Snowden like a refugee fleeing Nazis, says Stone

UNITED STATES: Edward Snowden, who exposed the mass surveillance programmes of the United States’ National Security Agency and then sought asylum in Moscow, should be compared to the refugees who fled Nazi Germany, film-maker Oliver Stone says.

Stone, who met Snowden in Moscow nine times while preparing a film about the former intelligence contractor, said Russia had become the only refuge for dissidents fleeing the US.

‘‘He’s in Russia,’’ he said, in an interview in New York. ‘‘In the 1940s, he’d be here.’’

Stone said Snowden would be jailed and ‘‘muzzled forever’’ if he returned to the US.

‘‘What country in the world would give him asylum? Even China didn’t want to give it to him because they’re scared.’’

Stone said that France under Charles de Gaulle and Sweden during the Vietnam War era would once have been likely refuges. Nowadays, ‘‘we are living in a world that’s basically uni-polar. The United States controls everything’’.

He said he had interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin and asked him about Snowden. ‘‘He said, ‘Look, I don’t particularly admire what [Snowden] did’, because he’d been a KGB agent at one point in his life, but he said he admired his courage.

‘‘He said the NSA had gone too far, a lot further than the Russians did because they had bigger money and more technology at that time.’’

Snowden, who leaked a trove of classified documents to reporters in 2013, has been charged under the US Espionage Act, a law dating back to 1917 that makes no distinction between leaking to reporters and passing intelligence to hostile

"What country in the world would give [Snowden] asylum? Even China didn't want to give it to him because they're scared." Oliver Stone

governments. It would not allow him the protections usually afforded to whistleblowers, and it might not allow him to defend himself by claiming he acted in the public interest.

Stone said that Putin told him, in one of a series of interviews for a forthcoming documentary, that Russia had been negotiating an extradition treaty with the US that would have allowed for Snowden to be sent back to face trial.

‘‘He said, ‘The United States did not want to sign because they have so many Russian criminals that stole money from the Russian state in the West, they didn’t want to return them’.’’ - The Times