We previously discussed how terribly confused Hillary Clinton appeared in discussing National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. She just could not understand why he would not have trusted the government to deal with any problems or why he would not come back to the United States. Now, Secretary of State John Kerry is offering his own brand of macho advice to the kid: “man up and come back to the United States.” Sure leaders have called for him to be tried as a traitor and either incarcerated for life or executed. Sure, he is not guaranteed to see all of the evidence used against him or even be guaranteed a federal trial as opposed to a military tribunal. However, Kerry appears ready to give him an “attaboy” on his way to solitary confinement under Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) that cut off virtually any contact with the outside world.
As we discussed with Clinton, the ruling class in Washington finds Snowden perfectly incomprehensible. Every aspect of our political system has long been tied down and controlled by the two parties. For such leaders, someone like Snowden is nothing short of an alien visitation — someone who throws away his career and possible freedom for what he claims to be principle. To make matters worse, Snowden is viewed as a whistleblower, if not a hero, by many in the United States and around the world. (However, polls in the U.S. are conflicting. A majority are glad that the disclosures were made but other polls show that a majority believes Snowden should stand trial. Making things even more precarious for people like Clinton is that younger people have particularly rallied to the side of Snowden as a whistleblower). While President Obama implausibly claimed that he would have reviewed these abusive programs without Snowden’s disclosures, Snowden was clearly the cause of multiple investigations and reforms of these programs.
Snowden committed the ultimate crime in Washington: he embarrassed leadership in both parties. He broke the rules and went outside of a carefully controlled duopoly system of control. He embarrassed many, including Clinton, who sat by quietly as the national security system invaded the privacy of every American citizen. Indeed, for people in the establishment who have spent their lives reinforcing that system, someone like Snowden is more than an anomaly. He is someone who not only broke the rules but threw away his career to make these disclosures. For people like Clinton and Kerry, he could just as well be a man from Mars.
Kerry said that Snowden really needs to “stand up in the United States and make his case to the American people.” Indeed, Kerry declared that “A patriot would not run away. … He can come home but he’s a fugitive from justice.” Like Clinton, Kerry cannot imagine why Snowden would not trust the system: “If he cares so much about America and he believes in America, he should trust the American system of justice.”
As someone who has held top clearances since the Reagan administration, I do not support the release of classified information. However, as someone who has litigated national security cases from terrorism to espionage cases, there is every reason for Snowden to be leery of our system as it currently stands in the post 9-11 world. I have great faith and love for our legal system, but national security law has become increasingly draconian and outcome determinative due to various changes in the last decade. This Administration has continued the use of secret legal opinions and secret evidence in cases. The agencies continue to classify information to prevent the public or defendants from reviewing potentially embarrassing or conflicting material. President Obama has refused to close tribunal proceedings and maintains the same claim of his inherent authority to decide whether people go to real courts or the widely ridiculed tribunal proceedings. Even if in the federal system, the government would hit Snowden with SAMs to cut off any contact and impose limitations on even his cleared counsel in speaking with him. At trial, federal judges are increasingly barring arguments from defendants as “immaterial” even when those arguments are the real reason for their actions.
Thus, the Justice Department would likely move to exclude arguments that disclosure was necessary because Snowden had no real alternative for reform. He might be even prevented from arguing that he was seeking to protect citizens from the systemic and comprehensive denial of privacy. Even if some of that motivational argument were allowed, it would likely trigger an instruction that that is no defense to the charges. Sentencing enhancements routinely used by the Justice Department would guarantee a life sentence if convicted for Snowden.
As for utilizing the system to make these disclosures before he fled, Snowden had little reason to trust the congressional oversight committees or the agencies themselves. Just for the record, as many of you know, I represented the prior whistleblower who first revealed this program years before Snowden. He tried to use the system. Happily he was not charged and is doing well. However, as I have testified in Congress, the whistleblower system referred to by Clinton is a colossal joke. First, there are exceptions under the whistleblower laws for national security information. Second, the House and Senate oversight committees are viewed as the place that whistleblowers go to get arrested. There is a revolving door of staff back and forth to the intelligence agencies and people like Dianne Feinstein have denounced Snowden as a traitor. While one can still criticize Snowden for breaking classification laws, the suggestion that he could have used the whistleblower system is hardly self-evident if you are familiar with the laws or the history of such cases.
Whatever Snowden decides, it is clear that if he returns he will be quickly put in isolation and would be virtually certain of conviction with a life sentence. That is assuming that some leaders do not get their way in calling for a death penalty case. That is certain a lot to “man up” to.
Obama is no fool. Obama is no coward.
He knew exactly what the West Point response would be. West Point was the appropriate place to give this foreign policy speech.
