“He May Also Have Been A Spy”: Snowden Lied About China Contacts
Yesterday, the New York Times urged the Obama administration to offer Edward Snowden “a plea bargain or some form of clemency.” The paper called the former NSA contractor “a whistle-blower” for his exposure of “the vast scope” of the NSA’s “reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe.”
Perhaps Snowden is what the Times portrays him to be, a hero of sorts, yet the editors of the paper rushed to judgment. In their editorial they did not even raise the possibility that he passed along vital national security secrets to China. It is likely he did so.
“I have had no contact with the Chinese government,” Snowden wrote in a Q&A on the Guardian website while taking refuge in Hong Kong in June. “I only work with journalists.”
That’s far short of the truth. By the time he wrote those words in the online chat, Snowden, according to one of my sources in Hong Kong, had at least one “high-level contact” with Chinese officials there. Those officials suggested he give an interview to the South China Morning Post, the most prominent English-language newspaper in Hong Kong. This is significant because, as the Post noted, Snowden turned over to the paper documents that contained detailed technical information on the NSA’s methods. Included in these documents were Hong Kong and Chinese IP addresses that the NSA was surveilling. The disclosure of those addresses was not whistle-blowing; that was aiding China.
The Post, my source told me, had sent two reporters to interview Snowden. The paper did not give a byline to one of them, a Chinese national serving as the deputy to Editor Wang Xiangwei, who openly sits on a Communist Party organ in the Mainland. That reporter is suspected to have then supplied Snowden’s documents to Chinese agents. Beijing, it appears, was able to cover its tracks while obtaining information from the so-called whistle-blower.
Specifically, it appears that agents of China’s Ministry of State Security were in contact with Snowden during his stay in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous part of China. “The Chinese already have everything Snowden had,” said an unnamed official to the Washington Free Beacon days after the leaker had left Hong Kong for Moscow. Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Snowden probably went to Mainland China during his stay in Hong Kong, a suspicion shared by some in that city.
Moreover, evidence suggests that Beijing orchestrated Snowden’s flight from Hong Kong. Albert Ho, one of Snowden’s lawyers, believes Chinese authorities contacted him through an intermediary to pass a message that it was time for Snowden to leave the city. “I have reasons to believe that… those who wanted him to leave represented Beijing authorities,” he was quoted as saying.
We can only speculate as to the motives of the Chinese to frustrate Washington’s attempts to apprehend Snowden, but they did their best to make sure that American officials did not get the opportunity to interrogate Snowden. The last thing they wanted was for the U.S. to learn the extent of their penetration of the NSA and the FBI in Hawaii.
Some in the American intelligence community suspect Snowden was really a “drop box,” receiving information from NSA personnel working for China. In other words, he was used as a courier.
In any event, the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake reported in late June that the FBI was investigating whether Snowden obtained documents “from a leak inside the secret FISA court.” Similarly, Mike Rogers has suggested Snowden probably had an accomplice in the NSA giving him information.
Beijing may also have encouraged Snowden to leave Hawaii. One of my sources indicates that Chinese intelligence, either directly or through FBI personnel working for China, tipped Snowden off that NSA investigators were closing in on him.
At this point, allegations of Snowden’s shadowy involvement with Chinese intelligence in Hawaii remain unconfirmed, but the evidence suggests he lied about his dealings with Chinese officials during his stay in Hong Kong. That tells us he may have been more than just a “whistle-blower.”
Just because he raised critical issues that go to the core of our democracy does not mean Mr. Snowden is a hero. He may also have been a spy.
By: Gordon G. Chang, Author of The Coming Collapse of China; The Daily Beast, January 3, 2014
“No Clemency For Snowden”: His Behavior Is More About Promoting Himself Than Promoting Privacy
The word “whistle-blower” conjures up a certain kind of individual and circumstance. One imagines a workaday, dedicated employee who comes to realize that there is corruption or grave misconduct, dangerous to the public good, happening at his or her workplace. The employee may or may not go to superiors at the company or agency (depending on fears of losing one’s job). If that is not an option, the next move is a prosecutor (in case of illegal activity), oversight agencies and sympathetic members of Congress. If none of that works – and it’s nearly unfathomable that no one at any of those institutions would take an interest – the whistle-blower can go to the press.
