The desperate efforts of Congress to change the public view of Edward Snowden appears to be continuing. This week someone in the Senate attempted to change the description of Snowden as a “dissident” to a “traitor” on Wikipedia. The White House and congressional leaders are clearly alarmed that many view Snowden as a whistleblower. The media groups like NPR previously yielded to pressure not to call Snowden a whistleblower and instead use the less flattering term “leaker.” However, that is not enough because it does not seem to have helped.
Snowden’s disclosures have embarrassed President Obama and congressional democrats, including Democratic members, who have been openly misleading the public about warrantless surveillance. While refusing to push for the prosecution of National Intelligence Chief James Clapper for perjury in earlier testimony, they are demanding that Snowden be tried as a traitor. These are politicians who know that optics are everything when spinning a scandal. It is essential for them to have Snowden referenced in the least flattering ways like “traitor” or “criminal” as opposed to “dissident” or “whistleblower.” The same tactics have been used with regard to Julian Assange. Media outlets have yielded to demands that he never be called a journalist or a whistleblower. He is simply defined as “an Assange.”
The attempt by the person in the Senate to change the description of Snowden was blocked by a keen eye of an editor. The person’s IP address was tracked back to the US Senate and the change was attempted one day after Snowden was granted political asylum in Russia.
In the meantime, Sen. Charles Schumer (D., NY) is calling Putin a “bully” for protecting Snowden. Of course, the United States has been threatening nations to cut off humanitarian aid and trade if they grant asylum to Snowden. It is the U.S. government that has been spying on every citizen without warrants and threatening journalists disclosing such abusive programs. It is the U.S. government who put reporters under surveillance and lied to the public. Schumer has nothing to say about that, but Putin is a bully. The funny thing is that Putin is a bully. A well-documented, unabashed bully. However, Democratic Senators have no moral standing to be denouncing others after their shameless role in the erosion civil liberties in this country. Once the party most associated with fighting for privacy and civil liberties, Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi are fighting to reinforce a growing security state apparatus in the country. They are joined by Republicans who followed a similar blind loyalty to George Bush in the prior administration. Even Senators like Al Franken are speaking out in favor of these massive surveillance systems and attacking Snowden.
The problem is that the public is not buying it. They are the subjects of these surveillance systems and polls show that the public is now more fearful of their own government’s attack on privacy than they are terrorists. That is why Snowden has to be mocked and vilified and ultimately tried as a criminal. They know that in the eyes of voters either Snowden is a traitor and a villain, then they are.
Source: Daily Mail
If he is a whistle blower, which countries does he chose to blow the whistle from? Why chose them? Think over it.
No one can read Snowden’s mind and we keep heaping on him titles.
The real traitors are the people betraying the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights
As seen on another site:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2013/08/05/a-new-kind-of-bicameral-legislature/
“As another byproduct of the Edward Snowden revelations, it has become clear that the real legislative division in the US is not between the House of Representatives and the Senate but between an Insider Congress and an Outsider Congress.”
[…]
“There is an inner coterie of people who are in the leadership and who get secret briefings and support the government’s programs and its secrecy, and there are the rest who are stonewalled when they ask for information, and yet are expected to vote on issues without knowing what is going on.”
A government of the few, by the few and for the few. It’s only a “republic” if you mean only the wealthy have rights, the rest are chattel and slaves.
Off Topic:
DEA Special Operations Division Covers Up Surveillance Used To Investigate Americans: Report
Reuters | Posted: 08/05/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/05/dea-surveillance-cover-up_n_3706207.html
Excerpt:
By John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke
WASHINGTON, Aug 5 (Reuters) – A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
Interesting continuity of govt. ”
Leaks and the Law
The case for prosecuting the New York Times.
Jul 3, 2006, Vol. 11, No. 40 • By GABRIEL SCHOENFELD
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CAN JOURNALISTS REALLY BE PROSECUTED for publishing national security secrets? In the wake of a series of New York Times stories revealing highly sensitive counterterrorism programs, that question is increasingly the talk of newsrooms across the country, and especially one newsroom located on West 43rd Street in Manhattan.
Last December, in the face of a presidential warning that they would compromise ongoing investigations of al Qaeda, the Times revealed the existence of an ultrasecret terrorist surveillance program of the National Security Agency and provided details of how it operated. Now, once again in the face of a presidential warning, the Times has published a front-page article disclosing a highly classified U.S. intelligence program that successfully penetrated the international bank transactions of al Qaeda terrorists.
Although the editors of the Times act as if prosecution is not a possibility, not everyone concurs. One person who is still mulling the matter over is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Asked in late May about the prospect of prosecuting the Times and others who publish classified information, he by no means ruled it out. “There are some statutes on the books,” he said, “which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility.”
