The Sad Truth about Edward Snowden - Nobody Really Wants Him

Edward Snowden continues to elude capture as a story unveils that has all the makings of a fascinating political thriller/personal drama. A lot of his support comes from people who believe he’s a hero and that he sacrificed himself for a worthy cause. Others, myself included, are a little more sceptical, mostly because of the countries he turned to for asylum. To proclaim yourself an activist for human rights – in this case privacy and freedom of speech – and then ask help from countries whose governments are notorious for violating those rights doesn’t make sense.

Snowden must be very naïve if he believes these countries would want to harbour an activist who has shown himself willing to break laws and expose and betray his own country. And he's downright deluded if he thinks they care more about human rights than about international relationships. They’ve already proved that they don’t. They’ll use him if they can and spit him out if they can’t.

Who is Edward Snowden, anyway? What’s his background? There’s not much information to be found about him. I guess he values his privacy. He doesn’t mind exposing a government but he doesn’t want anybody to expose him. He’s possibly also a little paranoid. NBC News reported that he covers himself and his laptop with a red hood when entering his passwords. I can’t say whether that information is true or not.

According to The Guardian, he comes from a middle class family. He was born in 1983 in Wilmington, N.C., his father is a former Coast Guard Officer and his mother is the chief deputy clerk for administration and information technology at Baltimore federal court. He has one sister, an attorney, who is older than him. He didn’t complete high school, but he’s mum on why. He studied at a community college and got a general equivalency degree. The Guardian learned that a student with his name and date of birth took classes at the Anne Arundel Community College from 1999 to 2001 and in 2004 and 2005.

In 2004 he was recruited into the Army Reserves special forces for a 14 week training course which he didn’t complete. Nor did he get any awards. Snowden told The Guardian he broke both his legs in an accident and that’s why he was discharged. 

He then worked as a security guard with the NSA, from where he moved onto doing IT for the CIA. He worked there from 2007-2009, when he left to work for private contractors. He had been working for Booz Allen for about 3 months when he let the cat out the bag. He had been making about $200 000 a year. By self admission he has been a spy almost all his life. Which doesn’t quite fit with the facts. It’s very Hollywood, though. 

Snowden told the Guardian that he was diagnosed with epilepsy last year and used that as his excuse to take leave from Booz Allen. He didn’t tell his girlfriend or his family where he was going or what he was going to do. Nor did he apparently stop to think about how his actions might impact on them. I guess big noble causes require people to be sacrificed, whether they want it or not.

What I wonder is, why did he leave school? No kid does that unless there’s provocation. And the accident with 2 broken legs? What happened there? Snowden did say that he wanted to go to Iraq to protect the Iraqi people but got disillusioned when he realized the special services were more about killing Arabs. 

Which is very understandable and commendable. But what did that do to him, I wonder? As for his home life, how successful was his older sister and what was his relationship with her and with his parents? And I’d be very interested to know when he first started communicating with Julian Assange, or at the least how much he was influenced by that man’s PR. I have the sense that, like poor Bradley Manning, who had lousy self esteem and was lonely and easy prey, Snowden is now just so much fodder for Assange and his personal quest to stay in the spotlight no matter what the cost to anybody.

Iraq War - And The Winners Are?

In January 2003 a CBS poll showed that 63% of Americans wanted a diplomatic solution to the US’s problem with Iraq. 62% believed that war would increase the threat of terrorism. 77% wanted real proof that Iraq had nuclear weapons. But in March that year the US, UK, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq, ostensibly to protect the world from an immediate and intolerable threat from weapons of mass destruction, and to free the Iraqi people. In 2005 the CIA released a report stating that no such weapons existed in Iraq.

From an analysis of 31,500 violent incidents between 20 March 2003 and 14 March 2013, Iraq Body Count reported that between 112,017 and 122,438 Iraqi civilians were killed. Reuters, cited on Huffington Post, puts that figure at 125,000, and deaths of soldiers at about 130,000.

An additional 1.7 million people have been displaced and 365,000 have been wounded. Now that’s freedom for you. After the fall of Hussein, US Commander in Iraq General Tommy Franks is reported to have said “we don’t do body counts” [Reuters]. Inconvenient, I guess. These figures don’t take into account subsequent deaths indirectly caused by the war. Suicides. Disease. 

