Now that untold damage has been done to our foreign policy with regard to China, the satellite government of Hong Kong has allowed Edward Snowden to board a plane to Moscow where he may travel on to an undetermined destination, possibly Venezuela.
This is after Hong Kong rebuffed U.S. officials in their weeks-long request to have Snowden extradited, but after Snowden spilled his guts to the Chinese press claiming that the NSA and the U.S. government essentially declared cyber-war on them in 2009, Hong Kong couldn’t find good reason to turn him over to U.S. authorities.
U.S. authorities have charged Snowden with theft of U.S. government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorized person, with the latter two charges falling under the U.S. Espionage Act.
The United States had asked Hong Kong, a special administrative region (SAR) of China, to send Snowden home.
“The U.S. government earlier on made a request to the HKSAR government for the issue of a provisional warrant of arrest against Mr Snowden,” the Hong Kong government said in a statement.
“Since the documents provided by the U.S. government did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law, the HKSAR government has requested the U.S. government to provide additional information … As the HKSAR government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.”
That is outstanding reasoning on display. The government documents provided by the U.S. to the Chinese government weren’t enough to hold Edward Snowden, but the government documents that he stole and his sloppy revelations of U.S. government intelligence gathering activities with regard to China were more than enough to snub American requests for extradition, and even warrant a statement of U.S. condemnation by China’s Xinhua news agency, which said,
“They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.”
You’re welcome, America. World War III, here we come!
Edward Snowden is now in the hands of the Wikileaks legal team who’ve basically said that he’s going to a real Democratic country. Oh, snap. At least more Democratic than China, I presume.