Gotcha!
The BBC reported that the Bolivia leader’s jet diverted ‘amid Snowden suspicions’:
Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane had to be diverted to Austria amid suspicion that US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden was on board, the Bolivian foreign minister has said.
Officials in both Austria and Bolivia said Mr Snowden was not on the plane.
France and Portugal reportedly refused to allow the Bolivia-bound flight to cross their airspace.
Based on the non-denial denials coming from various European foreign ministers, they really did commit a major diplomatic faux pas and blocked the passage of a diplomatic overflight based on bad intelligence.
Meanwhile, it is my considered opinion that top FSB officials are ROFL having suckered the US for the second time about Snowden leaving. The first time, only journalists were made to look monumentally stupid, but this time the US government embarrassed multiple NATO members while enraging yet another major natural gas producing nation.
7 comments
Putin may have even smirked for a few seconds in private, before putting back on his famous deadpan :). People forget that Putin is ex-KGB, and that the FSB is run by friends and former colleagues.
Russia shows what happens when oligarchs attempt to create a police state. Sooner or later, the secret policemen look at each other and say, “why are we letting these goobers call the shots?” and take power themselves. If only our oligarchs were smart enough to learn from that, but they’re basically inbred poodle people by this point in time, barely smart enough to piddle in the toilet rather than on the floor…
I expect more slapstick before the Snowden thing is resolved. The US should just drop it, and move on. The Shrubbery got away with doing that with bin Laden, so Snowden is really small potatoes. The FSB is not going to stop doing it, they are having too much fun.
Nothing will be done in the USA. Let’s not forget Valerie Plame-Willson and her husband, Ambassador Joeseph Willson. They were screwed, and even the US courts refuse justice, even though the laws were clearly broken, on technicalities.
Wikipedia: Valerie Plame
And then of course we have the FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds (I quite enjoy her blog Sibel Edmond’s Boiling Frogs). She has some good pieces up on all this on her blog. It’s because of her blogging that I no longer trust (sadly) Glen Greenwald & the Guardian.
Contradictory & Highly Troubling Questions on Guardian’s Snowden Coverage
Also, NSA Whistleblowers William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe, amongst others!
Any US citizen who thinks they will find Justice in the USA, is seriously living in fantasy land.
On the bright side, the USA does seem to have an excellent penchant for picking on the wrong people! 😀 And they never learn. Both good things for the rest of the World. 😉 🙂
Something that has amused me somewhat following all this, is that I’ve seen posts on a few sites comparing Obama to Nixon. 😆
So, I wonder who will be the new ‘Daniel Ellsberg’? Of course, whoever it is will have to leak to some other Nation’s Journalist, or blogger… *shrug* 🙂
Is Obama Like Richard Nixon?
It’s a fair question. 🙂
Having lived through the Nixon era I can personally state that Obama is not like Nixon – Nixon was more of a liberal, with better energy and environmental policy. I’m still waiting for Obama to do something that is actually aligned with the platform of the Democratic Party.
Even on their forms of abuse of power, Nixon was much more precise on the his targets, and limited in his scope. He was into ‘retail’ invasion of privacy, while Obama does it ‘wholesale’. All in all, Obama evinces a good deal more evil that Nixon.
The parallels between Obama and Nixon are scary on a number of fronts though. Nixon came into office promising to end the Vietnam War. He did, sort of — after extending it (via derailing the peace process) for long enough to get himself re-elected, just as Obama extended the Afghan war for much the same reason. Then there was the illegal bombing of sovereign countries with which the US is not at war, which Obama does retail vs wholesale (via drone strikes) but there you go. Then there is the belief “if the President does it, it’s not illegal” that Nixon expressed and that Obama appears to hold close to his heart.
I would not give two cents to Nixon’s supposed “liberalism”, he did sign some liberal legislation, but only because he had a liberal Congress and if he wanted his own legislation to be passed, he had to throw them some bones by signing some of their own pet legislation. Nixon was, in the end, a wily manipulator who had no real moral compass or ideological core, he went with the politically expedient at all times. Hmm, like Obama.
Sigh. At least Obama’s not a moron, unlike the last President.
OK, I’ll concede that Nixon might have been as big a screw up as Obama, but he had a press that actually cared, and Congresscritters that had some shreds of honesty. Obama doesn’t have those problems 😈