The forcing down of the Bolivian President’s jet was a clear breach of the Vienna Convention by Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to this Head of State while on a diplomatic mission. It has never been thought necessary to write down in a Treaty that Heads of State enjoy diplomatic immunity while engaged in diplomacy, as their representatives only enjoy diplomatic immunity as cyphers for their Head of State. But it is a hitherto unchallenged precept of customary international law, indeed arguably the oldest provision of international law.
To the US and its allies, international law is no longer of any consequence. I can see no evidence that anyone in an official position has even noted the illegality of repeated Israeli air and missile strikes against Syria. Snowden, Manning and Assange all exposed illegality on a massive scale, and no action whatsoever has been taken against any of the criminals they exposed. Instead they are being hounded out of all meaningful life and ability to function in society.
I have repeatedly posted, and have been saying in public speeches for ten years, that under the UK/US intelligence sharing agreements the NSA spies on UK citizens and GCHQ spies on US citizens and they swap the information. As they use a shared technological infrastructure, the division is simply a fiction to get round the law in each country restricting those agencies from spying on their own citizens.
I have also frequently remarked how extraordinary it is that the media keep this “secret”, which they have all known for years.
The Guardian published the truth on 29 June:
| This article has been taken down pending an investigation. | |
The strange script which appears there happens when I try to copy and paste from this site which preserved the article before the Guardian censored all the material about the UK/US intelligence sharing agreement from it.
As you can see from the newssniffer site linked above, for many hours there was just a notice stating that the article was “taken down pending investigation”, and then it was replaced on the same URL by the Guardian with a different story which does not mention the whistleblower Wayne Madsen or the intelligence sharing agreements!!
I can give, and I would give on oath, an eye witness guarantee that from my direct personal experience of twenty years as a British diplomat the deleted information from Wayne Madsen was true.
Ben: “Arbed; Do you think NEVER having confirmation of his whereabouts is in the plan?”
Ben/Arbed, i think that makes sense doesn’t it? He can still continue to share his reports. He can live incognito if thats what he wants, he’s safer that way, the host country is not outwardly the target of US wrath, and after Vienna, Russia has an excuse to help covertly.
I think Cuba and Venezuela (most oil-rich country) are still possibilities. It’ll be good if UNASUR somehow gives its consensus of backing so that its seen to be a joint decision should the plan be for Snowden to reappear.
Meanwhile i believe Bolivia is kicking-out the ambassadors of France, Spain and Portugal, quite rightly. What an Obummer of a blunder — what credibility has the President of the World left within the Global Village?
—-
Arbed please keep us posted…
The Irish – sartorially challenged though they may often be (I’m allowed to say that ;)) – seem to be slightly quicker on the uptake than their more cosmopolitan, elegant cousins:
A few voices in Germany:
Hurrah! Peeps on Twitter can join in:
@Ben – I used Google’s poor-quality translation prog and then tidied up the result a bit, so we are going backwards. I wondered whether someone might be able to provide a better translation who actually knows Spanish.
The reason I’d like a better translation of the 2nd paragraph is to find out whether they are saying Snowden didn’t meet Morales either in Russia or on the aircraft, or that he didn’t meet Morales in Russia and he didn’t go up in the aircraft, or that he has not met Morales and was not on the plane.
If he was in any place that could be interpreted as being under Bolivian jurisdiction, for any period of time, then he could have requested asylum during that time. There could well have been such a place at Sheremetevo.
The fact that the Austrian president went to Vienna’s Schwechat airport and met with Morales, and the plane stayed there for several hours, suggests that interesting events occurred at the airport which were different from a search of the plane. They may have involved a discussion of issues of asylum – and I don’t mean hypothetical issues.
There is some quality disinformation here, involving a number of organisations, and involving official silence as well as press releases and unattributable briefings. Those such as myself who have only read news reports rather than having any inside track remain completely in the dark as to whether any search took place.
All we know is that a search did take place, both countries’ governments seem to have agreed to keep quiet about it.
I am suggesting that they may also have something else to keep quiet about.
Wikileaks and Edward Snowden himself are also keeping quiet about what has been going on. I suspect that may not be the wisest policy for Snowden.
