“Edward Snowden Is No Hero”: He Is, Rather, A Grandiose Narcissist Who Deserves To Be In Prison
Edward Snowden, a twenty-nine-year-old former C.I.A. employee and current government contractor, has leaked news of National Security Agency programs that collect vast amounts of information about the telephone calls made by millions of Americans, as well as e-mails and other files of foreign targets and their American connections. For this, some, including my colleague John Cassidy, are hailing him as a hero and a whistle-blower. He is neither. He is, rather, a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.
Snowden provided information to the Washington Post and the Guardian, which also posted a video interview with him. In it, he describes himself as appalled by the government he served:
The N.S.A. has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.
I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things… I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.
What, one wonders, did Snowden think the N.S.A. did? Any marginally attentive citizen, much less N.S.A. employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications. Perhaps he thought that the N.S.A. operated only outside the United States; in that case, he hadn’t been paying very close attention. In any event, Snowden decided that he does not “want to live in a society” that intercepts private communications. His latter-day conversion is dubious.
And what of his decision to leak the documents? Doing so was, as he more or less acknowledges, a crime. Any government employee or contractor is warned repeatedly that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a crime. But Snowden, apparently, was answering to a higher calling. “When you see everything you realize that some of these things are abusive,” he said. “The awareness of wrongdoing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up. It was a natural process.” These were legally authorized programs; in the case of Verizon Business’s phone records, Snowden certainly knew this, because he leaked the very court order that approved the continuation of the project. So he wasn’t blowing the whistle on anything illegal; he was exposing something that failed to meet his own standards of propriety. The question, of course, is whether the government can function when all of its employees (and contractors) can take it upon themselves to sabotage the programs they don’t like. That’s what Snowden has done.
What makes leak cases difficult is that some leaking—some interaction between reporters and sources who have access to classified information—is normal, even indispensable, in a society with a free press. It’s not easy to draw the line between those kinds of healthy encounters and the wholesale, reckless dumping of classified information by the likes of Snowden or Bradley Manning. Indeed, Snowden was so irresponsible in what he gave the Guardian and the Post that even these institutions thought some of it should not be disseminated to the public. The Post decided to publish only four of the forty-one slides that Snowden provided. Its exercise of judgment suggests the absence of Snowden’s.
Snowden fled to Hong Kong when he knew publication of his leaks was imminent. In his interview, he said he went there because “they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent.” This may be true, in some limited way, but the overriding fact is that Hong Kong is part of China, which is, as Snowden knows, a stalwart adversary of the United States in intelligence matters. (Evan Osnos has more on that.) Snowden is now at the mercy of the Chinese leaders who run Hong Kong. As a result, all of Snowden’s secrets may wind up in the hands of the Chinese government—which has no commitment at all to free speech or the right to political dissent. And that makes Snowden a hero?
The American government, and its democracy, are flawed institutions. But our system offers legal options to disgruntled government employees and contractors. They can take advantage of federal whistle-blower laws; they can bring their complaints to Congress; they can try to protest within the institutions where they work. But Snowden did none of this. Instead, in an act that speaks more to his ego than his conscience, he threw the secrets he knew up in the air—and trusted, somehow, that good would come of it. We all now have to hope that he’s right.
By: Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, June 10, 2013
“If War Is Hell, What Is Perpetual War?”: The Question That Lindsey Graham Should Be Asked Every Day
I’ve been staring at Sen. Lindsey’s Graham’s comments yesterday from Fox News Sunday, when he criticized the president’s big counter-terrorism speech, and wondering what it would take to satisfy him that it’s time to declare the Global War On Terrorism over?
At a time we need resolved the most, we are sounding retreat. Our enemies are emboldened all over the planet. Al Qaeda in Iraq is coming back with vengeance, in Libya together. Our friends are uncertain. Syria is falling apart. We are talking about helping the rebels but doing nothing about it. Iran is marching toward a nuclear weapon….
At the end of the day, this is the most tone deaf president I’ve ever — could imagine and making such a speech at a time when our homeland is trying to be — attacked literally every day.
