At arstechnica, Edward Snowden, with years at the CIA under his belt, looks for a cushy European posting that he thinks he can wangle by pretending an interest in Middle Eastern “hell-holes”.

“Thank god for wars,” he says, in true Sophie Scholl fashion…

“Say, Department of State. They’re understaffed right now, but Europe posts are competitive, but you can get in the door much easier if you express an interest in going to near-east hellholes. Once you’re in, tough out the crappy tour and you should be able to pick from a list of preferred posts.

Alternately, get a clearance. If you’re cleared, have a lifestyle, and have specialized IT skills, you can go anywhere in the world right now.

Thank god for wars.”

Snowden has been described as an accomplished player of a video game called “Tekken,” a fight game.  In Language of Empire, I wrote about the use made of video-games by the military to desensitize adolescent males to violence and rehearse them in the mentality of the killers they will be trained to become.The US, of course, is not alone in using video games in this way. A recent piece in the Guardian describes the popularity of video-games among the world’s militaries.

That same piece describes the extent of US research into this new frontier of mind-control and brainwashing:

“By the late 1990s,” says Nick Turse, an American journalist, historian and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, “the [US] army was pouring tens of millions of dollars into a centre at the University of Southern California – the Institute of Creative Technologies – specifically to build partnerships with the gaming industry and Hollywood.”

It’s a toxic relationship in Turse’s opinion, since gaming leads to a reliance on remote-controlled warfare, and this in turn makes combat more palatable.”

Please note that by the late 1990s, the center of the US military’s partnership with Hollywood and the Gaming industry was Southern California. Please note that Ryuhana was established in 2002 ( accidentally wrote 2012 before) , next to the NSA in Fort Meade. Please note that after it folded up there in 2004, it moved to California.

ORIGINAL POST

In my previous blog post on Snowden, I pointed out that his career was essentially that of a spy and surveillance contractor, and not, as some at LRC have lamely tried to claim, that of a private-sector wunderkind.

The LRC claim was based solely on Snowden’s 2 year stint at a Japanese anime company.

However, as I noted in my previous blog, that company, Ryuhana, was sited next to the NSA when Snowden, whose parents were both in the service of the state, went to work for it.  The chances are that Ryuhana had some kind of government connection, since comics have long been a venue for state propaganda.

And why not? Comic strips are read more widely than any kind of opinion editorial. If editorial writing and reporting is closely monitored by the state, why wouldn’t comic book writing?

Hollywood, after all, has long been used to control the mass mind and many obvious propaganda films like “V for Vendetta” have had their origin in comics of some kind or in graphic novels.

“How the Government Turned Comic Books Into Propaganda” (Reason, Feb 28, 2013) describes how the government went to great lengths to ensure that war cartoons were not too simplistic.

“Unlike government titles charged with turning sewage treatment processes or Social Security benefits into the stuff of page-turning drama, this title featured government work in all its two-fisted, action-packed glory, with page after page of machine-gun strafing, saber disembowelings, and other vividly rendered war-time carnage. Issues like this one also featured dozens of actual black-and-white photographs of Marines in combat—hanging out in foxholes, poking enemy dead with bayonets, carrying their wounded brethren on stretchers.

In Government Issue, Richard Graham notes that while many commercial newspaper comic strips featured content depicting the war, including depictions of “Nazis as Teutonic buffoons and the Japanese as blood-drooling torturers,” the Office of War Information worried that such depictions were “too simplistic and could lead to over overconfidence” because they portrayed “the enemy as lazy and posing little threat.”

Perhaps that’s why on the cover of this Marine-approved comic, Prime Minister Tojo is depicted as a lively eight-legged sea-monster.”

But comics have their uses not only in demonizing the enemy in war-time. They can also be used to “sell” a country to its allies.

A piece at Japan Today, August 9, 2010 analyzed the American use of Japanese comics as the American military’s new Okinawa strategy:

“The U.S. military has produced a four-part manga series in Japanese titled, “Our Alliance – A Lasting Partnership.” The BBC, Yahoo news and various other sources picked up the AFP story without any mention of the obvious – this is pure propaganda concocted for the sole purpose of brainwashing Japan’s youth into accepting the massive American military presence right in their backyard.

