in fine<\/em> que la Russie est sans aucun doute plus attentive au respect des lois que les USA. Pour Lindorff, ce jour de la lettre de Holder fut celui o\u00f9 il eut le plus honte d’\u00eatre un citoyen des \u00c9tats-Unis d’Am\u00e9rique. Ce texte, qui n’est certainement pas excessif, fait mesurer l’effet que produit la politique US actuelle sur nombre de jugements aux USA, dans le climat exacerb\u00e9 actuel et d\u00e9sormais tout entier tourn\u00e9 vers la questions des libert\u00e9s individuelles.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00abI have been deeply ashamed of my country a number of times. The Nixon Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong was one such time, when hospitals, schools and dikes were targeted. The invasion of Iraq was another. Washington’s silence over the fatal Israeli Commando raid on the Gaza Peace Flotillain which a 19-year-old unarmed American boy was murderedwas a third. But I think I have never been as ashamed and disgusted as I was today reading that US Attorney General Eric Holder had sent a letter to the Russian minister of justice saying that the US would not seek the death penalty in its espionage case against National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, promising that even if the US later brought added charges against Snowden after obtaining him, they would not include any death penalty, and vowing that if Snowden were handed over by Russia to the US, he would not be tortured.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbSo it has come to this: That the United States has to promise (to Russia!) that it will not torture a prisoner in its control a US citizen at that and so therefore that person, Edward Snowden, has no basis for claiming that he should be treated as a refugee or granted asylum.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bb Why does Holder have to make these pathetic representations to his counterpart in Russia? Because Snowden has applied for asylum saying that he is at risk of torture or execution if returned to the US to face charges for leaking documents showing that the US government is massively violating the civil liberties and privacy of every American by monitoring every American’s electronic communications.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbSnowden has made that claim in seeking asylum because he knows that another whistleblower, Pvt. Bradley Manning, was in fact tortured by the US for months, and held without trial in solitary confinement for over a year before being finally put on trial in a kangaroo court, where the judge is as much prosecutor as jurist, and where his guilt was declared in advance by the President of the United States the same president who has also already publicly declared Snowden guilty too.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbIt is incredibly shameful that we US citizens have to admit that we live in a country that tortures its prisoners, that casually executes people who are mentally retarded, who are innocent, who had defense attorneys who slept through their clients’ trials, whose prosecutors slept with the judge, who were denied access to DNA evidence that could have proven their innocence, or who were convicted based upon the lies of prosecutors and prosecution witnesses.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbThis country’s justice system has become so perverted and politically tainted that the rest of the world, including Russia, knows that Snowden is telling the truth when he says he cannot hope to receive a fair trial here. Indeed, Congress has passed laws, and the President has signed laws, giving this government the power to lock someone like Snowden up indefinitely without trial, to torture him, and even to kill him, not through a jury decision on capital punishment, but simply on the basis of a secret finding by the President that he has aided or abetted terrorism.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbNo wonder Russia and several other countries, including Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, have offered or are considering offering Snowden asylum. And no wonder that, in its obsession with getting its tyrannical hands on him, this government is willing to promise (for what a promise from the US government is worth) not to kill him or torture him. Shame and anger are the only appropriate responses to that letter from Holder.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbIf this were a country that honored the rule of law, Attorney General Holder would not need to promise not to torture. He would need only to point to the US Constitution, with its ban on cruel and unusual punishment. He would not need to promise a fair trial to Snowden, with no capital punishment on any charges. He could point instead to the Constitution’s promise of a presumption of innocence and of a public trial by a jury of the accused’s peers, to make the case against the granting of asylum.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbIn such a country, someone like Snowden, with the help of a crack legal team, would have a fair shot at proving to a jury his innocence of the government’s frivolous espionage charges. He’d have a fair chance of convincing at least one juror of his absolute innocence of any crime, making his conviction impossible.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbBut that is not what this country is, especially today…<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\n
dedefensa.org<\/em><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"De la honte d’\u00eatre un citoyen des \u00c9tats-Unis d’Am\u00e9rique Il est vrai que la lettre que le secr\u00e9taire \u00e0 la justice Eric Holder a adress\u00e9e \u00e0 son coll\u00e8gue russe, le 23 juillet 2013 (voir le 26 juillet 2013, sur Russia Today), a quelque chose d’\u00e0 la fois path\u00e9tique et surr\u00e9aliste. Holder plaidait aupr\u00e8s du ministre… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[12229,12329,12327,4607,12328,2730,12224,4281],"class_list":["post-75127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ouverture-libre","tag-asile","tag-honte","tag-lindorff","tag-politique","tag-prices","tag-russie","tag-snowden","tag-torture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}