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Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden Would Not Get a Fair Trial – and Kerry Is Wrong
Daniel Ellsberg, no slouch himself in bringing to public awareness documents that reveal uncomfortable facts about government operations, says that "Edward Snowden is the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time." Ellsberg says, in an editorial at The Guardian pointed out by reader ABEND (15913), that Snowden cannot receive a fair trial without reform of the Espionage Act. According to Ellsberg, "Snowden would come back home to a jail cell – and not just an ordinary cell-block but isolation in solitary confinement, not just for months like Chelsea Manning but for the rest of his sentence, and probably the rest of his life. His legal adviser, Ben Wizner, told me that he estimates Snowden's chance of being allowed out on bail as zero. (I was out on bond, speaking against the Vietnam war, the whole 23 months I was under indictment). More importantly, the current state of whistleblowing prosecutions under the Espionage Act makes a truly fair trial wholly unavailable to an American who has exposed classified wrongdoing. Legal scholars have strongly argued that the US supreme court – which has never yet addressed the constitutionality of applying the Espionage Act to leaks to the American public – should find the use of it overbroad and unconstitutional in the absence of a public interest defense. The Espionage Act, as applied to whistleblowers, violates the First Amendment, is what they're saying. As I know from my own case, even Snowden's own testimony on the stand would be gagged by government objections and the (arguably unconstitutional) nature of his charges. That was my own experience in court, as the first American to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act – or any other statute – for giving information to the American people." Ellsberg rejects the distinction made by John Kerry in praising Ellsberg's own whistleblowing as patriotic, but Snowden's as cowardly and traitorous.
And he says Snowden won't. I believe him. What's your point?
Unlike evil Tricky Dick Nixon, President Obama is a constitutional scholar. You have nothing to fear.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
and never saw a day in prison.
Not because they didn't want to imprison him; it was due to an activist judge who held that there was such evidentiary misconduct that the case was dismissed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
This was due to the climate immediately following Watergate, where the judiciary had a lot of motive to prove themselves uncorrupt, at least compared to the executive branch of the time.
The current climate is one much of the evidence against Snowden would be considered classified, and therefore not challengeable. The FISA court, the national security letters, and other instruments available for use in shielding against charges of misconduct, and thus preventing such a dismissal, did not exist in Ellsberg's time.
Frankly, Snowden is lucky he initially established, and is successfully maintaining, a high profile, since it makes him less of a target for extraordinary rendition, which had it been used, he would have just disappeared into a black hole somewhere already.
First, Snowden took more than just the documents that have been published by the Guardian, this was confirmed by the Guardian in the first days of the leaks. Snowden asked them "to use their judgement and not publish anything 'seriously damaging'", which means there is more than just what the public has been made aware of.
Which is not relevant, you dont even know what the unpublished documents are or whether they have any bearing on anything whatsoever.
Second, it is almost certain that ALL of that information was given over to the governments of the countries he traveled to.
So the Espionage Act CAN be applied quite easily to Snowden for any classified information given to foreign governments that was not also part of the information leaked to the media.
And thankfully "almost certain" is a meaningless term that you use because you want it to be true to support your point of view but you have no proof, you then use this baseless assertion to attempt to justify application of the Espionage Act.
In addition, Ellsberg never got a "fair trial"; the charges against him were dismissed for gross misconduct on the part of the government -- see http://www.washingtonpost.com/... for a summary.
"The problems in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking which created them" --Albert Einstein
If Mr. Snowden is a traitor, we need to fix the laws until he ISN'T a traitor. He performed a valuable service to the citizens of this republic, and to the citizens of many other nations around the world.
"There are processes in place to deal with law violations committed under the veil of state secrecy. Snowden did not lift a finger for even a moment to follow those processes, electing instead to break the law himself and go straight to the public."
If that was even true he would have had good reason to do that. Two of his predecessors had their lives completely ruined after they tried to follow process.
