SocraticGadfly: Pardon Snowden and/or Assange? ONLY with preconditions

January 18, 2021

Pardon Snowden and/or Assange? ONLY with preconditions

This leftist homey doesn't write blank checks, and this tweet to Greenwald should say it all:

First, Snowden. 

The questions Glenn failed to ask (and Snowden has failed to answer despite being tagged by me on Twitter many times), are from my review of his book.

Short version here. Go to the review for more in-depth versions, with explainers and my tentative answers.

  • Question 1: Why didn’t Snowden approach him? 
  • Question 2. Snowden talks about cooling his heels in Hong Kong while getting people to bite. What journalists DID he talk to besides Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman and Ewan MacAskill? 
  • Question 3: What is he not revealing about his time in Hong Kong before meeting G & P? 
  • Question 4 goes straight to Snowden: If he did get other serious nibbles, did they not pan out? Did he cut them out? Why?
  • Question 5, or really, a series of related questions: What does he think about Poitras and Greenwald (actually Greenwald, basically) ultimately NOT publishing most of what he gave them? (This is also a question for Glennwald, of course, who lied his ass off when surrendering these jewels to Omidyar.) 
  • Question 6: Given Omidyar’s own access to the national security state, did Snowden not think of this possibility in advance? 
  • Question 7: Did he not, at this point, rethink going to Wikileaks? 
  • Question 8: Had he thought about Greenwald stovepipeing this information? 
  • Question 9: Did he really not think that the almighty US Government would find him sooner rather than later? 
  • Question 10: How does he reconcile him allegedly having a plan to go to Ecuador with him stating a dozen pages earlier that he chose NOT to originally go to Latin America? (At that point, I think we’ve caught Snowden in an outright lie.) 
  • Question 11: How do you explain apparent discrepancies in the passport and the time frame? 
  • Question 12: Why does he never mention direct Russian involvement? 
  • Question 13: This is unrelated to the spying, but if you were such an idealist, and already at least a bit informed at age 20, why didn’t you oppose the Iraq War?

These were no-brainer questions to me.

As for Assange? Beyond him being the first person to goose the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, his toady-flunky Craig Murray has indicated he knows that Assange knew something about their provenance before the end of 2016, it seems. And, he's never apologized for goosing the conspiracy theory.

Greenwald has been tagged about every time I've tagged Snowden, and has also chosen not to respond.

Beyond wanting to know what Snowden and Assange know, I want to remove the potential veil of martyrdom from them. 

Without that, no pardons.

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