I refer you to the case of a certain Nelson Mandela- yesterday’s terrorist and today’s international hero. I thought you were a lawyer- your criminology should tell you that the status of ‘criminal’ is flexible and changes from time to time and place to place!
No, the status of “criminal” is fixed to the time and place where the crime occurred. The fact that Mandela was granted clemency decades later doesn’t change the fact that Mandela undeniably did engage in armed rebellion against the South African government in the '50s and early '60s.
Snowden is a criminal, a traitor, a spy, and a coward, and he will remain these things for the rest of his life.
Maybe all those Russian dissidents in the third quarter of the twentieth century should have stayed in the USSR and gone to jail rather than defect and work against the system from abroad!
What ever happened to those criminals who were hiding Anne Frank?
Certainly the case under US jurisdiction. But he is not under US jurisdiction. Justice does not emanate from the US alone. Your definition would have us all agree that he recent execution in North Korea was that of a convicted criminal, rather than a political act.
Also, by Smapti’s own argument, if we lived in an alternate universe where Clapper did have to lie to protect security secrets, he should have insisted on going to prison for it. Surely he’s no coward!
North Korea doesn’t have a functioning rule of law, nor do its citizens have the right to redress. The US does.
The fact that Snowden fled US justice doesn’t mean he ceases to be a criminal - he’s simply a criminal under the protection of a rogue state that wants to embarrass the US.
If Clapper is charged with perjury and he responds by jumping on a flight to Russia, then yes, I’d agree.
Are there any charges pending against him yet?
Well, obviously I disagree.
But the real problem - I feel - with your stance is that it opens up the fact that no intelligence official can ever testify in clear about such operations. You are, in effect, saying that information classification trumps oversight.
Not only that, but merely believing such is the case trumps congressional oversight. That we are required to accept that intelligence officials may lie to us and we have to believe it without question.
Suppose he’d been asked ‘are you working to overthrow the United States of America’ and he believed that doing so was classified? At that point could he say ‘no’ and go on with his seditionary ways?
The corner you seem backed into here, that an intelligence official can lie under oath and not be held accountable on grounds of national security is a terrible one. It is also, frankly, one that undermines your point about Snowden and whether he should have stayed in the country to report his information. In the world you describe - wherein officials can lie under oath and claim (on their own word) national security - what would keep Snowden from being locked away under national security reasons? Then when asked about the information he wanted to disseminate an intelligence official could say ‘oh, nothing to it. Just some routine stuff that was classified. Pay no heed.’
The world you’re defining is one where a subset of the American government - the scary part with spies and weapons - is able to hold themselves above accountability. For a representative democracy if holds no logical sense.
Er, you might want to put some filler about the United Way or something in between “a criminal is a criminal and that’s all there is to it” and “well… the circumstances in this case make this particular criminal not really a criminal criminal…”
He certainly can, in closed session. Unfortunately, the C-SPAN cameras were running and he’d not been provided with an opportunity to request that they be shut off, or to testify in private. As such, any truthful answer he could have given would have resulted in exposing classified information to the entire world.
Of course they are; otherwise, what’s the point of having classified information at all?
I wouldn’t expect him to answer such a question with a “yes” even if he weren’t concerned with classifications.
If the things Snowden wanted to expose were actually illegal, then he’d be protected under federal whistleblower statutes. The problem for him, of course, isn’t that he was exposing illegal acts, but that he was exposing legal acts that he had decided on his own oughtn’t be legal, and placed his own judgment on that matter above the laws of the land.
Classified intelligence is not subject to a vote of the people in this or any representative democracy. It would undermine the entire purpose of having classified intelligence if it were.
Edward Snowden is currently wanted on charges of espionage and theft of government documents.
To the best of my knowledge, Clapper is not currently wanted for any crime.
No matter how often you repeat this nonsense, you can’t get away from the obvious fact that there is are clear and obvious answers (“I cannot discuss that matter in open session” or “I can neither affirm nor deny that assertion”) that reveal nothing whatsoever. Continuing with the line of nonsense after this has been pointed out is just digging yourself deeper into the hole. Currently, you’re reaching the “still close enough to hand you my Chinese food order for when you arrive” stage.
Any answer other than “no” reveals that the answer is not “no”.
And pleading the fifth is an admission of guilt. The framers of the Bill of Rights were fools.
It’s entertaining to explore the full inanity of this bit of nonsense. For instance, it proves that there was no need to have Clapper present at all; an empty chair could have just as easily failed to give a “no” answer and thus revealed… well, anything.
“Are there alien spacecraft at Area 51?” [silence] “Well, I guess that proves it, then…”
I point out that argumentum ad absurdum only works when addressed to someone who recognizes that the absurd proposition is, in fact, absurd. For example, you wouldn’t get anywhere by telling John Calhoun that feuding with Andrew Jackson was as foolish as believing that some humans were born to be slaves.
The whole affair was as much about genuine “oversight” as Issa’s Benghazi hearings have been, so yes.
Smapti - do you have a boundary somewhere that questions the validity of a law or is legality the sole determiner; would you, say, have traded slaves back in the day?
At what point would you question a criminal charge?
In our society, we have a well-established system that decides the validity of laws as provided by the Constitution. Any law approved by the people through their representatives and duly signed into law (or by referendum as the case may be at the state level) is valid until either repealed or the courts strike it down.
Mention of Darrell “Grand Theft Auto” Issa undercuts your case (again) – when he asked for an inappropriate security-compromising disclosure, he got a proper and straightforward refusal to answer the question, not a lie. If Clapper had taken that approach, he would have done his job within the confines the law.
Then again, if he and his agency had put some effort into doing their jobs within the confines of the law the whole matter would have been avoided.