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The New York Times Pushes For Clemency For Snowden
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The Editorial Board of the New York Times has weighed in on the criminal charges facing Edward Snowden and writes that 'Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight..' 'He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.' The president said in August that Snowden should come home to face charges in court and suggested that if Snowden had wanted to avoid criminal charges he could have simply told his superiors about the abuses, acting, in other words, as a whistle-blower. In fact, notes the editorial board, the executive order regarding whistleblowers did not apply to contractors, only to intelligence employees, rendering its protections useless to Snowden. More important, Snowden told The Washington Post that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the NSA, and that they took no action. 'Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not. ... When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government,' concludes the editorial. 'President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden's vilification and give him an incentive to return home.'"
and the Medal of Honor, just for starters. Snowden has done more for this country than our "Nobel Peace Prize" winning President!
Why??? Snowden did far more harm than good. Nothing has been done about anything he revealed, courts have been ruling it's legal.
So you are totally skipping over the whole "lying to congress" thing as if its inconsequential?
Snowden may have pulled the curtain away to reveal what was suspected with regards to who spies on who, but in doing so he also showed that the intelligence services were out of control and arrogant in their stance.
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That is the appropriate response to what he did.
---- Booth was a patriot ---- If you dont agree with me, dont bother replying as i dont care what you have to say ----
So says the guy with "Booth was a patriot" in his sig. Now that is funny.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
They shouldn't have broken the law. Yes the courts have ruled it all legal but everyone knows that to be a farce.
They shouldn't have persecuted Snowden. What has that accomplished?
They shouldn't have doubled down on their right to spy because that has caused an international incident.
And now their corporate partners are all turning on them one by one.
Give up, NSA. Have the national discussion you should have had a generation ago. We'll talk about it.
If we decide as a nation to go down that path... so be it. But we won't. Which means you'll have to operate within more limited rules and capabilities. And as much as that might vex you or put the public at greater risk such is the price of living in a free country.
What you have done is wrong. What snowden did violated the law but served the interests of the American people. We owe it to him to shield him and any like him.
If we don't stand up for men like Snowden then what chance do any of us have when the feds come for YOU.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Snowden has mainly revealed metadata -- what info collection programs exist, rather than actual data -- what was collected.
The NSA has emphasised what it does is benign as in mainly collects metadata.
Metadata -- no harm. no foul on either side.
Snowden did far more harm than good to the US government and the businesses wielding the US government like a club. For the rest of the world, Snowden gave us something we didn't have before: knowledge. We got information on who was spying on us and how. Who could be trusted and why. Which protocols were known to be compromised. NIST nearly lost all their credibility as a cryptography standards body. RSA lost the remainder of its credibility. Google and other companies discovered the government was stealing their data. The NSA was revealed as the most lawless organization on the planet, briefly eclipsing the CIA in illegal notoriety.
And we're supposed to just sweep this all under the rug because "everyone's doing it" and "oh look you pissed our allies off, now look what you've done?" What they're doing is wrong and illegal -- and the only reason they've been getting away with it is because they had no one that could hold them accountable. (Whether the public can actually hold them accountable in a representative democracy is currently up for open debate.)
What harm can come from the truth that is not deserved?
We are free to do what we please, but the legal system SHOULD deal out punishment for indiscretions (especially those that go against the ultimate law of the land, for the US this is the Constitution). As you pointed out, no one has been punished, this is THE core fault in the system given the public's knowledge of things.
Evidence of Constitutional breaches are important, evidence is far more powerful than what "everyone already knew" ("suspected" would have been a better word). Otherwise "knowing" is simply the realm of those with tin foil hats (who I have to assume have upgraded to full steel medieval helmets).
Some of us still care about the Constitution, and would like to see it upheld.
Burn a flag, everyone freaks out. Burn the Constitution, no one notices. This is especially clear given the critical information Snowden has released.
The Constitution is on fire. And that is what "we deserve"???
