Post #390,006
5/28/14 6:30:06 PM
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printed & mailed to Secretary Kerry today
Dear Secretary Kerry:
During the 2004 campaign I used to assert to friends that notwithstanding the senatorial coral you had accumulated, if you proved in office to be a tenth the man you were during your testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, you’d be twice the president this predatory empire deserves. I’m sorry to say that your recent remarks on Edward Snowden, including the terms “coward” and “traitor,” strike me as unworthy of the candidate I supported a decade ago. I grieve particularly to see you applying to treason, which is specifically and narrowly defined in the U.S. Constitution, the same elasticity of meaning that has been so perniciously brought to bear this century on the word “terrorism” at such cost to our former civil liberties.
I hold no brief for Snowden, who seems a bit of a grandstander, but I do not doubt that he is motivated by principle, and in his position I would also hesitate—hell, I would cling like grim death to the doorjamb—to subject myself to what passes to American “justice” in this age of secret tribunals and trial-by-Predator. You have contrasted Snowden unfavorably to Daniel Ellsberg. Is it necessary for me to remind you that Ellsberg has written this on the subject?
Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago.
I am more disappointed in you than I can say, and I suspect that the brave twenty-seven year-old Reserve Lieutenant who spoke truth to power those many decades ago would look with contempt on the cynicism of the Secretary of State.
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Post #390,026
5/29/14 5:58:22 AM
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Wish I'd said that.
Beautifully concise. I can't imagine how possibly his rebuttal could be constructed; hope it gets past the hired preeners.
Am compelled to try for a reasonable facsimile, as I have had inchoate I shoulds.. of similar intent.
Must find another angle to describe the mealy-mouthed codger-version of that once Mario Savio-grade speaker (of truthiness about "The Machine..")
Ah well, in sleep is when consciousness cuts through the incessant chatter of one's monkey-mind of daily roles.
If he gets two ... probably not enough to incite an epiphany, but wtf
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Post #390,033
5/29/14 8:45:07 AM
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Bit if there's three, you've got a movement
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Post #390,040
5/29/14 10:32:05 AM
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very well stated
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 58 years. meep
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Post #390,057
5/29/14 4:39:22 PM
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Excellent.
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Post #390,085
5/29/14 10:26:01 PM
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Privacy Under Attack, Snowden, et al
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Post #390,156
5/30/14 11:38:31 PM
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Moglen has another acolyte today.
Many thanks for finding this; the best sequential summary of what is at stake laterally and sequentially. I'd hate to have missed this, as the many words are all necessary and many writers have narrowed their focus to just obvious issues. That Zuckerberg can whip out pocket change of $30- MIllions to buy up all adjacent property for His privacy indicts the entire Vulture-capitalism system (again). Another case beyond irony, given his apparent plans for further enhancing FB-mining-for-$$M-->$$B. Moglen manages to make that point en passant (seems to possess enough chops for the context: historical, legal and obviously an intellect to eliminate many bogus rationales.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_MoglenHe properly-nailed NYT for its cowardice?/politically-loaded manipulation?/both? in '04. Clearly this info pre-election would have created changed attitudes in many; we'll never know now: How? changed, in How-many?? Can we draft him for Prez? Obama became Noticed.. immediately via his civil rhetoric, last seen of such quality.. decades past, well before Murica replaced the concept of America, comity and compromise--with dueling slogans and all that's now become bat-shit-crazy. It may be that BHO could have delivered on many of his principles in that America. Or not--if he believes still? that his adoption virgo-intacta, all of Shogunate 'security', leaving Patriot Act unchallenged, hiring their financiers and other apparatchiks: this actually circumscribes his world-view [??] (Certainly I can not see the reconciliation of his rhetoric and many of these actions. Gehabt Kindern==that's Lots of us.) Moglen seems capable of navigating the new swamp.. thus far in my reading. First pass on this article was too fast; I think it needs ... breaks ... to contemplate ..what he just said; let it marinate before going on to another equally compact and pithy passage. It's a treat! Hope this boffo manifesto soon grows LEGS. (Obviously NYT wouldn't have published it: they're dirty, now.
