Hillary: Snowden Should Return to USA for Trial

When it comes to repulsive characters of the type that are created by the failed American political system one of the worst of the dismal collection is Hillary Rodham Clinton. The former Secretary of State, US Senator and humiliated spouse of a philanderer in chief, Hillary has been a dominant and relentless performer in the political circus dating back to the waning days of the last century and after a failed run at the Democratic nomination in 2008 it was always a foregone conclusion that she would be running again. The Clintons are like genital herpes - they just won't go away.

Let’s face it; the woman is an egomaniac and nothing short of becoming the first female president in United States history is going to be satisfactory to her. Back during the 2008 primary season we were given an exhibit of exactly how she operates and how low that she will go to sip from the holy grail, her racist attacks on the man who beat her, Barack Obama were a precursor of the so-called Tea Party and every bit as dirty. It was trench warfare, even to the extent that Hillary even met with longtime Clinton family nemesis banking and media tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife (who only this week moved his base of operations to Hell) to get a leg up on the upstart Obama but it was all for naught. When Obama clinched the nomination there was much infighting within the Democratic party establishment and even the idea that she would assume a position of subservience to Obama on the ticket and take the VP slot but as Matt Taibbi brilliantly nailed it at the time – “Hillary would rather eat a KFC bucket full of her own shit than run with Obama” – so she eventually ended up as Secretary of State as a part of that vaunted and ridiculous “Team of Rivals” which could more accurately labeled as "Team of Rats" that set the stage for the five and a half years of cascading fuck-ups that has marked the Obama era.

On tour ostensibly to hustle her new book “Hard Choices” but truly to sell herself and rev up the engines of the formidable Clinton machine for the 2016 blitzkrieg towards the White House, Hillary made a trip across the pond and sat down for an interview with British host Phoebe Greenwood. The interview, the video of which can be found here and covered a wide range of topics with one of them being former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden who Clinton suggested should return to the USSA to be tried under the post-Constitutional legal system.

According to a story in The Guardian entitled “Edward Snowden should have right to legal defence in US, says Hillary Clinton”:

The former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has said Edward Snowden should have the right to launch a legal and public defence of his decision to leak top-secret documents if he returns to the United States.

"If he wishes to return knowing he would be held accountable and also able to present a defence, that is his decision to make," Clinton said in a video interview with the Guardian on Friday.

Snowden, who is currently in Russia where he has been afforded temporary asylum, has been charged with three separate violations of the US Espionage Act. These charges include stealing government property and sharing classified documents with the Guardian and the Washington Post.

The broadly worded law makes no distinction between a spy and a whistleblower and affords Snowden almost no recourse to a defence.

The former NSA employee is likely to face a number of additional charges should he return to the US.

When Clinton was asked if she believed the Espionage Act – passed in 1917 – should be reformed in order to allow Snowden a defence, she claimed not to know what the whistleblower had been charged with as they were "sealed indictments".

"In any case that I'm aware of as a former lawyer, he has a right to mount a defence," she said. "And he certainly has a right to launch both a legal defence and a public defence, which can of course affect the legal defence.

"Whether he chooses to return or not is up to him. He certainly can stay in Russia, apparently under Putin's protection, for the rest of his life if that's what he chooses. But if he is serious about engaging in the debate then he could take the opportunity to come back and have that debate. But that's his decision."

The interview is a masterpiece of bullshit, particularly where Mrs. Clinton dodges the question on the invocation of the Espionage Act of 1917 - an archaic World War I law used to criminalize dissent  that has been used by the Obama Justice Department with aplomb. She also dodges on the "crimes" that Snowden has been charged with as there is a sealed indictment and ludicrously states that he can be a part of the public "debate" were he to leave Russia and return to the open arms of Uncle Scam. Hillary is a snake, she has already declared that Snowden "helped terrorists" and alluded to the horseshit talking point that he is a Russian spy despite the truth that he was trapped in Russia only because the USA!, USA!, USA! revoked his passport and stranded him there, taking such extreme measures as forcing down the flight of Bolivian president Evo Morales out of suspicion that the patriotic whistleblower was onboard.