Unsurprisingly, given what is at stake, even that tentative opinion elicited a fire and brimstone denunciation from the Times. An editorial on May 24 dismissed as “bizarre” the attorney general’s “claim that a century-old espionage law could be used to muzzle the press.” It has long been understood, added the newspaper, that the “overly broad and little used” Espionage Act of 1917 applies only to government officials and “not to journalists.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/385jqmfk.asp
Dredd, A horrible song! You should go to the Wi. DNR Facebook page. They took it down last week but under pressure have put it back up. There are some poignant and hilarious comments ridiculing the gestapo for killing that fawn. The DNR put up a post about the hazards of blue/green algae. Someone commented, “Then shoot it!”
nick spinelli 1, August 5, 2013 at 5:00 pm
Come on, folks! Chucky is just carrying on the legacy of the guy he beat, Al D’Amato.
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Come on, folks! Chucky is just carrying on the legacy of the guy he beat, Al D’Amato.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D., NY) is a worthless, treasonous turd stain on the under pants of NYS (and the nation) who would sell his own mother out for political expediency.
Mr. Schumer is a shill for the corporate warfare, prison, surveillance state who thinks nothing of stealing your earnings under the guise of taxation in order to continue the regressive wealth re-distribution scheme he calls good governance.
How have your families fortunes fared beginning in 1983 and the 98th US Congress when our darling turd stain Mr. Schumer first took office?
For better or for worse?
Schumer: one of those New Yorkies who know everything.
Chuck, Chuck, bo buck, banana fanna fo schmuck, fee fi big schmuck.
Schumer! If the first two letters are ever the same..
Ya drop both and say the name,
Like bob fob f so rob and mary mary life is contrary.
So. Schumer is a big ol schmuck
He has an old lady who lives on a truck.
Its up Chuck, he is a schmuck.
He’s a red fed with a big old head.
etc
Max-1,
That video pulls together so much information and implications of that information. Thanks for posting it.
This is shocking: “…the State Department and the Pentagon have been unable to come up with a strategy for the trial or repatriation of men from more than a dozen countries held at Bagram. Meanwhile, the population in the prison is growing because of the apprehension of foreign fighters in joint U.S.-Afghan Special Forces operations. The newest detainee was sent to Bagram last month.
None of the prisoners have been formally tried. Many have been cleared for release by informal military review boards, but most of those were never freed.
Because the detention center is on Afghan soil, U.S. forces are technically obliged to shutter it when their combat role here formally ends in December 2014. But some U.S. officials and politicians say that would pose an enormous security risk.
The best solution, they say, is to keep the facility open under U.S. oversight, possibly for decades. It is not at all clear, though, that the Afghans will permit that.
As at Guantanamo, U.S. officials have deemed a portion of the Bagram prisoners too much of a threat to send home to countries that can’t or won’t keep them locked up. Officials worry that it might not be possible to convict the men in U.S. courts, because evidence could be classified or seen as weak.
“They’re too dangerous to let go,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a reservist Air Force lawyer who was appointed last month by Dunford to consider solutions to the detention dilemma.
“We’re a nation without an available jail in the war on terror, and we need to fix that,” Graham said in an interview.” (get from Glenn’s twitter)
A brief history of time:
(Van Buren, Huffpo).
Thanks for everyone’s links/info. Here is another:
“US embassy closures used to bolster case for NSA surveillance programs
Congress told that NSA monitoring led to interception of al-Qaida threats but privacy campaigners fear ulterior political motives”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/05/us-embassy-closure-nsa-surveillance
I also found this bit of history yesterday: “”The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=0
The Aug. 6 memo, PDB was leaked. No one was called a traitor or had to flee the country over that. It was a fairly damaging PDB, Bin Lauden Determined to Attack…
If that memo had been leaked today, what would have happened?
Reblogged this on PUMABydesign001's Blog and commented:
Good for Wikipedia. Just because Obama and his minions say it do not make it so. Edward Snowden is a whistleblower and for that he is under attack. He did the American people a service by exposing the sins of an administration that went rogue from day one.
Jumping off of bigfatmike’s post:
The court’s judges are appointed solely by the Supreme Court Chief Justice without confirmation or oversight by the U.S. Congress. (no checks and balances there either)
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/09/john_roberts_scary_secret_powers/
Jill’s linked article contains this gem:
“A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said.
“PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION”
After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as “parallel construction.” ”
Pretty amazing all in all and apparently parallel construction is a long standing method of law enforcement:
“The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. “Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day,” one official said. “It’s decades old, a bedrock concept.”
A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.”
I’m flabbergasted. It’s way too early to be flabbergasted. Is this really typical law enforcement methodology because like some of the folks interviewed in the article allege it sounds to me, on its face, unconstitutional?
Jill 1, August 5, 2013 at 10:02 am
dredd,
That is interesting. And I thought USGinc. wasn’t supposed to propagandize our citizens (although now that is perfectly “legal”!).
Why is someone from the senate propagandizing us?
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See the video about “Rise of the Warrior Cop” here.