With
all of the hooey being flung about in places from tornado-struck
trailer parks to Washington DC’s buttoned-down Political Action
Committees and caucuses (actually a very funny term in this particular
context) regarding TV’s Pork Princess Paula Deen’s using the “n-word,”
which, ironically can only be used by those whom it rudely deprecates,
and then trying to explain and apologize (which was the political and
negotiating equivalent of stating a guilty plea followed by a show-biz
finale of slowly screwing down deeper and deeper into a bed of quicksand
in a sloppy suicide attempt) for her faux pas
[that’s French!], alongside the somewhat more significant melodramatic
war of words between U.S. Legislators and Ecuador (with Russia rooting
and saber-rattling for Ecuador), I was faced with a dilemma.
At
the core of the the comedy is a Mr. Snowden, some “leaker” who
divulged some serious secret U.S. information to a world of unauthorized
parties [without Top Secret clearance!], is living the Tom Hanks part
in the movie “Terminal,”
at the present time -- but in a Russian airport, waiting for clearance
from Russia and Ecuador that he can have asylum in Ecuador, from which
place he won’t be extradited to the U.S. where he would face some very
serious charges and a very likely draconian sentence (the U.S. is
nothing but serious nowadays, and it enjoys prosecution, incarceration
and cheap prison labor -- it’s supposed to be good for the U.S. economy
-- and directly, through the Bureau Of Prisons’ Unicor program, has
inmates at far less than the Minimum Wage involved in building cables
and other non-combustible or explosive stuff to help perpetuate the war
effort at various places in the world).
Several things are certain:
1) You cannot negotiate effectively if you are an obvious hypocrite;
2)
You cannot negotiate unofficially, through the noisy innuendo-laced or
threat-laden comments by grandstanding legislators who have no authority
or directive;
3) Before you criticize, take a good, hard look at who you are and what you’ve done, lest you be made a fool of...
A
drowning man should not be negotiating too harshly (if at all) with the
people who have a life preserver or a rope to throw him.
I didn’t know whether to call this article (which I was busily trying to find a suitable angle for) to be published in The Internationalist Page Blog “The Mouse That Roared” or “When Is It Politically Correct To Call A ‘Spade’ A ‘Spade’?” I
was torn between two temptations. So I opted for a totally different
title which, I knew would in retrospect, look more sophisticated.
The moral of the story is to be careful what you say, how you say it and to whom you say it.
It’s
simple. but the U.S. has forgotten that lesson (just as it would seem
that it has forgotten about the Constitution), and is getting no end of
trouble in the International Community because of it. Yet the principle
is so simple that even a dim-witted child (I know this from personal
experience -- as any of Douglas E. Castle’s elementary school teachers about it) could understand it. Oh well.
An article which appeared in The Associated Press (AP) gave
a wonderfully fact-filled tennis match-like report of the heated
dialogue between Ecuador (the “Brave Little Mouse”) and the United
States (the “Naked Emperor,” or the “Paper-Printing Tiger,” [sorry Mr.
Bernanke, but someone had to say it] or the “World’s Policeman-Turned
Bully”). This passion play artfully sets forth two noble truths: 1) never make an idle threat or empty threat, as it can be turned around and made to bit you on the rump of your ‘royalty’, and 2)
you’d better have your own hands clean (the U.S. didn’t because of all
of the revelations circulating about The Internationalist Community
regarding the NSA’s unchecked, continued and increasing ‘excursions’
around the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution as well as it’s
flagrant violations of certain fundamental Human rights.
Jun 27, 9:18 PM EDT
Ecuador heats rhetoric as Obama downplays Snowden
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN and JULIE PACE
QUITO,
Ecuador (AP) -- President Barack Obama tried to cool the international
frenzy over Edward Snowden on Thursday as Ecuador stepped up its
defiance and said it was preemptively rejecting millions in trade
benefits that it could lose by taking in the fugitive from his limbo in a
Moscow airport.
The
country seen as likeliest to shelter the National Security Agency
leaker seemed determined to prove it could handle any repercussions,
with three of its highest officials calling an early-morning news
conference to "unilaterally and irrevocably renounce" $23 million a year
in lowered tariffs on products such as shrimp and frozen vegetables.
Fernando
Alvarado, the secretary of communications for leftist President Rafael
Correa, sarcastically suggested the U.S. use the money to train
government employees to respect human rights.
Obama,
meanwhile, sought to downplay the international chase for the man he
called "a 29-year-old hacker" and lower the temperature of an issue that
has raised tensions between the U.S. and uneasy partners Russia and
China. Obama said in Senegal that the damage to U.S. national security
has already been done and his top focus now is making sure it can't
happen again.
"I'm
not going to have one case with a suspect who we're trying to extradite
suddenly be 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 so he can face the justice system," Obama said
at a joint news conference with Senegal's President Macky Sall.
While
the Ecuadorean government appeared angry over U.S. threats of
punishment if it accepts Snowden, there were also mixed signals about
how eager it was to grant asylum. For days, officials here have been
blasting the U.S. and praising Snowden's leaks of NSA eavesdropping
secrets as a blow for global human rights.
But
they also have repeatedly insisted that they are nowhere close to
making a decision on whether Snowden can leave Moscow, where he is
believed to be holed up in an airport transit zone, for refuge in this
oil-rich South American nation.
"It's
a complex situation, we don't know how it'll be resolved," Correa told a
news conference Thursday in his first public comments on the case aside
from a handful of postings on Twitter.