I am sure that he would face a warm reception now that the probably successor to Barack Obama is rolling out the welcome mat, she was so prepared to be lenient and merciful to other whistleblowers during her tenure at Foggy Bottom – like Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning who was tortured, subjected to a show trial and thrown into prison. And Manning only embarrassed the State Department not the entire system like Snowden has. I am sure that Hillary’s word is as good as gold, that of the fool’s variety.  

Democratic Party Sheep Join the Attacks on Glenn Greenwald

Pulitzer Prize and Polk Award winning investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald continues to make the media rounds as he promotes his new book on the American Stasi  entitled "No Place to Hide:  Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State" and has yet to be arrested by the Obama administration. The author is not only loathed by authoritarian liars and scum the likes of departing House Intelligence Committee head Mike Rogers, the always loathsome former head of the Bush-Cheney CIA and NSA Michael Hayden, deranged Congressman Peter King and of course the sitting President of the USA, USA, USA himself but he has now acquired new and formidable foes among the Kool Aid drinkers of the Democratic party.

His unforgivable sin was calling out the queen in waiting Hillary Rodham-Clinton in a recent article for GQ Magazine where he blasted Clinton with both barrels: "Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she's been around forever, the Clinton circle. She's a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She's surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere" followed by "But she's going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist". Both statements are true and of the typical nature of the gut punches that Greenwald regularly delivers to the corrupt establishment and hatred of the man has now like the love of war, the expansion of the surveillance state and Wall Street bailouts become one of those cherished "bipartisan" endeavors that offer proof that despite the collapsing system that ' yes we all can live together after all.

Greenwald has developed a reputation of being more than somewhat of a prick for his refusal to knuckle under and toe the line when being attacked by the establishment and its toadies. He is a combative type which he revels in and as a former corporate litigator prior to becoming a crusading journalist he brings a particular vigor to fighting back, a great example of which was this excellent and hilarious comment on the now retired top Nazi at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade: General Keith Alexander. I excerpt the following from the transcript of an interview that he did with Amy Goodman for Democracy Now last week:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to part two of our special, an extended interview with Glenn Greenwald, author of the new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Four weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald returned to the United States for the first time since breaking the Snowden story. He and filmmaker Laura Poitras flew in from Berlin to accept the George Polk Award. Days later, the Pulitzer Prize was given to The Guardian and Washington Post for their coverage of the Snowden leaks. Former NSA director, General Keith Alexander, criticized the Pulitzer Prize committee; he said, quote, "I’m greatly disappointed that we have rewarded those who have put so many lives at risk." I asked Glenn Greenwald to respond.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, first of all, I mean, as a journalist, I consider it sort of an additional prize that somebody like Keith Alexander is so angry at the journalism I’m doing that he’s willing to make those things up in order to discredit it. I mean, the idea of a journalist is that you ought to be adversarial to people like Keith Alexander. And I would be a lot more worried if he liked the reporting that we did and praised it than I am that he’s saying things like that.

But the thing that I think is so important to realize is, you know, if you go back 40 years and look at what was said about Daniel Ellsberg, who most people across the political spectrum now consider to have been heroic and justified and noble in what he did, the same exact things were said about him. In fact, Nixon officials went before Congress and accused him of being a secret Russian spy. They said that he put lives at risk. They said that people were going to die as a result of these disclosures, that he was a traitor, that he was engaged in treason—all of which have been proven to be utter fabrications.

And every single whistleblowing event that has happened since then, including the 2005 NSA story in which someone in the Justice Department told The New York Times about that program, the blowing the whistle on Abu Ghraib and the torture program and the rendition program, what WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning did, this same rhetoric is constantly invoked, which is, if you shine a light on what we in political power are doing in a way that we haven’t authorized you to do, you’re going to have blood on your hands. I mean, there’s an obvious irony to being accused by a U.S. general who served in Iraq, of all places, of having blood on your hands or resulting—causing the death of innocent people. Nobody could ever surpass Keith Alexander and his fellow generals in their ability to do that. But the claim is made all the time, reflexively, without any evidence, because in reality the only thing that has been harmed by the disclosures is not the lives of innocent people, it’s the reputation and credibility of people like Keith Alexander. And so you can understand why they are so interested in demeaning it.

