Are Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden traitors or patriots? With Manning in jail and Snowden the subject of a global hunt, the Obama administration has made its position on the question clear.
Yet for the rest of us, the question presumes a prior one: To whom do U.S. Army privates and intelligence contractors owe their loyalty? To state or to country? To the national security apparatus that employs them or to the people that the apparatus is said to protect?
Those who speak for that apparatus, pre-eminently the president, assert that the interests of the state and the interests of the country are indistinguishable.