Anybody with any sense could see that the war in Afghanistan was a thinly veiled preparation for a war in Iraq for which there was no justification and which took such a toll on human life. The financial cost was huge, also. President Obama put the cost of the war in Iraq at $1 trillion. But in all, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan over the past ten years have cost the US about $3.7 trillion and counting. And the winners were?

In the short term, the contractors providing services at the expense of the US taxpayer - $138 billion worth of government contracts. Controversy about corruption rages over the company that got the lion’s share, Haliburton, awarded a $7 billion contract in a process that only allowed them to bid.

Once the war was ostensibly over, contractors stayed for security and to rebuild Iraq. Haliburton got a $2.5 billion contract to restore Iraqi Oil. It was supposed to pay for itself and for the reconstruction of the whole country.  

The project was a horror story from start to finish. Haliburton tried to drill a tunnel through a geological fault zone that they had been warned was unstable and impossible to drill. The New York Times reported that when army geologist Robert Sanders came to inspect the work in 2004, his comment was “no driller in his right mind would have gone ahead.” Money was poured down the toilet, and accountability blatantly avoided.

Getting off the subject of bungling winners, enter China, today. It has been pouring workers and billions of dollars into Iraq’s oil industry. It buys nearly half of everything Iraq produces and is currently bidding for Exon Mobil's stake.

China’s oil companies are state-owned and don’t answer to shareholders. They’re not in it for the profit, they’re in it for the control. So they accept Iraq’s rigorous terms, which western oil companies reject or balk at. And China doesn’t care how little its workers make or under what conditions they work. Nor do Chinese interfere in religious matters. Ironically, that Chinese investment has contributed to Iraq’s oil production shields the US. From a spike in oil prices caused by sanctions on Iran.

So everybody wins. Except for the dead. And the Iraqi citizens whose lives are still in turmoil. Whose country is still torn apart. 

Public domain photo of US soldier and Iraqi child

Google's New Search Tools Invade Your Privacy Even More

Once again Google has been working hard to do us all a favor – this time to save us the time and energy of thinking for ourselves. They’ve introduced new search tools, which, when you ask a question, predict what your next question will be and give you the answer to that too. They already do it, but they've refined it now. None of this of course allows for any original thinking and is predicated on the assumption that we’re all the same.

So Jack, who lives in LA, has a wife and two children, is an upper middle income architect who owns his own home, may ask Google how to bake a chocolate cake. I might ask the same question. I’m not an architect, I don’t live in LA and I don’t have two children or a wife. Will Google know the difference between us? If we’ve both got gmail accounts it might, because its algorithms mine the information in everybody’s gmail correspondence, and blogger blogs. From which a profile is created that’s updated every second you’re blogging or corresponding with somebody via gmail. Probably via other email hosts as well. It’s common knowledge that Google will commit dirty deeds if it can get away with it.

I Googled the question ‘how do I bake chocolate cake’ just to see the results. Can’t do any comparing here since I don’t know a Jack from LA. Google’s search results on the first page are all about, yes, baking a chocolate cake. Down at the bottom of the page, I see ‘how to bake a chocolate cornflake cake’ ‘no bake chocolate cake’. Clearly Google thinks I love cornflakes and don’t really like baking.

For now it’s just guesswork, but when that tool kicks in… And people are worried about big government big brother tactics? Big government has nothing on Google. Unless of course – OMG – Google is big government. Which isn't as absurd as you'd hope it would be given how much influence corporate interest has on state policies the world over.

Google’s PR drive with their new tools is that they’re helping people to become smarter. By spoonfeeding them information they haven’t directly asked for. What an absurd rationale. Ironically, big brother tactics by governments actually promote entitlement empowerment, because people have to think for themselves to find ways to elude being spied on. And they do. And they protest, and communicate with each other, and use their brains in all sorts of creative ways. But Google’s so-called ‘empowerment tool’ is a way of deadening people’s capacity for creative thinking altogether. 

But then that’s marketing for you. Extraordinary understanding of psychology they have - to be able to create an image of themselves as being heavily invested in individuality and creativity. Mind you, maybe they don't have such a great understanding after all. There’s one enormous aspect of being human that they've overlooked. Or just don't know anything about because - well, because they're all clones. It's that some people can actually think for themselves. For myself I’m happy to say, what Google never gets is that I don’t give a damn darling about affiliate marketers’ versions of how to bake a chocolate cake, or their cheap diversionary attempts to draw me to another site trying to sell me something that has nothing to do with chocolate cake. 

