Edward Snowden: Justice or Insolence?

Wilson Moreno

HAVANA TIMES — Newspapers around the world have been reporting and following up on a story that has caused much commotion in the United States: the story of a 30-year-old man who, through The Guardian and Washington Post, revealed top-secret, classified NSA documents, including information regarding the US secret surveillance program known as PRISM.

I am referring to Edward Snowden, a man whom the United States is hunting down as intensely as it once looked for the weapons of mass destruction “hidden” in Iraq (weapons it never found, incidentally).

Snowden has become something of a pebble in Uncle Sam’s shoe. Recently, the United States requested his extradition from the former British colony of Hong Kong, a request which was denied.

I must confess that, when I heard of Hong Kong’s decision in Venezuela, I felt a slight tickle of “satisfaction.” For a moment, Uncle Sam had been given a taste of his own medicine.

For years, Caracas has been asking the United States to extradite terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, a former Venezuelan Police agent and U.S. Army officer with some CIA involvement, to Venezuela.

He is accused of being the mastermind behind the terrorist mid-air bombing of Cubana de Aviacion flight 455, which killed 72 people in 1976. He is also accused of having personally tortured and murdered a number of people detained for political reasons in Caracas.

Posada Carriles has done much damage to the whole of Latin America. Some noteworthy deeds are his participation in different terrorist actions, such as the attempt to overthrow the president of Guatemala and the placing of bombs at different embassies (in Argentina, Chile and Venezuela) and in the offices of Air Panama in Colombia.

And where is this terrorist now? Hiding under the skirts of a country that would make demands on others while remaining deaf to their appeals, freely walking the streets of Miami – the stomping grounds of the bankers who have embezzled, conned and robbed hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans in Ecuador, Argentina and Venezuela.

The request to extradite former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles has been denied on more than one occasion with different pretexts and excuses. The real reason is that the CIA wants to protect the secrets Carriles holds.

Now that Edward Snowden has revealed a number of Uncle Sam’s secrets, he has become a much wanted man. Hunting people down is the only thing the United States knows how to do in response to such incidents – the accuser, no doubt, hates turning into the accused.