
We invite you to meet with us
As a previous American government said to Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce nation, "We have considered your objections, and we invite you to the fort for a review of the issues."
NSA leaker Edward Snowden says he repeatedly raised concerns with his superiors and with oversight groups that the scope of the NSA's domestic surveillance programs was too broad, but the government claims that isn't the case. In an interview with NBC's Brian Williams on Wednesday – the first time Snowden has appeared on US …
Maybe in the fairy stories they tell about Israeli intelligence. And you know, you have some truth on your side except that it would be the wrong guy, they would not have had an anaesthetist on a black op so the dosage would be wrong and the wrong guy in the crate would arrive as a highly deniable corpse.
You think I'm kidding? This has happened before.
Israelis a) believe their own propaganda and b) are no more competent than anyone else. The problem is that a combination of a) and too many bad Hollywood movies has led them to believe that there is such a thing as a safe universal anaesthetic. Protip - if this was true, the NHS would not train anaesthetists for upwards of 11 years just to be able to do their job.
There is a detective novel by Margery Allingham in which a firm of undertakers runs a sideline in smuggling criminals out of the country in just this way. The scheme unravels when one of them dies en route. I have sometimes wondered if this was the origin of the whole idea.
It is believed to have been tried by Nigerians in the past, and I think it was Alan Coren who commented in Punch that a safe way of transporting people like this could revolutionise the airline industry, because nobody really likes having to travel by plane.
Yeah, they killed a completely innocent man in Norway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair
And when they did 'get their man' later, they used the old and trusted standby; a car bomb, killing him, 4 body guards and 4 innocent bystanders, and injuring another 18...
Mossad; Surgical strikes using sledgehammers...
Anon... because...
What the flaming monkey arsehole are you on about, Anonymous Coward?
A) The UK certainly is better than the US. Not by bloody much, but when they get too far out of hand htey have the EU to restrain their excesses.
B) Better a thousand guilty men walk free than one innocent man be jailed.
C) What the hell does "documented criminal" actually mean anyways? The American justice system is so corrupt that one can be a "documented criminal" in that society and never have actually done a damned thing wrong. I mean, shit, Americans lock up people fleeing overwhelming gang violence in their home country as "criminals" then send them back to be tortured and killed. What the fuck kind of society is that?
D) I'm Canadian, you gibbering idiot.
> Also note the difference between treatment of citizens and non-citizens.
Really? You must mean "US Citizens can be assassinated by presidential directive without due process of law".
If you think this is an exaggeration, think not. There is a secret US Justice Department memo/legal opinion which apparently makes this legal.
Well, yes, Snowden has just revealed that agencies of the US government routinely break the law on a large scale, and Kerry, without the apparently slightest awareness of cognitive dissonance, suggests that Snowden should trust the US government.
At least we now know that the Kerry/Bush election truly was pot meet kettle.
I suspect that the Yanks may be telling the truth on this one - however I would expect them to smear him in any event so the point is moot. If I was Snowden and already planning to collect this stuff there would be no way I would draw attention to myself by rocking the boat....
On the "trained spy" bit - true or Assange-like ego trip, although if he had some kind of black hat training it would help explain the extent of his p0wnage.
It's certainly credible that Snowden may be having paranoid delusions or be on an ego trip, but intelligence agencies have been discrediting opponents and crying wolf for so long that it's impossible to believe anything they say any more.
Just like the old Aesop's fable I learned as a small child, when you lie all the time as a matter of course, eventually nobody will ever believe a word you say. The three-letter agencies have dug their own graves on this one.
Lets be honest, the NSA, and by extension the whole American executive have a major credibility problem, who on this planet is going to believe anything they say, after watching their own chief spy lie to congress, after reading about how their own CIA deleted embarrassing documents from the congressional oversight committee's computers, the oft repeated claims (from all sorts of people involved) about how it was all about stopping terrorism, followed by evidence that they we're bugging the governments of allies, and international trade negotiations, etc, etc.
There's too much evidence which screams "Don't trust anything they say!" for any claims they make about Snowden to be granted any credence at all.