At a time where opposition to the 47,000 U.S. troops stationed in Okinawa and other parts of Japan has reach a tipping point, it seems the new U.S. strategy may be to simply outwait the more vocal older generations and instead focus on the younger generations who are already largely apathetic to such issues.

In the first issue of the comic (which can be seen at http://www.usfj.mil/manga), an American boy, Usa-kun (U.S.A.-kun), comes to Japan and befriends a Japanese girl called Arai Anzu (sounds like “Alliance when spoken by Japanese). He tells her he has come to defend her home because they
are “important friends.”

“It’s good to have a friend you can rely on to go with you,” the little girl concludes.

Typical of modern reporting, the media articles merely regurgitate the press release given to them without adding any neutrality to the story, submitting obediently and serving as mouthpiece to the story’s “source” – which in this case was just a phone call with no apparent follow-up or questions challenging the motives of the manga.

Some gems spewed by U.S. forces’ propaganda office rep, Neil Fisher, include explanations on how the cute bunny-like characters “explore and learn about the U.S. military in Japan and its role in the U.S.-Japan alliance.” He nearly gives away his hand when he admits the U.S. chose manga because it’s “a very common way of communicating in Japan,” or “It is read as much if not more than newspapers” and “A lot of people love manga… Manga is a very light-hearted way to carry information.”

This isn’t the first time the U.S. has used comics to infiltrate the minds of Japanese children. In 2008, amid heavy opposition to an American nuclear powered aircraft carrier being permanently stationed at Yokosuka just south of Tokyo, the U.S. handed out 26,000 copies to children and young residents of a 200-page comic staring an American navy hero. The comic depicted the U.S. navy servicemen as ideal neighbors at a time when safety concerns over nuclear energy and crimes committed by Americans stationed in the area were in the spotlight”

Given this history, Snowden’s “Ryuhana,” situated as it was right next to the NSA (2002-2004) at Fort Meade, in Maryland, might well have been actively involved in state propaganda and Snowden’s stint there, far from being anomalous, his first work for the surveillance state.

The Japanese Anime Company Ryuhana where Snowden went to work in 2002 is being talked up on the LRC blog as an example of his work in the private sector.

Let’s see. In my previous blog, I showed that Snowden (and his parents) have been life-long employees/contractors of the state he claims to detest. He signed up, in turn, for the army, the special forces, the NSA, the CIA, and then for defense contractors tied to the CIA and the defense establishment (including Booz Allen). Some private sector poster boy. That is, out of a working life of about a decade, all but two years were spent sucking at the teat of the security state.

True, he was a webmaster at an (ostensible) anime company in 2002.

But, by 2004, the company had wound up its business.

That means it was open for business for all of two years. And guess where it was? At Fort Meade in Maryland, right next to the National Security Agency:

“Ryuhana closed in 2004 as the primary proprietors went off to college and opened a new business in California, according to the website. Other contributors to the site could not be reached for comment.

The defunct company listed an address in Fort Meade, Md., next door to the National Security Agency.”

(The Daily Mail, “I Like My Girlish Figure,” June 12, 2013)

Somebody really needs to check out whether this anime company had more going on with it than just cartoons.

Update (June 13):

I saw this blog post suggesting that Snowden was worried by the surveillance state in 2006, because someone with the handle The TrueHOOHAh, whom the blog identifies with Snowden, comments at a site called arstechnica:

“NSA’s new surveillance program.
That’s the sound of freedom, citizen!”

on May 19, 2006.

May 2006 would be only two years after Snowden had signed up for the Special Forces and then the NSA, where he worked  as a security guard.

ORIGINAL POST

The otherwise admirable Jacob Hornberger, by a series of false equations, rhetorical overstatements, and misleading analogies arrives at the equation,

SOPHIE SCHOLL =   EDWARD SNOWDEN

Well, we applauded Sophie Scholl in “Mobs,” but just as  reductio ad hitlerum is a rhetoric of desperation, so too is such “sophi-stry.”

Asserting without evidence that every self-proclaimed act of whistle-blowing (endorsed by such notable organs of the state as The Guardian and The New York Times, mind you) must be the same as the resistance of the White Rose is merely an admission that you have no other arguments on your side except US  versus Them.

