

U.S. officials scrambled to nab Snowden - robg
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-officials-scrambling-to-nab-snowden-hoped-he-would-take-a-wrong-step-he-didnt/2014/06/14/057a1ed2-f1ae-11e3-bf76-447a5df6411f_story.html?hpid=z4

======
panarky
Intelligence officials continue to make carefully worded statements that may
be technically true in some narrow, legalistic sense, but are designed to
deceive.

Why does the Washington Post just present this misleading material at face
value? Isn't it their responsibility to help the reader get at the truth, not
just be a stenographer and mouthpiece for these fuckers?

    
    
      The FBI doesn’t have any capability to operate in Moscow
      without the collaboration of the FSB.
    

Maybe the FBI by themselves can't operate in Moscow all by themselves, but
certainly they work with other agencies that can. Why would they include this
quote if not to deceive the reader?

    
    
      "The United States did not request that any country force
      down President Morales’s plane," said Hayden, the National
      Security Council spokeswoman. "What we did do ... was
      communicate via diplomatic and law enforcement channels
      with countries through which Mr. Snowden might transit."
    

What does this doublespeak even mean? What insight does it add to this topic?
It's worse than deceptive, it's maddeningly meaningless.

    
    
      Several U.S. officials cited a complication to gathering
      intelligence on Snowden that could be seen as ironic: the
      fact that there has been no determination that he is an
      "agent of a foreign power," a legal distinction required
      to make an American citizen a target of espionage
      overseas.
    

So the Washington Post would have us believe that there are legal constraints
on surveillance of Snowden in Moscow, and that our intelligence agencies are
respecting those constraints.

After all we've learned about surveillance of innocent Americans while in on
United States territory, is it really credible to think that there's anything
at all they won't do to an "enemy of the state" while in a foreign country?

~~~
PhantomGremlin
I agree with your characterization. This Washington Post article reads like
the American version of the old Pravda in the USSR. Not an independent
publication, rather a mouthpiece for the government.

