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Snowden: Fair trial ‘unlikely’ in U.S.

Posted at 10:49 AM, Jun 24, 2013
and last updated 2013-06-24 12:49:56-04

By Jethro Mullen and Michael Pearson

CNN

(CNN) — Pleading for asylum from U.S. officials he says want to persecute him, NSA leaker Edward Snowden told Ecuadorian officials that he fears a life of inhumane treatment — even death — if he’s returned the United States to answer espionage charges, the country’s foreign minister said Monday.

Snowden told Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa that it is “unlikely that I will have a fair trial or humane treatment” if handed over to U.S. officials to stand trial, according to a letter from Snowden read by Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino.

While Patino, speaking at a news conference in Vietnam, said the county has yet to decide on Snowden’s asylum request, he questioned whether it was Snowden or the United States that was acting badly in the affair.

He called the surveillance programs revealed by Snowden “a breach of the rights” of people around the world.

“We have to ask, who has betrayed who?” he said.

Snowden — whose passport has been revoked by U.S. authorities — left Hong Kong Sunday on a “refugee document of passage” issued by Ecuador, according to Julian Assange, founder of the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, which is aiding Snowden in his efforts to find a safe haven.

Russian officials confirmed that he had flown to Moscow, where he spent the night at Sheremetyevo International Airport, according to media reports. It was unclear where he was Monday, but White House spokesman Jay Carney said U.S. officials presume he remains in Russia.

Assange would say only that the former National Security Agency contractor is “in a safe place and his spirits are high.”

In addition to Ecuador, Snowden is asking Iceland and other, unspecified countries to consider granting him asylum, WikiLeaks attorney Michael Ratner told reporters Friday.

Iceland has not received a formal application from Snowden, the Interior Ministry said Monday.

Snowden had been expected to board a flight to Cuba on Monday, Russia’s semiofficial Interfax news agency reported. But a CNN journalist on a flight to Cuba said Snowden did not appear to be in the cabin. Interfax later reported that he did not board the plane and may be planning on taking the next flight to Cuba.

Officials at the airport declined Monday to say whether Snowden remained there.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials cast a wide net seeking his return, telling Russia and Latin American countries that they should hand Snowden over should he land on their soil.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said U.S. officials are reaching out to numerous countries in an effort to have Snowden turned over.

He particularly urged Russian authorities to work with the United States, noting that U.S. officials have turned over seven prisoners to Russia in recent years.

“We need to cooperate on this because it’s important to the upholding of the rule of law,” he said.

He defended the U.S. effort to capture Snowden for prosecution, saying “people may die as a consequence of what this man did.”

In Washington, a Justice Department official told CNN that the United States isn’t planning to ask for a “red notice” calling on members of the international police agency Interpol to take Snowden into custody.

The official, however, declined to say if the United States has sent or will send provisional arrest warrants to other countries that might take Snowden in or help him in his travels.

Ecuador ‘analyzing’ request

It seems unlikely that Cuba, Venezuela or Ecuador — the nations on Snowden’s potential itinerary — would be inclined to send him back to the United States.

The U.S. government has already asked those three Latin American countries to not admit Snowden or to expel him if they do, a senior Obama administration official told CNN on Sunday.

But Cuba and Venezuela have long had strained relations with Washington. And Ecuador has given Assange refuge in its embassy in London for a year after he unsuccessfully fought extradition to Sweden in British courts.

Assange say he fears Sweden, which wants him for questioning about sexual assault allegations, would transfer him to the United States.

In his letter, read by Patino, Snowden compared himself to Pvt. Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier accused of leaking classified information through WikiLeaks.

He said U.S. officials have treated Manning inhumanely by holding him in solitary confinement, and he predicted a similar “cruel and unusual” fate for himself if he falls into U.S. hands.

Assange, speaking to reporters on a conference call, accused the United States of trying to bully other nations into handing over Snowden, whom he referred to as a “whistle-blower who has told the public an important truth.”

“The Obama administration was not given a mandate by the people of the United States to hack and spy upon the entire world, to breach the U.S. Constitution and the laws of other nations in the manner that it has,” Assange said. “To now attempt to violate international asylum law by calling for the rendition of Edward Snowden further demonstrates the breakdown in the rule of law by the Obama administration, which has sadly become so familiar to so many.”

Assange said WikiLeaks aided Snowden in his asylum applications and is paying for his travels.

The Ecuadorian government is “analyzing” Snowden’s asylum request “with a lot of responsibility,” Patino earlier told reporters in Hanoi, Vietnam.

“It has to do with the freedom of expression, with the security of citizens around the world, and therefore we have to analyze it deeply,” Patino said.

U.S. warns Hong Kong

As U.S. officials try to figure out how to pin Snowden down, they are also voicing displeasure about the Hong Kong government’s decision to let him leave Sunday after he spent several weeks there leaking a series of classified documents that embarrassed and angered the Obama administration.

The United States publicly announced Friday that it was seeking to extradite Snowden on charges of espionage and theft of government property.

But the semi-autonomous Chinese territory declined to act on the U.S. request for a provisional arrest warrant, saying it needed more information. Without that information, it said, it had no reason to stop him from getting on the plane to Moscow.

“We have registered our strong objections to the authorities in Hong Kong as well as to the Chinese government through diplomatic channels,” National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said Monday, “and noted that such behavior is detrimental to U.S.-Hong Kong and U.S.-China bilateral relations.”

Officials in Washington have disputed Hong Kong’s assertion that the U.S. request didn’t fully meet requirements.

“They came back to us with a few questions late Friday, and we were in the process of answering those questions,” a Justice Department official said Sunday. “We believe we were meeting those requirements.”

The surveillance controversy

Snowden has acknowledged that he leaked classified documents about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs to the Guardian newspaper in Britain and to The Washington Post. The documents revealed the existence of programs that collect records of domestic telephone calls in the United States and monitor the Internet activity of overseas residents.

Snowden gave up a comfortable life “in order to bring to light what he believed was serious wrongdoing on the part of our political officials,” said Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian columnist who co-authored the stories. “And he’s now at best going to spend the rest of his life on the run from the most powerful government on Earth.”

The disclosures shook the U.S. intelligence community and raised questions about whether the NSA is eroding American civil liberties.

Snowden told the Guardian that he exposed the surveillance programs because they pose a threat to democracy, but administration officials said the programs are vital to preventing terrorist attacks and are overseen by all three branches of government.

“We have not in a single case had a place where a government official engaged in willful effort to circumvent or violate the law. Zero times have we done that,” Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA’s director, said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Snowden was a Hawaii-based computer network administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, an NSA contractor. Alexander said Snowden “betrayed the trust and confidence we had in him” and is “not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent.”

Greenwald said Snowden has been extremely judicious about what he has revealed.

“I know that he has in his possession thousands of documents which if published would impose crippling damage on the United States’ surveillance capabilities and systems around the world. He has never done any of that,” Greenwald told CNN.

An online petition calling on the White House to pardon Snowden passed the key threshold of 100,000 signatures over the weekend and had more than 110,000 early Monday.

The petition describes Snowden as “a national hero.”

The White House says it will respond to any petition on its site that gathers more than 100,000 signatures in 30 days.

CNN’s Alison Harding, Phil Black, Matt Smith, Catherine E. Shoichet, Jill Dougherty, Carol Cratty, Nic Robertson and Alla Eshchenko contributed to this report.

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