As a US State Department whistleblower, I think a lot about Edward
Snowden. I can't help myself. My friendships with other whistleblowers like Tom
Drake, Jesslyn Radack, Daniel Ellsberg, and John Kiriakou lead me to believe
that, however different we may be as individuals, our acts have given us much
in common. I suspect that includes Snowden, though I've never had the slightest
contact with him.
Still, as he took his long flight from Hong Kong into the unknown, I
couldn't help feeling that he was thinking some of my thoughts, or I his. Here
are five things that I imagine were on his mind (they would have been on mine)
as that plane took off.
I am afraid
Whistleblowers act on conscience because
they encounter something so horrifying, unconstitutional, wasteful, fraudulent,
or mismanaged that they are overcome by the need to speak out. There is always
a calculus of pain and gain (for others, if not oneself), but first thoughts
are about what you've uncovered, the information you feel compelled to bring
into the light, rather than your own circumstances.
In my case, I was ignorant of what would happen once I blew the whistle.
I didn't expect the Department of State to attack me. National Security Agency
(NSA) whistleblower Tom Drake was similarly unprepared. He initially believed
that, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation first came to interview him,
they were on his side, eager to learn more about the criminal acts he had
uncovered at the NSA. Snowden was different in this. He had the example of
Bradley Manning and others to learn from. He clearly never doubted that the
full weight of the US government would fall on him.
He knew what to fear. He knew the Obama administration was determined to
make any whistleblower pay, likely via yet another prosecution under the
Espionage Act (with the potential for the death penalty). He also knew what his
government had done since 9/11 without compunction: it had tortured and abused
people to crush them; it had forced those it considered enemies into years of
indefinite imprisonment, creating isolation cells for suspected terrorists and
even a pre-trial whistleblower. It had murdered Americans without due process,
and then, of course, there were the extraordinary renditions in which US agents
kidnapped perceived enemies and delivered them into the archipelago of
post-9/11 horrors.
Sooner or later, if you're a whistleblower, you get scared. It's only
human. On that flight, I imagine that Snowden, for all his youthful confidence
and bravado, was afraid. Would the Russians turn him over to Washington as part
of some secret deal, maybe the sort of spy-for-spy trade that would harken back
to the Cold War era?
Even if he made it out of Moscow, he couldn't have doubted that the full
resources of the NSA and other parts of the US government would be turned on
him. How many CIA case officers and Joint Special Operations Command types did
the US have undercover in Ecuador? After all, the dirty tricks had already
started. The partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke
Snowden's story, had his laptop stolen from their residence in Brazil. This
happened only after Greenwald told him via Skype that he would send him an
encrypted copy of Snowden's documents.
In such moments, you try to push back the sense of paranoia that creeps
into your mind when you realize that you are being monitored, followed,
watched. It's uncomfortable, scary. You have to wonder what your fate will be
once the media grows bored with your story, or when whatever government has
given you asylum changes its stance vis-a-vis the US. When the knock comes at
the door, who will protect you? So who can doubt that fear made the journey
with him?
Could I go back to the US?
Amnesty International was on target when it
stated that Snowden "could be at risk of ill-treatment if extradited to
the US". As if to prove them right, months, if not years, before any
trial, Speaker of the House John Boehner called Snowden a "traitor";
Congressman Peter King called him a "defector"; and others were
already demanding his execution. If that wasn't enough, the abuse Bradley
Manning suffered had already convinced Snowden that a fair trial and humane
treatment were impossible dreams for a whistleblower of his sort. (He
specifically cited Manning in his appeal for asylum to Ecuador.)
So on that flight he knew - as he had long known - that the natural
desire to go back to the US and make a stand was beyond foolhardy. Yet the urge
to return to the country he loves must have been traveling with him, too.
Perhaps on that flight he found himself grimly amused that, after years of
running roughshod over international standards - Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo,
"enhanced interrogation techniques", "black sites" - the US
had the nerve to chide Hong Kong, China, and Russia for not following the rule
of law.
