The New York Times and Britain's The Guardian are calling for the U/S. to grant Edward Snowden clemency. Deserved?
New York Times pushes clemency for Edward Snowden. Justified?
By Peter Grier (http://www.csmonitor.com/About/Staff/Peter-Grier), Staff writer / January 2, 2014
The case for some sort of clemency for Edward Snowden also involves a judgment on the National Security Agency's activities. If NSA phone metadata collections are held to be unconstitutional, the chance of a deal might rise.
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Should the United States government offer NSA leaker Edward Snowden some degree of clemency so he does not have to spend the rest of his life in exile, forever looking over his shoulder?
“Yes," says The New York Times editorial board, in perhaps the most high-profile defense yet of the famous fugitive. On Jan. 1, the Times published an editorial that argues that the information revealed by Mr. Snowden has had “enormous value” and launched a nationwide debate on government surveillance.
Snowden couldn’t just go to his superiors and work through channels to reveal NSA abuses, claims the Times, because legal protections for whistle-blower activities don’t apply to government contractors such as him. Meanwhile, there’s no proof his leaks have actually damaged US security, according to the paper’s editorial board.
“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,” writes the Times.
The British paper The Guardian has published an editorial with a similar point. This New Year’s push for mercy is likely to drive official Washington’s arguments over Snowden and his legacy, already heated, to new levels.
For instance, Business Insider political editor Josh Barro immediately fired back at the NYT’s logic, tweeting that it would be "terrible" to give Snowden a break along the lines laid out in the editorial, because to do would establish a dangerous precedent:
But the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, a longtime critic of the Obama administration’s surveillance and drone policies, fired right back at Mr. Barro, saying that pardons by definition deal with legal cases to which normal rules don’t seem to apply.
“They are meant to be used judiciously, on an ad hoc basis, in what are clearly exceptional circumstances,” Mr. Friedersdorf writes.
That’s just a taste of what security wonks will be tussling over. Of course we’ve got a couple of comments here ourselves.
First, any sort of negotiated deal with Snowden won’t happen quickly. That’s because, as a practical matter, it would probably have to wait until legal challenges to the NSA’s newly revealed activities have played out in the courts. The resultant legal framework could have a powerful effect on the inherently political nature of any Snowden clemency, after all. If the NSA’s phone metadata collections are held to be unconstitutional, his chances of a return to the US might rise. If not, it might be hard for any president to offer Snowden a deal he’d find acceptable.
Second (and related), your position on Snowden today likely depends on your snap judgment as to how history will judge the activities he revealed.
To the Times, and other clemency advocates such as the ACLU, he has laid bare widespread illegality and abuse. The NSA’s own internal auditor has judged that the agency exceeded its authority “thousands of times a year," writes the Times. The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has rebuked the NSA for repeatedly providing misleading information about its surveillance activities.
“Many of the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight, as [a recent] presidential panel recommended,” writes the Times editorial board.
Not everybody agrees with this judgment. Much of the coverage of Snowden leaks has ex
I'd think anyone who wasn't a redneck flag-waver has got to see him as something between 007, Silkwood, Robin Hood and Santa Claus. To the government he's one of those individuals who fits the category .. better to befriend.
...the danger of incarceration is that he would become St. Edward to a lot of folks...and he's already becoming insufferable...another 5 years in Moscow should be punishment enough...
Quote Originally Posted by cluezo
View Post (http://www.ajarnforum.net/vb/international-news/76231-clemency-for-snowden.html#post1867229)
to do would establish a dangerous precedent:
they can't let him off....he can teach ESL in Pyongyang or Vladivostock, when the $$$$ runs out...even if he did return to the US, he'd be under 24/7 surveillance
Quote Originally Posted by tomcat
View Post (http://www.ajarnforum.net/vb/international-news/76231-clemency-for-snowden.html#post1867234)
and he's already becoming insufferable
You ain't the only one saying that ...
Edward Snowden, the insufferable whistleblower
By Ruth Marcus, Published: December 31 E-mail the writer
Time has not deflated Edward Snowden’s messianic sense of self-importance. Nor has living in an actual police state given the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower any greater appreciation of the actual freedoms that Americans enjoy.
Insufferable is the first adjective evoked by Snowden’s recent interview with Barton Gellman in The Post, but it has numerous cousins: smug, self-righteous, egotistical, disingenuous, megalomaniacal, overwrought.
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The Snowden of Gellman’s interview is seized with infuriating certitude about the righteousness of his cause. Not for Snowden any anxiety about the implications for national security of his theft of government secrets, any regrets about his violations of a duty of secrecy.
“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished. I already won,” Snowden proclaimed. “Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”
And what gave Snowden the right to assume that responsibility? “That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model. They elected me. The overseers,” he said. “The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”
Thankfully, at least as Snowden sees it, he was there to pick up the slack. “The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that [NSA Director] Keith Alexander and [Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper did not.”
Snowden followed his Post interview with an overheated Christmas message that was broadcast on British television. A child born today, he warned, will “never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought.”
Oh, come on. George Orwell himself would have told Snowden to chill — and the author of “Animal Farm” surely would have shown more recognition of the irony of Snowden’s sojourn in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Does a man whose life is conducted so much online really believe that Putin’s spies are not cyber-peering over his shoulder?
The whistleblower personality is rarely an attractive one. Whistleblowers tend to be the difficult ones, the sort who tend to feel freer to speak out precisely because they don’t fit in. So perhaps it is not a surprise that the biggest whistleblower of all time has an unpleasant personality to match. And personality would not matter — at least it would not be so grating — if Snowden’s behavior were more upstanding and his actions more justified.
On behavior, if Snowden is such a believer in the Constitution, why didn’t he stick around to test the system the Constitution created and deal with the consequences of his actions?
