What Obama, Clinton Tried Doing To Snowden

Snowden acknowledges he was approached by Russian intelligence upon his arrival, but said he rejected the pitch and did not bring any classified files with him. He insisted in a recent NBC television interview that he has “no relationship” with the Russian government.

Ben Wizner, Snowden’s attorney and lawyer with American Civil Liberties Union, who corresponded with his client for the Post article, said Snowden gets no financial support from the Russian government and does not need it.

On top of Snowden’s savings from his six-figure NSA jobs, he has received tens of thousands of dollars in cash awards and appearance fees from privacy organizations and other groups over the past year, Wizner said.

An organization called the Courage Foundation launched a Web site to raise money for Snowden’s legal defense and listed contributions of $1,356 as of Saturday afternoon.

State Department and CIA officials pressured countries seen as potential destinations to turn Snowden away, reducing his options to a handful hostile toward the United States. Among them was Bolivia, whose president had signaled publicly that he would consider giving Snowden asylum.

“Why not?” Morales said during a July visit to Moscow. “Bolivia is there to welcome personalities who denounce — I don’t know if it’s espionage or control.”

U.S. officials acknowledged having no specific intelligence that Snowden would be on Morales’s plane. The Bolivian leader’s remark, however, was enough to set in motion a plan to enlist France, Spain, Italy and Portugal to block the Bolivian president’s flight home.

“The United States did not request that any country force down President Morales’s plane,” said Hayden, the National Security Council spokeswoman. “What we did do . . . was communicate via diplomatic and law enforcement channels with countries through which Mr. Snowden might transit.”

Another U.S. official described the effort as a “full-court press” involving CIA station chiefs in Europe. As it crossed Austria, the aircraft made a sudden U-turn and landed in Vienna, where authorities searched the cabin — with Morales’s permission, officials said — but did not find Snowden.

Even had Snowden been a passenger, officials claim it is unclear how he could have been removed from a Bolivian air force jet whose cabin would ordinarily be regarded as that country’s sovereign domain — especially in Austria, a country that considers itself diplomatically neutral.

“We would have looked foolish if Snowden had been on that plane sitting there grinning,” said a senior Austrian official. “There would have been nothing we could have done.”

With US black ops flourishing, however, one hates to think of what extremes they might have gone to ensure Snowden’s demise.

As it turned out, diverting Morales’s plane not only united Latin America against the United States and probably caused Snowden to abandon any idea of leaving Russia, squandering what Monaco called “the best play” for the United States.

Snowden has fielded inquiries about book and movie projects.

“Any moment that he decides that he wants to be a wealthy person, that route is available to him,” Wizner said, although the U.S. government could also attempt to seize such proceeds.

Wizner declined to discuss where Snowden lives.

Hillary Clinton, a possible Democratic 2016 presidential candidate, this week had harsh words about Snowden. The former secretary of state insisted in an NPR’ Fresh Air interview that Snowden’s decision to release huge troves of classified information about U.S. data-gathering activities was the wrong approach.

In a bald-faced lie, Clinton said Snowden “was not only an imperfect messenger, but he was a messenger who could have chosen other ways to raise the very specific issues about the impact on Americans.” 

“There were other ways that Mr. Snowden could have expressed his concerns — by reaching out to some of the senators or other members of Congress or journalists in order to convey his questions about the implementation of the laws surrounding the collection of information concerning Americans’ calls and emails,” Clinton claimed - as though any of those would have also worked for Chelsea Manning, captured, tortured and imprisoned for blowing the whistle on her and other leaders’ war crimes.

Clinton’s known, even to the progressive wing of her party, for being too hawkish. Some Republicans — such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul have also criticized her over some of her national security positions, especially with regard to the NSA.

But Clinton was firm in the interview that the U.S. is entitled to illegal surveillance activities and human rights abuses – as, she claims, needs a strong surveillance infrastructure to “protect itself.”

The primary entities being protected, however, are war criminals and the US corporate government, as Hillary Clinton defends, not the people or their human rights.

“There is a concerted effort by many nations and other groups to acquire information about America’s military readiness, about its strategic planning, about its economic activities,” she said. “And what we turn to the intelligence community, including the NSA to do, is to make sure that they do everything they can to know what other people are trying to get from us and prevent that from happening.”

In the second part of an exclusive Guardian interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, former NSA contractor Snowden contemplates the reaction from the US government to his revelations of top-secret documents regarding its spying operations on domestic and foreign internet traffic, email and phone use. This interview, in the Youtube video below, was recorded in Hong Kong on 6 June 2013.