The United States government claims that there’s a distinction between the NSA’s wholesale collection of information by and about individuals and governments overseas, versus the Chinese army unit charged with industrial espionage against American companies. The rest of the world, however, isn’t buying it.
Bluster Bomb
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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The United States is not bound by the Geneva Accords preventing torture. Why should this be any different. Might makes right. (But I wouldn’t push against the Chinese – they might foreclose on their holdings in the United States of America.)
I doubt that the Chinese are about to «foreclose» – there’s the old adage to the effect that if you owe the bank a thousand million dollars, that’s your problem, but if you owe the bank a million million dollars, that’s the bank’s problem (when I was a child, the figures would have been a thousand and a million dollars, respectively, but times have changed). The «indictments» strike me rather as an attempt by the administration to distract attention from the fact that in a week it will be the first anniversary of the initial release of the Snowden revelations. That they – and the assumption of universal jurisdiction on the part of US courts which underlies them – are not simply dismissed as ludicrous indicates the degree to which the corporate media in North America and Europe are under the thumb of Washington….
As for the Chinese, they will protest loudly, as they always do for the record, and then it will be business as usual, with a few exceptions : we can expect that they will see to it that the use of US software and hardware in government and commercial applications is drastically reduced….
Henri