The American Government’s Pathetic Snowden Petition Response

Two years later, the White House finally addressed a “We the People” online petition to grant Edward Snowden a pardon with a lame and predictable response: No. There was more to the response than that, but I won’t waste your time with a rehash of the baseless accusations and fear mongering we’ve heard before. The argument from a Homeland Security official regarding Snowden is as convincing as hearing the DEA’s BS for keeping marijuana a schedule 1 drug in the same class as Heroin and meth.

For all of the passing grades Obama gets in a variety of areas, he deserves a big, fat F for national security. He’s done virtually nothing to undo Bush’s most egregious attacks on the Constitution and due process, and seems to be letting the national security state run itself. Big mistake. Snowden is one of the twenty-first century’s genuine heroes, and deserves a ticker tape parade in Manhattan, not a jail cell in Leavenworth.

Our government still loves to taunt Snowden with the “come back and take the consequences like a man” canard, as if he would be enticed by such schoolyard nonsense. Snowden is a smart person. He knows that he would not be treated fairly or justly if he returned to America and it’s more of an indictment of this country that he’s right than any black mark on Snowden’s record. What angers our government more than any other aspect of the Snowden revelations is that he is a free man and not rotting in a dungeon somewhere as an example to other would be whistleblowers.

In a just and true democracy, Snowden would be pardoned. America is neither.

Obama administration applying Soviet style tactics to silence the press

American politics has entered a truly surreal phase. For once, liberals and conservatives are united in their anger over the DOJ’s surveillance of the Associated Press and investigation of FOX News reporter James Rosen, and rightly so. In addition, as Glenn Greenwald points out in his latest New York Times editorial, “The administration of Barack Obama has prosecuted more accused leakers under "espionage" statutes than all prior administrations combined -- in fact, double the number of all prior such prosecutions.”

The same Obama who talked about greater transparency in government during his first campaign for President is now employing Soviet style suppression tactics to make sure the only news that’s reported is government approved. This goes way beyond fighting terrorism. It is a blatant program to intimidate critics and punish those reporters who dare challenge the administration’s policies.

To reiterate a point I’ve made before, it was the post 9/11 Bush administration that opened the Pandora’s Box of executive prerogative in the name of fighting terrorism that has led to the abuses we are seeing today in Washington. Instead of repudiating and rescinding Bush’s blatant overreach of Presidential power, Obama has embraced it, expanded on it and taken it to new levels of secrecy and persecution.

We can’t call ourselves a democracy under these circumstances. If we don’t allow our press to speak truth to power, we are no better than any other totalitarian regime.

Unless Obama makes some drastic changes to the laws governing the surveillance and treatment of reporters and whistleblowers, we will continue slipping into a very dark and surreal episode in American history where the truth is the enemy and freedom a distant memory.