Nor does Google take into account that when I want to know something I know how to ask the specific question, and I don’t like somebody trying to predict what I want or what I need. In fact, I'm likely to discount any of those results out of pure annoyance.

And all the work they put into creating a profile they can market to is a waste of time, since I ignore all advertising. If I want to buy something I look for it. They're welcome to try and use that info against me, but it will never work. Furthermore, if what Google gives me doesn't meet my need I'll get frustrated with Googledom and try another route altogether. I guess they could start putting anarchistic sites in front of me. Which could lead to being targetting by gun dealers and right wing organizations. Then the FBI and the CIA could get wind of me and arrest me and… 

I wonder if there’s an architect named Jack living in LA, with two kids and a wife who’s thinking along the same lines as I am? Catch us if you can, Google. And here's a recipe that will never bake: Google + respect for the right to privacy.

An American President Who Doesn’t Support the Military Industrial Complex

Some months ago President Obama warned the Syrian government that if the US finds evidence of weapons of mass destruction being used on civilians, it would be a game changer. If G.W. Bush had said that it would have meant he was laying the groundwork for a war that had already been decided on.  He’d be in the process of manufacturing evidence if he couldn’t find it.

But Barack Obama is a different sort of man altogether and a very different sort of president. When reports (covered by nytimes.com) surfaced of evidence of the chemical sarin having been used by Assad and the Syrian government, he didn’t pounce into action. He said he needed conclusive evidence. 

The reports were based on tests taken from blood of wounded people and soil samples. Less than that was reason enough to invade Iraq, but Obama refused to act until there isn’t any doubt that sarin was used by the Syrian government. He was immediately accused of having no spine, of going back on his word, which is par for the course with any sane decision he makes. It’s extraordinary; an American president who’s prudent and reluctant to go to war. He’s a David to the Goliath military industrial complex and the politicians who are its puppets. They must be furious. 

Americans love to say "this is the greatest country on earth". In some ways it is, and I think President Obama is one of the greatest American presidents. But the US is also the biggest bully controlled for too long by the worst kind of people and it’s hard not to wonder how much impact any president can make on that. 

Take the CIA. nytimes.com recently reported that it has paid out tens of billions of dollars in cash – sometimes in plastic packets - to Afghanistan officials and politicians who have accepted the bribes and not delivered. Hardly intelligent work by the CIA. This organization is an insult to humanity and an international public menace with its bribery, assassinations, interference in foreign governments and covert operations all over the world. It 'somehow' didn't manage to stop 9/11 and look at the lovely war that ensued, on 100% false premises. 

The CIA is the working tool of the military industrial complex and it always has been since it was conceived of.  It’s gotten so glamorized by Hollywood that the horror of what it does kind of blends into the fantasy scenery.  It’s easy to forget that it’s run by individuals. Real human beings. 

Chalmers Johnson Ph D, Professor Emeritus UCSD and author had this to say of Bush, the CIA and extraordinary renditions: “There’s nothing in the US Constitution that says a president gets to commit felonies, but immediately after 9/11 GW was ordering CIA to engage in this odd euphemism they use to describe the kidnapping of people anywhere and secretly flying them to countries like Syria or Egypt where they certainly will be tortured.  

"We’ve had numerous CIA officials, high ranking officials saying ‘If you want a good interrogation you send them to Jordan. If you want them to disappear you send them to Egypt.’ It violates international law prohibiting torture. But the US has engaged in it.”

This is what happens with superpowers. There's no good reason on earth why one country should dominate another and it can't be done on a giant scale without giant scale corruption and murderous interference. The American way of life. All wrapped up in a pretty package. Disintegrating at the core as all superpowers eventually do.

It seems like the wrong place and the wrong time for a man of Barack Obama’s stature. He’s clearly far more intent on rebuilding America and forging world peace than promoting giant corporate interest and the military industrial complex. Eisenhower’s warning in his 1961 farewell address probably sounded theatrical to most Americans who didn’t have a clue about what was happening behind the scenes. So his warning fell on deaf ears. At least one American president is paying attention.