This is an appeal to the mob and demagoguery. I had hoped for more from Mr. Hornberger.

So for him… and for all the LRC cohorts who see any refusal to buy the latest creation of the intelligence services as a sign of “commies,” “Obamaites,” and government stooges…..let me, as none of those three, count the incredibly obvious differences between Sophie Scholl and Comrade Edward:

1. Sophie Scholl was the child of a principled family, with a history of political dissent. Her father and brothers were dissenters. Her friends at high school were chosen for their political opinions. She had a credible history of being a dissenter of conscience. Her father was imprisoned for a critical remark about Hitler.

1. Edward Snowden is the son of two officers of the US security state that he now proclaims he can’t abide.

His family lived all its life off of the state, with no evidence that they ever objected. His father belongs to the US coast guard; his mother is the chief deputy clerk for administration and information technology in the US Federal Court in Baltimore. Functionaries of the police state, dear reader, are not known to spawn dissenters.

Maryland – the environs of the capital of empire and site of all too-many judicial fixes, anthrax scares, CIA capers, and political assassinations – is as good as the belly of the beast.

In that belly, Edward was quite happy.

He joined no political parties, wrote no papers denouncing the empire, organized no protests.

In fact, he repeatedly sought employment in the security state and not in any innocuous (if there be such) part of it.

He enlisted in the US Army….and not in 2001, when he might be forgiven, since 9-11 had just occurred (whatever you think of that).

No. He enlisted in 2004 (2003 in some accounts) when the whole world had already marched against the Iraq war, when the evidence of torture and the use of Daisy Cutters and white phosphorus in Iraq was all over the internet.

At a time when the REAL equivalent of Sophie Scholl, Sergeant Samuel Provance, was outing his seniors in the army and facing genuine harassment rather than wall-to-wall coverage from the major media, Edward Snowden was signing up for the Army, and not just the Army, but the Special Forces.

By then special forces had already been proved to be involved in war crimes. But Edward the Dissenter was eager to join them.

2. Sophie Scholl’s brother was arrested in 1937 for participating in the German Youth Movement.

2. Edward Snowden’s sister is an attorney in Maryland who has not been arrested for anything.

3. Sophie Scholl was an avid reader, with a deep interest in philosophy and theology. She graduated from high school and wrote a paper entitled “The Hand That Moved The Cradle, Moved The World.”

3. Edward Snowden dropped out of school, got a GED, and studied computers at a community college. In other words, his principle interests were technical. Again, no obvious signs of philosophical objections to the state, or even interest in the question. To all appearances, a guy looking to make a good living the quickest way he could.

4. Sophie Scholl was a committed and public Christian who had developed a philosophical and religious objection to Nazism.

4. There is no public record of Snowden having any kind of principled philosophy of resistance to the state until his recent anointing by the spectrum of official activists in the US. [Correction: There are arstechica forum posts under the handle, the TrueHOOHA that express an awareness..and a distrust..of the surveillance state (see update at the top of the page).

5. Sophie Scholl took a job as a nursery school teacher, hoping to get out of working in the National Labor Service, at the time a requirement for anyone who wanted to go to University. In other words, she jeopardized an academic career for which she had great talent in order to be true to her principles.

5.Edward Snowden, as a computer expert, could easily have worked in the private sector, but chose to join the military. He was in the US Army Reserves for all of 4 months, long enough to break his legs and get discharged. Not long enough to face fire, do anything difficult, or get any awards. He didn’t even have the persistence to go back and finish his 14 week training.

Instead,  convinced of the goals of the US military (saving people from oppression), he went one better. He opted to join the National Security Agency as a security guard (a cushy and well-paying job needing not much in the way of expertise or hardship).

6. When her nursery teaching proved insufficient, Sophie Scholl reluctantly joined the auxiliary war service, although still in the innocent field of nursery teaching. Afterward, she enrolled in the University of Munich in Biology and philosophy. By then, she was already practicing passive resistance to the war and was a vocal and public part of a group of artists and writers who were struggling with moral questions about the individual’s duty under a dictatorship.

Sophie Scholl formed the White Rose after listening to an anti-Nazi sermon by the Catholic Bishop of Munster and after a long discussion of the issues in correspondence with her boyfriend.

