It appears that the U.S. media has again gone into convulsion behaving more like the traditional lynching mob-reminiscent of the days of slavery-than the independent free-thinking press of the 1970s and 1980s.
CNN, fuming in rage and foaming at the mouth at having been made literally a laughing stock, see's it's reporter dash in panic for the next flight out of Cuba rather than enjoy a day or two's rest in Havana and screeching at rather puzzled individuals in the transit cafe 'anyone seen Edward Snowden?',without even greeting them,explaining who he is or even bothering to check if they speak English, let alone, if indeed, they are even remotely interested in or had heard about this U.S. debacle.
This same fury is displayed by U.S. politicians calling for the death penalty specifically for Snowden and more generally for journalists and whistleblowers whilst warning Russia and China to hand over Snowden or face unspecified consequences.
I believe that Edward Snowden genuinely acted in good faith.
He believes,as do many educated Americans, that civil liberties are under threat from a super-state which reserves for itself the moral authority to invade and monitor the privacy of it's citizens and as much of the world as it can control, on the grounds of national 'security' be it economic, political and military, or all three.
On a strategic basis, America has decided that, in a world of global communications on an unprecedented scale, he who controls the technology and the information, rules the world. This principle has not been lost to our economic rival-China- also eager to achieve the same cyberspace objective as the world dominant superpower.
Edward Snowden is an educated man, so what would motivate him to run for his life to a territory which has never experienced a modicum of democracy under British administration and one in which all spontaneous demonstrators turning out in their masses to sheepishly support him against the 'evil' Obama are only permitted to so do at the behest of their Chinese masters in Beijing? Try demonstrating for independence from mainland China in Hong Kong and see how swiftly all of these naive and malleable supporters of Edward Snowden would be imprisoned for a very long time-or just 'disappear'. or probably be shot or hanged for treason after a kangaroo court trial in Beijing.
So what motivated him? It's absolutely clear from what I can make out that his decision to flee to Hong Kong was a hasty one. Perhaps it was taken because the FBI were homing in on an intelligence leak or security compromise.
He could certainly have found an easier way to 'disappear' without running half way around the world (to a Chinese 'territory') if his 'flight' to 'freedom' had been properly prepared in advance.
So anyone with a degree of common sense can see that this is not the flight of a traitor who has agreed to sell state secrets to an identified interested party, ready and waiting to provide a safe haven, but someone desperate for a way out of a situation he personally believed, on grounds of conscience, to be intolerable and one he could no longer support-the betrayal of the constitutional rights of the US citizen unblemished since the days of the founding fathers and evolved to support and strengthen civil rights and justice-rather than suppress them.
So what should we make of Snowden's decision to exit Russia for Ecuador-a country
with less human and indigenous rights (for it's minorities) than the one he forsake?
Will he be able to speak freely about human rights and civil rights in Ecuador, or Brazil, or any other Latin American country? I think not.
As Bob Dylan said ( and this can be said today for the Arab world and South America today,especially Brazil and Ecuador) - their 'road is rapidly agein' and 'the times they are a changin'.
One of the conditions of his asylum,if ever granted in Ecuador, will be an undertaking to confine his 'revelations' to those of the 'evil empire' (sic. the U.S.) and avoid human rights issues in Latin America-be it Ecuador or Brasil, or (Hitler's favourites) Argentina, Colombia Uruguay and Paraguay.
On this ground alone Edward Snowden is already a suffocated idealist and my guess is that he will, when he appreciates the horrors of media restrictions in Ecuador, ultimately return to the United States to, as it were, face his critics.
Sadly,nobody has inherited the Kennedy mantel nor the 'Tip' O'Neill flair for balance,wisdom, political compromise and moderation on Capitol Hill today.
Understanding Motive Is A Key Requisite
So why all the trouble knowing the fate which would befall him?
There is no reason, in my view,to doubt the sincerity of his beliefs but there is a question as to why someone with such passionate beliefs would sign an Official Secrets or National Security or Homeland Security pledge of non-disclosure knowing full-well what he would be likely letting himself in for.
Even allowing for him being innocent at recruitment, a further question would arise as to why he continued to take a handsome salary from a government he intended to betray.
