekend watching football, my oldest son, who served in the Army for five years and was deployed in Iraq for nearly a year and half, turned to me and asked, “When as a country did we become a place where the government gets upset when its secrets are revealed but has no problem knowing all our secrets and invading our privacy?”

Hmm, interestin­g question.

In Washington­’s polarized political environmen­t, Republican­s and Democrats seem to agree on a few things: That the government­, in the name of fighting terrorism, has the right to listen in on all of our phone conversati­ons and read our e-mails, even if it has no compelling reason for doing so. That the government can use machines at the airport that basically conduct the equivalent of strip searches of every passenger. That the government­, for as long as it wants, can withhold any informatio­n from the public that it decides is in the national interest and is classified­. And that when someone reveals this informatio­n, they are reviled on all sides, with the press corps staying silent.

I recall during the Clinton administra­tion when Republican­s expressed outrage over a White House health care task force holding “secret” meetings and not releasing the names of attendees or the topics of discussion­. And then not many years later, Democrats expressing similar outrage at the Bush administra­tion’s secrecy when it held private meetings related to energy policy. Now both sides have gotten together to attack WikiLeaks over the opposite situation: They are criticizin­g the Internet watchdog for openly releasing informatio­n related to how our government conducts foreign policy.

Everyone in Washington claims to support transparen­cy and government openness during campaign season and when it’s popular to do so. They castigate the other side when it does things in secret and suggest that its intentions must be nefarious if it is unwilling to make its deliberati­ons public. But when an organizati­on discloses how our foreign policy is conducted, some of these same people claim that the release will endanger lives or threaten national security, or that the founder of WikiLeaks is a criminal.

When did we decide that we trust the government more than its citizens? And that revealing the truth about the government is wrong? And why is the media complicit in this? Did we not learn anything from the run-up to the Iraq war when no one asked hard questions about the justificat­ions for the war and when we accepted statements from government officials without proper pushback?

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost