Freedom under law but for whom?

The betrayal of Nelson Mandela's legacy becomes ever more complete and further proof that freedom fighters who become national leaders are like the girl with the curl in her hair - when they are good, they are very, very good; when they are bad, they are awful.  On the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, South Africa's government blocked its judiciary and allowed indicted war criminal Omar al-Bashir of Sudan to fly home after attending an African Union summit.  South African freedom has been gradually eroded under first Thabo Mbeki and now (especially) Jacob Zuma, moving from de facto one-party state to de jure.
There is a grievance among African countries (or at least the elites who run them) that the International Criminal Court only targets malefactors from their continent, ignoring the fact the court was a direct response to trials of Balkan individuals for their role in atrocities during the disintegration of Yugoslavia, trying to make justice applicable to the world.  It also has Bashar al-Assad on its watchlist.  But these are mere blandishments to the likes of Zuma, who closed ranks with fellow autocrats at the AU, which used to be called the Organisation of African Unity or, in shorthand, the Dicators' Club.  It seems little has changed.

On another note yesterday, Glenn Greenwald gave a robust defence of Edward Snowden and his actions after weekend revelations that American and British spies were in jeopardy after Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies cracked (at least some of) the documents that Snowden took with him.  Greenwald said first of all that any files Snowden did take have already been disseminated to global media organisations and there was no evidence he had any more files on him.  The Sunday Times article was bad journalism because it took the word of anonymous government figures without questioning it, Greenwald went on.  Why did Russia give asylum to Snowden - to needle America of course.  But when questioned that there was no moral equivalence between Russia and the West. Greenwald blew it, lapsing into the juvenile anti-Americanism that is frequently a staple of The Guardian for whom he sometimes works.  Saying that Russia hasn't destroyed a country of 26 million in Iraq was foolish, illustrating a mindset stuck in 2003 and for whom the clock can never move on.  I was surprised he didn't reference Grenada in 1983 or the Vietnam War.  If your mindset is that rigid, it raises questions about your judgement.  And anyway, has he not been watching the news for the last seven years.  Russia has thrown in turmoil a country of 52 million in Ukraine, not to mention ravaging a country of 3.7 million in Georgia in 2008.  Then he said Russia didn't carry out illegal drone strikes but Russia doesn't need to when it can gun down its opponents in the street or deny them vital medical treatment when arrested on trumped-up charges.  Greenwald said Russi a didn't practice extraordinary rendition and dump its foes on "an island in the middle of the Atlantic - Guantanamo Bay."  Well, I wonder how all of Cuba likes being referred to as akin to St Helena but also Russia has a vast land ocean called Siberia and Greenwald doesn't know how the FSB (the KGB's successor) operates.  For Greenwald, if you're not the USA, you must be on the side of the angels and such a binary worldview is demagogic, unhelpful and untrue.  The interviewer on the Today programme didn't press him on this as it wasn't pertinent to the discussion but it undermined Greenwald's entire credibility.