WSJ: A PORTRAIT OF RESPECT- RUSSIA, ECUADOR, HONG KONG AND CHINA
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324183204578565501794475788.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
‘One of the things I intend to do as President is restore America’s standing in the world. We are less respected now than we were eight years ago or even four years ago.”
— Barack Obama, first presidential debate, September 26, 2008.
The Obama Administration wants the world to know that it cares very deeply about bringing self-admitted national-security leaker Edward Snowden back to the U.S. to stand trial. If only the world seemed to care as much about what the U.S. thinks.
Last week the U.S. announced that it had indicted Mr. Snowden on espionage and other charges and asked Hong Kong, where he’d been hiding out and giving interviews, to detain and extradite him. On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder called Hong Kong Secretary of Justice Rimsky Yuen to ask the government “to honor our request for Snowden’s arrest,” according to an official cited in the Washington Post.
Tom Donilon, the White House national security adviser, added his own rare public demarche on Saturday, saying, “Hong Kong has been a historically good partner of the United States in law enforcement matters, and we expect them to comply with the treaty in this case.”
On Sunday, Hong Kong let Mr. Snowden board a plane to Moscow.
Related Video
Editorial board member Matt Kaminski on why Hong Kong and Russia helped former security contractor Edward Snowden escape U.S. authorities.
Hong Kong’s government offered a transparently lame excuse, claiming the documents provided by the U.S. to justify arrest “did not fully comply” with their laws. Yet under terms of the territory’s bilateral 1996 extradition treaty with the U.S., Hong Kong was obliged to detain anyone wanted on criminal charges in America.
Several news outlets are reporting that Chinese officials in Beijing pressed Hong Kong’s leaders to let Mr. Snowden go. Only two weeks ago Mr. Obama hosted new Chinese President Xi Jinping at a “shirt-sleeve summit” designed to build personal goodwill. On Monday, White House press secretary Jay Carney said that “We are just not buying that this was a technical decision by a Hong Kong immigration official.”
On Monday night the drama moved to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, where Mr. Snowden bought a seat on an Aeroflot flight to Havana but didn’t turn up for departure. Secretary of State John Kerry called on Russia to send Mr. Snowden to the U.S., saying, “I would urge them to live by the standards of the law” and “there would be without any question some effect and impact on the relationship” with the U.S. if the Kremlin knew about and facilitated Mr. Snowden’s flight to Russia.
As we write these words, it isn’t clear where Mr. Snowden is, but Russian media are reporting that Russian authorities are saying there are no legal grounds to arrest him. The Kremlin has said nothing in public, so perhaps the FSB (the new KGB) is interrogating him or downloading the secret NSA data he brought with him. A “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations has been one of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy priorities.
Mr. Snowden’s many legal escorts are saying he may next go to Cuba, or Venezuela, or Ecuador, which has already granted asylum in its London embassy to WikiLeaker Julian Assange. Asked about “repercussions” for countries that defy the U.S., Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, refused to speculate.
A version of this article appeared June 25, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Portrait in Respect.
Comments are closed.
