Author Topic: Edward Snowden Flees To Russia ... (Read 1390 times)

alaric · « **on:** June 24, 2013, 07:46:36 AM »

Now American dissidents are fleeing to Mother Russia for freedom and against the police state of tyranny in the formerly great USA. could anyone have imagined this just ten years ago?

An American federal employee blows the whistle on the gov't for spying covertly on it's own citizens and politicians and is now on an escape from a worldwide manhunt by these same hypocritical "freedom-propagandizers" that remove entire regimes around the globe in order for them to have the same rights and principles as Snowden, unbelieveable.

You can't make this stuff up folks.

http://politix.topix.com/homepage/6670-edward-snowden-flees-to-russia?comments=1

Edward Snowden Flees To Russia

Leaker of national security material is on the run from U.S. authorities
21 hrs ago by David Mark

Editor-in-Chief

Edwards Snowden is on the run.

The Hong Kong government announced that it had allowed the former National Security Agency contractor to depart its territory, The New York Times reports. Snowden, 29, has acknowledged disclosing classified docuмents about United States government surveillance of internet and telephone communications around the world. He has as been charged with espionage, theft and conversion of government property

Snowden flew to Moscow on a one-way ticket, though it's unclear if Russia is his final destination. An Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong carrying Snowden landed at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Russia on Sunday. Snowden left Hong Kong "on his own accord for a third country," the government in Hong Kong said Sunday afternoon.

Snowden's final destination was unclear. Russian news agency Interfax and Radio Ekho Moskvy reported that Snowden was booked on a flight to Cuba and then from Havana to Caracas, Venezuela. The next Aeroflot flight to Havana leaves Monday. Ecuador and Iceland have also been mentioned as possibilities.

Snowden is being aided in his travel by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization that published hundreds of thousands of classified docuмents. The group posted on Twitter about 5 a.m. EDT that Snowden was "currently over Russian airspace accompanied by WikiLeaks legal advisors." The organization later said Snowden was accompanied on his flight to Moscow by Sarah hαɾɾιson, who the organization said is a UK citizen, journalist and legal researcher working with the WikiLeaks legal defense team.

Via The New York Times.

alaric · « **Reply #1 on:** June 24, 2013, 07:55:53 AM »

Jєω Zionist Sen Schumer angered at Russia for aiding and abeting international "criminial" Snowden, say there will be "consequences" for this.

Yes sure Chucky, just what "consequences" might that be?

Interview with Schumcky Schumer here;

alaric · « **Reply #2 on:** June 24, 2013, 08:02:00 AM »

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden 'requests asylum in Ecuador'

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Ecuadorian Ambassador to Russia among those involved in US whistleblower's search for asylum

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-requests-asylum-in-ecuador-8669963.html

alaric · « **Reply #3 on:** June 24, 2013, 08:09:21 AM »

Edward Snowden, A Modern Paul Revere

The authoritarians are coming! Indeed, they are already here…

by Justin Raimondo, June 24, 2013

Edward Snowden’s hegira – from the beaches of Hawaii to the teeming metropolis of Hong Kong, and then on to Russia and ultimately Ecuador (as of this writing) – dramatizes the decline and fall of the American republic in ways historians will look back on as emblematic of our era. As a lone individual makes fools out of bumbling US government officials, outmaneuvering them at every turn, defenders of the regime– let’s call them Regimists – are frantic. While Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian newspaper are pulling back the curtain on the Surveillance State, the Regimists are rallying around some very revealing talking points, one of which is that the countries Snowden has sought refuge in are hardly bastions of civil liberties. Hong Kong, an autonomous region of Not-so-Red China, Russia (every good neocon and neoliberal knows Putin = Stalin), and now – eeek! – Ecuador, which is being cast as another Venezuela. In response to these developments, Ken Roth, head of "Human Rights Watch," tweeted:

"Snowden’s #Ecuador is limiting asylum rights http://trib.al/goW5gcS and criminalizing journalists who harm security."

No sooner had Snowden’s plane touched down on Russian soil then Roth retweeted this pearl of wisdom from one of his "human rights" buddies:

"Edward Snowden, martyr for online freedom and privacy, now passing thru Moscow? Say hi to Alexei Navalny while you’re there."

As one Twitter wit quipped:

"Seems @KenRoth is following Snowden around the world, blasting HR in every country his plane is landing."

Your check is in the mail, Ken.

