Under any sane standard, the country’s national security and intelligence establishment are the real traitors, selling out and betraying the American people in dangerous and misguided quests for unlimited power and knowledge about our every activity.

The top brass in the intelligence community have established a clear, decades-long pattern of violating our rights and then brazenly lying to the people’s elected representatives, forgetting that they are supposed to be public servants, not omnipotent overlords. They lie under oath and violate their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution only to turn around and accuse actual heroes like Snowden of treason. And we let them get away with it—worse than that, we celebrate them, making them expert analysts on the major news networks, awarding them cushy posts at the nation’s most prestigious centers of learning, and generally ignoring, in investigative journalist William Arkin’s words, “the creeping fascism of homeland security.”

One can’t help but be reminded of the concept of what in George Orwell’s novel 1984 the Party calls “reality control”—or in its more famous Newspeak name: “doublethink.” The ascendency of America’s military and intelligence officialdom requires that we, paraphrasing 1984, deny the evidence of our senses. Orwell’s protagonist is tortured by the mental effort entailed in forcing himself to believe two opinions he knows to be irreconcilable. “All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.”

Americans must stop ignoring our senses and our memories. If President Trump has an ounce of decency, he should promptly pardon Edward Snowden, who at a very young age, with a promising career and his whole life ahead of him, put everything on the line to protect us from the very people who are supposed to be protecting us.