While many Americans consider Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who broke the news that the National Security Agency had been monitoring the phone and internet data of ordinary Americans, a traitor, Snowden still believes that America “is worth dying for.”
Snowden made the comment during a live question-and-answer session with The Guardian newspaper – the paper who had previously outed him at his request – Monday. The former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor, who answered questions sent into the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald via either the paper’s website or the Twitter hashtag #AskSnowden, denounced allegations of him being a Chinese spy and defended his intrinsically patriotic motivation behind the country’s largest political leaks.
“This country is worth dying for,” Snowden said when asked what he would say to others in a similar position of possessing classified information that could improve understanding of civil liberty violations in the U.S.
“[T]he U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,” he added.
And the truth, according to the whistleblower, is that the 29-year-old is not a Chinese spy. In fact, Snowden believes that rumor is intended to distract the public even more from the government’s misconduct.
“Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing?” Snowden asked. “I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”
Since the interview was purely text, however, Snowden clarified his remarks about the accusations later in the interview.
“I have had no contact with the Chinese government,” Snowden said. According to him, he only communicates with journalists, namely those at The Guardian and The Washington Post.
Along with denouncing accusations of being a Chinese spy, Snowden also tackled being called a “traitor” by those such as former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“U.S. officials say this every time there’s a public discussion that could limit their authority,” Snowden said. “U.S. officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs.”
Snowden apparently didn’t have his feelings hurt over Cheney’s comments, however, and in fact threw him under the bus as well.
“This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32, 000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100, 000 Iraqis dead,” Snowden said. “Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, [Calif. Sen. Dianne] Feinstein, and [New York Rep. Peter] King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.”
Snowden made sure to also stress in his interview the importance of what the NSA had done with “the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history,” calling out the media for focusing too much on what his girlfriend looks like and not the data seizure.