Errrm, I think the whole point is that he doesn't trust the American system of justice, I mean, isn't that his whole point! What an idiotic statement. Why does he have to be on American soil anyway to make his case to the American people? Unfortunately for the US we live in modern times and he can do that perfectly fine from anywhere but American soil where he will pressurised to redact things, say he was lying and much other nonsense in a bargain for a more lenient sentence...because thats justice, the US way.
US Secretary of State John Kerry told NBC's Today program that the administration would be happy to fly Snowden back to the United States to make his case before the American people.
"If he cares so much about America and he believes in America, he should trust in the American system of justice," Kerry said. ®
The very same American system of justice which has done fuck all to the people who outed the CIA chief of station in (of all places) Afghanistan... that selective system which only punishes those who do something the executive doesn't like?
It's not a very convincing argument that one.
"US Secretary of State John Kerry told NBC's Today program that the administration would be happy to fly Snowden back to the United States to make his case before the American people."
Not only would they be happy to fly him back, but they would be happy to force down any plane flying over (or even near by) American airspace if they thought he was on it and then fly him back.........
Can you think of any way he could prove that an email he produced wasn't a fake? The only proof that he'd actually sent the emails (rather than a convincing looking text file), would be in the logs on NSA mail servers, and I can't see them releasing those, can you?
"Can you think of any way he could prove that an email he produced wasn't a fake?"
If planned correctly, one aspect can be addressed simply.
Send the encrypted messages to a newsgroup that is archived and timestamped widely.
When you want to reveal the contents, reveal the key to decrypt. Of course, the messages can be faked up front, but having a copy that goes back before any debunking is at least as, if not more, credible than simply saying "nope, we didn't get that email".
As Snowden himself pointed out in the NBC interview Wednesday evening on US television, he would be tried under the terms of the espionage act, which would essentially be a secret trial. The prosecution evidence, the testimony, everything in the trial would be classified and concealed from public view. The transcripts and proceedings would be sealed and never declassified. Only the inevitable fact of his conviction would be announced. Also, given the sensitive nature of his situation, it would be reasonable to expect he'd be held in solitary confinement, isolated in an undisclosed location with no hope of parole or judicial review for life.
Secretary Kerry's assertion that Snowden return to face a fair trial is a brazen propaganda deception. He fully understands the implication and application of the espionage act provisions.
"The prosecution evidence, the testimony, everything in the trial would be classified and concealed from public view."
That doesn't necessarily mean the trial would be unfair. It would only be unfair if the prosecution evidence was concealed from the defence legal team, which is a very different situation.
"It would only be unfair if the prosecution evidence was concealed from the defence legal team, which is a very different situation."
This is exactly what has happened in a few cases.
In some cases the judge has viewed the evidence in chambers, but in more than one case the whole thing has been thrown out because the prosecution won't disclose evidence to the defence on the basis of "national security"
I'm not entirely sure what the point of snowden standing trial is.
Either he leaked actual NSA secrets which shows a complete disregard for international treaties and us laws or he didn't. If the former then the NSA and federal government admit they are douche bags...but lock him up instead of the people in charge of this crap. If the latter then he hasn't actual done anything wrong.
If I was Russia or China then I'd shoot him at some point, whiling framing a known US spy. They already know a big part of what the US does, snowdens death would be viewed by many as a retaliatory thing by the USA which would just cause more PR issues for them. Quite frankly the US government should be doing everything in its power to keep him alive.
"If he cares so much about America and he believes in America, he should trust in the American system of justice," Kerry said
Hey it's the Swiftboat Wonderboy speaking again. You know, the guy who allegedly threw his medals over the fence of the White House house, then found them back to show them on TV. Guy's just sick. I wonder what kind of black magic they use to keep his brain alive?
The US govt spends a lot of it's time trying to frame him as low level - assuming they're right surely somebody has to be asking why, if true, he had access to so much information that is protectively marked in a way that makes people think maybe they're lying.
Is nobody in the Obama administration seriously asking this basic question assuming that's what they've been told and they're choosing to believe it?
