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National Review 2016 article on release of report
Snowden Is a Traitor and a Fraud, Period
By FRED FLEITZ September 16, 2016 7:32 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/09/edward-snowden-report-house-intelligence-committee-not-pardon/
A bipartisan House Intelligence Committee report drives a stake through his disgraceful pardon bid.
At a time of extreme partisanship in our country and in the midst of what may be the most contentious presidential election in U.S. history, a congressional committee did something extraordinary: It issued a bipartisan and unanimous report on an extremely divisive issue. This issue is whether former National Security Agency technician Edward Snowden, who stole 1.5 million classified documents and leaked thousands to the news media, is a true whistleblower or a traitor.
The report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (where I worked for five years) found what many of us have long argued: Snowden is not a whistleblower; he is a disgruntled former intelligence employee who did enormous damage to U.S. national security. Click here to read the unclassified summary of this report.
The House Intelligence Committee report could not be better timed, having come out the day before the opening of Oliver Stone’s hagiographic film Snowden and a new campaign by liberal groups and the news media to persuade President Obama to pardon Snowden for the contribution he supposedly made to the cause of protecting civil liberties.
The five findings in the committee report’s unclassified summary are stunning.
Snowden Caused Tremendous Damage to National Security.
The vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests — they instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries. Although many experts had already concluded this, the report added that the U.S. government has spent at least hundreds of millions of dollars and will eventually spend billions to counter the damage done by the Snowden leaks.
The most well-known Snowden disclosure concerned the NSA metadata program, which collects phone records but not the contents of phone calls. Although this program has long been overseen by the congressional intelligence committees and helped halt several terrorist attacks against the United States, Snowden’s leaks about it led to a hysterical and uninformed reaction by the press and some members of Congress that led Congress and President Obama to implement major restrictions, which have made this program much more difficult for intelligence officers to use to identify and track terrorist suspects.
Snowden’s defenders claim that since the metadata program violated the Constitution and the privacy rights of Americans, Snowden was justified in leaking information to the press about it and therefore should receive a presidential pardon. Putting aside that Snowden didn’t bother trying to raise his supposed concern about this program through legal channels, the facts are that the vast majority of court decisions on this program upheld it as legal, Congress and the Justice Department have monitored it, and only very minor abuses were discovered. To read more on this issue, see my May 2015 NRO article “NSA Data Collection: Necessary or Unconstitutional.”
While the unclassified report summary does not give specifics of how Snowden’s leaks benefited U.S. enemies and terrorists (that is probably detailed in the classified version available to all House members), U.S. intelligence officials have publicly stated that Snowden’s leaks have allowed ISIS and al-Qaeda to evade detection by Western intelligence services. Former CIA director James Woolsey has called for Snowden to receive the death penalty because his leaks of NSA monitoring techniques helped the ISIS-inspired terrorists who committed the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks conceal their electronic communications.
The unclassified report also does not mention concerns that Snowden’s leaks have made it more difficult to stop terrorist attacks in the United States. A Chicago Tribune editorial and a Wall Street Journal op-ed by L. Gordon Cravitz, both published in December 2015, noted how limits on the use of the NSA metadata program — especially how long the government can retain phone records — kept intelligence agencies and law enforcement from acquiring intelligence that may have prevented the December 2, 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack in which two ISIS-inspired terrorists murdered 14.
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