Snowden flees Hong Kong
So while the US is demanding that Hong Kong turn over Ed Snowden, the NSA contractor-turned-snitch, he left China says the Washington Post and he’s bound for a third country;
Snowden is heading to Moscow, according to a report from the South China Morning Post. The newspaper reported that he boarded commercial flight Aeroflot SU213 from Chep Lap Kok airport at 11:04 a.m. He is scheduled to arrive at Moscow’s Shermetyevo International Airport at 5:15 p.m. (9:15 a.m. EDT)
Snowden’s final destination is unclear. Russian news agency Interfax reported that Snowden was booked on a flight to Cuba with the ultimate destination of Venezuela. Ecuador and Iceland have also been mentioned as possibilities.
Snowden is apparently being aided in his travel by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization that published hundreds of thousands of classified documents.
Funny, but I remember that in his initial interview, Snowden said he was ready to pay the price for his treachery, but, now suddenly not so much – but then, apparently, he’s never finished anything he started in his entire life without taking the easy way out.
Fox News is reporting in their broadcast that they think his final destination is Havana, Cuba. Good, it won’t be a long trip to Guantanamo, then.
Category: Shitbags
How can he be charged with espionage, when in fact, the government should be charged with it, and numerous high ranking officials, should be charged with perjury for lying to Congress about the programs? Even Obama himself said that the government isn’t listening to our phone calls, just to have another document saying the exact opposite? As a vet, I swore to uphold the Constitution. Once you throw the IRS, AP, Benghazi, Fast and the Furious program, using shooting victims as propaganda, and a list of other issues that have been brought to light, we have seen the Constitution, the backbone of our country, tore to shreds. Those who have agreed to obey such orders should’ve refused to do so due to the orders being unlawful. I understand that some of you are probably going to tear into me over this, and that’s fine. I’m willing to listen to those who disagree with me, and even though I may not agree with your opinion, I’m definitely willing to respect it.
@1. Well, the answer is that he apparently broke the law in acquiring and releasing info regarding the massive commo collection of the US gov’t. And that’s about the whole of it. Whether his actions were justified, should be excuse or mitigated, is a matter for a court to decide. If he doesn’t turn up suddenly dead, he will ultimately be caught an, presumably, we’ll hear from him then.
Fleeing to a country (allegedly Cuba) that is an enemy of the US to avoid extradition after publicly exposing US secrets, violating US espionage law in the process. Hmm. Is anyone really surprised?
Snowden best hope Fidel and Raoul each live to be well over 100. Otherwise, I’m guessing he’ll have a helluva problem in a few years.
@2 Thank you for that. It doesn’t get any simpler than you commit treason, are a traitor and you get charged and go to a nice Federal Prison. Hopefully in general population. I think it is a strong possibility he could end up assuming room temperature somewhere along the way.
@2. I’m just wondering why the government isn’t charged with it as well. I know it’s always going to be one of those ‘life isn’t fair’ type things, but, it just looks and sounds like a double standard is all, it’s a do as I say, not as I do mentality. Washington is spying on us, then lying about it and it’s ok, but, if you or I would be spying on someone, then lie under oath, we’d be screwed. I understand both sides to the debate that’s going on in regards to condemning him or thanking him. I know he should be held accountable in some regards to his actions, but, so should Washington.
I’m beginning to think that WikiLeaks needs a ‘Clear And Present Danger’ finding, not that it would ever happen with this Administration.
Mike
just another commie spy like Lee Harvey Oswald…
Treason has a social following.
This is *much* bigger trouble than most people realize. It needs to be stopped.
#1: His motive is beside the point, although his choice of friends pretty much put that to rest. There were plenty of other means to become a whistleblower, even if what he exposed turned out to be a crime.
#6: I was thinking that, too.
@1: If Snowden exposed something that was criminal then that needs to be dealt with very thoroughly. But he had other ways to get that information out without involving the Chinese or the Russians. His actions make him more of a grandstander like Manning than a whistleblower.