He certainly knew that his own revelations about extensive NSA
cyber-spying on Hong Kong and China had deeply embarrassed the Obama
administration. It had, after all, been blistering the Chinese for hacking into
US military and corporate computers. He himself had ensured that the Chinese
wouldn't turn him over, in the same way that history - decades of US bullying
in Latin America - ensured that he had a shot at a future in someplace like in
Ecuador.
If he knew his extradition history, Snowden might also have thought
about another time when Washington squirmed as a man it wanted left a friendly
country for asylum. In 2004, the US had chess great Bobby Fischer detained in
Japan on charges that he had attended a 1992 match in Yugoslavia in violation
of a US trade ban. Others suggested that the real reason Washington was after
him may have been Fischer's post 9/11 statement: "It's time to finish off
the US once and for all. This just shows what comes around, goes around."
Fischer's American passport was revoked just like Snowden's. In the
fashion of Hong Kong more recently, the Japanese released Fischer on an
immigration technicality, and he flew to Iceland, where he was granted
citizenship.
I was a diplomat in Japan at the time, and had a ringside seat for the
negotiations. They must have paralleled what went on in Hong Kong: the appeals
to treaty and international law; US diplomats sounding like so many
disappointed parents scolding a child; the pale hopes expressed for future good
relations; the search for a sympathetic ear among local law enforcement
agencies, immigration, and the foreign ministry - anybody, in fact - and
finally, the desperate attempt to call in personal favors to buy more time for
whatever Plan B might be. As with Snowden, in the end the US stood by
helplessly as its prey flew off.
How will i live now?
At some point, every whistleblower realizes
his life will never be the same. For me, that meant losing my job of 24 years
at the State Department. For Tom Drake, it meant financial ruin as the
government tried to bankrupt him through endless litigation. For CIA agent John
Kiriakou, it might have been the moment when, convicted of disclosing
classified information to journalists, he said goodbye to his family and walked
into Loretto Federal Correctional Institution.
Snowden could not have avoided anxiety about the future. Wherever he
ended up, how would he live? What work would he do? He's just turned 30 and
faces, at best, a lifetime in some foreign country he's never seen where he
might not know the language or much of anything else.
So fear again, in a slightly different form. It never leaves you, not
when you take on the world's most powerful government. Would he ever see his
family and friends again? Would they disown him, fearful of retaliation or
affected by the smear campaign against him? Would his parents/best
friend/girlfriend come to believe he was a traitor, a defector, a dangerous
man?
All whistleblowers find their personal relationships strained. Marriages
are tested or broken, friends lost, children teased or bullied at school. I
know from my own whistleblower's journey that it's an ugly penalty - encouraged
by a government scorned - for acting on conscience.
If he had a deeper sense of history, Snowden might have found humor in
the way the Obama administration chose to revoke his passport just before he
left Hong Kong. After all, in the Cold War years, it was the "evil
empire", the Soviet Union, which was notorious for refusing to grant
dissidents passports, while the US regularly waived such requirements when they
escaped to the West.
To deepen the irony of the moment, perhaps he was able to Google up the
2009-2011 figures on US grants of asylum: 1,222 Russians, 9,493 Chinese, and 22
Ecuadorians, not including family members. Maybe he learned that, despite the
tantrums US officials threw regarding the international obligation of Russia to
extradite him, the US has recently refused Russian requests to extradite two of
its citizens.
Snowden might have mused over then-candidate Obama's explicit pledge to
protect whistleblowers.
"Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse
in government," Obama then said, "is an existing government employee
committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage
and patriotism... should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been
during the Bush administration." It might have been Snowden's only laugh
of the flight.
I don't hate the US ... but believe it has strayed
On that flight, Snowden took his love of
America with him. It's what all of us whistleblowers share: a love of country,
if not necessarily its government, its military, or its intelligence services.
We care what happens to us the people. That may have been his anchor on his
unsettling journey. It would have been mine.
