Recall the Forced Landing of Bolivia's Plane to Find Snowden
greenwald.substack.com
greenwald.substack.com
Different to disallowing refueling? Last time I checked, planes come down without fuel, "threatening the lives of pilot and crew". One does not have to agree on that equivalence, but I think one should accept that the narrative is equally compelling.
I don’t think what happened in either situation (Snowden and Belarus) is acceptable.
> There is little doubt that the forced landing of this plane by Belarus, with the clear intention to arrest Protasevich, is illegal under numerous conventions and treaties governing air space. Any forced landing of a jet carries dangers, and safe international air travel would be impossible if countries could force planes flying with permission over their air space to land in order to seize passengers who might be on board. This act by Belarus merits all the condemnation it is receiving.
> None of what happened with this Morales incident has any bearing on the justifiability of what Belarus did on Sunday. That the U.S. and its E.U. allies committed a dangerous international crime in 2013 does not mitigate the criminal nature of similar actions by Belarus or any other country eight years later. The dangers of forcing down airplanes in order to arrest someone who is suspected to be on that plane are manifest. The danger increases, not decreases, as more countries do it.
I don't actually fully understand what Greenwald is trying to do, here.
This article reads as an attempt to justify the actions of Belarus (as opposed to criticizing the actions of the US and the EU, of which there was certainly no shortage back in 2013), which I find utterly astonishing and makes me further wonder what the heck is going on with Greenwald these days. In the past he never really struck me as an apologist for a dictator, but something has clearly changed.
>None of what happened with this Morales incident has any bearing on the justifiability of what Belarus did on Sunday. That the U.S. and its E.U. allies committed a dangerous international crime in 2013 does not mitigate the criminal nature of similar actions by Belarus or any other country eight years later. The dangers of forcing down airplanes in order to arrest someone who is suspected to be on that plane are manifest. The danger increases, not decreases, as more countries do it.
I do think he's spinning things in his own way. For example, toward the end of the article he claims:
> Indeed, the only two differences between these situations that one can locate are factors against the Western nations responsible for the downing of Morales’ plane. Unlike what Belarus did, the U.S. and its European allies obviously had no confirmation of Snowden's presence on the plane. They forced it to land based on a guess, on rumor, on speculation, which turned out to be utterly false. The second difference is that there are obviously additional international and diplomatic implications from forcing the plane of a democratically elected president to land as opposed to a standard passenger jet: that is, at the very least, a profound attack on the sovereignty of that country. Again, there are no valid justifications for what Belarus did, but to the extent one wants to distinguish its actions from what US/EU nations did in 2013, those are the only identifiable differences.
But this conveniently ignores that 1) Belarus scrambled a fighter jet and all but forced the aircraft to land, 2) did so under the guise of a fake bomb threat, all while 3) Russian agents appear to have been on the aircraft.
This is clearly and materially different from revoking passports and access to airspace.
So I reject Greenwald's claim that what Belarus did, here, was indistinguishable from actions of Western governments back when Snowden was on the run, and IMO Greenwald is guilty of misrepresenting the facts in service of his own narrative, which appears to be as simple as: everyone is equally bad.
I debated whether to get into this point, as there's probably a lot of people that view Snowden, his actions, and the US/EU response as somehow being equivalent to Protasevich, his actions, and the Belarussian response.
IMO that's utterly absurd, but I wasn't sure I wanted to invite that debate...
I think it kind of speaks to just how big a deal first impressions matter on a deeply psychological level because many people seem incapable of acknowledging that something major changed with him a while ago.
Positions I’ve seen him take in the past few months include:
- Matt Gatez did nothing wrong and there is no evidence against him anyways.
- Hunter Biden’s laptop is the key story to the 2020 election
- There is no meaningful difference between people who believe there was something suspect about Trumps relationship with Russia and QAnon
- January 6th was non violent
He is a fundamentally unserious person at this point.
But like Elon Musk he has some of the strangers defenders on the internet who will aggressively defend him at all costs and I don’t understand it.
They achieved the same goal.
I think I prefer the brutal honesty.
We set precedent and then we're surprised when others realize "Huh it's actually okay to do shit like this"
Not something that's talked about frequently, but bomb threats do not actually open restricted airspace.
The United States, for instance, has, and will continue to send fighter jets up to intercept private aircraft, whenever the hell it chooses to. European, and other countries do the same. [1] [2]
Pretty clearly, countries have the right to scramble jets, and also the right to deny flight privileges to planes in their airspace.
Likewise, countries clearly have the right to send armed ships to tail ships in their territorial waters, send armed police to tail vehicles on their roads, etc, etc. The legality of it only becomes questionable when someone starts shooting.
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/sonic-boom-after-raf-jets-sent-to...
"Without enough fuel to fly an alternative route, the Bolivian pilot was forced to make a U-turn and land in Vienna."
The plane would crash and everybody in it would die if they didn't comply. The plane was searched by Austrian police on the ground.
It says they were denied fuel, not denied emergency landing clearance.
See the ridiculousness of that argument?
What actually happened is that both planes were coerced under the threat of death.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/24/politics/biden-condemns-arres...
Large groups are expected to be a bit hypocritical sometimes, because of diversity of opinion and viewpoint. Here we see the moral flexibility of a single individual.
It's only terrorism when the Bad Guys do it.
Buried near the end of the article. Gotta love Greenwald’s extensive research.