I hope that check isn’t over two figures, however, since this particular talking point only underscores the arguments Snowden, and civil libertarians in the US, have been making: that the creation of a secret police state apparatus represents a fork in the road for the United States. Snowden said his motive was to make it possible for the American people to decide whether the Surveillance State is what they want – and that they couldn’t do this unless they knew what was going on behind their backs.

Aside from the absurdity of criticizing someone who is merely passing through a country that isn’t exactly a libertarian utopia, fleeing a threat to his freedom and possibly his life, the fact of the matter is that there aren’t any free countries left in the world – not with the US falling rapidly (and secretly) into authoritarianism.

It is a "soft" version, to be sure, at least for the moment. But the baring of authoritarian teeth was visible this [Sunday] morning, when the journalist who broke the Snowden story, Glenn Greenwald, appeared on "Meet the Press." Host David Gregory assumed the tone of a Justice Department prosecutor when he sternly asked:

"To the extent that you have aided and abetted Edward Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?”

To this onscreen transformation of a supposed "journalist" into the Grand Inquisitor, Greenwald responded:

"I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies."

Well, yes, it is extraordinary, but I think we should all be getting used to it pretty soon. And it’s not like there’s no precedent: I recall the Weekly Standard demanding the prosecution of the New York Times for revealing the Bush administration’s hand in pioneering the eavesdropping system the Obamaites have perfected, with other conservative "journalists" joining the chorus. But this used to be the kind of thing only neocons would say out loud – now the "liberals" have appropriated the neocons’ rhetorical style as well as their intelligence-gathering methods.

It was clear what Gregory was doing: letting the journalistic mask slip for a moment, and assuming his real role as the Voice of the Powers That Be, he was issuing a direct threat on behalf of his government sources – We’re gonna get you, punk!

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they tried: Gregory, with his sources in officialdom, may have been alerted to the possibility. As Glenn pointed out, the Obama administration has proffered the "legal" theory that a Fox News journalist who worked with a source inside the government is a "co-conspirator" and therefore a felon: even David Axelrod, the President’s own chief political advisor, confessed he found this "disturbing."

Let’s be clear about what the stakes are in this fight: the US government has been busy setting up a comprehensive database that contains vital information on everyone in the country: they can call up your phone calls, your online activities, your movements – anything and everything about you.

Oh, but we aren’t looking at any of this "content," they cry: it’s just "meta-data" we’re collecting. Anyone who believes that vast treasure trove of potentially incriminating information isn’t going to be used to the political advantage of whatever faction has access to it at the moment is living in world of illusion. This is the kind of thing the old KGB would’ve loved to get their hands on: the idea of tracking the "social networks" that might sow the seeds of subversion is an authoritarian’s dream come true. The belief that this could never happen here is what the myth of "American exceptionalism" is all about: we are somehow inherently inoculated against the toxic totalitarianism that poisons civil society in much of the rest of the world. History, however, refutes that conceit.

As McClatchy News reports, the Obama administration – already surpassing all previous administrations combined in their relentless prosecution of whistle-blowers – is cracking down hard within the government to make information of all kinds unavailable to the public, including the press. Tyranny percolates best in the dark, especially when the transition from a constitutional republic to democratic despotism is still in process. And we are right at that conjuncture when it’s still possible to stop it – which is why we’re getting a virtually united bipartisan Establishment pushing back hard against Snowden, Greenwald, and those who support them.

They have revoked Snowden’s passport – a typically totalitarian tactic against political dissidents, long practiced by the Soviet Union and the US during the cold war era – and my guess is that they will stop at nothing to discredit him, using methods straight out of the old KGB playbook. Consider what Snowden has told us about the ability of NSA "analysts" to penetrate the lives of anyone they choose to target, "even the President if I had a personal email." Snowden is no exception to this rule: they have a dossier on him, you can be sure, and there is nothing preventing them from handing out the juicy details (if there are any) to their favored "journalists."

In readying the population for quasi-authoritarian rule, our rulers have constructed an elaborate technological and "legal" machinery that implements and rationalizes what is in effect a "legal" coup d’etat. Snowden, however, has upended their plans by impeding the most vitally important element of the coup: getting Americans to go along with the program. The Bush administration thought they could do it by stealth and fear, and the Obamaites are pursuing that path with even greater determination than Dick Cheney ever showed. Just as they were on the brink of achieving their goal, however, one man – a modern day Paul Revere – sounded the alarm and wakened the American people to the danger they face.

In doing so, Snowden has made himself into a sacrificial offering on the altar of the Leviathan, bearing the entire burden on his own shoulders and suffering so that we might be free. Was there ever a nobler act performed in defense of our old republic? If so, I haven’t heard of it.

