How to Be a Rogue Superpower: A Manual for the Twenty-First Century

Continued from previous page

In this way, the Obama administration has  more than doubled the total whistleblower prosecutions of all previous administrations combined under the draconian World War I-era Espionage Act.  It has also gone after  Army Private Bradley Manning for releasing secret military and State Department files to WikiLeaks, not only attempting to put him away for life for “ aiding the enemy,” but subjecting him to particularly vindictive and  abusive treatment while in military prison. In addition, it has  threatened journalists who have written on or published leaked material and gone on expeditions into the  telephone andemail records of major media organizations.

All of this adds up to a new version of deterrence thinking in which a potential whistleblower should know that he or she will experience a lifetime of suffering for leaking anything; in which those, even  in the highest reaches of government, who consider speaking to journalists on classified subjects should know that their calls could be monitored and their whispers criminalized; and in which the media should know that reporting on such subjects is not a healthy activity.

This sort of deterrence already seemed increasingly extreme in nature; the response to Snowden's revelations took it to a new level.  Though the U.S. government  pursued WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange abroad (while reportedly  preparing to indict him at home), the other whistleblower cases might all be considered national security ones.  The manhunt against Snowden is something new.  Through it, Washington is now punitively expanding twenty-first century deterrence theory to the world.

The message is this: nowhere will you be safe from us if you breach U.S. secrecy.  Snowden’s will surely be a case study in how far the new global security state is willing to go.  And the answer is already in: far indeed.  We just don’t yet know exactly how far.

How to Down a Plane to (Not) Catch a Whistleblower

In this light, no incident has been more revealing than the  downing of the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales, the democratically elected head of a sovereign Latin American nation, and not an official enemy of the United States.  Angry Bolivian authorities termed it a " kidnapping" or " imperialist hijack."  It was, at the least, an act for which it’s hard to imagine a precedent.

Evidently officials in Washington believed that the plane bringing the Bolivian president back from Moscow was also carrying Snowden.  As a result, the U.S. seems to have put enough pressure on four European countries (France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy) to force that plane to land for refueling in a fifth country (Austria).  There -- again, U.S. pressure seems to have been the crucial factor -- it was searched under  disputed circumstances and Snowden not found.

So much is not known about what happened, in part because there has been no serious reporting from Washington on the subject.  The U.S. media has largely ignored the American role in the downing of the plane, an incident regularly described here as if the obvious hadn’t happened.  This may, at least in part, be the result of the Obama administration’s implacable pursuit of whistleblowers and leakers right into the phone records of reporters.  The government has made such a point of its willingness to pursue whistleblowers via journalists that, as Associated Press President Gary Pruitt recently pointed out, national security sources are drying up.  Key figures in Washington are scared to talk even off the record (now that “off” turns out to be potentially very “on”).  And the Justice Department’s new  "tighter" guildelines for accessing reporters’ records are clearly filled with loopholes and undoubtedly little more than window dressing.