Fair
enough response!
Personally,
I'm sick to death of slurs against Julian Assange, Wikileaks - and
now Edward Snowden from people who have never risked anything in
their whole lives except venting their ill-conceived opinions on
Facebook
Is
Naomi Wolf working for the NSA?
17
June, 2013
I
hate to do this, but I feel obligated to share, as the story unfolds,
my creeping concern that the writer Naomi Wolf is not whom she
purports to be, and that her motive in writing an article on her
public Facebook page speculating about whether National Security
Agency leaker Edward Snowden might actually be still working for the
NSA, could be to support the government’s effort to destroy him.
After
all, with Snowden under vicious attack by both the government and the
corporate media, being wrongly accused of treason, or portrayed as a
drop-out slacker, a narcissist, a loser hoping to gain fame and even
a “cross-dressing” weirdo, what defender of liberty would pile on
with publication of a work of absolutely fact-free speculation as to
whether he might also be a kind of “double agent” put out there
by the NSA in order to discourage real
potential whistleblowers from
even considering leaking information about government spying on
Americans.
Because
that is exactly what Wolf has done on her
website (the
first clause at the opening of this article is a direct quote from
the lead in Wolf’s Facebook piece, but with her name substituted
for Snowden’s).
What
basis does she offer for her wild-eyed speculation that Snowden is
perhaps “not who he purports to be”?
Well,
first of all she notes darkly that US spy agencies “create false
identities, build fake companies, influence real media with fake
stories, create distractions or demonizations in the local news that
advance US policies, bug (technologically) and harass the opposition,
disrupt and infiltrate the meetings and communications of factions
that the US does not wish to see in power.” This, she says, touting
her own now rather dated 2007 book The End of America, is “something
you can’t not see if you spend time around people who are senior in
both the political establishment and the intelligence and state
department establishments. You also can’t avoid seeing it if you
interview principled defectors from those systems, as I have done…”
Then,
after having assuring us of how well-connected she is, she raises
what she calls “red flags” about Snowden:
“I was concerned about the way Snowden conveys his message. He is not struggling for words, or thinking hard, as even bright, articulate whistleblowers under stress will do. Rather he appears to be transmitting whole paragraphs smoothly, without stumbling. To me this reads as someone who has learned his talking points — again the way that political campaigns train surrogates to transmit talking points.”
“He keeps saying things like, ‘If you are a journalist and they think you are the transmission point of this info, they will certainly kill you.’ Or: ‘I fully expect to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.’ He also keeps stressing what he will lose: his $200,000 salary, his girlfriend, his house in Hawaii. These are the kinds of messages that the police state would LIKE journalists to take away.” In case we miss the point, she adds, implying rather strongly that she is concluding Snowden is a fake, “A real whistleblower also does not put out potential legal penalties as options, and almost always by this point has a lawyer by his/her side who would PROHIBIT him/her from saying, ‘come get me under the Espionage Act.’ Finally in my experience, real whistleblowers are completely focused on their act of public service and trying to manage the jeopardy to themselves and their loved ones; they don’t tend ever to call attention to their own self-sacrifice.”
“It is actually in the Police State’s interest to let everyone know that everything you write or say everywhere is being surveilled, and that awful things happen to people who challenge this. Which is why I am not surprised that now he is on UK no-fly lists – I assume the end of this story is that we will all have a lesson in terrible things that happen to whistleblowers.” She adds, in a further indictment of Snowden, “That could be because he is a real guy who gets in trouble; but it would be as useful to the police state if he is a fake guy who gets in ‘trouble.’”
She
says he talks about the beautiful “pole-dancer” girlfriend he
abandoned (actually he did that for her safety, Naomi), implying his
repetition process might be so that the media have a justification to
keep showing her sexy photo (as though our prurient media needs a
justification to do such a thing).
The
media keep saying he is in a “safe house” in Hong Kong, which
according to Wolf cannot exist in the former British colony, now a
part of China, “Unless you are with the one organization that can
still get off the surveillance grid, because that org created it.”
