I have written repeatedly about president Obama’s war on whistleblowers. He hates any leaks that do not make him or his administration look good, making a mockery of his campaign promise to create the most transparent administration ever.
In particular, I wrote last year about the case of Thomas Drake, an analyst for the National Security Agency, whose attempts to expose waste in the NSA and its disregard for people’s privacy resulted in him being persecuted by the Obama administration. Reporter Jane Meyer had an excellent account of the case.
Jason Jones of The Daily Show reviews the history of the Thomas Drake affair while at the same time trying to see if there could be an action film starring him made about it.
(This clip appeared on August 6, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
By a quirk of fate I’ve recently been watching all the old “Danger Man” episodes. The hero, played by Patrick McGoohan, is “John Drake” So as I read this I thought, “What? A movie about Danger Man? Awesome!”
Drake’s story might make for a good movie. They’d have to tease the audience along the question of whether Drake was really a white knight or whether he was a bureaucrat who lost a bureaucratic in-battle over a pet project of his getting killed, and took revenge. As a taxpayer, I am almost more horrified by the waste that Drake documents than the NSA’s crimes. After all, the executive branch has apparently decided that NSA’s crimes aren’t, so what’s the point in blowing a whistle about them?
Of course, since what NSA did wasn’t a crime, then I don’t see what’s the big deal that Drake outed the crime that retroactively didn’t happen.
Uh.
Thanks for reminding me of the old Danger Man series. I always thought that Patrick McGoohan was a fine actor who never quite achieved the big screen fame that he deserved. He was in Silver Streak as the villain, if I recall.