@10 Thank you. Well put. There are an ocean full of US attorneys who would have taken his case just for the press coverage. Instead he goes to two of our not so friendly, friendly nations for help. Fuck him and I hope he gets the needle. You can bet he will play this ball for all the yardage he can get out of the press.
@11: Not to mention he had access to attorneys and ethics officers from his former employer and the NSA and there are provisions for whistleblowers to go to Congresscritters.
@12 You are right. The government agencies are crawling with “open door” whistleblower offices. No need to commit treason to get a point across if he thought something was wrong. By as his interviewed friends said, he was planning this before he took the job.
@5. Well, you are making a leap to the conclusion that the gov’t broke the law in collecting, presumably reviewing, and storing private communications. It is one thing to argue that a massive action like that is unconstitutional, and certainly it is the realized fear of our Founding Fathers regarding an unchecked national government, and it is quite another thing to say the action violated statute. I don’t trust the gov’t, especially the bureaucrats in the NSA or elsewhere who are anwerable to no one but one another. If Congress was lied to, the liar should be charged with perjury–but I don’t even know, if as happened with H. Wide Load Clinton, an oath was administered to the liar. The gov’t is purpoefully running off the constitutional rails but that doesn’t make Swenson a patriot.
@ 14. I’ll agree not to dub him a patriot due to the fact that he ran off to Russian, China, and wherever else he is going, that does show his cowardice. He isn’t the first person to come forward disclosing this information either. A few years ago there was an AT&T employee that disclosed this type of information gathering and there was the NSA employees who came forward and said that they would listen to calls between deployed troops and their loved ones and home. They would then document the ‘good’ ones which were mostly the intimate conversations between us vets and our significant other. Maybe it’s because of all the other problems that have been going on in Washington, maybe it’s because of social media, maybe it’s because Americans are sick of lawmakers picking and choosing what parts of the Constitution they want to follow or maybe it’s a combination of any of those that this one blew up as big as it did. I’ll also agree that he could’ve taken a different route to release this information. Hell, we all knew it was going on, he just had the paper to prove it. As far as the lying part, in March, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, asked Clapper whether the NSA collects “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”
“No sir,” Clapper responded, adding later: “It does not. Not wittingly.”
I’m not a lawyer, so maybe someone else can clarify what perjury exactly is, but to me, that sounds like perjury.
I hope all of you enjoy your Sunday. Thanks to all you vets, I absolutely love this ‘family’. If you’re deployed, stay safe, keep your buddy safe. Thanks for the discussion!
I’m torn on this one. On one hand the little shit deserves to get his balls crushed in a vise grip like all the other treasonous turds. On the other hand, it’s funny as hell watching all these miscreants flip off the B. Hussein Obama regime without hesitation. Ineptitude at its finest.
@ Jonn: I’d read his ‘pay the price’ bit as meaning he wouldn’t be able to return home again. In that sense, he is paying the price. Perhaps relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but he isn’t being inconsistent there.
And while this is certainly treason by the definition of things, I sure wish we’d pay some attention to Clapper lying directly to Congress, too. He was under oath, no?
@15. Good point, but does anyone know if Clapper was administered the oath prior to his testimony? If not, it was just an exercise in public relations, “no, we never listen in on phone calls, read e-mails, or keep records”. If you don’t “swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”, you don’t have to.
Personally, I think that Clapper was sworn to testify, in such case, you’ll have to depend on a Dem-controlled committee in the Dem-controlled Senate to make the complaint of perjury to the Dem-controlled DoJ. Good luck with that.
If Snowden wanted to be the whistle-blower he claims to have wanted to be, he could have revealed what he knew, at a presser on the steps of the Hoover Building, or at the main entrance to the Department of Justice Building, then walked into either building and turned himself in, claiming whistle-blower status.
Hey, everyone, you’re all missing the real point. Snowden had this planned well ahead of getting his job at Booze-Allen. That’s already been reported.
