The Real Ed Snowden Is a Patsy, a Fraud and a Kremlin-Controlled Pawn
I’ve closely followed the saga of Edward Snowden from the moment the former CIA and NSA IT contractor grabbed the global limelight with both hands back on June 12, 2013 by appearing in the Chinese media, exposing American government secrets on a scale nobody had ever done before.
I insisted from the outset that Snowden was not the whistleblower he claimed to be, rather an attention-seeking narcissist, and that certainly once he landed in Moscow on June 23, 2013—and quite possibly before—he was in bed with Russian intelligence. Moreover, Snowden’s 1.5 million stolen documents were nearly all about NSA foreign intelligence and Pentagon military matters—not domestic surveillance. In short, the Snowden saga as presented to the public by Ed and his media enablers was a fantasy.
Now, more than three years later, my position—which garnered me criticism and epic amounts of social media trolling—has been vindicated by several sources, including the U.S. Congress. Oliver Stone’s apologia-as-film about Snowden has just opened, to decidedly mixed reviews, and its premiere has been marred by the overdue intrusion of reality on this Moscow fable. Stone has a long history of making “truthy” movies based on Kremlin propaganda, and his latest sticks with that dubious pattern.
I’ve taken the Snowden debacle personally, in no small part because when I worked in NSA counterintelligence, it was obvious that something like Snowden was bound to happen. By ignoring basic security, by outsourcing core missions to greedy defense contractors, by allowing the security clearance process to fall apart—and above all by oversharing sensitive information with people who had no “need to know” as the spies say—NSA and our whole Intelligence Community created the circumstances that made Snowden possible.
None of this is to deny the traitor’s agency: Ed did all this, willfully. Yet NSA is every bit as culpable as Snowden for this historic debacle, for ignoring years of warnings about security that predicted exactly what came to pass when Snowden stole grandly and fled to China, then Russia, where he remains. I, along with others, warned NSA years ago that it was flirting with counterintelligence disaster, and the agency was “just one asshole away” from the security abyss. Eventually that asshole was going to show up. He did, as actuarially he was bound to. His name just happened to be Ed Snowden.
http://observer.com/2016/09/the-real-ed-snowden-is-a-patsy-a-fraud-and-a-kremlin-controlled-pawn/
Game, set, match
= new reply since forum marked as read
This article set off a bunch of red flags for me.
Most obvious: how could Snowden be "in bed with Russian intelligence" when he planned to spend just a few hours there changing planes? He remained in Russia only because the US trapped him there.
PBS Frontline did a real documentary ("United States of Secrets"
. Being PBS, they placed complete interviews on their web site, including NSA spokespeople and other Snowden opponents.
Watch the documentary, not the Hollywood garbage. It has the real words of Snowden and others, not some Hollywood script.
The documentary describes the persecution and hounding of Bush-era whistle-blowers, how this convinced Snowden he would never get a fair hearing or trial in the US, how he planned to give all his information to two reporters-so that they could determine what was newsworthy and would not compromise security, and then flee.
You have to decide for yourself who is trustworthy and who is just talking political BS. I think it's obvious, but, regardless: please do it based on real facts, and the real people, rather than either some souped-up Hollywood drama, or based on vague name-calling and red-baiting.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of-secrets/
