JOHN KERRY:  ON BEING A MAN

Mr.  Kerry wants Edward Snowden to "man -up," and go back to the United States to face what Mr. Kerry calls "justice."

Mr. Obama has already said that if Edward Snowden comes home, he--Mr. Obama--will not seek the death penalty for him.

What the United States calls justice --as Mr. Kerry should know--includes the illegal torture facility at Guantanamo Bay in illegally Cuba.  It includes using unmanned drones to kill people who--after they have been killed--are determined always to have been "enemies" of the United States.

The prisoners at Guantanamo--some of them there, now, for fourteen years--have never been tried in a court of law, not even a United States court of law!  They have been declared--without trial--to be "enemies" of the United States.

And now Mr. Kerry thinks Edward Snowden should "man-up" and go back to the United States. He would quickly get sent off to Guantanamo, where he could safely be tortured for the rest of his life.

If Mr. Snowden were not in Russia, Mr. Obama would by now have used one of his American drones to murder Mr. Snowden.  He has already killed one United States citizen with a drone.  (Never mind "trial by jury"--that doesn't mean anything is a rogue state.)

We might remember that when Bradley Manning was first apprehended, and put in solitary confinement, and tortured--in his native country, as a United States citizen:  even before anybody started talking about the perhaps necessity of bringing him to trial, Mr. Obama announced that Manning was in prison "because he broke the law."

When the president of a country declares someone guilty before he is even charged with specific offenses, before he is tried in court for any offenses, that country is a lawless rogue state.  Mr. Obama might as well declare himself for what he is:  a dictator, a lawless head of what has become a lawless state.

When will the United States recover itself?  It can still reform.  Its people aren't evil people.  Americans protested against Lyndon Johnson and his war in Vietnam, and brought him down.  When Richard Nixon's National Guard opened fire on antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio and killed four young people, the whole nation was horrified.

But now?  Well, the United States has been at war constantly since 1991.  Maybe now nobody knows how to stop being at war.  Maybe that's why most American citizens ignore it.  Maybe they figure they are lucky to be Americans--because so far Mr. Obama hasn't used his drones IN the United States.

Stay where you are, Edward Snowden.  And when you are given the Nobel Peace Prize, accept it in absentia.  Or go to Oslo with Mr. Putin walking in front of you and behind you.