Edward Snowden: What To Expect When You're Defecting

[MADem]

4. I do think they are fucking with him--they want him to go home. They don't really want to help him.

Meanwhile, they’re pretending that the Federal Migration Service is having a slow time (it’s summer!) processing Snowden’s papers for temporary asylum. Remember, the head of the FMS is an old KGB pal of Putin’s, FSB Lt. General Konstantin Romodanovsky, one of the big “Siloviki” or “Power Security Service Agents” who rule the country since Putin consolidated power in 2003-4. His Federal Migration Service answers directly to the Russian government — if they wanted to give Snowden his papers, no bureaucrat in their right mind would hold up Putin’s and Romodanovsky’s orders.

As I wrote last Friday, the same goon who’s helping lead Snowden’s case before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Robert Schlegel, is the same far-right fascist who threatened me in 2008, who pushed through laws censoring and criminalizing critical speech, and who led the Putinjugend “Nashi” group that harassed and threatened critics of the Kremlin.

In another sign of just how unpredictable and menacing “Kremlin protection” can be for Snowden — the Kremlin’s own website RT compared him to some of the most notorious Western traitors from the Cold War, many of whom met miserable ends under Soviet protection. In a piece published today headlined, “Spook out of water: What Snowden can expect if Russia grants him asylum,” the Kremlin website wrote:

Although Moscow is no longer behind the Iron Curtain, and Snowden’s PRISM leaks did not lead to the unmasking of hundreds of secret agents, the parallel that draws itself irresistibly is the Cambridge Four.

“Three of the top-level defectors – motivated by a sincere belief in Communism – were welcomed into the Soviet Union as heroes. Divorced from their members’ clubs in London with nothing in their schedule but the occasional lecture in front of KGB recruits, Kim Philby and Guy Burgess drank themselves to death in their state-allocated flats, awaiting a world revolution that never came. Don Maclean settled in better once he learned Russian - maybe a lesson Snowden could heed if he is in Moscow for the long haul.”

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/scribble/5595/4c86cbaf3b57ac2b44925571f9fe068e6626156c/

That opposition paper's remarks are nothing short of scathing, too.

I do think Putin will keep his promise to not extradite Snowden--he'll just make life miserable for him, by slow and painful degrees, is what it seems like...!