A Short History of the New World Order

A Short History of the New World Order

http://beyondtheriversofethiopia.blogspot.ca/2012/05/world-wants-to-be-deceived-so-then-let.html

Mayer Amschel Rothschild



1773 – Mayer Amschel Rothschild assembles twelve of his most influential friends and convinces them that if they all pool their resources together, they can rule the world.
This meeting took place in Frankfurt, Germany.
Rothschild also informs his friends that he has found the perfect candidate, an individual of incredible intellect and ingenuity, to lead the organisation he has planned – Adam Weishaupt.

Adam Weishaupt



May 1, 1776 – Adam Weishaupt (code named Spartacus) establishes a secret society called the Order of the Illuminati.
Weishaupt is the Professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, part of Germany.
This date, May Day, is to become highly significant to the Soviet Communists. They held festive military parades on this day.
The Illuminati seek to establish a New World Order.
Their objectives are as follows:

1) Abolition of all ordered governments 2) Abolition of private property
3) Abolition of inheritance
4) Abolition of patriotism
5) Abolition of the family
6) Abolition of religion
7) Creation of a world government



Francois Henri, comte de Virieu

July 1782 – The Order of the Illuminati joins forces with Freemasonry at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad.
The Comte de Virieu, an attendee at the conference, comes away visibly shaken.
When questioned about the "tragic secrets" he brought back with him, he replies:

"I will not confide them to you.

I can only tell you that all this is very much more serious than you think." From this time on, according to his biographer, the Comte de Virieu could only speak of Freemasonry with horror.

1785 – An Illuminati courier named Lanze is struck by lightning and killed while travelling by horseback through the town of Ratisbon.
When Bavarian officials examine the contents of his saddle bags, they discover the existence of the Order of the Illuminati and find plans detailing the coming French Revolution.
The Bavarian government attempts to alert the government of France of impending disaster, but the French government fails to heed this warning. Bavarian officials arrest all members of the Illuminati they can find, but Weishaupt and others have gone underground and cannot be found.


Franz Zwack Von Hertel Bavarian Illuminati

Oct. 11, 1785 – Bavarian authorities raid the home of an Illuminati member named Von Zwack.
They discover Illuminati documents which show quite clearly that they plan to bring about a "universal revolution that should deal the death-blow to society…this revolution will be the work of the secret societies, and that is one of our great mysteries."


Allegory of the French Revolution
with a portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and a Jacobin Phrygian bonnet


1789 – Violence erupts in France.
The French Revolution not only overthrows the existing government but also attempts to eliminate Christianity from the nation.

Procession of the Goddess of Reason, 10 November 1793

 

A half-naked prostitute is placed on the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame and extolled as the "Goddess of Reason."
Revolutionary officials even do away with the seven-day week and replace it with a ten-day week.

John Quincy Adams the 6th U.S. President

1796 – Freemasonry becomes a major issue in the Presidential election in the United States.
John Adams wins the election by opposing Masonry, and his son John Quincy Adams warns of the dire threat to the nation posed by the Masonic Lodges: "I do conscientiously and sincerely believe that the Order of Freemasonry, if not the greatest, is one of the greatest moral and political evils …"

John Robison, Professor of Natural History



1797 – John Robison, Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University in Scotland, publishes a book entitled "Proofs of a Conspiracy" in which he reveals that Adam Weishaupt had attempted to recruit him.
He exposes the diabolical aims of the Illuminati to the world. 


George Washington


1798 – George Washington acknowledges that Illuminati activity has come to America:

"It is not my intention to doubt that the doctrine of the Illuminati and the principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States.
On the contrary, no one is more satisfied of this fact than I am."



Bank of the United States (1816-1836) had a national charter from Congress
and operated similarly to its predecessor, the First Bank.
The so-called Second Bank also issued notes that were more
widely accepted than state banks’ notes



1816 – Congress grants a 20-year charter to the Bank of the United States, a private central bank for America. 

[The Constitution had granted to Congress the "power to coin money and regulate the value thereof." 

