Edward Snowden in an interview with the Washington Post has claimed: “I have already won!” Surely he has won the hearts and minds of the American people by opening their eyes about the Stalinistic spying on them by their government. And the lawless cowboys in Washington are not happy about. They have put him in their cross-hairs as a felon and as a traitor for hanging out the NSA’s dirty laundry! With the U.S. involved in wars with Muslims, and in many subversives operations to bring down anti-American governments (nearly all in Latin America, and elsewhere) keeping the dirty laundry out of sight is important business in Washington! It is a practice the U.S. government has adopted from Al Capone. If anyone of his hoodlums became a “snitch,” he became “trunk music,” the mafia lingo for being killed, stuffed in the trunk of a junk car without license plates, and abandoned somewhere. The U.S. doesn’t kill snitchers; it locks them on its trunk - the federal prisons. That is where the fate of Edward Snowden is supposed to end. But has Snowden committed a crime?
When Snowden was offered a job at the NSA, he nobly believed that he would be hunting for terrorist’s movements and communications. But then he found out there was no distinction between spying on terrorists or spying on American citizens. The NSA dragnet functioned like the infamous Cheka of the Bolshevik Communist Party in the Soviet Union, which later became the famous KGB - Putin’s former employer. It watched over everybody, and filled the Gulag in Siberia with millions of innocent people on suspicions only. That is what the NSA has been doing, but its Gulag is the massive vault of “metadata,” the Greek word “meta -mean after,” which practically is what thick dossiers used to be before data was digitized. And as Snowden told the British Channel 4 TV, the NSA can watch us like courts can watch criminals on bail that wear a GPS device attached on their leg. The difference? The cell-phone in our pocket functions like a GPS that the NSA can track 24-7! Add to that the NSA tracking of Internet, and every click we make, and we are all bagged - not the terrorists! Reports from Yemen reveal that terrorists and jihadists have been educating themselves on the CIA and NSA tracking techniques and cut off the links. We are the easy targets and the sitting ducks because if we turn off our phones they will be useless!
What benefit do the Americans get from the NSA tracking? None! Barack Obama claimed that the NSA tracking helped the U.S. to thwart and eliminate 50 terrorists threats. But the Committee of Experts he appointed to study the NSA spying and submit recommendations to him told the press and media that they found no evidence that the NSA had interrupted or thwarted any such terrorist threat!” The old adage “Never believe a politician” proved itself here! Count Obama as one of them!
Snowden’s discovery that the NSA spying net spread across the globe indiscriminately certainly weighed heavily on him -especially the wholesale spying on Americans. It certainly weighs for Brasil that plans to built a fiber optic cable link to Europe to bypass the U.S. dragnet. Could Snowden have stayed on the job for a lifetime of good salary and job security? Obviously no! At some point he cracked, bolted, out and crowed. The crowing was for the U.S. his crime! There are probably hundreds and maybe thousands of NSA employees that think likewise, but they swallow their guilt to hold on to their jobs. Snowden, however, had a higher sense of valor like former CIA agent Phillip Agee, and former Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg that exposed CIA and Pentagon crimes against humanity and were prosecuted. Along with him is Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, accused of publishing U.S. documents obtained illegally. All of them were deemed guilty by the U.S. for exposing its dirty laundry to humanity. If they were Chinese or Russian dissidents and they had exposed Chinese and Russian dirty laundry, the Western media would have touted them as heroes, and the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee would have awarded them Nobel Prizes! Example: A Nobel Peace Prize to Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov who exposed Soviet government abuses saying: “I could not stop something I knew was wrong and terrible,” on quote. That is exactly what Snowden thought and did, but instead of a Nobel he faces life in prison if he gets out of Russian asylum in Shakharov’s backyard! The valor of Shakharov is Snowden’s crime!
