President Barack Obama meets with members of the civil society at the
Crowne Plaza Hotel, during the G20 Summit in Saint Petersburg, Russia,
Sept. 6, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama should never have gone to the G20 meeting in St. Petersburg given the mass crime against humanity committed by Russia's ally Syria — with its considerable help ($1 billion in aid and constant political support at the UN, including a veto on ANY action on the atrocities in Syria).

If Obama couldn't muster the other 19 leaders to go somewhere else, he could lower the US representation at the meeting as a sign of approval or simply not come — after all, Putin has done the same thing himself to the US. Obama at least absorbed enough of the lesson  of how you deal with Russia when he agreed to cancel the Moscow summit — but even going on Putin's territory was a mistake — nothing was accomplished at the G20 meeting in persuading the Kremlin to release its deadly cling of the mass-murdering tyrant Assad.

Human Rights Watch, which has been fairly low-key on Russia (believing it is one of those countries with a government you "work with" and "engage") never called for boycotts of the G20 or stern lectures but merely suggested going and raising issues and meeting with human rights activists. Human Rights First suggested having a special meeting with gay activists. It was if these visitations to the sick of Russia, so to speak, would be a replacement for facing the need to cure the disease itself more radically.

So just as in the Soviet era, when American and Soviet leaders would discuss matters of life or death in nuclear war and the Kremlin would be placated with grain sales or arms talks while the American would host a luncheon of dissidents at the Embassy to soothe their consciences on human rights, so in our time, a meeting of "dissidents on a platter" (as we used to call these highly choreographed events in the 1980s) was organized in St. Petersburg.

Regretably, some of the seasoned older human rights defenders working on the hard core issues of prisons, torture, migrants, refugees, and the crackdown on NGOs — namely Lev Ponomarev, Svetlana Gannushkina and Ludmila Alexeyeva — could not come to the meeting when the schedule was changed several times. Understandably, a president trying to organize a world response on the Syrian crisis and needing to use the G20 meeting to accomplish some of this is going to have a schedule that changes. Many of the human rights leaders are in Moscow, which is an overnight train ride away from St. Petersburg.

Gannushkina, a leader on migration issues, had another urgent matter having to do with cases she had long worked on and couldn't make the time switch; she wrote an open letter to Obama about her concerns about migrants in Russia and also urged him to refrain from ordering the bombing of Syria so as not to create more refugees. The others also made statements of concern.

Make no mistake about it: as the Novaya Gazeta report indicates, these are by and large good people who do good work. They include Yevgeniya Chirikova, an environmentalist famous for trying to save the Khimki forest; Pavel Chikov, head of Agora, a lawyer who has registered NGOs and tried to protect them from the government's crackdown; Yelena Milashina, an investigative journalist at Novaya Gazeta, and others. (It seems there were only 9 in total, but it's hard to tell from news photos whether there were two meetings, one a separate one on LGBT). I'm sure all of them did their best to articulate their issues for Obama –and he was said to be "energized" from the meeting.

But the setting the Russians are in is one of terrible pressure and cooptation, and I think it is likely that even the very well-informed American ambassador, who has these activists for dinner all the time and visits their offices, and the people themselves don't even see, something like frogs in boiling water.

We who observe Russia from overseas are often blasted for not "being there" when it comes to all things Russian. Nowadays, you don't have to worry about "being there" and going to Russia because Russia comes to you — large numbers of people are leaving, and prominent journalists and opposition leaders are forced into exile now abroad. There are no shortage of fresh travelers to tell you the news first-hand from Bolotnaya Square.

I assumed that this meeting, while perhaps not ideal with the most seasoned people or the hardest-core issues given the cancellations — a chronic occurrence in all bilateral US-Russian meetings for reasons I've blogged about many times before — would at least "wave the flag" on the main problems — LGBT persecution, mistreatment of migrants, the crackdown on NGOs, etc. And certainly some of that was done and these people got an important "blessing" from the leader of the free world that hopefully will make it harder for the FSB to fuck with them – which it has had no qualms about doing when Russians tell their human rights problems to foreigners, as they've done at the UN Committee Against Torture — harassing and threatening people with the dreaded designation "foreign agent" merely because they spoke at a meeting about human rights in Geneva (and that very issue came up in the meeting).

