Author: Dave LIndorff

Ah, the rule of law. How often we hear our government leaders angrily demand that the rest of the world adhere to this sacred stricture, most recently as it demands that countries — even countries with which the US has signed no extradition treaty like Russia or China — honor the US charges leveled against National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and send him to the US for trial.

But the rule of law, in truth, means little to the US, which routinely thumbs its nose at the whole notion.

Take the case of Robert Seldon Lady, the former CIA station chief in Rome Italy. Lady, along with 21 other CIA operatives, was charged years ago with the illegal 2003 kidnapping off a street in Milan of a man that the US claimed was a suspected terrorist. Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr was thrown into a van and then secretly renditioned first to a secret CIA “black site,” and later to Egyptian police, who, he says, tortured him for the US. Four years later, Nasr was released after an Egyptian court ruled that he was not guilty of anything.

Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr was kidnapped off a Milan street by a gang of CIA agents led by CIA station chief Robert Lady, now convicted, sentenced and being sought by Italy on a fugitive warrant, but protected from extradition by the US

The Snowden saga continues to get weirder.

Let’s just pretend for a moment that the US government has it right, and that Edward Snowden, the renegade CIA and NSA employee who signed up with a government intelligence contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, so as to steal a huge swath of National Security Agency data that has the potential to destroy US intelligence operations around the globe, lay bare the NSA’s secret architecture and alert the world’s terrorists to how they are being monitored, is as vile traitor out to destroy America.
Where is the last place under such circumstances that the US would want him to wind up? For me, I’d say there’d be three of them: Iran, China and Russia.

Trapped in a Moscow airport: Is Russia where the US wants Snowden to end up?

In Edward Everett Hale’s short story “The Man Without a Country,” US Army Lt. Philip Nolan, following a court-martial, is exiled from his country, his citizenship snatched away, leaving him doomed to sail the seven seas confined to a Navy vessel, unable to make any country his home. His crime: being seduced by a treacherous leader to betray the US of A, the country of his birth.

Edward Snowden, 30, child of a career Coast Guard officer who signed up in the military after 9-11 to defend his country, later going to work at the CIA and the National Security Agency, was also seduced by treacherous leaders — first President George Bush, and then President Barack Obama–into participating in actions that betrayed his country, actions that breached the First and Fourth Amendments of the US Constitution that as a military officer and later a CIA and NSA employee he had sworn to “uphold and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’

At first glance, we have a case of reality mimicking fiction here, with two once promising young military men being led astray and ending up adrift in a pathetic exile. But in truth, fiction and reality diverge greatly from one another at that point.

Lt. Nolan turns on his homeland and then spends the rest of his misearble life — 55 years — regretting his youthful action.

Snowden, however, gradually woke up to realize he had been deceived by the vile propaganda of a fake “War” on terror, and, in his position at the NSA, came to see that the two men who had been president during his young and impressionable adulthood were shredding the US Constitution, spreading fear among the public in order to be handed the power and the money to build an unimaginably complex and omnipresent secret surveillance program in service to a national security state that was destroying anything to do with real democracy in the United States.
Two men without a country: The fictional Philip Nolan, and the very real Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden, the bete noir of the US national security state, who has leaked information that the National Security Agency is spying on all electronic communications of Americans, and on hundreds of millions of others around the globe, as well as on the leaders and the embassies of even many US allies, is accepting an offer of political asylum that has been extended by Russia, where he has been spending weeks in limbo in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, unable to fly to asylum elsewhere because of heavy-handed US pressure.

According to an RT-TV report, Snowden, in accepting the Russian offer, will have to abide by a condition set by Russian President Vladimir Putin that he not continue releasing documents harmful to the US.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden with two Russian human rights group activists at Moscow airport press briefing
 

This deal leaves a lot of questions unanswered:

First of all, Snowden has already turned over a huge trove of information to reporters at the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper in the UK, as well as lesser amounts of documents to Der Spiegel magazine in Germany and to other publications in other countries. It would appear that he can no longer control, at this point, whether or not those news organizations continue to publish articles based on the documents in their possession, It is also unclear what the Russian government response would be concerning Snowden’s protected status should any of those organizations, as is likely, continue to publish embarrassing or damaging disclosures about the NSA. Asked by reporters at an airport press conference whether he would continue to release details about the NSA himself while in Russia, Snowden’s answer was simple: “My job is done.” That “job,” though, was providing the leaked information to reporters. Snowden himself has not publicly disclosed the information.

