Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as Director of National Intelligence is one of the more hopeful signs that President Donald Trump will make good on his pledge to be a peacemaker.
While Gabbard is not a peacenik, she has fought against some of the worst abuses of the American empire. She opposed the “regime change” wars in Syria and Libya, the NSA’s mass surveillance of Americans, and demanded a pardon for whistleblower Edward Snowden.
To little surprise, these are the issues that senators attempted to attack during Gabbard’s confirmation hearing yesterday. Among the smears were claims that Snowden recklessly disclosed documents and that he fled to Russia.
The attacks on Snowden leveled by the senators were outright lies. They shamelessly misrepresented his heroic decision to inform the American people that their government was running a massive surveillance program that violated the constitutional rights of every American.
In this excerpt from Scott Horton’s new book, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, the Libertarian Institute’s director explains the truth behind Snowden’s saga and how it was weaponized as anti-Russian propaganda:
Tapping My Telephone
In the spring of 2013, Edward Snowden, a contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton working for the National Security Agency, liberated a trove of documents essentially proving that all the previous NSA whistleblowers like Russel Tice, Edward Loomis, J. Kirk Wiebe, Thomas Drake and William Binney, and great journalists like James Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets and The Shadow Factory, had been right on and much worse. The NSA, Snowden’s leak proved, was violating the civil liberties of virtually all Americans, working with telecommunications and Silicon Valley firms to compile endless amounts of metadata and cellphone location data, search, web traffic, email and instant messenger histories. This is all not to mention their wide-scale surveillance of the rest of the people of the planet, in cooperation with the “Five Eyes” of the Anglosphere alliance, which includes Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand — six if one counts Israel. Snowden’s leak to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill and Barton Gellman was a heroic service to the American people and to mankind. Snowden has said he was motivated to do this when he saw National Intelligence Director James Clapper perjure himself before Congress, falsely denying that the NSA was collecting data on innocent Americans.
The U.S. government, which was apparently too busy keeping tabs on all of us to take care of their own secrets or track down their missing contractor, was embarrassed. So naturally they lied, claiming Snowden was a spy working for Russia and China. Well, he had originally gone to Hong Kong, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant he released was the most recent version. You just have to imagine the rest of the case, because those total non sequiturs were all they ever had beyond wild anonymous claims.
Stranded
To this day people accuse Snowden of being a Russian spy just because the Obama administration deliberately stripped him of his passport while he was stuck there on a layover in his attempt to make it to Ecuador. The Democrats decided that it would be better to leave him in Russia, where the security services could presumably forcibly interrogate him about everything he knows, just for the public relations mileage they would get out of tarring his name with that of Putin and the Russian Federation. He would have been much easier to arrest in Ecuador if they had let him continue on his way. When they later mistakenly assumed he was escaping on the Bolivian president’s plane, the administration ordered their Western European clients to deny them entry to their airspace, forcing the plane to land in Austria in what would have been an absolute outrage if any country other than the U.S. had done it. Then, after Putin granted Snowden temporary asylum, Obama canceled a previously scheduled side meeting with Putin at the G-20 meeting in September 2013, making this self-inflicted diplomatic blunder another cause for worse relations between our two countries.
Importantly, Snowden denies that he has ever revealed a word about his previous work for U.S. intelligence to Russian operatives. He has also sworn he would return to the United States if Congress would amend Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act of 1917, which currently forbids defendants from even attempting a “just cause” defense for violating the law. In other words, if he could get a fair, American-style trial in America.
It is clear that Snowden is a patriot who liberated those documents out of a public-spirited concern for the American people’s rights. Those who accuse him of serving foreign nations are simply desperate liars, and those who accuse him of refraining from criticizing the Russian government are wrong, as even Michael McFaul has acknowledged.
If it is true that Putin is taking the opportunity to provide the hero safe haven from his U.S. government tormentors for public relations reasons, that is their fault. They could do the right thing and drop the charges at any time.