The real point is that he’s another attention whore who thinks he’s done or is doing something clever, without thinking about the consequences before he does it. If he were serious about hiding, he’d find a way to disappear and hide in plain sight. Real crooks do it all the time. He could have gone up to Yakutia and found a kapochek (forest preserve) where he could live in subsistence if he really wanted to disappear until it all blows over, but he didn’t do that.
This has never been about anything except getting attention from the media, and maybe a book contract.
Wonder of Barry realizes that Putin gave him the big finger by letting Snowden in?
@19 You are right. His friends, questioned by the FBI said he told them he was planning it. By the way, what happened to a thorough BI by the FBI/NSA for his clearance? Did they not ask his family and friends about his character? When I went from Army to Air Force, my TS clearance involved asking almost every relative and friends they named about me. Have things changed that much in the BI process? This traitor planned this ahead of time. That makes him a premeditated, treasonous traitor. I think of Manning and Walker. Although Walker if I remember, was recruited.
@19: I think labeling him an attention whore is too dismissive of the whole situation. It seems to me, at least, that he DID think about the consequences of his actions, and deemed those consequences worth it.
I’m torn on this whole issue, but if we’re talking about the consequences of actions, do you really think the government adequately thought about the consequences of theirs? We’ve had to deal with this sort of thing in the past, and it lead to lawsuits from France for allegedly using our intelligence apparatus to win commercial contracts for US companies. The fallout from this will hit US business interests, the ‘idea’ of ‘freedom’ that we so often tout as intrinsic to the American character, and, frankly, it won’t have any impact on the really bad actors – the ones we need to be worried about. They’re already using burners, one-time pads, and couriers that we can’t track with this sort of data collection.
Ignoring all that because ‘this dude just wants to write a book’ seems a bit dangerous.
Whatever. My government has the ability and desire to monitor every one of its citizens at once–and thinks its a great idea to be doing so. That used to be tinfoil-hat territory right there. I’m much more interested in that than what happens to snowden. Hey, I have an idea congress–why not take this time to just make all of this monitoring illegal? I haven’t even heard talk of doing that. If they’ve been doing this, who knows what else the tinfoil-hat crowd is right about.
I love this site. It makes me so upset to go to a place like Yahoo in the morning and read the blazing stupidity in the comments section when I go there that call Snowden a hero, that think Manning is a great role model. I can then take a deep breath and come where where the people are more sane and know that a lot of stuff sucks in the world.
As I said before I can’t wait for the Hollywood libtards and limousine liberals to have a red carpet fund raiser for him. Yes Anonymous, I am concerned the government has the ability to monitor everyone. Problem with it as I see it is they are monitoring the wrong section of society. But the NSA did not do this on their own. They had the POTUS stamp of approval for it without doubt. The Administration is the first agency to be reigned in.
In case you think this is something new, Richard Nixon’s administration engaged in the unauthorized wire-tapping of private citizens’ landlines — no cell phones, no internet back in those ‘good old days’ — on the basis of simply disagreeing with the government about the Vietnam War, but not actively protesting.
If you spoke out against Nixon or the war, or even contributed a dollar to the DNC, you were suspect and monitored. And people could tell when they were being ‘tapped: their phone reception faded in and out, and there were audible clicks on the lines.
When I say Snowden didn’t truly consider the consequences, I was not referring to private citizens being monitored or the government spying on us and lying about it.
I was referring to the fact that his pre-planned intent was a felony unless he acted as a whistleblower, which he did not do. He went at it the wrong way. Now he’s a felon.
Since there are whistleblower facilities in place, I feel no sympathy for him at all.
