Hours before Tulsi Gabbard appeared for a combative hearing on her nomination as director of national intelligence on Thursday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave some public advice to the woman who once pushed for his pardon.
“Tulsi Gabbard will be required to disown all prior support for whistleblowers as a condition of confirmation today. I encourage her to do so. Tell them I harmed national security and the sweet, soft feelings of staff. In D.C., that’s what passes for the pledge of allegiance,” Snowden said on X.
Even after facing more than a dozen questions about Snowden, however, Gabbard refused to back down.
Instead, Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Snowden broke the law and that she would no longer push for his pardon — but that he had revealed blatant violations of the Constitution.
I bet you it won’t.
Damn, the one thing she’s right on.
The idea that any senators would attack anyone for supporting Snowden is much more disturbing than any of the bullshit accusations they toss at Gabbard.
This is the line that the American Senatorial Leadership wants to draw. You can take money from the Qatars until your pockets burst. You can hold really perverse anti-American views on a caste system and work to enshrine them in public law. You can play footsie with the fascist Modi regime in India, the mafia-style business cartels in S. Korea, Indonesia, and the Phillipines, and the Russian oligarchy.
But to suggest that a Bush 43 Era massive domestic spying operation violated the 4th amendment?
Get thee behind me, Satan!
Listening to her is incredibly frustrating. I don’t see Snowden as a traitor but this bitch is one of the last people that should be trusted with intelligence
It’s just furthers Putin’s goals, even if it was the right thing to do. Broken clocks and all that.
Listening to casual misogyny is incredibly frustrating.
She’s selling out LGBT and other marginalized people for money and power.
She’s a bitch.
Frustrating that we don’t have a popular vocabulary equipped to express casual disdain without echoing implicit bigotry. Perhaps this administration will give us an opportunity to formulate some new slurs appropriate to the people in charge of it.
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That’s her only decent opinion and THAT is what’s going to tank her nomination???
She’s got a lot of well thought out positions. None of them much agree with the American propaganda machine as it currently sits.
If that were true you would have listed some.
Stop watching fox
It’s opposite decade in the US.
I find it hilarious that the 3 letter agencies are handing over big brother to the gustapo, without protest, while acting like they’re the goodies… as though they aren’t literally doing the exact thing Snowden warned everyone about — as a tool that will be turned against the people by domestic enemies.
And the best part? It only took 12 years post-leak for the worst case scenario to occur — for them to hand the keys to the entire kingdom over to fascism.
The keys have always been in the hands of fascists.
The Reagan/Bush Era was plenty reactionary. The Carter/Nixon era wasn’t anything to brag about, either. FFS, the Eisenhower government had a healthy assortment of literal ex-Nazis scattered through it. The ugly specters of J. Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles, Henry Ford, and Prescott Bush have haunted our country for longer than any of us have been alive.
Trumpism is the dead fish rot finally reaching the noses of the white working class (and even then, just barely). Americans are looking on in horror at the prospect of the government treating everyone like we’ve been treated Black People and Native Americans for the last century.
There’s a lot of common sense, popular opinions that you can’t have in Washington because there’s a bipartisan consensus to do the opposite.
It’s a bad look when the director of national intelligence supports someone who leaks intelligence secrets to enemy nations. It’s a good reason to pass on her aside from all of her personal issues.
He leaked information to the citizens of the country doing the spying.
It’s interesting you describe them as enemies
I believe the letter agencies consider the public their enemy #1, there some old ex CIA dude quote about it I’m too lazy to open Firefox to find
Ge leaked them to many nations not just the USA. You know that other nations can access US press and the internet in general, right? That’s the enemies Im talking about eg DPRK, Russia, or Iran.
No, he didn’t. This is 100% factually wrong. He gave them to to the Guardian and to the New York Times, and to Glenn Greenwald., and he gave it to them encrypted and deleted them himself. Part of his requirements was that they vet everything they released before they released it to make sure that no one was hurt as an effect.
This was part of why the Guardian ended up having it’s higher level employees replaced after MI6 trashed the place (literally).
You might be thinking of Julian Assange, but even there there was double checking and not one single individual has proven to be hurt by those leaks.
That’s the enemies Im talking about eg DPRK, Russia, or Iran.
Let me guess, you’re a liberal of the “Liberals hate every war except the current one” bent, aren’t you? To the point that you’re literally making shit up to slander an actual fucking hero that revealed quite a lot to the public that wasn’t at that point known.
Get the fuck out of here with your stupid ignorant bullshit that lets you feel smugly superior.
EDIT: We never got the full leaks because the news organizations he gave them to ended up deleting them from under governmental pressure, and he no longer had copies of them.
