Pepe Escobar

So what is the "extremely disappointed" Obama administration, the Orwellian/Panopticon complex and the discredited US Congress to do? Send a Navy Seal Team 6 to snatch him or to target assassinate him - turning Moscow into Abbottabad 2.0? Drone him? Poison his borscht? Shower his new house with depleted uranium? Install a no-fly zone over Russia?

Edward Snowden, under his new legal status in Russia, simply cannot be handed over to Bradley Manning's lynch mob. Legally, Washington is now as powerless as a tribal Pashtun girl facing an incoming Hellfire missile. A President of the United States (POTUS) so proud of his constitutional law pedigree - recent serial trampling of the US constitution notwithstanding, not to mention international law - seems not to have understood the message.

Barack Obama virtually screamed his lungs out telling Russian President Vladimir Putin he had to hand him Snowden "under international law". Putin repeatedly said this was not going to happen.

Obama even phoned Putin. Nothing. Washington even forced European poodles to down Bolivian President Evo Morales's plane. Worse. Moscow kept following the letter of Russian law and eventually granted temporary asylum to Snowden.

The Edward Snowden saga has turned the Pentagon's Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine on its Hydra-head. Not only because of the humbling of the whole US security state apparatus, but also for exploding the myth of Full Spectrum Dominance by POTUS.

Obama revealed himself once again as a mediocre politician and an incompetent negotiator. Putin devoured him as a succulent serving of eggs benedict. Glenn Greenwald will be inflicting death by a thousand leaks - because he is in charge of Snowden's digital treasure chest. And Snowden took a taxi and left the airport - on his own terms.

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Stephen Lendman

Evidence mounts. America crossed the line. It operates lawlessly. It reflects police state ruthlessness. Big Brother's real. It's not fiction. It watches everyone. It's about control, espionage and intimidation. It targets fundamental freedoms. It has nothing to do with national security. America's only threats are ones it invents. It does so for political advantage.

On July 31, London's Guardian headlined "XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the Internet.' " It "gives 'widest reading' collection of online data. NSA analysts require no prior authorizations for searches." They sweep up "emails, social media and browsing history." It collects "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet." Every keystroke enters a database. NSA training materials call XKeyscore its "widest-reaching" online intelligence gathering tool. Agency officials call it their Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). Virtually nothing escapes scrutiny.

London's Guardian used classified information. It's sourced from a February 2008 presentation. It's about meta-data mining. It explains what Edward Snowden meant, saying: "I, sitting at my desk, (can) wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email" address. It's chilling. It's worst than previously thought.

According to Guardian contributor Glenn Greenwald: XKeyscore lets analysts "mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed." Agency personnel use XKeyscore and other systems for "real-time" interception of personal online activity.

At the time, US officials scoffed. House Republican Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Mike Rogers said: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."

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Thomas Gaist

Lon Snowden, father of Edward Snowden, has written an open letter to President Barack Obama denouncing the NSA surveillance programs exposed by his son and the Obama administration’s international witch-hunt in response to the disclosures.

The letter, dated July 26, 2013, was written together with Lon Snowden’s lawyer, Bruce Fein.

In the letter, Snowden compares the NSA surveillance programs to the Fugitive Slave Act and the Jim Crow laws in the American South and writes that the United States has lessons to learn from “the dynamics of the Third Reich.” The letter further compares the present situation to the post-World War II Nuremburg trials “in which ‘following orders’ was rejected as a defense.”

It comes amid new revelations concerning the expansive scope of the programs. In an interview on ABC News’ “This Week” program on Sunday, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald commented: “The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years.”

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James Bamford

In mid-May, Edward Snowden, an American in his late twenties, walked through the onyx entrance of the Mira Hotel on Nathan Road in Hong Kong and checked in. He was pulling a small black travel bag and had a number of laptop cases draped over his shoulders. Inside those cases were four computers packed with some of his country’s most closely held secrets.

Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealing several of the National Security Agency’s extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. On Amazon.com, the book made the “Movers & Shakers” list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day. Written sixty-five years ago, it described a fictitious totalitarian society where a shadowy leader known as “Big Brother” controls his population through invasive surveillance. “The telescreens,” Orwell wrote, “have hidden microphones and cameras. These devices, alongside informers, permit the Thought Police to spy upon everyone….”