What do you want.? A president who shows up in a ‘remarkable’ flight suit on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier with a ‘Mission Accomplished” banner marking the Beginning of the Butchering of many hundreds of thousands and the giving away of Billions? Did those bells and whistles make your heart soar?
One thing you can be counted on for is denigrating someone with something they were not responsible for. The mission accomplished banner was for the ship not the President. Plus, the President was wearing a flight suit because he had just landed a plane on the carrier.
Most people are calling Obama’s foreign policy speech a move backward in policy.
Quite a tepid review of the speech. Any port in a storm, I guess.
Laser
West Point is perfectly suitable for a speech about foreign policy. I like that he gave it in a place of military pride. Bush, and maybe others, have done the same. Bush just had a different message – pre-emptive war. I like Obama’s better.
Here is an article from Foreign Policy:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/05/29/obama_s_west_point_speech_is_our_problem_not_his_us_foreign_policy
Exerpt:
“Do we need to be reminded that the president has been the Extricator-in-Chief from the beginning? That his strategic objective has been to get America out of the two longest and among the most profitless wars in its history?
Do we need to be told that he is determined to get the United States out of these wars and not get America into new ones? Or that the relationship between means and ends and the relationship between the application of American military power and the end state is open-ended and unclear?
…
This is a president convinced that most of the challenges America faces don’t have easy solutions; instead, they have unpredictable outcomes. But many Americans still cling to the notion that their country can do what it wants, when it wants. Clearly, Obama doesn’t believe the United States can hit these home runs. So, to use his baseball metaphor, it’s singles and doubles.
This isn’t the stuff of which foreign-policy legacies and legends are made. But if Guantanamo is closed, if a compelling deal with Iran is made, if a robust and effective counterterrorism policy is maintained that deters and hunts down al Qaeda, if Putin is checked in Eastern Europe, and if Bashar al-Assad is weakened over time, that would be pretty good. ”
_______________________________________________
Harris, brilliant.
Laser, As Commander and Chief he knows he is losing what little support[25%] he has w/ the military due to this VA scandal. That’s why he flew to Afghanistan and why he made the West Point speech. However, the West Point speech was panned by the NYT and WashPo as clueless. Obama is a speech maker in chief. When he’s in trouble he gives a speech. Well, “The thrill is gone, the thrill is gone, baby.” When you play your trump card and the mainstream press, which were sycophants the first term, turn on you, it is the beginning of the end. It is going to be a disastrous midterm and second term.
I find it noteworthy that the good Professor is staying in tune with such a lengthy thread; even but to enforce civility.
Max 1
The quotes are priceless and telltale.
I concur with the reflections that our Government keeps getting it wrong – in this particular case; and that SOS Kerry is exposed as bad bark for badness sake.
Of course West Point Cadette(s) are going to have less than favorable views of a Commander who is slowing down the military complex. Such students are being taught by the military (and needed so) to be leaders of the military in current war strategies, weapons etc., etc.
They are “vested” in defense and war!
But they only – Advance up the promotional ladder (to General some day)
Through WAR!
My question is – why did POTUS go their in the 1st place?
Bettykath, Snowden is indeed already in prison. It would be most wise of him not to return to the states.
I’ve seen the Ted talk that he did a few months ago and he is one brave person. Some people get confused as to where others stand when it comes to being a Democrat with liberal principles and being a person who is against unwarranted spying on one’s own countrymen. One can hold both principles simultaneously.
SWM, I had heard Ellsberg praise Snowden soon after Greenwald broke the story. So, when I heard mortician Kerry condemn Snowden and praise Ellsberg I wondered what Ellsberg thought about that. Thanks for answering the question. And, thank you for directing the discussion away from madness and back on topic.
Opinions may, or may not, be facts.
As a scientist and licensed Wisconsin Professional Engineer whose license requires that I work in accord with the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers, I would put my license at risk if ever I confused opinions with facts.
FACT: The NSA can not turn on any cellular telephone in to a microphone; whenever I want to deny to the NSA the ability to turn on one of my cellular telephones, I remove the battery and wrap the cellular telephone in a few layers of heavy aluminum foil.
Another FACT: I want the NSA to be very aware of my bioengineering research work and its findings. Yet another FACT: I want to be not-anoymous regarding my bioengineering research centered on the relationships of society with cultures with nation-states with both personal and pubic safety.
For me and for my work in bioengineering, this Turley blog thread has provided me with the basis for an interesting metadata study, using information readily available to the public (the comments posted on this thread) regarding the relationship of ethics to morality.
In my work, I parse human conduct, in terms of ethics and in terms of morality, into that which is deemed to be ethical through social/cultural group conscience, and into that which is moral through individual conscience.