So are the only alternatives for the United States a world free of threats or perpetual war? That would seem to be Graham’s essential argument. And what a forfeiture of national sovereignty he calls for, if we are prohibited from adjusting our national security strategy and returning to a normal constitutional regime so long as one “emboldened” enemy or “uncertain” friend might notice!
The habit, carried over from the Cold War, of waging undeclared wars fought under hazy international and domestic auspices is dangerous enough. The idea that anything other than a permanent war footing invites disaster is an extension of the Cold War “Peace Through Strength” doctrine that in fact rules out peace.
If, as Sherman rightly said, “War is hell!”–then what kind of existence do advocates of perpetual war propose for us? It’s a question that Lindsey Graham should be asked to ponder every time he objects to even the smallest steps away from fear and hysteria.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 27, 2013
“Notes On A Pseudo-Scandal”: With No Credibility On Issues, Republicans Demand For Scandal Is Intense And Unflagging
OK folks, if you have the patience for some meta-blogging on the subject of Benghazi, let me share with you some of the thoughts that have been running around my head as I struggle with how to talk about this story. Whenever a topic like this comes up, you have to ask yourself a couple of questions. Do I have something worthwhile to contribute to this discussion? Is there something that needs to be said but hasn’t been yet? Is this thing even worth talking about? Much as I’d like to be immune to the consideration of whether I’m doing a favor for those pushing the story for their own partisan ends by keeping the discussion going, it’s hard to avoid that question popping into your head from time to time.
There’s an objective reality out there, hard though it may sometimes be to discern—either there was or was not actual wrongdoing, and the whole matter is either trivial or momentous—but everyone’s perception of that reality is formed within the context of a partisan competition. Irrespective of any facts, Democrats would like this story to just go away, and Republicans would like it to become The Worst Scandal In History. I’ll be honest and say it’s hard to avoid thinking about that when you’re writing about it. Even doing something like refuting the latest crazy thing someone on the right is alleging does, to at least a small degree, help maintain the story’s momentum.
To step back to the big picture, a “scandal” can proceed regardless of whether any wrongdoing is ever found. If you have your own media system, you can keep talking about it (combined with, always always always, accusations that the mainstream media are ignoring it not because of a reasonable news judgment but because of their liberal bias) until the mainstream media start doing their own reporting on it, pushing the story ahead. This is a routine conservative media are practiced at, and they seem to be having some success yet again. If you have control of one house of Congress, furthermore, you can start investigations and hold hearings, which may not uncover anything incriminating, but it creates news events and produces information, which can be spun to be something nefarious even if it’s utterly mundane.
For instance, conservatives continue to froth at the mouth over whether a set of talking points the administration produced contained the words “terrorism” or “Islamic extremists” or “extremists,” as though one answer means everything was above-board and another answer means there was a cover-up so sinister that impeaching the president is the obvious response. You may be shocked to learn that talking points on national security matters are routinely edited by representatives of different agencies! Or maybe you’re not shocked, but just in case, Republicans are going to act as though it’s shocking. If you’re an Obama partisan, the fact that your opponents think that the key to the President’s undoing will be found in some Microsoft Word “track changes” should make you feel pretty secure, since those opponents are plainly a bunch of buffoons.
Trouble is, that may not stop the “scandal” from continuing to generate momentum. Brendan Nyhan just put out a paper in which he posits a theory of scandals, arguing that they are a “co-production” of the media and the opposition party. Specifically, the less popular a president is with the opposing party, the more likely a scandal is to emerge.Other factors have an impact as well, including competing news stories, the time a president has been in office, and the time since the last scandal. This is essentially what Jamelle noted yesterday, that while there may not be much of a supply of actual Obama administration wrongdoing, the demand for scandal on the right is intense and unflagging. That demand is met by the conservative media, whose coverage pushes Republican lawmakers to get involved, which generates more coverage, which generates more demand in the Republican rank and file, and on and on.
