[LINK] Another great article about the Snowden saga

[jore]

http://johnpilger.com/articles/forcing-down-the-bolivian-president-s-plane-was-an-act-of-piracy


      Forcing down the Bolivian president's plane was an act of piracy


        4 July 2013

Imagine the aircraft of the President of France being forced down in
Latin America on "suspicion" that it was carrying a political refugee to
safety - and not just any refugee but someone who has provided the
people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale.


Imagine the response from Paris, let alone the "international
community", as the governments of the West call themselves. To a chorus
of baying indignation from Whitehall to Washington, Brussels to Madrid,
heroic special forces would be dispatched to rescue their leader and, as
sport, smash up the source of such flagrant international gangsterism.
Editorials would cheer them on, perhaps reminding readers that this kind
of piracy was exhibited by the German Reich in the 1930s.


The forcing down of Bolivian President Evo Morales's plane - denied air
space by France, Spain and Portugal, followed by his 14-hour confinement
while Austrian officials demanded to "inspect" his aircraft for the
"fugitive" Edward Snowden - was an act of air piracy and state
terrorism. It was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the
world and the cowardice and hypocrisy of bystanders who dare not speak
its name.


In Moscow for a summit of gas-producing nations,  Morales had been asked
about Snowden who remains trapped in Moscow airport. "If there were a
request [for political asylum]," he said, "of course, we would be
willing to debate and consider the idea." That was clearly enough
provocation for the Godfather. "We have been in touch with a range of
countries that had a chance of having Snowden land or travel through
their country," said a US state department official. 


The French - having squealed about Washington spying on their every
move, as revealed by Snowden - were first off the mark, followed by the
Portuguese. The Spanish then did their bit by enforcing a flight ban of
their airspace, giving the Godfather's Viennese hirelings enough time to
find out if Snowden was indeed invoking article 14 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which states: "Everyone has the right to
seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution."


Those paid to keep the record straight have played their part with a
cat-and-mouse media game that reinforces the Godfather's lie that this
heroic young man is running from a system of justice, rather than
preordained, vindictive incarceration that amounts to torture: ask
Bradley Manning and the living ghosts in Guantanamo. 


Historians seem to agree that the rise of fascism in Europe might have
been averted had the liberal or left political class understood the true
nature of its enemy. The parallels today are very different; but the
Damocles sword over Snowden, like the casual abduction of the Bolivian
president, ought to stir us into recognising the true nature of the enemy. 


Snowden's revelations are not merely about privacy, nor civil liberty,
nor even mass spying. They are about the unmentionable: that the
democratic facades of the United States now barely conceal a systematic
gangsterism historically identified with if not necessarily the same as
fascism. On Tuesday, a US drone killed 16 people  in North Waziristan,
"where many of the world's most dangerous militants live", said the few
paragraphs I read. That by far the world's most dangerous militants had
hurled the drones was not a consideration. President Obama personally
sends them every Tuesday. 


In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, Harold Pinter
referred to "a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed". He asked why
"the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities" of the Soviet
Union were well known in the West while America's crimes were
"superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged".
The most enduring silence of the modern era covered the extinction and
dispossession of countless human beings by a rampant America and its
agents. "But you wouldn't know it," said Pinter. "It never happened.
Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn't matter. It was
of no interest."  


This hidden history - not really hidden, of course, but excluded from
the consciousness of societies drilled in American myths and priorities
- has never been more vulnerable to exposure. Edward Snowden's
whistleblowing, like that of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and
WikiLeaks, threatens to break the silence Pinter described. In revealing
a vast Orwellian police state apparatus servicing history's greatest
war-making machine, they illuminate the true extremism of the 21st
century. Unprecedented, Germany's Der Spiegel has described the Obama
administration as "soft totalitarianism". If the penny is finally
falling, we might all look closer to home.

/This article first appeared in the Guardian/