BlameBillCosby.com
We have a president who, after promising the most open administration ever, has done a complete 180 and tried to limit press coverage, access to records and administration officials, and so on. He has offered pardons to fewer people than any other president. That doesn't sound like a welcoming environment to come home to, when you get right down to it. That said, I've always had mixed feelings about Snowden. To be honest, China and Russia probably know much about what is going on, because they do the same things themselves. In addition, it's not unlike the Wikileaks dump...people in Iraq and Afghanistan know what's going on there...it's the American people who are kept in the dark. On the other hand, we want the "American standard of living," which is no different from the "British Way" back in the 1800s, and so on. We're not a bucolic merchant republic any more. America is a global empire, the Rome of our day, and maintaining that position requires an awful lot of "off the books" action. People scream for more security, lower gas prices, salute the flag all over the place, and don't want to deal with paying taxes to maintain military hegemony, the rabid pursuit of dissent, or the corruption which invariably accompanies a concentration of power.
Maybe it has something to do with those two nations being part of a small group that isn't beholden, in one way or another, to the U.S., and therefore would be significantly less likely to put a bag over his head and send him back to the states?
Really? So what have YOU done to further the hope for greater freedom in the United States?
IMO, he's exactly the type of hero our country needs many more of.... People willing to take action when they see government wrong-doing, rather than sit back, collecting a paycheck at the taxpayer's expense, and perpetuating the problem. All the while, convincing themselves they're "just doing their job".
If nothing gets done based on what he revealed, that just speaks to how deep we're all stuck in the pit of Fascism, inside our nation that pays lip service to completely different concepts. The courts should NOT be ruling this stuff is legal, and people should be outraged when they do! Unfortunately, we seem to live in a country where the majority still take an attitude of, "I don't care as long as it doesn't affect me personally right now. I'll happily piss away a basic right or freedom if it punishes people for doing something I'm not personally a fan of."
As far as your claim that all Snowden did was confirm what everyone already knew? I strongly disagree with that! I don't think the vast majority of people knew, for example, that the NSA might redirect your mail orders for brand new computer systems, planting spyware on them before they reached your address. I don't think the vast majority of people knew for sure that the NSA collected as much information about US citizens as we now know it does. (It's one thing to joke in passing about how the government "already knows you sent that email" or "heard what you said in that phone call". But that just speaks to a very vague, general sense that a well funded government agency with spying capabilities could theoretically do such a thing. Having an inside contractor verify they actually do it, AND detailing the extent of it is a whole different level.)
The fact Snowden found it safer to run to a nation known for a lack of personal liberty and huge privacy issues speaks volumes about how far the USA has slipped. If our country was a more sane and just place to live, he would never have felt the need to flee at all! Fact is, he couldn't trust any of the B.S. spouted off by govt. officials, promising to work with him if he just turned himself in. (Heck, a former head of the NSA was recently quoted as essentially saying he'd like to see Snowden's head on a platter.) These people still view him a a traitor who deserves execution, since he didn't go along with the status quo of trampling all over the rights of U.S. citizens in order to build a more powerful organization for themselves.
While such a position is surprisingly non-toadying for the NYT, fuck 'clemency'. 'Clemency' is the merciful withholding of some portion of a deserved punishment. Since Snowden deserves a hero's welcome, rather than any punishment, 'clemency' is an insult.
If there's anyone who is in a position to be begging for 'clemency' it's the Oh-So-Very-Serious-and-Responsible spooks currently whining about how much damage Snowden has allegedly done to their hitherto impressive record of completely and utterly unverifiable or demonstrable terrorist hunting.
Snowden is probably better off in Russia. Does NY Times have the balls to start talking about bringing charges against the NSA ? 2,776 incidents of unauthorized collection of legally protected communications
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Whoosh?
It was labeled as such. That's what an editorial is.
Shill:Fail
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I'm pretty sure that this last decade, the CIA has gone through a transformation where people capable of doing actual intelligence work have left the bureau, and mostly people that know how to 'extract' info from others remain. Unfortunately, such info is typically useless, making the CIA just another device for oppression of brown people worshiping the wrong god, as intelligence they will not gather anymore.