One of the former managers of the American surveillance state says Edward Snowden (shown) should be executed for treason, blaming the Paris massacre on Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s unconstitutional surveillance policies and programs.
“It’s still a capital crime, and I would give him the death sentence, and I would prefer to see him hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted,” former CIA Director James Woolsey said during an appearance on CNN on November 19.
Woolsey insists there’s a direct connection between the information revealed in Snowden’s release of classified NSA documents and the intelligence apparatus’s failure to prevent the Paris attacks.
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“I think the blood of a lot of these French young people is on his [Snowden’s] hands,” Woolsey added.
Then, in a bizarre exchange regarding details of Mexican law enforcement efforts to curtail human trafficking allegedly leaked by Snowden, Woolsey asked whether Snowden is “pro-pimp,” referring to those who abduct women for the purpose of forced prostitution.
That tangent aside, Woolsey’s recommendation that Snowden be given the death penalty sounds similar to sentiments expressed by current CIA Director John Brennan one day earlier, during the annual meeting of the Overseas Security Advisory Council.
Referring to Snowden, Brennan said, “He has hurt this country and has helped our enemies. ISIS has clearly gone to school on what they need to do in order to keep their activities concealed from the authorities.”
Brennan claims that the answer to preventing similar slaughters in the future is to ramp up the surveillance and remove the obstacles erected since the Snowden leaks:
In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of handwringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.
I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call particularly in areas of Europe where I think there has been a misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing by some quarters that are designed to undercut those capabilities.
“I think any unauthorized disclosures made by individuals that have dishonored the oath of office, that they have raised their hand and attested to, undermines this nation’s security,” Brennan added. Ironically, Snowden’s unauthorized disclosures exposed the U.S. government’s warrantless, unconstitutional mass surveillance of the American people. Brennan, who supports the mass surveillance, should probably tread lightly when it comes to calling for the prosecution of everyone who has “raised their hand” and then “dishonored the oath of office.”
In June 2013, the Obama administration charged Snowden with espionage.
Snowden leaked to the Washington Post and to the Guardian (U.K.) a cache of documents exposing the NSA’s wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment through the dragnet surveillance of phone records and monitoring of Internet traffic.
According to the criminal complaint filed by the federal government against Snowden in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the former NSA networking contractor is charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information,” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.”
The last two counts are violations of the Espionage Act of 1917.
A Washington Post story on the filing of the espionage charges against Snowden published at the time revealed that the Justice Department chose that particular district court because Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, is headquartered within that jurisdiction and it is “a district with a long track record of prosecuting cases with national security implications.”
When those charges were filed against him, Snowden became the eighth person to be charged under the Espionage Act by the Obama administration.
President Obama has targeted each of these eight men — including Edward Snowden — for their efforts to expose government corruption. In fact, the others charged with espionage are targets of an apparent vendetta against whistleblowers in direct contradiction of the president’s promise to protect them.
In 2008, then-president-elect Obama declared, “We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government.”
President Obama’s policy of zealously pursuing, prosecuting, and punishing those who report abuses in government is remarkable for its relentlessness, even for a group of people (politicians) not known for keeping their oaths or campaign promises.
Two days after the U.S. Justice Department unsealed the espionage charges against him, Snowden fled to Russia, seeking asylum.
The Russian government granted Snowden asylum for three years. To this day he remains in Russia, living in an undisclosed location. He makes occasional appearances via Internet video chat at liberty-themed conferences.
Photo: Edward Snowden
