Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trial -- and Kerry is wrong

[unhappycamper]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Daniel-Ellsberg-Snowden-w-by-Daniel-Ellsberg-Courage_Edward-Snowden_Patriotism_Prosecution-140530-269.html



As the author knows 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 int

Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trial -- and Kerry is wrong
By Daniel Ellsberg
OpEdNews Op Eds 5/30/2014 at 19:43:16

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."

~snip~

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 have strongly 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.

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IIRC, Woodrow Wilson rammed the Espionage Act through Congress to suppress anti-war sentiments prior to (our) jumping into WW I.

Question: What ended WW I?