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I
knew perfectly well when I started watching the interview that it had
been edited -never mind giving shithead Kerry right of reply
Read
Snowden’s comments on 9/11 that NBC didn’t broadcast
Only around a quarter of the recent NBC News interview with former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden made it to broadcast, but unaired excerpts now online show that the network neglected to air critical statements about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
RT,
30
May, 2014
When
the four-hour sit-down between journalist Brian Williams and Snowden
made it to air on Wednesday night, NBC condensed roughly four hours
of conversation into a 60-minute time slot. During an analysis of the
full interview afterwards, however, the network showed portions of
the interview that didn’t make it into the primetime broadcast,
including remarks from the former National Security Agency contractor
in which he questioned the American intelligence community’s
inability to stop the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
In
response to a question from Williams concerning a “non-traditional
enemy,”
Al-Qaeda, and how to prevent further attacks from that organization
and others, Snowden suggested that United States had the proper
intelligence ahead of 9/11 but failed to act.
“You
know, and this is a key question that the 9/11 Commission considered.
And what they found, in the post-mortem, when they looked at all of
the classified intelligence from all of the different intelligence
agencies, they found that we had all of the information we needed as
an intelligence community, as a classified sector, as the national
defense of the United States to detect this plot,” Snowden
said. “We
actually had records of the phone calls from the United States and
out.
The CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that we
weren’t collecting information, it wasn’t that we didn’t have
enough dots, it wasn’t that we didn’t have a haystack, it was
that we did not understand the haystack that we have.”
“The
problem with mass surveillance is that we’re piling more hay on a
haystack we already don’t understand, and this is the haystack of
the human lives of every American citizen in our country,”Snowden
continued. “If
these programs aren’t keeping us safe, and they’re making us miss
connections — vital connections — on information we already have,
if we’re taking resources away from traditional methods of
investigation, from law enforcement operations that we know work, if
we’re missing things like the Boston Marathon bombings where all of
these mass surveillance systems, every domestic dragnet in the world
didn’t reveal guys that the Russian intelligence service told us
about by name, is that really the best way to protect our country? Or
are we — are we trying to throw money at a magic solution that’s
actually not just costing us our safety, but our rights and our way
of life?
Indeed,
the director of the NSA during Snowden’s stint there, Gen. Keith
Alexander, reportedly endorsed a method of intelligence gathering in
which the agency would collect quite literally all the digital
information it was capable of.
“Rather
than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was,
‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,’” one
former senior US intelligence official recently told the Washington
Post. “Collect
it all, tag it, store it. . . .And whatever it is you want, you
go searching for it.”
In
recent weeks, a leaked NSA document has affirmed that under the helm
of Alexander, the agency was told it should do as much as possible
with the information it gathers:
"sniff it all, know it all, collect it all, process it all and
exploit it all,” according
to the slide.
“They're
making themselves dysfunctional by collecting all of this data,” Bill
Binney, a former NSA employee-turned-whistleblower himself, told
the Daily
Caller last
year. Like Snowden, Binney has also argued that the NSA’s “collect
it all”
condition with regards to intelligence gathering is deeply flawed.
“They've
got so much collection capability but they can't do everything.
They're probably getting something on the order of 80 percent of what
goes up on the network. So they're going into the telecoms who have
recorded all of the material that has gone across the network. And
the telecoms keep a record of it for I think about a year. They're
asking the telecoms for all the data so they can fill in the gaps. So
between the two sources of what they've collected, they get the whole
picture,”
Binney said.
Although
NBC neglected to play Mr. Snowden’s remarks to Williams in which he
questioned the efficiency of modern intelligence gathering under the
guise of being a counterterrorism tool, it did air on television
other remarks from the former contractor concerning the terrorist
attacks.
“It’s
really disingenuous for the government to invoke and sort of
scandalize our memories to sort of exploit the national trauma that
we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through to
justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost
us liberties and freedoms that we don’t need to give up and our
Constitution says we don’t need to give up,”
he said in an excerpt broadcast on air.
Daniel
Ellsberg: Snowden
would not get a fair trial –
and Kerry is wrong
Edward
Snowden is the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time, and he
knows what I learned more than four decades ago: until the Espionage
Act gets reformed, he can never come home safe and receive justice
30
May, 2014
John
Kerry was in my mind Wednesday morning, and not because he had called
me a patriot on NBC News. I was reading the lead story in the New
York Times – "US
Troops to Leave Afghanistan by End of 2016"
– with a photo of American soldiers looking for caves. I recalled
not the Secretary of State but a 27-year-old Kerry, asking, as he
testified to the Senate about the US troops who were still in Vietnam
and were to remain for another two years: How
do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
I
wondered how a 70-year-old Kerry would relate to that question as he
looked at that picture and that headline. And then there he was on
MSNBC an
hour later, thinking
about me,
too, during a round of interviews about Afghanistan that inevitably
turned to Edward Snowden ahead of my fellow whistleblower’s own
primetime interview that night:
There are many a patriot – you can go back to the Pentagon Papers with Dan Ellsberg and others who stood and went to the court system of America and made their case. Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor, and he has betrayed his country. And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so.
