Know Edward Snowden by taking a look at who his friends are. As it becomes more and more obvious that Mr. Snowden is not a civil-libertarian whistle-blower, but someone committed to engaging in espionage, his list of supporters is beginning to dwindle.
Even his father recently acknowledged that his son broke U.S. law; he wants him to come home and trust his fate to the American system of justice. “And if folks want to classify him as a traitor, in fact he has betrayed his government,” he told NBC News. “But I don’t believe that he’s betrayed the people of the United States.”
Lonnie Snowden then added the following statement about those surrounding and encouraging Snowden, including the followers of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks: “I don’t want to put him in peril, but I am concerned about those who surround him. I think WikiLeaks, if you’ve looked at past history, you know, their focus isn’t necessarily the Constitution of the United States. It’s simply to release as much information as possible.”
So who exactly is left defending Edward Snowden, and trying to gather support for him by circulating a petition demanding that the government of Ecuador grant him political asylum? There is the group that calls itself “Just Foreign Policy,” which, in translation, means a desire for a weak and ineffective United States that will fold before its Islamist enemies, seek to appease them if not openly welcome them, and continually apologize for what its adherents believe is America’s bellicose imperialism.
In an online petition posted three days ago, the group accused our government of “severe abuses of the basic constitutional rights of U.S. citizens and the rights of people in other nations.” It declared that Snowden is a “brave whistle-blower who, at great personal risk, decided to step forward and inform the U.S. public about what is being done in their name and what is being done to them.”
The group says nothing about the countries Snowden has decided to seek aid from, all of them leftist dictatorships. Ecuador has a clearly mad president, Rafael Correa, who has already stuck his nose in the face of our country. He has announced that Ecuador has “unilaterally and irrevocably” given up its tariff-free trading pact with the United States. He would rather bankrupt his nation to show the Latin American left that he stands with the late Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and the Castro brothers.
Now the “Just Foreign Policy” group calls the U.S. indictment of Snowden a “grave assault against freedom of the press,” a “political persecution,” and it argues that Snowden’s prosecution was handled in a “completely arbitrary fashion.” In the group’s eyes, Snowden only revealed NSA actions that were violations of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. To “Just Foreign Policy,” President Obama is clearly a fascist who “seeks to silence those who have brought these abuses to light.” Hence, the Obama administration is guilty of “political repression,” the Left’s most favored term.
So who signed the petition? The answer is the usual suspects — all leaders of the far-Left fringe in our country. The headline on the petition reads: “Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden Urge President Correa to Grant Snowden Asylum.”
Oliver Stone, as readers of PJ Media well know, is a friend to any leftist thug, from Fidel Castro (whom he honored in two television documentaries) to Hugo Chavez, and of course a man whose recent TV series on Showtime honors the legacy of Joseph Stalin and his appeasers in the United States. Noam Chomsky is an open friend to terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, an enemy of the state of Israel, and a man who is second to none in his hatred of the United States. Tom Hayden, once the hero of the New Left, has descended in his mature years to another in the chorus of left-wing crazies, becoming more and more extreme in his utterances with each judgment.
The remaining signers are a virtual who’s who of the anti-American far Left. The list includes actors Danny Glover, Shia LaBeouf, John Cusack, and Rosanne Barr — reminding us that actors have no more sense than any other set of fools; leftist activist Medea Benjamin of “Code Pink”; Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine; leftist history professors Peter Kuznick (Stone’s co-author of the TV series), Carolyn “Rusty” Eisenberg of Hofstra University, Greg Grandin, Sinclair Thomson, and Marilyn Blatt Young of New York University, and Bob Buzzanco of Houston University; and 60s activist lawyer and historian Staughton Lynd.
Of the others listed, one must also mention Daniel Ellsberg, who gained fame as the man who released the “Pentagon Papers.” Say what you will about Ellsberg, he did not leave the country, he faced the music, and he argued that what he released was an informational study about how the U.S. got into the war in Vietnam, which he hoped would get the American public to see the war as an unnecessary and unjust intervention. Since then, Ellsberg has revealed himself to be just another in the chorus of far-left extremists, and a man close to Noam Chomsky.
One has to wonder if Edward Snowden, when he started out, really knew that he would become the propaganda tool of far leftists, and a stooge for America’s enemies abroad and at home. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Edward Jay Epstein connects the dots and shows that before Snowden took his job with Booz Allen Hamilton, he already had got in touch with “with people who would later help arrange the publication of the material he purloined. Two of these individuals, filmmaker Laura Poitras and Guardian blogger Glenn Greenwald, were on the Board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation that, among other things, funds WikiLeaks.”
That means that Snowden planned to release information that he had sworn to protect, a violation of the oath he took when he received his security clearance. He misappropriated communications intelligence and, as Epstein writes, it was a “well-planned theft of U.S. secrets,” probably aided and abetted by others who were his accomplices. He was not any kind of a whistle-blower.
Hopefully, unless they want to remain in the same camp with leftist extremists, some of the libertarians who have supported Snowden, like Glenn Beck, will reconsider their actions. To offer support and gratitude to Edward Snowden, at this point, is to support those who would like to bring the United States down. That should be clear when we look at the politics of those who approve of what he has done.
Related: Snowden’s Father Offers Deal to Feds for Son’s Return to U.S.
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