What a hairball. Snowden’s situation is a dilemma that’s hard to get a handle on because it has so many moving parts. And all those pieces, at least it seems me, tend to be a distraction from only a couple of basic issues. On one hand, you need to ask yourself if Snowden made a reasonable effort to go through appropriate channels to expose what he thought was illegal activity on the part of the intelligence community. The mere fact that he exposed such activity doesn’t give him a get-out-of-jail-free card. On the other hand, Snowden did bring to light some questionable activity on the part of the NSA which pushes the ethical boundaries of the Fourth Amendment. Given the circumstances, NSA shouldn’t get a free pass either. It’s not that difficult to understand why the NSA does what it does. If they find a terrorist cell phone in Chechnya, and it has a stored number for some doofus in Boston, there’s an arguable need to find out who has the Boston number under a definition of hot pursuit. But the NSA isn’t helping itself by wrapping everything in self-referential layers of classification. We can’t tell you why following the Boston number is a secret, says the NSA, because that’s a secret. And we can’t tell you why it’s a secret that we can’t tell you why following the Boston number is a secret, because that’s a secret too. This is going to sound esoteric, and a lawyer could probably explain it better, but we seem to have lost track of the old common law concept of posse comitatus under both its definitions. One of those definitions, the one in the NSA charter it’s supposed to abide by, is that the military and ancillaries such as the NSA are not supposed to have jurisdiction within the U.S. The other definition, one rarely mentioned, is that ultimately those who act as public servants are dependent on those who are governed. If some guy steals somebody’s horse, the Sheriff depends on a group of citizens to help him go find the guy,… Read more »
@23-Reaper, Personally, I’ve switched from aluminum foil to a Titanium cranial protector-and man, is it hard on the neck. What amazes me about the whole Snowden/Manning thing is-who the hell is clearing these mouse droppings to work with sensitive material. When I got my T.
/S clearance back in the day, the NIS came out to my neighborhood, knocked on doors and shadowed my family for awhile. My father only found out because hea the local LE about 2 strangers sitting in a car across the street.
Whomever is clearing these idiots should be fired and prosecuted for dereliction.
Damn-just read that last. Need more coffee!
I’m not going to defend Snowden for what he did, but i not sure that the idea that there were easier ways to turn whistleblower is entirely correct. There was a story when all this broke where three other whistleblowers were being interviewed and they were applauding Snowden. Each said that they had tried to blow the whistle via established routes and gotten nowhere. Maybe they were disgruntled or ideologically driven and I’ll look for the story when I get home (I’m on my iPhone now), but it may not be as easy to work within the bounds of the law as we assume.
Headlines (CBS) says Snowden just landed in Moscow.
So…The US Department of State (I assume) asked the Hong Kong Goverment to hold him and hand him over, and they basically said ‘No can do’ and let him go?
Sounds like someone’s just flipped a giant bird to the Obama Administration.
Chuckie boy Schumer was on the news earlier talking about Russia’s helping Snowden evade, and saying that is not how “ALLIES” treat each other. If a US senator thinks Putin is an ally that is about all we need to know.
British paper “Daily Mail” says not only has this ass gasket landed in Moscow, but is already meeting with Venezuelan officials. So much (as Jonn points out) for the willingness to pay the price for his treasonous actions.
Here’s the “three whistleblower” link http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/
@35-68W58-I figured something like this was coming. Our government (no matter which party-witness the Valerie Plame debacle). I now wonder not only who is vetting these “whistle” blowers (I like to think of them as blowing something else) but also who is charged with clearing the bubblehead (apologies to Ray) heads of department/s.
USMCBRIT1, I read another article saying that he had a plane ticket to Cuba via Aeroflot. IMHO, it’s very obvious that he’s going to pull every chickens#1t stunt he can to avoid the consequences of his actions!
@37-Proud, Yup-a la Manning. They are cut from the same pile of rat dung!
BBC News now says this distinguished individual (NOT) is seeking asylum in Equador!
http://www.bbc.com/news/
“The mere fact that he exposed such activity doesn’t give him a get-out-of-jail-free card.” That’s about it, in a nutshell. Now, this massive data collection is not a healthy thing in an ostensibly free society. I don’t buy–and never have bought–the if-you-did-nothing-wrong-you-have-nothing-to-worry-about retort. I value my privacy and yours. A large, national gov’t with near absolute (directly or c/o buy-offs to the state governments) control is repugnant to our design. But that’s what we have, thank you very much. The tension among the three branches is a false one. The Supreme Court’s power to rewrite, selectively, the Constitution is not authorized by the Constitution. In short, we are screwed and only good people who are duly elected to office can alter our otherwise disatrous fate. But something tells me that is unlikely to happen, especially if 33 million illegals are added to the voting rolls. As I said before, I await the rebellion.
