Chomsky praises Snowden and condemns US hypocrisy

Typ­i­cally elo­quent Noam Chom­sky, speak­ing this week­end at the Geneva Press Club:

My own opin­ion is that Snow­den should be hon­ored. He was doing what every cit­i­zen ought to do, telling. [Ap­plause] He was telling Amer­i­cans what the gov­ern­ment was doing. That’s what’s sup­posed to hap­pen.
Gov­ern­ments as I men­tioned be­fore al­ways plead se­cu­rity no mat­ter what’s going on. The re­flex­ive de­fense is se­cu­rity. But any­one who’s looked at– first of all, you take a look at what he ex­posed. At least any­thing that’s been pub­lished, it’s not any kind of threat to se­cu­rity, with one ex­cep­tion, the se­cu­rity of the gov­ern­ment from its own pop­u­la­tion. And in fact if you look at any­one who’s spent any time por­ing through de­clas­si­fied records– I have, I’m sure many of you have– you find that over­whelm­ingly the se­cu­rity is the se­cu­rity of the state from its own pop­u­la­tion and that’s why things have to be kept se­cret.
There are some cases where there’s au­then­tic se­cu­rity con­cerns. But they’re pretty lim­ited.
The plea of the US gov­ern­ment in this case for the sur­veil­lance and so on, is that it’s se­cu­rity against ter­ror. But at the very same mo­ment the US pol­icy is de­signed in a way to in­crease ter­ror. The US it­self is car­ry­ing out the most awe­some in­ter­na­tional ter­ror­ist cam­paign, ever, I sup­pose– the drones and spe­cial forces cam­paign. That’s a major ter­ror­ist cam­paign, all over the world, and it’s also gen­er­at­ing ter­ror­ists. You can read that and hear that from the high­est sources, Gen­eral Mc­Chrys­tal and schol­ars and all, so on.
Of course the drone cam­paign is cre­at­ing po­ten­tial ter­ror­ists, and you can eas­ily un­der­stand why. I mean, if you were walk­ing through the streets of Geneva and you don’t know whether five min­utes from now there’s going to be an ex­plo­sion across the street that’s run a cou­ple thou­sand of miles away and it will blow away some peo­ple and who ever else hap­pens to be around– you’re ter­ror­ized. And you don’t like it. And you may de­cide to react. That’s hap­pen­ing all over the re­gions that are sub­jected to the Obama ter­ror cam­paign.
So you can’t se­ri­ously on the one hand be not only car­ry­ing out mas­sive ter­ror but even  gen­er­at­ing po­ten­tial ter­ror­ists against your­self and claim that we have to have mas­sive sur­veil­lance to pro­tect our­selves against ter­ror. That’s a joke. It should be head­lines.
Then comes the in­ter­est­ing ques­tion of ex­tra­di­tion. The US has just an­nounced again that they’re going to pun­ish any­body who re­fuses to ex­tra­dite Snow­den.
At the same time the US is one of the leaers in re­fus­ing ex­tra­di­tion. Bo­livia is an in­ter­est­ing case. The US has im­posed pres­sure at least… to try to block the Bo­li­vian plane be­cause they want Snow­den ex­tra­dited. For years Bo­livia has been try­ing to ex­tra­dite from the United States the for­mer pres­i­dent who’s al­ready in­dicted in Bo­livia for all sorts of crimes. The US re­fuses to ex­tra­dite him.
In fact it’s hap­pen­ing right in Eu­rope. Italy has been try­ing to ex­tra­dite 22 CIA agents who were in­volved and in fact in­dicted for par­tic­i­pat­ing in a kid­nap­ing in Milan. They kid­naped some­body, sent him off I think to Egypt to be tor­tured.  And agreed later he was innno­cent…
Ex­tra­dite the peo­ple in­volved, the US of course re­fuses. And there’s case after case like this… There are a lot of cases where the U.S. just re­fuses…
In fact one of the most strik­ing cases is Latin Amer­ica, again, not just Bo­livia. One of the world’s lead­ing ter­ror­ists is Luis Posada, who was in­volved in blow­ing up a Cubana air­liner which killed 73 peo­ple and lots of other ter­ror­ist acts. He’s sit­ting hap­pily in… Miami, and his col­league Rolando Bosch also a major ter­ror­ist… is hap­pily there…  Cuba and Venezuela are try­ing to ex­tra­dite them. But you know. Fat chance.
So for the U.S. to be call­ing for oth­ers to ex­tra­dite Snow­den is let’s say a lit­tle ironic. Again, these ought to be head­lines.