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson had specifically warned the American people against turning this power to create money over to a private group that was un-elected and not accountable to the public:
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."]





Georg W. F. Hegel



1821 – Georg W. F. Hegel formulates what is called the Hegelian dialectic – the process by which Illuminati objectives are achieved.
According to the Hegelian dialectic, thesis plus antithesis equals synthesis.

Hegelian dialectic

  

In other words, first you foment a crisis.
Then there is an enormous public outcry that something must be done about the problem.
So you offer a solution that brings about the changes you really wanted all along, but which people would have been unwilling to accept initially.
[A good example of this would be the killings at Dunblane and Hungerford. In both cases public outrage was accompanied by the passage of stringent new gun legislation in the British parliament; yet serious questions remain unanswered about both incidents, Ed.]



William Morgan



1826 – William Morgan attempts to publish a book exposing the wrongdoing of the Masonic Lodges.

While he is in the process of having his book printed, he mysteriously disappears.
[His body was found in Lake Ontario a year later.]


Mayer A Rothschild Give me control of money

1828 – Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who finances the Illuminati, expresses his utter contempt for national governments which attempt to regulate international bankers such as him:
"Allow me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who writes the laws."
[As Sir Josiah Stamp, president of the Bank of England in the 1920s, would remark years later:
"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth; take it away from them but leave them the power to create deposits, and with a flick of a pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again."]

Frances "Fanny" Wright

1829 – British Illuminist Frances "Fanny" Wright gives a series of lectures in the United States. She announces that various subversives and revolutionaries are to be united in a movement that will be called "Communism."
She explains that the movement is to be made more acceptable to the public by professing to support "equal opportunity" and "equal rights."



President Andrew Jackson

1829-1837 – While President Andrew Jackson is in office, there are attempts to continue and strengthen the hold of a central bank over the United States.
President Jackson vigorously opposes these efforts.
Jackson tells his adversaries:
"You are a den of vipers! I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning."
In 1832, Jackson vetoes a bill to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States.

In 1833, he removes government funds from the Bank of the United States.

Moses Mordecai Marx Levy, alias Karl Marx



1848 – Moses Mordecai Marx Levy, alias Karl Marx, writes "The Communist Manifesto." Marx is a member of an Illuminati front organisation called the League of the Just.
He not only advocates economic and political changes; he advocates moral and spiritual changes as well.
He believes the family should be abolished and that all children should be raised by a central authority.
He expresses his attitude toward God by saying:

"We must war against all prevailing ideas of religion, of the state, of country, of patriotism. The idea
of God is the keynote of a perverted civilisation.

It must be destroyed."

John Ruskin

1870 – John Ruskin is named Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford University in England.
He teaches his students that the government should take control of all means of production and distribution, and he is prepared to place control of the government in the hands of a single man:
"My continual aim has been to show the eternal superiority of some men to others, sometimes even of one man to all others."





Albert Pike


1871 – Albert Pike, founder of the Klux Klux Klan, publishes his 861-page book"Morals and Dogma", intended only for Masonic eyes.
He indicates that those in the lower ranks of Masonry are deliberately deceived by their superiors:
"The Blue degrees [the first three degrees of the 32] are but the outer court or portico of the Temple.
Parts of the symbols are displayed there to the Initiate, but he is intentionally misled by false interpretations.
It is not intended that he shall understand them; but it is intended that he shall imagine that he shall understand them.
Their true explication is reserved for the Adepts, the Princes of Masonry."
[This is why about 95% of the men involved in Masonry don’t have a clue as to what the objectives of the organisation actually are.
They are under the delusion that it’s just a fine community organisation doing good works.]



Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founder of the Theosophical Society



1875 – Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founds the Theosophical Society.
Madame Blavatsky claims that Tibetan holy men in the Himalayas, whom she refers to as the Masters of Wisdom, communicated with her in London by telepathy.
She insists that the Christians have it all backwards – that Satan is good and God is evil.
She writes:

"The Christians and scientists must be made to respect their Indian betters. The Wisdom of India, her philosophy and achievement, must be made known in Europe and America."

