Mainstream Media Portal
Morales challenges U.S. after Snowden rumor holds up plane in Europe
(CNN) -- A defiant Evo Morales returned to Bolivia late Wednesday, railing on the United States after his presidential jet was held up in Europe under suspicions that U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden had hitched a ride.
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"Message to the Americans: The empire and its servants will never be able to intimidate or scare us," Morales told supporters at El Alto International Airport outside La Paz. "European countries need to liberate themselves from the imperialism of the Americans."
Morales has a right and is right to complain about this ridiculous overreach by the American Government.
CNN used the word "rumor" in their title, which is interesting. The first sentence in the article used the term suspicions, but the title used "rumors".
When we are talking about "US intelligence agencies" being 'suspicious' we may tend to think they have "intelligence'' about an event.
We think - I think - that they have some collection of information that was gained from "spying" and is likely "high-quality" information. ie: It is 'correct'.
But the use of the word "rumor" isn't exactly the sexiest word to apply to the purported products of 'spying' and all of the efforts that go into "signal collection' and 'snooping' and other forms of sneaky data collection.. With all the billions spent on intelligence, with all the various ways our 4th Amendment rights are washed away by some 'memo' from a presidential administration (those current and past) I, at least, would hope for more than 'rumor'.
And the rumor was wrong.
Now, leaders from a number of South American countries are PISSED and are going to have a meeting to hash this out and likely complain to the UN.
By Wednesday evening, the presidents of Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Suriname, Ecuador and Bolivia had confirmed their plans to attend, said Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino, who called the situation "very serious."
President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, felt the incident could have been 'life-threatening':
"The embarrassment to President Morales reaches not only Bolivia, but all of Latin America. It compromises the dialogue between the two continents and possible negotiations between them," she said. "It also requires prompt and explanation by the countries involved in this provocation."
The collective feeling from South America is that this was humiliating for the Bolivian president and a slap in the face of all South American countries.
I imagine the message is they, too, can expect similar treatment based on high-tech intelligence gathering an empire's paranoid ideas.