Snowden: DOJ Won't Prosecute Official For Lying, But Will Stop At Nothing To Persecute Someone For Telling The Truth
from the unfortunately-revealing dept
As you hopefully have heard by now, a group of US intelligence community whistleblowers traveled to Moscow last week to present Ed Snowden with the Integrity Award from the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. As I saw mentioned (and repeated) on Twitter, this image of all of them together is like the Justice League of Whistleblowers. Wikileaks has now released some short video clips from the dinner they all had together. A few of them are quite interesting. Here's the one I thought most on point:It's led us to a point in our relationship with the government, where we have an executive -- a Department of Justice -- that's unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to Congress and the country on camera, but they'll stop at nothing to persecute someone who told them the truth. And that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.That encapsulates so much of what the problem is with everything that's happened in the past few months. It's a point well worth repeating. The other video I really liked was the one where Snowden talked about the problem of secret laws and secret programs and the idea that the government is supposed to be in power with the consent of the governed, but how that's impossible without oversight.
This is not about any particular program. This is about a trend in the relationship between the governing and the governed in Amercia, that is coming increasingly into conflict with what we expect as a free and democratic society. If we can't understand the policies and programs of our government, we cannot grant our consent in regulating them....Snowden has mostly stayed hidden away from the public eye since all of this began. He's turned down basically all interview requests, so there's been very little shown of him actually speaking, other than the initial video he recorded with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. Once again, these videos show someone who appears to have thought deeply about what he is doing and why he did it.
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Filed Under: democracy, doj, ed snowden, lies, nsa, nsa surveillance, sam adams award, truth
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I bet the food tester for this dinner had his life insurance premiums paid up.
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/s
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"Guarding [against] the guardians" is impossible, period.
Gov't is" "Like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearsome master." -- George Washington ("fearful" changed to "fearsome" for more modern usage.)
And as ever: Who controls gov't? -- The Rich. Not coincidentally, they too are inherently evil, not least when inherit so much wealth as puts them above all reach of law, let alone ordinary competition in a free market.
SO, though true and stirring, it's yet more diversion.
The cure is simple (just not easy): indict, try, and JAIL the criminals. Nothing short of that will affect the rest of the criminals or prevent them from ratcheting up the surveillance. Anything which distracts from the known simple fix isn't helpful. It's mere NPR-style "concerned" discussion about well-known trends.
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Re: "Guarding [against] the guardians" is impossible, period.
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Re: "Guarding [against] the guardians" is impossible, period.
Sigh...
The US allows people to buy and carry assault weapons and body armour. The solution is actually quite simple and effective: instead of using them to shoot children in a school, shoot some man-children (as in, government staff) in congress or senate or something.
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Re: Re: "Guarding [against] the guardians" is impossible, period.
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Re: Re: Re: "Guarding [against] the guardians" is impossible, period.
Otherwise, your only option is to rely on a corrupt system to judge those that corrupted the system in the first place. I think we can both agree that that will go nowhere: you still solved nothing and your government is still getting worse.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: "Guarding [against] the guardians" is impossible, period.
Imagine what the stock market would do if a third of the population went on strike because they were protesting the excess of the government. Play the market all you want with your short sells, there is only so far you can go before it all falls apart. Someone, somewhere, caves; the demands of the protestors get met.
Violence is a useful threat to have on the back-burner, but it is the last resort for when all other options have been not just tried but exhausted and still found wanting. Those options include waiting for something to swing the balance of some other method in your favor, by the way.
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Re: "Guarding [against] the guardians" is impossible, period.
The corrupt love this approach, they just have to push a scapegoat and they can deflect all the public outrage away from anything that would actually bring about change. If you are going to insist on this approach, be very careful to make sure you get all the criminals, including all those who aided and abetted the primary actors.
Or we could go about the process of patching the system and providing greater transparency so that it will be easier to maintain. It is a longer and harder fight, but the results are correspondingly longer lasting.
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Re: "Guarding [against] the guardians" is impossible, period.
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Edward Snowden > Julian Assange
Assange, on the other hand, has been basking in the limelight ever since wikileaks released the cables Manning gave them. Julian only seems interested in his own notoriety/fame, instead of considering that his actions might get people killed (As far as I know, there haven't been any American deaths because of the cables, but I'd be willing to bet that at least a few US assets found themselves on the wrong end of a gun because of the info dump from wikileaks).
I almost want Hollywood to make a movie about Snowden instead of Assange (which will almost certainly overdramatize the impact of what wikileaks did, making people less sympathetic toward whistleblowers like Snowden as a result), but that'd be taking the focus away from the importance of the documents he sent to the Greenwald/Gellman/Poitras.