The sign on 17 Osnaburgh Street where the Fabian Society was founded in 1884

1884 – The Fabian Society is founded to promote Socialism



Roman General Fabius Maximus


The Fabian Society takes its name from the Roman General Fabius Maximus, who fought Hannibal’s army in small debilitating skirmishes, rather than attempting one decisive battle.

Statue of Lucifer, the Fallen Angel

July 14, 1889 – Albert Pike issues instructions to the 23 Supreme Councils of the world.
He reveals who is the true object of Masonic worship:"To you, Sovereign Grand Instructors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the Brethren of the 32nd, 31st and 30th degrees: The Masonic religion should be, by all of us initiates of the high degrees, maintained in the purity of the Luciferian doctrine."



Cecil Rhodes

1890-1896 – Cecil Rhodes, an enthusiastic student of John Ruskin, is Prime Minister of South Africa, a British colony at the time.
He is able to exploit and control the gold and diamond wealth of South Africa.

Yellow diamond the Sun-Drop Diamond, discovered in South Africa

He works to bring all the habitable portions of the world under the domination of a ruling elite.
To that end, he uses a portion of his vast wealth to establish the famous Rhodes Scholarships.

William Stead

Feb. 5, 1891 – Rhodes joins his group from Oxford with a similar group from Cambridge headed by ardent social reformer William Stead.
Rhodes and Stead are members of the inner "Circle of Initiates" of the secret society which they found.
There is also an outer circle known as the "Association of Helpers."

http://beyondtheriversofethiopia.blogspot.ca/2012/05/world-wants-to-be-deceived-so-then-let.html

The Hegelian Dialectic

The Hegelian Dialectic and its use in Controlling Modern Society

General Maddox
realnewsaustralia.com
April 8, 2013

What exactly is the Hegelian Dialectic? Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a 19th century German philosopher who devised a particular dialectic, or, method of argument for resolving disagreements. His method of arriving at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments is a system of thought process still use to this day.

To put it simply, the basis of Hegelianism dictates that the human mind can’t understand anything unless it can be split into two polar opposites. Good / Evil, Right / Wrong, Left / Right.

For example when people are talking about 2 political parties, Labor or Liberal, what they’re actually referring to, without realising it, is the thesis and the antithesis based off the Hegelian Dialectic. The only real debate that occurs is just the minor differences between those two parties. Nothing is said or done about the issues that neither left or right is discussing. This in particular will become more apparent as the election draws near.

Another form of the Hegelian Dialectic is Problem – Reaction – Solution. Most of us unwittingly fall victim to it all too often and sadly if we don’t stop, we will continue to lose our free will and liberties. It has been widely used by our governments and corporations around the world. You could say that in terms of controlling the masses, and society in general, it’s deployment has been an effective tool in keeping humanity in check.

Almost all major events in history employ the Hegelian Dialectic of:
Problem – manufacture a crisis or take advantage of one already in place in order to get the desiredReaction of public outcry whereby the public demands a Solution which as been predetermined from the beginning.

A classic example is 9/11.

Only when you break the left/right paradigm and come to the realisation that the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the whole fake, and not to mention contradictory, war on terrorwas the desired outcome for the neo-conservatives within the Bush administration and the whole military industrial complex. They in fact stated in their own white papers the need for another catastrophic and catalysing event like a “new Pearl Harbour”.

Here’s a more current example of the Hegelian Dialectic is use. In Australia at present both of the main political parties on the eve of the upcoming election on September 7 are discussing “Boat People”. A derogatory term used to describe refugees and asylum seekers displaced by war or other hardships. I don’t believe they constitute what you would call a “crisis” as the statistics clearly show they aren’t, but for the purpose of this example, our Government is telling us they are a problem. The media is used to play up this problem in order to instigate a reaction (debate) in the public domain on how to tackle it. Both the opposition and ruling party offer their solution.

