In a move which officials are trying to spin as discrediting him, the NSA has released a single email exchange with the Office of General Counsel (OGC) on NSA oversight, related to the relation of executive orders to statutory laws.
The single email released did not cover the array of issues Snowden says he brought up with the OGC, though since Snowden reported multiple email exchanges with them throughout the years that he didn’t bring up every single issue in this one, hand-selected for release email, that hardly proves they didn’t happen.
Indeed, the Snowden email released today was actually dated a full month after Snowden began talking with reporters about leaking information, so it seems likely the major concerns he brought up in other cases, which he says he didn’t get satisfactory answers for, came long before reaching this point, when he was practically out the door.
The NSA didn’t deny that other emails existed, but did claim this was the only one that immediately came up for release. The White House insisted Snowden could’ve conceivably found other ways to complain about NSA abuses besides emailing the OGC, though they didn’t make clear what those ways were.
When you have an out of control Government that believes it can do something, EVERYONE who has an opposing view is ignored! One only has to look at the foolish notion that waterboarding is not torture, It was when the US Government prosecuted a US soldier for doing it in the Phillipines before the turn of the 20th Century, It was when a Japanese General did it to US troops in the Phillipines in WWII and it was when a Law enforcement officer did it in Texas in the early nineties to a rape suspect, except for the General they got 10 years prison each, the General was executed! Yet we still hear that the Gitmo Prisoners that were Waterboarded had no crime committed against them! Both from the Public that buy the line spun by the Bush Administration and the Administration itself! Why if they are legal does the Administration fight so hard to keep such things out of the Courts, could it be (most definitely) that it KNOWS that their legal opinions are flimsy at best! On the torture/ waterboarding matter that the federal Government has prosecuted, imprisoned and executed War Criminals both foreign and Domestic as well as civilian police shows they definitely KNOW that the activities were and are War crimes! In that case the Lawyers who wrote the opinion are criminals in their own right, and it shouldn't be forgotten that after WWII Judges of the Third Reich were prosecuted for War Crimes for sentences that they handed down!
I would like to add this quote as well! My addition in brackets!
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany (or any other Country) does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
Justice Robert Jackson, US SUPREME Court who served as the chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials.