I Know This is Days Late--But I'm Still Wondering About the Morales Plane Deal

Okay, I have a bias that I have very little fear of admitting because I am not often proved entirely wrong--I refrain from thinking in conspiratorial terms because perfidy requires competence above and beyond most job specs, and it's easier to assume that when things look hinky, it's because someone was having a bad brain day, or week, or month. There's just no underestimating human intelligence. So when something just looks damn stupid to me, my first instinct is that it must be following the SNAFU principle.  Step one of the test is identifying who has the presumptive upper hand and who is being stupid. If they are one and the same, congratulations--this is a normal situation of up-fuckedness. So, when a bunch of "Old Europe" (as intended by Donald Rumsfeld, not Marija Gimbutas) countries (Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy, I think, were all of them) decided that the plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales probably shouldn't land in any of those countries, but should probably land where it did--Austria? It just looked to me like an authoritarian allergic reaction to comments made by Morales earlier about just maybe thinking of offering asylum to Edward Snowden puffed out into his actually being presumed guilty. Initially embarassing, not overtly hinky.

But mulling over the Die Presse assertion that the claim that Snowden was on Morales' plane actually came from a US official, Amb. to Austria William Eacho, raised a bit of a flag in my head. Is there any reason at all that someone connected to the State Dept would have valid reason to believe Snowden was on that plane? Even if I thought life did sometimes work like a LeCarre thriller, the answer is, "No". Simply, Sheremetyevo is probably staked out to the max and movement from there to the airport Morales left from would probably have to be confirmed before someone would have the brass to assume that Snowden was being transported in the ultimate of Diplomatic Attache cases--a plane carrying a head of state.

To me, this is weird, because of the number of countries involved and that a name of a US official was floated as being the source of the rumor (or rather, since more than a rumor should have been needed--are we saying a firm lead? What should that have been--Interpol? Because like I suspected, Snowden is letting other countries' laundry hang out). But there doesn't look to be any major attempt at corroboration of the one link to the US floating that rumor we have (I suck and am no journalist, I checked Eacho's Twitter profile and Googled him, but mentions of l'affaire Snowden are scarce). And it still seems to me like it would be hella stupid for the US to initiate that kind of pressure--

For one thing, so heavy-handed. It looks totes authoritarian, which we should be trying to avoid right now, you think? Because if the US wanted to not call attention to what Snowden was putting out, "Hey, look over here, we're trying to catch Snowden a lot!" especially after Obama pointed out we wouldn't be scrambling jets after the guy looks a little klutz-fingered.

Also, if you think in terms of whether any action has an equal and opposite reaction (that's just science, peeps), doesn't it seems like doing stop and frisk on a Latin American head of state might just engender the handful of asylum offers that have occurred with Venezuala, Nicaragua, and now Bolivia? You know, to anyone who has ever watched a tv sitcom since the dawn of tv and has heard of the term "reverse psychology? Where something like Snowden's asylum has been almost embarrassingly discouraged and now it seems like the hip y tu mama tambien thing to do?

I dunno. I don't know why folks do what they do. It just bugs me.