Time to pardon Assange and Snowden

U.K. COURT REJECTS EXTRADITION OF ASSANGE TO THE U.S.

U.S. APPEAL COULD DRAG OUT DECISION FOR YEARS

 

A U.K. court in London refused to grant the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States. It is expected that the U.S. will appeal the decision. The trans-atlantic political pressure will be enormous in the quest to prosecute Assange for publishing classified documents on his on-line Wikileaks. Assange's only difference between the New York Times and the Washington Post is that his revelations were not to the liking of the powers that be. They did not provide political advantage to those in power.

Assange has been under assault for 8 years, spending 7 years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London on trumped up sex charges in Sweden.  After being forced out of the embassy he has spent the last year in London jails fighting extradition to the U.S. You can bet his woes are not going to be over unless he is pardoned and an end is made of this political persecution.

Assange also has the knowledge and the proof as to the source of the hacking of the Democrat National committee in 2016. He has claimed it was not a source from a sovereign nation and was handed to one of his allies in a park in Washington D.C. Any such provable revelation would blow a hole in the existing narrative of Russian election interference.

As for Snowden, his crime was revealing the NSA's illegal collection of communications data on every American citizen. This was supposed to be in an effort to counter terrorist acts. This data was and is likely still being collected without warrant or probable cause and stored in the NSA's massive facilities in Nevada. The terrorists were mostly well aware of this capability, that is why Osama bin Laden used hand carried messages rather than any electronic communication. The only revelation was to American citizens who were in the dark about this illegal collection of data. The then NSA director Clapper swore under oath in congressional hearings on National TV that the NSA does not collect and store information on American citizens. No action was ever taken against Clapper, as compared to what would have happened to the political enemies of the deep state.

Snowden was in fact a true whistle blower, not the fake leakers we have witnessed for the last few years. Snowden revealed illegal actions by U.S. government agencies taken against the civil rights of American citizens. No action has yet to be taken to protect the privacy of Americans and no explanation has yet been given to what end all this information is going to be used.

The collection of this massive data from communication companies and social media suggests that there is a program in place to profile all Americans, very similar to what has been done in communist China.

Both Snowden and Assange should be pardoned by Trump. It is unlikely that they will treated better under a Biden presidency. Then we could have a real discussion on what constitutes freedom of the press. What are the limits to government surveillance and what kind of information should be maintained by the government on American citizens. It seems we now live in an era without any such discussion, just a lot of fluff about personalities and irrelevant gossip. Journalism has now become a distraction from the real issues of importance.