To add insult-to-injury to Snowden’s revelations, under American laws whistle-blowers are protected and rewarded, but not when they expose the illegal or even criminal activities of government agencies. They are the “Sacred Cows!” Example: U.S. Federal Agencies in an operation named “Fast and Furious” exported thousands of AK-47 and ammunitions to drug cartels in Mexico, and an Federal Drug Administration agent was killed with them. There were no charges filled and no convictions; the case was swept under the rug! The moral of the story: U.S. Government agencies -NSA included- are not always the law-keepers; there are wild-cards of the global political antagonisms, the sub-level of the Cold War that still continues unabated. Their functions spread across legal and illegal activities
in the subterranean world under the motto “the end justify the means!” In this stratum there are no morals, no conscience, and nothing is spared! And as the U.S. spying on U.S. allies has proven, the NSA sees only foes everywhere - even on Americans who pay their plum salaries, benefits and pensions! And if anybody blows the whistle, he is deemed a criminal and charged! That’s Snowden!
The U.S. “Public Broadcasting System” (PBS) broadcasts daily this parable: “Democracy is not what the governments do; democracy is what the people do!” Under this motto - which is certainly promoted by the U.S. government that funds most of the PBS, the NSA spying on Americans is not what the U.S. government (the NSA) does, but “what the American people do!” Had the American people -with their vote- authorized, or approved, the NSA to spy on them? Of course not! It is a preposterous definition of democracy. Aristotle said that only tyrants employed foreign mercenaries as bodyguards, as Uganda’s late dictator Idi Amin did, and their secret police listened to every congregation of people. That regime is a tyranny, not a constitutional government. The purpose of any constitution is to protect the public from abuse by leaders who turn abusive or become dictatorial once in power, or to protect the public from abusive royal courts and abusive officials appointed by inept or incompetent leaders. Count Barack Obama as one; he should have fired NSA’s James Clapper and General Alexander immediately after Sbowden’s revelations - unless he had authorized them without actually knowing what he was doing! I believe that is the core of the Snowden case.
Is wholesale spying on people by the government - for no apparent or legal reason- constitutional? Of course not, and a U.S. Federal Judge has already ruled so! ! If anything, the U.S. laws rewards whistle-blowers that expose “illegal activities” by government agencies, and many whistle-blowers have reaped $ millions for doing so. Why not Snowden? Snowden’s motive, as he stated it was: “All I wanted was for the (American) public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” on quote! Obama’s appointed commission of experts found -according to press reports- 47 wrong things in NSA activities! Whys is then Snowden prosecuted? Because he exposed Obama’s incompetence or complicity in the NSA spying! After getting a mouthful of complaints from German chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazil’s president Dilma Yousef, Obama needed someone to take the blame - especially after former federal officials told the media that Obama gets a briefing every morning, and he knew what the NSA was doing! Snowden’s prosecution is , therefore, designed to cover up Obama’s ineptness or complicity in the NSA scandal!
Is Edward Snowden a “personal privacy crusader” as 90% of the American people certainly believe, or a traitor and felon as the U.S. government does? Whistle-blowers are people of high morals and deep conscientious convictions - not traitors. His revelations were meant to give the American people a view of what their government does to them. He has not provided any foreign government with anything that they can use to spy on the U.S., or anything that compromised the U.S. national security. But Obama feels too embarrassed to admit that he had allowed the NSA to treat every American as a potential terrorist, probably through incompetence rather than malice, and he tries to prevent a blot on his presidential tenure. Nixon did it in the Watergate scandal too, but those years presidential briefings were officially recorded for history and they did him in! He lied at first, but the recordings couldn’t lie, and Nixon’s fate was sealed. Without such tapes, Obama is free to toss blame around - except on himself! Theodore Roosevelt said: “Power undirected by high purpose spells calamity!” Obama’s played aloofness spells calamity for Snowden by a president who is intent to unload his approval of NSA illegal and unethical practices on him. His prosecution would serve as the detergent to launder Obama’s acquiescence in the whole scheme!
The NSA widespread spying would live on - with cosmetic changes which will be touted as safeguards for public consumption. History is telling us that no genie has ever gone back into the bottle!
Nikos Retsos, retired professor