Ethics, Is, as I have been able to observe, of group norms, and is an extrinsic aspect of individual human persons, whereas morality, as I have been able to observe, is of individual intrinsic conscience.
Group conscience allows the American Psychiatric Association, through its DSM-5â„¢, to define me as a person with a Neurodevelopmental Disorder, specifically, Autism Spectrum Disorder (DSM-5â„¢ code 299.00 or ICD-10-CM code F.84.0). That diagostic label is the result of a social reality ethical consensus effort on the part of the authors of the DSM-5â„¢, and it, as an exercise of extrinsic group consensus ethically-defined reality conflicts immensely with my intrinsic, inborn, “moral compass.”
My intrinsic and inborn moral compass informs me that deception, and the dishonesty that causes and sustains deception, is the actual mental disorder, and that rigorously truthful honesty is the antithesis of a mental or personal or social disorder.
In my bioengineering work, it is the traumatic indoctrination of social-convention-based social norms inherent to the social construction of reality which is the essence and the essential process of the so-called infant-child transition (aka, the terrible twos?) that damages or destroys the inherent, inborn moral compass with which I find that all human persons are inescapably born. The neurological trauma of that transition results in people learning to replace inborn and innate morality with a socially concocted set of ethical constructs in the form of psychological defenses which distort objective reality “in the service of the person’s socially-generated (Freudian-type?) Ego” through neurologically damaging socially-mandated forms of dishonesty which, through ethical conventions, masquerade with self-referential entrapment as honesty defined through dishonesty.
The human enigma of morality and ethics is, for me, an aspect of the incompleteness of human biological and social evolution; for social convention, as I have experienced it during my 75 some years of living surrounded by people whose mental disorder seems to me to be of autism insufficiency stemming from traumatic moral injuries stemming from existential ignorance of what human socialization trauma truly is, is of a human-species-transcending existential predicament as to how to accurately recognize and note (or, accurately observe) and share, what is, and what is not, scientifically accurate understanding of what is, and is not, actually true.
The seeming conflicts which this Turley blog thread may have evoked are evidence of the disparate ways whereby differences in individual socialization sequence experiences lead to people forming clusters in which the traumas of socialization are gathered into diverse and disparate ethical systems, which, being grounded in neurological, hence moral, injuries, cannot other than be in conflict with one another.
Some ethical codes, as I have been able to observe, define deception and dishonesty as ethical mandates; however, not all ethical codes define deception and dishonesty as not being deceptive or dishonest in the same ways; hence ethical codes tend to conflict with other ethical codes, and bullying seems to me to be the only way whereby humans have learned to impose any particular ethical code on a group of people as a form of fiat conscience.
Snowden is a whistleblower and a hero and he already has done his “man up” bit. He’s already in prison. He’s in a foreign country away from family and friends and without the possibility of travel lest he end up in a detention center. He also has to watch his back for kidnappers, e.g. MI6 (or is MI5?). He made a great sacrifice for us.
“As for Kerry saying that — I’d say a man that I once admired, that was a long time ago — the statement that he made on [MSNBC] that Edward Snowden is a coward, a traitor, and he betrayed his country is one of the most despicable statements I have heard from a politician or anyone else who I can remember. It is very much to his discredit and I think very much the less of him.”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/29/daniel-ellsberg-john-kerry-snowden_n_5412980.html
A month or so ago, Vogue did an article about Snowden, his decision to reveal the surveillance program, and the events around the time of his going public. Fascinating. It tells the extraordinary steps the Guardian had to take to protect the documents Snowden had given them (kept in a vault on computers that had never been connected to the internet).
The most chilling part: The NSA can turn any cellphone into a microphone – even if it’s been turned off.
No, no, wait; even more chilling: They can turn plastic cups in a room into listening devices.
Darren Smith,
I figured it out!
Less trash retrieval requests from me in the future… 🙂
Once before, the White House refused to man up about a FIOA request…
https://twitter.com/MuckRock/statuses/472089981004292096
Max-1 – And you are surprised that the administration, the most transparent administration evah, exempted the emails from a FOIA request?
“Man up,” he said?
Edward Snowden responds to release of e-mail by U.S. officials
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/edward-snowden-responds-to-release-of-e-mail-by-us-officials/2014/05/29/95137e1c-e781-11e3-afc6-a1dd9407abcf_story.html
Getting back on topic…
I’m now considering writing my Congressman a letter insisting he “man up” about abusive Administrations.
Sorry… forgot the “QUOTES”
If this helps…
http://jonathanturley.org/civility-rule/
Frankly, while I have limited time to monitor the site, I will delete abusive comments when I see them or when they are raised to me. If the conduct continues, I will consider banning the person responsible. However, such transgressions should be raised with me by email and not used as an excuse to trash talk or retaliate.