Lets be clear about what Edward Snowden was: a sub-contracted U.S. Government employee, not a journalist nor researcher, dealing with highly sensitive data which he had pledged in writing to keep secret.
I know about such undertakings, I signed them myself before I retired as a civil servant.
They are not presented to employees for no reason-and even if you are unaware of exactly what you will be dealing with, the most obvious course of action is to resign if it becomes clear there is a conflict between belief and faith. It might be a philosophical argument but it is not to be dismissed lightly.
Was there a need to go public (nay,universal) when there are still many avenues in the U.S. to ultimately bring such issues under political scrutiny and accountability?
Is there a difference between Watergate and Prismgate?
Should Obama be impeached for bugging the nation,nay, the world, like Richard Nixon was for bugging the offices of political rivals?
There is certainly a difference.
That fundamental difference is 9/11,the War on Terror and The Patriot Act.
Incredibly Remote
Most movies and documentaries about the events surrounding that fateful morning are rabidly partisan,conspiracist, racist or just anti-Muslim so I don't have much time for them.
'Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close' by Jonathan Safran Foer is the exception to the rule. It is a fictional account of one American family's suffering in the aftermath of 9/11.
If you don't have time to read the book, watch the movie.
What has a soppy fiction book about 9/11 got to do with Edward Snowden?
What about the close to two million Muslim lives which have been either lost,displaced or afflicted in Iraq,Syria and Afghanistan since 9/11?
What about the suffering indigenous Christians in Arab lands (with the exceptions of The Arab Muslim Gulf States) today?; driven from their homes in a new genocide, a Christian Hegira from Arab lands in the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and North Africa today and one the media quite deliberately and consciously ignores-and which all Christian politicians in Europe and the United States would also prefer to keep silent about. The treatment of Christian Syrians (in flight for their lives) by Greek Police and Customs -who send them back out to sea in boats in the hope the boats will drift away from Greek waters (or sink) is reminiscent to me of the bestial cruelty of the Ottoman Turks who placed men, women and children onto boats and capsized them in the Black Sea during the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923.
Surely we all need to be incredibly deaf and extremely remote to ignore the pain of these innocent victims?; you may very well, and rightly, demand.
What all of the above have in common with the events unfolding is remoteness.
The remoteness of the killers from their victims, the remoteness of so-called professing Christians (specifically Greek Orthodox) from the tenets of Christianity-with regard to the plight of fellow Christians fleeing from persecution today in Syria and North Africa.
(Shame on all the Christian world which turns away Christians fleeing persecution in Muslim lands in these turbulent times and seeking sanctuary from fellow-Christians in America, Europe and elsewhere.
Even in historical battles and rivalry during the Dark or Middle-Ages, Muslims showed more mercy to Christians than Christians are showing for fellow-Christians in today's historical exodus from Muslim lands.)
The 9/11 hijackers were as remote from the lives they touched, the pain and suffering they caused to communities worldwide, the flames and burning eternal hatred they stoked as the cruise missiles and RPV bombs and remote command center operators are about the lives they blow away-as if each one was never born,never was a child with a family,never went to school, never loved nor was loved by someone.
It's that 'matter-of-fact' remoteness that is chilling to the bone.
Politicians display that same remoteness-be it the Japanese politician who said that elderly people should commit suicide to save their government the financial cost of their maintenance or the House of Representative member who called for the execution of Edward Snowden.
Edward Snowden himself has shown that same remoteness when applied to the country whose secrets he pledged to safeguard. For personal reasons, with little thought to the consequences on security,vulnerability and penetration which rival superpowers such as China would not miss to access every computer and household in the United States-should an opportunity present itself- he decided, without malice but certainly also, I believe, without forethought of the hundreds of millions of lives which could be affected in the U.S. to release everything he was entrusted with the responsibility for safeguarding.
It's this common theme of remoteness which collectively permeates and fuels conflict in the world today.
Snowden is the product of a society, or to be more precise, a civil society, which has by stealth,thrown away protection of the right to privacy on-line. It could have been done openly. Neither Congress nor The Senate ever debated whether Verizon, Google, Facebook and the rest of them would be openly requested to hand over the nation's browsing and communications profiles. Instead, a section of The Patriot Act was invoked to literally go on a 'fishing' expedition to net the entire American public.
