{"id":319168,"date":"2022-10-02T14:00:40","date_gmt":"2022-10-02T18:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/?p=319168"},"modified":"2022-10-02T02:16:05","modified_gmt":"2022-10-02T06:16:05","slug":"snowden-didnt-flee-to-russia-obama-trapped-him-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/2022\/10\/snowden-didnt-flee-to-russia-obama-trapped-him-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Snowden Didn’t Flee to Russia: Obama Trapped Him There"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Brian McGlinchey, Stark Realities<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

When Russian President Vladimir Putin\u00a0granted citizenship<\/a>\u00a0to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden \u201cfled to Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

That disinformation-trafficking wasn\u2019t limited to random people on social media. Among others,\u00a0The New York Times<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0The Guardian<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0ABC<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0Christian Science Monitor<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and Canada\u2019s\u00a0CBC<\/a><\/em>\u00a0all asserted in the past week that Snowden \u201cfled to Russia\u201d in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own citizens, in violation of the U.S. Constitution\u2019s\u00a0Fourth Amendment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

TRUTH LIVES on at\u00a0https:\/\/sgtreport.tv\/<\/a><\/p>\n

What many people don\u2019t realize \u2014 and what some people both inside the government and out of it purposefully ignore \u2014 is that Snowden wasn\u2019t traveling\u00a0to<\/em>\u00a0Russia, but merely\u00a0through<\/a><\/em>\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

When he left Hong Kong after meeting with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and turning over hundreds of thousands of stolen files,\u00a0Snowden\u2019s ultimate destination was Quito, Ecuador.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note that Snowden says that, before leaving, he\u00a0destroyed<\/a>\u00a0his cryptographic keys that provided him access to the files, and didn\u2019t bring any copies of the files with him.<\/p>\n

At the time, the Ecuadoran government was providing political asylum to Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange at the country\u2019s London consulate, and Snowden hoped Ecuador would provide him asylum as well.<\/p>\n

Snowden\u2019s itinerary was arranged such that he wouldn\u2019t land in countries that would extradite him to the United States. Nor would he cross U.S. airspace along the way. He was to make four flights in all, taking him from Hong Kong to Moscow, then Havana, Cuba; Caracas, Venezuela and finally Quito.<\/p>\n

However, upon arriving in Moscow, Snowden was escorted by Russian security officials to an airport conference room, where they informed him that, while he was flying to Moscow, the Obama administration had invalidated his passport.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d spend the next 40 days at the Sheremetyevo airport, during which he applied to 27 countries for political asylum. \u201cNot a single one of them was willing to stand up to American pressure,\u201d Snowden wrote in his memoir,\u00a0Permanent Record<\/a><\/em>, \u201cwith some countries refusing outright, and others declaring they were unable to even consider my request until I arrived in their territory \u2014 a feat that was impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seemingly tired of the spectacle, Putin granted Snowden asylum, and he\u2019s been in Russia ever since.\u00a0The essential point, however, is that Snowden is in Russia because the Obama administration deliberately trapped him there.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2013 and ever since, rabid Snowden detractors have failed to acknowledge how that move by the Obama White House belied its own assertions that Snowden was a traitor who traveled to Moscow with highly valuable intelligence information and was at high risk of turning it over to the Russian government.<\/p>\n

Read More @ starkrealities.substack.com<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Brian McGlinchey, Stark Realities: When Russian President Vladimir Putin\u00a0granted citizenship\u00a0to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden \u201cfled to Russia.\u201d That disinformation-trafficking wasn\u2019t limited to random […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[139148],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319168"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}