But I'm sorry, some things went terribly wrong  in this meeting, and it has to be called out. I'm well aware that Amb. McFaul himself feels very differently about it, as do the participants. I don't care. I'm well aware that scorn will be heaped on me for "making rash judgements on partial information on Twitter", or for "not being there"

Because none of that matters and in fact I got the story very much in spades in these exchanges documented here.

I've been reluctant for some years to articulate what many speak of privately — and increasingly — that the human rights movement in Russia has been coopted and that in dealing with it, we are dealing with a manipulated situation and have to take that into account.

The first sign of trouble I could see from the article in Novaya Gazeta, where the Russians themselves raise the Manning/Snowden "whistleblower" issue as if it is some grand new international drama that "we must all work on" — a tactic that some have chosen to become more "relevant" and attractive to easily distracted foreigners, some have cunningly chosen to distract from internal problems and others have staged outright provocations around hoping that the "halo effect" of human rights and people doing actual good work will prevent anyone from ever noticing and criticizing it.

And that's just it. You can't always tell the difference. The managed democracy manhandlers involved in influencing this meeting form the Russian intelligence services basically have a deadly but effective formula going now. They don't have to actually "be there" or have "plants" or "their people" in the meeting as GONGOs, although they might have been.

They can seed even among decent people who do good work the idea that there is some "international privacy issue we must all care about" or that "Snowden has started an important international conversation for us all" and not take the harsh Russian realities on their own terms as emanating from government oppression, not the failure of the US to be "a model."

The entire orchestrated circus at Sheremetyevo existed to that end — to have Snowden meet *and be accepted by* both international and Russian human rights groups and lawyers and convert what was a Kremlin-instigated defection from the get-go into a "whistleblowing" case.

I view all this as particularly grave and disturbing — it's like the political and philosophical equivalent of taking human shields in battle. You can't criticize it without dinging the decent people — and indeed, when you criticize it, some of them howl and you are indignantly accused of failing to see "good people doing good work." It's very, very cunningly done — and done by the past masters at this sort of simulation of civil society.

But I think it's so important to expose that this is going on, and so important to get people away from this cunning distraction back to looking at the real domestic issues of Russia that I really don't care if in the process I'm denounced as "blaming colleagues" (as one of the Russians has already denounced me) or if in anger Amb. McFaul unfollows me and even blocks me on Twitter (which he has done — the online equivalent  of a shun and a banning from the State Department building).

As you can see, the first problem is the double talking I got when I asked some very basic questions.

Just look at them!

First I'm told that it was the Russians who raised Manning by McFaul; then I'm told that it was Obama who raised these issues by the Russian lawyer in the meeting. Well, which is it guys? I actually believed McFaul, for various reasons, but it turned out to be both — soon the Russian lawyer was admitting that one of their side had raised Manning (and as I was told later, it was in that faux pious way that may be consciously or unconsciously imbibed from internationals who say the case "makes their work more difficult" — this is that phony notion that if the US for a moment fails to be a paragon of light, why, the Kremlin tells hapless human rights lawyers in their clutches that they have no reason to be good now — as if virtue wasn't able to be practiced except bilaterally and in tandem.)

Then as I got into it with Chirov, it emerged that 30 entire minutes of the meeting were taken up by Obama.

I'm not surprised — given that first he gave a rather vapid speech without specifically naming one hard human rights case — no LGBT heads bloodied, no Pussy Riot or Khodorkovsky or Bolotnaya demonstrators in jail; no migrants beaten and intimidated. Just vague notions of "freedom of media" and "freedom of assembly" (and at least these got mentioned).

As the Novaya Gazeta article explains, Obama felt he had to explain how he, well, sort of went off track with the reset — he had thought that by adopting large issues to cooperate with the Russian government on, like fighting terrorism or seeking reduction of nuclear weapons, why, human rights would be pulled along on its own.

I don't know who or what ever gave him that assanine notion — that the automagical tide of bilateralism was supposed to raise all civil society boats. It was only a disaster — the US-Russian working group finally got disbanded, thank God but it should never have been formed in the first place — the Russians do not act in good faith, ever.

