By Donald Lambro
Wednesday, July 03, 2013
Fugitive Edward Snowden, wanted on charges of espionage
against his own country, is caught in a trap of his own making.
He finds himself stranded at an airport in Moscow where
he's been promised political asylum by Russian President Vladimir Putin who
says he will never turn Snowden over to the United States to stand trial on
criminal charges of exposing national security secrets to our enemies.
"Russia has never given up anyone to anybody and
does not plan to," Putin said this week.
But the former Soviet KGB agent's offer of a safe haven
comes with one condition. "If he wants to stay here... he must stop his
work aimed at harming our American partners, as strange as that sounds coming
from my lips," he told reporters at a gas exporters' conference in Moscow
on Monday.
It sounds more than strange from the lips of a man who
ruthlessly rules Russia with an iron hand, crushing his political opponents,
jailing people who dare to criticize his autocratic government that has led his
country back into a dark era of political corruption, skullduggery and fear.
It is more than likely that the Russians have debriefed
and interrogated Snowden by now, and no doubt made him enticing offers of
asylum that they hoped he could not refuse. Many secrets are still hidden in
his laptop, but can anyone really believe Putin's intelligence apparatchiks
have not seen them?
There are those who suspect that Snowden is or was a
Russian agent who sought jobs in the CIA and the secret National Security
Agency that ran PRISM, the telecom surveillance program he exposed to the
world.
Putin flatly denied that again Monday. "As for Mr.
Snowden, he is not our agent and he is not working with us," he insisted.
Sure.
Snowden has been in Moscow for nine days in a transit
area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, plotting his next move, even as he
declares that he would not accept any demand by Putin or anyone else that he
stop revealing more secrets about U.S. intelligence activities.
U.S. intelligence officials here believe that Snowden has
a large cache of information about American surveillance programs that he
intends to reveal over the coming weeks and months in an effort to further
damage U.S. security on the international stage.
In a letter to Ecuador's President Rafael Correa seen by
the Reuters news agency Monday, Snowden complains he is being wrongly
persecuted by the U.S. for revealing its surveillance methods, but says he will
not be silenced.
"I remain free and able to publish information that
serves the public interest," he wrote in a bizarre, delusional, far left
manifesto of his larger, longterm goals.
"No matter how many more days my life contains, I
remain dedicated to the fight for justice in this unequal world," he wrote
in an appeal to Correa, the leftist leader who has launched his own campaign
against the right of a free press to criticize his administration.
At times, Snowden's self-serving writings veer off into
the psychotic, accusing the U.S. of unfairly conducting "an extrajudicial
man-hunt costing me, my family, my freedom to travel, and my right to live
peacefully without fear of illegal aggression."
In a statement released by the anti-secrecy web site
WikiLeaks, Snowden said the Obama administration had used tactics that had
turned him into "a stateless person."
Indeed, he seemed naively and peculiarly surprised that
the U.S. revoked his passport in its efforts to bring him to justice. Why on
earth does he think WikiLeak founder Julian Assange, his hero and role model,
who published reams of classified U.S. documents, is holed up in the Ecuador
embassy in London?
President Obama, while traveling in Tanzania, said the
U.S. has been working through law enforcement channels and at other high
diplomatic levels with the Russians "to find a solution to the
problem."
But Putin, enjoying any opportunity to stick it to the
U.S., was not budging from his conditional offer of a safe harbor, even as he
acknowledged that Snowden isn't going to buy it because "he feels himself
to be a human rights activist." If Snowden will not agree to his
conditions, Putin said, well then "he must choose a country of destination
and go there."
Snowden wants to do just that. The Los Angeles Times
reported Monday that he's given Russian officials a list of 15 countries to
whom he plans to apply for asylum.
Snowden is a young, naive, undereducated computer hacker
and political zealot who is under the simple-minded delusion that America's
government shouldn't have any secrets; that it should conduct no surveillance
programs to protect Americans from deadly terrorist attacks; and that a free
society means that law enforcers should not conduct precautionary inquiries
into people here and abroad who are, with just cause, suspected of plotting to
kill as many of us as they can.
This week, evidence was presented in the court-martial
trial of Bradley Manning who leaked classified U.S. documents to WikiLeaks that
showed al-Qaeda leaders reveling in the secret information that they said will
help them to attack our country.
"By the grace of God the enemy's interests are today
spread all over the place," said Adam Gadahn, a member of the terrorist
group, in a 2011 al-Qaeda-produced video. The video urged its terrorist members
to study the material revealed by WikiLeaks, whose release was applauded by
Snowden.
The prosecution at Manning's trial offered excerpts from
the winter 2010 issue of al-Qaeda's online magazine "Inspire," which
said, "Anything useful from WikiLeaks is useful for archiving."
The government also submitted evidence that al-Quaeda
leader Osama bin Laden obtained Afghanistan battlefield documents published by
WikiLeaks that were discovered during the May 2011 raid in his Pakistan
compound where he was killed.
This is what's at stake in Snowden's unconscionable theft
and disclosure of vital national security information that has terrorist
leaders cheering his evil acts. He is not a hero. He's a criminal who is
helping terrorists wage war on Americans and our homeland.
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