"America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat"- blogger writing on SmirkingChimp in July.
It boggles the rational mind to comprehend how a people who once valued liberty and had enough education to see through vapid PR, now can't tell their asses from holes in the ground. Such is the case as a new CBS poll has found 61 percent of Americans demand Edward Snowden stand trial, compared to 23 percent who believe Obama ought to grant him amnesty.
This follows on from an earlier (July) Washington Post- ABC News poll. According to the poll's finding:
"The American people, who once defended Edward Snowden’s leaks of sensitive intelligence information gathered by the
If we take common sense for granted in this sampled population (and that is not a foregone conclusion by any means) then one would expect people who are reasonably educated to be aware that their privacy rights are bound up intimately with their 4th amendment rights - to be free of lawless search and seizure. As I noted in previous blogs to do with this issue, while the specific right to privacy isn’t specifically listed in the Constitution, the Founders understood that as time went on new rights would emerge which they might not be able to think of (e.g. to health care), hence bundled these into the unenumerated rights under the 9th amendment..
We also expect them to be informed enough to grasp the extent of NSA's unconstitutional mass data collection. And hence to realize that if NSA can snatch their email address books, Google searches and content, web browsing histories, Twitter messages, and cell phone calls as well as all telephone call logs, they are in the condition described by Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, who described the NSA programs to the Guardian thusly:
"The Snowden revelations have made clear that there has been an intrusion on our right to privacy of unprecedented scope, yet the government is dismissing any complaints about our right to privacy as irrelevant."
Roth said that from a human rights perspective, one of the biggest missteps the US administration had committed was to insist that there was a difference between the content of private communication and "metadata" – information about where, when and between whom the communication takes place. This distinction was based on a 1979 court case from the pre-digital era, which Human Rights Watch described as "troglodyte".
Roth said: "I used to be a prosecutor – I used to put pen registers on people's phones, collecting the numbers that you dial – but I had to manually compile the numbers. It was very labor intensive, and hence self-limiting. Today, the computer can piece together your entire personal life in a matter of seconds."
Roth also went on to invoke the following analogy for any recalcitrant or too forgiving (of the NSA) goobers who can't grasp the extent to which they've been deprived of their privacy:
"Imagine the government putting a video camera in your bedroom and saying 'don't worry, the feed will only go into a government computer, which we won't look at unless we have reason to believe that wrongdoing is taking place'. Would you feel your privacy is being respected? Of course not. But that's exactly what the government is doing."
So really, Americans ought to be getting on their damned knees and THANKING Snowden for revealing what he has about the disgusting trampling of their 4th amendment rights. To have 61% instead calling for a trial - which any person of even average intellect would understand to be rigged from the outset - is to demonstrate stupidity beyond all bounds. Worse, it evokes memories of the "good Germans" who after WWII had to be dragged into the concentration camps to be shown what they turned a blind eye to during Hitler's reign.
Recall also, for the memory deprived, that the Judges at the Nuremberg War Crime trial told all the Nazi defendants that "following orders" (or oaths) was NO excuse! They were obliged to follow a higher conscience and to disobey unlawful orders or oaths. THIS is exactly what Snowden did.
For those who shudder at giving him amnesty let me also provide another memory jog: The two terrorists who blew up a Cubana Airlines flight (over Barbados in Oct. 1976) Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch walked Scott free thanks to the two Bush presidents. See e.g. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/042606.html
Excerpt:
"Not only did the first Bush administration free Bosch from jail a decade and a half ago, the second Bush administration has now pushed Venezuela’s extradition request for his alleged co-conspirator, Posada, onto the back burner."
This is one of the murderous rats, Luis Posada - taking 73 lives in the worst terror act in the hemisphere before 9/11Can 'Muricans be so deaf, dumb, blind and stupid to accept this rat's ass fucker deserves amnesty or pardoning but not Snowden? Then these Americans don't deserve liberty! They deserve to be tossed into some damned Gulag - for their gross stupidity if nothing else.
When the interviewer asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded,
“In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”
And this turd gets a pardon??!
So hear me out - IF two TERRORISTS can be given relative freedom by the 2 Bush presidents, then Obama can sure as shit pardon Ed Snowden for fulfilling the duty of a real citizen and whistle blowing on government transgressions of the Constitution! See also:
: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/51088/restore-honor-and-pardon-edward-snowden
I am hoping to learn that this poll was in some way bogus or defective in sampling technique. I refuse to believe so many MORONS can live in this country and call themselves Americans!
See also:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/23/nsa-barack-obama-phone-data-collection-illegal-privacy-board
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