FORMER CIA OFFICER: Edward Snowden Is No Traitor - Business Insider
There are a number of narratives being floated by the usual suspects to attempt to demonstrate that Edward Snowden is a traitor who has betrayed secrets vital to the security of the United States. All the arguments being made are essentially without merit. Snowden has undeniably violated his agreement to protect classified information, which is a crime. But in reality, he has revealed only one actual secret that matters, which is the United States government’s serial violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution through its collection of personal information on millions of innocent American citizens without any probable cause or search warrant.
That makes Snowden a whistleblower, as he is exposing illegal activity on the part of the federal government. The damage he has inflicted is not against U.S. national security but rather on the politicians and senior bureaucrats who ordered, managed, condoned, and concealed the illegal activity.
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In August 2005, Giraldi wrote that US Vice President Dick Cheney had instructed STRATCOM to prepare “a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States… [including] a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons… not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States.” The reason cited for the attack to use mini-nukes is that the targets are hardened or are deep underground and would not be destroyed by non-nuclear warheads.[7][8]
In 2005 Giraldi also wrote that the Italian Niger/yellowcake documents claiming an Iraqi interest in purchasing uranium from Niger were forgeries created by former CIA officers and Michael Ledeen. (See Niger uranium forgeries.) Giraldi also wrote that officials in the Office of Special Plans working for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith had forged the “Habbush letter” allegedly written by Saddam Hussein’s intelligence director regarding shipping the uranium.[9][10]
In 2009 Giraldi wrote that unnamed intelligence sources had told him that a document published by The Times, which allegedly described an Iranian plan to experiment on a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weapon, was in fact a fabrication, which Giraldi speculated was created by the state of Israel. He claimed that Rupert Murdoch publications regularly published false intelligence from the Israeli and sometimes the British government.[9][11] Further disclosures by The Times undermined the document’s veracity.[12]