The tone of the article made me laugh. WaPo seems to expect China to ask "how high?" when the US says "Jump!" The Chinese have to decide how they're going to approach this, and there's no reason for them to take Snowden into custody until they do.
It is actually a Hong Kong issue at this point, and there are a ton of (even British) lawyers in HK who would die to take this case. China is not likely to do anything to interfere in any fashion that might suggest an encroachment of the autonomous rule Hong Kong enjoys.
China sees its management of Hong Kong as a precursor for handling reunification with Taiwan. That issue (territorial integrity) is hands-down the most sensitive political issue in China which means that the government will think about fifteen times before taking actions which will cause problems with Hong Kong (relations are already at an all-time low).
There is simply no way the Chinese government will violate Hong Kong political independence in such a ham-fisted manner given the huge publicity surrounding this case. Which means that assuming the Hong Kong police decide this is an arrestable offense and take Snowden into custody (having just been in Hong Kong literally yesterday, my guess is that no-one knows where he is), the question of what happens to him will play out in the Hong Kong courts and the court of public opinion, and it is very likely that he won't be extradited for years if at all.
I don't think Hong Kong has any political independence to violate. Decisions are already made in Beijing and then passed to Hong Kong's government to implement.
In this particular case the Chinese government has an official mechanism to override extradition decisions, but I don't think there's any reason for them to actually need it.
This is a no-op article. Obviously if there's an arrest out for a person, and the person is not arrested yet - it means that the person is still no found / not in custody. Unless the paper meant to point to some kind of collusion/corruption (which it makes no claims of) - there is nothing to see here.
Saying "We can't catch person cause he is missing/at large" adds nothing to the discussion.
It is worse than that. The article ignores basic facts that have been widely reported elsewhere about the difficulty of doing this particular extradition. It really serves no useful purpose other than to draw clicks, and push for a drumbeat of complaints about Hong Kong and China for domestic political consumption.
It's actually not clear that there is a warrant for his arrest in Hong Kong, only a request by the US to Hong Kong authorities.
Right now I'm guessing Hong Kong and Beijing authorities are both dearly wishing Snowden had chosen somewhere else, and wondering what exactly to do with him. Until they figure that out, staying silent is probably the best thing they can do.
Right now I'm guessing Hong Kong and Beijing authorities
are both dearly wishing Snowden had chosen somewhere else
Flip the actors. What if a Chinese spy had fled to the United States and started to feed the press information on how the Chinese government had hacked essentially every computer system in the US; and in return the Chinese issued an arrest warrant, and demanded that the US send him back to the mainland so he could be tortured to death?
Where is the absurd hyperbole? That he would be tortured? Look at the case of Manning. Look to what the three NSA whistleblowers said awaited him when he returned.
As a US citizen, I want to believe this is hyperbole and nonsense, but the fact is, this is exactly what we should be doing - turning the mirror upon ourselves and performing a real self-examination of who we are as a country.
To me it seems they are going to protect him or at least prevent Us from searching him. After all he showed to the world that US is just as bad in the things as China is and you'd think China wouldn't want to just give him up for it.
There aren't any countries that can afford to not give a shit about the US, but that's not the same thing as saying they need to buckle to every whim in Washington.
Wait, what? You don't honestly believe that no laws were broken in the inflation and collapse of the housing bubble, do you? You're just trolling, right? I'm sorry, you were being serious? Oh boy, where to begin...
And then there's PBS's Frontline, which did a devastating program on "Too Big To Jail" that focused on HSBC's money laundering for Mexican drug cartels, and specifically on why the Justice Department's refusal to prosecute in spite of having overwhelming evidence of unambiguously criminal conduct.
Their number two official (Lanny Breuer) made the mistake of admitting, on camera, that is was because Justice saw HSBC as too big to jail. Specifically, they feared that criminal convictions would trigger a series of events leading to a a global financial collapse. This explanation happened to account for the total absence of prosecutions for a wide range of well-documented violations at all the major banks engaged in a variety of criminal endeavors. Breuer resigned suddenly right after the program aired, causing huge headaches for his boss, Eric Holder, who first admitted that Breuer's assertion was true before backtracking.
For the best introduction to this broader range of crimes, see "Inside Job", which focuses on the interlocking forms of corruption and unpunished illegality that allowed the whole crisis to develop in the first place. You can watch it in full, for free, here (kudos, by the way, to Sony Pictures Classics for making it so publicly available).
Yes, I'm pretty familiar with this topic. I'm not trolling, I just don't know what else was supposed to be done. It was a big complicated affair. My mistake here was contributing to the political noise that is taking over HN.
"Political noise"? Rather discussing trivial things is a political statement as well, and to my ears the true cacaphony in all this.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.
Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
