Thread: Edward Snowden and his stay in Russia

Originally Posted by Deborski

My cousin was CIA. Shortly after he retired he was in an "accident" which left him brain-damaged. He used to speak fluent Russian, but recently I tried to speak with him in Russian and he could no longer put a sentence together. Trust me on this: Snowden will NEVER be safe from US authorities.

My suggestion for Snowden before he goes "sight-seeing" would be to find a really good plastic surgeon.

I was more worried about Snowden learning too much about Russia. Even if he wouldn't give anymore secrets away, if somebody caught him they could interrogate him.
And yeah, I think he should get a new face and new ID and stuff. If somebody does catch him then they won't care what other Americans think. They will just put him in prison, torture him, and then have a show trial. If they don't kill him first.

Originally Posted by Hanna

Sigh.... Throwing the toys out of the pram... I hope Russia is cooler than taking notice:

PressTV - US Senate mulling sanctions against Russia over Snowden

Yeah, that's what our country does to control other countries. The best thing Russia could do is just find other countries to trade with. Don't give in to the dark side! That leads to McDonald's hamburgers!

They don't stand a chance. The elite in the USA wants surveillance. Keep tabs on "terrorists" and any other potential troublemakers... Lord knows what they'll use it for in the future.

And they've got 100s of TV channels, the Hollywood establishment and most written media and radio behind them. Spreading their relentless message not just in the USA but around the globe.

What chance does a lone senator have against that?

They've already turned the US public against Snowden.

On privacy; in the UK and the USA we are marching at a fast pace towards 1984. Here in the UK you notice it everywhere; CCTV, constant checks of credit history, criminal history, security checks.

And all the other West allied countries are busy falling in line and lapping up the latest gospel from the USA via the "free" media.

Seriously, nothing short of a popular revolution could stop the new world order now. It's just around the corner.

Just the food for thought: it seems that the US goverment has suddenly changed its mind and now proposes to give him the temporary passport immediately, so he can return home.
But what is awaiting him there?

Originally Posted by DrBaldhead

Just the food for thought: it seems that the US goverment has suddenly changed its mind and now proposes to give him the temporary passport immediately, so he can return home.
But what is awaiting him there?

"Abandon all hope" waits for him there

America's latest strategy is to try to undermine Snowden's asylum claim by saying that he wouldn't be tortured or executed. That he is eligible for a "limited" US passport, so hence, there is no reason for Russia to give him political asylum. Talk about false representation and pathetically grasping for straws!

And in that case they have some explanation to do in regards to Manning and the Guantanamo prisoners, many of whom are guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, following the wrong religion... Also, since Russia doesn't even practice the death penalty one can wonder on what grounds the US gives political asylum to Russian citizens, which is not unusual.

The United States' word is not worth more than loo paper when it come to politics, and their promises are either not kept at all, or have a short expiry date.

No trick or attempt at manipulation seems to be too low to get their hands on Snowden.
All the more reason for Russia not to cave in.

I don't give a rotten blueberry for Putin's public comments on this so far, but I'd love to hear what he says privately about this.

By coincidence, Putin's now going through divorce, so the one who wants to hear his "private words" about that issue has a unique chance to do so

Lol! And yeah, people here lie about everything and politicians are Pro Liars. The best liars always get the best jobs.
This is like the game "chess" and I'm sure that this is what's happening:

1. If they could convince the Russian government that Snowden isn't an "Asylum" case, then they could remove a lot of Snowden's protection.
2. If that worked, then our government could use the limited passport to convince Snowden to come home.
3. If that worked, then they arrest him and put him in a civilian jail with a lawyer.
4. Then the military demands that Snoden be turned over to them.
5. Then the government has a special hearing about that.
6. The military wins.
7. Snowden gets moved to a military prison and gets tortured and maybe even killed.

But our country has routinely ignored Russia's requests for extradition of all Russian criminals. So Snowden still stays in Russia.
Imo, Snowden is not dangerous to the USA. He made a lot of leaks but nothing has really changed that much. The government still makes agreements with other countries. We still had eggs, sausages, and waffles this morning and we will still go horseback riding tomorrow. So did it hurt anything? All it did was make the politicians work instead of playing golf, lol! Work is healthy.

Btw, Crime and Punishment was the perfect book for Snowden. He reminds me of Raskolnikov. Well, except with more money.

Originally Posted by UhOhXplode

Btw, Crime and Punishment was the perfect book for Snowden. He reminds me of Raskolnikov. Well, except with more money.

And the US is the old lady?

Apparently Russia's stated that it "never extradites anyone". Good!

