[jiggyboy]

Nah, you know that’s simply what HK (aka China) was going to say. Translation problems, blah blah. They did what they wanted to do and simply declared that somebody else did something wrong — that’s how they do business, whether it’s another government or a guy trying to return a bad box of granite tiles.

[Procyon]

Snowden presented Hong Kong with a dilemma. In the long run Beijing would never consent to HK complying with its treaty obligations with the U.S. so they punted. A request from Snowden for political asylum in HK would have just prolonged the matter (the request would have been granted on orders from Beijing and resulted in bad blood v.v. HK- US relations).

So now Snowden is someone else's problem. I'm not of the opinion that Snowden is such a high-value target (like a terrorist) that the U.S. would attempt an extraordinary rendition. It's not like Snowden is telling us something we don't already assume is true about NSA capabilities and actions. He merely confirms it. And even in the case of Phillip Agee (the CIA renegade in 70s who revealed names of CIA agents around the world) we never serious attempted to bring him home for trial and he spent a lifetime being a gadfly from the safey of a sympathetic country.