People of every age and range of experience, including national security
experts, are weighing in on Edward Snowden's decision to leak details
of U.S. surveillance programs.
FULL STORY
|
LEGAL RISKS
|
WHY DID HE DO IT?
This photo, released by the Santa
Monica Police department, shows the gunman entering the Santa Monica
College library on June 7. The gunman's shooting spree began in a home
near the college, where two were found dead, and ended when police
killed him in the college library. Santa Monica police have identified
the suspect as John Zawahri.
Santa Monica, California (CNN) -- What would compel a man to take his father's and his brother's lives and then spray bullets at his former college, killing three other people in the next 13 minutes?
Family emotional over tragic loss
Santa Monica hero used car as blockade
5th victim dead in Santa Monica shooting
(CNN) -- A 29-year-old who admitted leaking details
of a secret U.S. government program that collects massive phone and
Internet data now says he doesn't want attention.
NSA leaker hiding in Hong Kong
FBI Whistleblower Coleen Rowley
Political fallout from NSA surveillance
|
WHY DID HE DO IT?
June 10, 2013 -- Updated 1942 GMT (0342 HKT)
What would compel a man to take his father's and brother's lives before
embarking on a deadly shooting spree at his former college? FULL STORY
|
HERO RECOUNTS TERROR
|
FATHER, DAUGHTER REMEMBERED
|
FATHER, DAUGHTER REMEMBERED
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June 10, 2013 -- Updated 1918 GMT (0318 HKT)
This photo, released by the Santa
Monica Police department, shows the gunman entering the Santa Monica
College library on June 7. The gunman's shooting spree began in a home
near the college, where two were found dead, and ended when police
killed him in the college library. Santa Monica police have identified
the suspect as John Zawahri.
HIDE CAPTION
Shooting at Santa Monica College
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Police say John Zawahri fatally shot his father, brother and three others
- A fifth victim was taken off life support Sunday
- Zawahri ended his rampage at Santa Monica College, where police killed him
- A woman who tried to stop his attempted carjacking was shot several times
The Friday afternoon rampage in Santa Monica, California, ended only when police shot dead the suspect, John Zawahri.
Over the weekend, bits and pieces emerged about 23-year-old.
But with his death -- a day shy of his 24th birthday -- the central question may remain unanswered.
He had suffered mental
health issues and was hospitalized a few years ago after allegedly
talking about harming someone, a law enforcement source said.
Family emotional over tragic loss
Santa Monica hero used car as blockade
5th victim dead in Santa Monica shooting
Police had contact with
him in 2006 -- but because he was in high school, and therefore a
juvenile at the time, police couldn't disclose more.
And as recently as 2010, he attended Santa Monica College -- where he met his chaotic end in the school library.
'I'll never forget his eyes'
Police say the spate of
violence that left this beachfront city reeling on Friday involved as
many as six incidents over 13 minutes.
It started at the
Zawahri family house on Yorkshire Avenue shortly before noon, and ended a
mile away in the college library where students were studying for
finals.
Officers were dispatched
to the house to respond to reports of shots fired. There, they found
the 1,000-square-foot home in flames.
Inside, firefighters would later find two bodies in a back room -- that of Zawahri's father, Samir, and his brother Chris.
Both had been shot.
Outside the house, police came across an injured woman who too had been shot: Deborah Fine.
Fine told CNN she was driving when she saw the gunman pull over another woman and hold a rifle to her head.
"I thought to myself,
'What are you doing? Why are you pointing this gun at her?' And so I put
on my accelerator, I hit the gas, and I got in between the two of
them," she said.
The bold move quickly turned the gunman's attention to Fine.
"I'll never forget his eyes. They were just so intense and so cold," she said. "That's when he raised his rifle."
The bullets struck Fine three to four times across her body.
With blood pooling around her, she slumped over and played dead in hopes that the gunman would stop.
When neighbors rushed to the scene, Fine had one plea:
"Please, I don't want to die. I have twins. Just please open my car door," she said.
Fine still has pieces of shrapnel inside her body.
The next two victims
Fine had interrupted the gunman's carjacking. But the gunman's rampage was just beginning.
He got into the carjacked vehicle and forced his victim to drive the short distance to Santa Monica College.
During their ride, 911 calls poured in, keeping police on the gunman's path.
As the car headed toward
the campus of the community college, where 30,000 students are
registered, he opened fire on a passing bus, slightly wounding three
people.