Now, before you smugly utter the next banal lie liberals always do to slander him: He didn’t want to go to Russia. He intended to go to Ecuador, but the Obama Administration broke a bunch of international laws, including forcing aircraft with diplomatic immunity to land in other countries airspace to try and capture him. Turned out, of course, that he wasn’t on board. He went to Russia out of desperation.
God forbid you have a head of intelligence might follow the bill of rights
Why would you think that’s their job? Do you have any idea how any of this works?
Snowden compromised the security of the intelligence apparatus of the USA and regardless of the reason you can’t have a DNI that approves of this.
No, he didn’t.
You know nothing about this topic as I detailed in my other response.
Stop spouting lies.
Why would you think that’s their job?
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title%3A5+section%3A3331+edition%3Aprelim)
§3331. Oath of office
An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: “I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
I mean, you can dismiss it as pageantry and fluff. But every appointee has it in their job description as a matter of law per Title 5 Civil Service Functions and Responsibilities statute.
Go look what the DNI’s job is and tell me what she has to do with protecting constitutional rights.
The oath of office is cute but try looking at the job description of the office we are talking about as that’s actually relevant.
Identifying and eliminating criminal misconduct within Intelligence Agencies would go a long way towards protecting the constitutional rights of US residents.
The oath of office is cute
The absolute state of modern liberalism.
That’s not the job of the DNI.
You made a really weak argument utilizing the oath of office. Do you really think you are in a position to speak down to anyone after demonstrating such a flawed understanding of our system?
Edward Snowden sitting in Russia thinking “Damn it, if I had just kept those documents in my bathroom, I could be President right now!”
Damn, this is a hard one. Gabbard is right to defend him but likely for deeply shitty motivations.
At the end of the day this is probably going to make it much more difficult to discuss why whistle-blowers deserve protection with my liberal family.
This is a stopped clock situation.
She’s not wrong to defend him. But she would be a catastrophically awful pick for this position.
Stopped digital clocks just display 88 all the time.
Even after facing more than a dozen questions about Snowden, however, Gabbard refused to back down. Instead, Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Snowden broke the law and that she would no longer push for his pardon
Is that not backing down?
Yes u am so confused by the quote and article. Snowden said she’d need to disown whistleblowers and she did just that. Seems to me like she stepped in line. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something?
I can try making a cake, if I stop trying before I manage to make one, it doesn’t mean I will complain if my girlfriend decides to make one instead of me!
It’s not even that, it’s someone told you to make a cake, so you talk about how you don’t make cakes, your against making a cake, but you could make a cake if someone really needs you to.
And if your girlfriend does then make a cake, you just start taking credit.
Actions are louder than words.
She pushed for his pardon
She now says she won’t do it anymore, that she agrees he broke the law (need to have broken the law to get a pardon) BUT that she still believes what he did was right, implying that he deserves a pardon, she just won’t be the one trying to make it happen anymore.
When the worst people make the right decision for the wrong reasons
Isn’t American law supposed to protect whistleblowers? I mean we all know it doesn’t but at least in public speaking defending whistleblowers should be considered a good thing no?
No it only pretends to. Because whistleblowers have to leak sensitive information to blow the whistle, the US goes after them for treachery.
These days whistleblowing against America or big companies leads to suicide with a bullet to the back of the head.
It doesn’t though - and that’s had an obvious chilling effect on whistle-blowers.
One of the key issues is that most politicians will express support for whistle-blowing in the abstract or when exposing flaws of opposing administrations. But the administration that is likely to be damaged by whistle-blowing is the one vested with the responsibility to protect it… and that abstract support evaporates pretty fucking quickly if it’s damaging your image.
Unless my memory is faulty the modern attacks on whistle-blowing mostly date back to Obama’s administration. During W Bush we had the Abu Ghraib torture revelations and the whistle-blower in that case ended up receiving high praise even while causing significant damage to both W Bush and Rumsfeld.
Sometimes I wonder if Snowden is given a script to post when needed or if the FSB just controls his social media. We’ll find out everything one day because he’s undoubtedly under constant surveillance.
I’d wager there’s no way his staying in Russia doesn’t come with many strings attached. He’s only useful to them in these kinds of situations saying these kinds of things.
I mean to be fair I’d be salty too if I were him.
Something left of some principles in there?
No. She’s a Russian asset, and Russia purchased Snowden’s compliance with safe harbor. Everything else is theatre as far as she is concerned.
The thing about wedge issues and propaganda is that they’re wedge issues for a reason, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the society that makes it divisive in the first place, as some advocate for change and others resent it.
She’s a Russian asset,
How so? What’s the evidence?
There is no smoking gun. More like she has parroted Russian propaganda for a long time. Why would she do this though? The answer seems to be she is a Russian asset.
An Assad defender and prolific spreader of misinformation. She is a garbage person for trying to lie to victims of Assad’s reign. She tried to pin the blame on ISIS when they have no fucking jets. Why would she lie to children who lost everything?
