The “Snowden is Ready
to Come Home!” Story: a Case Study in
Typical Media Deceit
By Glenn Greenwald
March 05, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Intercept" -
- Most sentient people rationally accept
that the U.S. media routinely
disseminates misleading stories and
outright falsehoods in the
most authoritative tones. But it’s
nonetheless valuable to examine
particularly egregious case studies to
see how that works. In that spirit,
let’s take yesterday’s
numerous,
breathless
reports trumpeting the “BREAKING” news that
“Edward Snowden now wants to come home!”
and is “now negotiating the terms of his
return!”Ever
since Snowden revealed himself to the
public 20 months ago, he has repeatedly
said the same exact thing when asked
about his returning to the U.S.: I
would love to come home, and would do so
if I could get a fair trial, but right
now, I can’t.
His primary rationale
for this argument has long been
that under the Espionage Act, the 1917
statute under which he has been charged,
he would be barred by
U.S. courts from even raising his key
defense: that the information he
revealed to journalists should never
have been concealed in the first place
and he was thus justified in disclosing
it to journalists. In other words, when
U.S. political and media figures say
Snowden should “man up,” come home
and argue to a court that he did nothing
wrong, they are deceiving the public,
since they have made certain that
whistleblowers charged with “espionage”
are legally barred from even raising
that defense.
Snowden has also
pointed out that legal protections
for whistleblowers are explicitly
inapplicable to those, like him, who are
employed by private contractors
(rendering President Obama’s
argument about why Snowden should “come
home”
entirely false). One month after
Snowden was revealed, Daniel Ellsberg
wrote
an Op-Ed in the Washington Post
arguing that Snowden did the right thing
in leaving the U.S. because he would not
be treated fairly, and argued
Snowden should not return until he is
guaranteed a fully fair trial.
Snowden has said all
of this over and over. In June 2013,
when I asked him during the
online Guardian chat why he
left the U.S. for Hong Kong, he said:
“the US Government, just as they did
with other whistleblowers, immediately
and predictably destroyed any
possibility of a fair trial at home . .
. That’s not justice, and it would be
foolish to volunteer yourself to it if
you can do more good outside of prison
than in it.” In January 2014, AP
reported about a
new online chat Snowden gave:
“Snowden said returning would be the
best resolution. But Snowden said he
can’t return because he wouldn’t be
allowed to argue at trial that he acted
in the public interest when he revealed
the National Security Agency’s mass
surveillance programs.” In that chat, he
said: “Returning to the US, I
think, is the best resolution for the
government, the public, and myself.”
In his May 2014
interview with NBC News’ Brian
Williams, Snowden
said: “I don’t think there’s ever
been any question that I’d like to go
home.” That led to headlines like this
one from CBS News — on
May 29, 2014, more than nine months ago:
For many months, it
has also been repeatedly reported there
have been negotiations between the DOJ
and Snowden’s lawyers for the terms of
his return, though those negotiations
have gone nowhere. In April 2014, the
New York Times
reported that Snowden “retained a
well known Washington defense lawyer
last summer in hopes of reaching a plea
deal with federal prosecutors that would
allow him to return to the United States
and spare him significant prison
time.” In June 2014, Bill Gertz
reported that “Federal prosecutors
recently held discussions with
representatives of renegade National
Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward
Snowden on a possible deal involving his
return to the United States.”
Snowden’s U.S. lawyers
have repeatedly said the same thing. In
April 2014, New
York magazine — under the headline
“Snowden Hired Lawyer to Negotiate a
Plea Deal” — reported:
Government
officials said negotiations
with Snowden’s lawyers remained at
an early stage, and it
doesn’t appear that there’s any deal
on the horizon. However, Ben
Wizner, an American Civil Liberties
Union lawyer who represents Snowden,
said he is still “interested in
returning home” from Moscow,
where he has temporary asylum.
Wizner continued:
“He is and always
has been on America’s side. He would
cooperate in extraordinary ways in
the right circumstances. But he does
not believe that the ‘felon’ label
is the right word for someone whose
act of conscience has revitalized
democratic oversight of the
intelligence community and is
leading to historic reforms.”
