Not that he’s necessarily wrong, but it seems like a leap to go from Snowden saying something he believes, to a certainty that “the US military can and will assassinate US citizens in the middle of manhattan”.
After CIA training, he worked in Geneva under diplomatic cover, in 2007 to 2009.
It is much more realistic that what happened was a true "Burn after reading moment" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pabA320p9B0
He wrote about some of the things that happened in Geneva, I encourage you to read them. Even sysadmins for the CIA need to know some stuff about how the game works.
This feels like a strawman to cling to the idea that being a US citizen means that the CIA won't assassinate you for being inconvenient, which has been literally and directly claimed, at least twice, by someone from the actual CIA.
Indeed, the reason you even know the name Jason Bourne, or the reason those movies work, is because of the generation-long history and reputation of the US military intelligence services to break the law flagrantly in many countries with no meaningful consequences. We don't have to suspend disbelief to engage with the idea that there is a section of government with staff who can kill anyone they deem needs killing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki
The potential murder of Gellman was stated by Snowden, who was trained by the CIA, and was stated on more than one occasion.
A US State Department document made available by the National Security Archive on 10 April 2010 reveals that a démarche protesting Pinochet's Operation Condor assassination program was proposed and sent on 23 August 1976 to US diplomatic missions in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile to be delivered to their host governments but later rescinded on 16 September 1976 by Henry Kissinger, following concerns raised by US ambassadors assigned there of both personal safety and a likely diplomatic contretemps. Five days later, the Letelier assassination took place.[8]
Documents released in 2015 revealed a CIA report dated 28 April 1978, which showed that the agency by then had knowledge that Pinochet ordered the murders.[9] The report stated, "Contreras told a confidante he authorized the assassination of Letelier on orders from Pinochet."[9] A State Department document also referred to eight separate CIA reports from around the same date, each sourced to "extremely sensitive informants" who provided evidence of Pinochet's direct involvement in ordering the assassination and in directing the subsequent cover-up.[9]
During the tenure of Richard Downie at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, a U.S. Southern Command educational institution located at the National Defense University, the alleged (and as yet unproven) role of Jaime Garcia Covarrubias, a Chilean professor who was head of counterintelligence for DINA in the 1970s, in the torture and murder of seven detainees was revealed inside the center. His alleged role was first brought to Downie's attention in early 2008 by Center Assistant Professor Martin Edwin Andersen, a senior staff member who earlier, as a senior advisor for policy planning at the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, was the first national security whistleblower to receive the U.S. Office of Special Counsel's "Public Servant Award."[10] In an October 1987 investigative report in The Nation, Andersen broke the story of how, in a June 1976 meeting in the Hotel Carrera in Santiago, Kissinger gave the bloody military junta in neighboring Argentina the "green light" for their own dirty "war."[11]
It really diminishes your point when that is compared to an airstrike on foreign soil.
We don't say that the FSB attempting to execute Skripal in a UK shopping mall doesn't count because it was in the UK. Murder is murder.
The claim that the IC would assassinate Gellman in New York was made by someone who used to be an actual CIA operative and went through their training.
Bart Gellman's book says that Snowden warned him not to be the only person in possession of the leaked data prior to publication, as the US intelligence community would kill him (Gellman) instantly to prevent the publication of the information contained therein.
This was the biggest takeaway from the book, for me: the US military will assassinate US citizens (journalists!) in the middle of New York City without due process or a trial to prevent them from carrying out journalism.
We expect this kind of cloak and dagger shit from the CIA, but it pays to think about it in clear terms: the US military can and will assassinate US citizens engaging in constitutionally protected activity in the middle of Manhattan with no consequences whatsoever.