Edward Snowden seems to have successfully hit official Washington’s Achilles’ Heel. The political and public responses to his disclosures are still in flux, so I’m hesitant to speak with any confidence as things currently stand, but the pushback against the surveillance state seems to be at or near critical mass.
Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), one of the most prominent members of California’s Congressional delegation, has publicly said that Snowden committed crimes with his disclosures but should be pardoned because he is a whistleblower who exposed wholesale subversion of the Fourth Amendment and that he should be answering questions about the surveillance state at home, not abroad. McClintock seemed to imply that he would like Snowden to testify before Congress. As I alluded to, the response to this scandal is growing by the week, so Snowden is conceivably on the verge of simultaneously being under federal criminal indictment for leaking state secrets and under Congressional subpoena to testify about the same state secrets as a whistleblower, not a defendant. This could easily put the Department of Justice in effective, or even official, contempt of Congress for obstructing the sworn testimony of a subpoeanaed witness.
If more members of Congress join McClintock, Justin Amash, Ron Wyden and company in demanding answers, and if the answers that they demand include sworn testimony from Snowden, my guess is that Eric Holder will be a couple of wrong moves away from impeachment. Prior to Snowden’s indictment, much of the Republican Caucus was steaming mad at Holder over the “Fast and Furious” gun-running debacle, and a smaller (and certainly less organized and vocal) contingent of populists from both parties was disgusted with him for failing to prosecute bank executives for fraud in the subprime mortgage meltdown. If Holder continues to vindictively keep Snowden in exile (he almost certainly will) at a time when Congress has called Snowden to testify in person (by no means assured, but likely enough given the rapidly shifting Congressional response to the NSA scandal), the vendetta against Snowden could be Holder’s last major project as Attorney General and an ignominious capstone capstone to his legacy. I’d be highly surprised if Holder manages to talk his way out of that sticky wicket.
On a brief sidenote, I’d say that Tom McClintock is now bar none the strongest prospective challenger to either Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein. California’s Republican primary voters have taken to nominating nobodies to challenge their state’s entrenched US Senators, and much of the state’s Republican establishment at all levels is buffoonish and bloodthirsty. Boxer and Feinstein (especially Feinstein) are authoritarian nightmares, but they have on their side inertia and a hapless opposition; McClintock is in a strong, and probably unique, position to singlehandedly destroy these advantages if he chooses to run for the US Senate.
Snowden’s supporters in Congress amount to a dissident faction trying to subvert the Politburo. The official response from the State Department, the Attorney General’s Office and the White House has been a clusterfuck. The sputtering rage at an exiled dissident has become so extreme and pervasive that the Washington press corps, normally prone to flatter the subjects of its coverage in exchange for access, is barely trying to spin the official response into anything rational. These high officials and spokespeople insulted, in succession, the sovereignty of Hong Kong (for allowing Snowden to lawfully enter and leave its territory in accordance with Chinese immigration law), China (mostly for unrelated geopolitical grievances that were irrelevant on account of Beijing’s delegation of political control in Hong Kong to the territory’s British-style parliamentary government), Ecuador (for offering Snowden asylum), Bolivia (again, for offering asylum, and additionally by grounding the country’s presidential plane to search for Snowden as President Evo Morales returned from official business in Moscow), several Western European countries (by intimidating them into closing their airspace to Snowden), and most recently Russia.
Washington’s belligerence towards Moscow has been especially foolish. The State Department effectively made Snowden stateless by revoking his passport while he was holed up in the Sheremetyevo Airport international transit zone. Moviegoers may remember Tom Hanks in a similar predicament. State decided to reenact Airport, but in another country’s airport. Then various shrill officials took it upon themselves to publicly berate the Kremlin, one of Washington’s most celebrated adversaries, for not deporting a US citizen from a transit zone specificially set up for foreigners who did not intend to clear Russian immigration, for allowing that US citizen to hold a press conference in the transit zone and providing incidental logistical support to escort members of the press through passport control, for even thinking about granting this fugitive dissident asylum, and finally for granting him temporary asylum. Washington is now in the embarrassing position of having an American citizen and political fugitive freely and lawfully living in Russia without a valid US passport but with a valid Russian residency document under the odd name of “Snouden Edvard Dzhozef.” Washington could easily have avoided this embarrassment. It took a month of shrilly berating the very nationalistic government of a major military power, adversary, and oil and gas exporter to get Mother Russia to finally embrace the young man. One does not simply end up with Russian documents.