This is not what happened with Edward Snowden. Snowden took an oath, when he joined the national security community, to keep national secrets secret. There is a legitimate argument to be had over whether too much is classified. But that is an argument someone with national security clearance can have internally. If you take the pledge, you take the pledge. Snowden broke it when he collected massive amounts of classified information and released it to the media.
Breaking the law would be more forgivable if it was both targeted and a last resort. Neither of those things is true in Snowden’s case. He told the South China Morning Post that he got a job with government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton for the purpose of collecting information on federal surveillance. This is like saying you took a job as a construction contractor so you could rob people’s homes.
Nor did Snowden make an effort to go to Congress with his concerns – an outlet where there are certainly members who would bring Snowden’s concerns to light in a responsible way. But that avenue would have made the issue about, well, the issue, and not about Snowden – which seems to be Snowden’s main concern.
Had Snowden gone into the national security business, become alarmed and disillusioned at what he saw as unwarranted invasion of Americans’ privacy, and then made efforts to expose that troubling practice in a targeted and responsible way, he would be a more sympathetic character. But what Snowden did – amass huge amounts of information, then leave the country as he watched U.S. officials squirm over how much Snowden knew and what he would tell – is proof that his behavior was more about promoting himself than promoting privacy. And piously warning New Year’s babies about the loss of privacy is pretty rich, considering that Snowden made his name by stealing secrets and making them public.
Blowing town doesn’t add to Snowden’s credibility. A real whistle-blower or practitioner of civil disobedience waits around and takes the fallout. They don’t hightail it out of the country and shop around for exile – most laughably, in places where civil liberties are not respected.
The New York Times editorial board has called on President Obama to engage in clemency talks with Snowden. That would be a reasonable suggestion if Snowden had made a very targeted release of information after first trying other avenues. It would be reasonable if Snowden had had the courage to stay in the country he purports to be protecting from tyranny and take the heat from his illegal behavior. But he didn’t. Clemency would just make national security oaths and laws a joke.
It’s a good thing that Americans know about the vast information-collecting the U.S. government has been doing on its own citizens (though there’s been something of an over-reaction by people who think the government is reading through everyone’s emails and listening to everyone’s calls). Congress – which, notably, gave intelligence-gathering authorities the right to do such data-mining in the hysteria after 9/11 – ought to re-examine what we allow our own government to do in the name of public security. But that’s not what Snowden’s behavior was about. It was all about Edward Snowden.
By: Susan Milligan, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 2, 2014
“No Hero’s Welcome”: Edward Snowden Can’t Expect To Be Welcomed Back From Russia
Edward Snowden wants the U.S. government to stop treating him like a defector. Then why did he defect?
Snowden, of course, is the former government contractor who released an enormous trove of classified information to news organizations detailing the data- and intelligence-gathering activities of U.S. security agencies. The disclosures were disturbing, and revealed the extent of spying on both U.S. citizens and allies.
Some of it should not be a surprise, considering the expansion of authority a spooked Congress gave to the intelligence community after 9/11. The upside of the disclosures is that it has caused a national discussion on what authority our government should have in monitoring its own citizens.
But Snowden still broke the law, and very deliberately so. He also did not carefully expose just one troubling element of the data-mining activities he knew of, nor did he first try to go to a member of Congress with his concerns. He dumped the classified information wholesale, and then got on a plane for Hong Kong – as sure a sign as any that he knew he had violated the law and would face serious consequences for it.
Snowden is now residing in exile in Russia, and apparently is already getting antsy. Through a German lawyer, Snowden released a letter appealing to the U.S. government to stop treating him like a traitor for what he called his “moral duty to act.” Said the letter:
My government continues to treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech with felony charges that provide no defense. Speaking the truth is not a crime. I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior.
The problem for Snowden is that speaking the truth indeed can be a crime, especially when you sign a document pledging to keep national security secrets and then very deliberately violate that pledge. And Snowden obviously knew what he had done was wrong or at least, if he didn’t think it was morally wrong, illegal. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have high-tailed it to Hong Kong and then to Moscow to escape punishment.
