Al Jazeera
"The Obama team has every reason to
want this whole story to go away. But he may not find it so easy to get
rid of it," writes Mark Weisbrot [Reuters]
In his videotaped interview
with journalist Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden said that “the world’s
most powerful intelligence agencies” (like the CIA) were so formidable
that “[n]o one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you,
they'll get you in time.”
That remains to be seen. On Wednesday President Obama beat a hasty
retreat from his global public relations and diplomatic, and political
campaign against Snowden. It was quite an amazing, if implicit,
admission of defeat. Here was the president of the world’s most powerful
nation, with the world’s most influential media outlets having rallied to his cause,
now quietly trying to lower the profile of an issue that his own
government had elevated to one of the biggest stories in the world.