He then got out and shot
into a red Ford Explorer, carrying 26-year-old Marcela Franco and her
father, 68-year-old Carlos Navarro Franco. They were on campus to get
textbooks for Marcela.
Carlos Franco worked as a groundskeeper at the college. He died shortly after the shooting.
"Carlos worked really
hard. He worked beyond the age of retirement ... so that he could
support his daughters and especially Marcela," who was about to
graduate, relative Margret Quinonez Perez said.
Marcela Franco wanted to be a clinical psychologist. She was taken off life support Sunday.
"We spent last 48 hours
like (in) a cocoon. Nobody else in there -- just us," Quinonez Perez
said. "We were loving her, telling her how much we loved her. We're
going to miss her."
The Santa Monica College Foundation established The Carlos Franco Family Memorial Fund to help the family. Relatives want to give the father and daughter proper burials.
"'Broken' is not a strong enough word to describe us," Quinonez Perez said.
'He executed her'
After shooting into the SUV, the gunman abandoned his hijacked vehicle -- leaving the driver unhurt.
Dressed in black and
wearing a ballistic vest, he then walked the campus, "shooting as he
went along," Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks said.
Outside the school library, he saw a woman and "executed her," Seabrooks said.
Her death was the fifth of the rampage. Her name was not released.
Gunfight in the library
By all accounts, the
gunman was ready to inflict maximum harm. He had about 1,300 rounds of
ammunition and multiple firearms, Seabrooks said.
He went into the school library and fired several times at terrified patrons who were hiding in a safe room.
Police said it was "miraculous" that they were not wounded.
Jasmine Franco was in a classroom next to the library -- waiting for her English class to start.
"You could hear
rumbling, a lot of rumbling, it sounded like an earthquake or
something," she said, referring to the sounds of gunfire mixed with the
footfalls of people running.
Inside the library, Priscilla Morales and her friends hid.
"I was so scared and thought literally I was going to die," she said.
By then, the gunman had returned to the main area of the library, he was met with three police officers.
"Drop it!" Morales said she heard police say.
Then she heard gunshots and a man's screams. Officers had shot and killed Zawahri.
The rampage was over, but the questions remain.
Kyung Lah reported from Santa Monica; Holly
Yan and Jackie Castillo reported from Atlanta. CNN's Susan Candiotti and
Traci Tamura also contributed to this report.
June 10, 2013 -- Updated 1814 GMT (0214 HKT)
NSA leaker 'doesn't want publicity'
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Dozens of Facebook pages support or criticize the NSA leaker
- Some say he's a hero championing transparency; others call him a traitor
- Edward Snowden's actions have united strange bedfellows
- Snowden told the Guardian he admires Bradley Manning but he's different
Too late, Edward Snowden.
You're getting it -- on every scale, good and bad, across the Internet
on social media and on every news broadcast. People of every age and
range of experience, including national security experts, are weighing
in on what you've done.
Some love you, others
despise you. You're now a lightning rod for spirited debate surrounding
government transparency versus public protection against the threat of
terrorism.
Like WikiLeaks' source
Bradley Manning, now on trial for leaking secrets, Snowden said he
independently decided that the program was counter to American
principles and should be revealed.
NSA leaker hiding in Hong Kong
FBI Whistleblower Coleen Rowley
Political fallout from NSA surveillance
"There is no public oversight," he told the Guardian newspaper.
Like Manning, he went outside the system, and critics are blasting the computer expert for not airing concerns internally.
Snowden's actions have united some strange bedfellows. Left-leaning filmmaker Michael Moore and right-leaning commentator Glenn Beck tweeted that they think he's a "hero."
Democratic senators Ron
Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado and Republican Sen. Rand Paul
of Kentucky say they're worried the government could be overreaching
with the program. Opensecrets.org lists Snowden as contributing to the 2012 presidential campaign of Rand Paul's father, libertarian Ron Paul.
Dozens of Facebook pages
supporting Snowden have popped up in the past day. There are at least 2
million mentions of the North Carolina native on Twitter. Comments are
so wide-ranging it's hard to put a finger on one theme, but social media aggregator BuzzFeed says that the word "hero" pops up more on Twitter than "traitor."
Snowden's strongest
critics are using terrorism and incidents like the Boston bombings and
9/11 to explain why government monitoring is necessary to head off
attacks. They say he should have kept what he was working on quiet to
protect the public.
Some added that they
don't mind being watched. If they are doing nothing wrong, they argue,
then they have nothing to fear from a monitoring program.
