This Can't Be Happening!

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

To gauge the real impact of a historic development like “the Snowden revelations”, it’s sometimes useful to examine how wide it’s being felt. An illustration: Jay-Z’s “Magna Carta Holy Grail” Samsung cellphone app. I’ve a feeling some may not know what I’m talking about because, up until this past Friday, neither did I. But my May First/People Link colleague and office buddy Hilary Goldstein (who has often been the source of ideas for my writings here) sent me an email with a link to a story about the controversy and it got me thinking about how our society has succumbed to a massive crime and how this might be a kind of “critical mass”.

The story starts with a Tweet by a respected Hip Hop artist named Michael “Killer Mike” Render. The Atlanta, Georgia resident issued a tweet this week displaying a graphic of the registration screen for the Magna Carta Holy Grail App with the cryptic but powerful message: “Naw…I’m cool.” The app (a term used to describe small applications often used on hand-held devices) lets the user download a new album (called “Magna Carta Holy Grail”) by Hip Hop super-star Jay-Z.

The App and the Artist
 

The meaning of the message (a bit more dismissive than “Thanks but no thanks”) is significant because over a half million people had already said “yes” to that App and had downloaded it to their phones. In the process, they gave Samsung their names, specific GPS location, approximate network location and the phone’s precies id and status as well as permission to “modify or delete contents” from their USB storage, stop the phone from sleeping and get full access to their network communications.

In other words, you give them a treasure trove of information about you in exchange for downloading a “pre-release” version of this album.

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 was a typical US government response to favorable facts-on-the-ground rooted in violence. Once the military coup in Egypt had been accomplished and the first democratically-elected president of Egypt and many of his allies had been arrested and all sympathetic radio stations had been shut down, the US State Department released a statement expressing US condemnation of any future violence.

While the dirty deal was going down President Obama played golf and Secretary of State John Kerry went sailing off Nantucket. It was a bit like the The Godfather when Don Corleone is shown in church and the sequence is inter-cut with scenes of men being shot dead in bed and sputtering as they are being garroted.

This is not a particularly novel turn of events — just especially dishonest and dishonorable. It seems to be the way the US does coups in the 21st century. The days of crude coups like Iran (’53), Guatemala (’54) and Chile (’73) are long gone. Today, it’s done with great coordinated finesse thanks to a sophisticated international secrecy network vis-à-vis American taxpayers and the rest of the civilian world. As citizens, all we get is public relations that expresses great concern for the control of violence … once the favorable facts-on-the-ground have been established.

Scenes from post coup Egypt
 

Currently, members of the Freedom and Justice Party, the name of the Muslim Brotherhood’s and ousted President Morsi’s political party, are furious. They should be. The New York Times reports that the party is planning to organize escalated demonstrations across Egypt. Many fear where this coup will lead. A 23-year-old female law student told The Times that her Islamist neighbors had started shaving their heads, which sounded ominous. “Everyone’s worried about a civil war,” she said. The body count is now rising.

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?

Those of us who have been saying that the US has become a weak, or at least more ordinary power among many in the world because of its military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because of its economic decline, will have to recalibrate our analysis after watching the pathetic behavior of the leaders of Russia, Germany and France under pressure from the Obama administration not to allow Edward Snowden to gain asylum in those countries or even to escape his purgatory in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.

Last night, in an astonishing display of fawning obedience to the demands of US leaders, France and Germany first announced that they would not grant asylum to Snowden, despite broad popular support by French and German people for such an offer of aid to the embattled whistleblower. Then, France and Portugal abruptly refused to allow a Bolivian aircraft carrying the country’s president, Evo Morales, from a state visit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, to land for refueling in their countries, saying that they were concerned he might be flying Snowden to asylum in Bolivia.

Although Spain said eventually it would allow the Morales plane to refuel in the Canary Islands, it did not have enough fuel to get there and had to be diverted to Vienna, where, astonishingly, it was then searched like a drug-smuggling flight over Bolivian protests. Snowden was not aboard. A furious Morales immediately blamed the US Department of State for the whole incident — a charge that no one has disputed, though of course the US is refusing to comment.

