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President Obama Should Pardon Edward Snowden Before Leaving Office (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Verge: Ever since Edward Snowden set in motion the most powerful public act of whistleblowing in U.S. history, he has been living in exile in Russia from the United States. An article in this week's New York Magazine looks at how Snowden may have a narrow window of opportunity where President Obama could pardon him before he leaves office. Presumably, once he leaves office, the chances of Snowden being pardoned by Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump are miniscule. Obama has said nothing in the past few years to suggest he's interested in pardoning Snowden. Not only would it contradict his national security policy, but it will severely alienate the intelligence community for many years to come. With that said, anyone who values a free and secure internet believes pardoning Snowden would be the right thing to do. The Verge reports: "[Snowden] faces charges under the Espionage Act, which makes no distinction between delivering classified files to journalists and delivering the same files to a foreign power. For the first 80 years of its life, it was used almost entirely to prosecute spies. The president has prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all president before him combined. His Justice Department has vastly expanded the scope of the law, turning it from a weapon against the nation's enemies to one that's pointed against its own citizens. The result will be less scrutiny of the nation's most powerful agencies, and fewer forces to keep them in check. With Snowden's push for clemency, the president has a chance to complicate that legacy and begin to undo it. It's the last chance we'll have."
but ES won't be one
A 'pardon' suggests that you've done something wrong but are being let of lightly because we are just that nice. Give the guy a damn medal.
President Obama is many things, but on his list of top personal identities, I don't see any identity that would pardon Edward Snowden. I think he's a good man, and even a good president under the circumstances, but it ain't going to happen.
Just to clarify my analysis, let me pick the personal identity of "politician". I happen to think it might be Obama's #1 identity, but it's certainly near the top of his list. Pardoning Snowden would be extremely bad as a political move and would give enormous fuel and enthusiasm to his political enemies.
The best candidate to pardon Snowden would probably be a philosopher who was primarily concerned about right and wrong, and you better not hold your breath waiting for one to become president. I actually think that Obama has a philosophical streak, but not in his top 10 identities. His identity as a lawyer is certainly higher, and professional lawyers are trained to ignore such trivialities as right and wrong.
On the third hand, I also blame the big dick Cheney, both for creating the personal-privacy-abusing national security apparatus that Obama has to deal with (in his persona as a realist) and for stuffing the entire civil service with ideologues. That may be the worst legacy of Dubya's miserable failure of an administration. The federal civil service was supposed to be task-oriented and apolitical, an organization of professionals who would competently and impartially administer whatever legislation the political process threw at them, and even ignoring political pressures from the executive branch. Not so under Cheney and his cronies, who actively worked to drive out competent careerists and carefully screened the personal politics of all new hires. Of course the punchline is that the so-called Republican Party now blames Obama for being unable to fix the system they worked so hard to break and keep broken.
Pardoning Snowden? You'd be better off hoping they decided corporations are inhuman monstrosities hiding under the legal fiction of decency.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
A previous article covers whistle-blower Thomas Drake being denied protections for trying to use the proper channels. John Crane, who was to protect the whistle-blowers, became a whistle-blower himself when it became evident the Pentagon was abusing their power in order to punish Thomas Drake.
The article quotes Snowden, "Name one whistleblower from the intelligence community whose disclosures led to real change - overturning laws, ending policies - who didn't face retaliation as a result. The protections just aren't there"
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
https://www.theguardian.com/us...
There is an endless discussion about everything but the real issue:
Our freedom is being completely destroyed along with the hope that we will ever get it back.
Our future is being threatened. Our lives are at risk.
No one seems to have detected any apology from Trump.
I'm sure he's sorry they confessed. What other apology does he need to make? They confessed, and Trump had nothing to do with that or with convicting them or setting the sentence. Should he feel sorry that he thought the murder/rape of a jogger in a public park merited the death penalty?
If you scratch an ardent Trump supporter, you find a hater.
You don't even need to scratch the surface of the Trump haters to find a hater.
He exposed programs and technologies that provided real foreign intelligence and were no threat to American citizens.
That's because he doesn't view himself as an American citizen. He is on the record as saying that he's a "Citizen of the World," whatever that means. I rather liked Robert Gates assessment of him, "He said the government has built an institution of oversight over intelligence-gathering for the past 40 years, and there are avenues for people to pursue with the authorities if they believe a law has been broken. Gates said for Snowden to make public his allegations instead “is an extraordinary act of hubris.”
Hubris indeed; a 29 year old decided that he knew better than the hundreds of elected officials that we the people appointed to make these sorts of decisions on our behalf. Nobody elected him or entrusted him with this sort of power, he just took it for himself. Then, as if that wasn't enough, he leaks EVERYTHING, to foreign media. At least Ellsberg leaked to a reputable American media outlet that takes pains to scrub information that would endanger lives. Snowden's media buddies just dumped everything out there without any consideration whatsoever of the consequences.
Then, the final insult, he runs away to a country that stands diametrically opposed to every human right he claims to champion. This happens AFTER he makes himself the story, by outing himself, rather than at least trying to remain anonymous, as Deep Throat did. It speaks to a personality that craves the affirmation of the public spotlight, which brings me back to Secretary Gates' comment about hubris.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
People say he did it out of conviction or stayed true to his principles. Well, so does a suicide bomber.
But here's the difference: The suicide bomber is expecting a reward - 72 virgins or some other heavenly reward. Snowden knew he would throw away his life but he didn't do it for a personal reward. He did it for others, for his country.
I haven't made up my mind whether Snowden was misguided, stupid or justified. But I have concluded that the man is principled and a selfless patriot. He might be stupid and misguided, but he felt he did the right thing, at great personal cost to himself, for no personal reward.