The Fact That The US Intelligence Community So Readily Admits To Fantasies Of Killing Ed Snowden Shows Why They Can't Be Trusted

from the scary-shit dept

“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”



“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”



[....] “His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas Intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”



[....] “I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”

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We've mentioned things in the past like former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden "jokingly" talking about how he'd like to put Ed Snowden on a "kill list" while simultaneously suggesting that the NSA should be a part of determining who to target. While some would dismiss this as a tasteless "joke" it seems like he's not the only one in the intelligence community with such thoughts. We just recently noted that reporter Steven Levy, who spent over two hours interviewing NSA officials, had said that they appear to have a real and passionate hatred towards Snowden.Now, Benny Johnson, over at Buzzfeed, has been able to get a bunch of intelligence community and military officials to comment anonymously, but on the record, about how much they want to kill Snowden , often including full descriptions of how they'd do it -- and the fact that they don't see any reason to support things like basic due process. The quotes are chilling.While it may bethat those still on the inside of the intelligence community and the military have thisreaction to Ed Snowden, it actually helps to demonstrate. NSA officials like to talk about all of the training everyone in the intelligence community has, and how it's "in their DNA" to protect the Constitution and the American way. The NSA official in charge of dealing with the Snowden leak even told Levy that if there was any abuse of the NSA's data, there would be "lines at the Inspector General's office here, and at Congress as well--longer than a Disneyland line." And yet... here are lots of those very same insiders who clearly are overcome with an emotional, rather than logical, response to the situation. They appear to have no problem tossing aside ideals like freedom, due process -- or even the 4th Amendment which Snowden was trying to restore support for. And instead of all that: they just want blood. They want to kill. They don't want a trial.Do people like that sound like the kinds of people you can "trust" to not abuse their power? Do they sound like people you can "trust" to not spy on people they don't like? They've already admitted that they're willing to kill someone they don't like just because they don't like him.The article is chilling not just because of what these employees of the American public are openly discussing doing to someone who sought to inform the American public -- but because it shows the lengths they will go to to trample the American ideal and the Constitution, which they took an oath to uphold. They are directly admitting that all of that, all logic, all reason goes right out the window when someone pisses them off.And that's the very reason why the NSA needs to be reined in. The people working there seem to be bloodthirsty and emotional, prone to lashing out and dismissing the very basis of the Constitution. After hearing those statements, I don't see how anyone in the NSA can possibly claim that the American public can "trust" them not to abuse the system. They appear bloodthirsty andto abuse the system.

Filed Under: death threats, ed snowden, emotions, intelligence community, killing, nsa, surveillance