Notice, too, how calm Vladimir Putin has remained throughout the mess. Jay Carney yelling at a KGB Zen master was never auspicious, and indeed it has been fruitless. Putin was reticent in his public comments, initially calling Snowden a patriot, then describing the tar baby that the Snowden incident had become with a classic Putinism about shearing a pig (“a lot of squealing but little hair”), and keeping mum when, all but certainly on his explicit approval, Snowden was granted temporary asylum. Putin is continuing to let Washington officials do the talking about the White House’s cancellation of one-on-one talks that he was scheduled to have with Barack Obama next month, talks that have admittedly been canceled in part to punish Putin for granting Snowden asylum.
This is nuts. My country’s highest officials are acting like toddlers. For the last two months, they’ve been picking fights with any foreign government that dares cross them by showing or even considering showing mercy to a whistleblower whom they want to jail for exposing unconstitutional wholesale domestic spying. They’re cavalierly destroying goodwill with any country that thwarts their effort to persecute one of their own citizens for embarrassing them and trying to hold them accountable for secret subversion of the Constitution.
Comparisons to the Brezhnev-era USSR are appropriate. Snowden was a refusenik for a month, and the reason he is no longer one is that a moderately autocratic regime centered around a neotsarist personality cult gave him asylum at a time when he was stranded in one of its airports, forsaken by his own government.
We have a balance of powers again. This can’t be the “reset” of relations that Hillary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov sought. Russia is again welcoming American dissidents, much as the Soviet Union welcomed unemployed laborers and disaffected black activists in the 1930s. Angry US officials demand that Russia hand over a political fugitive, Russian officials calmly refuse, and the US officials build up an even stronger head of steam. We’re approaching the point at which Obama bangs a shoe on the podium while Putin quietly smirks and, if he says anything about the outburst, says something unimaginably crude and yet eloquent.
Ed Snowden isn’t exactly a loose cannon, either. Washington picked the most sympathetic whistleblower imaginable to target with its unprecedented campaign of smearing and intimidation. Snowden hasn’t been silenced like Bradley Manning, and he isn’t eccentric like Julian Assange. He’s as normal as they come, and the public knows it. The public also knows that his critics are overwhelmingly a bunch of amoral Beltway careerist freaks.
This huge mess may get resolved a lot more quickly and thoroughly than I had feared.
Notes On Liberty 
So, how does it get resolved? Where does it go from here?
The eternal optimist in me wants to think that there will be a sudden consciousness shift and we save our country from the rapidly developing police state.
The realist in me thinks we are headed for a slow and painful decline, with perpetual unemployment, endlessly polarizing political ‘debate’, and a continued march towards complete police state.
The tin foil hat wearing conspiring in me, worries about even posting this with Big Brother collecting every word we say….but since Apple is probably already sending them my keystroke data, might as well post it now.
Btw, just discovered your blog through reddit, and find what I’ve read so far interesting. I’d also like to know what your predictions are for how this all ends.
In a nutshell, I agree with you that American politics and economic policy are intractably dysfunctional, but I’m more optimistic about the pushback against the national security state.
Your comment about chronic unemployment and political acrimony is spot on. I strongly believe that the two are related, as no politician who seriously wanted to improve the employment situation would proceed with the disgusting frivolity and malice that so many American politicians have adopted on economic matters.
I’m thirty-one, and I spent most of my twenties among the long-term unemployed. I’ve been extremely lucky to have financial fallbacks and family connections that many long-term unemployed lacked, including the opportunity to help care for my ailing late grandmother for most of the last two years of her life and multiple stints helping other relatives run their vineyard and winery. I know both intellectually and viscerally that things are much bleaker for many long-term unemployed. For many of them, things are truly dire.
And yet we have politicians, many of them mainstream Republicans, waving the bloody shirt about food stamp fraud. It’s reprehensible, and frankly it’s reckless, too.
For one thing, I have absolutely no doubt that if all welfare programs were abruptly cut off there would be civil war in every American neighborhood with a significant black underclass in a matter of hours. The only questions I have are about just how much of the rest of the country would get sucked into the vortex. When I consider the Rodney King riots (over the acquittal of cops for beating up a guy who was high out of his mind on PCP) and the hamhanded police response to them (responding officers retreating from Florence and Normandie instead of continuing to confront a then-small ad hoc gang, Daryl Gates staying at a fundraiser on the Westside instead of taking over incident command), and when I consider how awful many of our cops and soldiers are, I see nothing good at all coming from just pulling the plug on welfare. The underreported wave of property and violent crime (e.g., kidnappings for ransom) during the Great Depression is another antecedent worth considering. The only safe policy fixes to rampant welfare dependency in these neighborhoods are incremental.
