Glenn Greenwald: It's 'Irrational to blame Paris terrorism on Snowden

Glenn Greenwald called claims that Edward Snowden was to blame for last week's attacks in Paris "unbelievably irrational" in a conversation with HuffPost Live on Monday.

The Snowden confidant said that he's not surprised by attempts to link Snowden to the terror in Paris because doing so redirects blame that should be placed on intelligence agencies. Greenwald explained:

If you think about who's actually trying to convince people to blame [Snowden], it's current and former officials at the CIA, the NSA and other government agencies. And if you think about their predicament, these are people who receive billions and billions of dollars every year in American taxpayer money and have been vested with enormous radical authorities ... and they have only one mission, and their mission is to find terror plots. And so when they fail miserably in their job and dozens of people die, as just happened in Paris, of course they're petrified that people are going to look to them and say, 'Why did you fail in your job?' So what they want to do is point the finger at other people and say, 'Oh, don't think about us, don't look at us, don't ask why we failed even though we have all this money. Look over there are Edward Snowden, it's his fault.'

Greenwald added that the world's history of terror attacks is proof that it doesn't make sense to accuse Snowden of teaching the attackers in Paris how to evade surveillance.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/glenn-greenwald-irrational-to-blame-snowden-leaks-for-paris-terrorists_564b4005e4b08cda348a7d00