Will Obama Pardon Ed Snowdon? Can Obama Pardon Ed Snowdon?

https://jonathanturley.org/2016/11/21/pardon-me-obama-wrongly-states-that-he-cannot-pardon-edward-snowdon/

He should do it. The incoming Trump administration will fuck Snowdon if they get the chance. With Trump's & Tillerson's close personal ties with Putin, Snowdon just might find his Moscow lease up.

Posts : 139 Join date : 2015-06-28

Not a big fan of Snowden; he can stay in exile as far as I'm concerned. But I'd like to see a pardon for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Huh? Bergdahl was not a whistleblower; he was a deserter. Entirely different circumstances.

Posts : 139 Join date : 2015-06-28

Quote :: Entirely different circumstances.

Huh?

So the president can only pardon whistleblowers? I'm just saying that as long as he's got the pardon pen out I'd rather see Bergdahl and a bunch of non-violent drug offenders freed than people like Manning and Snowden.

Well you are of course entitled to your opinion -- no matter how wrong it is -- but a soldier trying to save his own skin is a lot less honorable than a highly-paid IT consultant who torpedos his career and risks his own personal freedom to expose wrong-doing by the government.

IMO.

Posts : 139 Join date : 2015-06-28

Quote :: ...who torpedoes his career and risks his own personal freedom to expose wrong-doing by the government.

Fuck him. He broke the law. He violated the terms of his employment. And he didn't even do it with class. He could have selected a few pertinent documents, arranged a meeting with Seymour Hersch or some other independent journalist, and awakened people to what some of what was going on. (Although I don't see why the government should be hampered from amassing data on individuals when corporations are already doing this with impunity.) Instead he releases everything — exposing our intelligence techniques to terrorist networks who were then able to avoid detection — and then, instead of accepting the consequences of his actions, runs away to hide under Putin's skirt. The pitiful Manning isn't much better but at least it's done some prison time.

I can see you're not familiar with his case.

He released NOTHING. He turned over the documents to The Guardian (Glenn Greenwald) and The New York Post (I believe it was), so THEY could vet the information and make sure nothing classified was released. He was very, very careful not to harm anyone or compromise national security -- despite the lies that have been printed about him.

He only ended up in Russia because the US revoked his passport enroute to I believe it was Uruguay -- a friendly nation without extradition to the US -- where he planned to wait out the furor over his releases before returning home.

NoCoPilot wrote:: ...but a soldier trying to save his own skin is a lot less honorable than a highly-paid IT consultant who torpedos his career...IMO.

What we have here is a significant lack of experience.

Fuck Snowden. If he had shown some balls, I might feel differently, but I have no respect for the man.

Manning was held in solitary confinement and subjected to psychological torture for over a year.

For releasing diplomatic cables.

Not even classified information. And you ask why Snowdon elected to put himself out of the government's clutches?

I didn't see anyone here "asking why".

Let's see ... a civilian can run away and you praise him, but a serviceman who tries to save his ass is deserving of your contempt. Have I got that right?

A civilian sacrifices himself for a greater goal, versus a scared soldier deserting his post.

Yes, that's right.

Posts : 139 Join date : 2015-06-28

Thanks for filling me in as to the details, NoCo; I dimly recall those facts now.

Quote :: He turned over the documents to The Guardian

Well, that's what I mean. He turned over too much. Way more than was necessary to make his point. And I don't see it as an act of patriotism or even remotely heroic.

Last edited by NoCoPilot on Thu Jan 19, 2017 1:05 pm; edited 1 time in total

The more you learn about Snowdon's case the more heroic he becomes.

The exhaustive Wikipedia article on him is a good start.

The more I learn about it, the more I realize you continually misspell his name.

SOMEbody does Smile

Huh, it's me. I could've SWORN his was the non-standard spelling. Oh well.

NoCoPilot wrote:: ...a scared soldier deserting his post.

Have you read much about Bergdahl's case, or have you just accepted the Fox News reports?
The conditions surrounding his departure from his unit are complex and it's been hard to pin down exactly what happened. But if you want to continue with your John Wayne attitude, you're in good company: The Machurian Mango says Bergdahl is “a no-good traitor who should have been executed.”

The Army investigation concluded in 2015 that Sergeant Bergdahl had left his outpost intending to hike to another military post and report to an officer there on perceived wrongdoing involving his unit. A sanity board found that he had been suffering from a “severe mental disease or defect” at the time.

No offense intended, NoCo, but you are not qualified to judge Bergdahl.

Okay, I accept that. I've read two books and a dozen articles on Snowden -- however you spell it -- and almost nothing on Bergdahl.

That doesn't change the facts on Snowden.

NoCoPilot wrote:: ...and almost nothing on Bergdahl.