Quite rightly Snowden saw his own freedoms being thrown in the dustbin together with those of his fellow Americans. Wrongly, in my opinion, he then decided to betray that confidence with which he was entrusted rather than do the honorable thing-just resign from his post and find another pathway to take his grievance forward to the American public.
I have no doubt that there are many organizations and intellectuals in the U.S. powerful enough to support such grievances and take them to the public arena through less turbulent and tragic scenarios as the one currently unfolding.
As if these mistakes are not bad enough, politicians,the U.S. media in general, without shame nor conscience, jump on the band wagon and commit to the death penalty for all whistleblowers, journalists, indeed anyone exposing anything which can be contrived as 'terrorist' under the (one day to be significantly amended) 'Patriot Act' whose scope and breadth go far beyond protecting America against external threats and subjectively ensnare every aspect of civil disobedience and dissent as, potentially, aiding and abetting terrorism.
Every time I look at the U.S. media today I see fear-fear to oppose the status quo, fear of special interests, fear of power, fear of government, fear of politicians, (and politicians equally fearful of the masses of ordinary folk preferring instead to create gated and secure ivory towers for themselves and the special interest groups who finance them); a willingness of the mass media to focus on exploited workers overseas rather than being prepared to take a stand against exploitation at home. Conformity and silence is always the easier course of action.
In conclusion I cannot agree with what Edward Snowden did nor can I find any justification for his actions.
Neither, in my opinion, is there justification for his depiction as a national traitor to be made stateless and hounded to the ends of the earth.
This will not frighten the next generation of whistleblowers-on the contrary it will only embolden them to even greater revelations using more subtle and subversive tactics, regardless of the consequences.
The greatest tragedy to come out of this fiasco is that so uneducated are the peoples representatives today, they cannot understand why this will be the case-and will press for even more absurdly draconian punishments for future 'Snowdens' on sacrificial altars in their vain Canute-like hope of turning back the tide.
Patrick Emek
28th June 2013
CNN, fuming in rage and foaming at the mouth at having been made literally a laughing stock, see's it's reporter dash in panic for the next flight out of Cuba rather than enjoy a day or two's rest in Havana and screeching at rather puzzled individuals in the transit cafe 'anyone seen Edward Snowden?',without even greeting them,explaining who he is or even bothering to check if they speak English, let alone, if indeed, they are even remotely interested in or had heard about this U.S. debacle.
This same fury is displayed by U.S. politicians calling for the death penalty specifically for Snowden and more generally for journalists and whistleblowers whilst warning Russia and China to hand over Snowden or face unspecified consequences.
I believe that Edward Snowden genuinely acted in good faith.
He believes,as do many educated Americans, that civil liberties are under threat from a super-state which reserves for itself the moral authority to invade and monitor the privacy of it's citizens and as much of the world as it can control, on the grounds of national 'security' be it economic, political and military, or all three.
On a strategic basis, America has decided that, in a world of global communications on an unprecedented scale, he who controls the technology and the information, rules the world. This principle has not been lost to our economic rival-China- also eager to achieve the same cyberspace objective as the world dominant superpower.
Edward Snowden is an educated man, so what would motivate him to run for his life to a territory which has never experienced a modicum of democracy under British administration and one in which all spontaneous demonstrators turning out in their masses to sheepishly support him against the 'evil' Obama are only permitted to so do at the behest of their Chinese masters in Beijing? Try demonstrating for independence from mainland China in Hong Kong and see how swiftly all of these naive and malleable supporters of Edward Snowden would be imprisoned for a very long time-or just 'disappear'. or probably be shot or hanged for treason after a kangaroo court trial in Beijing.
So what motivated him? It's absolutely clear from what I can make out that his decision to flee to Hong Kong was a hasty one. Perhaps it was taken because the FBI were homing in on an intelligence leak or security compromise.
He could certainly have found an easier way to 'disappear' without running half way around the world (to a Chinese 'territory') if his 'flight' to 'freedom' had been properly prepared in advance.
