I'm not being entirely serious (hard to be, given the little we know) but I'm not being sarcastic, either. Some of Snowden's behaviour has been pretty odd. A variety of interpretations are possible. One is that he's a mastermind media manipulator/intelligence operator/exploiter of immigration laws/meticulous planner of a fugitive. This idea has some traction on HN and outside but I'm pretty skeptical of it. The interpretation that I lean towards, mostly for Occam's razor-ish reasons, is that he's maybe a little bit naive and perhaps doesn't quite know what he's doing.
If you care about things like your credibility and being taken seriously you probably don't do things like fib about your salary or suggest the CIA is going to hire triads to have you whacked.
If you hope to avoid the reach of the US criminal justice system or intelligence services you probably don't meet, in person, with high-profile US journalists in a Hong Kong hotel carrying a Rubik's cube. You probably don't go to Hong Kong in the first place where your ability to predict your future fate is very limited.
And finally, if you hope to represent your prosecution as political and your acts as acts of conscience in defense of civil liberties, you probably don't start divulging operational details of overseas US intelligence operations to foreign governments - they're not related to your stated cause and just land you in much deeper doodoo.
Now, it's possible all of this is some diabolically clever ploy/gambit but, personally, I find that a little hard to swallow.
I think the most salient point is that he needed to go to a country where
- the US did not have significant influence
- could not be strong-armed into giving him up
- would cause significant problems if he were taken without consent (or killed outright - not implausible, given the things we've seen in Pakistan)
China is a fairly logical choice - it's as far as you can run from the US in geopolitical terms. Hong Kong is just being in China without "being in China".
Ooof, kind of, sort of, maybe? I can see the argument, at a very high level but I don't think it survives even a cursory examination of the details, which are - by going to HK he's walking into a very convoluted situation the outcome of which neither he nor anyone else can really predict. And he's basically betting that all twists and turns of the various intermediate outcomes will go his way. This seems incredibly risky and not very, well, strategic.
I don't think, though, that in the unlikely event he gets Vanunu'd out Hong Kong it would cause significant problems for anyone but him. He also doesn't really face any risk of being killed - whatever one may think of the ethics, legality or quality of targeting of the drone strikes, they do target people involved in a violent, armed conflict with the US - 'enemy combatants' as the USG likes to call them. Snowden is not any sort of enemy combatant.
Most European countries have to a smaller or greater extent been complicit in illegal CIA rendition flights over the last decade and/or are extradition-happy or have already made it clear he's not a desirable person to host (UK telling airlines not to allow him onto flights).
Poorer countries or countries with unstable governments provide plenty of options to bribe someone to pick him up and/or drone strikes.
It needs to be somewhere where the US can't interfere without local government support without a massive backlash, and where there's at least a chance the local government or judiciary will hinder or delay an extradition, and there's not many places that fits those criteria and even fewer that fits those criteria and are desirable to go to. I assume, e.g. Iran isn't particularly tempting.
Releasing the information was incredibly risky. He might have chosen what he sees as the least bad alternative on a long list of bad alternatives.
> whatever one may think of the ethics, legality or quality of targeting of the drone strikes, they do target people involved in a violent, armed conflict with the US - 'enemy combatants' as the USG likes to call them.
Or so they say. And use as an excuse for all kinds of "collateral damage" including dead children. I don't see why the leap to going after Snowden if he were to hide in a country where they did not see a large risk of political fallout and didn't have other options, would be so great. E.g. if he were to hide in any country with a rebel movement hostile to the US, it'd be easy to claim he was meeting terrorists. I don't we have any basis for saying anything about what his risk of being taken out is.
I also find it interesting that you write off his risk of being killed by questioning the likelihood of drone strikes. US intelligence agencies have decades of history of "quieter" assassination methods.
I'd suggest he should have quit his job, made his disclosures and stayed put. Look at the three people in the linked interview - while it's undisputed that they've suffered great disruptions to their careers and lives in general, all three are free men, giving interviews to a national US newspaper. Edward Snowden is a fugitive in some strange limbo largely of his own making which he appears, inexplicably, quite blithely set on making worse.