Today, as the Snowden documents make clear, it is the NSA that keeps track of phone calls, monitors communications, and analyzes people’s thoughts through data mining of Google searches and other online activity. “Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,” Orwell wrote about his protagonist, Winston Smith.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

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David Bromwich

The crux of the NSA story in one phrase: 'collect it all'.
~ Glenn Greenwald

Most Americans who know anything about the National Security Agency probably got their mental picture of it from a 1998 thriller called Enemy of the State. A lawyer (Will Smith), swept up by mistake into the system of total surveillance, suddenly finds his life turned upside down, his family watched and harassed, his livelihood taken from him and the records of his conduct altered and criminalised. He is saved by a retired NSA analyst (Gene Hackman) who knows the organisation from innards to brains and hates every cog and gear that drives it. This ally is a loner. He has pulled back his way of life and associations to a minimum, and lives now in a desolate building called The Jar, which he has proofed against spying and tricked out with anti-listening armour, decoy-signal devices and advanced encryption-ware. From his one-man fortress, he leads the hero to turn the tables on the agency and to expose one of its larger malignant operations.

Michael Hayden, who became the director of the NSA in 1999, saw the movie and told his workers they had an image problem: the agency had to change its ways and inspire the trust of citizens. But in 2001 Hayden, like many other Americans, underwent a galvanic change of consciousness and broke through to the other side. In the new era, in order to fight a new enemy, he saw that the United States must be equipped with a secret police as inquisitive and capable as the police of a totalitarian state, though of course more scrupulous.

Gripped by the same fever and an appetite for power all his own, Dick Cheney floated the idea of Total Information Awareness (soliciting Americans to spy on their neighbours to fight terrorism), but found the country not yet ready for it. So he took the project underground and executed it in secret. Cheney issued the orders, his lawyer David Addington drew up the rationale, and Hayden at NSA made the practical arrangements. Eventually Cheney would appoint Hayden director of the CIA.

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Pepe Escobar

Lenin is watching... (Stasi Museum. Berlin, June 2010)

This Fourth of July has been brought to you by the 'United Stasi of America'. Forget the 4th Amendment. Yes, we are watching you. All of you. All over the world. All the time. But it’s for your own good.

Those were the days when assorted latitudes were glued to the platitudes of an up and coming “Yes We Can” cipher on the virtues of teaching constitutional law. Wake up; in Pentagon speak, the NSA “does not do constitutional freedom.”

The "American-style Stasi methods," as Markus Ferber, a European Parliament member from Merkel's Bavarian sister party, put it, included revoking Edward Snowden’s passport, depriving him of citizenship and rendering him, in theory, stateless. But that does not prevent him from seeking asylum. Any sovereign country may offer him political asylum. It’s a matter of political will – as in calculating the costs of defying the 'United Stasi of America’s' might.

Self-described European champions of freedom of speech such as Austria, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Switzerland have tried to buy some wiggle room by saying Snowden would have to make his request on their soil. It’s not true; they could all give him safe passage if they really meant it.

President Obama said US courts will take care of the “29-year-old hacker”. This is pure deception. The Obama administration sees Snowden as the ultimate planetary threat to US security. Worse than bottom-of-the-Arabian-Sea Osama bin Laden. Snowden is worse than “terra”; he’s facilitating “terra”.

And with Glenn Greenwald stressing that Snowden turned over his files to The Guardian, implying that from now on it’s The Guardian leaking (or Der Spiegel this week, and the South China Morning Post two weeks ago), the Obama administration is now severely tempted to criminalize investigative journalism in bulk.

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Stephen Lendman

It's long past time America was held accountable.

Give credit when deserved. It happens all too seldom. The Guardian is an establishment publication. It's been around since 1821. It's credentials are well-known. It published other notable scoops. It was out in front on Rupert Murdoch's News International phone hacking scandal. It caused an uproar in parliament. Related police corruption was revealed. So did information about Murdoch's son James, as well as other News Corp executives and editors having private meetings with Prime Minister David Cameron never disclosed.

Guardian contributors told readers what they need to know. They told enough to matter. They're reporting responsibly on Snowden. They're doing what journalists are supposed to do - their job. They broke news about Snowden's revelations. Follow-up reports explained more. Expect others ahead.

A previous article discussed Guardian editorial opinion on Snowden. It bears repeating. It headlined "Edward Snowden: in defence of whistleblowers," saying: He's no traitor. America's First Amendment matters. It "prevents prior restraint and affords a considerable measure of protection to free speech."

