T.D.: We have. Read the memo, the Open Letter to the President. We lay it all out in there. We issue twenty one recommendations. It's all there. We even had an op-ed in yesterday's USA Today, millions of newspapers across the country, we lay it out, it's plain text language for all to read and in particular the USA Today op-ed. That USA Today op-ed was speaking directly to Americans.
That's our answer to all of this Kabuki dance from the administration and we put it there on Thursday on purpose in anticipation of precisely what we expected the president would say. Look, if the oath that I took means anything, it means that you support and defend a way of governing called the Constitution, against all enemies foreign and domestic. What has happened is that our own government has become a clear and compelling danger to the Constitution. What that means is they have substituted the Constitution with an anathema form of government, alien form of government.
I absolutely resist it because I know what it's like to live under the boot of that alien form of government. They came closer than most people realize to putting me away for a long long time. It took an unbelievable amount of support and I have realized my own fortitude in this, I wasn't going to let them get to me. Why? Because there was too much at stake in terms of History.
Do you know what it means to actually keep your freedoms and never actually have them taken away? It means more to me now than ever and as the weeks and months have gone by and it's now been two and a half years since the conclusion of my five, six year ordeal starting in 2006 but the five year ordeal that ended in a pro forma sentence, I mean five years, what it means to actually keep your freedoms, it really means, I have a greater appreciation for the oath that I took now than I did then.
It means something. If it doesn't mean anything then we just become, we go back to the Middle Ages but a modern era version of that. The twenty first century where we have those who think they have the right to rule over us and there are no rights and you're beholden to the powers that be and you're serfs and servants, you're not citizens and sovereign human beings. I don't want to live in the kind of world, I don't want to be Winston in 1984 cowering in a corner because that's the only place that the cameras couldn't see which meant the cameras knew where he was. That's no life.
And so I have dedicated the rest of my life defending life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That's fundamental and you cannot live that life without defending the sovereignty and rights that all human beings are given.
R.K.: I am sure grateful for it and I know that our listeners and our readers will be too. You have done an amazing service for democracy, for freedom, for transparency, and you just can't be thanked enough Thomas, but thank you thank you thank you. You want to wrap up with anything? You have said enough unless you need to say anything else.
T.D.: No, obviously I am rather passionate about this, I mean it reminds me and I think I shared that at dinner the other night, it reminds me of the Star Trek episode the Wrath of Khan and Star Trek in terms of a reflection of our society and the greater themes of society both the positives and negatives, I think Gene Roddenberry's original vision is a way to express all of our contradictions but also hold up a mirror at the same time and in the movie Spock sacrifices his life for the sake of the crew and there's that famous line where Kirk, his best friend is asking him "why Spock, why?" because he's in the chamber and he is being irradiated to death, he says, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." This in the end, in my own case was never about me.
Snowden, it was never about Snowden. I made a fateful decision myself both within the system and outside the system. I am fortunate that I have a voice and that I can speak freely but that was not the case for quite some time. I was made stateless in my own country by virtue of having my passport confiscated. I was criminalized for my First Amendment activity. My Whistleblowing was considered an act of treason against the State. Capital S.
I was severely restricted from traveling, I could not leave the immediate area without the permission of the court for fourteen months and the government had the right of first refusal. The government actually argued in my arraignment before Judge Richard Bennet in the Federal District Court House the week after I was indicted that I was a flight risk. That is how they viewed me. I became an enemy of the state.
Snowden was made stateless on purpose, conveniently so by the United States Government revoking his passport, that's how he ended up stuck in the transit zone in Moscow. He never intended on going to live in Russia. That was never his intent. He actually had tickets, there's proof of that, in fact there's a famous picture of the seat where it was him and Sarah Harrison were on their way to Latin America.
Well he got stuck in the transit zone because he was rendered stateless. But he has a voice even from Russia of all places. I mean it's remarkable to me and I will be the first to acknowledge that the safest place for him right now is actually in Russia and believe me I am well aware of history here and the contradictions of that history. Wow who would have thunk it was Russia that actually granted him temporary asylum under international law and right now at this time, I mean there's Western powers that should know better and grant him asylum but they won't because it's apparently politically untenable and the United States has made it very difficult for even other Western Powers who themselves have been under the boot of the surveillance, the international surveillance state.
Well these are all, this is all this world here and out of all of this, what are we supposed to, that's not a society I want to live in and some people say, well if you don't want to live in this society why don't you go live in Russia with Snowden? He ended the only, think about it, he saw what happened to me and the others and it had gotten worse under Obama in particular, Bush never went this far, even he in his own memoirs said that the whole thing about the secret surveillance programs, in fact I think Bush in some ways had a much more balanced perspective although he regretted having ceded so much of the National Security Portfolio to Cheney but even Bush, for all his contractions in his memoir said it was just a policy difference, why would we prosecute, criminalize it?
There's a policy difference. Obviously it was far more than a policy difference, it was a fundamental constitutional issue but Bush cast it in terms of just differences of opinion. It took Obama to actually use the Espionage Act to prosecute those who would dare speak truth to or of power.
It's extremely dangerous right now to speak up, especially about National Security matters because as soon as you do, they're saying you're revealing sources and methods, you're making us look bad, you're endangering, remember if you look at my own indictment, it is made crystal clear in this extended narrative prior to count one, one of ten felony counts by the way, but in that narrative, the kind of damage that my activities, the damage that it did to national security is of the highest kind, the highest. Grave, not just dangerous, not just severe, but grave!
R.K.: And then they dropped every one of those charges, you know-
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