On
the Today show and CBS, Kerry complimented me again – and said
Snowden "should
man up and come back to the United States" to
face charges. But John Kerry is wrong, because that's not the measure
of patriotism when it comes to whistleblowing, for me or Snowden, who
is facing the same criminal charges I did for exposing the Pentagon
Papers.
As
Snowden told
Brian Williams on NBC later that night and
Snowden's lawyer told me the next morning, he would have no chance
whatsoever to come home and make his case – in public or in court.
Snowden
would come back home to a jail cell – and not just an ordinary
cell-block but isolation in solitary confinement, not just for months
like Chelsea Manning but for the rest of his sentence, and probably
the rest of his life. His legal adviser, Ben Wizner, told me that he
estimates Snowden's chance of being allowed out on bail as zero. (I
was out on bond, speaking against the Vietnam war, the whole 23
months I was under indictment).
More
importantly, the current state of whistleblowing prosecutions under
the Espionage Act makes a truly fair trial wholly unavailable to an
American who has exposed classified wrongdoing. Legal scholars
havestrongly argued that
the US supreme court – which has never yet addressed the
constitutionality of applying the Espionage Act to leaks to the
American public – should find the use of it overbroad and
unconstitutional in the absence of a public interest defense. The
Espionage Act, as applied to whistleblowers, violates the First
Amendment, is what they're saying.
As
I know from my own case, even Snowden's own testimony on the stand
would be gagged by government objections and the (arguably
unconstitutional) nature of his charges. That was my own experience
in court, as the first American to be prosecuted under the Espionage
Act – or any other statute – for giving information to the
American people.
I
had looked forward to offering a fuller account in my trial than I
had given previously to any journalist – any Glenn Greenwald or
Brian Williams of my time – as to the considerations that led me to
copy and distribute thousands of pages of top-secret documents. I had
saved many details until I could present them on the stand, under
oath, just as a young John Kerry had delivered his strongest lines in
sworn testimony.
But
when I finally heard my lawyer ask the prearranged question in direct
examination – Why did you copy the Pentagon Papers? –
I was silenced before I could begin to answer. The government
prosecutor objected – irrelevant – and the judge
sustained. My lawyer, exasperated, said he "had never heard of a
case where a defendant was not permitted to tell the jury why he did
what he did." The judge responded:well, you're hearing one
now.
And
so it has been with every subsequent whistleblower under indictment,
and so it would be if Edward Snowden was on trial in an American
courtroom now.
Indeed,
in recent years, the silencing effect of the Espionage Act has only
become worse. The other NSA whistleblower prosecuted, Thomas Drake,
was barred from uttering the words "whistleblowing" and
"overclassification" in his trial. (Thankfully, the Justice
Department's case fell apart one day before it was to begin). In
the recent case of the State Department contractor Stephen Kim,
the presiding judge ruled the prosecution "need not show that
the information he allegedly leaked could damage US national security
or benefit a foreign power, even potentially."
We
saw this entire scenario play out last summer in the trial of Chelsea
Manning. The military judge in that case did not let Manning or her
lawyer argue her intent, the lack of damage to the US,
overclassification of the cables or the benefits of the leaks
... until
she was already found guilty.
Without
reform to the Espionage Act that lets a court hear a public interest
defense – or a challenge to the appropriateness of government
secrecy in each particular case – Snowden and future Snowdens can
and will only be able to "make their case" from outside the
United States.
As
I know from direct chat-log conversations with him over the past
year, Snowden acted in full knowledge of the constitutionally
questionable efforts of the Obama administration, in particular, to
use the Espionage Act in a way it was never intended by Congress: as
the equivalent of a British-type Official Secrets Act criminalizing
any and all unauthorized release of classified information. (Congress
has repeatedly rejected proposals for such an act as violating the
First Amendment protections of free speech and a free press; the one
exception to that was vetoed by President Clinton in November 2000,
on constitutional grounds.)
John
Kerry's challenge to Snowden to return and face trial is either
disingenuous or simply ignorant that current prosecutions under the
Espionage Act allow no distinction whatever between a patriotic
whistleblower and a spy. Either way, nothing excuses Kerry's
slanderous and despicable characterizations of a young man who, in my
opinion, has done more than anyone in or out of government in this
century to demonstrate his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to
the oath of office the three of us swore: to support and defend the
Constitution of the United States.