In any event, a lot of mass hysteria and confusion have occurred over the Manning and Snowden cases — and have had a lot of help from RT, the Kremlin Internet and cable TV propaganda station that has adopted American hackers assaulting the US government and corporate world with a passion as part of an overall Kremlin strategy to weaken America so it can indulge in its zero-sum game of strength.

So it's important to have our heads on straight about all this.

o Manning is not a whistleblower — she is a convicted felon sentenced to 35 years for theft and disclosure of US classified files in the WikiLeaks caper. This sentence isn't a function of "lack of protection for whistleblowers" as Ken Roth and other Human Rights Watch executives keep babbling without any basis, research, or findings of their own, let alone judicial rulings. Such protections exist and Manning didn't avail herself of them — just like she never availed herself of cooperation with real newspapers with professional journalists like the New York Times, as Daniel Ellsberg did in his day, but chose a conspiratorial anarchist collective formed through a club in Germany which once hacked the US for the KGB.

Trust me, if Manning really conscientiously found wrongs in the military or in our government, I most definitely wouldn't have a problem supporting an effort to right them — I spent years criticizing the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and particularly in recent years, the adverse affect on human rights in Central Asia from the Northern Distribution Network which has made us so beholden to Russia, and issues like drones and civilian deaths.

But as a human rights activist, I could see right away that the Leninist "the worse, the better" with which both she and Assange operated was not out of the human rights handbook. Indeed, the very case that Manning said caused her to decide to revolt and hack the files in the military's SIPRINET was a case of what she saw as an unfair arrest of Iraqis running a printing press that only printed pamphlets exposing corruption. I fastened on that single case and looked for it in WikiLeaks — I couldn't find it, ever. It was never published, and that let me know how insincere these people were.

To my astonishment, during Manning's trial, she said that Assange had rejected her request to publish it, saying it wasn't important. Imagine. Wrongful arrest of printing press operators? Really? Was that because we might find out they weren't just that, but terrorist? Or what? And why didn't Manning insist, if she were a whistleblower? She simply isn't; it's about anarchism, not restoring the rule of law.

o By the same token Edward Snowden is no whistleblower, either — cooperating with some very bad actors bent on anarchist havoc like Jacob Appelbaum of WikiLeaks about whom I've written extensively at my other blog. Even Mother Jones gets it by now that Snowden isn't just exposing privacy violations; he is engaging in espionage in favour of China and Russia.

There is every indication that the Russian intelligence agencies engineered Snowden's flight and defection, if not his original hack, or even WikiLeaks itself. Certainly we now have amply evidence of how much WikiLeaks is in the tank with the Kremlin, and Russian human rights activists have no excuse not knowing this.

Just as Manning and Assange threw overboard the Iraqi printing press operators they pretended to care about as ostensible victims of American evil — illustrating how it's not about human rights — so Snowden has never come up with one single case of someone harmed by all these hysterical hypotheticals he has claimed are abused by the NSA — except indirectly, a "suspected hacker's girlfriend" who he claims had her cell phone tapped while in Europe. He never says who it is; we can't check.

In the welter of technical data spewn out by the Snowden affair, it's easy to be intimidated and get lost in "the hall of mirrors that is the interwebs."

But the bottom line is this: Snowden didn't start with actual cases of people wrongfully snooped on, wrongfully put under surveillance, unjustly victimized by FISA courts or intrusions of privacy — he has no concrete cases and neither do his various handlers starting with Glenn Greenwald. Instead, he and they invoke hysterical hypothetics — potentials or vulnerabilities to abuse that in fact in the days since this outrageous hack, government officials as well as industry experts and the more honest journalists have explained are not the horrors this very tendentious bunch from WikiLeaks have claimed. There are no cases.

Just like I didn't hear any cases mentioned in St. Petersburg. Human rights is made of people — cases. I didn't hear any names.

I didn't hear the name of Anna Politkovskaya who was murdered for her work at Novaya Gazeta. Would it have been so hard to weave names like hers into Obama's otherwise vapid opening speech? It had no names.

I didn't hear the name of Masha Gessen, a prominent journalist and gay leader who announced that she is forced to leave Russia now because of statements by the government that gay parents will not be allowed to have adopted children live with them — she has one adopted child.

I didn't hear the name of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose case has been emblematic of unfair imprisonment and persecution of the business sector.