As to the drone strikes, I was replying to the other commenter who seemed to think drone strikes or some sort or intervention by the US military is a realistic risk Snowden faces. I'd put 'covert CIA assassination' in the same bucket and I don't really know how to put this politely but this is, in my mind, tinfoilhattery.
He's facing a big fat criminal indictment - there are probably people at the DOJ working on it who didn't get to go home this weekend after he started talking about entirely unrelated (to his civil liberties claims) details of US intelligence operations. There's probably nothing the US government would like more than to see him tried on criminal charges in open, civilian court - it's a slam dunk of a case, by this point. There's nothing whatsoever to be gained by killing him.
Once indicted, I think kidnapping is at least a plausible concern - there are documented cases of US Marshals pursuing people wanted by the US courts overseas - with varying degrees of success and with or without the cooperation of local authorities. I can even think of a couple of cases pre-war-on-terror military interventions as part of efforts to apprehend wanted persons. The Achille Lauro hijackers come to mind - and even they, while being actual terrorists and actual murderers, ended up being prosecuted in Italy and serving time in Italian prisons. But again, Snowden could have trivially avoided this entire line of unpleasant possibilities by simply not getting on a plane to Hong Kong.
"I'd put 'covert CIA assassination' in the same bucket and I don't really know how to put this politely but this is, in my mind, tinfoilhattery."
I don't know how much any of us is in a position to assess the how 'tinfoilhattery' the risk of this is,
its easy to dismiss that as something that only happens in movies, but if it happens in real life, would we be any the wiser?
we do know that Iranian scientists have low life expectancies
couple of thoughts:
1) Snowdon is probably in a better position than us to assess that risk, and seemed to think it was real
2) either way, going public lessened the risk, if he gets in a drunk driving accident next week, or is shot by a mugger, most people won't assume it was coincidence
3) I think Mannings fate is argument enough against staying put
I guess my point is that there would be severe ramifications if the US deployed its military to retrieve Snowden within Chinese territory.
Whether they'd do it or not is not the issue - Snowden is a whistle blower who's had a peak inside the system, and is paranoid (perhaps justifiably given what he was leaking) about his safety. We're only trying to explain his choice, not whether it was a good one.
edit: also, the US has already killed its citizens without trial using drones in the war on terror. I think it's a pretty thin line between "enemy combatant" and "treasonous spy", slippery slope and all..
I don't want to bury you in some dreary repeat wall of text so I sort of combine-replied to you in the response to the upthread poster.
As to the quality of his choices, I think that's the actual interesting thing - not whether we can come up with some semi-plausible theory for them. Are his choices a part of some grand strategy (like the article we're discussing seems to suggest) or are they haphazard? To me, the evidence so far seems to strongly point to 'haphazard', which is very bad news both for him personally and for the cause of civil liberties which he claims as his motivation.
I'd love to be wrong about this but not quite to the point where I leave my critical faculties in my other pants.
The other most obvious point is that on top of all external considerations he had some particular friend or resource in HK. Having left the hotel, where is he staying now? If he got there and then later wished to go to Iceland, would he have anyone beyond what popular sympathy drums up to help him?
Even if Hong Kong has lots of practical concerns because of its relationship with China it was obviously going to provoke obvious questions about idealistic / vs ulterior motives, a big negative I would think for someone acting from idealistic motivations and knowing from experience how much that would be questioned.
I'm inclined to agree with Glurgh's comment and Occam's razor -- he's surely bright, but doesn't necessarily seem to be some type of master manipulator / strategist to have ended up in Hong Kong at this point, good cell phone access aside.
If you care about things like your credibility and being taken seriously you probably don't do things like fib about your salary or suggest the CIA is going to hire triads to have you whacked.
If you hope to avoid the reach of the US criminal justice system or intelligence services you probably don't meet, in person, with high-profile US journalists in a Hong Kong hotel carrying a Rubik's cube. You probably don't go to Hong Kong in the first place where your ability to predict your future fate is very limited.
And finally, if you hope to represent your prosecution as political and your acts as acts of conscience in defense of civil liberties, you probably don't start divulging operational details of overseas US intelligence operations to foreign governments - they're not related to your stated cause and just land you in much deeper doodoo.
Now, it's possible all of this is some diabolically clever ploy/gambit but, personally, I find that a little hard to swallow.