On January 11, 2011, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit vendor, set himself on fire in front of the city hall in his village in protest against harassment he’d endured at the hands of authorities, who were preventing him from selling at the marketplace without a government license. His self-immolation set off a firestorm of protest that soon spread to much of the Arab world, toppling US-backed tyrants such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak: the seismic power of the "Arab Spring" is still shaking the region. My question is this: could Edward Snowden be our Mohamed Bouazizi, setting off a popular protest against the consolidation of a police state in America?

While inside Mordor Washington Snowden is being vilified, out here in the cornfields he’s a hero – and his deft maneuvering to get away from the long arm of the Leviathan has ordinary people cheering, just as it has the Washington sycophants at the Court of King Obama enraged beyond all measure. There is a powerful movement afoot in the country that resents and even hates these arrogant and very well-heeled parasites, and that anger is just looking for a catalyst to give it full expression. The Snowden revelations, coupled with the threat of yet another – this time, bigger – economic meltdown, could be the sparks that ignite a prairie fire.

Most of our incredibly slow-witted and cowardly politicians don’t know what is happening, but I have to hand it to Sen. Rand Paul, the only Washington politician to stand up for Snowden, who gave us a little historical perspective on the big news of the day:

"I do think that when history looks at this, they are going to contrast the behavior of James Clapper, our national intelligence director, with Edward Snowden. Mr. Clapper lied in Congress, in defiance of the law, in the name of security. Mr. Snowden told the truth in the name of privacy. So I think there will be a judgment, because both of them broke the law."

Let history judge, as Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev put it – but be aware that we are writing that history, even as I am writing these words. And if the historians of a future Sovietized – or, rather, Obama-ized – America are assigned this task, you can bet their judgment will be very different from Sen. Paul’s. If we lose this battle, future students of history will learn how Edward Snowden, the evil Chinese-Russian agent of influence, "betrayed" his country and made us all less safe from omnipresent terrorists. Indeed, I have little doubt that the next successful terrorist attack in the US will be blamed on Snowden’s revelations: officials will argue that the exposure caused the Bad Guys to somehow change their tactics and elude detection. Of course, the Boston Marathon bombing occurred while the Surveillance State was operating in the dark full throttle, but never mind: no prominent figure, except for the saints among them, will dare bring up this point for fear the contents of their government-held dossiers will be "leaked." And you can bet those are the kinds of leaks our wise rulers will be quite relaxed about.

God help us if we don’t stop them.

Charlemagne · « **Reply #4 on:** June 24, 2013, 01:10:31 PM »

Quote from: alaric

Jєω Zionist Sen Schumer angered at Russia for aiding and abeting international "criminial" Snowden, say there will be "consequences" for this.

Yes sure Chucky, just what "consequences" might that be?

Interview with Schumcky Schumer here;

No free bagels or Jєωιѕн rye for Putin when he next visits the U.S.? :scratchchin:

Seriously, the idiot politicians in this country do more to undermine America than Snowden ever could.

alaric · « **Reply #5 on:** June 24, 2013, 02:37:14 PM »

Brother Nathanael nails it again, this time on the politicians, Jєωιѕн or otherwise who are calling for Snowden's head. They want to prosecute this guy for excercising the very rights they're supposedly championing around the globe.

What an amazing display of chutzpah!

http://www.realJєωnews.com/?p=826

alaric · « **Reply #6 on:** June 24, 2013, 04:29:28 PM »

Obama to Putin:" Give Snowden Back"

Yea, good luck with that Barry...... :rolleyes:

Obama to Russia: Turn over Snowden

Edward Snowden's global fight could have major diplomatic ramifications.

The Obama administration is asking Russia to turn over Snowden, who has been charged with espionage in connection with news leaks of National Security Agency surveillance programs -- the same request Obama's team made of China and Hong Kong, which still allowed Snowden to depart to Russia on Sunday.

In a statement on Russia issued early Monday, National Security Council spokesperson Caitlin Hayden cited "our intensified cooperation after the Boston Marathon bombings and our history of working with Russia on law enforcement matters, including returning numerous high level criminals back to Russia at the request of the Russian government."

Hayden added: "We expect the Russian Government to look at all options available to expel Mr. Snowden back to the U.S. to face justice for the crimes with which he is charged."

Snowden is believed to still be in Russia; he reportedly planned to fly to Cuba, on Monday morning, but journalists aboard that flight said his seat was empty.