People have gone to prison, sometimes for many years, in defiance of a law or policy they thought was unjust. Snowden has already managed to avoid that fate. It’s asking too much to expect the government whose secrets he illegally revealed to welcome him back as a hero.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, November 4, 2013
“Leading By Weather Vane”: Mitch McConnell Sticks His Finger In The Wind, Makes Up His Mind
In August, as Senate Republicans argued among themselves over budget strategies, their ostensible leader, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell (R), stayed on the sidelines. Worried that bold stands might hurt his re-election chances, the Senate Minority Leader was too afraid to take a stand.
In September, as GOP lawmakers have argued among themselves over U.S. policy in Syria, McConnell has again been afraid to lead. Yesterday, the Minority Leader didn’t even want to be on the Senate floor for fear he might have to take a position on the issue of the day.
This morning, after carefully waiting for his pollsters to tell him what to say pondering the issue for three weeks, McConnell spoke up.
Breaking his silence on Syria, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell revealed Tuesday that he will oppose a resolution giving President Barack Obama the authority to unleash military strikes.
“I will be voting against this resolution — a vital national security risk is clearly not at play” McConnell said in a speech prepared for delivery on the Senate floor that painted the White House strategy as muddled and rife with “unintended consequences.
McConnell added, “It’s not exactly a state secret that I’m no fan of this president’s foreign policy.”
That’s certainly true, though it’s also not exactly a state secret that McConnell has spent his congressional career as a hawk, broadly supportive of using force abroad and backing military intervention to address national security crises.
So what changed? In case it’s not obvious, McConnell is terrified of losing.
He has a credible primary opponent, an equal credible general-election challenger, and poll numbers that suggest McConnell is one of the least popular senators in the nation. It made for an easy calculus — the Minority Leader will abandon his foreign policy principles because neither the president nor intervention in Syria are popular. Sure, it’s craven to approach U.S. foreign policy this way, but McConnell apparently doesn’t care.
This also, incidentally, creates an unexpected intra-party division — the top two House Republicans (Boehner and Cantor) support the president’s position, while the top two Senate Republicans (McConnell and Cornyn) do not.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, Deptember 10, 2013
“Unlike The Invasion Of Iraq”: The Syrian Government’s Use Of Chemical Weapons Matters To U. S. National Security
On Saturday President Obama said that a large-scale chemical weapons attack “presents a serious danger to our national security.”
This is a key notion in the debate about whether the U.S. should again choose to meddle in the Middle East.
The president gave three reasons:
1) “It risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons.”
Earlier this week Ian Bremmer told Business Insider the U.S. “has to respond given international norms against the use of chemical weapons” because the “costs of not responding at this point are too high.”
The international norm argument underlies Obama’s “question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community: What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?”
2) “It endangers our friends and our partners along Syria’s borders, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq.”
The U.S. stated, in a law signed by Obama in July 2012, that the strategic environment in the Middle East poses “great challenges to the national security of the United States and our allies in the region, particularly our most important ally in the region.”
And several of America’s other allies in the region are calling for U.S. intervention aimed at toppling Assad so that the devastating 29-month conflict ends.
“Obama never needed to go searching for a coalition of the willing for Syria; one … has been knocking, in fact, at the door of the Oval Office for quite some time,” Interpreter Magazine Editor-in-Chief Michael D. Weiss wrote in Foreign Policy. “Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, all see Syria as a grave short-term threat to their national security.”
3) “It could lead to escalating use of chemical weapons, or their proliferation to terrorist groups who would do our people harm.”
This reason involves the fear that Assad would transfer chemical weapons to Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based terrorist group and Iranian proxy that has more than 60,000 rockets pointed at Israel.
Furthermore, Michael Gordon of The New York Times reported that effective strikes “may also send a signal to Iran that the White House is prepared to back up its words, no small consideration for an administration that has proclaimed that the use of military force remains an option if the leadership in Iran insists on fielding a nuclear weapon.”
In Obama’s words: “If we won’t enforce accountability in the face of this heinous act, what does it say about our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules?”
So, unlike the invasion of Iraq, it appears that the Assad’s regime’s perceived large-scale use of chemical weapons — and a response to such an action — actually involves legitimate national security interests.
By: Michael Kelly, Business Insider, August 31, 2013
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