Ignore Snowden?

For John, BLUF:  The Federal Government should be studiously ignoring Mr Edward Snowden.

Columnist Trudy Rubin, of The Philadelphia Inquirer, on this Thursday, wrote "For Snowden, Odd Bedfellows".  This Column does a good job of laying out the current situation, and some of the pitfalls.

The global hunt for Edward Snowden is damaging U.S. interests in ways that go far beyond the intelligence data he leaked.

The wild flight of the fugitive leaker—from Hong Kong to the transit area of Moscow's Sherymetyvo Airport, and perhaps on to Ecuador—has turned into a public humiliation for the White House.  U.S. officials publicly threatened "consequences" if Snowden wasn't returned, only to be openly rebuffed by Chinese officials and Russia's Vladimir Putin.  This made embarrassingly clear how little leverage President Obama has in Moscow or Beijing (and how much wiser it would have been to request Snowden's return in private).

Most disturbing, the Snowden affair has enabled some of the world's worst human-rights offenders to portray themselves as champions of freedom by defending Snowden while denouncing America as a massive violator of rights.

China's Xinhua news agency branded the United States as "the biggest [cyber]villain in our age."  Russian parliamentarians did likewise.  You might think that such self-righteous claims would be dismissed as political posturing.  Yet in today's world, with America's image sullied by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and by our paralyzed politics, these charges can find a receptive audience, not only abroad but at home.

The direction Ms Trudy Rubin is going is shown by her final paragraph.

So, critics of American hubris may cheer when Putin praises Snowden - or when the People's Daily proclaims that Snowden "tore off Washington's sanctimonious mask." It's necessary to remind them: The countries helping Snowden aren't doing so because they dislike spying. On the contrary. They don't want limits on their own surveillance, just on ours.

The more important conclusion is that we will not be seen as a serious international player, which means we won't be taken seriously.  I do believe the President is taking a better tone, with his comment that he is not going to be focusing his time on Mr Snowden.  Per The Washington Post, here is what the President said in Senegal, yesterday:

“I shouldn’t have to,” Obama added at a news conference in Senegal. “I’m not going to have one case of a suspect who we’re trying to extradite suddenly being elevated to the point where I’ve got to start doing wheeling and dealing and trading on a whole host of other issues simply to get a guy extradited.”

That is the proper public face for all Administration officials.

Regards  —  Cliff