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Greenwald: Why the CIA Is Smearing Edward Snowden After Paris Attacks (latimes.com)
JoeyRox points out that Glenn Greenwald has some harsh words for the CIA in an op-ed piece for the LA Times. From the article: "Decent people see tragedy and barbarism when viewing a terrorism attack. American politicians and intelligence officials see something else: opportunity. Bodies were still lying in the streets of Paris when CIA operatives began exploiting the resulting fear and anger to advance long-standing political agendas. They and their congressional allies instantly attempted to heap blame for the atrocity not on Islamic State but on several preexisting adversaries: Internet encryption, Silicon Valley's privacy policies and Edward Snowden."
Some people are too lazy to know right from wrong, so they let the state dictate morality for them. These people are going to hell.
By any objective standard, Snowden has been right on all accounts and the Empire has nothing to say except "TRAITOR!"
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Are you being serious?
Let's assume for a moment, that you aren't being a blatant troll here. With that in mind, here's why it is a smear.
1) The paris terrorists did not use encryption at all--
2) The French government, and the US government already had people warning them about the impending attacks.
3) Snowden's leaks centered around *ILLEGAL* intelligence gathering practices, and his leaks were carefully sanitized and redacted by reporters with journalistic integrity.
4) Unless you think Russia is somehow behind the paris attacks, there is nothing that ties Snowden with said attacks-- and even that is just supposition. (There is shit little Snowden has given Russia besides PR.)
The only connection here is that Snowden drew attention to the US's (and its allies') use of illegal data collection for intelligence purposes, which gave the US a black eye, (and a much needed one at that.) and the administrators behind those illegal data collection practices want to try to assert (falsely) that they could have stopped the paris attack, if it hadn't been for that meddling kid-- Erhm-- Edward Snowden.
This is bullshit-- as again, the terrorists were using unencrypted channels of communication, AND were already known about by intelligence agents/agencies-- who already knew the attack was going to happen.
So, why didn't they stop it? Oh-- yeah-- Because Edward Snowden somehow used whistleblower black magic to somehow make it so they couldnt act on the intelligence they had already collected.... Somehow.
All that said-- Seriously, go troll somewhere else.
Go fuck yourself, you boot-licking scumbag. Snowden is a hero who told the American people about billions of felonies committed against us every day.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
4) Unless you think Russia is somehow behind the paris attacks, there is nothing that ties Snowden with said attacks-- and even that is just supposition. (There is shit little Snowden has given Russia besides PR.)
I posted before, Assange advised Snowden to go to Russia, and ignore concerns about the “negative PR consequences” of sheltering in Russia because it was one of the few places in the world where the CIA’s influence did not reach.. Snowden himself, chose Latin America, but the consequences proved that Assange is right:
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/e...
The story, by Greg Miller, recounts daily meetings with senior officials from the FBI, CIA, and State Department, all desperately trying to come up with ways to capture Snowden. One official told Miller: “We were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: ‘You’re in our airspace. Land.’ ” He wasn’t. And since he disappeared into Russia, the US seems to have lost all trace of him.
Bolivian President Aircraft was forced to take off for searching Snowden.
> No relation to encryption isn't an issue. He attacked his country's intelligence services, at a bad time it turns out.
He exposed criminal behavior, both in the US and worldwide, and the waste of millions if not billions of dollars of intelligence efforts aimed at completely innocent people. Because it's proven so very fruitless, it was and remains a good idea to expose it.
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Rahm Emanuel
I see that quote a lot. But I never see a source for it. It sounds too on the nose to be believable. So this time I decided to check it out myself. Turns out that is not what he said. And to misquote him like that is to mislead. Here's the actual source:
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's new chief of staff, told a Wall Street Journal conference of top corporate chief executives this week.
He elaborated: "Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
-- http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
As you can see, what he was talking about was work that had been postponed because it wasn't considered urgent enough. That's a completely different meaning than your version which boils down to tricking people while they aren't thinking clearly.
> Aren't politics grand?
Indeed it is. I hope you can recognize the role you just played. At best you were lied to and used to further someone else's agenda, at worst you deliberately set out to deceive in order to further your agenda.
The invasion of Afghanistan was not any more justified than Iraq.
The Taliban was the de-facto government of Afghanistan at the time and they refused to hand over Bin Laden, the man behind the 9/11 attacks. That alone was justification for war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. You're either an idiot or a dishonest weenie if you cannot admit that.