In an exclusive interview on Feb. 25 with Afshin Rattansi on the Dubai-based platform “Going Underground,” Seymour Hersh defended Edward Snowden’s actions to blow the whistle on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) massive spying on communications among Americans. (https://rumble.com/v2atfik-seymour-hersh-on-why-us-blew-up-the-nordstreams-compares-his-source-to-edwa.html )
In 2013, Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents exposing surveillance programs run by both the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ that monitored the communications records of not just criminals or potential terrorists, but law-abiding citizens as well.
Snowden, fearing for his life fled to Hong Kong, and after U.S. charged him under the Espionage Act, he sought to seek asylum in Ibero-America. Instead, he was left with no alternative but ending up in Russia, and, finding the State Department had annulled his passport while he was in the Moscow airport, had no choice but to seek asylum from Russia.
In October 2020, he was granted permanent residency in Russia, and in September 2022, he was granted Russian citizenship by President Vladimir Putin, making extradition to the U.S. impossible.
Hersh told Rattansi that in 2009-2013 when Snowden worked for NSA, it employed some 25,000 people, but “Out of those many thousands, one [Snowden] spoke out about a direct violation of one the most sensitive things in the American Constitution,” he said, referring to a citizen’s right not to be searched (or in this case spied upon) without a warrant. “There is something about the [intelligence] community that is bizarre,” reported RT in its coverage of the interview. (https://www.rt.com/news/572053-hersh-snowden-nord-stream/ )
It took Snowden a lot of “guts” to do what he did and he’s now paying a high price, Hersh said. “I don’t think it’s safe for him to ever come back in the country [the U.S.],” RT quoted him telling Rattansi.
RT went on: “Hersh argued that the Snowden affair should serve as a response to those who label him [Hersh] a ‘conspiracy theorist’ over his reporting, including his recent bombshell article blaming the Biden administration for the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea last year.”
Hersh told “Going Underground” that “many in the U.S. intelligence community, many in the military value the Constitution” and they have often been the sources for his reports, says RT in its concluding coverage: “Those people, some of [whom] are high-ranking, ‘talked to me privately about the stuff they couldn’t stand.... Those people are the people I know. And I will tell you right now—those are the people I’ll protect forever,’ the journalist insisted.”
