By now, everyone knows: NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who left Hong Kong last week for Moscow, never boarded the plane he was expected to take yesterday to Cuba. His exact whereabouts were unclear. It’s the latest of many Obama administration fumbles in trying to catch this guy — while the Russians and Chinese pull all the intel they want off him and his laptops. And the rest of the world laughs at our impotence and incompetence.
But is it really incompetence? Or is it possible Team Obama doesn’t really care whether Snowden gets caught?
The sad fact is this White House has never cared much about our national security or protecting us from our deadliest enemies. Yet it goes on the warpath against any reporter who might publish leaks that might make it look bad — just ask James Rosen of Fox News. Indeed, it has prosecuted more federal whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.
The pattern is appallingly clear: Under Obama, real whistleblowers get nailed to the wall, while those who threaten our national security get a pass, starting with Julian Assange. He’s the one who engineered the WikiLeaks scandal, releasing loads of classified and highly sensitive data about our nation’s diplomacy and our war on terror — much of it actionable intelligence for our nation’s foes, including al Qaeda. Under an Eisenhower or a Reagan, Assange would have been the late WikiLeaker.
Instead, he was allowed to wander the globe virtually scot free and is now happily ensconced in London at the Embassy of Ecuador, where we have an extradition treaty but where a Marxist government has given Assange safe haven — and where he is reportedly helping Snowden get the same deal.
Meanwhile, the trial of the Army tech who helped Assange drags on with no end in sight.
The leaking of classified data with impunity doesn’t stop there. It goes straight to the White House itself. Who can forget how the Obama national-security team leaked news that it had helped Israel launch a computer virus into Iran’s nuclear program, a story that got three Iranian technicians arrested as American spies? Or how they gave Hollywood film-makers direct access to the planner of the Osama bin Laden kill, whose identity was otherwise highly secret?
In 2011 came revelations (ironically from WikiLeaks) that in order to get the Russians to sign the new START treaty, the Obama administration passed on secret information about the British nuclear arsenal, right down to the serial numbers of the warheads. It also wants to give them vital classified data on our missile-defense system — and, indeed, may already have done so.
The ostensible goal was to reassure Vladimir Putin that the system we were installing in Poland was designed to defend against rogue missiles from Iran or North Korea, not from Russia’s nuclear arsenal. But the underlying assumption was that the world is afraid of us — and passing on our most vital national secrets can help to dispel that fear.
So if Snowden didn’t feel any compunction about leaking classified data to real or potential foes, he was only taking his cues from President Obama.
Now Sen. Charles Schumer says that if Russia gives Snowden safe haven, it “will have serious consequences.” Really? Will Putin believe that when he himself has been handed nuclear secrets by our own commander in chief?
The result of sucking up to Putin hasn’t been better relations but worse, as the Snowden case reveals. And the alternative to keeping our national-security secrets under lock and key isn’t more “transparency” but more power to the thugocrats — and a far more dangerous world.
Arthur Herman’s “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World WarII” will be released in paperback next month.