Glenn Greenwald, Intercept = Whistleblowers are always accused of helping America’s enemies (top Nixon aides accused Daniel Ellsberg of being a Soviet spy and causing the deaths of Americans with his leak); it’s just the tactical playbook that’s automatically used. So it’s of course unsurprising that ever since Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing enabled newspapers around the world to report on secretly implemented programs of mass surveillance, he has been accused by “officials” and their various media allies of helping the terrorists.
Still, I was a bit surprised just by how quickly and blatantly — how shamelessly — some of them jumped to exploit the emotions prompted by the carnage in France to blame Snowden: doing so literally as the bodies still lay on the streets of Paris. At first, the tawdry exploiters were the likes of crazed ex-intelligence officials (former CIA chief James Woolsey, who once said Snowden “should be hanged by his neck until he is dead” and now has deep ties to private NSA contractors, along with Iran–obsessed Robert Baer); former Bush/Cheney apparatchiks (ex-White House spokesperson and current Fox personality Dana Perino); and obscure Fox News comedians (Perino’s co-host).
But now we’ve entered the inevitable “U.S. Officials Say” stage of the “reporting” on the Paris attack — i.e., journalists mindlessly and uncritically repeat whatever U.S. officials whisper in their ear about what happened. So now credible news sites are regurgitating the claim that the Paris Terrorists were enabled by Snowden leaks — based on no evidence or specific proof of any kind, needless to say, but just the unverified, obviously self-serving assertions of government officials. But much of the U.S. media loves to repeat rather than scrutinize what government officials tell them to say. So now this accusation has become widespread and is thus worth examining with just some of the actual evidence.
One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, the terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to plot, so Western governments were able to track their plotting and disrupt at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise to the victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, 2008 in Mumbai, and April 2013 at the Boston Marathon. How did the multiple perpetrators of those well-coordinated attacks — all of which were carried out prior to Snowden’s June 2013 revelations — hide their communications from detection?
This is a glaring case where propagandists can’t keep their stories straight. The implicit premise of this accusation is that the terrorists didn’t know to avoid telephones or how to use effective encryption until Snowden came along and told them. Yet we’ve been warned for years and years before Snowden that the terrorists are so diabolical and sophisticated that they engage in all sorts of complex techniques to evade electronic surveillance.
2 comments:
There really isn't anything new here, though it does need to keep being reported. The likes of Woolsey, Clapper, the 'former' special forces operative now employed by the pentagon who volunteered to kill Snowden and other government tit suckers too incompetent to get a job doing anything else manage to keep their names and bloated, shaved heads in front of a camera warning of doom and gloom. They live in the rarified stench of the inbred Washington insiders who give reach arounds to each other in order to stay in good standing with each other. Americans outside of Washington knew long before Snowden what happens here. Snowden simply documented it where they can't deny it. Fire the Washington crowd; their jobs aren't needed and they'll either face the real world or disappear. This comical security apparatus has spent billions to intrude into lives not only throughout America but around the world, and the best they can do is 'respond' when a tragedy occurs. This morning the 'former executive assistant associate director of this-or-that' are lining up on the government PR stations, otherwise known as FOX, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and so on. There job is to explain how all this could happen with the tens of thousands of 'security experts' being paid by the government and the billions of tax dollars spent to intrude on people's privacy. They can't! They failed...end of story...nothing for them to say...they are failures.
When a psychopath like Netanyahu can claim that a no-op like the Grand Mufti was the real source of the Shoah, and all that happens is that people laugh at him rather than depose and lock him up as being dangerous, it's not at all surprising that other psychopaths would try to hang Paris around Snowden's neck.l
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