Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as Director of National Intelligence is one of the more hopeful signs that President Donald Trump will make good on his pledge to be a peacemaker.
While Gabbard is not a peacenik, she has fought against some of the worst abuses of the American empire. She opposed the “regime change” wars in Syria and Libya, the NSA’s mass surveillance of Americans, and demanded a pardon for whistleblower Edward Snowden.
To little surprise, these are the issues that senators attempted to attack during Gabbard’s confirmation hearing yesterday. Among the smears were claims that Snowden recklessly disclosed documents and that he fled to Russia.
The attacks on Snowden leveled by the senators were outright lies. They shamelessly misrepresented his heroic decision to inform the American people that their government was running a massive surveillance program that violated the constitutional rights of every American.
The claim here is that Snowden did nothing other whistleblowers had not done in the past and even provided evidence that those previous whistleblowers were accurate. He was stripped of his passport while he was in transit to Ecuador on a stop over. He had to go somewhere, so he went to Russia. Snowden did nothing recklessly, he did it knowingly and with purpose to reveal unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens by the Obama administration. That was his crime!!! They tried to attach this crime to Gabbard. What a way to do fact finding, right?