(I can't even describe how disappointed 'd be with Russia if it extradited Snowden. It would fall a mile in my estimation.
If he is extradited so Putin can maintain his relationship with the "American partners" then Russia is no longer a country I take seriously.)

It's been fully established that the USA tortures people, including at times, it's own citizens, but particularly citizens of other countries.
What a rotten lie to claim anything else! The USA has given political asylum to a number of Russian ex employees of security services, like that tiresome man who's always in American news, forgotten the name.

I am certainly not saying that Russia is a perfect country. No doubt there are all sorts of quesetions the leadership should answer. However, Russia is not holding itself up as a judge of other countries' integrity, it does not presume to say which countries are "evil" and it isn't preaching freedom and democracy to the world while invading nations and keeping bases across the globe.
So Russia is at least less of a liar and hypocrite in its foreign polcy.

Who knows, maybe Snowden can become a part of society in Russia and start supporting change in areas like corruption, in Russia.

Originally Posted by UhOhXplode

Btw, Crime and Punishment was the perfect book for Snowden. He reminds me of Raskolnikov. Well, except with more money.

Haha, he's been reading that at the airport? Stylish choice. With the amount of time he's had there by now, he should have been able to make it through quite a few of the Russian classics. Hope he realises that he'd better get on with the language studies!

Originally Posted by Hanna

America's latest strategy is to try to undermine Snowden's asylum claim by saying that he wouldn't be tortured or executed. That he is eligible for a "limited" US passport, so hence, there is no reason for Russia to give him political asylum.

I think he didn't ask for asylum but rather for temporary asylum. If I understand correctly these are two very different things from legal point of view
It is much easier to get temporary asylum in terms of time and substantiations but at the same time you are very limited in your rights in particular country that grants you the temporary asylum

Originally Posted by Hanna

(I can't even describe how disappointed 'd be with Russia if it extradited Snowden. It would fall a mile in my estimation.
If he is extradited so Putin can maintain his relationship with the "American partners" then Russia is no longer a country I take seriously.)[/I]

Big words
Why don't you start with Sweden that collects fingerprints or the UK with their multiple "Security" and "Terrorism" acts, collecting DNA samples etc.?
Eventually you will run out of countries

Originally Posted by Doomer

I think he didn't ask for asylum but rather for temporary asylum. If I understand correctly these are two very different things from legal point of view
It is much easier to get temporary asylum in terms of time and substantiations but at the same time you are very limited in your rights in particular country that grants you the temporary asylum

I think the reality is that he simply can't make it to South America in a legitimate way.
Maybe if Russia assisted him by hiding him a way on a boat or something. But as a passenger on a commercial plane under his own identity, probably not.
So the reality is that he is stuck in Russia.
It's certainly a really good thing he decided to transit in Moscow and not some NATO or EU country capital!

Originally Posted by http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/07/26/315728/no-torture-death-penalty-for-snowden/

Russia has so far refused to extradite Snowden as there is no US-Russia extradition treaty.

"Russia has never extradited anyone and never will," said Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Reacting to the letter, Snowden's lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said that the Holder’s letter is not something new.

"Snowden's current situation is due to the actions of the US authorities, who annulled his passport," Kucherena said. "That is why he has ended up in the transit zone of the Sheremetyevo airport.

Originally Posted by Hanna

I think the reality is that he simply can't make it to South America in a legitimate way.
Maybe if Russia assisted him by hiding him a way on a boat or something.

Yeah, I can see the headlines: "Russia is smuggling US citizen to South America"
Snowden has taken Russia as a hostage and at the same time Russia seems to be he's only hope to survive

Originally Posted by Doomer

Big words
Why don't use start with Sweden that collects fingerprints or the UK with their multiple "Security" and "Terrorism" acts, collecting DNA samples etc.?
Eventually you will run out of countries

Absolutely. Totally agree. It's disgusting. Unfortunately in Sweden, practically everybody is convinced that the state is good, and therefore it doesn't matter that they collect finger prints... Anyone who speaks up against it is essentially a tinfoil hat. I'd be a lone voice if I took up this cause! Not even the whole circus around Assange, or the torture flights to the USA made people wake up and realise that the state is in fact not good ANYMORE. In fact it's getting more evil every day. I think that if the Russian state started collecting fingerprints for passport every single person in the country would flip out, because they (sensibly) don't trust the state.

UK essentially has no political activism worth mentioning. But I've donated to Big brother watch and if they organise a demo, I'll go.
I stayed for a while outside the Ecuadorian embassy in support of Assange a few weekends ago as I was in the area.
The UK is essentially a poltically dead country though, and has been since the 1970s. Thatcher killed all political awareness in the UK.

But the topic here is Russia, and I'm just saying I won't get over it, if Russia extradites Snowden.

Deleted. L.

