Well, Chelsea Manning for one, though in neither case would I go so far as to call their actions “treason.”
But what’s the point?
I would venture that in Manning’s case a lot more than 50% were “incensed”.
The point is, when 50% of the country supports the man’s actions, it’s kinda hard to call it “treason”. “Treason” is a pretty unequivocal designation.
Indeed we do. Let’s see what someone trained in the functioning of that well-established system has to say:
Right. So the system works and there’s no need to steal classified information.
That’s pretty disingenuous. The “system”, in this case, wouldn’t have had a chance to “work” if Snowden didn’t steal classified information.
Apparently not, no. I’d wager that opinion on Manning and opinion on Snowden overlap almost entirely.
Well sure, like I said I wouldn’t call it treason, myself. It’s still illegal though.
Turns out me and some chick in The New Yorker are tight on this:
So … because " the normal instruments of oversight and judicial review were broken" Snowden had to break ‘the law’ in order to try and mend the law.
okay, that’ll work for the purposes of amnesty or Pardon.
That’s pure conjecture. You can’t say that noone would ever have learned about the program or found standing to sue if Snowden hadn’t committed treason.
If I were Snowden, I’d sue you for libel for that statement.
Shh, don’t give the kool-aid drinkers a reason to shut up. “Proper channels” and all.
How can you have “standing to sue” about something that you have no idea exists?
Gee, if only we didn’t have years of examples of the federal government denying people standing for bullshit reasons.
These two statements do not parse. If you believe your first point, how could you respect Snowden even if he did return to the US to face the thing we can only ironically call justice nowadays?
Well if they think their sentence was unjust because they saved quite a few lives by killing a psychopath, then yes, they should be allowed to break out of prison.
Smapti would respect the hell out of her corpse!
Sure, the prosecution for the Valerie Plame affair. I was outraged that only Scooter Libby got prosecuted … clearly, Cheney was the responsible party, Libby is just a minion … and that Libby was pardoned. Cheney, was of course, a traitor to the government he “led” … he was only trying to get revenge for Plame’s husband revealing evidence of his war crimes in lying to the American people to get us into an unnecessary and unjust war (Iraq).
I believe there were a lot of Americans who disagreed with me. You might have been one of them.
I support Manning, but she was a tool for Wikileaks, and leaked hundreds of thousands of documents indiscriminately. I believe Wikileaks does their best to scrub the leaks for information that would actually harm people (as opposed to embarrass governments) before releasing them, but it was questionable for an American to place those documents in foreign hands before doing so herself. I can see some punishment being appropriate, but certainly not to the extent she actually got.
Snowden is in complete control, making very sure no one is actually put in harm’s way by his disclosures, and leaking them carefully and slowly for maximum effect. He’s a complete professional about this, and nobody’s tool. Way more deserving of the “hero” label, in my opinion. He’s essentially filling the role journalists are supposed to play in a functioning democracy, but that actual journalists have refused to do for a few decades now.
Because it’d prove that he actually does have the courage of his convictions and isn’t just a self-serving demagogue.
Do you actually know what “demagogue” means?