For all anyone knows, Snowden might have been taking all this in Monday through his laptop in his hotel room in Hong Kong.
On Sunday, he outted himself a Guardian
video interview. He must have known the stakes; after the first reports
in the Guardian, the U.S. Justice Department said it was beginning a
criminal investigation into the leak.
On Sunday, Snowden told the newspaper, "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong."
Snowden told the
newspaper that while he admires Manning and Daniel Ellsberg, famous for
leaking the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war, he considers himself
different from Manning because he "carefully evaluated every single
document" to "ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest."
"There are all sorts of
documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over,
because harming people isn't my goal," he said. "Transparency is."
But no matter his
intention, he says he's paying a price. The newspaper gave details of
his comfortable life before he became a leaker, saying that he walked
away from a $200,000 job for Booz Allen Hamilton, which let him work
from his Hawaii home. Booz Allen Hamilton is a private consulting firm
the government contracted to work on the program.
Afraid the government
would come after him, the paper said, he told his girlfriend he had to
go away for a bit and has been living in a hotel room and stuffing
pillows under his door to thwart eavesdroppers.
Staying at the hotel is expensive enough, the Guardian said, but room service is killing him.
Snowden is hoping a country will offer him political asylum -- a wish reminiscent of notorious WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Like Assange, Snowden may be already on a path to cult status.
"Yeah, man, going to try and get this page big and then get donations for his lawyers," wrote Rob Williams on one of many Facebook pages supporting Snowden.
"Very courageous what this man has done," Williams wrote, on a site with more than 1,000 "likes."
This is about our government becoming an evil empire.
Brett Foley, Facebook poster
Brett Foley, Facebook poster
The focus shouldn't be on Snowden, another page argued.
"It's not about the government seeing who I call or what you Google,"
Facebook poster Brett Foley wrote. "This is about our government
becoming an evil empire."
There are several anti-Snowden pages, too. Rob Edwards Ellison
wrote that he supports sanctions against any nation that grants Snowden
asylum. "His alleged actions are not a political issue but rather a
serious criminal matter for which the United States has the right to
prosecute even if it means bringing the matter before the International
Court in The Hague."
By noon Monday, CNN's story on Snowden had generated nearly 10,700 comments.
Some commenters are citing the Boston bombings and 9/11 to justify government monitoring.
Annie Mee said she was
"impressed" with Snowden but "when people found out the Boston Bombers
had been under surveillance by the FBI, people demanded to know why MORE
hadn't been done. "So how do you want it, people? You can't have it
both ways."
Snowden's actions are not tantamount to spying or aiding the enemy, argued a CNN commenter "Bacon2014."
"It's one thing to
expose national secrets that are meant for foreign espionage. That's
treason. That said, this man exposed a secret spying operation on US
citizens - both innocent and otherwise. We have a Constitutional right
against such intrusions. That's not traitorous ...
"I am all for punishing
people who expose national secrets. I am very against the whole concept
of WikiLeaks. But this is different. Exposing the government's violation
of our constitutional rights is contextually the opposite of treason."
Some readers suggested those outraged by the government's program are being naive about terrorists.
"You'd prefer that
terrorists operate in comfort with the knowledge that you'll be fighting
for their privacy?" Jermaine in Atlanta said. "Why would you not want
the US government to be able to have all the information it can have
when it comes to protecting itself and its people?"
Gregory Keener shot
back, "The threat of terrorism does NOT justify abandoning
constitutional principals (sic) ... the invasion of privacy of millions
without ANY reasonable suspicion for the vast majority."
While observers continued to debate, a person with a unique understanding of the situation appeared on CNN Monday morning.
Former FBI agent Coleen Rowley gained notoriety in 2002 when a scathing memo
she wrote about the agency became public. She criticized the FBI for
mishandling the investigation of terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui
before the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Rowley said top bureau officials stymied a wider investigation into
Moussaoui, then held in Minnesota on immigration charges. She also
accused FBI officials of acting to "circle the wagons" after the attacks
on New York and Washington. Moussaoui was later charged as a
conspirator in those attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people.
Rowley was one of three whistle-blowers featured as Time magazine's Persons of the Year in December 2002.
"I'm sure (Snowden) has a
healthy awareness of the bumpy road ahead of him," Rowley said, adding
that she felt it was "sad" that "American truth tellers" have to go to
another country.
But Rowley worked within the system, and that's what she says separates her from Snowden.
What do you think? Was Snowden right to leak? Tell us below.
COPY http://edition.cnn.com
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