He did expose some pretty bad practices to the general public, but asylum in Russia afterwards? Are you kidding me? That just looks super fishy to anyone with at least an ounce of critical thought in his brain. Especially in the context of the Crimea debacle.
Considering how disgustingly subservient all of Europe has been to bend over backwards to the US (e.g. forcing the landing of a presidential plane because someone suspected it was carrying Snowden) you can't really blame him. Russia is the only country in the region that doesn't care whether the US wants him or not (and would even refuse to co-operate simply to flip them off).
Heck, I'd love to see him be granted asylum somewhere else but all of Europe would drop him like a hot potato the second the US told them to hand him over.
Indeed -- the decision on Snowden came around the same time Obama was getting ready to invade Syria.
Putin is a de-facto old-school dictator, but on this he did everything right. I wish he'd completed the job by sneaking Snowden to Ecuador via submarine, but I can understand why he didn't -- he can play that card next time he desperately needs a propaganda boost.
It was interesting to see how suddenly our media (in Germany) stopped their sympathetic reporting on the Syrian rebels and how desperately they need our support (i.e. at least give them some guns) when ISIS began making headlines.
I remember thinking that supporting the rebels in Syria (though it viscerally felt like the "right thing" to do) was probably the worse bad choice to make even before Russia & al heavily spoke against it. It's easy to forget that both the direct intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the less direct support of the rebellions during the "Arab Spring" resulted in very unstable situations and a very disconcerting shift towards Islamist extremism in those regions.
Hanlon's razor kills conspiracies.
[1] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-source-nsa-leaker-snowdens...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/02/ecuador-rafael-...
> He only had to take asylum in Russia because the US revoked his passport and prevented him from going anywhere else.
That implies that it's the fault of the US government that he is currently in Russia (I think it also forwards the misconception that Snowden was in Russia when his passport was revoked). He didn't have to flee to Hong Kong to begin with. When the US government requested extradition and revoked his passport in order to keep him inside Hong Kong, he fled using what turned out to be an invalid travel document. Snowden has ended up in purely out of his own actions. The US isn't preventing him from traveling - he can walk down to the embassy at any time he wants and get a plane ticket home.
US English must have diverged quite a lot from UK English if 'home' now means 'prison'.
Snowden probably doesn't like the Russian government, but he was stuck in a Russian airport with a revoked passport. Even if he had free choice, Russia is one of the few countries willing and able to withstand US pressure to extradite him. Being on trial in the US isn't an option for him because what he did may have been just, but was striclty illegal.
Russian-US relations were at a low and Russia generally likes sending little fuck-yous. Granting Snowden asylum is also good PR for Russia because they appear strong against perceived US injustice.
For both sides the choices appear completely rational without implying any foul play or hidden relations.
Crimea is a very strategic area to get hold of which NATO wants to break into Russia through color revolutions ETC just because Putin refused to be US dog. When Ukraine democratic government was forcefully overthrown by a US-backed Nazi military coup what choice Russia had? Just imagine how US would respond if China or Russia back coup takes place in Mexico or Canada? Why pivot to Asia, why redrawing Middle East, dividing Iraq into three small states? Supporting rebels against Serian government while helping Saudi dictatership to kill Yemen civilions just to suppress another rebels. All sugarcoded IN the name of democracy and freedom? which even US is failing to provide to its citizens.
We're listening about China aggression, Russian aggression, while US is at war in almost the whole world directly or through proxies.
US has accumulated enough bad karma to insure its decline, those who don't remember history are bound to repeat it. This war game and greed for hegemony by bullet at all cost has happened countless times in the past and has always resulted in complete destruction of empires and civilizations sooner or later.
But public is sleeping as always, only with a vein optimism that "this won't happen to us, we're unique in the human history!" You're not unique, you're just a spec of dust in the cosmos which has eternal law of upholding justice. It's just that it comes at the right time when the bucket is full.
Wait, wait, wait. When did this happen? Because I think I might've missed something.
Yanukovych was democratically elected and overthrown by popular protests (backed by the EU / US?).
Next time, buy some room for your outraged response with a couple sentences of explanation.
> While many of Globalresearch's articles discuss legitimate humanitarian or environmental concerns, the site has a strong undercurrent of reality warping throughout its pages, especially in relation to taking its news from sources such as Russia Today RT[2] and Press TV.[3] Its view of science, the economy and geopolitics seems to be broadly conspiracist.
> Whenever someone makes a remarkable claim and cites Globalresearch, they are almost certainly wrong.
I agree about the low quality of blumkvist's reply.
The ignorance here is mindblowing. Russians live in a perpetual conspiracy theory it seems. Autocratic states are known for their information control and propaganda it seems even when historically controlled media has been highly inaccurate, yet somehow the populace keeps buying into statements from state controlled media. I guess the state knows how to deliver information by exploiting both ignorance and patriotism. Two things Russia has high supplies of.
0]: http://www.globalresearch.ca/jfk-and-the-unspeakable-why-he-...
That's not to say the initial act has no value. It most certainly has. But everything he says afterward I just don't value at all.
I don't think you should desert to the enemy if you're trying to fix your battalion.
> It's like exposing corruption in the police department and then only hanging out at the mafia's restaurant. How am I supposed at look at that guy now?
The whole point of staying in Russia is that he can't leave because the US made sure his travel documents were revoked, and Russia is unlikely to extradite him under political pressure from the US. If it was Snowdens goal to pass on information to Russia, he wouldn't have made such a big fuss about releasing that info to the media. So it's actually more like exposing corruption in the police department, and then seeking refuge from the wrath of those corrupt police, and the only safe place you can find is the maffia's restaurant.