Snowden also correctly pointed out the distinction between “damaging America,” and exposing the NSA. “No actions I take or plan are meant to harm the US… I want the US to succeed,” he said in answer to a question. Would Putin consider further leaks about the US government’s spying on its own citizens “damaging” to America? Open question.

In any event, Putin has made clear that Russia would never extradite Snowden. As he put it, “Russia has never extradited anyone and is not going to do so. Same as no one has ever been extradited to Russia.” Besides, the cat’s already out of the bag, in terms of the big revelations Snowden made public.

Straphangers in New York City became a mass of unwitting guinea pigs Tuesday in a system-wide test by the New York Police Department and the Brookhaven Lab to determine how successful a terrorist organization could be at poisoning the city’s underground commuters with toxic gas.

According to reports in the local media like the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the test, funded by a $3.4-million grant from the US Department of Homeland Security, involved releasing small amounts of allegedly “harmless” gas into the subway at various places in Manhattan south of 59th Street, and then testing to see how widely and quickly it dispersed through the five boroughs through subway tunnels and in subway cars.

The gas used, called a perfluorocarbon, besides posing a serious threat to the ozone layer that has led to its being largely banned from industrial use, is suspected of causing tumors in animals, and of impacting immune systems and liver and endocrine systems. The odorless chemical is also very long-lasting once absorbed by the body, and while the dispersed gas would in very low and surely harmless concentrations, that might not be the case in the 21 stations where it was being released initially–especially as citizens were not told where the actuall releases were taking place “for security reasons.”

Several such tests are planned over the summer. Tuesday was just test number one.

The real question is why the NYPD, Brookhaven Lab, and the Department of Homeland Security would run such a test in the first place. It’s pretty much a no-brainer that if some terrorist outfit decided to disperse sarin gas into the Times Square subway station at rush hour it would spread mayhem north, south and cross-town in no time. No need for a perfluorocarbon gas test to figure that out. The best I can figure is that Homeland Security, a super-agency created in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, is always looking for ways to boost its budget by spending whatever it can, and by further terrorizing the public into supporting politicians who will keep allocating more money to to the agency year after year.

NYPD and Homeland Security are demonstrating how to poison the city's straphangers

It’s little wonder that despite his disclosure of an unprecedented KBG-like or Stasi-like spying program targeting all Americans, fully half of all Americans polled are saying that National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is a “spy” or “traitor” who should be brought to justice.

Why would this be, when a solid majority also say they oppose the spying program?

A major reason would be that the politicians and other Washington leaders like Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey are lying, claiming that Snowden has damaged US national security. Another would be that the corporate media are pushing the line that Snowden is not a civil-liberties motivated whistle-blowing patriot, but rather a traitor or a spy.

Take the Philadelphia Inquirer. A couple of days ago, this once-respected paper in one of America’s major cities ran a piece about Snowden, calling him a “spy” in the headline, though there was no mention of the word spy in the article itself. Without any sense of irony, the paper ran another article that day on the same page about the anger in Europe over the NSA’s spying on Europeans and their governments — supposedly America’s allies — and while that article was about spying by the US government, the headline eschewed using the word “spy.”

I called the paper’s city desk to complain and was told by a seemingly sympathetic editor on the desk that the head of the copy desk would call me, but of course, he never did. Nor did the paper deign to publish a letter I sent in criticizing the decision to use the word “spy” to describe Snowden.

Then today, the Inquirer did it again. This time it was an AP article on page two of the paper reporting on comments made by Gen. Dempsey on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. Again, the Inquirer’s headline was “Dempsey: Spy has harmed relations.” But the piece, which refers to Snowden as a “leaker,” never does call Snowden a “spy.” Nor does Gen. Dempsey, at least as quoted in the article. The “spy” terminology is purely the work of the paper’s editors.