Touché in calling out the ongoing falsehoods that reporting on the revelations of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden endangering lives. It is about time that these fuckers get called out in that it is their own damned wars that are jeopardizing Americans (as well as killing hundreds of thousands of brown-skinned, non-Christian people) it is only too bad that it was on Democracy Now which doesn’t get the attention of a state-corporate ‘news’ show like NBC’s Meet the Press where Greenwald returned as a guest on Sunday morning.

Being interviewed at length by NBC's so-called "justice correspondent" Pete Williams - since the obnoxious power suckler David Gregory either chickened out or was benched by the network to avoid the public spectacle of having his ass handed to him - Greenwald still was hit with the same stale talking points although with more respect now that the book is a hit and additional serious revelations on the NSA are promised to be coming. The interview was in one of those town hall type of formats where random questions were submitted (likely by government sock puppets) which were answered by Greenwald with follow-up from the interviewer. I excerpt from today's Meet the Press transcript:

PETE WILLIAMS: Here are two related questions: Aliz Koletas asks, "What is his response to critics who call him a traitor for helping Snowden?" And Mary Jane Jones says, "How does he feel about making the U.S. a sitting duck to our enemies?"

GLENN GREENWALD: It is always the case that people who bring unwanted disclosure that makes people in power uncomfortable are called traitors. And I'd look at that, really, as a badge of honor. I think it's a testament to the fact that we're doing our job.

PETE WILLIAMS: As you know, the heads of several U.S. intelligence agencies, and also in the U.K., have said that these disclosures have caused potential terrorists to change their method of communication, which makes it harder to detect. What about that? Does that concern you?

GLENN GREENWALD: This claim that these disclosures have helped the terrorists is the same script from which they always read whenever people shine a light on what they're doing. And I hope nobody is willing to accept it on faith, but instead, demands evidence that that has happened, because there actually is none.

While Pete Williams is a typical subservient government hack – his questions dripping with fealty to the masters of the surveillance machine – Greenwald was at least afforded some of the courtesy that he did not get from the always obnoxious Gregory who subjected him to veiled threats last June. The online streaming of the interview that I watched prominently featured banner ads as well as a short commercial for defense contractor Boeing so it is pretty apparent on who it is exactly who butters the bread of Pete Williams.

But while Greenwald does his book promotion tour the liberals that take their marching orders from the stinking carcass of a political party that are the Democrats are revving up the "misogynist" slander machine in preparation for the two year steel cage death match between Queen Hillary the Inevitable and Jeb Bush. The cyber sewer that is Daily Kos is as usual at the tip of the spear and the soldiers of orange or the Kossacks (there seems to be a rather strange communist ring to that) as they endearingly refer to themselves are trashing Greenwald. The "diary" as they refer to such things has been cross-pollinated to other liberal and progressive websites in a tactic used at times to really hammer home a meme. It is encouraging that it is mocked and called out as bullshit on other sites outside of the domain of Markos Molitsas-Zuniga who really is "left" in the same way that Stalin was and some of the responses at least offer a glimmer of hope that the lies of the two party scam are being recognized and rejected by at least a small and vocal percentage of progressives, the type who are able to put aside differences and work with libertarians in the pursuit of a larger attempt to fight a true enemy of freedom such as the surveillance state.

Greenwald will continue to be slimed by both the red and blue sheep in that his opposition to the menace of the very dangerous fascist element that has embedded itself within the US government remains consistent no matter which phony party is officially in power.

Smear Machine to Be Unleashed on Greenwald

Tuesday marks the release date of the long-awaited book by Polk Award winning journalist Glenn Greenwald on the NSA and the Edward Snowden leaks. No Place to Hide officially came out today and contains additional revelations on the unconstitutional exploits of the American Stasi at Ft. Meade as well as the suffocating surveillance state that we all must live under in The Homeland of the 21st Century. While I have yet to read the book - I have it on order - early accounts report that in addition to the Snowden story that there will also be material included on the NSA intercepting US manufactured routers for the implanting of surveillance tools, that Obama darling Susan Rice enlisted the NSA to assist in spying on diplomats and more. Unfortunately the book seems to be something of a tease as the author is still holding back the really good stuff which will likely be published when they finally get their shit together over at First Look Media's The Intercept.