I didn't hear the names of Pussy Riot, the band of women who got draconian sentences for their "punk prayer" in protest in a Russian Orthodox Church.

I didn't hear the names of Tajiks and Azeris who have been beaten, or had their stalls overturned, or even been the victim of hate murders in a wave of anti-migrant violence.

Instead, I only heard the name of two hacker thugs — Snowden and Manning. This is really a travesty, I'm sorry. You're worried about privacy for your Facebook cat pictures when children in Syria have given up privacy forever, their little bodies stacked like cordwood followed chemical weapons attacks?

I'm sure the good people in the meeting felt that by raising issues they are getting at cases. But it really isn't the same. You have to name names.

The info policy hipsters sitting in that room had no business bleating about "mass surveillance" or "privacy" in some manipulated fake internationalized way when Pavel Durov's very business VKontakte was subjected to a thuggish government-backed takeover of some of the shares, and VKontakte itself is down today during elections all over the country in what many suspect is an attempt to prevent the opposition from reporting it.

There are zillions of people in the world to worry about every hair on Manning's little head — she has lawyers, support groups, lawsuits, requests for presidential pardons — that it really is an obscenity in Russia to be "internationalizing" the issue and not talking about Russia.

But it's about calling out what is really going on here: cooptation by a cunning Putin who has gotten everyone distracted from the distraction that has become the managed-democracy human rights movement.

Once again — the people in this meeting do good and important and
selfless work. It's not about an unwillingness to see the torch go from
an older generation who picked up hard-core issues like torture in the GULAG to a
newer generation that picks up more hipster issues like "Internet privacy".

But…No one who calls themselves a human rights defender should be remaining on the presidential human rights council. If Pavel Chirov thinks this helps groups under his wing stay registered and out of jail, then he should think again of the consequences of such "refuge" in the long run. The atrocities in Syria — about which the Russian intelligentsia has had almost nothing to say to their own government  (at least Gannushkina called on Obama not to bomb Syria and create more refugees!) — alone are a reason not to associate with any Russian government structure of this nature.

All of the human rights groups should be calling for an effective response regarding Syria and other massive human rights problems instigated by Putin — such as the massive waves of arrests and torture and killings in Dagestan, where even the police themselves report on torture in their precincts and the murders of their own officers, and elsewhere in the Caucasus. That efffective response in my view is a boycott of the Sochi Olympics — something Russian groups fearing politics and backlash don't wish to do.

Well, then they can call on the leader of the free world to send lesser representation — not every head of state attends. They can do that much. There are other ideas for what you can recommend to Obama once you realize it *is* your job to leverage such influence as he has for good inside Russia.

I'm filled with deep dismay about what happened in St. Petersburg — about how people, some of whom I considered colleagues, are behaving under ugly state pressure; about how our ambassador poorly managed that situation, and how our president could sit in a room of people working on issues he can't even begin to imagine that actually stem from communism's mass crimes against humanity, which he never seemed to care about in his youthful infatuation with the socialist movements in America — an infatuation still reflected in bizarre programs like turning the Soviet propaganda slogan of 1982 — "no first use of nuclear weapons" — into actual US policy today.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter what I say about this, what matters is what genuine activists are saying in Russia. And what they are saying — if we get past the "community organizing" and "massive surveillance and Snowden" scrum is that Obama has to speak out more directly and forcefully:

Igor Kochetkov, the head of LGBT Network, who took part in the protest
and also attended the meeting with Obama, said the activists pushed him
to be more outspoken in his criticism of the rights situation in Russia.

"We asked him to be more open while assessing the human rights situation in other countries, including Russia," Kochetkov said.

He
praised Obama for sending a "clear signal that it's impossible to
discuss the human rights situation without discussing the problems faced
by LGBT." ''The rise of xenophobia, homophobia and anti-Western
sentiments in Russia are inter-connected," Kochetkov said.

Kochetkov
added that the participants appreciated Obama's candor, his
acknowledgement that "he's not a superman who can come and fix
everything."

Once again: Russian activists are squeezed hard by their own government now precisely on the issue of looking to the US in any way, accepting any aid from the US, or even seeing the US as any kind of beacon of freedom in the world — to do so is to be branded as a "foreign agent" and that can mean jail time.

They understandably have to play this game in their circumstances.

We don't have to.