That’s not to say Gen. Dempsey isn’t also messing with the truth in this case. He stated on the CNN program that Snowden’s disclosure about global surveillance programs targeting allies in Europe and elsewhere had “undermined US relationships with other countries” and affected what he called “the importance of trust.” As Dempsey put it, “the US will have to work its way back. but it (the disclosure by Snowden) will set us back temporarily.”
The ugly face of US Empire (from left): Gen. Dempsey, Pres. Obama, Rep. Rogers and Sen. Menendez

It is clear that the entrapment and forced landing in Austria of the official airplane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was the work of the US, which was obviously behind the decision by France and Portugal to deny air rights to the flight, and which also was obviously behind the Austrian government’s demand to be allowed to search the jet after it landed. After all, those countries have no interest themselves in capturing US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who is only Obama’s and the NSA’s quarry. (A Spanish official said Spain was “told” Snowden was on the plane but wouldn’t say by what country. Let’s guess who would do that!)

So given that the US was behind the Morales “kidnap” outrage, it is worth examining how the US has historically viewed the legal status of heads of state under international law and custom when they are traveling.

In 2004, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (New York) ruled that Robert Mugabe, the corrupt and brutal leader of Zimbabwe, enjoyed “absolute immunity” while inside the US on a visit to New York. The decision stemmed from 2001, when a group of citizens of Zimbabwe sought to have Mugabe arrested in New York on charges of “extrajudicial killing, torture, terrorism, rape, beatings and other acts of violence and destruction.” A month earlier, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (Chicago), reached a similar conclusion in a case involving then Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

The US government had filed briefs in both those cases arguing that both Jiang and Mugabe (as well as Mugabe’s foreign minister, who was traveling with him), had absolute immunity as traveling heads of state. Interestingly, the US brief, in addition to citing the Vienna Convention, cited the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), signed into law by Pres. Gerald Ford, which among other things makes sovereign leaders absolutely immune. Ironically, that law was successfully used by by leaders of Saudi Arabia to convince US courts to immunize them against civil suits filed against them by victims of the 9-11 attacks, who had claimed Saudi leaders had funded the attacks.

No surprise that the US would want sovereign immunity, given that the head of state of the US at the time of the court proceedings and the Appellate Court hearing, George W. Bush, and his vice president Dick Cheney, were already themselves guilty of serious war crimes and crimes against humanity for their illegal invasion of Iraq, their authorization of kidnappings, extrajudicial killings and torture, and their financing of acts of terrorism. They understandably wanted to establish that nobody should even think about trying to embarrass them with an arrest warrant for these crimes during any trips abroad.

Who's the international criminal fugitive from justice?

UPDATE: Today it is being reported that European leaders are expressing anger at disclosures by Snowden showing that the US National Security Agency spied on the European Union. According to a new cover story report in the German magazine Der Spiegel, the NSA has been spying extensively on German, French and other governments, gleaning inside info on things like trade negotiating positions, etc. Reportedly, the governments are angry. But that purported anger is meaningless unless they act on it. If they are really miffed, they should show their appreciation for the man who alerted them to the US betrayal of its purported allies and friends by offering Snowden asylum. Franch and Germany in particular, which have the military and economic strength to stand up to the US, should do so immediately with an unconditional offer of protection to Snowden. Enough with the talk! This is time for action!
 

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry as the US goes all out to get its hands on National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

We’ve got the US leaning on Russia to push him out of his sanctuary in their Moscow airport. We’ve got Obama and the State Department warning countries around the globe not to accept him or allow him to transit their airspace. And now there’s smilin’ Joe Biden, lecturing Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa (threatening would be a better word) about not granting asylum to Snowden, whom the Obama administration and the Republican and Democratic stooges in Congress are branding a “traitor.”

Meanwhile, the real traitors who have done so much to destroy America are buying politicians of both parties, using their undue influence to gut any effort at real regulation, all the while earning fat bonuses in their corner offices at megabanks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citi Group, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. No need to extradite those guys in order to prosecute ’em. They’re right here in the USA. All that’s lacking is a will to bring charges for things like mortgage fraud, derivative fraud, collusion, lying under oath, etc. But Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, a former corporate lawyer himself, has already declared that he will not prosecute Wall Street’s banks for their frauds in bringing down the US economy.

