Snowden’s Father Calls Out Obama On Nuremberg Crimes
August 2, 2013 0
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
Infowars
Predictably, the corporate media, the official propaganda outlet for the establishment, has refused to post or publish
an open letter sent to Obama by Lon Snowden, the father of Edward
Snowden. This callous refusal should finally convince any who may have
had any doubt that the United States is anything but a tyrannical
national security state with a state-run media no different than the one in Cuba, China or Iran.
Edward Snowden’s unwarranted persecution
and vilification by the globalist propaganda media is part of a larger
campaign to snuff out investigative media.
Glenn Greenwald eluded to this during a
conversation about the persecution of Pfc. Bradley Manning with CIA
operative Anderson Cooper and CNN legal analyst and establishment
insider Jeffrey Toobin. In response to Toobin’s defense of Manning’s
unjust persecution and probable life sentence, Greenwald said the former
Harvard Review editor was arguing “for the end of investigative journalism.”
As the indisputable assassination of
investigative journalist Michael Hastings makes painfully obvious, the
government is not merely attempting to persecute journalists who refuse
to act as stenographers for the national security state, but is actively
killing them. The United States is now on par with Mexico, Iran,
Colombia, and Russia, countries that stand accused of murdering
journalists.
The letter penned by constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein and sent by Lon Snowden to Obama follows. Below it is a video of the exchange
between Greenwald and the apologist for a vindictive and murderous
state, Jeffrey Toobin, who counts as his close friend Supreme Court
justice Elena Kagan.
July 26, 2013
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500
Re: Civil Disobedience, Edward J. Snowden, and the Constitution
Dear Mr. President:
You are acutely aware that the
history of liberty is a history of civil disobedience to unjust laws or
practices. As Edmund Burke sermonized, “All that is necessary for the
triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Civil disobedience is not the first, but the last option.
Henry David Thoreau wrote with profound restraint in Civil
Disobedience: “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the
machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear
smooth certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a
spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then
perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the
evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent
of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a
counter friction to stop the machine.”
Thoreau’s moral philosophy found
expression during the Nuremburg trials in which “following orders” was
rejected as a defense. Indeed, military law requires disobedience to
clearly illegal orders.
A dark chapter in America’s World War II history would not have been written if the then United States Attorney General had resigned rather than participate in racist concentration camps imprisoning 120,000 Japanese American citizens and resident aliens.
Civil disobedience to the Fugitive
Slave Act and Jim Crow laws provoked the end of slavery and the modern
civil rights revolution.
We submit that Edward J. Snowden’s
disclosures of dragnet surveillance of Americans under § 215 of the
Patriot Act, § 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
Amendments, or otherwise were sanctioned by Thoreau’s time-honored
moral philosophy and justifications for civil disobedience. Since 2005,
Mr. Snowden had been employed by the intelligence community. He found
himself complicit in secret, indiscriminate spying on millions of
innocent citizens contrary to the spirit if not the letter of the First
and Fourth Amendments and the transparency indispensable to
self-government. Members of Congress entrusted with oversight remained
silent or Delphic. Mr. Snowden confronted a choice between civic duty
and passivity. He may have recalled the injunction of Martin Luther
King, Jr.: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as
he who helps to perpetrate it.” Mr. Snowden chose duty. Your
administration vindictively responded with a criminal complaint alleging
violations of the Espionage Act.
From the commencement of your administration, your secrecy of the National Security Agency’s Orwellian surveillance programs
had frustrated a national conversation over their legality, necessity,
or morality. That secrecy (combined with congressional nonfeasance)
provoked Edward’s disclosures, which sparked a national conversation
which you have belatedly and cynically embraced. Legislation has been
introduced in both the House of Representatives and Senate to curtail or
terminate the NSA’s programs, and the American people are being
educated to the public policy
choices at hand. A commanding majority now voice concerns over the
dragnet surveillance of Americans that Edward exposed and you concealed.