Yesterday, in Moscow,
Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly
Kucherena held a press conference to
promote his new book, was asked about
Snowden’s case, and said exactly what
has been known for almost two years: “He
has a desire to go back, and we are
doing everything possible to make that
happen.” Kucherena added that lawyers in
various countries have been working on
Snowden’s behalf to negotiate terms for
a fair trial.
Various media outlets
then took these redundant, anodyne
comments and distorted them into some
brand new BREAKING!! event — as though
Snowden suddenly decided for the first
time he wants to Come Home — and then
proceeded to extract from this fake
narrative a series of utterly
misleading, false and propagandistic
claims about Snowden, Russia and the
NSA. The first instance I saw of this
was yesterday morning, from
Politico’s digital editorial
director Blake Hounshell, looking as
always to generate Politico
clicks by hyping empty garbage:
That was retweeted by
dozens of journalists and others,
treating it like some sort of new
confession on Snowden’s part that he’s
suddenly “ready to return” home. Over
and over, print and television media
outlets then spent the rest of the day
screeching that Snowden has now decided
he wants to come home!!! “Snowden Seeks
to Return Home,”
proclaimed the headline of the New
York Times, while the
article strongly suggested this was a
new desire created by life in Moscow:
Snowden “would like to return to the
U.S. after nearly two years of exile in
Russia.” The NSA-allied website Lawfare
cited the article to
claim: “Edward Snowden wants to come
home.” ABC
pronounced: “NSA Leaker Edward
Snowden Wants to Return Home.”
Reuters: “Fugitive ex-NSA
contractor Snowden seeks to come home:
lawyer.” And on and on and on.
Countless cable shows
similarly treated this like some sort of
breaking, revealing news about Snowden’s
life in Russia and his desperation to
return to the Land of the Free — all
based on things that happened over and
over during the last 20 months. The most
hilariously inane was
this CNN discussion of “BREAKING
NOW” news hosted by Wolf Blitzer,
involving his know-nothing panelists:
CNN “counter-terrorism analyst” (i.e.,
former CIA counter-terrorism
official) Phillip Mudd, the Washington
Post’s David Ignatius, and Newt
Gingrich, all of whom put on their
Serious Expert Faces to spout utter
idiocy. Let’s look at some of what they
said:
Mudd: “I
don’t understand why someone who is
one of the most remarkable leakers
we’ve ever seen gets to flee
overseas, and then talk to the
Department of Justice about what he
wants for his trial. Come home, son,
and spend your 30 years in jail.
He’s cooked.”
CNN’s “expert” is
apparently unaware that the DOJ very
frequently — almost always, in fact
— negotiates with people charged
with very serious felonies over plea
agreements. He’s also apparently unaware
of this thing called “asylum,” which the
U.S.
routinely grants to people charged
by other countries with crimes on the
ground that they’d be
persecuted with imprisonment if they
returned home.
Also, with this
prevailing mentality being spewed by
former government officials and current
news network “experts” — “come home,
son, and spend your 30 years in jail.
He’s cooked” — does anyone have
difficulty seeing why Snowden believes
he would not get a fair trial?
Ignatius:
“It must be very difficult to be
Edward Snowden, living in the Moscow
of Vladimir Putin, at a time when
Putin’s opposition is being murdered
in the streets, so I can’t help but
think that Snowden wants out, and
the fact that he’s willing to
negotiate, which he said before he
wouldn’t do, is interesting.”
It’s hard to overstate
how false and misleading this is.
Snowden had never said he wouldn’t
negotiate for his return; as I’ve
demonstrated, he’s been negotiating this
through his lawyers informally for a
long time, and his position has always
been the same: he’d like to return home
if he could be assured a fair trial.
David Ignatitus just made all of this
up, all based on this fake news item
that Snowden has had some sort of sudden
change of heart.
Then there’s the bit
about living in the Russia “of Vladimir
Putin.” For more than 60 years,
U.S. elites have been eager to tell
Americans that anyone living in Russia
is inherently miserable. That’s
particularly true of Western dissidents:
the apocryphal stories of British
defector Kim Philby being destroyed by a
dark, lonely, miserable existence that
culminated in his drinking himself to
death are
often invoked to suggest that
a similar fate awaits Snowden (who
doesn’t drink, who lives with his
longtime girlfriend, who is regarded as
a hero by millions and millions of
people around the world, who receives
awards and prestigious appointments, and
who is incredibly gratified and
fulfilled both by what he did and his
current life).
