Snowden Releases A Statement…Probably Not…

Maybe just a little too close to Assange, almost as though Assange or his lover, Sarah Harrison, wrote it…

Via WaPo:

Within minutes of Edward Snowden releasing his first statement after eight days of silence, published on Wikileaks’ website, a number of journalists and others noticed something strange.

The language in the statement, between accusations that the Obama administration was employing “political aggression” and feared “an informed, angry public,” seemed to betray a tinge of non-American English. It was this line that first jumped out: “For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum.” As Slate’s Farhad Manjoo pointed out on Twitter, Americans refer to the United States as singular, rather than plural: one would expect Snowden, an American, to write “the United States of America has been.”

Alone, that wouldn’t seem to say much. But there were other details, such as the date on the letter, appended as “1st July 2013″ rather than the typical American style. But maybe most eyebrow-raising of all is the statement’s fiery tone and dramatic cadence. “Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum,” the statement reads, a far cry from the straightforward, plainspoken voice Snowden has used in all other public comments.

The statement’s tone and word choice seems conspicuously similar to that of Julian Assange, the Australian and Wikileaks chief who has developed a reputation for his extremely distinctive writing style.

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The one I saw was this as well:

“Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right.”

That is also an odd construction for a 29 year old American; we would say “stop me FROM exercising a basic right”.

Of course, once this began to be questioned, WikiLeaks amended the statement to change the most egregious error re: the use of the plural with “United States of America”.

If he isn’t writing his own statements, one has to wonder about who is really running the show here, and what his condition is.