‘What he has disclosed is patently in the public interest and as a whistleblower his actions were justified’ – Sergei Nikitin
The U.S. administration has gone off the rails and as well as imposing a ‘climate solution’ based on false science, uses secret courts to justify breaking the U.S. constitution and international law:
From Amnesty.org.uk
Speaking after taking part in a meeting with the US whistleblower Edward Snowden at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport earlier this afternoon, Sergei Nikitin, Head of Amnesty International’s Moscow office, said:
“Amnesty International was pleased to reiterate our support for Edward Snowden in person.
“We will continue to pressure governments to ensure his rights are respected – this includes the unassailable right to claim asylum wherever he may choose.
“What he has disclosed is patently in the public interest and as a whistleblower his actions were justified. He has exposed unlawful sweeping surveillance programmes that unquestionably interfere with an individual’s right to privacy.
“States that attempt to stop a person from revealing such unlawful behaviour are flouting international law. Freedom of expression is a fundamental right.
“Instead of addressing or even owning up to these blatant breaches, the US government is more intent on persecuting him. Attempts to pressure governments to block his efforts to seek asylum are deplorable.”
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Meanwhile, Snowden has met with other human rights representatives and a Wikileaks activist. According to RT.com:
Thirteen Russian and international human rights advocates and lawyers have gathered at Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport for a meeting with Snowden. The whistleblower said the living conditions were fine at the airport and he felt safe there, but he knows he can’t stay there forever, according to Lokshina.
NSA leaker & former CIA employee Edward Snowden has asked for political asylum in Russia, saying he could not fly to Latin America, according to human rights activists who met the whistleblower at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.
According to Tatyana Lokshina of Human Rights Watch, Snowden seeks to stay in Russia as he “can’t fly to Latin America yet.”
When asked if the NSA leaker has any more revelations, Lokshina responded: “He says that his job is done.”
The Russian president’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded by saying the Kremlin has not yet received any formal asylum request from Snowden. The conditions for his staying in Russia remain the same as voiced by Vladimir Putin earlier, he added.
Should Snowden apply for asylum, Russia will consider his request, Peskov said.
Russia was one of over twenty countries to which Snowden sent asylum request according to Wikileaks. President Vladimir Putin said then Snowden may stay in Russia, if he wants to, but only if he stops activities aimed against the United States.
“There is one condition if he wants to remain here: he must stop his work aimed at damaging our American partners. As odd as it may sound from me,” Putin told a media conference in Moscow.
In Putin’s opinion, Snowden considers himself “a fighter for human rights” and it seems unlikely that he is going to stop leaking American secret data.
However, Russia is not going to extradite Snowden, the president underlined.
“Russia has never extradited anyone and is not going to do so. Same as no one has ever been extradited to Russia,” Putin stated.
“Snowden, by sincere conviction or for some other reason, considers himself to be a human rights activist, a fighter for the ideals of democracy and human freedom. Russian human rights activists and organizations, as well as their colleagues abroad acknowledge this. For this reason, extraditing Snowden to a country like the US where capital punishment is enforced is impossible,”
Check this link for video of the meeting and the rest of the story.
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Transcript of Edward Joseph Snowden statement, given at 5pm Moscow time on Friday 12th July 2013. (Transcript corrected to delivery)
Hello. My name is Ed Snowden. A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates.
It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice – that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.
I believe in the principle declared at Nuremberg in 1945: “Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”
Accordingly, I did what I believed right and began a campaign to correct this wrongdoing. I did not seek to enrich myself. I did not seek to sell US secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.
That moral decision to tell the public about spying that affects all of us has been costly, but it was the right thing to do and I have no regrets.
Since that time, the government and intelligence services of the United States of America have attempted to make an example of me, a warning to all others who might speak out as I have. I have been made stateless and hounded for my act of political expression. The United States Government has placed me on no-fly lists. It demanded Hong Kong return me outside of the framework of its laws, in direct violation of the principle of non-refoulement – the Law of Nations. It has threatened with sanctions countries who would stand up for my human rights and the UN asylum system. It has even taken the unprecedented step of ordering military allies to ground a Latin American president’s plane in search for a political refugee. These dangerous escalations represent a threat not just to the dignity of Latin America, but to the basic rights shared by every person, every nation, to live free from persecution, and to seek and enjoy asylum.
