An extract from a Q & A session in The Guardian this afternoon with NSA leaker Edward Snowden, the former CIA technician turned whistleblower who has lifted the lid on the can of worms that is Obama’s national security state:
“Q: Washington-based foreign affairs analyst Steve Clemons said he overheard at the capital’s Dulles airport four men discussing an intelligence conference they had just attended. Speaking about the leaks, one of them said, according to Clemons, that both the reporter and leaker should be “disappeared”. How do you feel about that?”
CLEMONS’ TWEET: “Steve Clemons @SCClemons
In Dulles UAL lounge listening to 4 US intel officials saying loudly leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should be disappeared recorded a bit
11:42 AM – 8 Jun 2013
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A: “Someone responded to the story said ‘real spies do not speak like that’. Well, I am a spy and that is how they talk. Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process – they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general.”
The ‘liberal’ defenders of police state measures are out in force.
The New Yorker leads the charge with Jeffrey Toobin lamenting the ‘grandiose narcissism’ displayed by Snowden, while Professor Geoffrey R Stone head up the operation over at the Huffington Post.
Ingo Müller wrote in Hitler’s Justice: The Court of the Third Reich, the Nazi Supreme Court “defined the ‘legal nature’ of the civil service as ‘loyalty, obedience, and conscientious performance of duty’ and had referred to civil servants as ‘the political troops of the Führer in the area of administration.’