Whistleblower Edward Snowden Releases Statement from Moscow: Still Seeking Asylum
Christina Sarich, Staff Writer
Waking Times
As the Obama administration strongly chides Edward Snowden for whistle-blowing on the entire US government, namely the NSA and CIA who has been tapping cell phones and sneaking a peek at Internet transactions via forced hand-overs from the likes of Google and Facebook utilizing a program called PRISM, the brave refugee still seeks asylum.
Edward Snowden has released a statement from Moscow, and in it he scolds the Obama administration for pressuring countries to turn him into the US for trial, instead of allowing him to stay a safe distance from our shady government, and on non-US soil. If he is turned into the US government, his trial will likely be unfair if the Espionage Act is used against him. This act was never meant to roast our own countrymen, but was enacted in 1917 to try to keep foreign spies from leaking top-secret information to our political enemies during WWI. In 1919, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Schenck v. United States that the act did not violate the freedom of speech of those convicted under its provisions. You can be sure this same ruling would be used against Snowden in 2013.
In his recent message from Moscow, Snowden stated:
“One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.
On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic “wheeling and dealing” over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.”
The oppression of whistle-blowers and our free press will likely continue, unless entire nations stand up for people like Snowden. Controlling information through seven very specific media channels, our Orwellian government has heretofore assumed that they could control the masses with spying and disinformation, leaked through main stream media channels and kept in check by the super secret National Security Agency (NSA). The big question is just whose ‘security’ is being looked after anyhow?
Since Americans have allowed our true liberties to be quashed by governments and corporations, one after another, the truth will surely not be allowed to surface without some serious pressure from the powers that be. As Snowden goes from Hong Kong to Moscow, to wherever he can find a safe corner of the world next, we should support him for leaking information on PRISM – otherwise how would we have known just how scandalous the government’s agenda to control the masses truly is?
As Snowden has said in a previously recorded interview, “When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for the sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale then the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal person’s career you’d only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses. And when you talk to people about them in a place like this where this is the normal state of business people tend not to take them very seriously and move on from them.”
It is this same apathy (or fear) that resulted in us giving away our civil liberties after the twin tower attacks of September, 2011. More than 10 years later, we are still climbing back to our previous freedoms – among them our freedom of speech, freedom to organize, and freedom to hold arms. It took someone like Snowden to help us wake up and see just how much we’ve lost in such a short time. You can read the entire transcript of Snowden’s video-taped message about why he decided to become a whistle-blower indebted to the public here.
About the Author
Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny, Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and See the Big Picture. Her blog is Yoga for the New World. Her latest book is Pharma Sutra: Healing the Body And Mind Through the Art of Yoga.
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