Yet even in the face of this historically disproportionate aggression, countries around the world have offered support and asylum. These nations, including Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador have my gratitude and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless. By refusing to compromise their principles in the face of intimidation, they have earned the respect of the world. It is my intention to travel to each of these countries to extend my personal thanks to their people and leaders.
I announce today my formal acceptance of all offers of support or asylum I have been extended and all others that may be offered in the future. With, for example, the grant of asylum provided by Venezuela’s President Maduro, my asylee status is now formal, and no state has a basis by which to limit or interfere with my right to enjoy that asylum. As we have seen, however, some governments in Western European and North American states have demonstrated a willingness to act outside the law, and this behavior persists today. This unlawful threat makes it impossible for me to travel to Latin America and enjoy the asylum granted there in accordance with our shared rights.
This willingness by powerful states to act extra-legally represents a threat to all of us, and must not be allowed to succeed. Accordingly, I ask for your assistance in requesting guarantees of safe passage from the relevant nations in securing my travel to Latin America, as well as requesting asylum in Russia until such time as these states accede to law and my legal travel is permitted. I will be submitting my request to Russia today, and hope it will be accepted favorably.
If you have any questions, I will answer what I can.
Thank you.
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To some extent this 1984 stuff was always going to be inevitable and eventually all countries with the resources to do so will do so. Much of it may disappear from public view but will no doubt take place. If they use it to disable terrorism, then all well and good. But I don’t doubt that it will also be used from time to time for political purposes and abuses of people rights will no doubt also occur. It is something that society has no choice about and will have to lean to live with.
It’s really weird to see how the USA and Russia seem to have completely swapped positions on human rights over the years. The only thing missing in the US is a one party state. Perhaps Obama will declare himself Tsar and ban all political parties other than the Democrats.
Having been raided by the thought police using anti-terror laws, I have views on this. I don’t believe we have to accept secret courts or oppression of legitimately held views. Vote out politicians who go along with this abuse of authority.
Strange, this man is/has taken refuge in two countries that almost certainly have similar programs monitoring communication networks.
I agree tallbloke. Problem is keeping a check on the people you vote for. I once thought Cameron was a good guy. I did a six month course at GCHQ Cheltenham some fifty years ago. My, how the technology has changed! Very difficult to keep the spooks out these days. Going to have to pick sides. This is now a period of intense social evolution for humanity. The lefties are doing very well. We need an awakening.
You cannot trust any administration that accepts and promulgates the “runaway global warming” fraud, because it basically authorizes insanity, i.e., belief in a patently unreal science–an oxymoron, if science is to have any true meaning. The Obama administration represents what I have been calling the Insane Left for the last 3 years or more, and with its long list of abuses of the American system of government (which are all tied together under the heading, “lying to the American people”), I was not surprised it calls Snowden a traitor and wants to grab him and punish him. But the quickness with which the Republican leaders also call him traitor tells me the hands of both parties are dirty on this, and both have embraced suppression, in service to the state, over inalienable individual freedoms, a problem continually in the news, or behind the scenes of every story, now. The question is whether the growing minority populations in the U.S.A.–blacks and latinos, primarily, but Asians as well–will put aside their strong feelings of cultural and other fundamental differences with traditional white America, and all can renew a common committment to the same core values, or whether the number wanting to tear apart America–“transforming” it only in the sense of demolishing it–will continue to grow, and finally succeed (as they all threaten to do now, with the likes of Obama in charge, making his administration just a supersized “reality show” that is blatantly unreal). But the underlying threat is aggressive dogmas, worldwide, and thus a much deeper, general testing of man:
There Are More Things In Heaven And Earth, Than Are Dreamt Of In Your Philosophy
Saw you on Al Jazeera last night!
You do not have to harbour secret, revolutionary thoughts to be frightened and shell-shocked by the behaviour of the American government to those it feels act or may act against its current, and very malleable, interests. I was a supporter of the US of A despite its loudness, crass consumerism and its swagger. The US has dragged the rest of the world into the 21st century kicking and screaming. If not for the American attitude of “get-er-done-now” we’d be living in a British-European way of status quo of perhaps the 1930s. Not that would necessarily be bad, but I doubt that I’d be typing on an iPad mini using a Bluetooth keyboard in a restaurant right now.
