Plan B Forum

John Kerry: Edward Snowden a ‘coward ... traitor’

Edward Snowden is a “coward,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday in response to the NSA leaker’s first television interview.

“Edward Snowden is a coward,” Kerry told Chuck Todd on MSNBC. “He is a traitor. And he has betrayed his country. And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so.”

In a series of interviews on the Wednesday morning shows, Kerry addressed the interview between Snowden and NBC News anchor Brian Williams.

The nation’s top diplomat conceded to Todd that the debate about privacy and the NSA would not have “risen” to its current level without the Snowden disclosures. But he insisted the issues were important to President Barack Obama before the leaks and said the disclosures imperiled national security.

“More importantly, much more importantly, what he’s done is hurt his country,” he said. “What he’s done is expose, for terrorists, a lot of mechanisms which now affect operational security of those terrorists and make it harder for the United States to break up plots, harder to protect our nation.”

In his appearances, Kerry was harshly critical of Snowden, saying that he had fled to an authoritarian country in Russia after harming the U.S. He also challenged the NSA leaker to return to the U.S. to “make his case” to the American public.

“He should man up, come back to the United States,” the secretary said on “CBS This Morning.” “If he has a complaint about what’s wrong with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case. But instead, he’s just sitting there taking pot shots at his country, violating his oath that he took when he took on the job he took, and betraying, I think, the fundamental agreement that he entered into when he became an employee.”

On the “Today” show, Kerry also addressed Snowden’s claim, released in an excerpt from his interview with Williams, in which he said he was forced to stay in Russia because the State Department revoked his passport.

“Well, for a supposedly smart guy, that’s a pretty dumb answer, frankly,” he said.

“If Mr. Snowden wants to come back to the United States today, we’ll have him on a flight today,” Kerry added. “We’d be delighted for him to come back. And that’s what a patriot would do.”

The nation’s top diplomat has been critical of Snowden in the past, telling CNN last year: “People may die as a consequence of what this man did.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/e ... z332Oh8zgj

Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, working closely with the National Security Agency, monitored the communications of senior European Union officials, foreign leaders including African heads of state and sometimes their family members, directors of United Nations and other relief programs, and officials overseeing oil and finance ministries, according to the documents. In addition to Israel, some targets involved close allies like France and Germany, where tensions have already erupted over recent revelations about spying by the N.S.A.

And then there’s Snowden’s denials that he did any damage. Show me the evidence, he protests, that anyone was really hurt by anything he did—and Williams does not call him on the point. But it’s a mug’s game to acquit oneself of doing harm by simply defining all of the harms one does as goods. If one calls democratic debate and sunshine the blowing of sensitive intelligence programs in which one’s country has invested enormous resources and on which it relies for all sorts of intelligence collection, the exposure is of course harmless. If one regards as a salutary exercise the exposure of one’s country’s offensive intelligence operations and capabilities to the intelligence services of adversary nations, then of course that exposure does no harm. And if one regards the many billions of dollars American industry has lost as merely a fair tax on its sins for having cooperated with NSA, then sure, no harm there either.

Snowden is too smart to actually believe that he did no harm to the U.S. What he means, rather, is that he regards harms to U.S. intelligence interests as good things much of the time and that he reserves for himself the right to define which harms are goods and which harms are real harms.

And this brings us to Snowden’s ultimate arrogance, the thing that makes his calm certainty finally more infuriating than anything else: He believes he is above the law. He believes he should get to decide what stays secret and what does not. He believes that he should get to decide what laws he can and cannot be tried under. He believes he gets to decide what rules should govern spying. And he not only believes he should get credit for civil disobedience without being willing to face the legal consequences of his actions, he believes he should get credit for courage as though he had done so as well.

Secretary of State John Kerry late Thursday dismissed former Vice President Dick Cheney's comments knocking the Obama administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal plan.

“Any advice from him really has no meaning to me with respect to what we’re doing today,” Kerry said on PBS Newshour.

Kerry said he’s not surprised Cheney would say something “negative” and “wrong.”
“Dick Cheney was completely wrong about Iraq, and we are still struggling with the aftermath of what Dick Cheney and his crew thought was the right policy: To go in and start a war of choice for the wrong reasons. And they turned topsy-turvy the entire region with respect to Sunni and Shia and the relationships there,” Kerry said.