6.  The only evidence we have that Snowden had any interest in privacy rights is the insistent repetition by The Guardian, the New York Times (known outlets of state disinformation) that he had stickers of the Electric Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project on his laptop.  This is very much the type of signalling used by Rolling Stone in its write up of Jacob Applebaum (one of the Wikileaks group). In that piece, “The Most Dangerous Man in Cyberspace,” there were the same type of pointed references to Applebaum’s liking for the movie “V for Vendetta”. Vendetta is a movie most likely intended to prep the public mind for the role of the hactivist-hero (think of Julian Assange or Anonymous) as the new mouthpiece for globalist propaganda, following the discrediting of the major newspapers in the wake of the Iraq War.

Apart from that, Tor encryption is known to have back-doors for the US government and allied corporations. It was likely pushed for just that reason, by Applebaum and his colleague at Wikileaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, an employee of Microsoft, a corporation with close government ties.

7. While in the University, Scholl and her circle started passing out pamphlets encouraging Germans to engage in passive resistance to Nazism. Passive resistance is completely consistent with the Christian principles in which the White Rose believed.

7.

Snowden’s only political engagement was to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and then donate $500 to Ron Paul in 2012.

He left the CIA not because he had any differences of opinion about their mission or modus operandi.

He left to become a private contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton, a lucrative defense contractor, acquired by the Carlyle Group at a cost of $1 billion and a probable profit of $3 billion.

Booz Allen makes a healthy profit from promoting the security state. Edward was making money off of that.

Contractors of the state are paid a whole lot more than employees and have to conform to no rules. I need not remind you that the whole heart of the torture scandal of Abu Ghraib was the nexus of private contractors and CIA – precisely where Snowden chose to position himself.

As a system administrator for all of 4 months  at Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden was stationed in high-priced Hawaii at a salary of $200,000 (by his account) or $ $112,000 (according to his bosses). He passed out no pamphlets objecting to torture, war, propaganda, or anything else, as far as I know.

8. Sophie Scholl’s boyfriend was also a resistor, with whom she had long impassioned discussions about moral questions.

8. Snowden’s girlfriend Lindsay Mills is self-described as a “world-traveling pole dancing superhero,” language  that is not only juvenile but bears the marks of an intelligence creation. Nothing is as likely to get hits as much as a “sex angle” of some kind.

Remember the Assange story and Julian’s “reputation”?  Whether you consider it good or bad,  it is likely to be riveting to the mass of young self-styled rebels.

Snowden admits he had a very “comfortable” life with her. No earnest discussion of moral conundrums have come to light so far.

However, well before his emergence as a latter-day Gandhi in June of this year, Snowden did approach a film-maker in January 2013. That was Laura Poitras, who happened to have written about a more credible NSA whistle-blower William Binney. Poitras is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award. MacArthur is one of several foundations (including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller) known to collaborate with the CIA, according to Frances Stoner Saunders (Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War).

Poitras’ film “Bin Laden’s Body Guard” was funded by the Guggenheim Fellowship and by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Poitras also just happens to be a board member of the Freedom of Press Foundation, along with Glenn Greenwald, and – surprise! – old faithful Daniel Ellsberg.  She has also been involved with “surveillance teach-ins” with Jacob Applebaum.

And while Greenwald asserts that Poitras’s harassment by Homeland Security (she was detained and questioned at the border on many occasions) was for no reason at all, The Weekly Standard (admittedly a neocon outfit) reports, credibly, that there was reason for it, because some soldiers allege that she had foreknowledge of an Iraqi ambush and didn’t warn American soldiers about it.

[This is not to endorse any harassment of Poitras on that account. It’s merely to demonstrate that there’s a lot more going on here than a rerun of The White Rose.]

The Freedom of Press Foundation, which strongly supports Manning and Assange, was formed only in 2012. On its website, it endorses wikileaks, truthout, and some new outfits that I’ll check up on as soon as I have time.

To a cursory eye, it looks like a recently cobbled together effort.

Meanwhile, just in case you miss the point, Greenwald has been pushing Snowden as a “hero” and “whistle-blower” on his prominent blog at the Guardian.

