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Showing Original Post only (View all)A reminder...Snowden had NO ALTERNATIVE but to go to Russia. [View all]
1)Snowden HAD to go public with the secrets. He'd have been silenced if he'd gone to Obama about it. Working within the system would have been hopeless.
2)If Snowden had stayed here, he faced a life prison sentence, and probably would have been subjected to a Chelsea Manning-like "suicide watch" ordeal once in custody. No president would ever have commuted his sentence. And none of the anti-Snowden people here or elsewhere in the Democratic Party universe would have spoken out on his behalf. Snowden didn't owe it to anyone to be a martyr.
3)No other country was a possible refuge for Snowden. He tried to get to Venezuela or Bolivia, but getting on planes to either country would have meant getting the flight diverted to the U.S. by Air Force planes and being taken into U.S. custody(where, again, he'd have been treated just as cruelly as Chelsea Manning was).
4)Snowden is not perfect. He's not a progressive. But that doesn't matter. If McCain had won in 2008, Snowden likely still would have done what he did. And what he did was, plainly and simply, commit truth. And it's wrong to punish anyone who does that.
If Snowden hadn't done what he did, no one would have known what the NSA was doing, and no calls for change would ever have been heard. And everything, everywhere, would be the worse for that.
And there is no one here who can look anyone else in the eye and say they'd have made different choices than Snowden made in the same situation. We all know that no other choices existed.