So anyone with a degree of common sense can see that this is not the flight of a traitor who has agreed to sell state secrets to an identified interested party, ready and waiting to provide a safe haven, but someone desperate for a way out of a situation he personally believed, on grounds of conscience, to be intolerable and one he could no longer support-the betrayal of the constitutional rights of the US citizen unblemished since the days of the founding fathers and evolved to support and strengthen civil rights and justice-rather than suppress them.
So what should we make of Snowden's decision to exit Russia for Ecuador-a country
with less human and indigenous rights (for it's minorities) than the one he forsake?
Will he be able to speak freely about human rights and civil rights in Ecuador, or Brazil, or any other Latin American country? I think not.
As Bob Dylan said ( and this can be said today for the Arab world and South America today,especially Brazil and Ecuador) - their 'road is rapidly agein' and 'the times they are a changin'.
One of the conditions of his asylum,if ever granted in Ecuador, will be an undertaking to confine his 'revelations' to those of the 'evil empire' (sic. the U.S.) and avoid human rights issues in Latin America-be it Ecuador or Brasil, or (Hitler's favourites) Argentina, Colombia Uruguay and Paraguay.
On this ground alone Edward Snowden is already a suffocated idealist and my guess is that he will, when he appreciates the horrors of media restrictions in Ecuador, ultimately return to the United States to, as it were, face his critics.
Sadly,nobody has inherited the Kennedy mantel nor the 'Tip' O'Neill flair for balance,wisdom, political compromise and moderation on Capitol Hill today.
Understanding Motive Is A Key Requisite
So why all the trouble knowing the fate which would befall him?
There is no reason, in my view,to doubt the sincerity of his beliefs but there is a question as to why someone with such passionate beliefs would sign an Official Secrets or National Security or Homeland Security pledge of non-disclosure knowing full-well what he would be likely letting himself in for.
Even allowing for him being innocent at recruitment, a further question would arise as to why he continued to take a handsome salary from a government he intended to betray.
Lets be clear about what Edward Snowden was: a sub-contracted U.S. Government employee, not a journalist nor researcher, dealing with highly sensitive data which he had pledged in writing to keep secret.
I know about such undertakings, I signed them myself before I retired as a civil servant.
They are not presented to employees for no reason-and even if you are unaware of exactly what you will be dealing with, the most obvious course of action is to resign if it becomes clear there is a conflict between belief and faith. It might be a philosophical argument but it is not to be dismissed lightly.
Was there a need to go public (nay,universal) when there are still many avenues in the U.S. to ultimately bring such issues under political scrutiny and accountability?
Is there a difference between Watergate and Prismgate?
Should Obama be impeached for bugging the nation,nay, the world, like Richard Nixon was for bugging the offices of political rivals?
There is certainly a difference.
That fundamental difference is 9/11,the War on Terror and The Patriot Act.
Incredibly Remote
Most movies and documentaries about the events surrounding that fateful morning are rabidly partisan,conspiracist, racist or just anti-Muslim so I don't have much time for them.
'Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close' by Jonathan Safran Foer is the exception to the rule. It is a fictional account of one American family's suffering in the aftermath of 9/11.
If you don't have time to read the book, watch the movie.
What has a soppy fiction book about 9/11 got to do with Edward Snowden?
What about the close to two million Muslim lives which have been either lost,displaced or afflicted in Iraq,Syria and Afghanistan since 9/11?
What about the suffering indigenous Christians in Arab lands (with the exceptions of The Arab Muslim Gulf States) today?; driven from their homes in a new genocide, a Christian Hegira from Arab lands in the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and North Africa today and one the media quite deliberately and consciously ignores-and which all Christian politicians in Europe and the United States would also prefer to keep silent about. The treatment of Christian Syrians (in flight for their lives) by Greek Police and Customs -who send them back out to sea in boats in the hope the boats will drift away from Greek waters (or sink) is reminiscent to me of the bestial cruelty of the Ottoman Turks who placed men, women and children onto boats and capsized them in the Black Sea during the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923.