It’s much the same way he pushed Julian Assange from his blog at Salon, making sure to let you know that if you had any questions about St. Julian, this qualified you for public branding as a totalitarian.

From www.thepeople’sview.net come more interesting revelations substantiating my hunch that Mr. Greenwald, conscience of the nation-‘n-all, ain’t as spotlessly disinterested as he would have us believe, and, no, that undisclosed Cato gig is the not only reason to believe that.

“The very same Glenn Greenwald who is accusing the SEIU of trying to use OWS’ language (heaven forbid!) for their own purposes (which, as a union, just happens to be supporting working people), penned another column earlier last week trying to sell (and promote) winter gear for the OWS protesters being disbursed by the notorious Firedoglake. But of course, Greenwald fails to mention that he stands to financially gain from donations to FDL, as the treasurer of FDL’s PAC, Accountability Now, and his company, DMDM Enterprises, is used to taking money for “administrative expenses” from Accountability Now.

An examination of FEC reports shows that Greenwald’s DMDM Enterprises received more than $40,000 from FDL’s Accountability Now from 2008-2010, and of course, we have no idea how much more he has received as salary as Treasurer. (For those interested, yes, I have been working on a story on this with some help, and it keeps getting pushed back for different reasons – but expect a campaign finance story on Greenwald, Hamsher et al. to drop soon).”

Of course, this doesn’t mean I subscribe to the politics of the blog on which this tidbit has been served up. But one doesn’t have to be an Obamite to worry about Greenwald.  Remember, he was also one of the strongest supporters of Julian Assange…which about says it all.

The original NSA whistle-blower was William Binney (hat-tip to Scott Creighton).:

“Long before Edward the Great made his plans, all of this was exposed on international television on RT by another NSA whistle-blower, William Binney, former NSA crypto-mathematician, who apparently didn’t lie about his background… and where was the indignation? Where were all the Stand with Willy movements?

Where was FACEBOOK on this one? Where was Reddit?

He named the Narus devises, said they were sweeping up EVERYTHING from EVERYONE so it could be used in the future if the powers that be ended up not liking you are your particular agenda.”

One might ask the same question about Anna Hazare (in India). Where was his anti-corruption movement without Facebook? And what happened to Baba Ramdev, the man who was really leading an anti-corruption movement when Western intel decided it needed to step in and take control of the movement, as it has done in so many instances of revolution?

Mind you, I usually like what Greenwald has to say, even as I have been suspicious for a long time about why he says it and have come to distrust his version of controversial events (say, on the Bradley Manning case); noticed his tendency to lift other people’s ideas (mine included); his tendency to hyperbole and misrepresentation); and his failure to disclose his past ties to the Koch-funded Cato Institute when it was ethical to do so.

Look at his enemies, I told myself, biting my lip and unburdening myself only to the one or two others who were equally skeptical of the verbose civil libertarian….. like Douglas Valentine.

Only after conscientious independent activists like Mr. Creighton at Willy Loman show up the Greenwald-Snowden act for the media event it is, does an establishment outlet admit the truth:

Business Insider now concedes what anyone with any knowledge about the matter already knows – that Snowden isn’t telling us anything new.

There have been NSA whistle-blowers before of far greater credibility, only the establishment wasn’t yet ready to give them any air time.

Business Insider:

Meanwhile Greenwald, dubbed a second Jefferson by the hilariously obsequious EconomicPolicyJournal, manages to interview his hero Snowden, without calling him out even when he echoes Binney:

“The most important thing NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has said comes at the end of his interview with Glenn Greenwald. In the final minutes of his interview he makes clear that the infrastructure is in place to bring tyranny onto the people of the United States. Only a switch has to be flipped, he correctly calls it, “turnkey tyranny.”

As one commentator at EPJ, Dan Lind, immediately noted, these were Binney’s words:

“Wired Magazine
“The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)”
by James Bamford
03.15.12
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
…

…
Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, [William] Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.”

This mimicry and repetition of key-phrases of dissidents is one way in which the establishment co-opts the energy and attention of potential supporters.

The mimicry muddies the narrative (who said what when), diverts attention to the establishment’s chosen sock-puppet rebels, and makes sure that the status-quo is not disturbed in ways that might actually challenge the power of the elites.