The US's ability to "manage" the news cycle only seems to extend as far as its borders (where it is able to manage its MSM). In the ROTW the US is looking ... well ... a slight bit .... (pick your adjective). While inside the US, to anyone watching the MSM, the "Snowden is a traitor" meme may have legs, from outside the US this looks ... to put it mildly ... (pick another adjective). [this fill in the blank introduction is a (pick another adjective) attempt to avoid inflammatory language]
A few cases in point below the squiggly (note: this is a collection of opinions from various commentators, so there may be some contradictions therewithin)
1. Screwing up the paperwork.
Obviously there may be some other issue here, but the big error the US seems to have made in trying to get Snowden from HK was throwing the espionage charge into the mix as even Dershowitz noted http://www.newsmax.com/...
“Forget about whether it’s warranted or not,” said Dershowitz in an exclusive interview on Saturday. “It’s really dumb to charge him with what might be considered to be a political offense when they’re trying to extradite him.”
In addition to being difficult for prosecutors to prove, the extradition treaty with Hong Kong “explicitly excludes political crimes and this gives them an excuse to say ‘we’re not going to turn him over to you because you’ve indicted him for a political crime,'” according to Dershowitz, who is also a Newsmax contributor.
“If they had just indicted him for theft and conversion of property — an ordinary crime — the chances of getting him extradited would have increased dramatically,” he explained. “But at this point they have really shot themselves in the foot. I don’t know why they did it.”
The above concern was echoed by
Corrente noting the
South China Morning Post article
There were, as well, more substantial problems with the US document:
The US also failed to explain to Hong Kong authorities how two of the three charges the US mentioned in its arrest request fell within the scope of a US-Hong Kong rendition of fugitive offenders agreement signed in 1996.
The Hong Kong government on June 15 received the US request for the provisional arrest of Snowden on three charges, namely unauthorised disclosure of national defence information, unauthorised disclosure of intelligence and stealing state property.
Yuen said the US had failed to tell Hong Kong authorities which part of the agreement covered the first two charges.
He also said documents from the US made no mention of what evidence they had against Snowden, a requirement for Hong Kong courts to move ahead with a provisional arrest.
2. Losing face:
In dealing with the Chinese the US seems to have forgotten about the concept of "face", basically the most important thing to know when dealing with Chinese.
By continuing to argue with China over whether the documents were correct, or wondering how they could have let Snowden slip away they are ignoring "face". To some degree letting Snowden leave was a way for both sides to avoid losing too much face, and probably avoided a much bigger blow up had he stayed (Snowden had immense support in HK so sending him back would have been extremely unpopular and would have looked really bad to the Chinese people).
By questioning the Chinese on their excuse the US is showing itself as being uncultured (by Chinese standards of course) and being rather barbarian about it.
3. Local politics:
The Russian and Chinese governments are laughing their heads off. For them Snowden is NOT an espionage win (they probably know just about everything he has already), but his treatment by the US is a massive PR win for them with their people.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
The over-exaggerated "treasure chest" of secrets the world presumes Snowden's laptop to be is of no use to the Russian government since they have their own (albeit weaker) NSA with spies, satellites, cryptography specialists, and a general understanding of an intelligence agency's modus operandi that is far beyond that of any journalist or civilian in the US. Official Moscow may have a hard time grasping the basic principles of democracy, but it sure knows a thing or two about intelligence gathering. So no PRISM, Tempora, Verizon court orders or, say, a secret program that installs NSA modules into TiVo sets for tracking al-Qaida based on TV preferences is of any interest (or surprise) to the Russian government. What they do care about is sticking it to the US any way they can. And Snowden is just the guy they need.
4. Role reversal: Who said this? Obama or Putin?
“Assange and Snowden consider themselves human rights activists and say they’re fighting for the spread of information,” ??? said. “Ask yourself this: should you hand these people over so they’ll be put in prison?”
Just unbelievable how poorly this is playing outside the US. Just think how you would feel as a Russian dissident as you watch your corrupt leader able to claim moral superiority over the US. Yikes! The damage is going to last for some time.
5. Strategically shortsighted
Marcy Wheeler notes that if the intent of the US was to minimize the spread of info to China/Russia etc then: http://www.emptywheel.net/...
it seems the Obama approach has been precisely the wrong approach in limiting potential damage to national security. The best way to limit damage, for example, would be to get Snowden to a safe place where our greatest adversaries can’t get to him, where we could make an eternal stink about his asylum there, but still rest easy knowing he wasn’t leaking further secrets. Indeed, if he were exiled in some place like France, we’d likely have more influence over what he was allowed to do than if he gets to Ecuador, for example.
The smart thing to do then (from the protecting the data perspective versus winning the traitor wars game), may have been a back door approach to letting Snowden have his freedom, but in a place where he would eventually become irrelevant. The same could probably be said for Assange. Having him locked up in the Ecuadorian embassy controls him to an extent, but also keeps him alive as a potent symbol in the media.
6. Unhappy Germans:
While the actual comments are directed mainly at the Brits, the fact is that the Brits and Americans are working together on this (250 US NSA agents in the UK for one).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
The German government has expressed the growing public anger of its citizens over Britain's mass programme of monitoring global phone and internet traffic and directly challenged UK ministers over the whole basis of GCHQ's Project Tempora surveillance operation.
The German justice minister, who has described the secret operation by Britain's eavesdropping agency as a catastrophe that sounded "like a Hollywood nightmare", warned UK ministers that free and democratic societies could not flourish when states shielded their actions in "a veil of secrecy".
The Snowden revelations have drawn widescale comparisons in the last fortnight with Gestapo and Stasi techniques. "I thought this era had ended when the German Democratic Republic fell," Markus Ferber, a member of the European parliament, said in a Reuters interview.
Bonus content:
Great interview with Jeremy Scahill (national security correspondent for the Nation)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
Complete diagram and blow by blow history of the spying program going back to 2001
http://www.zerohedge.com/...
A look at how other countries are protecting privacy: http://www.bbc.com/...
Even the EU is considering stricter, and controversial, personal privacy measures, such as the right to be forgotten. If approved, a person’s past could be wiped off the internet and their data could no longer be processed or stored. US companies in Silicon Valley, among others, are fighting these proposed EU regulations, but the effort has continued to move forward.
Finally came across this this morning over at
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.ca/ (great site), as a timely reminder amid all the daily back and forth.