Even Cyrus Vance Jr., the supposedly tough-as-nails, no-nonsense district attorney of Manhattan, whose jurisdiction encompasses the home offices of most of the biggest “too-big-to-fail” banks, won’t indict any of them or any of their top executives. It’s not that he won’t indict a bank, but instead of going after Goldman or Citi or Chase, he has indicted — ready for this? — a little independently owned community-based Chinatown bank called Abacus Bank, which has total assets of less than $250 million. That’s million. For comparison, the largest US bank, JP Morgan Chase, has total assets of $2.39 trillion dollars, which is almost 10,000 times as big. Worse yet, although Vance, in indicting the bank, claimed its fraud (a bank employee, fired and voluntarily reported to regulators by the bank, had been been falsely inflating loan applicants’ incomes to help them take bigger loans), was “an example of what brought down the US economy,” actually Abacus has a loan default rate of 0.5%, which is just one-tenth of the national average bank loan default rate of 5-6%.

Why hasn’t Vance, at least, indicted some of the big banks, which many knowledgeable analysts and critics have said are little more than giant organized crime syndicates, in some cases such as B of A, Citibank and HSBC actually knowingly laundering vast amounts of drug cartel cash? His deputy says it’s because there is no evidence of prosecutable crimes committed by them! Probably it’s the same reason Washington politicians won’t go after them: it would jeopardize all that banker campaign lucre — and Vance surely has his eye on the New York governor’s mansion in Albany.

And so, back to Snowden, whose only “crime” has been to expose the galloping fascism of the US government, which has, behind our backs, established a national domestic surveillance system so vast and Orwellian that the old East German Stasi or Soviet KGB couldn’t even dream about having such a thing.

Who has done more damage to the US? (from left, CitiGroup’s Jamie Dimon, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein)

(This article originally ran in WhoWhatWhy.org)
 

Would you be shocked to learn that the FBI apparently knew that some organization, perhaps even a law enforcement agency or private security outfit, had contingency plans to assassinate peaceful protestors in Houston and perhaps several other American cities — and did nothing to intervene?

Would you be surprised to learn that this intelligence comes not from a shadowy whistle-blower but from the FBI itself – specifically, from a document obtained from Houston FBI office last December, as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Washington, DC-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund?

To repeat: this comes from the FBI itself. The question, then, is: What did the FBI do about it?

The Plot

Remember the Occupy Movement? The peaceful crowds that camped out in the center of a number of cities in the fall of 2011, calling for some recognition by local, state and federal authorities that our democratic system was out of whack, controlled by corporate interests, and in need of immediate repair?

That movement swept the US beginning in mid-September 2011. When, in early October, the movement came to Texas, law enforcement officials and the state’s banking and oil industry executives freaked out  perhaps even more so than they did in some other cities. The push-back took the form of violent assaults by police on Occupy activists, federal and local surveillance of people seen as organizers, infiltration by police provocateurs—and, as crazy as it sounds, some kind of plot to assassinate the “leaders” of this non-violent and leaderless movement.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what the document obtained from the Houston FBI, said:
 

FBI knew of plot to murder Occupy Activists in Houston but took no action to stop it, documents show

“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

— President Barack Obama
 

While President Obama used the right words in this quote, he clearly is taking the public for idiots.
 
Because as he surely is aware, we do have some big problems. They are not caused by misguided citizens who foolishly mistrust their government, though. Rather, our problems stem from the fact that our leaders, including him, have consistently lied to us, been corrupted by big money and have acted to benefit corporate interests to the detriment of the commonweal.

On March 12 of this year, when Obama’s National Intelligence Director James Clapper told a congressional inquiry that the government does not wittingly conduct surveillance of Americans, he was lying. He was deliberately deceiving the very people upon whom we’re told to rely to exercise oversight and safeguard our rights. When caught out in his lie by the disclosures of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Clapper additted his prevarications, saying he had tried to give “the least untrue answer” he could come up with.

Obama himself too, subsequent to Snowden’s disclosures of the NSA’s nationwide vacuuming up of all electronic communications of all Americans, has radically changed his tune about the surveillance techniques which he criticized under President Bush but has now embraced fully.

At this point, when it comes to our elected and appointed leaders, we can trust only that their words are untrustworthy.

Trust Congress? Venal, corrupted, pawns of their powerful financial contributors, feckless posturing maintainers of the status quo; not too much to trust there.

How about the courts? How much trust can we gin up for the brilliant black robed justices who have anointed corporations with personhood? When they go duck hunting with a torture advocating Vice President one day, and rule on the constitutionality of his draconian national security laws the next, how much trust do they inspire?

No Mr. President, the problem is not with us, it is squarely with you and the National Security State that preceded you and that you have continued to further expand and empower.
Who're we gonna believe, our leaders or our lying common sense?