Snowdon is a dummy

A quarter million innocents targeted on USA government death lists and you bring up this silly old canard. You really are completely nuts, glitterbag.

That was supposed to be controlled by the three papers that received those documents; the NYT, Washington Post, and the Guardian.

From my recent reading about this very issue, it seems they exposed some intelligence members. That was not Snowden; the media should know better.

Really??? Where do you suppose the newspapers got the info? Wiki leaks?

No; the media is supposed to know not to reveal names that might endanger them.

I believe this was what you have been searching for, CI. Snowden would be fucked. He would never be heard from again. And it would be all "legal" in the good ole us of a.

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http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/End_Of_America.html

p15
Everything changed in America in September of 2006, when Congress passed the Military Commissions Act." This law created a new legal reality that heralds the end of America if we do not take action. Yet most Americans still do not understand what happened to them when that law passed.

This law gives the president-any president-the authority to establish a separate justice system for trying alien unlawfiul enemy combatants. It defines both "torture" and "materially support[ing] hostilities" broadly. The MCA justice system lacks the basic protections afforded defendants in our domestic system of laws, in our military justice system, or in the system of laws used to try war criminals-Nazi leaders got better civil liberty protection than alien enemy combatants, as did perpetrators of genocide like Slobodan Milosovic. And persons accused by the president (or his designees) of being alien unlawful enemy combatants are forbidden from invoking the Geneva Conventions, a treaty that represents the basic protections of justice common to all civilized nations. The United States has signed the Geneva Conventions and agreed to abide by them, and this repudiation is a radical departure from our traditions. Under the MCA, the government can used "coerced" interrogation to obtain evidence. Finally, and perhaps most damagingly, the MCA denies unlawful alien enemy combatants the right to challenge the legitimacy of their confinement or treatment. So, while the MCA provides all sorts of rules that the military is supposed to follow, it will be difficult, if not impossible to hold anyone accountable for breaking those rules.

But this is not all. The president and his lawyers now claim the authority to designate any American citizen he chooses as being an "enemy combatant"; and to define both "torture" and "material support" broadly. They claim the authority to give anyone in the executive branch the power to knock on your door, seize you on the street, or grab you as you are changing planes at Newark or Atlanta airports; blindfold you and put earphones on you; take you to a cell in a navy prison; keep you in complete isolation for months or even years; delay your trial again and again; and make it hard for you to communicate with your lawyer. The president claims the authority to direct agents to threaten you in interrogations and allow into your trial things you confessed to while you were being mistreated.

The president claims the authority to do any of those things to any American citizen now on his say-so alone. Let me repeat this: The president asserts that he can do this to you even if you have never committed a crime of any kind: "enemy combatant" is a status offense. Meaning that if the president says you are one, then you are.

You mean a DOD member who is operating as a terrorist in some nation they have no business in?

Oh, right, right,right, right, right. I forgot about the sacred oath they swore to censor info if a DOD member could be in danger. Kind of like Valerie Plame? I feel better already.

The word "good" is a value.

Glitterbags: Kind of like Valerie Plame? I feel better already.

Talk about abysmal ignorance.

I don't give a rat's ass how you 'feel.'

About drones and Obama.

A court of law is not the same as a news channel. If something is ruled inadmissible the defence can't use it, no matter what's been said on the telly.

JPB said it better.

It's no surprise that there is greater support in Congress to curtail metadata collections once they discovered that the NSA is sweeping up their conversations too.

That is one of the main reasons, if not the main one, why witch-hunting was curtailed. The witch-hunters began to give attention to the powerful because it was more lucrative and politically useful.

I hope i am wrong. Maybe a few MPs will rise to the occasion and lead a succesdful campaign to repel the NSA. I just don't see it coming.

From an editorial in ... you certainly guessed it ... the Washington Times

Duh,, I said, regardless of any good. So I didn't put a value on the "good." In any case, it is a stupid point.

There's a nationwide effort today to get people to write to their reps for support for the USA Freedom Act (curtails metadata capture) over the FISA Improvement Act (codifies current practices). The former is sponsored by Jim Sensenbrenner who authored Article 215 of the Patriot Act and insists it was never intended to be interpreted the way it's being interpreted by the DOD/DOJ. The later is sponsored by Diane Feinstein who heads up the Senate committee charged with oversight of the NSA, which goes to show how little oversight there has been.

Hyperlinks to information on both Acts Here

When/if he is actually charged with terrorism, then ya'll will have a point. Until then it is a red herring because he is actually charged with espionage.