Senate bill authorizes sanctions on Russia or any other country offering Snowden asylum

AP via Washington Post ^

[cunning_fish]

WASHINGTON — U.S. sanctions against any country offering asylum to Edward Snowden advanced in Congress Thursday as the 30-year-old National Security Agency leaker remained in a Moscow airport while Russia weighed a request for him to stay permanently.

The measure introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., demands the State Department coordinate with lawmakers on setting penalties against nations that seek to help Snowden avoid extradition to the United States, where authorities want him prosecuted for revealing details of the government’s massive surveillance system. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved the proposal unanimously by voice vote as an amendment to next year’s $50.6 billion diplomacy and international aid bill.

“I don’t know if he’s getting a change of clothes. I don’t know if he’s going to stay in Russia forever. I don’t know where he’s going to go,” Graham said. “But I know this: That the right thing to do is to send him back home so he can face charges for the crimes he’s allegedly committed.”

[Venturer]

Now they are saying they won’t give him the death penalty, How freaky is that?

[DesertRhino]

Nice, huh? They only intend to lock him in a cell in the USMC Brig at Quantico 100% incommunicado, pending a secret trial, in a secret court. Then after his assured conviction, he will be locked into the Colorado Supermax where he is alone 23 hours a day and permitted to walk alone in a concrete-walled exercise yard once a day. Until he dies of old age.

But they promise not to kill him.

At least in the USSR a “tenner” was the most dreaded sentence. 10 years in the gulags from which you wouldn’t likely survive. But many in the gulags were eventually released. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is an example.
We are ruled by despots.