Originally Posted by Hanna

Absolutely. Totally agree. It's disgusting.

Correct me if I'm wrong
You don't like the country where you live but you didn't do anything about it
You using such big words for a country that you don't really know and where you don't live and you ready to blame them for something that country where you live already doing, and doing it big time
So in other words you live in a crappy place (which apparently disappoints you beyond you can explain) but continue to live there. I wonder what is the weight of your big words then?

Originally Posted by UhOhXplode

Btw, Crime and Punishment was the perfect book for Snowden. He reminds me of Raskolnikov. Well, except with more money.

Btw Raskolnikov went to the prison willingly

Originally Posted by Doomer

And the US is the old lady?

Could be, lol!

Originally Posted by Hanna

Apparently Russia's stated that it "never extradites anyone". Good!
Haha, he's been reading that at the airport? Stylish choice. With the amount of time he's had there by now, he should have been able to make it through quite a few of the Russian classics. Hope he realises that he'd better get on with the language studies!

Yeah, he's safe if he stays in Russia. But I think he wants to keep leaking so he may go to South America someday.
His lawyer, Kucherena, brought him some books to read and that one was so perfect, lol! I think he has Nikolai Karamzin's history books and some books by Anton Chekhov too. He will have lots to read!

Originally Posted by DrBaldhead

Btw Raskolnikov went to the prison willingly

Noooo! Please don't tell me what happens! I started reading it yesterday and I've only read the first 2 chapters. But it's a really cool book! And I like history too so I'm going to look for the Karamzin, Russian States books too. I've studied a lot of Russian history this summer already but there's still more I want to know.
But yeah, if anything happens to Snowden, he won't be going to any prison willingly.
Btw, I like Dostoevsky's writing style. He was kinda heavy on the dialogue but he had an awesome way of pulling the reader into the book with his scenery and narratives. And he was good at building suspense.

Letter from Edward Snowden's father Lon to President Obama...

Bruce Fein & Associates, Inc.
722 12th Street, N.W., 4th Floor
Washington, D.C. 20005
Phone: 703-963-4968
bruce@thelichfieldgroup.com
July 26, 2013

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500
Re: Civil Disobedience, Edward J. Snowden, and the Constitution

Dear Mr. President:
You are acutely aware that the history of liberty is a history of civil disobedience to unjust laws or practices. As Edmund Burke sermonized, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Civil disobedience is not the first, but the last option. Henry David Thoreau wrote with profound restraint in Civil Disobedience: “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”

Thoreau’s moral philosophy found expression during the Nuremburg trials in which “following orders” was rejected as a defense. Indeed, military law requires disobedience to clearly illegal orders. A dark chapter in America’s World War II history would not have been written if the then United States Attorney General had resigned rather than participate in racist concentration camps imprisoning 120,000 Japanese American citizens and resident aliens.

Civil disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act and Jim Crow laws provoked the end of slavery and the modern civil rights revolution. We submit that Edward J. Snowden’s disclosures of dragnet surveillance of Americans under § 215 of the Patriot Act, § 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments, or otherwise were sanctioned by Thoreau’s time-honored moral philosophy and justifications for civil disobedience. Since 2005, Mr. Snowden had been employed by the intelligence community. He found himself complicit in secret, indiscriminate spying on millions of innocent citizens contrary to the spirit if not the letter of the First and Fourth Amendments and the transparency indispensable to self-government.

Members of Congress entrusted with oversight remained silent or Delphic. Mr. Snowden confronted a choice between civic duty and passivity. He may have recalled the injunction of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it."

Mr. Snowden chose duty. Your administration vindictively responded with a criminal complaint alleging violations of the Espionage Act. From the commencement of your administration, your secrecy of the National Security Agency’s Orwellian surveillance programs had frustrated a national conversation over their legality, necessity, or morality. That secrecy (combined with congressional nonfeasance) provoked Edward’s disclosures, which sparked a national conversation which you have belatedly and cynically embraced. Legislation has been introduced in both the House of Representatives and Senate to curtail or terminate the NSA’s programs, and the American people are being educated to the public policy choices at hand.

A commanding majority now voice concerns over the dragnet surveillance of Americans that Edward exposed and you concealed. It seems mystifying to us that you are prosecuting Edward for accomplishing what you have said urgently needed to be done! The right to be left alone from government snooping--the most cherished right among civilized people—is the cornerstone of liberty.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson served as Chief Prosecutor at Nuremburg. He came to learn of the dy namics of the Third Reich that crushed a free society, and which have lessons for the United States today. Writing in Brinegar v. United States, Justice Jackson elaborated: The Fourth Amendment states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

These, I protest, are not mere second-class rights but belong in the catalog of indispensable freedoms. Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart. Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government. And one need only briefly to have dwelt and worked among a people possessed of many admirable qualities but deprived of these rights to know that the human personality deteriorates and dignity and self-reliance disappear where homes, persons and possessions are subject at any hour to unheralded search and seizure by the police.

