Edward Snowden has been receiving a lot of mail recently.
I have no idea if Snowden has been receiving “regular” mail at his Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport transit zone lounge address, and I would assume he has received a lot of e-mail on any of his four laptops if he is a Wi-Fi hotspot area. I am talking about several “open letters” that have been written to him in various media.
The first one I read was a letter MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry wrote a couple of weeks ago. Although I agreed with the general intent, I thought it was a little too sarcastic, perhaps even snarly. You can read the letter here and decide for yourself.
While I believe that the NSA surveillance activities need to be fully examined and changed in order to protect our rights and privacy consistent with national security and the protection of our people against terrorist attacks, I have been critical of the way Snowden has been going about exposing the NSA transgressions — along with much classified and sensitive information.
So, I also took the modern “pen in hand” and wrote an open letter to Mr. Snowden expressing such feelings and frustrations.
Others have done likewise.
Perhaps the most eloquent, powerful, dramatic letter — albeit I do not agree with it — is a long, 3000-word letter by Rebecca Solnit under the title “Prometheus Among the Cannibals.”
Solnit, a TomDispatch.com contributor and an author. has been a vocal critic of the NSA surveillance programs and an equally vocal supporter of Snowden.
She begins her letter with, “Billions of us, from prime ministers to hackers, are watching a live espionage movie in which you are the protagonist and perhaps the sacrifice. Your way forward is clear to no one, least of all, I’m sure, you.”
Solnit clearly views Snowden as a hero, a martyr, “our truest patriot,” Prometheus, and a dragon slayer situated where he “could run a dagger through the dragon’s eye, and that dragon is writhing in agony now; in that agony it has lost its magic: an arrangement whereby it remains invisible while making the rest of us ever more naked to its glaring eye.”
Solnit compares Snowden to “Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Rachel Carson, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi — [who] endeavored to save us from ourselves, from our own governments and systems of power,” and also to “26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi, whose December 2010 self-immolation to protest his humiliation and hopelessness triggered what became the still-blooming, still-burning Arab Spring.” Solnit adds “Sometimes one person changes the world. This should make most of us hopeful and some of them fearful, because what I am also saying is that we now live in a world of us and them, a binary world. It’s not the old world of capitalism versus communism, but of the big versus the little, of oligarchy versus democracy, of hierarchies versus swarms, of corporations versus public interest and civil society.”
Solnit also takes a “historical” look at our government’s “spying” and “invasion of privacy,” at how we have become a “blighted, corrupted, corporate-dominated country,” starting, according to Solnit, in 1996 with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore when they pushed the dreadful slogan “building a bridge to the twenty-first century,” celebrating, among other things, Silicon Valley-style technological innovation and corporate globalization, “erecting a massive electronic infrastructure that outpaces our ability to democratically manage it and shifting our economy backward to recreate the chasms of class divide that marked the nineteenth century.”
New technologies that “made a surveillance state that much more powerful and far-reaching; the new technologies replaced many jobs with few; the new technologies created new billionaires without principles; the new technologies made us all into commodities to be sold to advertisers; the new technologies turned our every move into something that could be tracked; the new technologies kept us distracted and busy. Meanwhile, almost everyone got poorer.”
And, of course, the Bush administration’s PATRIOT Act.
Soltin concludes with a soaring tribute to Snowden:
Someday you may be regarded as a Mandela of sorts for the information age, or perhaps a John Brown, someone who refused to fit in, to bow down, to make a system work that shouldn’t work, that should explode. And perhaps we’re watching it explode.
The match is sacrificed to start the fire. So maybe, Edward Snowden, you’re a sacrifice. In the process, you’ve lit a bonfire out of their secrecy and spying, a call to action.
I fear for you, but your gift gives us hope and your courage, an example. Our loyalty should be to our ideals, because they are a threat to the secret system you’ve exposed, because we have to choose between the two. Right now you embody that threat, just as you embody those ideals. For which I am grateful, for which everyone who is not embedded in that system should be grateful.
Love,
Rebecca
There have been other interesting open letters to Snowden, albeit not quite as impassioned as Soltin’s
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who is serving a thirty-month sentence in prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, has written an open letter to Snowden expressing his moral support for him and offering him some legal advice.
Roger Burbach, the director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA), in a letter to Snowden, gives him “Ten Reasons You Should Hightail It to Venezuela,” but cautions “In Caracas you will experience shortages (from toilet paper to electricity) because the Venezuelan economy is in transition.”
Edward Snowden’s father, Lon Snowden, has also written an open letter to his son, comparing “his son’s leaks to Paul Revere warning of incoming British troops, ‘summoning the American people to confront the growing danger of tyranny and one branch government.’”
Please read the letter here.
Finally, no overview of “letters to Snowden” would be complete without mentioning, “An Open Letter to the Media on the ‘Irony’ of Snowden’s Request for Asylum in Venezuela and Ecuador,” by approximately 30 Latin America experts, applauding the freedom of the press in Venezuela and Ecuador “where a fiercely critical press not only exists, but thrives” and condemning the “’irony’ of the many thousands of people who have taken refuge in the United States, which is currently torturing people in a secret prison at Guantanamo, and regularly kills civilians in drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries…” and the “’irony’ of refugees who have fled here from terror that was actively funded and sponsored by the U.S. government, e.g. from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, and other countries.”
Image: www.shutterstock.com
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.