Edward Snowden, the former US National Security Agency whistleblower who has lived in Russia since his revelations rocked the US intelligence community in 2013, has a taxpayer identification number, Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit found.
Whatever he’s doing now, he still did the right thing as an American by honoring his oath to uphold the US Constitution when he exposed the abuse against our rights. He deserves a pardon so he can return home.
It’s crazy how he’s not a national hero.
It’s really sad the way he got captured in Russia during his escape. I think he rightly believed that was somewhere the US couldn’t likely get to him, and he was right, but his understandable fear of US persecution blinded him to the fact that the danger from enemies of the US was just as great.
Putin captured him to use as a pawn against the US and to try to extract any remaining information he could from him and I’m sure at this point he’s mostly accomplished that goal. I feel like at this point he is basically a political prisoner and he has to play along and cooperate with the regime to survive, I don’t think Putin would ever let him leave even if he was pardoned, he’s too useful to keep under his thumb. I hope to be proven wrong and that he escapes someday, whether released legitimately as being past his usefulness, or by fleeing and finding somewhere else to hide, but I’m not optimistic with the state of the world these days.
The cost of whistleblowing can be very high and very permanent, as they are in this case, and no amount of protection will ever make you totally safe from consequences, and that’s the way the powers that be like it despite what they may say.
This is not how things happened. He got stranded in Russia when the USA cancelled his passport, he was en route to Ecuador (at the time they had a government that was willing to give him asylum).
I’m not sure what your point is. We agree on the facts, and my speculation is as good as yours. There are some options a stateless person stuck in an airport without passport can pursue, but they take time, sometimes a whole lot of time, maybe even a lifetime (there’s even a movie about it, and a famous person it happened to) and in that time, does anyone actually think he was just treated normally and in good faith by Russian authorities, and he decided:
a) “hey these Russian folks are alright and want to help me out and certainly don’t spy on their own citizens like the US does which is famously what I was whistleblowing about in the first place maybe would like to live here forever because I don’t care about having human rights anymore”
and/or
b) “aha the US fell perfectly for my sinister plan to create plausible deniabilty to pretend that I wasn’t secretly a russian agent all along by making it look like I became trapped in Russia entirely by accident, when it was exactly where I wanted to be! those suckers!”
I don’t think either of those things are plausible. I think he got stuck in Russia, and the Kremlin realized how fortunate this was for them, and they took advantage of his stateless status to make sure he never left while making sure he said all the right things to make sure everyone knew it was entirely “his choice made of his own free will”, as such dictatorships like to do. I’m sure it has been explained to him that it would be dangerous for him to leave Russia’s “protection”. It’s speculation, granted, but I believe it in absence of any other more convincing theory.
You worded your post like this:
This text implies that Snowden was actively captured. Of course he’s not there because he choose to, or so I believe. But the fact is that he got stranded there, his own country put him in that situation.
And this is actually true. If Snowden lands on any country that extradites to the USA, there’s where he would be in a heartbeat, to rot forever in some jail, forgotten.
You don’t need a passport to claim asylum. The whole story reeks tbh. He stayed in Russia because he wasn’t allowed to leave. Or because he was a Russian agent. But there are many diplomatic avenues to get from one sympathetic country to another for a legitimate asylum claim.
So you say, without providing any proof such avenues exist.
https://www.google.com/search?q=do+you+need+a+passport+to+claim+asylum
Well duh. You can apply for asylum without a passport. Now try to bridge the ~8k miles from Russia to Ecuador without one, while trying to avoid being deported to the USA, and see how far you’ll get. Best case, you’d be stuck for years in some embassy like happened to Julian Assange.
You can apply for asylum in an embassy and receive travel documents if approved. Either Russia or Ecuador could also have just put him on a diplomatic flight. Edward Snowden is not the first person who needed to cross hostile borders to claim asylum. The simple fact of the matter is that he either chose not to do so, or was not allowed to do so.