But wait, can people stand for both the NSA and MLK?

"Yes, we can." A perfect example of one of my heroes who supported both MLK and the NSA/national security community at the same time was President Barack Obama. President Obama in my view was the greatest president of my lifetime, though it's up for debate which generation I'm a part of. (It's worth noting that Obama practically used Cesar Chavez's slogan "Si, se puede" which literally translates to "Yes, one can" in English, and that the expression has deep roots in community organizing, as Obama himself did.) 

At first blush, supporting the NSA/MLK at the same time might seem like a contradiction in terms. MLK used non-violence (or did he?) whereas the NSA/CIA/national security community toppled the governments of foreign nations, including staging a coup in Iran and also training the Chilean military in the infamous school of the Americas to overthrow democratically-elected President Salvador Allende, another one of my ultimate heroes, who threatened U.S. copper interests in Chile after nationalizing copper mines, and about whom I wrote a term paper in high school before I went on to live in Chile for about a year prior to going to law school. The NSA/CIA also uses some of the most outrageous forms of surveillance as Edward Snowden showed the entire country, and for his whistleblowing, the United States revoked his passport and he was forced to become an exile, though there have also been accusations by a person I personally know in the national security community that Snowden went to Russia because he was a double agent, and while I have no personal knowledge of this, there are ways to discredit individuals and Snowden's original destination prior to being forced to remain in Russia was in South America and Snowden was prevented from getting on a plane to go there. (Snowden also had strange things happen when he flew to Hong Kong for his interview with the Guardian, which was heavily learned on and also surveilled at the time and some of the Guardian's reporters have since left the UK with one moving to Brazil, and Snowden also had at least one rent check bounce and large construction trucks appeared outside his residence. Snowden was also originally reluctant to even report this story in the United States, though the Washington Post later ran the story and it went viral afterwards.) To be clear, I do not endorse any of these actions taken by the national security community. Why? They are or should be illegal, though the ACLU lost its case against Jim Clapper for lack of evidence that ACLU lawyers were under surveillance even though in my view this case was blatantly wrongly decided.

But President Obama saw no contradiction in terms supporting the NSA and MLK, and neither do I, although Obama took strong actions to restrain the national security community, and issued an Executive Order as his first act as President attempting to close Guantanamo Bay, and was thwarted by Congress. (Incidentally, Obama and Eric Holder, another hero, planned to try the Guantanamo Five not as terrorists or war criminals but under criminal law in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York the very year I clerked there, and at the time I speculated that my district court judge, the late great Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum who is another hero and mentor of mine might be in line to oversee the case, but ultimately Holder's attempts to try the Gitmo 5 criminally were politically thwarted.) 

Obama famously had MLK's quote about the arc of the moral universe being long but bending towards justice woven into his rug in the Oval Office. (Although if one really wants to be persnickety and a know-it-all, a charge leveled at me, this quote originated from 19th Century abolitionist Thomas Parker, who MLK rephrased. MLK also allegedly plagiarized sections of his dissertation, but is this really important . . . I mean Shakespeare practically plagiarized his entire body of work, not that I'm defending plagiarism, I'm strongly against it, but I note racial disparities because when MLK does it, people care, but they never breathe a critique of the Bard.)

Despite Obama's background in community organizing and his explicit praise of MLK and MLK's alleged commitment to non-violence, Obama saw no issue with assassinating Osama bin Laden even though the assassination at the time not in line with the history of armed conflict because according to many of my colleagues in the progressive national security community such as Jonathan Hafetz, formerly of the ACLU and of the Brennan Center for Justice (Jonathan, you are amazing) now at Seton Hall, the United States was not technically at war with Al Qaeda or the Taliban because neither was a nation state and to qualify as a war under international laws of armed conflict, one can only take defensive action against an aggressor if the aggressor is a nation state, though the Supreme Court essentially overruled the UCMJ in a well-known series of decisions. (Many other people famously disagreed well before the Supreme Court intervened and took canonical laws of war taught by my teacher and mentor Christopher Kutz at UC Berkeley into its own hands, including John Yoo at Berkeley, who is still on the faculty and well-known for his collegiality and excellent teaching), though protestors have repeatedly interrupted his classes, and protested my law school graduation ceremony where now-Dean Chemerinsky of UCB prophetically told my graduating class that we should all act as if our actions would appear on the front page of a newspaper, a proposition I take issue with because I believe in privacy, but the point is that technology exists to invade privacy and in the progressive national security community it is well known that there's no such thing as privacy and anyone anywhere can be listened in to, at least as of circa 2013.