The harder question, because the cost-benefit analysis is inherently both opaque and subjective, concerns the actions themselves. Is Snowden’s massive theft justified by the degree of governmental intrusion he unveiled; the importance of the public discussion he provoked; the systemic shortcomings, if not outright failures, that both eroded adequate oversight and short-circuited the possibility of public debate absent his intervention? On the other, even more unknowable side of the ledger is the lasting damage to U.S. security from having its capabilities exposed for the United States’ enemies to see.
Your assessment might be different. My scale weighs against Snowden. He launched an important, overdue debate and reassessment of collection practices. Perhaps that would not have happened o
Quote Originally Posted by cluezo
View Post (http://www.ajarnforum.net/vb/international-news/76231-clemency-for-snowden.html#post1867236)
“I am still working for the NSA right now,” Snowden announced. “They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”
Orwell might have called that double-think.
Frank Orwell maybe.
George however, no. He might (seeing as we're in that territory) have appreciated the irony of the comparison in this piece; not so much double-think, as upside-down reversed single-think with a cherry on top.
Quote Originally Posted by cluezo
View Post (http://www.ajarnforum.net/vb/international-news/76231-clemency-for-snowden.html#post1867229)
“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,” writes the Times.
The British paper The Guardian has published an editorial with a similar point. This New Year’s push for mercy is likely to drive official Washington’s arguments over Snowden and his legacy, already heated, to new levels.
Agreed.
Quote Originally Posted by Anna Key
View Post (http://www.ajarnforum.net/vb/international-news/76231-clemency-for-snowden.html#post1867239)
not so much double-think, as upside-down reversed single-think
double-speak
Double penetration
Quote Originally Posted by fred flintstone
View Post (http://www.ajarnforum.net/vb/international-news/76231-clemency-for-snowden.html#post1867490)
double-speak
...no, slow child.
uh huh [image: http://www.ajarnforum.net/vb/images/smilies/adrian.gif]
This dude was a low level employee of a government contracter, did he really have access to super top secret information? If so, Why? If so, that alone shows serious concerns of the use of the data collected.
Good guy or bad guy?
I have a hard time taking sides, but if he had done with he did during the Bush years he would have been a huge star and media darling of the left, but since he did his stuff during Obama's time, it is difficult for the left to really embrace him.
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^
Sexual functional issues?
Quote Originally Posted by Accidental Ajarn
View Post (http://www.ajarnforum.net/vb/international-news/76231-clemency-for-snowden.html#post1868952)
This dude was a low level employee of a government contracter, did he really have access to super top secret information? If so, Why? If so, that alone shows serious concerns of the use of the data collected.
I asked myself the same questions, AA.
I tired myself out over the wikileaks fiasco: a newspaper asking me to find my own story in a carelessly tossed bundle of random data; the haste with which the Guardian rushed to print, aware that they needed something out of this man; Julian Assange's increasingly egomaniacal and near Messianic public persona - long before the Guardian debacle, the New Yorker painted a picture of a deeply flawed man - wading through embassy tittle-tattle and dry-cleaning bills only to find that at the end of the rainbow was a crock of shit. Edward Snowden should have struck me as a wannabe St. Julian. And yet he didn't for some reason.
Quote Originally Posted by Accidental Ajarn
View Post (http://www.ajarnforum.net/vb/international-news/76231-clemency-for-snowden.html#post1868952)
This dude was a low level employee of a government contracter
So we're told. But the speed with which we were told this, and the swift - and frankly disingenuous - impugning of his character gave me cause to pause in the initial rush to judgment.
The thread on here (AF) gave a flavour of how effective that initial, official response had been. 'Hero or Fool' was the thread title. As he clearly wasn't a hero the implicit invitation to tick the 'fool' option was quite clear.
This ill-chosen title was followed by a lot of ill-thought-out comment, most of which poured scorn on his pariah status as a 'high school drop-out'. That was the disingenuous part as later reports revealed. Not quite a lie, but a deft piece of 'spin' on the actual reason for Snowden's lack of a high school diploma.
This reductive label meant that Snowden was first stoned by the snobbery of his generational peers. His greater crime seemed to be that he wasn't 'one of us' and worse, here was a young man, a true non-conformist to the bien pensant pretend Left, a young American man who was damaging Barack Obama in a way that rendered their usual cry of 'racist' utterly impotent. I could almost hear the shuffling feet as the thread was allowed to wither on the vine, as the veil surrounding the activities of the NSA began to lift in this mix of metaphors I do so enjoy.
Assange gave us, or rather Bradley (Chelsea) Manning - ironically possessed of bigger balls than Julian - gave us truly horrific and graphic video of a TV crew mown down by fire from above. But even the most rabid critic of US intervention in Iraq knew that they weren't witnessing a crime (except as a purple description of a terrible mistake). The knowledge that a Yemeni defence minister didn't like Oreos must have come as scant comfort to those who had been promised world-changing information. The world did not change, though a few minor diplomats did suffer deep but temporary embarrassment.
So why all the fuss about this high school drop-out, peevishly dismissed as a no-mark, not worth the fuel of military jets in a poor joke that Obama thought was worth telling in public? Why even bother about an odd-job man of no importance, yet one worthy of disparaging by none other than the leader of the free world?
Well now we know why.
I immediately thought of Barbara Streisand's oceanside mansion. As indeed a lot of non-Streisand fans did as they rushed to Google Earth to see it for themselves.
Quote Originally Posted by Accidental Ajarn
View Post (http://www.ajarnforum.net/vb/international-news/76231-clemency-for-snowden.html#post1868952)
if he had done with he did during the Bush years he would have been a huge star and media darling of the left, but since he did his stuff during Obama's time, it is difficult for the left to re