"It's nice to see you back Mr Snowden. We have provided you with a suite close to the tropical beach.
Now we would like to prove that American Justice is functional.
If you would just drop your trousers so that we can attach these Erm, lie detector electrodes and then lie down over there and put this cloth over your face....
If they had just kept their mouths shut, not responded to anything, it would have blown over in the press and the 'Merican minds. Then whenever there were more of Snowden's docs released, the 'Mericans would have wondered who the hell he is and why is the TV not showing the Kartrashians.
Let's face, we 'Mericans have short memories.... otherwise, Mr. Kerry wouldn't still be in politics after the Vietnam BS stories we heard. It's funny, today if he pulled some that, he could be charged with "Stolen Valor".
Even if the US was sincere and honest on this matter who is going to believe them? So far they have lied outright consistently and a fair amount of Snowden's leeks have proven this outright lying. The US could suddenly have a massive change of heart and become entirely honest and nobody would believe them. That is exceptionally damaging to the credibility of the US and has likely inflicted more harm than the actual leeks which are pretty bad anyway.
Snowden keeps coming off sounding like the hero regardless of how true it is. I dont know if Snowden is a stand up guy or not. I hear the legend as his leeks expose crimes against the people which add the the crimes we knew about beforehand. And the pursuit by the US to stop this guy and any reasonable discussion continues to frame the US as a greater and greater evil even against its own. And in doing that makes Snowden look more and more heroic.
The fact is probably somewhere in-between.
The US state is covered up stuff which would fracture all trust in them, so this is a piss take e.g.
the real reasons that the World Trade Centre Towers and Building 7 collapsed and turned into powder so fast, and the foundations were furnaces for months etc.! Three of them and US owned.
The real reason is that conspiracy theorists don't understand the difference between the melting point of steel and the gradual loss of strength with rise in temperature. Really people who think metals retain their strength to the melting point and then suddenly liquefy are not the people to go to for explanations of building collapse in fires.
(Mind you, I once saw the result of an "engineer" (actually an HNC in mechanical eng) who didn't understand this and replaced a nimonic vacuum furnace tube with A2 to save money, then didn't understand why it looked like a banana after its first outing.)
I personally know someone involved with the FEA (Finite Element Analysis) of the World Trade Center beam failures. Each building was designed to the working limit of it's materials because the owners/developers wanted more sellable open floor space and only the skin/frame and center supports remained and when heat from the fires degraded the buildings strength, the beams catastrophically failed, and the buildings collapsed. Falling that far generated enough force to destroy what might have been left.
"the people to go to for explanations of building collapse in fires."
3 Steel structure builds collapsing into their own footprint in one day.
That buildings collapse during fires, sure - but like that and under such circumstances? If you have reference material for similar building collapses I wouldn't mind taking a look.
Snowden really picked the wrong administration for this.
If the GOP were in power right now, the Democrats would be hailing him as a national hero and the greatest patriot of the last fifty years, but of course when it happens on their watch they can't say anything about it.
Whenever I see a suggestion like Kerry's, I'm reminded of a conversational exchange I had with a law student. This was right after Bush v. Gore, and he came right out and said that he was in law school because he believed America was becoming a judicial dictatorship, and he wanted to be one of the dictators. (I have to describe it as 'a conversational exchange' for certain reasons, perhaps even legal ones.) If he has become a judge since then, I hope he's losing sleep over his ancient honesty, but I certainly deny having any copy thereof.
It's hard not to think that America has passed a point of no return. I used to think the conspiracy theorists were nuts, and I still think that most of them are, but I'm increasingly inclined to think that some narrowly focused and small-scale conspiracies are plausible. Was Michael Hastings killed by hacking his car? It's possible that could have been done by a couple of people, and most of them wouldn't even have had to know what they were doing. Was Ron Suskinds effectively neutralized by poisoning his son? If the appropriate psychoactive chemical exists, a single actor would have sufficed. I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to predict that Snowden is likely to come to a bad end, especially if he persists in bearding the giant.
John Kerry was once a man of high principle. Long time ago. At this point, I trust his words far less than Snowden's.