We thus find your administration’s zeal to punish Mr. Snowden’s discharge of civic duty to protect democratic processes and to safeguard liberty to be unconscionable and indefensible. We are also appalled at your administration’s scorn for due process, the rule of law, fairness, and the presumption of innocence as regards Edward.

On June 27, 2013, Mr. Fein wrote a letter to the Attorney General stating that Edward’s father was substantially convinced that he would return to the United States to confront the charges that have been lodged against him if three cornerstones of due process were guaranteed. The letter was not an ultimatum, but an invitation to discuss fair trial imperatives. The Attorney General has sneered at the overture with studied silence. We thus suspect your administration wishes to avoid a trial because of constitutional doubts about application of the Espionage Act in these circumstances, and obligations to disclose to the public potentially embarrassing classified information under the Classified Information Procedures Act.

Your decision to force down a civilian airliner carrying Bolivian President Eva Morales in hopes of kidnapping Edward also does not inspire confidence that you are committed to providing him a fair trial. Neither does your refusal to remind the American people and prominent Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate like House Speaker John Boehner, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, and Senator Dianne Feinstein that Edward enjoys a presumption of innocence. He should not be convicted before trial. Yet Speaker Boehner has denounced Edward as a “traitor.” Ms. Pelosi has pontificated that Edward “did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents.” Ms. Bachmann has pronounced that, “This was not the act of a patriot; this was an act of a traitor.” And Ms. Feinstein has decreed that Edward was guilty of “treason,” which is defined in Article III of the Constitution as “levying war” against the United States, “or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

You have let those quadruple affronts to due process pass unrebuked, while you have disparaged Edward as a “hacker” to cast aspersion on his motivations and talents. Have you forgotten the Supreme Court’s gospel in Berger v. United States that the interests of the government “in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done?”

We also find reprehensible your administration’s Espionage Act prosecution of Edward for disclosures indistinguishable from those which routinely find their way into the public domain via your high level appointees for partisan political advantage. Classified details of your predator drone protocols, for instance, were shared with the New York Times with impunity to bolster your national security credentials. Justice Jackson observed in Railway Express Agency, Inc. v. New York: “The framers of the Constitution knew, and we should not forget today, that there is no more effective practical guaranty against arbitrary and unreasonable government than to require that the principles of law which officials would impose upon a minority must be imposed generally.”

In light of the circumstances amplified above, we urge you to order the Attorney General to move to dismiss the outstanding criminal complaint against Edward, and to support legislation to remedy the NSA surveillance abuses he revealed. Such presidential directives would mark your finest constitutional and moral hour.

Sincerely,
Bruce Fein
Counsel for Lon Snowden
Lon Snowden

Thanks for posting the letter. I didn't have time to look that up today.

Here's what Snowden's dad is saying now.

The elder Snowden said he thinks Russia is probably the best place to seek asylum because it is most likely to withstand U.S. pressure. Edward Snowden applied for temporary asylum in Russia last week.
Lon Snowden, a Coast Guard veteran who has worked on national security issues in his career, said he has tremendous faith in the American people and in the Constitution. He said that in a more subdued environment he feels confident that his son could get a fair trial, and the leak would be considered in context of his son’s desire to expose a surveillance program that he and others believe exceeds constitutional bounds.

But he said the Justice Department’s efforts to pressure other countries to turn over Snowden, coupled with silence from President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder in the face of denunciations leveled by members of Congress who have labeled Snowden a traitor, have eroded his hope for a fair trial.
On NBC’s “Today” show today, Lon Snowden said there’s been a concerted effort by some members of Congress to “demonize” his son.

Lon Snowden and his lawyer, Bruce Fein, released a letter asking Obama to dismiss the criminal charges against Edward Snowden and to support legislation “to remedy the NSA surveillance abuses he revealed.”
The elder Snowden and Fein said they were disgusted by Holder’s letter to Russian officials promising that Snowden would not face the death penalty if he were extradited. They said it reflects a mindset that Snowden is presumed guilty and that a sentence of 30 years or life would be a reasonable punishment.

Edward Snowden's father, of Lehigh County, says son better off in Russia | lehighvalleylive.com

He sent the letter to President Obama and now they still want to arrest him. That proves that Obama didn't agree with the letter. And I just know that the offer for a civilian trial with a lawyer is just a lie to try and get him back.
Like his dad said, he's lucky to be in Russia.