Again we see that the only real debate occurring is just the minor differences between those two parties. Nothing is said or done about the many other more important issues that neither left or right is discussing.

In order to avoid falling victim to the Hegelian Dialectic from now on you must remember the process involved. Anytime a major problem or issue arises in society think about who will gain or profit from it. Then remove yourself from the equation and take a step back to look at it from a third party perspective. See the so-called “problem”, look at who is reacting, why and in what way. Then look for who is offering up the solution.

When you do this from now on you’ll quickly see the real truth instead of the false truth they wanted you to see.

Domestic Spying Is Dangerous to Freedom AND is also Treason against the Constitution of the USA

Domestic Spying Is Dangerous to Freedom

DHS, the DoJ, the DoD, the DEA, the CIA, the IRS, and the FBI are all in on it.

Andrew Napolitano | August 8, 2013

How is it that the government can charge Edward Snowden with espionage for telling a journalist that the feds have been spying on all Americans and many of our allies, but the NSA itself, in a public relations campaign intended to win support for its lawlessness, can reveal secrets and do so with impunity? That question goes to the heart of the rule of law in a free society.

Since Snowden’s June 6th revelations about massive NSA spying, we have learned that all Americans who communicate via telephone or the Internet (who doesn’t?) have had all of their communications swept up by the federal government for two-plus years. The government initially claimed that the NSA has gathered only telephone numbers and billing data. Now we know that the NSA has captured and stored the content of trillions of telephone conversations, texts and emails, and can access that content at the press of a few computer keys. All of this happened in the dark, with the permission of President Obama, with the knowledge and consent of fewer than 20 members of Congress who were forbidden from doing anything about it by the laws they themselves had written, and based on secret legal arguments accepted by a secret court that keeps its records secret even from the judges who sit on the court.

This massive spying — metadata gathering, as the NSA calls it — was also done notwithstanding statements NSA officials made in public under oath and in secret classified briefings to Congress, which effectively denied it. The denials were in one case admitted to — "least untruthful," as the director of national intelligence later called his own testimony. Then, when even members of Congress who usually support a muscular national security apparatus realized that they, too, had been lied to by the NSA, the NSA responded with its own leaks.

It has leaked, for example, that as a consequence of its spying it has prevented at least 50 foreign-originated plots from harming Americans. It eventually backed off that number and declined to reveal with specificity what it independently learned and how that knowledge foiled the plots. But we do know that its colleagues in the FBI were participants in many of those plots, which means they weren’t real plots at all — just government stings going after dopes and dupes.

Last week, the NSA leaked that it captured actionable intelligence of grave and imminent danger to our embassies in the Middle East. The implication it wants you to draw here is that because it caught al-Qaida operatives talking in code in Yemen about deadly deeds they plan to perpetrate in the Arabian Peninsula, somehow the NSA’s spying on 300 million innocent Americans is constitutional, lawful, effective and therefore worth the loss of freedom.

Earlier this week, we learned that other federal agencies of alphabet nomenclature — the DHS, the DoJ, the DoD, the DEA, the CIA, the IRS, the FBI — all want access to the NSA’s database, and it has shared some of it with most of them. Also this week, former DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agents, claiming this has been going on for at least a decade, acknowledged that the DEA regularly receives raw data from the NSA and uses that data to commence criminal investigations.

Down the slippery slope we go.

The whole NSA spying apparatus was sold to Congress as a limited mechanism for combating foreign terrorists. How putting the intimate thoughts of all Americans who use telephones and the Internet under the federal microscope helps to fight foreign terrorists has never been explained in a public court — only in a secret one. But using this extra-constitutional means to fight crime brings us closer to a Soviet-style and value-free police state.

