“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”
― Edward Abbey
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TBH, I’m getting tired of some of the recent decisions for the Nobel Peace Price (and I’m saying this as one of last year’s laureates). While it makes sense to support people who do significant things in our time, I’d rather wait for the dust to settle before awarding prizes based on a few months’ work or our prediction of their possible long term results.
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How about they just retract Obama’s and give it to Snowden and Manning?
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They can’t (under the present rules, at least). Once a laureate has been chosen, the decision is final and can’t be revoked (although the laureate can refuse the award). There was a petition this April to revoke Obama’s prize, but I can’t even find any official response from the committee. It gained 20,000 signatures in the first week (10,000 in the first 24 hours), but seems to have lost some steam since then.
It would cautiously support the prize to specific whistleblowers like Snowden and Manning, but given that the prize is intended to be timeless and not swayed by the current social issues (i.e. picking someone based on promises and not being GWB), I’d rather the committee waited for a couple of years at least to get some perspective.
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You are a winner of a nobel prize and are coming out against their decision for the Peace Prize laureates lately? You should write a letter to a major paper expressing the opinion. It will carry more weight than most people’s anger filled tirades and might correct the legislature into making good choices for the Prize…
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The EU won the prize last year. I am a citizen of two EU countries, so unless the EU is defined only as the governments themselves for the purposes of the award, I might as well take my own microscopic piece of the credit!
In all seriousness though, Europe has done a lot to promote internal peace and goodwill between its members. While the decision itself wasn’t without controversy and it would be good to see more laureates in the future that are not associated with governments, it’s worth recognizing the progress that has been made since WWII. Whether this should be done with the Nobel Peace Prize or whether an award would paper over the less commendable aspects of Europe is another issue.
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Oh, yeah. That was clarified to mean the governments behind the EU, I thought.
Laureates get nomination rights, that’s why I asked.
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I’m not nearly that important, unfortunately.
@jimh: Pardon me, but since when have whistleblowers been sent to Gitmo to be tortured? Bradley Manning isn’t going to be sentenced there.
Less hysteria and more fact, please.
When it is determined that he has hurt the US in some small or big way, I will consider the idea that he is NOT a patriot. So, far, I cannot contemplate this idea, having not received any credible information along those lines. By the way, embarrassment does not count. Suffering diplomatically will often not count in my book either, since US foreign policy and US diplomacy are in such a shambles already now.
When I do receive information along these lines, I will then have to weight it against the obvious good accomplished.
If we take him at his word (no reason not to at this point), we see his motivations are clearly patriotic.
Pretty simple really.
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We can’t. So we shouldn’t. The system has become so corrupt, so punishing to whistleblowers, that we daren’t turn it loose on them. The damage done by any actual traitors is pretty minor compared to the damage done by the system that can declare anyone it likes a traitor.
Once we’ve reformed the system, then it’s safe to go back to trying to sort whistleblowers from enemy agents. But by then you won’t need to.
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I’m still not quite sold on the fact that Snowden is a whistleblower. We have specific laws covering whistleblowers, and what they say is that you MUST notify someone internally that you are seeing a wrong doing being commited. That can include the soliciter general or a congressperson. You can’t tell me that some of these “small government tea party obama hating” congress critters would take information that the administration is spying on tons of americans and do NOTHING with it. Look at what they’ve done over the IRS scandal. They’d spin it as “Obama’s spying on good republican americans” and run with it.
But even by Greenwald’s own admission, Snowden contacted him BEFORE HE WAS EVEN HIRED by BAH. He was teaching Glen how to use encrypted mail before he started. He had NO INTENTION of ever trying to work within the system, his goal from square one was to leak stuff straight to the press.
Now, I can believe his goal is admirable, that he just didn’t believe that it was possible to fix from within… but the whistleblower law requires you at least TRY… and he didn’t do that.
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