One of my favorite lines (gleaned from a post here as a matter of fact) is, do you really expect to win a rigged game by playing by the rules?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Snowden would be prosecuted & sentenced. We would all be pissed off. Some cities would even have public protests. Then Snowden would get locked in a cell. Things would gradually cool down. Uh, whatever happened to ol' Ed?
*crickets*
If he returns to the US, Snowden will never again see the light of day. Look at what happened to insiders like Thomas Drake (an NSA guy with 30 years in) who developed an analysis tool named "Thin Thread". He added constitutional protections. The NSA removed them. He complained. He was then threatened with 1000 years in prison by Federal Prosecuters (Persecutors?). Included was gag orders on just about everything, constant surveilence, seizure of this computers (home/work/wherever). Wiretaps, harrasment, intimidation, threats of physical violence, physical violence, etc. And he was an inside guy. Then take a look at what happened to the guy who was running Lavabit. Gag orders prohibiting him from talking to his lawyer, gag orders preventing him from talking to anyone, judges imposing arbitrary fines of $5000 per day, he isn't even allowed to see the charges against him! This is sick! The US Constitution is an ideal that the US Government cannot live up to (and they have no intention of trying). If he returned to the US, what would happen to Snowden would best be described as "Punitive, Vindictive, and Arbitrary".
Chelsea Manning is a perfect example. Reveal war crimes and end up in a little box, forgotten.
Traitor or not, he Pwned their ass. The NSA look like complete idiots, and continue to do so, and Snowden has shown them up at every turn. Remind me what we are paying billions of dollars for again? Whether or not you can lock up Snowden, the NSA needs its plug pulled for utter incompetence.
You authoritarian monarchist hacks out yourselves by spending soooo much time talking about how Snowden deserves to go to jail, but say nothing about the lawbreaking and lawbreakers revealed by Snowden. Not one word on Clapper going to jail for perjury, not one word for imprisoning Alexander for FISA violations, not one word on impeaching the POTUS for overseeing it all.
5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each violation of FISA laws. But this was never about the law, for you.
I happen to believe in trials. So did the founding fathers.
Great, that makes three of us. We can start with Clapper and Alexander, since they're easy to apprehend and Snowden isn't. We don't even have to extradite them from Russia or Hong Kong. We can send some Federal marshals to pick them up after breakfast tomorrow. Sound good to you?
Which is why calls were 100 to 1 against telecom immunity in 2008, from across the ideological spectrum. Because if there's one thing a majority of Americans want, it's corrupt unaccountable Big Brother spying on the entire planet. And that's before getting to the naked hackery of NBC's polling. You run a poll asking 'do you support Snowden taking classified documents to Putin's Russia?!?!?' and are surprised at the results? How about 'do you support whisteblowers when they reveal top officials breaking the law hundreds of times a second every day of the week'?
Is this perfromance art, or did you bring enough hallucenegic drugs for everybody? Cuz you're on some mighty powerful acid if you're seriously suggesting we need to spend hundreds of billions to tap the personal communications of our closest allies.
It doesn't work to blame Snowden for ending up in Putin's Russia when it was Clinton's State Department who canceled his passport on his way to South America. And for having the president of Ecuador's plane forced down because he might have been carrying Snowden on board.
Why did it cross the line?
We're told that we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, and suspend aspects of our Constitutional law, in order to stop terrorism. Then we find out that some this stuff we bought and paid for is being used to tap the Chancellor's cellphone one of the most prosperous, stable, and democratic allies in the world. How is that not relevant?
It goes directly to the motive and function of our surveillance network. We're told the NSA needs to tap domestic phone lines to catch foreign terrorists. Do they mean foreign terrorists like Chancellor Merkel?
Heck, supposedly Obama said that he didn't know about it. If we take his word at face value, is it not relevant that the intelligence regime has grown so out of proportion that it's doing things that even the president would abhor?
And we should take these things at face value. Otherwise we're liable to fall prey to our romantic Cold War notions about the honor and peril involved in international espionage.
