Widely-replicated photo by Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch showing Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, and a Russian interpreter at a meeting with lawyers and human rights activists at Sheremetyevo Airport in July 2013.

Human Rights Watch used to know the difference between defectors and dissidents.

They've lost touch with this essential knowledge inherent in the human rights activist's vocation now that they've gone overboard to embrace Edward Snowden and his cause as a just one — converting him from an unethical hacker to a human rights defender. (They don't have a case).

It was essential knowledge precisely because ill-willed oppressive states always claimed human rights work was a form of spying and sabotage. You know, the way Vladimir Putin is now calling thousands of innocent NGOs in Russia "foreign agents" and demanding they register as such if they engage in vaguely-defined "political activity". That's why, you know, you keep these concepts straight.

HRW didn't used to sacrifice these crucial distinctions for the sake of  hipster holier-than-thou posturing between the super-powers. When I worked for Human Rights Watch 27 years ago, and I went to the JFK airport to receive and help Dr. Yuri Orlov, a physicist and political prisoner who was exchanged for a Soviet spy, HRW knew the difference between human rights activism and espionage, and made every effort to keep the cases separate. They understood that spying and disclosure of state secrets weren't human rights activism and publicizing violations — they didn't take up Philip Agee, the CIA defector to Russia of that era, as some kind of human rights hero.

Today, this organization has lurched to the left and completely lost its way. This is not about international refugee law — if all the parties involved in this circus at the airport were sincere, they would have let the UNHCR quietly handle Snowden and make a determination about his eligibility and sought a country to take him. They would have — as in fact Russia's respected human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin suggested — worked out the case with Russian authorities, as is appropriate for a state that has signed the refugee convention. But that wasn't WikiLeaks' script in coopting the human rights movement, nor the script of the human rights groups eager to be coopted by hackers in the name of their independence from states, good or bad.

In fact, WikiLeaks pulled off quite a coup by exploiting both this vanity, and the fact that HRW's Tanya Lokshina managed to snap a few cell-phone photos  of Snowden before his WikiLeaks minder told everyone to stop taking photos. She posted her shots on Twitter, and every news agency in the universe for ever more is using this latest photo of Snowden, with the byline of Human Rights Watch right underneath it, as if they somehow endorse him. That's the frame. And that's no accident.

Just as Amnesty International shouldn't have appeared on the same platform with Moazzam Begg of Cageprisoners, so Human Rights Watch shouldn't have appeared on the same platform with the defector Snowden and Sarah Harrison, representative of WikiLeaks which has in fact harmed people's human rights. They shouldn't have allowed themselves to be hijacked that way. They can affirm the rights of asylum-seekers and call on UNHCR and the Russian government to perform their obligations — end of story. No need for charades.

I do hope some of these arbitrarily-adopted notions of the international justice jet-set will get some testing in reality in Congress during the confirmation hearing of Tom Malinowski, Human Rights Watch's advocacy director. Senators should ask why this nominee for a position as the State Department's human rights voice can defend the White House's position that Snowden is not a human rights activist but a wanted felon, even as his group calls Snowden a hero for his expose.

Ken Roth, executive director of HRW, made it clear that he believes Snowden to be a human rights advocate. The statement that HRW issued in New York and recited in Moscow states unequivocally that they believe that Snowden has uncovered human rights violations — making him an advocate for human rights.

They've deliberately — and mischievously — decided in advance without any evidence or any substantiated reports of their own — that Snowden deserves asylum — and that the entirely dishonest actor Russia must give it to him because Snowden ostensibly faces "a well-founded fear of persecution" at home.

(HRW can sneakily pretend to take a literalist position on their notion of excessive punishment, and then align-themselves cost-free with the hordes of Internet "progressives" and radicals who think hacking is just and constantly pressure human rights liberals to bless their cause.)

Invoking the fake bugabear of the US as a source of persecution of Edward really doesn't fly, because neither he nor WikiLeaks have ever been able to explain why he didn't fly to Venezuela in the first place and make his revelations from there, instead of first going to China's territory of Hong Kong — knowing China is the leading hacker of America, and giving them aid & comfort, then going to Russia, the leading source of cyberattacks on Europe, to help them by his very presence.

Human Rights Watch knows full well — on the eve of the confirmation of Tom Malinowski, their advocacy director currently nominated by President Obama for the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, Democracy and Labor — that they've played politics a little too close to the flame here. (Possibly the counterspin is a last-ditch effort to prevent any harsh questioning of Tom on Snowden; innoculate themselves against Putin's persecution they've already experienced; possibly in some intricate intramural conniptions to establish their future independence from the Obama Administration).