Yet you saw fit to pass judgement on him.

NoCoPilot wrote:: That doesn't change the facts on Snowden.

Well, of course not; they are two different matters. I have no idea why Snowden did what he did, but the manner in which he did it was not brilliant. Had he just copied and released information regarding only the NSA spying program and then stayed around to protest that spying and support his actions, I might feel differently. But his actions after he copied the files was blatant cowardice which greatly diminished the public effect of the documents he released. Had he stayed and fought the good fight, the public would have been more engrossed in the matter and it would have been a more valuable act.

'When Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, he didn't run off and hide, and he had a lot more to lose than did Snowden.

_Howard wrote:: Yet you saw fit to pass judgement on him.

Wikipedia wrote:: A Pentagon investigation in 2010 concluded that Bergdahl walked away from his unit.[31][32][33] Bergdahl wrote e-mails to his parents in which he reported having become disillusioned with the war effort and bothered by the treatment of Afghans by American soldiers. He said in his e-mail he was ashamed to be American.[22] Some sources say he left an explanatory note before leaving, though this was denied. According to soldiers in Bergdahl's platoon, the morning when Bergdahl was discovered to be missing, his equipment was found neatly stacked, with his compass missing.[30]

Slate wrote:: Manning, an Army private who once went by the name Bradley Manning, was arrested in 2010 for supplying 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks, which passed them on to the New York Times and other media. In 2013, she was found guilty of 20 crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and sentenced to 35 years, including the three-plus years already spent in prison, the first of those years under conditions that the U.N. rapporteur on torture denounced as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan denounced Obama’s move as “outrageous” and “a dangerous precedent that those who compromise our national security won’t be held accountable for their crimes,” adding that “Manning’s treachery put American lives at stake and exposed some of our most sensitive secrets.”

This critique is overwrought. First, the presiding judge in Manning’s case, Col. Denise Lind, found her not guilty of “aiding the enemy”—the Army prosecutors’ most serious charge, which could have carried the death penalty. Second, the most highly classified documents in Manning’s cache were marked “secret”—the second-lowest label in the security world—and many were deemed “unclassified but sensitive.” These were not crown jewels by any stretch.

Finally, a damage report conducted by military intelligence officials concluded that Manning’s leaks caused no great harm to U.S. national security, according to officers who read the report.

Manning’s most headline-grabbing leak—and the one that most qualified as an act of whistle-blowing—was a suppressed video of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed two Reuters photographers, whose cameras were mistaken by the pilots for firearms, and several Iraqi civilians in a van who had stopped to help them. (The incident occurred near an actual insurgent attack on American soldiers.) Most of the other documents were diplomatic memos that revealed nothing immoral or criminal but whose release caused embarrassment and, in a few cases, brief setbacks to relations with American allies.

Had Manning been a civilian, she probably would have been sentenced to a few years in jail. However, the military justice system is a very different beast.

Wikipedia wrote:: Snowden was asked in a January 2014 interview about returning to the U.S. to face the charges in court, as Obama had suggested a few days prior. Snowden explained why he rejected the request: "What he doesn't say are that the crimes that he's charged me with are crimes that don't allow me to make my case. They don't allow me to defend myself in an open court to the public and convince a jury that what I did was to their benefit. ... So it's, I would say, illustrative that the President would choose to say someone should face the music when he knows the music is a show trial."[48][246] Snowden's legal representative, Jesselyn Radack, wrote that "the Espionage Act effectively hinders a person from defending himself before a jury in an open court, as past examples show," referring to Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou and Chelsea Manning. Radack said that the "arcane World War I law" was never meant to prosecute whistleblowers, but rather spies who sold secrets to enemies for profit. Under this law, she states, "no prosecution of a non-spy can be fair or just."[247]

On October 29, 2015, the European Parliament voted 285 to 281 for a non-binding resolution for EU states to drop criminal charges against Snowden and prevent his extradition by third parties, in recognition of "his status as [a] whistle-blower and international human rights defender", reflecting fears of mass surveillance from European nations.[248] Snowden responded in Twitter by calling it a "game-changer" and "not a blow against the US government", but rather "a chance to move forward."[249]

Lots of words, NoCo. Was there some specific point you were trying to make?

Not right now. I'll draw you a cartoon later.

Number of soldiers killed looking for Bowe Bergdahl: Six, sorta.

Number of soldiers (or anybody) harmed by Snowden's releases (except to embarrass the US Gov't): none.

Number of soldiers killed looking for Bowe Bergdahl: None.

Posts : 139 Join date : 2015-06-28

Is Snowden a Russian Agent?

He doesn't appear to be but I thought this might be of interest.

Totally without merit. Even a cursory investigation of the facts belies it.

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