Yet that brashness and control in my opinion has, since the 1980s, morphed into a hostile, us-vs-them attitude – indeed, Bush was explicit in this when he said that we were either with him or against him in his first “war on terror” in 1991. Perhaps that situation always existed (Guatemala, Argentina spring to mind) but it wasn’t so blatant. Or pervasive. Perhaps the pervasiveness is not a new development of attitude but of the same internet, computer-in-a-restaurant that I mentioned above.
My eight-year-old son, responding to my question as to why the schoolyard bullies did what they did, explained them and probably the most powerful nation in the world: “Because they can, Dad”. If a child understands humanity correctly, as I unfortunately have come to believe, he has posed the situation that requires us, demands us, to oppose authoritarian surveilance especially in our own nation, and support Snowden’s actions. If all it takes for a bully to bully is the knowledge that he “can”, then we must stop him from even thinking he can. And stop him every day of our lives, because it is only the belief that he is unable to spy, to arrest, to execute and invade that prevents him from doing so.
The German General Staff operated long before the rest of the world in creating plans to invade and defend their territories and those around them, with partners and without. Arguably it lead to wars when conditions developed to favour one of the hypothetical scenarios (WWI) but its concept was that of constant preparedness. Is that what American has done, has taken the concept of constant preparedness to the global level with the power of technology, and is now acting on “positive” scenarios? I suspect that is the case.
America – and its new-best-buddy Britain (how else to retain power in a post-Empire world?) – speak of freedoms, but the freedoms are not now those of the common people to mind their own business, to create their own lives. The freedoms of importance are those of national action. Blair described the FOI legislation as the worst decision of his political life, as it limited the exercise of “good government”. Meaning weaseling your way to get what you want by means that would not be acceptable to the electorate if they knew what was going on. How stunningly cynical is that! Canada is not so far behind except for its relative lack of wealth and organization. Freedom to act at a national level has always been the goal of nations, of course, and essentially for business reasons, but never has democratic values been so clearly breached ….. against its own citizens.
The War Against Terror has evolved into the War For Control. Positive control. “Report suspect activity” said the lighted billboard on the interstate in New Jersey when I drove to the beach a few years ago. And nobody was outraged, perplexed pehaps, but not outraged. After all, THEY weren’t acting suspiciously. (I wanted to report my neighbour for cutting his grass in a criss-cross, tartan pattern that made me think he was a Martian in love with grass and the Scots, but my girlfriend stopped me.) That sign was 1984 in 2005.
Widespread, constant surveillance. What a crock! It doesn’t find the Mafia, it doesn’t find the Bernie Madoffs, it doesn’t find the drug dealers or perverts that parasitize our communities, but it is supposed to find the disaffected almost-man with a vague grudge against, well, everyone. Is that really what it is intended to do? Or, really, to lie there like a leopard in the tall grass, until something or someone – like an annoying political challenger – walks by.
In other words, until YOU become one of THEM.
Oh, and to whoever is reading this for my file, make sure you spell my last name with an “o”. I am not of the Procter-and-Gamble family, unless there is some unclaimed inheritance around.
[…] In other words, until YOU become one of THEM.” – Original comment here. […]
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
Amnesty International’s stated goal is “for every person to enjoy all the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. That does not include the right to break an oath.
The organization paid its outgoing Secretary General Irene Khan a golden parachute over $850,000 and more than $500,000 to her deputy Kate Gilmore. I am pleased to announce an immediate cessation of my support of Amnesty International.
I am waiting for Ed Snowdon or Julian Assange to spill the beans on the Soviet police state… errr I mean Government.
Sound of crickets…….
One hour later… Oh! I forgot!! Questioning authority is only cool if it the United States.
Just want to point out that the US has had Britain, Australia, and New Zealand as coconspirators in Echelon since the 70’s. The US was legally inhibited from looking at intercepts of domestic traffic so gave the ability to collect data to others so we could all SHARE!! I believe NZ finally blew the whistle on the show.
Other countries were part of the networks at differing levels. The recent feigned outrage by countries HORRIFIED by our spying is sad. Most have been complicit at different levels based on mutual exchanges of info or bribery, but especially so since 9/11.
Ian Wilson, I agree. I also never saw Wikileaks do anything on China unless it came out of the Data Dump from our little upset Gay Sergeant Bradley Manning. Snowden was involved in European operations so should have information there. Funny he and his commie handler, Greenwald, hasn’t even THREATENED to release any of it!!