Sometimes, it’s hard to grasp just how our world has been transformed since September 11, 2001. But here’s a little exchangeat NBC Nightly News a few days back -- just part of the humdrum flow of TV news-chat -- that somehow caught my attention. News anchor Brian Williams and Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell were discussing how the Obama administration was dealing with NSA leaker Edward Snowden, then reportedly somewhere in the bowels of Moscow’s international airport. Here was the exchange:
“Williams: The U.S. can say whatever it wishes and the press secretary can get angry and so on, what real power does the United States have here?“Mitchell: It’s got a lot of leverage against Russia and China. They’re working behind the scenes, but short of rendition -- and that’s not going to happen getting him out of Russia -- there’s isn’t anything physical that they can do. So they have to just exert the pressure and hope that diplomacy works, but Vladimir Putin is a tough customer.”
It was that reference to “rendition” -- to, that is, the kidnapping of terror suspects by American forces (usually the CIA) off global streets (or highways or backlands) and their “rendering” to the United States, or to U.S. Navy ships in global waters, or to theprisons of allied regimes willing to torture any “suspect” and share whatever information (or misinformation) might be extracted with Washington. For a while, this practice was called “extraordinary rendition,” but it’s now so deeply embedded in our American world that it’s become highly ordinary rendition. In any case, the implication of Mitchell’s passing comment was that the U.S. wouldn’t “render” someone from an airport in the capital of a major power, but if that wasn’t “going to happen getting him out of Russia,” I think it’s hard not to complete Mitchell’s sentence with something like “it might be a perfectly reasonable option for Washington in, say, Ecuador.”
We are, in other words, in a new world where practices that once would have shocked have become the norm of news and pundit chitchat. TomDispatch, however, refuses to consider any of this “normal.” We have over these last years regularly focused on the way Washington’s most oppressive powers have been wildly enhanced and on people we now know as “whistleblowers,” people like Bradley Manning, who saw something truly, unnervingly different in our American world and decided they just had to do something about it. TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren is one of them and today he considers what Snowden might be going through. Tom
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