@40-Air Cav, I truly believe it would be cheaper to annex mexico as the 51st state. With the acceptance of the latest immigration run across the border, if each one allowed to stay is allowed to bring over let’s say 4 other family members, I think that would about encompass over 63% of the entire population (as of 2010). This based on the more conservative numbers constantly being bandied about in the press. Outrageous! My good friend Tommy Gonzales (CA Mission Band Indian) used to say that they are taking California back-1 baby at a time.
Yeah, I feel for our fellow citizens in the SW. There is a Walmart in Winchester, VA that I infrequently visit and it’s like I’m in Mexico, only I don’t have to suffer the water. I wouldn’t mind if that assimilation thingy was still in vogue but it’s not. Retention of one’s former national identity post immigration is not only tolerated, it’s encouraged! Our strength is in our divestity. What’s that old expression? Oh yeah, I remember now: BullShit!
Air Cav-Amen! Another article (LA Times today) talks about the thousands of unidentified dead illegals found in the Texas/Arizona desert, many from countries south of mexico. I really don’t like to be callous, but why can’t these folks stay home and force their government/s to encompass economic reforms to improve their lots? Mexico is the 9th biggest oil producing country-but the benefits/money only accrue to the top 3% of the population. Which, BTW, is the direction our country is heading.
@42. You’ve got one too? We have a Wal-Mart in Walker, Michigan that’s the same way. Walk in the door, welcome to the Third World. All languages, except English, spoken there.
@15 and @18:
There’s a law making it illegal to lie to a congressional hearing even you hadn’t been sworn in. I dunno if it’s still called perjury, but it’s against the law just the same.
But I wouldn’t count on Clapper being charged with perjury anyway. As I understand it, there was also a secret hearing, and he said more there. He *might* have gotten flustered while trying to give a careful answer, and simply mangled it.
Note the emphasis on *might*. I’m not sure. But I kinda doubt that he’d want to risk prison for this administration’s national security policy decisions.
Back to the subject at hand. Officials in Hong Kong say the extradition request from the US gov’t did not “fully comply with legal requirements under HK law”. Wow-didn’t see that one coming. So, now we have Manning, Assange and this bottom feeder all conspiring together. Can anyone say “Predator’+
The way I see it is that Snowden and Manning had an agenda to cater to anti-American factions when they commenced their ass-hattery. Snowden definately went into it with his mind made up that he was going to “get” the Government.
Any of the “good” they supposedly accomplished was outweighed by the aid given to the enemy ( Manning) and attention whoring ( Snowden). It’s like when a Fox kills a ferret in your henhouse, but kills half a dozen chickens too.
You still shoot the bastard.
@45. You are correct. There are two separate crimes, one perjury where a testifier lies under oath; the other lying when not under oath. The difference may seem neglible but it’s not. The oathless lie is purely subjective and difficult to prove. If I ask you what day of the week you were born (let’s say it was a Friday), under oath you say “Tuesday.” That’s a lie and all I have to do to convict you is prove you were actually born on Friday but testified under oath that it was a Tuesday. The oathless lie requires that I prove that you intentionally sought to deceive or mislead when you answered “Tuesday.” As a practical matter, if a testifier isn’t under oath, he can damn near lie through his (or her, as was the case with H. Wide Load Clinton and Benghazi) with impunity.
I wonder how long before a ‘whistleblower’ reveals that Obamacare is actually just another tax?
just a Chinese/ Russian collaboration in the spy world. the Chinese just showed us how much they thought of us and of the us building their economy from a third world to a possibly world power thru our trade agreements and they took a big noodle shit on all of us. I say that Taiwan and mexico gets to make all of our disposable crap.