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Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Is Snowden in the crosshairs?

“Everybody’s worried about him and what they’re going to do, and how they’re going to convict him of treason, and how they’re going to kill him, but what about the people who destroy our Constitution?” the former Texas Republican congressman asserted. “What kind of penalty for those individuals who just take the Fourth Amendment and destroy it? What do we think about people who assassinate American citizens without trials and assume that that’s the law of the land? That’s where our problem is.”

Paul said that “our problem isn’t with people who are trying to tell us the truth about what’s happening” as in the case of Snowden, and he fears that the U.S. government may try to kill the former contractor.

“I’m worried about somebody in our government might kill him with a Cruise missile or a drone missile,” Paul said.


i) I’m not worried about Snowden’s fate. I don’t care about him personally.

ii) I think it highly unlikely that we’d dispatch a predator drone to Hong Kong. That would create an “international incident.”

iii) I don’t think our gov’t is motivated to assassinate him. Rather, our gov’t is motivated to apprehend him and interrogate him. If he were going to defect, that might be a motivation to assassinate him, but Ron Paul rules that out.

iv) Apropos (iii), I’m guessing he went public, after taking refuge in Hong Kong, because–ironically enough–he may feel much safer now that he’s world famous. Since US intelligence agencies could probably track him down sooner or later, anonymity would make it easier for the authorities to whisk him away to a black site in Bulgaria. No one would be the wiser. This way, anything that’s done to him will have to be under the spotlight of the international news media.

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