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> What Obama thinks Snowden "deserves" is irrelevant. Sort of. Obama has the ability to pardon Snowden, if he felt strongly about it.
by evan_ 13y ago
> What Obama thinks Snowden "deserves" is irrelevant.
Sort of. Obama has the ability to pardon Snowden, if he felt strongly about it.
- dmix 13y agoOnly after he's been tried?
- lostcolony 13y agoFord pardoned Nixon without Nixon ever going to trial. So no, don't think it's necessary.
- lostcolony 13y agoIt is also perfectly legal to hold a trial where he is represented by counsel, rather than physically present. So if they were serious about trying to achieve 'justice', they could. But they're not. They're serious about trying to get him back on US soil. Which doesn't really speak well of their intentions.
- jljljl 13y agoI'm pretty sure if they did this, we would have a bunch of posts on this very forum decrying the trial as a "show trial", where Snowden does not have the ability to speak for himself or present his own defense. Whatever counsel they choose would be dismissed as a government puppet, and the result would have no impact on how people think.
- blisterpeanuts 13y agoPrecisely. Of course, somewhere down the line Snowden could get in trouble for something else, failure to pay 2013 income taxes for example. EDIT: my meaning is that if the Justice Dept. wants to nail him, they will have options regardless.
- tribe 13y agoSince he has not been convicted, he would only need to get the DOJ to drop the charges, not pardon him, right?
- Crito 13y agoAs I understand it, that would leave open the possibility of charges being brought against him again in the future, provided it never got beyond the "charges" stage.
- diminoten 13y agoIgnoring ethics for a moment (heh), one has to consider the ramifications a pardon such as that would send. That's tacit endorsement from the president of the US for everyone who thinks wrongdoings are going on to come out and tell the world, regardless of the chain-of-command, regardless of any oaths these people have taken - it's basically carte blanch permission for people in the government to start leaking privileged information. I can't think of a way to pardon Snowden without sending that kind of message - you can't say, "Only do this if you're really sure what's happening is super bad." So yeah, he could pardon Snowden, but the consequences could be ruinous to the US, even if it is "The Right Thing" to do.
- lostcolony 13y agoRight. Much better to send the message that even if the disclosure proves warranted, even if we end up agreeing that reforms are needed, even if it's clear that the 'appropriate channels' are broken, if you disclose we'll hound and pursue you to the ends of the earth. /sarcasm Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers led to charges, that were later dropped, and we didn't see some huge number of whistleblowers. So I assert your claim is a poor one. History has not shown that granting a pardon to a whistleblower has led to inappropriate leaking, and the chilling effect of not doing it when appropriate (or deciding it's not appropriate when it clearly was, such as now), is not worth the trade off.
- diminoten 13y agoI don't think history can help us here, as 1960/1970 was a fundamentally different time than now. It's infinitely easier to proliferate information to the population, and there are no barriers to doing so now, whereas the newspapers were gatekeepers of public dissemination when Ellsberg did what he did.
- moocowduckquack 13y agothe newspapers were gatekeepers of public dissemination when Ellsberg did what he did They are still in the Snowden case as well. Also, to declare that history cannot help in the analysis of a problem in the present is to admit defeat. To fully understand the present, the only real tool you have is history.