From MSNBC’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann talks to Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, a Navy lawyer forced out because he did his job too well. He was assigned by his superiors to provide legal representation to one of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Apparently he was supposed to lose his case.
“All I ever wanted was to make a difference — and in that sense I think my career and personal satisfaction has been beyond my dreams,” Swift said [in a newspaper interview].
In the Olbermann interview, Swift paraphrases Thomas Paine, who wrote:
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
Thomas Paine also said this:
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.
For too long, we’ve relied on men and women in uniform to secure liberty for us. But “these are the times that try men’s souls.” Now it’s time for the rest of us to step up and take our share of the burden, and to defend our rights and our Constitution from those who would despoil and defile them.
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