Obama violates its letter and spirit. He's done so by

"show(ing) a dismaying aggression in not only criminalising leaking and whistleblowing, but also recently placing reporters under surveillance - tracking them and pulling their phone and email logs in order to monitor their sources for stories that were patently of public importance."

Whistleblower Thomas Drake revealed

"a vast, systemic institutionalized, industrial-scale Leviathan surveillance state that has clearly gone far beyond the original mandate to deal with terrorism."

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Paul Craig Roberts

If good fails in its battle with Washington’s evil, our
future is a boot stamping on the human face forever...

“V For Vendetta,” a film that portrays evil in a futuristic England as a proxy for the evil that exists today in America, ends with the defeat of evil. But this is a movie in which the hero has super powers. If you have not seen this film, you should watch it. It might wake you up and give you courage. The excerpts below show that, at least among some filmmakers, the desire for liberty still exists.

Whether the desire for liberty exists in America remains to be seen. If Americans can overcome their gullibility, their lifelong brainwashing, their propensity to believe every lie that “their” government tells them, and if Americans can escape the Matrix in which they live, they can reestablish the morality, justice, peace, freedom, and liberty that “their” government has taken from them. It is not impossible for Americans to again stand with uplifted heads. They only have to recognize that “their” government is the enemy of truth, justice, human rights and life itself.

Can mere ordinary Americans triumph over the evil that is “their” government without the aid of a superhero? If ideas are strong enough and Americans can comprehend them, good can prevail over the evil that is concentrated in Washington. What stands between the American people and their comprehension of evil is their gullibility.

If good fails in its battle with Washington’s evil, our future is a boot stamping on the human face forever. If you, an American, living in superpower America lack the courage to stand up to the evil that is “your” government, perhaps the courage of Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and tiny Ecuador will give you heart.

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Trevor Paglen

By exposing NSA programs like PRISM and Boundless Informant, Edward Snowden has revealed that we are not moving toward a surveillance state: we live in the heart of one. The 30-year-old whistleblower told The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA’s data collection created the possibility of a “turnkey tyranny,” whereby a malevolent future government could create an authoritarian state with the flick of a switch. The truth is actually worse. Within the context of current economic, political and environmental trends, the existence of a surveillance state doesn’t just create a theoretical possibility of tyranny with the turn of a key—it virtually guarantees it.

For more than a decade, we’ve seen the rise of what we might call a “Terror State,” of which the NSA’s surveillance capabilities represent just one part. Its rise occurs at a historical moment when state agencies and programs designed to enable social mobility, provide economic security and enhance civic life have been targeted for significant cuts. The last three decades, in fact, have seen serious and consistent attacks on social security, food assistance programs, unemployment benefits and education and health programs. As the social safety net has shrunk, the prison system has grown. The United States now imprisons its own citizens at a higher rate than any other country in the world.

While civic parts of the state have been in retreat, institutions of the Terror State have grown dramatically. In the name of an amorphous and never-ending “war on terror,” the Department of Homeland Security was created, while institutions such as the CIA, FBI and NSA, and darker parts of the military like the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) have expanded considerably in size and political influence.

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Stephen Lendman

America is a rogue terror state. It is ruthlessly out-of-control. It spurns rule of law principles. It mocks democratic rights. It honors its worst. It persecutes its best. It acts unconscionably. It threatens freedom. It menaces world peace. It endangers humanity. It is guilty of worldwide espionage on a massive, unprecedented scale.

Edward Snowden revealed it. Everyone needs to know. He did it heroically. He accepted great risks. He acted responsibly. He did so because it matters. He's a role model for others. Hopefully he'll embolden others to come forward.

Political Washington vilified him. He's excoriated for doing the right thing. Media scoundrels piled on. They're unprincipled. They're vicious. They're unrelenting. They front for power. They support America's worst crimes. They mock legitimate journalism doing so.

Snowden has millions of world supporters. Important nations respect him. His legitimate rights matter. Russia, China, Ecuador, Venezuela, and other countries stand tall. They've done so in his behalf. Hopefully they'll keep doing it. Perhaps others will join them.

Snowden flew to Moscow. He's in Sheremetyevo Airport's transit area. He hasn't crossed Russia's border. Doing so requires clearing customs. Moscow has no extradition treaty with Washington.

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