He’s
not surrounded by an army of attorneys the way Wikileaks’ Julian
Assange was when he traveled (and by the way, I recall that for a
long time, after Wikileaks ran the Bradley Manning documents,
including the horrific “Collateral Damage” war crime video, there
were conspiracy theorists out there claiming baselessly that he was
actually probably a Mossad asset — this on the basis that he had
not been sufficiently leaking damaging information about Israel’s
actions against Palestinians).
That’s
it, folks! All sheer wild speculation about Snowden, with not even
one shred of actual evidence against him to suggest he’s anything
but what he says he is: a young man who was hired to do some really
dirty work spying on Americans en masse, who decided that what was
happening was the creation of a totalitarian system, and who had the
courage of, instead of walking away from it, putting his life in
jeopardy by publicly blowing the whistle.
I
have nothing against trying to uncover conspiracies, particularly
those orchestrated by a government like our own which we know has
manufactured from whole cloth faked evidence to justify a war in Iraq
that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, even to the
point of torturing captives to get them to make up tales that would
justify that fake evidence. But when someone with Wolf’s reputation
on the left sinks to this level of baseless and libelous accusations
against a brave person who is under attack by that government, it
cannot be allowed to pass.
Of
course, I don’t really think that Wolf is acting as an agent for
the government (I could only speculate about that, and I won’t).
And if she were just thinking these idle thoughts, and maybe raising
them in a playful discussion at home with a few friends over dinner,
I would see nothing wrong in the exercise. But as a highly
media-savvy public person, she’s publishing them intentionally
where they will be widely circulated: on her publicly accessible
Facebook page. I have to conclude she has allowed her instinct for
self-promotion and grandstanding in this case to let her do something
truly treacherous and unconscionable: baselessly defaming and
attacking the credibility of a brave whistleblower who is under
official under attack.
As
a long-time investigative reporter, I also dispute Wolf’s
self-serving claim that her own experience in dealing with
whistleblowers shows them to be uniformly disorganized and
inarticulate. In my experience, some are very disorganized and hard
to follow because of their focus on the trees in their personal
forest, but some whistleblowers are intensely organized and know
exactly what they want to tell you as a journalist. They are also
apt, organized or not, contrary to what Wolf says, to highlight the
danger they are in, and that they may be putting the reporter in.
Sometimes this may be simply to make sure you are interested and
recognize the seriousness of what they have to say, and sometimes it
is out of genuine fear for themselves and concern for the
journalist’s safety, and perhaps also to make sure you fully
understand what you’re getting into and that you will not cave and
reveal their identity the moment you are put under pressure yourself.
Wolf,
who always makes a point of mentioning she’s a Yale grad and a
Rhodes Scholar who studied at Oxford, should take care in assuming
that someone with only a high school diploma speaking in whole
sentences or paragraphs is probably reciting “talking points”
from a script. Her assumption reeks of class-based stereotyping. I
have met car mechanics, who besides working miracles on my old cars,
can speak in multiple paragraphs about politics, often with more
wisdom and insight than most of the ivy-league pundits on the tube.
As
for Wolf’s claim of there being “no safe houses” in Hong Kong,
I just have to laugh. Having lived in Hong Kong for five years, I can
assure her that there are myriad urban warrens all over Hong Kong
where one could hide for decades undetected, as well as vast
stretches of tropical wilderness in the New Territories where people
can become lost for days, even with professional rescue teams looking
for them. Wolf should stick to things she has actual knowledge about,
instead of trashing good people on the basis of ignorant speculation
and pretend savvy.
Unless
and until someone comes up with a single hard fact seriously
suggesting that Snowden is a fake, this kind of fantasizing should
halt. Wolf should apologize for her self-aggrandizing tripe and make
a generous donation from her book sales to the Snowden defense fund —
unless of course she has evidence that the Progressive Change
Campaign Committee is an NSA or CIA front group.
DAVE
LINDORFF is
a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!,
an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK
Press).
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