So they've been spinning backwards on their own lesser-viewed website even as Pokempner gets the real mindshare on this issue MSNBC and the retweets.

Caroll Bogert, a former correspondent in Newsweek's Moscow bureau, and long time public relations and media manager for Human Rights Watch, has written a somewhat sarcastic "Russian language primer" for Snowden, to try to create some distance between his seeming lack of awareness of the realities of Russia's vicious human rights crackdown, and his, um, noble cause of "revealing human rights violations" by the NSA and running with WikiLeaks, that expert at how to evade the notorious NSA.

That's so that when even board members complain — some of whom are most definitely raising their eyebrows at this media circus HRW has indulged in with Snowden in Moscow — HRW can point to Bogert's piece and say that they have balanced their saddle bags. HRW is all about endlessly balancing the saddle bags…even if it means one report on a country in a region is only 10 pages, and the other is 100….

Then there's Rachel Denber's statements for the wire services for good measure,

“Edward Snowden should be allowed to get asylum wherever he thinks he can be safe,” said Rachel Denber, Human Rights Watch’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia. “His rights should be respected.” But she warned, “Russia is in the midst of the most intense, fierce crackdown on human rights since the end of the Soviet era. It’s across the board, on a whole range of civil and political rights.

It has always been the case — and remains most definitely so! — that when it comes to human rights flight and Russia and the United States, there's a Texas seven-lane-highway going out, and a cowpath going in.  HRW knows that. That's why their adoption of a defector — not a human rights hero — and a claim that he has no other choice but abusive Russia — is pure politics — and a politics whose end game is unclear.

Regarding Snowden's flight into the arms of Russian intelligence, which most definitely has him under control, HRW's legal counsel seems to speak directly at odds with the media relations person explaining Russian reality. On MSNBC yesterday in a debate with former NSA analyst John Schindler, Dinah Pokempner opines about Snowden's lurch to Moscow,  "His choice is not especially insane."

Her Moscow staff, barely hanging on to permission to keep HRW's Moscow office open, might put it otherwise – but whistleblowers about the internal doings of human rights organizations and their contradictions to their own ideals is something you never, ever see — you will see it from Turkmenistan sooner than you'll see it from Watchistan, 350 Fifth Avenue, 34th floor.

"The US government has driven him to Russia," intones Pokempner. Really, Dinah? And the reason he didn't stay in Hong Kong — better off, rights-wise, than Russia is…what? and the reason he originally back in May didn't fly  with his booty to Ecuador or Venezuela…is why? And…if Human Rights Watch really, really thinks that Snowden has uncovered human rights violations, can't he get a fair trial in the US with all kinds of help from HRW and ACLU and the best lawyers in the business and prove this?

And finally: he couldn't embody the courage of his convictions and face his punishment like a man in a place that I think we will all agree in 10 years will seem far preferable to the prison of Russia?

The diplomatic assurances that the US provided that it would not subject Snowden to torture  — in fact standard in these cases for all countries and not just show-boating — were given in good faith. After all, the US government is not to blame for this hacker and his dramatic flight; it merely had poor quality-control on its sub-contracted "infrastructure analysis" and obviously didn't hold Snowden's hand and make him hack because he was too lazy to do the kind of painstaking human rights work for which HRW is famous.

WikiLeaks did. For allying themselves with this unscrupulous and thoroughly discredited radical group, HRW should be deeply ashamed. I know that I personally experience deep revulsion.

Chris Hayes objects to Schindler's serious warnings about WikiLeaks by jauntily responding that he is "imbuing them with power they don't have".

Oh, really? While we get it that WikiLeaks is a dwindling, unkempt band of psychopathic and meglomaniac hackers and their cowed cult-follower myrmidons, they really did — with the help of Russia along the way and likely a number of other bad actors — bring the State Department to its knees during Cablegate, harmed sources, and made it hugely difficult for the US to perform its much-needed quiet diplomacy in a dangerous world. Now it has thrown the NSA on its ear and forced — coercively, without really finding facts — a vote in the Congress that came very close to paralyzing national security further. Untold, rolling damage continues to unfold, and the result is likely to make the liberal government of the US not more open, but more closed. But that was always the way that the Leninist Assange liked it — "the worse, the better," so he could discredit the US as being unlike its ideals, while holding forth on his own TV show paid for by the Kremlin.

Human rights group lawfarers are naturally not good at determining what is a reasonable level of national security to sustain, because it will always be too much for them and they don't really have to bear the consequences high above in the Empire State Building. That's because they imagine that liberal and reasonable law-invoking folks like themselves will get to stay in charge, and not the sinister cyberspace revolutionaries who have exploited them — or the far more evil states who crush such people at home without compunction.