The
Ecuadorean leader said that in order for Snowden's asylum application
to be processed, he would have to be in Ecuador or inside an Ecuadorean
Embassy, "and he isn't." Another country would have to permit Snowden to
transit its territory for that requirement to be met, Correa said.
WikiLeaks,
which has been aiding Snowden, announced earlier he was en route to
Ecuador and had received a travel document. On Wednesday, the Univision
television network displayed an unsigned letter of safe passage for him.
Officials
on Thursday acknowledged that the Ecuadorean Embassy in London had
issued a June 22 letter of safe passage for Snowden that calls on other
countries to allow him to travel to asylum in Ecuador. But Ecuador's
secretary of political management, Betty Tola, said the letter was
invalid because it was issued without the approval of the government in
the capital, Quito.
She
also threatened legal action against whoever leaked the document, which
she said "has no validity and is the exclusive responsibility of the
person who issued it."
"This
demonstrates a total lack of coordination in the department of foreign
affairs," said Santiago Basabe, a professor of political science at the
Latin American School of Social Sciences in Quito. "It's no small
question to issue a document of safe passage or a diplomatic document
for someone like Snowden without this decision being taken directly by
the foreign minister or president."
The
renunciation of trade benefits was a dramatic but mostly symbolic
threat. The U.S Congress was widely expected to let the benefits lapse
in coming weeks, for reasons unrelated to the Snowden case. And if they
continued, it appeared highly unlikely that the Ecuadorean government
would be able to unilaterally cancel tariff benefits that went directly
to their country's exporters.
Behind Ecuador's mixed messages, some analysts saw not confusion but internal divisions in the Ecuadorean government.
Michael
Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank focused
on Latin America, said many in Washington believed that Correa, a
leftist elected to a third term in February, had been telegraphing a
desire to moderate and take a softer tack toward the United States and
private business.
Harder-core
leftists led by Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino may be seeking to
maintain a tough line, he said, a division expressing itself in
confusing messages.
"I
think there really are different factions within the government on
this," Shifter said. "Correa wants to become more moderate. That has
been the signal that has been communicated in Washington."
Embarrassment
for the Obama administration over the surveillance revelations
continued as documents disclosed Thursday showed the Obama
administration gathered U.S. citizens' Internet data until 2011,
continuing a spying program started under President George W. Bush that
revealed whom Americans exchanged emails with and the Internet Protocol
address of their computer.
The
National Security Agency ended the program that collected email logs
and timing, but not content, in 2011 because it decided it didn't
effectively stop terrorist plots, according to the NSA's director, Gen.
Keith Alexander, who also heads the U.S. Cyber Command. He said all data
was purged in 2011.
Britain's
Guardian newspaper on Thursday released documents detailing the
collection, though the program was also described earlier this month by
The Washington Post.
The
U.S. administration was expected to decide by Monday what export
privileges to grant Ecuador under the Generalized System of Preferences,
a program meant to spur development and growth in poorer countries.
Although
the deadline was set long before the Snowden affair, U.S. Trade
Representative Michael Froman said Thursday that Ecuador's application
to add a handful of products such as artichokes and cut flowers - the
latter a major industry here - would not be decided immediately but
would remain pending. That gives the U.S. additional leverage over
Ecuador while Snowden's fate remains uncertain.
More
broadly, a larger trade pact allowing reduced tariffs on more than $5
billion in annual exports to the U.S. is up for congressional renewal
before July 21. While approval of the Andean Trade Preference Act has
long been seen as doubtful in Washington, Ecuador has been lobbying
strongly for its renewal.
On
Wednesday, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, pledged to lead an effort to block
extension of U.S. tariff benefits if Ecuador grants asylum to Snowden,
who turned 30 last week. Nearly half of Ecuador's billions a year in
foreign trade depends on the United States.
The
Obama administration said Thursday that accepting Snowden would damage
the overall relationship between the two countries and analysts said it
was almost certain that granting the leaker asylum would lead the U.S.
to cut roughly $30 million a year in military and law enforcement
assistance.
Granting
asylum to Snowden would cause "great difficulties in our bilateral
relationship," State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said. "If
they take that step, that would have very negative repercussions."
Alvarado,
the communications minister, said his country rejects economic
"blackmail" in the form of threats against the trade measures.
"The
preferences were authorized for Andean countries as compensation for
the fight against drugs, but soon became a new instrument of pressure,"
he said. "As a result, Ecuador unilaterally and irrevocably renounces
these preferences."
Alvarado did not explicitly mention the separate effort to win trade benefits under the presidential order.
He
did suggest, however, how the U.S. could use the money saved from
Ecuadorean tariffs to train government employees to respect citizens'
rights.
"Ecuador
offers the United States $23 million a year in economic aid, an amount
similar to what we were receiving under the tariff benefits, with the
purpose of providing human rights training that will contribute to avoid
violations of people's privacy, that degrade humanity," he said.
---
Pace
reported from Dakar, Senegal. Gonzalo Solano in Quito, Peter Orsi in
Caracas, Venezuela, and Ken Thomas in Washington contributed to this
report.
---
Follow Michael Weissenstein on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mweissenstein
###
Subsequently, while US President Obama was trying to play down the whole incident and get on to other matters of State, Vice President Joe Biden was trying to do some political worldview damage control by more politely (without idle threats and unkindness) engaging in somewhat conciliatory talks with Quito and still gently insisting that they should not give Mr. Snowden, the man without a country, asylum and allow him to escape “justice” at the hands of the U.S. But since the revelations about Guantanamo, most of the Internationalist Community believes that U.S. “justice” is merely a euphemism for punishment.
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