@Arbed – we may disagree on this point. Snowden’s ‘protectors’ may turn out to be not exclusively committed to that role. I continue to believe that he was stitched up into going to Moscow. Have you studied the Bobby Fischer case? From a Japanese jail cell, he publicised every damned last thing that happened, and he eventually defeated the US government and got citizenship of Iceland.
I hope Snowden is alive and in good health, and on his way to being publicly acknowledged to have claimed and been granted asylum.
@Ben – you ask who started the dance. For certain, given the disinformation put out in the western media and the location of Sheremetevo, we know that both US and Russian agencies are involved.
Nevermind, 6.18pm
I wouldn’t be concerned about Julian Assange’s ability to outfox surveillance by intelligence services – he has years of experience at that, and is, besides, one of the world’s top cryptographic experts.
Villager; Multiple Nation approvals and then reported sightings in each of those seems his best bet.
Not having a fix on him as to exact location is the way he will have to live.
Nevermind; sorry I misled. I don’t speak Spanish, but I do know syntax is a problem with translation. My point was that it was a non-denial denial. ‘He didn’t meet him’ seems to be the legalese escape clause; as my only point.
Arbed @ 6:18; Putin, the likely source of the rumor is having lots of fun with the US.
N, 6.31pm
If by that you mean Wikileaks, oh I think they are wholly committed to it. The organisation’s entire raison d’etre is to protect whistleblowers. Things may not always be what they seem – in order to get a good insight into what is going on, it is necessary to read pretty widely and exploit as many internet sources of information as you can.
Here’s an example. Edward Snowden’s father wrote a corker of an open letter to his son, comparing him to Paul Revere no less – well, no, actually Snowden Senior’s letter was penned with the help of his lawyer, Bruce Fein – and the Washington Post duly reported that Fein said they’d received a message, allegedly from Edward but conveyed via Julian Assange, to “keep quiet”. “We’re working to establish a direct link to Snowden without having to go through an intermediary”, said Fein:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/snowdens-father-signals-frustration-with-wikileaks-issues-broad-defense-of-son/2013/07/02/5c1dc6aa-e352-11e2-aef3-339619eab080_story.html
Got that? Now, here’s the rub. This is from the website of Sibel Edmonds, head of the US-based National Security Whistleblowers Alliance, herself a whistleblower and whose bone fides cannot be doubted. A post all about Bruce Fein, his background and his clients, from September 2011:
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/tag/neocon-bruce-fein/
Think about it, Ben. Start off with a time when he’s stuck at Sheremetevo. Various parties are going to be trying to bribe, threaten, or trick him. If he had as much sense as Bobby Fischer (and he probably hasn’t), he’d sort himself out some way of communicating to the world, and fuck what any lawyer tells him about keeping his mouth shut. Where can he fly to from where he can get a flight to where he wants to go? If his final destination isn’t an ALBA country, with first preference for Bolivia but Ecuador, Venezuela and Cuba will also suffice, then he’s an idiot.
Morales’s plane was at Schwechat for 14 hours! OK Austria is landlocked nowadays, but for fuck’s sake! Talks took place there, I’m tellin’ ya’! 🙂
Let’s hope Snowden has got the sense not to go anywhere near Schiphol (Amsterdam) or Frankfurt!
” fuck what any lawyer tells him about keeping his mouth shut”
It’s a legal strategy, N_. The refugee status and HR charters of the UN proscribe illegality.
The South Korean Head of the UN has already said some untoward words wrt Snowden.
“If by that you mean Wikileaks, oh I think they are wholly committed to it. The organisation’s entire raison d’etre is to protect whistleblowers”
They are totally invested, for sure. Their fates are all intertwined and I think that bodes well for being honorable toward Snowden. I think Assange has been very frustrated he couldn’t help Manning more than he has, but those were circumstances out of reach.
I think N’s insistence that Snowden can’t get a safe flight route out of Sheremetevo airport – yes, that’s where he is, there’s no mystery – are premature. Belarus, Austria, German airspace doesn’t seem to be a problem yet.
Oh, look – here’s more voices speaking out in Germany trying to find political solutions that might work:
@Arbed – N, 6.31pm
“[me] Snowden’s ‘protectors’ may turn out to be not exclusively committed to that role.”
