Jesus

I thought our government couldn't possibly make me say "unbelievable" again. But I was wrong.

US Attorney General Eric Holder has promised Moscow that Snowden will be given a fair trial, and will not be tortured or sentenced to death. The pledge was made in a diplomatic letter Holder sent earlier this week.

“The United States will not seek the death penalty for Mr. Snowden should he return to the United States. The charges he faces do not carry that possibility, and the United States would not seek the death penalty even if Mr. Snowden were charged with additional, death penalty-eligible crimes,” said the missive, which was addressed to Russian Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov.

In the letter, the US also promised that Snowden would receive a public jury trial in the civil courts, and would not be subjected to anything but “voluntary questioning” in the lead-up to his trial.

“Mr. Snowden will not be tortured. Torture is unlawful in the United States,” wrote the attorney general.

  RT

Unbelievable. 

That should reassure everybody.  Give him back, now.   We promise we won't hurt him. 

Twisted.  Evil.  Gives you the creeps, doesn't it? 

Eric Holder and his boss are the dark heart of devil slime, and I'm sorry, that insults the devil. 

Good luck, Edward. 

UPDATE:

Holder said that it wasn’t true that, with his passport revoked, Snowden couldn’t go anywhere without asylum: the government would gladly give him “a limited validity passport good for direct return to the United States.”

  New Yorker

Gee, that’s mighty white of you.

What is striking, though, reading his letter, is how non-obvious these very obvious things have become. The United States has tortured, as much as the Obama Administration has disowned the practice. It has played fast and loose with the question of venues, keeping both American and non-American citizens out of the civilian courts where they belong.

[...]

[T]he Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has, as it stands, been shaped above all by the legal imagination of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has named all of its members. What was once a check on illegal domestic wiretapping has become a workshop where words are re-defined and precedents are strung together, all out of public view—to the point where one can get a letter from the Attorney General, written in plain language, and not have any idea what it means.