Snowden’s statements recently have referred to him as “stateless” and that President Obama is removing his citizenship.
That seems like a bit of hyperbole on his part. The president doesn’t have the power to revoke citizenship. Snowden has no intention of setting foot in the US however, so he’s effectively renounced his citizenship and is now looking for a country that will take him.
No, he hasn’t renounced his citizenship; that’s not an action that you can do without a complex process, which involves visiting a US consulate and handing in your passport. There is no de facto renunciation.
And the article says:
But as the prospects appear increasingly dim, remember: Snowden only needs one “yes.” Well, that and safe passage.
That’s not quite true; he needs two “yesses.” One from the Russians to leave their airport, and one from a country to welcome him.
Until you’ve dropped the press bomb, and been threatened for your act of heroism, you don’t have grounds to seek asylum. Asylum requires reasonable fear of an unfair trial or threat to your safety. Snowden has both of these things - now.
How very, very sad! Not that this government or any other would falsely accuse a citizen and try to make them a political scapegoat - that has gone on for centuries. But that anyone would defend Barack’s awful behavior. The guy who was supposed bring healing and be a defender of Civil Rights.
Make no mistake - he CAN say yes or no. It’s HIS DOJ and HIS State Dept. doing this!
Swartz. Manning. Showdown. Oh - and closing Gitmo.
Nice going, Barack. Please. Tell us how FISA and your policies are different from the old-school House UnAmerican Activites Committee? Can’t wait to see which banker he pardons as he leaves office…
Snowden strikes me as typical of many engineers who think that because they know a lot about computers means that they are always the smartest person in the room. Right now he’s horribly out of his depth. He misjudged Hong Kong’s willingness to give him a favorable hearing in their legal system. He failed to predict that the US Government could and would cancel his passport, and how that would restrict his ability to travel. He trusted Wikileaks to provide safe passage to Ecuador, overestimating Assange’s ability to influence their government. That left him marooned in Moscow, and at the whim of Vladimir Putin.
Now he’s left firing scattershot asylum requests, but his association with Wikileaks and his determination to keep leaking creates a headache for any country that dares take him in. If there’s a grand strategy or goal he has here, it’s a poorly thought out one. We may all be impressed with his encrypted files or storing mobile phones in fridges to disrupt signals, but he didn’t understand the geopolitics of what he has done. It’s going to leave him with a very rough life.
I love that we finally get a new picture of Edward Snowden, and it’s basically the same shot.
It is not hyperbole, it is a lie. He is a US citizen who has been indicted in a US court and is subject to an outstanding arrest warrant. As a result, he has had passport revoked. That is standard for procedure for fugitives.
Bradley Manning isn’t really the right comparison, as he was subject to military justice. It doesn’t make what was done to him any less ugly, but that’s not exactly what Snowden faces in the US.
It takes a lot of whale oil to fill up a Gulfstream, and those critters are hard to find nowadays.
How would you have done it? Assumptions: leaks must still occur. Flight for safety must still occur.
In Norway, a selection of organizations are granted the privilege to ask for a “second opinion” on asylum applications, among them the free speech organization PEN who just exercised that right: The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) is reconsidering Snowden’s asylum request.
Lead by example.
Wouldn’t it be more polite and helpful to provide him a link to the Booz Allen Hamilton careers page?
Wishful thinking, though. Our beloved Merkel has no spine whatsoever. So she and and cronies will do everything to hinder the prosecution as much as possible.
Given the propensites of intelligence agencies for, you know, spying on other countries, that might not pan out too well…
What you say here about asylum is a point well taken and it helps me to re-frame this whole thing,
Point taken as to procedures…but who is the present Commander-in-Chief again?
Well, apparently they’ll hire anyone…
That means they looked at all the options regarding Snowden, and realized that he would do more harm than good if he kept leaking and got to stay in Russia. For those very same reasons: the US would most certainly withhold money from Russian trade, etc., as payback.I'd have thought a more major issue for countries like Russia and China is that a brave new world where leaks are seen as potentially excusable doesn't sit well with their own ideas of government. For the same reason, they couldn't be seen to side against the governments in the Arab Spring, as that would be lending support to protesters in their own countries.
… and that’s an excuse for torture? We know how the US treats prisoners it doesn’t like - ask those guys from Abu Ghraib, all the taxi drivers, street vendors and children … ehrm terrorists who were at the wrong place at the wrong time.
There are international laws against torture, laws the US ratified and then ignored when it was convenient. The US ignores laws (or use special secret interpretations of those laws) when it suits them. We don’t know for sure how Snowden will be treated when in the US.