Aircraft carrying national leaders have absolute diplomatic immunity under international law and moreover, Bolivia would have the absolute right to grant Snowden amnesty, and to bring him to its territory, whether or not he had a valid passport. As the leader of a sovereign nation, Morales has every right to carry anyone he wants on his plane with him back to his country.
Bolivian President Evo Morales, forced under US pressure to land in Vienna to have his returning plane searched for Snowden, calls the blocking of his flight from Russia to Bolivia a “kidnapping,” and “act of aggression” and an “offense against all the whole Latin region.”

We’re all aware of the reputed Chinese curse about living in interesting times. Upheaval seems to be in the air. According to Wikipedia, the interesting times curse was linked with a second, more worrisome curse: “May you come to the attention of those in authority.”

If a young computer nerd like Edward Snowden can access so much secret information concerning US citizens’ lives, what’s to stop some righteous NSA employee with the moral intelligence of Adolf Eichmann from accessing the same material and, in collusion with a para-military cabal of like-minded and armed patriots, deciding someone (me!) is a national security threat in need of neutralization?

Admiral William McRaven, head of Special Operations Command, a special ops killer and mob killer Whitey Bulger

Paranoia? Maybe. But I see it as paying attention and having the historically-based imagination to understand we’re no longer in Kansas — that we actually live in Oz and Toto has been declared a terrorist. The basis of Franz Kafka’s absurd world, of course, is that what you know about yourself doesn’t matter if powerful, secretive elements act hostilely against you based on what they think they know about you.

At an anti-Iraq War demonstration in Philadelphia some years ago, a Civil Affairs cop took me aside and told me the FBI had just called him about me. He seemed to be warning me so I could clean up any suspicious behavior. Since I was exercising my first amendment rights, I felt I had nothing to hide. But, then, I began to wonder why exactly some FBI drone thought I might be a threat and how dangerous for me such a person might be.

It all distills down to Power versus Truth and which one is the lodestar for one’s actions. The Obama administration’s current obsession with crushing whistleblowers is clearly about Power and assuring the bloated national security apparatus he oversees retains all its accumulated Power. This is done by controlling access to the Truth.

In his 2011 book The Future of Power, Joseph Nye, Jr. says we live in an age of the “diffusion of power” in which the nation state is no longer the only game in town. “Transnational actors” of all sorts — corporations, terrorist networks, affinity groups, media and entertainment forces — all vie for power and attention. The fact our lives are overwhelmed by computers, social media and the forces of economic globalization is central to this diffusion. I would argue that US militarism and the burgeoning police state has become a power center in its own right separate from whatever “The United States of America” is — and that this militaristic power center is more and more driven by its own self-aggrandizing impulses.

The nonviolent antiwar/peace movement is, then, arguably a countervailing power center within the land mass that is the United States of America. Unfortunately, this power center has yet to reach any kind of critical mass analogous to how frustrations with corruption are being manifested in Brazil and Egypt. The cruel truth, it’s hard to get anywhere in today’s world unless you’re rich or well armed.

In one of the most innovative uses of the bizarre rules of international travel, whistle-blower Edward Snowden sits in an airport transit lounge outside the customs barrier that is Russian enough to not invade but not Russian enough to claim the Russians are hiding him. He has now reportedly applied for asylum in Russia.

The coverage of his asylum applications and whereabouts, linked with a torrent of public attacks against him from politicians and pundits, have come close to derailing the discussion of the real issues his revelations raise: we are ruled by people who have no faith in democracy and they are able to spy on us because of choices about the Internet that we have made.

Those are issues worth discussing but, as usual, noise is making productive conversation difficult.

Dropmire Graphic and German justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger: "reminiscent of…the cold war."
 

We got another glimpse of that late last week when several European governments erupted in outraged protest that the United States has apparently been conducting intense surveillance on their U.S. embassies and U.N. missions through phone taps and Internet data capture. The operations, with code-names like “Dropmire” and “Powell”, have reportedly targeted 38 nations’ U.S. and U.N. operations using all kinds of surveillance prompting some European officials to compare it to “the cold war”.

If the “outrage” were genuine, one could argue, these countries would be lining up to give Snowden asylum. After all, his revelations were of significant service to them in exposing what the US was up to behind their backs. Germany and France, two of the most vocal protestors, certainly have both the authority and power to do that and such an action would probably be very popular in their countries. It’s not advisable to hold one’s breath on this one. The torrent of rage and outrage seems to be as misdirecting as the anti-Snowden campaign in this country.

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)