World News Korner

Edward Snowden regrets participating in staged Q and A with Putin. Gee, ya think?

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:

NSA leaker Edward Snowden instantly regretted asking Russian President Vladimir Putin a softball question on live television about the Kremlin’s mass surveillance effort, two sources close to the leaker tell The Daily Beast.

“It certainly didn’t go as he would’ve hoped,” one of these sources said. “I don’t think there’s any shame in saying that he made an error in judgment.” “He basically viewed the question as his first foray into criticizing Russia.

He was genuinely surprised that in reasonable corridors it was seen as the opposite,” added Ben Wizner, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who serves as one of Snowden’s closest advisers. According to Wizner and others, Snowden hadn’t realized how much last week’s Q&A—with Putin blithely assuring Snowden that Moscow had no such eavesdropping programs—would appear to be a Kremlin propaganda victory to Western eyes.

Snowden’s camp wouldn’t get into the specifics of how his question made it onto the live broadcast on Russian state television. But it is worth noting that Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden’s Russian lawyer, has deep Kremlin ties and sits on the board that oversees the FSB, the successor to the KGB. Getting on state television wouldn’t have been much trouble.

The article goes on to quote Snowden's camp as claiming that Snowden genuinely thought he could catch Putin in a lie, and that he would prove to the western world that he was not a Russian stooge.

Now color me as a skeptic here, but this reads like damage control to me.

As the article pointed out, Snowden's Russian lawyer has deep ties to the KGB, just like Putin, and appears to me as more of a handler than a lawyer.

So if a former KGB operative is controlling the message read by an American defector, what in the world would make somebody supposedly as smart as Edward Snowden believe that he would be allowed to ask a question live and on the air that Putin had not been prepared to answer?

Which clearly he was:

Putin’s answer was predictable.

“Of course, we know that criminals and terrorists use technology for their criminal acts and of course the special services have to use technical means to respond to their crimes,” he said. “But we don’t have a mass-scale, uncontrollable efforts like that…Our special services…are strictly controlled by the society and the law, and are regulated by the law.”

As the Daily Beast article points out that is a blatant, and obvious lie.

Yet it was left to hang there, unchallenged by Snowden, or anybody else involved in the interview session.

That meant that to Russian and American ears, Edward Snowden, the man who revealed duplicity with the NSA here at home, had just provided Putin with a get out of domestic spying free card.

There is no goddamn way that he could not have seen that coming!

So I call bullshit on the Q and A, and I call bullshit on this attempt to cover his ass.

Source