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Post #390,158
5/31/14 6:18:38 AM
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Ellsberg's response to Kerry in The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/30/daniel-ellsberg-snowden-fair-trial-kerry-espionage-act
Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trial – and Kerry is wrong
Edward Snowden is the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time, and he knows what I learned more than four decades ago: until the Espionage Act gets reformed, he can never come home safe and receive justice
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.
On the Today show and CBS, Kerry complimented me again – and said Snowden "should man up and come back to the United States" to face charges. But John Kerry is wrong, because that's not the measure of patriotism when it comes to whistleblowing, for me or Snowden, who is facing the same criminal charges I did for exposing the Pentagon Papers.
As Snowden told Brian Williams on NBC later that night and Snowden's lawyer told me the next morning, he would have no chance whatsoever to come home and make his case – in public or in court.
[. . .]
..Working on my missive to the former maverick-Kerry (of 9 years-before-Ronnie, thence the loss of most American hopes, ever since that B-actor.) --who ratted-out fellow actors before HUAC, the sanctimonious, cowardly twit. But now, after this riposte: it seems I will be piling-on; there's no doubt that, whatever his filter-people do: Kerry Will be getting diss-mail up the wazoo. Will he 'buffer' that? (vanity's standard LaLaLa response) or ... revert to an authentic Outlier and.. Man-up? Could Happen but, you know.. (Hey.. I'm older than that sucker, and I sure-as-fuck ain't bought the Repo hook-line-sinker fantasy; wtf's His excuse? senility? or.. just now rich-enough.. to remain detached from all that evident U.S. internal-rot?)
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Post #390,171
5/31/14 1:45:31 PM
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Re: Ellsberg's response to Kerry in The Guardian
By gawd, my little squeak of reproach will likely never reach the Secretary's desk, but that magisterial blast will certainly catch his attention. John Kerry's challenge to Snowden to return and face trial is either disingenuous or simply ignorant that current prosecutions under the Espionage Act allow no distinction whatever between a patriotic whistleblower and a spy. Either way, nothing excuses Kerry's slanderous and despicable characterizations of a young man who, in my opinion, has done more than anyone in or out of government in this century to demonstrate his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the oath of office the three of us swore: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Man, that's bound to sting if, as I persist in believing, there remain some vestiges of integrity and conscience slumbering uneasily beneath all the accumulated coral of power. Preach it, Brother Ellsberg! cordially,
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Post #390,178
5/31/14 5:08:45 PM
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Thou sayest re the BIggest of the crap-shoots before us/the dis-USA.
In the memorable query of Mr. Welch on the Day that he + cohorts handed-his-Head to Joseph {Tail-gunner Joe} McCarthy, ~~ but close-enough:
Senator, at long last ... have you no sense of decency ... at all?
This after McC had--completely gratuitously--interjected into the proceedings a scurrilous innuendo to the effect that a young man on Welch's staff (David Schine? IIRC)
just might be ... A HOMOSEXUAL!?.
Translation into the vernacular: (== deviant, Commsymp WDYHASM-spewing infra-human er, 'Kike'--also-too.)
[The above for modrin readers to whom these matters are evanescent snippets of antediluvian weirdness.]
How MANY? of present persons-of-note, here in 2014, RETAIN a Sense of DECENCY?? (on any hot-topic Whatsoever.)
I suspect that (were such a question ever convincingly-answerable/given the 99.99%-spin/knuckle-balls behind every single on-camera utterance:
WE would -simply- be able to foresee our..? ... fershure-OUR (collective-) FATE. In a trice.
Personally I see.. I See: a handful of unarguably Mensch-calibre (of all genders) auf alles in Die Welt.
But then, I have not met everybody. My sense of Mensch/Murican-capita seems to coalesce at ~ [0.0001% +/- 0.001%] aka, 5-avge in each State?
YMMV: any Pollyannas out there (still?)
Carrion. (It can be tasty to the already-starving.)
Law above fear, justice above law, mercy above justice, love above all.
(er, Live-it or.. fucking Die-like-a-dawg.)
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