The Constitution intentionally has placed values in the path of law enforcement and national security so as to maintain our natural rights. Those values are generally articulated throughout the Constitution and specifically addressed in the Fourth Amendment. The linchpin of those values is the natural right to be left alone. All persons — even bad guys — have that inalienable right, and the government may only invade that right when it can identify a bad guy and articulate the probable cause it has to believe he is committing criminal acts. The rest of us — those for whom there is no probable cause of criminal acts — retain that right, and it cannot be taken away from us by the supine acquiescence of Congress or an unnamed judge in a secret court. That constitutional requirement — and that requirement alone — has kept Americans free from Soviet-style persecutions.

Now comes Obama, who is quarterbacking the most massive end run around the Constitution in modern times by invading everyone’s right to be left alone in the name of national security, but in reality for any governmental purpose the government wishes. And for the unfortunate people whose criminal prosecutions have commenced from the NSA’s supposedly anti-terror spying, the feds are refusing to reveal to lawyers what the source of the negative information against them was. That, of course, violates the constitutionally protected right to confront all of one’s accusers, especially those who have been paid for their accusations.

What’s going on here?

It is painfully obvious that the government is not troubled by its own violation of the Constitution. The people in the government who have done this are far more concerned with their retention of power than they are with protecting our personal liberties. That explains their perverse view that when Snowden frustrates them with a whistle-blowing leak, he can be prosecuted, but when they rebut him with their own leaks, they are to be lauded. That is not the rule of law in a free society.

What will the NSA spies seek next? Our passwords? We already know the answer to that one. They asked for them last week.

***********************

Exclusive: IRS manual detailed DEA’s use of hidden intel evidence

By John Shiffman and David Ingram

WASHINGTON | Wed Aug 7, 2013 11:29pm BST

(Reuters) – Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defence lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.

A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA’s Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

An IRS spokesman had no comment on the entry or on why it was removed from the manual. Reuters recovered the previous editions from the archives of the Westlaw legal database, which is owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, the parent of this news agency.

As Reuters reported Monday, the Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. The DEA phone database is distinct from a NSA database disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Monday’s Reuters report cited internal government documents that show that law enforcement agents have been trained to conceal how such investigations truly begin – to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up the original source of the information.

DEA officials said the practice is legal and has been in near-daily use since the 1990s. They have said that its purpose is to protect sources and methods, not to withhold evidence.

NEW DETAIL

Defence attorneys and some former judges and prosecutors say that systematically hiding potential evidence from defendants violates the U.S. Constitution. According to documents and interviews, agents use a procedure they call "parallel construction" to recreate the investigative trail, stating in affidavits or in court, for example, that an investigation began with a traffic infraction rather than an SOD tip.

The IRS document offers further detail on the parallel construction program.

"Special Operations Division has the ability to collect, collate, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate information and intelligence derived from worldwide multi-agency sources, including classified projects," the IRS document says. "SOD converts extremely sensitive information into usable leads and tips which are then passed to the field offices for real-time enforcement activity against major international drug trafficking organizations."

The 2005 IRS document focuses on SOD tips that are classified and notes that the Justice Department "closely guards the information provided by SOD with strict oversight." While the IRS document says that SOD information may only be used for drug investigations, DEA officials said the SOD role has recently expanded to organized crime and money laundering.

According to the document, IRS agents are directed to use the tips to find new, "independent" evidence: "Usable information regarding these leads must be developed from such independent sources as investigative files, subscriber and toll requests, physical surveillance, wire intercepts, and confidential source information. Information obtained from SOD in response to a search or query request cannot be used directly in any investigation (i.e. cannot be used in affidavits, court proceedings or maintained in investigative files)."

The IRS document makes no reference to SOD’s sources of information, which include a large DEA telephone and Internet database.

CONCERN IN CONGRESS

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, expressed concern with the concept of parallel construction as a method to hide the origin of an investigation. His comments came on the Mike Huckabee Show radio program.

"If they’re recreating a trail, that’s wrong and we’re going to have to do something about it," said Rogers, a former FBI agent. "We’re working with the DEA and intelligence organizations to try to find out exactly what that story is."

Spokespeople for the DEA and the Department of Justice declined to comment.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, a member of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, said he was troubled that DEA agents have been "trying to cover up a program that investigates Americans."

