iPINIONS argued in a July 2013 commentary on boycotting the Olympics over Snowden that Putin clearly had no use for Snowden and seemed certain to hand him over to his American partner well ahead of the Sochi Opening Ceremony.
Well, such a handover now seems like a pipe dream. Far from using Snowden as a bargaining chip or goodwill gesture, Putin is using him as a stick to poke in the eye of the United States.
Indeed, he appears to be grinning inside like a Cheshire cat every time he tries to convince the world that this American had to flee to Russia to escape political persecution back home … in America.
And it hardly helped matters when Obama famously snubbed him during September’s G20 Summit in St. Petersburg, and then forfeited an opportunity (because of the U.S. government shutdown) to make amends at the APEC forum in Indonesia earlier this month.
Which is why this came as no surprise:
Talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama are unlikely to take place this year… [But, significantly,] Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said bilateral ties between Russia and the United States require ‘continuation of dialogue at the top level.’
(Xinhua, October 22, 2013)
In the meantime, Snowden’s NSA caper is continuing to wreak havoc on practically all of America’s other foreign relationships, despite Putin’s warning that:
If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: He must stop his activities aimed at inflicting damage on our American partners, no matter how strange it may sound coming from my lips.
(Associated Press, July 1, 2013)
The latest mockery of his warning came this week when Snowden’s leaks forced the president of France and chancellor of Germany to join the heads of Brazil and Mexico in making quite a public show (to maintain street cred with their respective voters) of demanding personal explanations from Obama for U.S. intelligence agencies spying – not just on tens of millions of their citizens, but on them as well.
But the leaders doth protest too much, methinks. Frankly, French President Francois Hollande pretending to be “shocked, shocked” by Snowden’s revelations smacks of acting worthy of Claude Rains as Captain Renault in Casablanca. And Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff canceling a state visit to Washington smacks of a triumph of political posturing for her next election over political performance for the annals of history.
Not to mention that if an Edward Snowden from any of these countries were to commit a similar betrayal, the world would find they were doing the same thing. As I noted in I Spy, You Spy, We All Spy at the time.
Apropos of which, Obama is duly taking their calls. But I have no doubt that what he’s saying to them in private is only a less diplomatic version of how he has been defending the United States in public ever since the London Guardian published the first of Snowden’s many (and seemingly endless) leaks. Namely:
We should stipulate that every intelligence service — not just ours, but every European intelligence service, every Asian intelligence service, wherever there’s an intelligence service — here’s one thing that they’re going to be doing: They’re going to be trying to understand the world better, and what’s going on in world capitals around the world. If that weren’t the case, then there’d be no use for an intelligence service.
(Associated Press, July 1, 2013)
And let’s face it, if America’s Big-Brother spying is as global as Snowden’s leaks indicate, then surely Obama knows full well the extent of the in-kind spying other countries are doing on him and his fellow Americans.
Indeed, some of the reaction among these ostensibly outraged heads of state probably emanates from nothing more than envy over the degree and breadth of U.S. intelligence gathering, which evidently even extends to tapping their personal mobile phones.
For what it’s worth, though, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney promised all heads of state on Wednesday that the U.S. is not and will not spy on them … anymore. Of course, any leader who believes that is a gullible fool. Moreover, it’s in the nature of the intelligence-gathering business that no president should ever comment on any specific aspect of it — no matter how provocative and politically compromising Snowden’s leaks.
(This might be a good time for the United States to say to its allies, particularly in the Middle East, that it’s no longer acceptable to bash the United States in public to appease rabid anti-American factions in their populations, while continuing to solicit U.S. military and financial aid in private. No government should be deemed a U.S. ally if that government is too afraid or ashamed to embrace that alliance publicly.)
Meanwhile, Snowden is enjoying his honeymoon period in Moscow, being fêted, oddly enough, by Westerners his WikiLeaks paymasters are flying in to sing his praises.
In a video released by WikiLeaks, Snowden is presented with the annual Sam Adams Award by former U.S. security officers.
The video is believed to have been shot on Wednesday 9 October in Moscow at an undisclosed location, where Mr. Snowden was granted asylum in August.
The award is named for a CIA analyst during the Vietnam War who accused the US military of deliberately underestimating the enemy’s strength for political purposes.
(London Telegraph, October 12, 2013)
Actually, Snowden seems destined to emulate British double agent Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 and lived there (in Moscow) free of reprisals until his death in 1988. It is instructive to note, however, that this fabled “Third Man” lived out almost all of his 25 years in relative obscurity and penury. It speaks volumes that he drowned his abiding sorrows in the bottles of alcohol that eventually killed him.
Kim Philby, the most successful of the Cambridge spies, tried to drink himself to death in Moscow because he was disillusioned with communism and tortured by his own failings, his last wife has said in an interview.
(London Guardian, March 30, 2011)
So don’t be surprised if a disillusioned Snowden ends up drinking himself to death too. After all, Philby’s Russian spymasters had just cause to treat him like a national hero, yet he still felt like little more than a Western mascot almost from day one.
By contrast, Snowden’s Russian wards have no reason to treat him like anything but a traitorous rat. Not least because Putin is a former KGB spy who prizes loyalty to country above all else. He must also resent that Snowden ended up in Russia only after his preferred Chinese spymasters extracted all they wanted from him.
But don’t be surprised if national pride compels Obama to order the CIA or Seal Team 6 to take him out – even in/from Moscow – long before he surpasses Philby’s 25 years as a fugitive….
In any event, that video of Snowden receiving an award for championing the freedom of the press, while living like a refugee in neo-Stalinist Russia, is rife with so much irony, if not hypocrisy, that it seems like a Monty Python spoof.
Unfortunately, the far more troubling irony is that, thanks to Snowden, people all around the world are developing a view of Obama’s America as a greater violator of the freedom of the press, privacy rights of the individual, and other civil liberties than Putin’s Russia.
Admittedly, this seems wholly consistent with Orwell’s dystopian world where war is peace, ignorance is strength … communism is capitalism. But I submit that we are still light years away from a world where not Russia (or China) but the United States, arguably the most free and transparent society in the history of mankind, can be fairly pilloried as the “perfect totalitarian state:”
In which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law.
(George Orwell, ‘1984’)
I fully appreciate that millions now consider Snowden a heroic, whistle-blowing defender of freedom and democracy. But the ultimate irony is that he is a self-righteous narcissist who is nothing more than a useful idiot to totalitarian regimes like Russia and China. Their very existence depends on the doublethink his leaks are fostering, as well as systematic violations of the very civil liberties he presumes to be championing
More to the point, countries like Russia and China will only become more oppressive if they can propagate the perverse belief worldwide that they are just as democratic, transparent, and free as countries like the United States and United Kingdom. That would be truly Orwellian.
In the meantime, even though Snowden will not cause much substantive damage to U.S. interest, there’s no gainsaying the unprecedented and incalculable reputational damage (and embarrassment) he’s causing….
NOTE: All of these complaints about NSA surveillance will seem quaint and naive when terrorists pull off another 9/11-style attack either in the United States or in Europe. Then, I assure you, the very people now championing Snowden and damning Obama will be calling for even greater surveillance. For a little perspective, though, just bear in mind that Google, Amazon, and other commercial companies do more surveillance of your daily activities to sell you stuff than the NSA does to keep you safe. So get a friggin’ grip people!
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