Surely we all need to be incredibly deaf and extremely remote to ignore the pain of these innocent victims?; you may very well, and rightly, demand.
What all of the above have in common with the events unfolding is remoteness.
The remoteness of the killers from their victims, the remoteness of so-called professing Christians (specifically Greek Orthodox) from the tenets of Christianity-with regard to the plight of fellow Christians fleeing from persecution today in Syria and North Africa.
(Shame on all the Christian world which turns away Christians fleeing persecution in Muslim lands in these turbulent times and seeking sanctuary from fellow-Christians in America, Europe and elsewhere.
Even in historical battles and rivalry during the Dark or Middle-Ages, Muslims showed more mercy to Christians than Christians are showing for fellow-Christians in today's historical exodus from Muslim lands.)
The 9/11 hijackers were as remote from the lives they touched, the pain and suffering they caused to communities worldwide, the flames and burning eternal hatred they stoked as the cruise missiles and RPV bombs and remote command center operators are about the lives they blow away-as if each one was never born,never was a child with a family,never went to school, never loved nor was loved by someone.
It's that 'matter-of-fact' remoteness that is chilling to the bone.
Politicians display that same remoteness-be it the Japanese politician who said that elderly people should commit suicide to save their government the financial cost of their maintenance or the House of Representative member who called for the execution of Edward Snowden.
Edward Snowden himself has shown that same remoteness when applied to the country whose secrets he pledged to safeguard. For personal reasons, with little thought to the consequences on security,vulnerability and penetration which rival superpowers such as China would not miss to access every computer and household in the United States-should an opportunity present itself- he decided, without malice but certainly also, I believe, without forethought of the hundreds of millions of lives which could be affected in the U.S. to release everything he was entrusted with the responsibility for safeguarding.
It's this common theme of remoteness which collectively permeates and fuels conflict in the world today.
Snowden is the product of a society, or to be more precise, a civil society, which has by stealth,thrown away protection of the right to privacy on-line. It could have been done openly. Neither Congress nor The Senate ever debated whether Verizon, Google, Facebook and the rest of them would be openly requested to hand over the nation's browsing and communications profiles. Instead, a section of The Patriot Act was invoked to literally go on a 'fishing' expedition to net the entire American public.
Quite rightly Snowden saw his own freedoms being thrown in the dustbin together with those of his fellow Americans. Wrongly, in my opinion, he then decided to betray that confidence with which he was entrusted rather than do the honorable thing-just resign from his post and find another pathway to take his grievance forward to the American public.
I have no doubt that there are many organizations and intellectuals in the U.S. powerful enough to support such grievances and take them to the public arena through less turbulent and tragic scenarios as the one currently unfolding.
As if these mistakes are not bad enough, politicians,the U.S. media in general, without shame nor conscience, jump on the band wagon and commit to the death penalty for all whistleblowers, journalists, indeed anyone exposing anything which can be contrived as 'terrorist' under the (one day to be significantly amended) 'Patriot Act' whose scope and breadth go far beyond protecting America against external threats and subjectively ensnare every aspect of civil disobedience and dissent as, potentially, aiding and abetting terrorism.
Every time I look at the U.S. media today I see fear-fear to oppose the status quo, fear of special interests, fear of power, fear of government, fear of politicians, (and politicians equally fearful of the masses of ordinary folk preferring instead to create gated and secure ivory towers for themselves and the special interest groups who finance them); a willingness of the mass media to focus on exploited workers overseas rather than being prepared to take a stand against exploitation at home. Conformity and silence is always the easier course of action.
In conclusion I cannot agree with what Edward Snowden did nor can I find any justification for his actions.
Neither, in my opinion, is there justification for his depiction as a national traitor to be made stateless and hounded to the ends of the earth.
This will not frighten the next generation of whistleblowers-on the contrary it will only embolden them to even greater revelations using more subtle and subversive tactics, regardless of the consequences.
The greatest tragedy to come out of this fiasco is that so uneducated are the peoples representatives today, they cannot understand why this will be the case-and will press for even more absurdly draconian punishments for future 'Snowdens' on sacrificial altars in their vain Canute-like hope of turning back the tide.
Patrick Emek
28th June 2013