Why did Edward Snowden go to Hong Kong?

This Can Be Happening!
Dave Lindorf
June 11, 2013.

First of all, forget about Hong Kong’s extradition treaty. When it comes to deciding whether someone will be extradited, particularly for a political crime, as opposed to a simple murder or bank heist, the decision will be made in Beijing, not in a Hong Kong courtroom. Second, Hong Kong has a long history of providing a haven to dissidents — even to dissidents wanted by the Chinese government. Consider, for example, the Chinese labor movement activist Han Dongfang, who was the subject of a massive dragnet after the Tiananmen protests, but who successfully fled to Hong Kong before the handover of the place from Britain to China, and is continuing to monitor Chinese labor strife and protest from his home on Hong Kong’s Lamma Island. Hong Kong also has a public that is very supportive of democratic values — certainly more so than the majority of American citizens. Hong Kong people may not be paying too much attention to Snowden’s situation right now, but if the US were to actively seek to extradite him, I am confident that the place would erupt in support for him, including the local media.

As for China, while the issue that has Snowden on the run — exposing an Orwellian spying program targeting the American people and run by the super-secret National Security Agency — is certainly not one that the Chinese like to discuss in terms of their own locked-down society, you can bet that the folks in the Propaganda Bureau in Beijing, and in the inner circle of the government, are rubbing their hands with glee both at the incredible embarrassment their harboring of Snowden causes the hypocritical US, and at the trove of intelligence information he has, which they may be able ultimately to lure him into disclosing if they treat him well.

Then too, there is the matter of the Confucian concept of gift-giving and mutual obligations. It was, I am sure, no accident that Snowden chose the weekend that President Obama was hosting a summit in California with China’s new president Xi Jinping to disclose his identity as the NSA whistleblower who exposed the national spying program to the Guardian and the Washington Post. In doing that, he gave President Xi an incredible gift — the chance to hold the upper hand in his negotiations with a hugely embarrassed and compromised Obama over issues like Chinese computer hacking of US corporate and government secrets, and theft of intellectual property. For of course it is clear that the NSA is at least as active in hacking Chinese computers and spying on Chinese communications.

Such a gift as that is not easily ignored or forgotten in Chinese culture. President Xi owes Snowden a lot, and I believe he will honor that debt by seeing that Snowden is protected from any threat that might be posed to him by a vindictive or frightened US government.

But Snowden isn’t relying solely on Chinese cultural values to protect himself.

He was also careful to send a powerful message of warning to the US officials in the videoed public interview he gave outing himself. As he told interviewer Glenn Greenwald, “I had access to the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all over the world. The locations of every station, we have what their missions are and so forth. If I had just wanted to harm the US? You could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon.”

That one line at the end had to make the folks in Langley and at NSA headquarters sit up straight or to head to the bar for a stiff one! And indeed he could. And I will guarantee you, Snowden being as smart as he is, that he has already taken that information and dispersed it to a number of trusted people, perhaps including Greenwald, with instructions that they should put it all out on the Web if anything happens to him, such as his being kidnapped or disappeared or terminated. It’s a wonderful insurance policy and one that would not have escaped him. Nor would he have bothered to discover that he had all that information available to him if he hadn’t thought that he might need it.

It would be a relatively easy matter for the high-tech spooks at the NSA to retrace Snowden’s electronic trail to see if he really did download all that super-secret information and really could blow up the entire US spy machine. If they find out that he really has that information, he’s basically untouchable.

The real question is not what they are going to do to Snowden. It’s what we Americans are going to do now that we know how truly insane and totalitarian our government has become.

Read the rest here.

*****

Comment: The more I read about Edward Snowden the more I like him and what he stands for.

I like that his actions to make us know about PRISM has Obama squirming and weakened.

Snowden is obviously a smart and politically adept young man.  Working for the CIA he must have known that they will do anything to find him and bring him back to the US.  If that failed they would kill him for acts of treason or really just revenge at this point.

But the manner in which he has unfolded his cards suggest that it won't be so easy to just seize him or force the Chinese to hand him over.  He knows more stuff and as Lindorff says above he has most likely strategically paced more damaging information just in case.

It is his insurance so to speak and the US won't want to risk even more damage at this point.

But that said we are dealing with a state that exists and thrives on violence.  And, I bet you they will make life hard for those who surround Snowden and that includes Glenn Greenwald and the other journalists who broke this story.

It is all very interesting as it plays out.  For me it just adds another reason why Obama can't ever be trusted (as if any thinking person needed more).

Glad I did not vote for the fascist - and you know I am saying "I told you so" in 2004 already.

Onward!