Luckily, I'm not President like Obama was and have no plants to run for office, though I've been told by strangers I should. (At what point? I do predict even with my compassionate world view expressed in yesterday's post that Donald Trump is an existential threat to to democracy and that it's possible there will never be another free and fair election ever again. I have compassion for Donald Trump, as I do for all beings, because by all accounts he is an abuse victim and was bullied by his father, nevertheless he is simultaneously an existential threat to the United States of America and the democratic institutions that have withstood the test of time despite the civil war. . . another post on this later.) 

But many people of color full well know democracy isn't fair and has been broken since slavery and the 3/5ths clause, and that persons of color and women have been held to illegal double standards, but equally some of history's greatest persons of color and women have given their lives to the dream of democracy, and entered the military or worked for the military to defend and protect the dream of democracy because the military gave and gives persons of color and women vastly more opportunities than other institutions and the military was the one of the only institutions in all of society that could allow my heroes such as Black women mathematicians, the most famous of whom is Katherine Johnson whose story was featured in one of my favorite books and movies, Hidden Figures to actually use their math and physics abilities when no else would hire them or even touch their applications. Katherine Johnson served as a human computer for a defense agency prior to it becoming the modern-day NASA and her mathematical calculations, which were done without modern technology, put the first astronaut Neil Armstrong on the moon, and while Armstrong's words "one small step for man, one giant leap for [humanity]" echo throughout history, this achievement would not have been possible without Katherine Johnson, who was forced to be better than her white male and female colleagues. In my view, putting an astronaut on the moon is the single greatest scientific accomplishment in the history of the United States, and if life were fair (which it obviously isn't, but should be), Katherine Johnson should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, since her mathematics were essentially applied physics. But Katherine Johnson's legacy because she was a Black woman was buried by history even though if she'd been a white man in 1940s Princeton she could easily have bested John Nash (my nemesis and the subject of my research) with two hands tied behind her back, and likely even if she'd literally been blindfolded because many persons with math abilities like mine can "see" math in the universe even if we're not writing it down. 

So in my view, yes it's absolutely possible to stand for MLK/the national security community at the same time, and Katherine Johnson and the Black women mathematicians and physicists in Hidden Figures did because some of them benefitted from MLK's activism, and one of them even had to sue a school just to be permitted to take night classes in physics. Incidentally, lest anyone think Dr. King was completely non-violent, this is simply a philosophy, but he actually worked with the military and in his own way was not as non-violent as some might think. For example, Dr. King's goal of desegregation was effectuated by a federalized national guard, and President Kennedy to forcibly desegregate Alabama when Southern governor George Wallace attempted to obstruct desegregation with his own body. (I'll have a separate post on George Wallace. . . history might see him as a villain but at least he had the courage to apologize later in life after he became disabled and was in a wheelchair and was forgiven by many Black persons, though I don't speak for them.) Finally, Dr. King himself used tactics and strategies that are hard to characterize as non-violent and intentionally for the purposes of optics dressed little Black girls in dresses with ribbons and these children were subjected to water hoses, all because Dr. King knew that if the South perpetrated violence against little children, the North would be deeply sympathetic to the movement, and the New York Times and many other media outlets covered these protests.

Life is not black and white. It's in technicolor, and despite my post on binary choices, it's best to see the world in all its complexity and seeming contradictions, and attempt to reconcile them as best we can. 

-Cortelyou C. Kenney

[NB: There have been multiple instances of the state national guards being federalized, and Eisenhower also did it. But JFK did it too. I add a link to support this proposition on 9/10/25 in the wake of DT's federalizing the CA national guard.]