Remember, if we were working in the government in the first place, like
every federal employee, soldier, and many government contractors, we had taken
an oath that states: "I will support and defend the Constitution of the
United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true
faith and allegiance to the same." We didn't pledge fealty to the
government or a president or party, only - as the Constitution makes clear - to
the ultimate source of legitimacy in our nation, "the people".
In an interview, Snowden indicated that he held off on making his
disclosures for some time, in hopes that Barack Obama might look into the abyss
and decide to become the bravest president in our history by reversing the
country's course. Only when Obama's courage or intelligence failed was it time
to become a whistleblower.
Some pundits claim that Snowden deserves nothing because he didn't go
through "proper channels". They couldn't be more wrong, and Snowden
knows it. As with many of us whistleblowers facing a government acting in
opposition to the Constitution, Snowden went through the channels that matter
most: he used a free press to speak directly to his real boss, the American
people.
In that sense, whatever the fear and anxiety about his life and his
future, he must have felt easy with his actions. He had not betrayed his
country, he had sought to inform it.
As with Bradley Manning, Obama administration officials are now claiming
that Snowden has blood on his hands. Typically, Secretary of State John Kerry
claimed: "People may die as a consequence to what this man did. It is
possible that the United States would be attacked because terrorists may now
know how to protect themselves in some way or another that they didn't know
before."
Snowden had heard the same slurs circling around Bradley Manning: that
he had put people in danger. After the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to
speak of the war on terror, there is irony too obvious to dwell upon in such
charges.
Flying into the unknown, Snowden had to feel secure in having risked
everything to show Americans how their government and the NSA bend or break
laws to collect information on us in direct conflict with the Fourth
Amendment's protections. Amnesty International pointed out that blood-on-hands
wasn't at issue. "It appears he is being charged primarily for revealing
US and other governments' unlawful actions that violate human rights."
Those whispers of support are something to take into the dark with you.
I believe in things bigger than myself
Some of the charges against Snowden would
make anyone pause: that, for instance, he did what he did for the thrill of
publicity, out of narcissism, or for his own selfish reasons. To any of the
members of the post-9/11 club of whistleblowers, the idea that we acted
primarily for our own benefit has a theater of the absurd quality to it. Having
been there, the negative sentiments expressed do not read or ring true.
Snowden himself laughed off the notion that he had acted for his own
benefit. If he had wanted money, any number of foreign governments would have
paid handsomely for the information he handed out to journalists for free, and
he would never have had to embark on that plane flight from Hong Kong. (No one
ever called Aldrich Ames a whistleblower.) If he wanted fame, there were
potential book contracts and film deals to be had.
No, it was conscience. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere along the
line Snowden had read the Declaration of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal:
"Individuals have international duties which transcend the national
obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to
violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from
occurring".
Edward Snowden undoubtedly took comfort knowing that a growing group of
Americans are outraged enough to resist a government turning against its own
people. His thoughts were mirrored by Julian Assange, who said, "In the
Obama administration's attempt to crush these young whistleblowers with
espionage charges, the US government is taking on a generation, a young
generation of people who find the mass violation of the rights of privacy and
open process unacceptable. In taking on the generation, the Obama
administration can only lose."
Snowden
surely hoped President Obama would ask himself why he has pursued more than
double the number of Espionage Act cases of all his presidential predecessors
combined, and why almost all of those prosecutions failed.
On that flight, Snowden must have reflected on what he had lost,
including the high salary, the sweet life in Hawaii and Switzerland, the
personal relationships, and the excitement of being on the inside, as well as
the coolness of knowing tomorrow's news today. He has already lost much that
matters in an individual life, but not everything that matters.
Sometimes -
and any whistleblower comes to know this in a deep way - you have to believe
that something other, more, deeper, better than yourself matters. You have to
believe that one courageous act of conscience might make a difference in an
America gone astray or simply that, matter or not, you did the right thing for
your country.
By
M K Bhadrakumar 
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