I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.
He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.” (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)
...a nonsensical comparison. Manning was in the military.
If Snowden was a "spy," as he claimed, and didn't know the consequences of his actions, then he's in lala land. Thomas Tamm:
“He’s in for a pretty overwhelming investigation,” Tamm, now a criminal defense attorney in Rockville, Md., told POLITICO in an interview. “I think the government will use a lot of their resources to try to find him.”
But if Snowden is returned to the United States, Tamm said, “I think with the right representation, and with the right way of presenting what he did, I think he’ll be able to put his life back together.” Tamm says he’d even be willing to be part of the defense team.
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=A9C45FF7-E7EB-44AD-9C5A-D2C7F0B7F276There have been several prominent whistleblowers over the last several years who did not flee the country.
William Binney, Thomas Drake, and Tamm are whistleblowers who stayed and faced the consequences of their actions. They were not persecuted, they faced prosecution. They are not in jail. In fact, Tamm was the one who exposed Bush's illegal eavesdropping on Americans.
Snowden created a bigger problem for himself with the information he stole and revealed that was unrelated to NSA domestic activities. Fleeing to Russia did not help his cause. Apparently, Assange is trying to make it worse.
N.S.A. whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who handed over his trove of documents to Greenwald, has said he also doesn’t believe in Assange’s particularly uniform view on secrecy, having entrusted the cache of N.S.A. documents he lifted to journalists he trusts will evaluate the risks inherent in publishing from them.
“We don’t share identical politics,” Snowden told Vanity Fair earlier this year. “I am not anti-secrecy. I’m pro-accountability. I’ve made many statements indicating both the importance of secrecy and spying, and my support for the working-level people at the N.S.A. and other agencies. It’s the senior officials you have to watch out for.”
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/05/julian-assange-glenn-greenwald-nsa-afghanistan...by revealing information that Greenwald is saying will cause people harm. The decision to release information unrelated to the domestic surveillance issues has been coming back to bite him in the ass.
“If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of US network operations against their people should be published.”
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023084875
Greenwald said that some journalists’ accounts of the Snowden leaks scandal, the impression many get is that America would turn to extraordinary methods to eliminate the threat posed by Snowden if he decided to turn over to a foreign government the information at his disposal.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023035095
"Snowden has enough information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had," Greenwald said in an interview in Rio de Janeiro with the Argentinean daily La Nacion.
"The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023242606
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