Let's be clear: the bulk of the current intelligence regime is not a successor to the heroes of WWII and Cold War intelligence. The current regime is what you get when you ask Google and Facebook how to go about fighting terrorism.
Step 1: Spy on everybody
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Profit
The thing is, mass surveillance works for Google and Facebook because they profit off of each individual, and off of each banal web page we visit. The equation wrt to terrorism is completely different. There's no logic--only idiotic presumptions--that spying on everybody will allow us to thwart the random and exceedingly rare actions of a small cadre of loosely networked individuals around the globe.
It was also illegal for Rosa Parks to sit on the bus where she did.
If your arguing you need to respect terrible laws %100 of the time, with no alotment for mitigating circumstances, then you are seriously out of touch with reality.
>Personally, I would like to see Snowden prosecuted for the crimes he's accused of and given a trial by his peers.
you know damn well he'll never been given a fair trial. The attitude of both parties and the government in general for the last 25 years was to milk the system for everything you can get, bend every rule, then hiring some PR hack to convince everyone that its for the better good.
I happen to believe in trials. So did the founding fathers.
Then why didn't they turn themselves in at the nearest British courthouse for a trial? They were all wanted.
Now, you can argue about what the law should have been, but you can't argue that they were indeed breaking the laws as they were written at the time.
That'd be the same Wyden who already knew a lot of what Snowden revealed and felt he couldn't say anything because it was all classified? The same Congress that discovered they'd been lied to, openly, baldly and repeatedly, and did diddly squat because it was a high ranking member of the security state who did it?
Good one. Snowden did what he did because the entire US political structure has been subverted by the military to such an extent that there is nobody left who will hold them genuinely accountable. The press won't do it. Congress won't do it. The courts won't do it. The only guy left who will do it was a 30 year old former spy. That's what America is, now.
I happen to believe in trials. So did the founding fathers.
Huh. No. You're wrong. The founding fathers believed in fair trials and so do I. And that is why using the Espionage Act to prosecute an American revealing illegal government actions to the American people is unconstitutional. But the Constitution means nothing in the US anymore. Also Snowden has not admitted he's is guilty of espionage. But by charging him with that the government gets to suppress any defense based on the fact that he was revealing illegal unconstitutional actions by government agencies.
Who is John Galt?
Are you kidding me?
Russia would be tough, but Snowden only wound up in Russia after he was left with no other options. So if he kept a low profile, he'd never have wound up in Russia.
If you think the US doesn't have the power to take it's own citizens from many, many countries in the world and just make them disappear, you're living in a delusion, The US has a golden ticket that the lawyers have been ever-expanding their justification to do anything. It's called the Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists, and it's been used to justify killing and targeting people that have no connection to the Sept 11 attacks. You think they wouldn't try use it to legally justify kidnapping Snowden?
And if they couldn't do that, you think they wouldn't use a CIA operative to kidnap him, or get some other group to do it? Countries are mean motherfuckers. You're under the misapprehension that countries actions are ruled by laws. They aren't, they're ruled by politics and what they can get away with. The OP is right. If Snowden hadn't put up a big profile rather quickly, the US govt would have found him and hung him out to dry in one way or another. (And I'm certain Ed Snowden is under no illusion this would have happened, and likely was a major reason he DID come forward).
AccountKiller
Jury nullification almost never happen, and in this case the jury would be carefully selected to completely exclude this remote possibility. Like it or now, your attitude summarizes a lot of what we hear about Snowden. Almost no one on the radio, newspaper, etc says anything about the crimes that Snowden has uncovered, and that will go unpunished, because, you know, everything is about Snowden.
The best option for Snowden is to hide and wait for the American people to realize he was right all along, and a true hero like Ellsberg, and certainly not submit himself to some kangaroo court. If that never happens, the American people deserve their fate.
Almost no one like heroes that disturb the comfortable status quo.