Why U.S. is being humiliated by the hunt for Snowden … The increasingly slapstick global steeplechase in pursuit of Edward Snowden, the former American contractor who leaked topsecret details of surveillance programs, looks like a cross between "The Hunt for Red October" and "The Bonfire of the Vanities." Nobody, except perhaps Snowden himself, is coming out of this well. – CNN Simon Tisdall
Dominant Social Theme: Snowden is a traitor and US law enforcement will hunt him down.
Free-Market Analysis: For decades, US and British law enforcement, encouraged by their corporate, political and banking betters, have colluded to extend the penal reach of their regulatory democracy around the world.
To some extent they have succeeded, but the Snowden blowback is so powerful and anti-American that even CNN is suddenly impelled to run truthful articles about its reality.
Here's more:
US Secretary of State John Kerry seems to believe "the law" is what the White House counsel and U.S. Justice Department deem it to be on any given day, and that this made-in-America "law" applies inexorably to every country and every corner of the world.
Wrong, John. It's like invading somebody else's country without a U.N. Security Council resolution, or entering a home without a warrant. Not advisable, unless you relish hand-to-hand combat and endless sarcasm.
… Perhaps the U.S. will retaliate by ordering the secret hacking of Chinese government data banks? Wait a minute. Hasn't that been done already? To Asian eyes, Snowden is a new, more useful kind of Quiet American. Having picked his brains or pockets or both, Hong Kong happily let him go.
Russia says it feels "threatened" by U.S. criticism. This is as close as Sergei Lavrov, Moscow's dour foreign minister, has ever got to making a joke. If Putin and pals can stiff Obama on Syria and Iran, they can certainly "lift" a tale-teller and endure a cyber-tiff or two. These are tears of laughter, not pain.
Crowing Chinese comments about how the heroic Snowden has "torn off Washington's sanctimonious mask" give a clue to what is going on here. So, too, does the uppity behavior of tiny Ecuador and Iceland.
If these international minnows dare challenge the pomp and majesty of Imperial America, how stands the Empire now, Caesar? Fraying at the edges, is the answer. Admit it. For Obama et al, it's a "pants-down" day …
Granted, this excoriation comes from the Guardian's Simon Tisdall, but it is nonetheless unusual to see posted at CNN, a news organization that usually gives the former USSR's TASS a run for its money.
Since CNN, like much of the mainstream media, is in some ways an appendage of the larger US Super State – the one that lives in a perpetual condition of war – we wonder if the US intel-industrial complex isn't getting the message that they may have pushed too far.
Perhaps they will use the Snowden Affair to polish their image a bit, as well. Those in leadership seem to have forgotten that appearances are important. We figure this is an outcome of the Internet itself, which has frightened those at the top as thoroughly as the rest of society.
As a result, they are apparently rolling out various false flags as intelligence agencies are apt to do in an effort to control the damage. But if Snowden, like Assange, is a kind of false flag intended to polarize the situation, it doesn't seem to be working to the advantage of those who launched him.
The 21st century is not the 20th … and the Internet is a process, not an episode.