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Re: Edward Snowden > Julian Assange
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Re: Edward Snowden > Julian Assange
You almost want the propaganda machine of the US to make a movie about what they consider the biggest "enemy" of the US* right now?
I hope you're gunning for a comedy, because what you're gonna get is a factless, baseless and one-sided narrative.
* US government, not the US people
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Re: Re: Edward Snowden > Julian Assange
Since shooting at secrecies covering over conspiracies has been basically 50 % of the non-comedies through the 20th century, that is probably the one thing Hollywood will not stand for. Self-censoring is a beast the writers will not use. If enough of them writes stories with some basis in reality, even the bigwig studios will be forced to take angled stories around too much surveillance.
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Re: Edward Snowden > Julian Assange
This is not a race. Quit diverting from the real problem: governmental institutions doing wrong things.
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The idea of those at the heads of various branches have exposed through cover-up, lying, and misdirection, have spoken loudly and the message resonates with the public as one they don't like.
No valid justification has surfaced for all the spying over personal communications beyond "we can". Couple that with the latest performance of Congress over the debt extension and you get an accurate picture of a government that no longer cares for it's people nor represents them.
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They try to paint the picture as though it's "US" (republicans or democrats) vs. "THEM" (the party not chosen before) and some people will try to say that it's a RICH vs. POOR issue, and while they're not too far off, it's a RULER vs. PEASANT issue here, and if you're not in the government, then you're a peasant (and even some people who are in the government are considered peasants)... They don't think they need to tell us the truth or answer to the laws that they make in our name. Unless and until we get every incumbent out and elect PEASANTS willing to do the work to right the ship, then we deserve all the fists the government tries to shove up our ass...
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Maybe...don't vote for anyone who gets campaign funding by one of those 1,000 donors?
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next great idea ? ? ?
(Hint: the electoral process is both a closed shop, figuratively 'fixed', and literally 'fixed'... that way lies madness...
hmmm, what does that leave us ? ? ?
hmmmmm...)
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It does, more often than you might think. But more importantly, money is very effective at keeping others from voting at all even when they are strongly motivated to.
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Money may not cast votes, but it does buy TV time, etc.. In the end, it buys a position on the ballot. The only president I voted for with no reservations was Jimmy Carter. Every one since has been in the pocket of large political fund raisers and donors.
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biochip implants that enable torture
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the very situation we have at the moment with the USA and the threats it puts out to countries who do not want to accept the so-called 'Trade Agreements' that are continuously being conducted in secret, as far as the public are concerned, that are detrimental not only to citizens everywhere but also to businesses everywhere as well, except those of the USA!
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Creeped out
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the brain initiative = the great deception
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Hampton, Newport News and Virginia state police
“Former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director and now Google Executive, Regina E. Dugan, has unveiled a super small, ingestible microchip that we can all be expected to swallow by 2017. “A means of authentication,” she calls it, also called an electronic tattoo, which takes NSA spying to whole new levels. She talks of the ‘mechanical mismatch problem between machines and humans,’ and specifically targets 10 – 20 year olds in her rant about the wonderful qualities of this new technology that can stretch in the human body and still be functional. Hailed as a ‘critical shift for research and medicine,’ these biochips would not only allow full access to insurance companies and government agencies to our pharmaceutical med-taking compliancy (or lack thereof), but also a host of other aspects of our lives which are truly none of their business, and certainly an extension of the removal of our freedoms and rights.” Google News
The ARRA authorizes payments to the states in an effort to encourage Medicaid Providers to adopt and use “certified EHR technology” aka biochips. ARRA will match Medicaid $5 for every $1 a state provides. Hospitals are paid $2 million to create “crisis stabilization wards” (Gitmo’s) where state police torture people – even unto death. They stopped my heart 90 times in 6 hours. Virginia Beach EMT’s were called to the scene.
Mary E. Schloendorff, v. The Society of New York Hospital 105 N. E. 92, 93 (N. Y. 1914) Justice Cardozo states, “every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body; and a surgeon who performs an operation without his patient’s consent, commits an assault, for which he is liable in damages. (Pratt v Davis, 224 Ill. 300; Mohr v Williams, 95 Minn. 261.)
This case precedent requires police to falsely arrest you or kidnap you and call you a mental health patient in order to force the implant on you. You can also be forced to have a biochip if you have an infectious disease – like Eboli or Aids. Coalition of Justice vs the City of Hampton, VA settled a case out of court for $500,000 and removal of the biochip. Torture is punishable by $1,000 per day up to $2 million; Medical battery is worth $2.05 million.
They told my family it was the brain initiative. This requires informed, knowledgeable consent. Mark Warner told me it was research with the Active Denial System by the College of William and Mary, the USAF, and state and local law enforcement. It is called IBEX and it is excruciating. If you are an organ donor, they volunteer you.
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