The Fable of Edward Snowden
Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in espionage, and was only a whistleblower seeking to expose the overreach of NSAs information gathering. With the clock ticking on Mr. Snowdens chance of a pardon, now is a good time to review what we have learned about his real mission.
Mr. Snowdens theft of Americas most closely guarded communication secrets occurred in May 2013, according to the criminal complaint filed against him by federal prosecutors the following month. At the time Mr. Snowden was a 29-year-old technologist working as an analyst-in-training for the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton at the regional base of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Oahu, Hawaii. On May 20, only some six weeks after his job there began, he failed to show up for work, emailing his supervisor that he was at the hospital being tested for epilepsy.
This excuse was untrue. Mr. Snowden was not even in Hawaii. He was in Hong Kong. He had flown there with a cache of secret data that he had stolen from the NSA.
This was not the only lie Mr. Snowden told. As became clear during my investigation over the past three years, nearly every element of the narrative Mr. Snowden has provided, which reached its final iteration in Oliver Stones 2016 movie, Snowden, is demonstrably false.
This narrative began soon after Mr. Snowden arrived in Hong Kong, where he arranged to meet with Laura Poitras, a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker, and Glenn Greenwald, a Brazil-based blogger for the Guardian. Both journalists were longtime critics of NSA surveillance with whom Mr. Snowden (under the alias Citizen Four) had been in contact for four months.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fable-of-edward-snowden-1483143143
brush
(53,771 posts)There's pretty convincing evidence that Snowden is a liar and probably an agent, and not for us.
http://www.wikileaks-forum.com/edward-snowden/469/the-fable-of-edward-snowden/35180/
". . . In his narrative, Mr. Snowden always claims that he was a conscientious whistleblower who turned over all the stolen NSA material to journalists in Hong Kong. He has insisted he had no intention of defecting to Russia but was on his way to Latin America when he was trapped in Russia by the U.S. government in an attempt to demonize him.
For example, in October 2014, he told the editor of the Nation, Im in exile. My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled and chose to keep me in Russia. According to Mr. Snowden, the U.S. government accomplished this entrapment by suspending his passport while he was in midair after he departed Hong Kong on June 23, thus forcing him into the hands of President Vladimir Putins regime.
None of this is true. The State Department invalidated Mr. Snowdens passport while he was still in Hong Kong, not after he left for Moscow on June 23. The Consul General-Hong Kong confirmed that Hong Kong authorities were notified that Mr. Snowdens passport was revoked June 22, according to the State Departments senior watch officer, as reported by ABC news on June 23, 2013.
Mr. Snowden could not have been unaware of the governments pursuit of him, since the criminal complaint against him, which was filed June 14, had been headline news in Hong Kong. That the U.S. acted against him while he was still in Hong Kong is of great importance to the timeline because it points to the direct involvement of Aeroflot, an airline which the Russian government effectively controls. Aeroflot bypassed its normal procedures to allow Mr. Snowden to board the Moscow flighteven though he had neither a valid passport nor a Russian visa, as his newly assigned lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said at a press conference in Russia on July 12, 2013.
By falsely claiming his passport was invalidated after the plane departed Hong Konginstead of before he leftMr. Snowden hoped to conceal this extraordinary waiver. The Russian government further revealed its helping hand, judging by a report in Russias Izvestia newspaper when, on arrival, Mr. Snowden was taken off the plane by a security team in a special operation.
Nor was it any kind of accident. Vladimir Putin personally authorized this assistance after Mr. Snowden met with Russian officials in Hong Kong, as Mr. Putin admitted in a televised press conference on Sept. 2, 2013.
To provide a smokescreen for Mr. Snowdens escape from Hong Kong, WikiLeaks (an organization that the Obama administration asserted to be a tool of Russian intelligence after the hacking of Democratic Party leaders email in 2016) booked a dozen or more diversionary flight reservations to other destinations for Mr. Snowden.
WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange also dispatched Sarah Harrison, his deputy at WikiLeaks, to fly to Hong Kong to pay Mr. Snowdens expenses and escort him to Moscow. In short, Mr. Snowdens arrival in Moscow was neither accidental nor the work of the U.S. government.
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)He jumped in front of cameras and admitted his wrong doing. If he was taking advice from others he should expose them, face his charges and do his punishment.
4Tone
(49 posts)I never trusted him. Cheese from Switzerland has less holes in it than his story.