In a scathing attack on the Obama administration, Edward Snowden, who is wanted in the US on charges of espionage and leaking classified information and is stranded at the Moscow airport for the last several days after his passport was revoked, on Monday alleged that he has been left as a “stateless” person because of no fault of his.
“The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person,” Snowden wrote in a letter which was posted on the Wikileaks website.
“Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum,” he wrote in the letter.
Edward wrote that one week ago he left Hong Kong after it became clear that his freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth.
“My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will.
I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful,” he said.
“On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic “wheeling and dealing” over my case.
Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions,” Snowden alleged.
“This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me,” he said.
For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum, he wrote.
“Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the US in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country,” he said.
“In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised – and it should be,” Snowden wrote.
“I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many,” he said in his statement date July 01.