By Emmett Tyrrell
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Dante Alighieri was the 13th-century Florentine author
whose Inferno apportioned his sinners' suffering in hell to their vices
committed on earth with delightful affect. For instance, flatterers are mired
in human excrement. Traitors are frozen in a lake of ice. Now, Margaret
Thatcher's distinguished British biographer Charles Moore updates Dante by
heaving the wretched Edward Snowden into hell.
Moore writes that "it will be entirely fitting if
Edward Snowden spends eternity in a Moscow airport lounge." I might add
that the airport lounge is a transit lounge with Snowden transiting from the
free world to absolutely nowhere, all under the watchful eyes of the Russians'
Federal Security Service, the modern equivalent of Communist Russia's KGB.
Snowden supposedly worries about the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the
Central Intelligence Agency and, of course, the National Security Agency. Let
him sound off to the officers of Russia's Federal Security Service, and they
will teach him a lesson in human rights. By the way, is it possible that he
really entered Russia with four laptops containing top secret American
intelligence, and no one in the Russian intelligence community has politely
asked him to let them see his laptops under penalty of having his arms broken?
Frankly this is another absurd aspect of Snowden's absurd adventure.
On the other hand, if he is shipped off to Venezuela, as
has been reported, that will be fitting, too. There this ignorant modern-day
Daniel Ellsberg will be hosted by phony human rights defender President Nicolas
Maduro, whose government desperately fights to control the flow of information
worldwide to the Venezuelan public by taking over cable television, hounding
the remaining independent press and, most ironic of all, spying on his
citizens' telephone calls. Venezuela is a human rights mess. Ecuador is a human
rights mess. Bolivia is a human rights mess. These are but three of the
countries in which this lunkhead seeks refuge. How odd.
The world of Snowden is like no world I have ever
imagined. For that matter, so is the world of Julian Assange and his bizarre
contrivance, WikiLeaks. In a recent public letter to the president of Ecuador,
Snowden wrote that the United States system of surveillance is "a grave
violation of our universal human rights." Whose system of universal human
rights is he talking about? What are those rights? Who enforces them? Do they
include the right to freely exchange ideas, say in Venezuela or, for that
matter, in Russia? Do they include the right to freedom of speech, freedom of
worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear? Those would be the four
freedoms that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt deposited into the
Atlantic Charter as universal goals before World War II. They sound very nice,
but even today they are not universal rights. Try practicing any one of them in
areas held by the Taliban or the North Koreans or any of a dozen other regimes
that have attracted the vigilant eyes and ears of the CIA, the NSA and other
Western intelligence eavesdroppers.
I do not mean to say that a free society has no reason to
fear government intrusion into our freedoms. Certainly the administration's
excesses at the Internal Revenue Service are a matter of grave concern and
require further investigation by Congress and the media. As for the NSA's
system of surveillance, we need to remain vigilant. Yet the NSA is not
eavesdropping on law-abiding Americans. It is listening for hints of terrorist
activity. It has been remarkably successful in thwarting the bad guys and ought
not to be hindered by Snowden, Assange and the other twits that are out there.
To return to Snowden, let us hope he is remanded to American custody and that
our government can discover how he got access to all that information that he
is now traveling the world with on his four laptops. Then, I say try him for
treason and put him in a proper prison until he is taken by a divine authority
to hell.
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