Who’s talking the most nonsense about Edward Snowden? It’s a tough contest

From which of the actors engaged in the thoroughly entertaining case of Edward Snowden has come the biggest spewing-out of cant, do you reckon? Edward himself? The Guardian? Or the Yanks or -Chinese?

Edward was a fairly low-level CIA technical contractor in Hawaii when he released to the world details of his government’s clandestine electronic surveillance programme (Prism) and also some stuff about our own much-loved GCHQ in Cheltenham. Apparently shocked to the core to discover that the security services were secretly spying on people, Edward was gripped by a spasm of narcissistic outrage and said: ‘I don’t want to live in a society which does these sorts of things.’ No, indeed — at which point he duly fled the immoral and abusive USA for a bolthole in the open, transparent, consensual and liberal People’s Republic of China, where ‘these sorts of things’ are beyond the pale.

The Chinese did not arrest Edward and send him back to the USA, as some politicians in Washington — presumably whacked out of their minds on psychotropic substances — fondly imagined they would. Instead they let him get on a plane for another sort of bolthole in a similar paragon of democracy and openness, Russia. Cue, then, some fantastic expressions of faux outrage and cant from Washington about China’s ‘deliberate choice to release a fugitive despite a valid arrest warrant’. Also weighing in was that charismatic political powerhouse and Mr Punch lookalike John Kerry, who described the Chinese inaction as ‘deeply troubling’.

I assume the commies were rendered insensate with laughter for a while after hearing this stern admonition: Snowden’s revelations, of course, concerned covert surveillance directed primarily at the Chinese (in particular, Chinese mobile telephone companies), and Beijing subsequently praised the traitor for ‘tearing off Washington’s sanctimonious mask’.