As of early this morning the establishment attack dogs have yet to be loosed but they are coming and probably less for what Greenwald writes in the book than for some of the statements from a GQ interview entitled "The Man Who Knows Too Much" which is either here or as excepted for easy consumption over at the libertarian financial blog Zero Hedge. Some of the better chunks of red meat that will be thrown to the wolves the sun sets tonight are:

What do you think would happen if Snowden were to fly from, say, Moscow to New York today?

I think it would be a huge media circus, and then he would be instantly arrested and probably rendered incommunicado for the entire duration of his judicial proceeding on the grounds that he has classified information that could damage the United States. The prosecutors would say he would have to be kept away from media. He would just be disappeared. Rendered completely invisible and mute.

[Wonderful analysis on the current state of our judicial system and very true. There are authoritarian fiends right now who are absolutely drooling over the prospect of getting their hands on Snowden and torturing him to death]

AND –

You call out a few other names in this book, including David Gregory and Tim Russert. Why are these guys targets in your mind?

I think most TV journalists, like all those Sunday-talk-show hosts like David Gregory and Bob Schieffer and George Stephanopoulos, to a lesser extent—the whole kind of dynamic of those Sunday shows is to ensure that the most powerful people come on their shows, which they accomplish by giving them a platform to basically spew what they want in an unchallenged manner. I mean, there's the appearance of adversarial questioning, but it's all very reverent.

[If Joseph Goebbels had the ability to use television he would have invented the Sunday morning "news" shows]

You write that when Cheney wanted to get his message out, he'd go on Meet the Press.

Right, and that was with Tim Russert, who was depicted as hard-nosed. You know, like everyone was petrified of him. When he died, Lewis Lapham described him as the overaccommodating head waiter at some really swanky restaurant who's just really good at ass-kissing every rich person who comes into the door. And that was Tim Russert—which is why they all loved Tim Russert, right? Because the benefit of Tim Russert was that not only did he let them control the message, but he cast the appearance that they were subjected to really rigorous questioning. So it was the extra bonus of propagandizing while convincing the public that they weren't being propagandized. And so I think all those TV hosts do that, and I think that most major newspapers are incredibly deferential to high-level government officials, and especially to military and intelligence officials.

[BLASPHEMY! How dare Greenwald call out a deceased celebrity brown-noser like Tim Russert as the courtier to power that he always was and spot on about Cheney showing up on MTP to spew his fascist lies]

AND -

How do you feel about the early presidential jockeying?

Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she's been around forever, the Clinton circle. She's a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She's surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she's going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It's going to be this completely symbolic messaging that's going to overshadow the fact that she'll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They'll probably have a gay person after Hillary who's just going to do the same thing.

I hope this happens so badly, because I think it'll be so instructive in that regard. It'll prove the point. Americans love to mock the idea of monarchy, and yet we have our own de facto monarchy. I think what these leaks did is, they demonstrated that there really is this government that just is the kind of permanent government that doesn't get affected by election choices and that isn't in any way accountable to any sort of democratic transparency and just creates its own world off on its own.

The Democrats and their shills will be loudly wailing about the impugning of the inevitable Queen Hillary alone and the reference to a “gay person” as president will be seized upon as the same sort of vicious slander towards gays as Putin is accused of. Not that it bothers that Greenwald himself is openly gay one can already hear the workers in the propaganda chop shops busily concocting a Greenwald-Snowden-Putin axis of espionage. He also calls it spot on with Obama in that opposition to him has been so easily cast as being “racist”, one can largely thank the rebranded neo-Confederate, Jesus juicing GOP Religious Right base that became the “Tea Party” for a lot of it but it is also used to deflect legitimate condemnation of Obama policies. It is all so cynical but lost on the average American who still foolishly believes that they live in a functional democracy. 

The ginned-up outrage will be rolling in soon so grab a seat and enjoy the show.