I hesitate to even use the word “scandal” to describe Benghazi, because so far we haven’t learned of anything scandalous anyone did. Conservatives themselves don’t seem to be able to say exactly what the Obama administration is supposed to have done wrong, particularly since lethal attacks on American diplomatic mission are a frequent occurrence, even under Republican administrations. “Talking points were edited to make the attack sound less terrorist-y” isn’t exactly a high crime. “Some different decisions in those first chaotic hours might have made a difference” isn’t much of an indictment either; that’s always true of any tragedy. Yes, there are some people on the right who will speculate that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton actually said, “Go ahead and let those people in Benghazi die, because even though we could save their lives, doing so might harm our re-election, so screw ’em.” But those people are obviously nuts, and everybody knows it.
It may well be that, as it was during the Clinton years, even many of the people pushing the alleged scandal realize there’s not much to it, but they find political utility in keeping the president under siege. If he’s worried about this, he’ll have less time to devote to his other priorities. Spend tens of millions investigating a failed land deal, and even if you don’t find that he did anything wrong there, maybe along the way you’ll discover that he got a blow job from an intern.
As reluctant as I am to feed that beast, in the end I suspect they’ll be punished for their obsession with Benghazi, assuming that they fail, just as they have so far, to uncover any actual wrongdoing. And that’ll happen whether people like me write about it or not.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 10, 2013
The “Other Than 9/11 Argument”: How Not To Rehabilitate A Failed President
A confluence of events appears to have created a curious new talking point on the right. With former President George W. Bush’s library set to open, and last week’s Boston Marathon bombing still very much on the public’s mind, Republican pundits see value in trying to tie the two together in the hopes of improving Bush’s reputation.
The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin, for example, published this gem yesterday:
“Unlike Obama’s tenure, there was no successful attack on the homeland after 9/11.”
A few hours later on Fox News, Eric Bolling echoed the sentiment.
“I will tell one thing, from you 9/12/01 until the time President Obama raised his right hand January of ’09, the man kept us safe. And there — you certainly can’t say that since President Obama has taken the oath of office.”
When it comes to Bolling, I should note that this is an improvement from his previous stance. Two years ago, he suggested on the air that he didn’t recall 9/11 at all: “America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008. I don’t remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time.”
I should also note that neither Rubin nor Bolling seemed to be kidding. Their comments weren’t satirical or jokes intended to make Republicans appear silly.
As for the substance, there are three main angles to keep in mind. The first is the bizarre assertion that President Obama somehow deserves the blame for the bomb that killed three people in Boston last week, because he didn’t “keep us safe.” The argument reflects a child-like understanding of national security and is absurd on its face.
Second, though the right likes to pretend otherwise, there were terrorist attacks during Bush/Cheney’s tenure — after 9/11 — that shouldn’t be ignored. Indeed, it’s a little tiresome to hear Republicans argue in effect, “Other than the deadly anthrax attacks, the attack against El Al ticket counter at LAX, the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush’s inability to capture those responsible for 9/11, waging an unnecessary war that inspired more terrorists, and the success terrorists had in exploiting Bush’s international unpopularity, the former president’s record on counter-terrorism was awesome.”
And finally, I’m not sure Republican pundits have fully thought through the wisdom of the “other than 9/11” argument.
Bush received an intelligence briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, at which he was handed a memo with an important headline: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
Bush, however, was on a month-long vacation at the time. He heard the briefer out and replied, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.” A month later, al Qaeda killed 3,000 people.
For Rubin and Bolling, the response is, in effect, “Yeah, but other than that, he kept us safe.” The problem, of course, is that’s roughly the equivalent of saying other than that iceberg, the Titanic had a pleasant voyage. Other than that one time, Pompeii didn’t have to worry about the nearby volcano. Other than Booth, Lincoln enjoyed his evening at Ford’s Theater.
It is, in other words, a little more difficult to airbrush catastrophic events from history.
