Society 10:02 19/12/2013

‘Snowden safer in Russia than Brazil’

Press TV has conducted an interview with Wayne Madsen, an investigative journalist, in Florida, about Edward Snowden and his offer to help Brazil if they were to grant him political asylum.

- Do you think Brazil will grant Edward Snowden permanent asylum in return for his offer of help?

- I’m not sure because, at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela, I noticed that President Obama and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff had a friendly encounter.

Now, of course President Rousseff canceled her visit to the United States over the revelations about US espionage against her email and her cell phone calls. But the nature of these things are fleeting and while she may have been mad a few weeks ago, it looked to me at the Mandela funeral that there was an effort to patch things up.

So, I would be very careful if I were Ed Snowden.

I hope my reporting of an attempt by the British embassy MI6 to try to ensnare Snowden in Moscow... it seems to have improved the security around him. I think he’s much safer in Russia if they extend his political asylum than he would be in a country in the Western hemisphere.

And let’s face it, the United States has had a long and very jaded history in Latin America as far as being able to go into these countries and commit all sorts of illegal and heinous acts.

- How capable is Snowden of causing more harm to US intelligence systems at this point in time?

- Well, as we know from the recent revelations and I predict that there’ll be more about the Scandinavian countries being used by the NSA to spy on various entities - in this case Norway spying against Russia - we’re going to see more and more of these revelations.

But I have to say they seem to have come to almost a drip, drip, drip. We don’t see the massive amount of intelligence leaks as we saw in the past and probably the reason for that is, there are some books in the works - I hear a couple of movies about Snowden. So, we’re seeing some of the revelations sort of slow down a bit.

But we’ll see more about the use of Norwegian facilities to spy on Russia and things like that, but I’m sure we’re going to see it to the degree we saw just a couple of months ago.

- A point you noted about Russia extending Snowden’s asylum, how much do you think Russia will do this?

- Well, I think as long as President Putin is facing this onslaught by NATO and the European Union as we saw recently in Maidan (Nezalezhnosti) Square in Kiev, this is just an attempt to move NATO’s borders further to the east.

That’s just irritating the Russian government and I think as long as the United States, the Obama administration and people like McCain – Senator John McCain - are circling Russia’s borders, I think Ed Snowden is pretty safe in Russia.

He’s just basically proving what President Putin and others have said in Russia for a long time that the Cold War is not over for many American leaders and I’m afraid that does include, depending on what day of the week it is of course, President Obama himself.

 



Source Panorama.am
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