That’s all Ignatius is
up to with these claims, all based on
the obvious media-created fiction that
Snowden has suddenly realized how
desperate he is to leave Russia. Again,
this entire conversation — like the
whole media blitz yesterday about this
story — is all based on utter fiction.
This
“everyone-in-Russia-is-miserable” line
has been a staple of U.S propaganda
since the end of World War II, and
remarkably, nothing has changed. Indeed,
the climate created by our New Cold
Warriors is, in some respects, even more
desperate than the “he’s-a-Soviet-shill”
tactics pioneered in the 1950s
(yesterday, BuzzFeed
investigated a journalist for the
Thought Crime of writing articles which
BuzzFeed’s blogger Miriam Elder deemed
to be “pro-Russia,” and thus smeared him
with evidence-free innuendo as a likely
paid Kremlin agent). Yes, many political
rights are severely abridged in Russia,
but there are over 140 million people
living in Russia and some of them are
fulfilled human beings living fulfilled
human lives (BREAKING!) while there is
substantial human misery in the U.S. as
well.
Snowden did not choose
to live in Russia. He was forced to
remain there when trying to leave
because the U.S. government revoked his
passport and bullied the Cubans out of
offering him safe passage on his way to
Latin America. But whether jingoists
like David Ignatius can comprehend this
or not, Snowden (as most people
would) actually considers living in
Moscow with his girlfriend and freely
participating in the vital global debate
he provoked to be preferable to
withering in a cage inside the
repressive U.S. penal state.
Blitzer:
“What do you think, Mr. Speaker? He
could spend the rest of his life in
Moscow — it might be chilly there in
the winter — but it’s better,
presumably, than jail?”
I can’t overstate how
many times I’ve heard people say that
Snowden must be miserable in Moscow
because of how cold it gets in the
winter. Leave aside the bizarre view
that climate is the greatest factor in
determining how happy and fulfilled
someone’s life is, and further leave
aside the notion that all 140 million
Russians must have a horrible life
because it’s cold during the
winter. There are other places — such as
Canada, North Dakota, Sweden, Boston —
that are also extremely cold; do people
believe that residents there are, as a
result of the weather, inherently doomed
to horrible lives?
Gingrich:
“I think if we can find a way to get
him home, get the rest of the
documents that he has not leaked . .
. it’s worth doing, but I think he’d
have to serve jail time, and it’d
probably be fairly lengthy. I don’t
think the country would tolerate
this level of betrayal, not having
some very significant jail time —
Blitzer:
“You say lengthy. What do you think?
Gingrich:
“I’m not an expert in this, but I’d
say more than 10 years.”
Where to start? First,
Gingrich’s belief that it’s possible to
“get the rest of the documents that he
has not leaked” is simply adorable.
Second, Gingrich is a fascinating choice
for CNN to have pontificate on proper
punishments given that he is the first
House Speaker to ever be
punished for ethics violations, for
which he was fined $300,000. Third,
David Petraeus was just allowed to plead
guilty for leaking
extremely sensitive secrets — not
out of a whistleblowing desire to inform
the public but simply to
satisfy his mistress — and will
almost certainly spend no time
in jail; Gingrich, Blitzer, Ignatius
and friends would never dare suggest
that the General should go to prison
(just as DC’s stern law-and-order
advocates who demand Snowden’s
imprisonment would never dare
suggest the same for James Clapper for
having lied to Congress).
Most important, if you
were Snowden, and you constantly heard
U.S. political and media elites
consigning you to prison for a decade or
longer before your trial started, would
you remotely believe assurances that
you’d get a fair trial? What rational
person would ever willingly submit
themselves to a penal state that
imprisons more of its citizens than any
other in the world, run by people with
this mentality?
And when you examine
case studies like this of what U.S.
media is not just capable of doing but
eager to do — concoct a completely false
narrative based on fictitious events and
then proceed to spend a full day drawing
all sorts of self-serving and
propagandistic lessons from it — why
would anyone regard what comes spewing
forth from them with anything other than
extreme suspicion and contempt?
Photo:
Bryan Bedder/Getty