“If by that you mean Wikileaks, oh I think they are wholly committed to it. The organisation’s entire raison d’etre is to protect whistleblowers.”
That’s a funny chain of logic you’ve got there.
“Things may not always be what they seem – in order to get a good insight into what is going on, it is necessary to read pretty widely and exploit as many internet sources of information as you can.”
But not sufficient.
Examine your notions. How can an organisation be committed to anything?
The very idea of having a global central point for whistleblowers to use is bullshit. Whistleblowers would be much better off learning how to post to Usenet.
Look how the Wikileaks hierarchs work with the NYT and the Guardian. For goodness sake! They’re both Zionist through and through, and the Guardian – isn’t that the paper which says it’s lawful for the Brits to break into embassies?
I hate all this Woodward and Bernstein stuff.
“Here’s an example. Edward Snowden’s father wrote a corker of an open letter to his son, comparing him to Paul Revere no less – well, no, actually Snowden Senior’s letter was penned with the help of his lawyer, Bruce Fein – and the Washington Post duly reported that Fein said they’d received a message, allegedly from Edward but conveyed via Julian Assange, to “keep quiet”. “We’re working to establish a direct link to Snowden without having to go through an intermediary”, said Fein:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/snowdens-father-signals-frustration-with-wikileaks-issues-broad-defense-of-son/2013/07/02/5c1dc6aa-e352-11e2-aef3-339619eab080_story.html
Got that?”
Yeah. A lawyer’s got close to his father, with whom Snowden’s own minders seem to be ‘protecting’ him from communicating. Last we heard, he wasn’t in captivity. The FSR listen to everything at Sheremetevo, electronic or otherwise. There’s absolutely no chance of him having a secure line of communication with his father. He should know that, and so should Assange. He might as well use a common-or-garden unencrypted mobile phone.
“Now, here’s the rub. This is from the website of Sibel Edmonds, head of the US-based National Security Whistleblowers Alliance, herself a whistleblower and whose bone fides cannot be doubted. A post all about Bruce Fein, his background and his clients, from September 2011:
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/tag/neocon-bruce-fein/
Yikes! Fein worked as Research Director for the Republican Party on the Joint Congressional Committee on Covert Arms Sales to Iran, and has been a Fellow for Constitutional Studies at the Heritage Foundation and worked at the American Enterprise Institute. He has advised various countries on “constitutional reform”, including South Africa, Hungary and Russia.
Really hard to imagine a background that shouts “CIA” any more loudly.
Funny how it was the right wing that started this NSA story off, too. Ditto MPs’ expenses in the little ol’ UK.
Arbed
Witness protection program in Germany? I see wheels within local political wheels grinding his life to dust. I don’t trust any of the governmental principals including Ecuador to keep Snowden’s life or liberty. They all have their own domestic agenda.
Oh, lovely…
Meanwhile…
Latvia – wouldn’t that be a gateway to another possible flight path?
And…
It’s all getting a bit Tectonic, isn’t it? Haha, what an almighty Game of Thrones we’re having. I haven’t had this much fun in ages.
Assange is the mediator wrt communication between Snowden and Dad, N_
Let’s look on the bright side. Like the Stasi in East Gemany, the NSA are collating in one place embarrassing details on every one of the shower of shit that have been running the West into a cesspit.
It’ll be handy for the prosecutions that must follow their demise.
““He might be able to present a whistleblower defense by showing that the documents he revealed benefited the public’s interest more than the state,” Amnesty International’s Michael Bochenek said.
According to the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees, refugee status can only be granted if an applicant can successfully argue that they face persecution due to one of the following reasons: race, religion, nationality, membership to a social group, or political opinion.
However, countries may reject refugee status if there is “serious reason to suspect that [he has] committed a crime against peace, a war crime, a crime against humanity, or a serious non-political crime outside of [his] country of origin.””
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/04/19283845-nsa-leaker-edward-snowden-attempts-to-navigate-legal-labyrinth?lite
So Snowden’s entire 8 year long project either had no plan, or a near fail-safe plan with multiple tangents based upon future exigent circumstances. I think the latter is more than speculation.
@Arbed – Iceland, yeah! And not simply asylum, but citizenship.
I told everyone to read up on the Bobby Fischer case!
