Discussion: Kerry On Snowden: 'Patriots' Don't Seek Asylum, 'They Fight Their Cause Here'

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Discussion for article #223228

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BOOM!!

You tell that traitorous fuck what time it is, Kerry!

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Snowden wants the glory of being a martyr–except for the icky dying part.

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“If this man is a patriot, he should stay in the United States and make his case.”

Right Senator, make his case. From where, solitary confinement?

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Mr. Kerry conveniently forgets that the US now claims torture is legal (Bybee memos), Guantanamo is America (prisoners held without charge or trial), and citizens can be summarily executed (by angry drones and secret emails). Why would Snowden want to submit himself to such extreme extra-judicial behavior? Please explain.

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Not very dignified when a government official trolls on television.

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Always makes me laugh to hear Snowden or others complain that the only reason he is in Russia is because the US canceled his passport. Because the US should allow criminals to travel freely wherever they wish to go when avoiding criminal prosecution. Heck, I guess the US should have purchased a direct ticket for him to his destination in South America, so that he wouldn’t even have been inconvenienced by a stop over in Cuba…

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So to be clear, you don’t think that the US should have killed Anwar al-Awlaki, even though he was obviously a terrorist causing direct and indirect harm to American citizens, just because he was born in America? The US had no way of extracting him from Yemen. Should they have just marked him off limits and let him continue his terrorist actions?

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No, what he is saying is that when the constitutional guarantee of due process no longer implies judicial due process, it would be foolish to come back to the US to see what form “due process” would take in his case.

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He could have, I don’t know, kept his disclosures on point about what he considered inappropriate spying by the NSA on US citizens. Instead, he felt the need to disclose legitimate intelligence operations, whether you or he approve of them or not. There are many ways that he could have revealed his information differently, and stayed in the US to make his case. Would he have been jailed? Most certainly. If he had stuck to surveillance on US citizens, revealed it, leaked it, broadcast it, while remaining in the US to make his case, he would have more support, and he would have had his day in court.

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Either that or general population, I’m okay with either.

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Due process no longer applies? In what sense do you make that claim? Habeas Corpus is in effect, they don’t disappear US citizens, regardless of what the Internets may say. If he had revealed what he knew about surveillance on US citizens, he would have certainly been arrested, but the information would have been out, just as it is now. The difference being, he wouldn’t have revealed states secrets regarding legitimate intelligence operations, and he could have made his case in court.

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I doubt Snowden’s due process would include suspension of habeas, summary execution by drone or torture with an itchy blanket.

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Jose Padilla

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Had his day in court and is appealing his sentence.

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And was ‘disappeared’ for nearly 4 years where he was subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation’.

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Who can say what the evidence is? Do you have the full story? I think not. What you are repeating is the Govt Line, and we know that isn’t always perfect or objective (ref: Jessica Lynch Rescue Story, Saddam’s Yellow Cake, ad nauseum). Where is the evidence and judicial activity? Do you really want Federal Execution by Secret Memo? If so, why not do the same to some white-collar executives of Wall St. banks that took down an economy? That was bloody stuff that sure seems criminal. (And it’s clear you skipped the other 2 elements of my brief post.) It’s perfectly logical to not fully trust the Federal Security Establishment. Would you?

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Yet he still got his day in court, did he not? Has there been another case like Padilla’s under the current administration?

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“What he’s done is expose for terrorists a lot of mechanisms which now affect operational security of those terrorists and make it harder for the United States to break up plots, harder to protect our nation.”

Simply untrue. This is scaremongering of Cheney-esque proportions. Kerry is disgracing himself and the president.

What Snowden has certainly done is expose extraordinary and, it may be, unconstitutional governmental scrutiny and collection of private communications between US citizens.

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His day in court, perhaps just like those saps in Guantanamo. What would prevent that? Nothing. Current war powers give the Feds the ability to go to extremes. NSA spying excesses have proved that.

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