Ted Rall’s book Snowden, out this week, could not be debuting at a stranger time for its embattled and controversial author, given the bizarre parallels between his subject’s experiences with state surveillance and his own. In Snowden, Rall chronicles the rise of Edward Snowden as he becomes aware of massive, overreaching state monitoring of our private lives – at the precise moment when secret state surveillance on Rall’s past life would bring his work with the Los Angeles Times to a screeching halt.
But why did Edward Snowden, well-documented in these pages and in the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, need to be captured in cartoon form? Rall’s long-planned project about the NSA whistleblower was a natural for cartooning, he said last week in a phone interview.
“When I read Glenn Greenwald about Snowden,” Rall said, he was overwhelmed by “how complicated the story is”.
Rall believed that the Snowden affair is also “something a YA [Young Adult] audience could get into”. And his book, at 225 pages long, is actually extremely useful even to someone who knows the Snowden story relatively well. Rall clearly lays the story out in a comprehensive, surprisingly enjoyable way, and his signature, colorfully wry figures in text-heavy panels lend a whimsy and absurdity which match Snowden’s saga.
Rall says he was most interested in the subject because Snowden had “a compelling story. I was also really interested in the existential dilemma he faced.” But clearly, it has now struck other chords with him. Rall’s experience with the LAPD (and the relative silence of most of his media colleagues) is not a complete reflection of Snowden’s with the feds, but it has its resemblances.
The book was out of his hands, printed and on its way to bookstores, when Rall realized he, too, was going to face an existential dilemma involving government surveillance. In July, Rall got a phone call from the Los Angeles Times, where for years he’d had “the best gig I ever had” as a cartoonist and blogger, even though, he told me, it only paid $300 a week.
Rall found out he was under investigation by his client about a May blog post he had drawn and written about an encounter he had had in 2001 with the LAPD. The Times believed he had exaggerated or lied about his exchange with the police officer.
Rall was baffled and confused that “an audio tape for my arrest for jaywalking 14 years ago had been slipped surreptitiously to the Los Angeles Times, in order to get me fired because,” he says, police “didn’t like my cartoon”. Yet a few days after he learned about it, Times opinion editor Nicholas Goldberg posted a note saying: “Rall’s future work will not appear in The Times.”
Rall “had no idea” the LAPD cop was audio-taping him at the time of his arrest, and he’s suspicious of the idea that the tape still existed 14 years later. In fact, he doesn’t believe in its authenticity all. He thinks the tape was “spliced and edited”, that the arresting cop “whistled” to manipulate the mic, and that there are “clicks” which show the tape was tampered with. At best, Rall says, the tape is “just a muddled mess” which might not “prove my story, but certainly doesn’t prove theirs”.
Rall compares the tape to the “singing in A Clockwork Orange, which is happening while raping and killing is going on”. Rall had the tape “enhanced” by an audio expert, a process which he says reveals a pedestrian saying “why’d you handcuff him?” and exonerates him of the claim by the Los Angeles Times that he lied about being handcuffed. When we spoke, he was upset that the Times “wouldn’t even look at the new evidence”.
But a few days later, the Times responded publicly, saying it had listened to both versions of the audio, “had two forensic audio experts analyze” them, and it stood by its previous note. Rall has since responded, questioning the motivation of the police and asking for an independent review of the audio – as the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists has also requested.
Rall thinks he was set up by the Los Angeles police union, as a warning shot to journalists who write critical stories about police. “I was easy to get rid of,” Rall says. “I was a contractor. There would be no scene of me cleaning out my desk.”
The intent, Rall believes, was not just to discredit him, but to warn any writer or citizen that he or she could be attacked if an original police report doesn’t match his or her own account. He mentions that “only 1.6%” of LAPD complaints are found by the LAPD to have merit, a figure from an oft-cited academic study from Harvard’s Kennedy School which found that “of the 2,368 complaints the LAPD closed in 2008 that involved an allegation of discourtesy, 39 (1.6%) were sustained”. The odds of any one citizen’s memory of a bad encounter with the LAPD matching the department’s own report are pretty slim.
Rall’s story lines up with his book’s account about Snowden in the effect both stories have as chilling tools. State surveillance, and the punishment which surrounds it, silences critics of a police state. In Snowden’s case, the whistleblower fears so much for his freedom that he has remained outside the United States since he let the public know about the breadth of US spying on its own citizens. He was demonized by much of the traditional media. For exposing the massive surveillance state, Snowden’s reward, if he were to return home, would probably be no better than that of Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced to 35 years in prison for whistleblowing and who was threatened with solitary confinement in connection with banned reading material and expired toothpaste.
Rall’s fate may not ultimately be as dramatic as Snowden’s. But he, too, has heard the warning in these stories about the costs paid by whistleblowers. And he’s right: there is something “weird” about the way, in his case: “The police walk[ed] said tape over to a newspaper in an attempt to get a cartoonist known for not liking cops fired.”