@Ben – if you mean “intermediary”, yes, I got that. Or maybe the middle intermediary, with others being Fein (closest to father) and Wikileaks’s ‘agents on the spot’ (closest to Snowden). If I were him, I’d speak to my family on an ordinary phone. Talk about false ‘security’. Ironic, given the circumstances!
Yes, ‘intermediary’.
John Pilger in the Guardian.
Forcing down Evo Morales’s plane was an act of air piracy
Denying the Bolivian president air space was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the world
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/04/forcing-down-morales-plane-air-piracy?CMP=twt_gu
Some appalling comments there.
N, 7.29pm
Yes, the bill in Iceland to grant citizenship helps – any displays of ‘official’ support will help. Extradition and asylum are, after all, 90 per cent political decisions, and 10 per cent legalities.
My money’s still on UNASUR, though. Iceland pop. = 300,000. UNASUR = 12-nation bloc.
Here it is. (see #2) UNCHR protocols must be satisfied. They have to court the UN. This is the reason for the legalisms.
http://eng.velferdarraduneyti.is/media/acrobat-enskar_sidur/UNCHR_COUNTRY_3._Iceland.pdf
N_ Don’t know what happened to the comment, but my 7:42 is the result of checking your Fischer reference.
He was given status by Iceland while in Japan, so there goes the requirement that he must physically present on the Nation’s soil.
Then there’s that NATO thang….Arbed?
Amnesty International are talking crap as usual. At least it gives the MI6 wives something to do, in the posh areas of certain English cathedral cities. If Snowden goes to trial, he’s fucked. Doesn’t matter what his defence would be. What he needs is asylum. The UN is obviously not going to grant refugee status, and countries aren’t limited by international law as to whom they can grant asylum to.
Barrister Gemma Lindfield, according to Owen Boycott at the Guardian, implies that Russia have only defined airside transit at Sheremetevo to be extra-territorial because it suits their interests in the Snowden case.
It’s very odd for a country to have a consulate at its own airport. Does someone know when the Russian consulate at Sheremetevo was first set up?
Any guesses for what work Lindfield has done in the past?
OK, time’s up.
She worked as a junior for the fucking Swedish government in the Assange case! And she whinges on her webpage that she “(a)cted as a led junior in the extradition proceedings against a very well resourced defence team.
Owen Boycott quotes her as if she’s an independent expert!
For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume she’s correct here, which she may be.
Then the question becomes why Russia did it.
Presumably precisely to spark off a protracted period of people talking to other people, all under the watchful eye of Russian state security.
Makes me wonder whether the FSR might have had a hand, together with people in Wikileaks, in stitching Snowden up into going to Moscow in the first place.
PS
I looked up who was head of chambers where Lindfield works, at 7 Bedford Row. It’s Simeon Maskrey, who says that “since 2008 he has […] been acting for security firms defending actions arising out of injuries sustained in Iraq, Afghanistan and other world-wide trouble spots.”
Take off your mask, Gemma – you’ve been exposed.
I see nothing which would threaten NATO status, but sharper eyes are needed.
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_24443.htm?selectedLocale=en
Visions of Tom Hanks in the Terminal….vending machine food…yummy.
@Arbed – yes – the story with Fischer was that first the Icelandic parliament voted to give him the right of abode as a non-national, with a travel document appropriate to that (an “alien’s passport”). The Japanese authorities said they wouldn’t release him from jail and let him out of the country on that document, so the Icelandic parliament then voted to give him full citizenship. They did so against US pressure, and their action was only to be applauded. A country with a small population can do a lot if the will is there. I am really glad that a motion to support Snowden in a similar way will go before the Icelandic parliament. Certainly, everyone in Iceland knows the Fischer case.
As for Unasur, well let’s hope Snowden gets some support there too, although they can’t grant asylum as far as I am aware. At least one member, Brazil, has already said no.
A government such as the one in Bolivia does not always get the best legal or PR advice, and I was dismayed when they said they can only consider an asylum request when someone is on Bolivian territory or under Bolivian jurisdiction. If necessary, they too could grant citizenship, or, as you say, they could issue some kind of laissez passer preliminary to a grant of asylum when he arrives.
It would not surprise me if there was some interesting stuff involving Bolivia at Sheremetevo. In Vienna, there must have been.