Still, few people know for sure where Snowden is. The Russian news agency Interfax, citing an unnamed source, reported Monday that Snowden "has most likely left Russia."

Secretary of State John Kerry, on a trip to India, told reporters it would be "deeply troubling" if Russia knew Snowden was entering the country and did nothing to detain him.

"I would urge them to live by the standards of the law," Kerry said.

Throughout the weekend, Obama administration officials suggested there would be diplomatic consequences for nations that protect Snowden.

"We are disappointed by the decision of the authorities in Hong Kong to permit Mr. Snowden to flee despite the legally valid U.S. request to arrest him for purposes of his extradition under the U.S.-Hong Kong Surrender Agreement," Hayden said.

She added: "We have registered our strong objections to the authorities in Hong Kong as well as to the Chinese government through diplomatic channels and noted that such behavior is detrimental to U.S.-Hong Kong and U.S.-China bilateral relations."

U.S. relations with Russia and China already have their fair share of tensions.

Increased American aid to rebels in Syria have drawn criticism from Russia President Vladimir Putin, who still backs Syrian leader Bashar Assad.

The Obama administration and China have also clashed over cybersecurity.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2013/06/24/obama-russia-snowden-nsa-hong-kong-china/2451283/

Arbogastes · « **Reply #7 on:** June 24, 2013, 05:50:22 PM »

I am a little suspicious about this. The government has been spying on people by authorization of the PATRIOT Act for over a decade and suddenly this guy, of all people, decides that it is now time to inform the American people about this? Sounds like another damage-control operation by the spook establishment (like Wikileaks).

The truth is that the government has been spying on people for a lot longer. Do you think that it is a mere coincide that the NSA was established by none other than the well-known craftsman (i.e. freemason) Truman?

Neil Obstat · « **Reply #8 on:** July 03, 2013, 08:35:16 PM »

.

You guys really ought to be watching what you type in that little window
on the CI site because someone's reading it and maybe they'll use it
against you. You're delusional if you think your ID is 'hidden' behind a
username and a website login.

This is the power that the Menzingen-denizens really want to have, so
they will always know who is the author of what they're reading off the
Internet.

ggreg · « **Reply #9 on:** July 04, 2013, 03:00:06 AM »

But Neil, they now know you are a forward thinking and intelligent anti big brother type which makes you even more dangerous to them.

The software algorithms they use to analyse postings and 'dangerous' people are sophisticated enough to pigeon hole you from what you read, write, who you email, associate with on the net. It can statistically compare you to vast amounts of data from other people and pattern match in that data. It does not need you to post anything specific. Humans work like that, but computer intelligence does not.

If you are any kind of a Trad or a person who will stand up to the forces of evil, then you're pretty much screwed if the big brother state takes over. So you might as well vent your spleen while you have the chance. In the end it won't make very much difference, because a computer will compile the list of the waves of people to be arrested, not a human.

Neil Obstat · « **Reply #10 on:** July 05, 2013, 11:13:45 PM »

.

ggreg - good point. If Verizon and McDonalds let the computer
make all the decisions, why not the State Department?

There's news today about Edward Snowden --- the Guardian.co.uk

Venezuela president Nicolas Maduro has offered asylum to Edward
Snowden. Photograph: Ariana Cubillos/AP

Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro said on Friday he had decided to offer asylum to former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has petitioned several countries to avoid capture by Washington.

"In the name of America's dignity ... I have decided to offer humanitarian asylum to Edward Snowden," Maduro told a televised military parade marking Venezuela's independence day.

The 30-year-old former National Security Agency contractor is believed to be holed up in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo international airport.

WikiLeaks said on Friday that Snowden had applied to six more nations for asylum, bringing to about 20 the number of countries he has asked for protection from US espionage charges.

Maduro said Venezuela was ready to offer him sanctuary, and that the details Snowden had revealed of a US spy program had exposed the nefarious schemes of the US "empire".

"He has told the truth, in the spirit of rebellion, about the US spying on the whole world," Maduro said.

"Who is the guilty one? A young man ... who denounces war plans, or the US government which launches bombs and arms the terrorist Syrian opposition against the people and legitimate president Bashar al-Assad?"

"Who is the terrorist? Who is the global delinquent?"

Russia has shown signs of growing impatience over Snowden's stay in Moscow. Its deputy foreign minister said on Thursday that Snowden had not sought asylum in that country and needed to choose a place to go.

Moscow has made clear that the longer he stays, the greater the risk of the diplomatic standoff over his fate causing lasting damage to relations with Washington.

...etc.