"National security is one of government’s most important functions. So is protecting individual liberty," Paul said. "If the Constitution still has any sway, a government that is constantly overreaching on security while completely neglecting liberty is in grave violation of our founding doctrine."

Officials have stressed that the NSA and DEA telephone databases are distinct. The NSA database, disclosed by Snowden, includes data about every telephone call placed inside the United States. An NSA official said that database is not used for domestic criminal law enforcement.

The DEA database, called DICE, consists largely of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. DICE includes about 1 billion records, and they are kept for about a year and then purged, DEA officials said.

(Research by Hilary Shroyer of West, a Thomson Reuters business. Additional reporting by David Lawder. Edited by Michael Williams)

Overpasses for Obama’s Impeachment

 

 

 

IMPEACH THIS MOTHER FUCKIN TRAITOR BARRY BARACK OBAMA SOETORO

 

 

 

A letter from Snowden’s Father to the Real Traitorous Criminal Obama Administration

Snowden’s Father Calls Out Obama On Nuremberg Crimes

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
August 1, 2013

Predictably, the corporate media, the official propaganda outlet for the establishment, has refused to post or publish an open letter sent to Obama by Lon Snowden, the father of Edward Snowden. This callous refusal should finally convince any who may have had any doubt that the United States is anything but a tyrannical national security state with a state-run media no different than the one in Cuba, China or Iran.

Edward Snowden’s unwarranted persecution and vilification by the globalist propaganda media is part of a larger campaign to snuff out investigative media.

Glenn Greenwald eluded to this during a conversation about the persecution of Pfc. Bradley Manning with CIA operative Anderson Cooper and CNN legal analyst and establishment insider Jeffrey Toobin. In response to Toobin’s defense of Manning’s unjust persecution and probable life sentence, Greenwald said the former Harvard Review editor  was arguing “for the end of investigative journalism.”

As the indisputable assassination of investigative journalist Michael Hastings makes painfully obvious, the government is not merely attempting to persecute journalists who refuse to act as stenographers for the national security state, but is actively killing them. The United States is now on par with Mexico, Iran, Colombia, and Russia, countries that stand accused of murdering journalists.

The letter penned by constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein and sent by Lon Snowden to Obama follows. Below it is a video of the exchange between Greenwald and the apologist for a vindictive and murderous state, Jeffrey Toobin, who counts as his close friend Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan.

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500

July 26, 2013

Re: Civil Disobedience, Edward J. Snowden, and the Constitution

Dear Mr. President:

You are acutely aware that the history of liberty is a history of civil disobedience to unjust laws or practices. As Edmund Burke sermonized, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Civil disobedience is not the first, but the last option. Henry David Thoreau wrote with profound restraint in Civil Disobedience: “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

Thoreau’s moral philosophy found expression during the Nuremburg trials in which “following orders” was rejected as a defense. Indeed, military law requires disobedience to clearly illegal orders.

A dark chapter in America’s World War II history would not have been written if the then United States Attorney General had resigned rather than participate in racist concentration camps imprisoning 120,000 Japanese American citizens and resident aliens.

Civil disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act and Jim Crow laws provoked the end of slavery and the modern civil rights revolution.

We submit that Edward J. Snowden’s disclosures of dragnet surveillance of Americans under § 215 of the Patriot Act, § 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments, or otherwise were sanctioned by Thoreau’s time-honored moral philosophy and justifications for civil disobedience. Since 2005, Mr. Snowden had been employed by the intelligence community. He found himself complicit in secret, indiscriminate spying on millions of innocent citizens contrary to the spirit if not the letter of the First and Fourth Amendments and the transparency indispensable to self-government. Members of Congress entrusted with oversight remained silent or Delphic. Mr. Snowden confronted a choice between civic duty and passivity. He may have recalled the injunction of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.” Mr. Snowden chose duty. Your administration vindictively responded with a criminal complaint alleging violations of the Espionage Act.

