This CIA Operative Indicted for Extraordinary Renditions Vanished from the Map—Twice

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After all, the country that took him into custody on that Interpol warrant was a genuine rarity in a changing Latin America.  It was still an ally of the United States, which had once built a canal across its territory, controlled its politics for years, and in 1989 sent in the U.S. military to forcefully sort out those politics once again.  Italy wanted Lady back and evidently requested that Panama hand him over (though the countries had no extradition treaty).  But could anyone be surprised by what happened or by the role Washington clearly played in settling Lady’s fate?  If you had paid any attention to the global pressure Washington was exerting in an “ international manhunt” to get Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower it had already charged under the draconian Espionage Act, back to its shores, you knew which direction Robert Seldon Lady would be heading when he hit the nearest plane out of Panama — and I don’t mean Italy.

But here was the curious thing: when Panama sent him north, not east, there wasn’t the slightest ripple of U.S. media curiosity about the act or what lay behind it.  Lady simply disappeared.  While the Italian minister of justice “ deeply regretted” Panama’s decision, there was not, as far as I can tell, a single editorial, outraged or otherwise, anywhere in this country questioning the Obama administration's decision not to allow a convicted criminal to be brought to justice in the courts of a democratic ally or even praising Washington’s role in protecting him.  And we're not talking about a media with no interest in trials in Italy.  Who doesn’t remember the wall-to-wall coverage of the murder trial (and retrial) of American student Amanda Knox there?  For the American media, however, Lady clearly lacked Knox's sex appeal (nor would he make millions off a future account of his Italian sojourn).

In this same period, there was, of course, another man who almost magically disappeared.  In a transit area of Moscow’s international airport, Edward Snowden discovered that the U.S. government had deprived him of his passport and was determined to bring him back to Washington by just about any means to stand trial.  That included forcing the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales, returning from Moscow, to make an unscheduled landing in Austria and be searched for Snowden.

The NSA whistleblower was trapped in a kind of no-man’s-land by an Obama administration demanding that the Russians turn him over or face the consequences.  After which, for days, he disappeared from sight.  In his case, unlike Lady’s, however, Washington never stopped talking about him and the media never stopped speculating on his fate.  It hasn’t yet.

He’s only appeared in public once since his “disappearance” —at a press conference at that airport with human rights activists from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.  The U.S. government promptly deplored and denounced the event as something Moscow “facilitated” or “orchestrated,” a “propaganda platform,” and a State Department spokesperson even suggested that Snowden, not yet convicted of anything, shouldn’t have the right to express himself in Moscow or anywhere else.

The truth is: when it comes to Snowden, official Washington can’t shut up.  Congressional figures have denounced him as a “ traitor” or a “ defector.”  The world has repeatedly been lectured from the bully pulpit in our national capital on how necessary his return and trial is to freedom, justice, and global peace.  Snowden, it seems, represents the opposite of a magician’s trick.  He can’t disappear even when he wants to.  Washington won’t let him, not now, not -- as officials have made clear —ever.  It’s a matter of morality that he faces the law and pays the (already preordained) price for his “crime.”  This, in today’s Washington, is what passes for a self-evident truth.