Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Why U.S. is being humiliated by the hunt for Snowden...

(...)

Perhaps it has something to do with Guantanamo. For sure, the Beijing Politburo has no problem with detaining people indefinitely without charge. After all, they've been doing it for years. But it comes hard from a global superpower that is constantly lecturing China and everybody else about the inviolability of human rights.

Perhaps it's a Bradley Manning thing. There's a lot of sympathy out there for the pint-sized soldier who dared to share the State Department's incredibly tedious cables, then got treated worse than a mass murderer.

Every country has its own experience of U.S. bullying. In Britain, the case of Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon, accused by the U.S. of the "biggest military computer hack of all time", became a cause celebre.

In the end even Britain's sycophantic Cameron government was obliged, by force of public opinion, to throw out the U.S. extradition demand.

(...)

Extra-judicial assassination, drones, killer robots, extraordinary rendition, black ops, wet ops, psy-ops, silly ops... The world is a bit tired of all this American posturing, grandstanding, and self-serving banditry.

So now it's cyber-ops, but wholly unofficial, courtesy Mr E. Snowden. It would hard to accept it is real, if you didn't suspect it was virtual. Rather than decry it, many applaud it.

The White House is furious at the non-cooperation it has received. But has it occurred to them that maybe not just the Russians and the Chinese, but those soft, liberal Europeans and all the other neutrals also don't like the idea of being spied on by an out-of-control transnational agency beyond the reach of the law, any law, anywhere? Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Greenwald: Snowden's files are out there if "anything happens" to him...
  2. Putin on Snowden: No extradition, accusations against Russia 'nonsense...
  3. Mick Jagger jabs Obama over NSA scandal...
  4. On the Espionage Act charges against Edward Snowden...
  5. China slams US as world’s biggest villain for cyber espionage...
  6. Senators say NSA phone records played little role in stopping terror plots...
  7. Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald on Snowden and the US "terrorism" sham...

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