From the commencement of your administration, your secrecy of the National Security Agency’s Orwellian surveillance programs had frustrated a national conversation over their legality, necessity, or morality. That secrecy (combined with congressional nonfeasance) provoked Edward’s disclosures, which sparked a national conversation which you have belatedly and cynically embraced. Legislation has been introduced in both the House of Representatives and Senate to curtail or terminate the NSA’s programs, and the American people are being educated to the public policy choices at hand. A commanding majority now voice concerns over the dragnet surveillance of Americans that Edward exposed and you concealed. It seems mystifying to us that you are prosecuting Edward for accomplishing what you have said urgently needed to be done!

The right to be left alone from government snooping–the most cherished right among civilized people—is the cornerstone of liberty. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson served as Chief Prosecutor at Nuremburg. He came to learn of the dynamics of the Third Reich that crushed a free society, and which have lessons for the United States today.

Writing in Brinegar v. United States, Justice Jackson elaborated:

The Fourth Amendment states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing
the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

These, I protest, are not mere second-class rights but belong in the catalog of indispensable freedoms. Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart. Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government. And one need only briefly to have dwelt and worked among a people possessed of many admirable qualities but deprived of these rights to know that the human personality deteriorates and dignity and self-reliance
disappear where homes, persons and possessions are subject at any hour to unheralded search and seizure by the police.

We thus find your administration’s zeal to punish Mr. Snowden’s discharge of civic duty to protect democratic processes and to safeguard liberty to be unconscionable and indefensible.

We are also appalled at your administration’s scorn for due process, the rule of law, fairness, and the presumption of innocence as regards Edward.

On June 27, 2013, Mr. Fein wrote a letter to the Attorney General stating that Edward’s father was substantially convinced that he would return to the United States to confront the charges that have been lodged against him if three cornerstones of due process were guaranteed. The letter was not an ultimatum, but an invitation to discuss fair trial imperatives. The Attorney General has sneered at the overture with studied silence.

We thus suspect your administration wishes to avoid a trial because of constitutional doubts about application of the Espionage Act in these circumstances, and obligations to disclose to the public potentially embarrassing classified information under the Classified Information Procedures Act.

Your decision to force down a civilian airliner carrying Bolivian President Eva Morales in hopes of kidnapping Edward also does not inspire confidence that you are committed to providing him a fair trial. Neither does your refusal to remind the American people and prominent Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate like House Speaker John Boehner, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann,and Senator Dianne Feinstein that Edward enjoys a presumption of innocence. He should not be convicted before trial. Yet Speaker Boehner has denounced Edward as a “traitor.”

Ms. Pelosi has pontificated that Edward “did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents.” Ms. Bachmann has pronounced that, “This was not the act of a patriot; this was an act of a traitor.” And Ms. Feinstein has decreed that Edward was guilty of “treason,” which is defined in Article III of the Constitution as “levying war” against the United States, “or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

You have let those quadruple affronts to due process pass unrebuked, while you have disparaged Edward as a “hacker” to cast aspersion on his motivations and talents. Have you forgotten the Supreme Court’s gospel in Berger v. United States that the interests of the government “in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done?”

We also find reprehensible your administration’s Espionage Act prosecution of Edward for disclosures indistinguishable from those which routinely find their way into the public domain via your high level appointees for partisan political advantage. Classified details of your predator drone protocols, for instance, were shared with the New York Times with impunity to bolster your national security credentials. Justice Jackson observed in Railway Express Agency, Inc. v. New York: “The framers of the Constitution knew, and we should not forget today, that there is no more effective practical guaranty against arbitrary and unreasonable government than to require that the principles of law which officials would impose upon a minority must be imposed generally.”

In light of the circumstances amplified above, we urge you to order the Attorney General to move to dismiss the outstanding criminal complaint against Edward, and to support legislation to remedy the NSA surveillance abuses he revealed. Such presidential directives would mark your finest constitutional and moral hour.

Sincerely,
Bruce Fein
Counsel for Lon Snowden
Lon Snowden

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