I can appreciate the zeal with which Republican pundits want to rehabilitate Bush’s poor standing, but they’ll have to do better than this.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 24, 2013
“Saying What Everyone Felt”: Uncle Ruslan And Big Papi Remind Us That We’re All In This Together
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
–Woody Guthrie, 1944
For what it’s worth, almost everybody in Arkansas who can find Massachusetts on a road map was appalled by state Rep. Nate Bell’s grotesquely inappropriate Twitter post. (Of course not everybody can, but that’s a different issue.) At the height of the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, the Mena Republican informed the world, “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?”
Reaction from New England was swift, often witty and rarely polite. “Go put on a pair of shoes and fry me up some squirrel, Gomer,” my pal Charles Pierce wrote on his Esquire blog. In a post entitled “Bite Me,” he urged readers to remind Bell “that God loves him as he loves all mouthy hicks.” Joe Koehane, the Boston-bred columnist, was less circumspect: “Might want to take a flight up north and try saying that in person, you waterheaded, little-d**k hillbilly a**hole.”
Note to Nate: Anybody who thinks Boston’s a city of Perrier-sipping pantywaists has clearly spent no time there. It didn’t help that in photos, Bell looks less like a Navy Seal than a guy who’s never personally assaulted anything more lethal than the buffet table down at the Squat n’ Gobble Barbecue Shack. Many Bostonians speculated that his fondness for big guns originated in less-than-robust manliness. Southerners are sometimes surprised to learn that when provoked, New Englanders remember the Civil War too—particularly the Irish.
Back home, Arkansans long sensitive to being caricatured as ignorant hayseeds urged Bell to resign. My sainted wife, a lifelong Arkansan (apart from our three long-ago years in Massachusetts), summed things up wearily. “Oh my God,” she said. “He’s just pathetic.”
It’s merely ironic that “redneck” remains the last socially-acceptable ethnic slur in American life. Fools like Rep. Bell help make it so. It’s a wonder the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce or the Parks & Tourism people didn’t have him kidnapped and transported to Mississippi.
Then after the big dope said he was sorry for the unfortunate “timing” of his remarks, Davy Carter, the Speaker of the Arkansas House, and also a Republican, had the decency to post a proper apology:
“On behalf of the Arkansas House of Representatives and the state of Arkansas, I want to extend my deepest apologies to the people of the City of Boston and the state of Massachusetts for the inappropriate and insensitive comment made this morning by an Arkansas House member. I can assure the people of Boston and the people of Massachusetts that Arkansans have them in their thoughts and prayers during this tragic time.”
Of course they do.
Indeed, if there’s any good to come from evil acts like the Boston Marathon bombing, it’s to remind Americans that the things binding us together as a people far outweigh our differences. In all the rage and sorrow, the words that rang truest to me came from the bombers’ immigrant uncle Ruslan Tsarni and a baseball player from the Dominican Republic.
Uncle Ruslan spoke with rare passion. He urged his surviving nephew Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to turn himself in and beg forgiveness. Maybe he needn’t have said that his brother’s sons had shamed and embarrassed all Chechen immigrants, because we don’t do—or we’re not supposed to do—collective racial and ethnic guilt here in America. But anybody who grew up with first- and second-generation immigrant families knows exactly where he was coming from. Better to hear it raw than listen to mealy-mouthed apologetics on MSNBC.
Uncle Ruslan allowed his nephews no excuses. He found their alleged religious motives fraudulent and contemptible. More than that, he spoke in terms of bedrock Americanism common to Boston, Little Rock and his Maryland home. He said he teaches his own children that the United States is the best country in the world. “I love this country which gives (everybody) a chance to be treated as a human being.”
And then came Big Papi, David Ortiz, a beloved bear of a man who briefly addressed a Fenway Park crowd after a pregame memorial service. Gesturing to his chest, Ortiz pointed out in Spanish-accented English that on that day his uniform shirt didn’t say Red Sox.
“It says Boston,” he said. ““This is our f***ing city, and nobody is going to dictate our freedom. Stay strong.”
Expletive and all, he said what everybody felt. The crowd erupted in a spontaneous roar.
Sitting halfway across the country in front of a TV set at my home on a gravel road in darkest Arkansas, I have to tell you, I damn near cried.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, April 24, 2013
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