On Monday’s NOW with Alex Wagner, the panel discussed some of the recent comments made by Edward Snowden in a live chat hosted on The Guardian website.
The 29-year-old-former NSA contractor told readers that he considered it an “honor” to be called a traitor by Dick Cheney after the former vice president accused Snowden of being one in an interview Sunday.
“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 wrote Monday. “Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American … 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 also denied being a Chinese spy, telling readers, “if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”
Snowden’s comments—his first since speaking to The South China Morning Post last week—came after The Guardian newspaper published his latest leak documenting how the U.K. and U.S. governments had spied on foreign officials at two international conferences in London back in 2009.
Snowden’s comments also came after his father, Lon Snowden—told Fox News Channel that he was “saddened” by his son’s decision to leak classified documents.
Matthew Alexander