Posted on 10/01/2022 10:50:39 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.”
The disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own citizens, in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.
What many people don’t realize — and what some people both inside the government and out of it purposefully ignore — is that Snowden wasn’t traveling to Russia, but merely through it.
When he left Hong Kong after meeting with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and turning over hundreds of thousands of stolen files, Snowden’s ultimate destination was Quito, Ecuador.
It’s important to note that Snowden says that, before leaving, he destroyed his cryptographic keys that provided him access to the files, and didn’t bring any copies of the files with him.
At the time, the Ecuadoran government was providing political asylum to Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange at the country’s London consulate, and Snowden hoped Ecuador would provide him asylum as well.
Snowden’s itinerary was arranged such that he wouldn’t land in countries that would extradite him to the United States. Nor would he cross U.S. airspace along the way. He was to make four flights in all, taking him from Hong Kong to Moscow, then Havana, Cuba; Caracas, Venezuela and finally Quito.
However, upon arriving in Moscow, Snowden was escorted by Russian security officials to an airport conference room, where they informed him that, while he was flying to Moscow, the Obama administration had invalidated his passport.
He’d spend the next 40 days at the Sheremetyevo airport, during which he applied to 27 countries for political asylum. “Not a single one of them was willing to stand up to American pressure,” Snowden wrote in his memoir, Permanent Record, “with some countries refusing outright, and others declaring they were unable to even consider my request until I arrived in their territory — a feat that was impossible.”
Seemingly tired of the spectacle, Putin granted Snowden asylum, and he’s been in Russia ever since. The essential point, however, is that Snowden is in Russia because the Obama administration deliberately trapped him there.
In 2013 and ever since, rabid Snowden detractors have failed to acknowledge how that move by the Obama White House belied its own assertions that Snowden was a traitor who traveled to Moscow with highly valuable intelligence information and was at high risk of turning it over to the Russian government.
Think about it: if Obama officials believed Snowden had possession of an extremely sensitive archive of top secret documents - as they insist but Snowden denies - why would they *want to trap him in Russia*?
Because they knew it'd be easy to convince idiots he was a Kremlin spy. — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 26, 2022
Aside from revealing the unconstitutional surveillance regime, Snowden’s disclosures also proved that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had committed perjury in testifying before Congress:
Clapper didn’t merely escape perjury charges, termination or a shameful resignation — CNN actually put him on the payroll as a “national security analyst,” giving him a pulpit from which to continue spewing all manner of falsehoods on behalf of the national security establishment, on everything from Russiagate to Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Meanwhile, though Snowden has been vindicated many times over — including a 2020 federal court ruling that the NSA’s surveillance program violated the Constitution — he’s compelled to live in Russia to escape prosecution under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Which brings us to another myth that goes hand-in-hand with “fled to Russia” falsehood: Detractors routinely say Snowden was a “coward” to flee the United States at all.
The noble course of action, they say, would be to go to trial in America and let a jury of his peers decide whether he was justified in exposing his government’s crimes by leaking secret documents to journalists.
However, as government-whistleblower attorney Jesselyn Radack explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, that’s not how Espionage Act prosecutions work:
“The Espionage Act has morphed into a strict liability law, which means the government does not have to show the defendant had a felonious intent. A defendant cannot argue that the information was improperly classified…The motive and intent of the whistleblower are irrelevant. And there is no whistleblower defense, meaning the public value of the material disclosed does not matter at all.”
In short, the only way for Snowden to be treated justly is for him to be pardoned or given a plea deal with a very short sentence.
As the intelligence community continues to wield excessive influence on our government, neither outcome is likely anytime soon.
Stark Realities undermines official narratives, demolishes conventional wisdom and exposes fundamental myths across the political spectrum.
So they “trapped” him in Russia. They could of trapped him in Cuba. They had a better chance of extradition from Russia than Cuba. A fugitive getting his passport suspended is common so this is a semantic word game for sympathy.
Clapper didn’t merely escape perjury charges, termination or a shameful resignation — CNN actually put him on the payroll as a “national security analyst,” giving him a pulpit from which to continue spewing all manner of falsehoods on behalf of the national security establishment, on everything from Russiagate to Hunter Biden’s laptop.
No one dragged him kicking and screaming into planes. He chose to first fly to China and from there to Russia.
He stole over million secret documents and gave these to China and Russia because he is a traitorous SOB.
It just gets more confusin’ every day!
Snowden’s not trapped anywhere. He can come home to the US any time he likes.
A fugitive of what?
The man let the American people know that the government was spying on them, for any reason.
The man should have received a medal.
But, but, but he’s a traitor.
I think he also dreamed of becoming a national Political Hero before the obvious reality of Treason settled in.
I was not pleased with Snowden given the initial reports. But I eventually had reservations about condemning the guy. My ultimate position concerned safe return and Congressional hearings.
Given the varying FReeper reports and opinions over the following years, I began to suspect his intentions were Constitutionally sound.
We have an interesting pool of intelligence here at FR — intelligence in the sense of data gathering and analysis. Assuming a high percentage of honest players, we manage to grind through the details pretty much exploring the realistic possibilities without individual reservations (although frequently contentious). In a way, FR is an undisciplined thinktank.
>I think he also dreamed of becoming a national Political Hero
He certainly imagined himself becoming a jet-setting International Man of Mystery cashing in speaking at conferences admired by all.
That is why he falsely claimed to be a Special Forces candidate, whose career was cut short by injury, while in reality he just enlisted and washed out in two months. He also refers to himself as a “former CIA agent”, when he was really an office software support person.
He stole 1.7 million documents so he certainly couldn’t have known what is in there. He made explosive claims of abuse, but the explosive ones are the ones he doesn’t have evidence for (and we already know he is a liar). Those he showed evidence for were pretty milquetoast.
We see you.
Snowden could have flown to Ecuador BEFORE he flew to Hong Kong. In fact, journalist Glenn Greenwald has lived right next door to Ecuador, in Brazil, for two decades.
Fact - at that point in time, Snowden had no idea if Ecuador would give him asylum or not.
Julian Assange got temporary asylum in the Ecuador London Embassy because Assange was in the politically sensitive secret information business.
All Snowden had to sell was CIA and NSA spy craft.
Snowden's "information" was nothing more than billions of completely useless emails and phone conversations.
Snowden should have gotten a medal
Lets be rather blunt about the 1.7-million ‘documents’. At best, he might have read half of 1-percent of them and could assign a value of worth to them. The rest are all unknowns.
He’s one of these individuals (like Reality Winner) who came into the US military or the NSA in the past 20 years and felt they could ‘save’ the world. Amongst their various talents (or lack of talents), they felt they could correct corruption or ‘evil’.
And exposing Clapper's felony perjury.
Which, in the turd-world American Jesters System, means nothing.
If it’s not too G14 Classified, can you share some supporting information regarding the “1,700,000 documents’ he stole?
IE…..where did you get that number?
On Nov. 20, 2004, Poitras was in Baghdad filming “My Country, My Country.” The film depicts Iraqi elections from the perspective of an Iraqi doctor, who criticized the U.S. occupation yet hoped democracy would take root in his homeland.
Members of a U.S. Army National Guard unit from Oregon reported seeing a “white female” holding a camera on a rooftop just before they were attacked. David Roustum, 22, an Army National Guardsman from West Seneca, New York, was killed. Several troops were wounded. Some guardsmen who saw Poitras suspected she had a heads-up about the attack and didn’t share that information with American forces because she wanted to film it. If true, Poitras would have broken U.S. criminal law.”
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