It seems mystifying to us that you are prosecuting Edward for
accomplishing what you have said urgently needed to be done!
The right to be left alone from
government snooping–the most cherished right among civilized people—is
the cornerstone of liberty. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson served
as Chief Prosecutor at Nuremburg. He came to learn of the dynamics of
the Third Reich that crushed a free society, and which have lessons for
the United States today.
Writing in Brinegar v. United States, Justice Jackson elaborated:
The Fourth Amendment states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly
describing
the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
These, I protest, are not mere
second-class rights but belong in the catalog of indispensable freedoms.
Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a
population, crushing the spirit of the individual
and putting terror in every heart. Uncontrolled search and seizure is
one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every
arbitrary government. And one need only briefly to have dwelt and worked
among a people possessed of many admirable qualities but deprived of
these rights to know that the human personality deteriorates and dignity
and self-reliance
disappear where homes, persons and possessions are subject at any hour to unheralded search and seizure by the police.
disappear where homes, persons and possessions are subject at any hour to unheralded search and seizure by the police.
We thus find your administration’s zeal to punish Mr. Snowden’s discharge of civic duty to protect democratic processes and to safeguard liberty to be unconscionable and indefensible.
We are also appalled at your
administration’s scorn for due process, the rule of law, fairness, and
the presumption of innocence as regards Edward.
On June 27, 2013, Mr. Fein wrote a letter to the Attorney
General stating that Edward’s father was substantially convinced that
he would return to the United States to confront the charges that have
been lodged against him if three cornerstones of due process were
guaranteed. The letter was not an ultimatum, but an invitation to
discuss fair trial imperatives. The Attorney General has sneered at the overture with studied silence.
We thus suspect your administration
wishes to avoid a trial because of constitutional doubts about
application of the Espionage Act in these circumstances, and obligations
to disclose to the public potentially embarrassing classified information under the Classified Information Procedures Act.
Your decision to force down a
civilian airliner carrying Bolivian President Eva Morales in hopes of
kidnapping Edward also does not inspire confidence that you are
committed to providing him a fair trial. Neither does your refusal to
remind the American people and prominent Democrats and Republicans in
the House and Senate like House Speaker
John Boehner, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Congresswoman Michele
Bachmann,and Senator Dianne Feinstein that Edward enjoys a presumption
of innocence. He should not be convicted before trial. Yet Speaker Boehner has denounced Edward as a “traitor.”
Ms. Pelosi has pontificated that
Edward “did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents.” Ms.
Bachmann has pronounced that, “This was not the act of a patriot; this
was an act of a traitor.” And Ms. Feinstein has decreed that Edward was
guilty of “treason,” which is defined in Article III of the Constitution
as “levying war” against the United States, “or in adhering to their
enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”
You have let those quadruple
affronts to due process pass unrebuked, while you have disparaged Edward
as a “hacker” to cast aspersion on his motivations and talents. Have
you forgotten the Supreme Court’s gospel in Berger v. United States that
the interests of the government “in a criminal prosecution is not that
it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done?”
We also find reprehensible your
administration’s Espionage Act prosecution of Edward for disclosures
indistinguishable from those which routinely find their way into the
public domain via your high level appointees for partisan political
advantage. Classified details of your predator drone protocols, for
instance, were shared with the New York Times with impunity to bolster
your national security credentials. Justice Jackson observed in Railway
Express Agency, Inc. v. New York: “The framers of the Constitution knew,
and we should not forget today, that there is no more effective
practical guaranty against arbitrary and unreasonable government than to
require that the principles of law which officials would impose upon a
minority must be imposed generally.”
In light of the circumstances
amplified above, we urge you to order the Attorney General to move to
dismiss the outstanding criminal complaint against Edward, and to
support legislation to remedy the NSA surveillance abuses he revealed.
Such presidential directives would mark your finest constitutional and
moral hour.
Sincerely,
Bruce Fein
Counsel for Lon Snowden
Lon Snowden
Bruce Fein
Counsel for Lon Snowden
Lon Snowden
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