Snowden's father's brilliant open letter to Barack Obama

On one side we have Snowden, Edmund Burke, the findings of the Nuremberg trials, opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act and the Jim Crow Laws.

On the other side we have Barack Obama, Lindsey Graham, Peter King and Michele Bachmann.

July 26, 2013
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500

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 smoothcertainly 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.

Read more at:-
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/tvnews/dateline%20nbc/obama.pdf