Of course, the racebaiting demagogues who promote this specious malice (and much of it is little more than racial code words) assume that they’ll be out of the line of fire if shit hits the fan, but if they’re in any city, that will not necessarily be the case. A few years ago, a black underclass flash mob ransacked a swath of Center City Philadelphia, an area normally safe from the violence of the “Badlands” to the north and west, in response to nothing but a festering sense of grievance. The salient point is probably that even when things are quiescent in the ghettos, they’re really just metastable, and indescribably worse than the sheltered American political class can imagine.
That’s true to a lesser extent of the United States at large. More Americans should read the back stories of Andrew Kehoe, George Sodini, and the Post Office workplace shooters of the 1980’s. There is a degree of economic dislocation at which massacres by the downwardly mobile become as predictable as the sunrise. The United States has been at that point since 2007 or 2008.
Basically, the overall response to the current depression has been insane, and at best I expect it to only slowly become less insane. What scares me is that we’ll just have more slip-stick releases, mostly mass shootings by economically ruined men punctuating a business and political backdrop of rampant hypocrisy, predation, and fraud.
The response so far to Snowden’s disclosures, however, I find much more encouraging. The self-disenfranchisement, apathy and resignation hobbling the response to the economic collapse are less pervasive. Quite a few people have gotten up off their asses for once, and the situation has gotten unusually out of the control of the ruling political-media establishment. Congress isn’t rolling over en masse this time. Bloggers are running circles around the courtiers, and even the mainstream media are reporting official doings that inevitably make Obama, Carney and company look pathetic and untrustworthy. My main disappointment is that the pushback has not yet reached post-Watergate levels. Hopefully it will at least come close.
I also think that popular disgust with the heavyhanded tactics of the police is approaching a tipping point. Lt. John Pike became an internet meme for calmly pepper-spraying Occupy demonstrators at UC Davis, and the same thing has been happening to the police in general over “puppycide,” the shooting of dogs for no reason. A lot of police misconduct has been going viral on the internet. If the exposure of this stuff is kept up, before long it should start affecting jury pools in earnest.
I think the national jury pool is even closer to a tipping point in the Snowden case. If he is ever brought to trial, he will enjoy a lot of positive prejudice, and it will be very difficult, even in the Eastern District for Virginia’s “rocket docket,” for the DOJ to effectively pack a jury. There are just too many people who would rather side with Snowden over the government, and their number seems to be growing.
We haven’t yet seen the judicial branch air its dirty laundry. And if a federal district hands down a 4th amendment decision in contravention of a FISA court one (or a decision that questions the validity of the FISC itself) won’t it put the SCOTUS chief justice in a position in which many will suggest he recuse himself (he appoints the FISC judges)?
Scalia is probably a vote for a colonial-era interpretation of the 4th, which was a direct response to writs of assistance by the British governors of the colonies (which were overbroad search and seizure warrants more similar to the Verizon “give me everything” warrants we now know are de rigueur for every wireless and wireline carrier than anything we’ve seen since the 1700s.)
Thomas might even have to ask a question about this. There’s nobody he trusts to copy his answers from. Most of the SCOTUS liberals will probably line up against NSA with the possible exception of Kagan, who may be pressured to recuse herself too, if she was any part of the legal authorities used to support NSA in her last incarnation as executive branch lawyer.
There’s never been a case that’s gotten loose in the court system. What state secrets defenses don’t knock off, claims they’re “speculative” do. But that ended the day Ed Snowden gave us all proof, and the damage a few congress-critters can do by passive-aggressive “if you only knew” hints is nothing like what one federal judge can do with decision announced in open court.
It is now quite obvious that 9/11 was manufactured by the security services, the military and the arms industry.
In 2001 Russia was militarily almost dead, so they faced a massive budget cut. What could help ? Well, use some old CIA/ISI assets to do some “big time agent provocateur” thing.
Then, use the shock and outrage to get massive funding so that business nicely continues. Israel was part of this, as Saddam Hussein got hit too, despite him being totally unrelated to Sunni Terrorism. But he previously rained missiles on Israel, so they wanted his head.
America needs to wake up and see how she is shafted every day by corrupt business and government interests.
If anyone had any doubts about the FISA court being a rubber stamp….
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/court-ability-to-police-us-spying-program-limited/2013/08/15/4a8c8c44-05cd-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html