WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange today blamed the United States for leaving spy-secrets leaker Edward Snowden “marooned” in a Moscow airport by cancelling his passport.
“The United States by canceling his passport has left him for the moment marooned in Russia,” Assange told ABC’s “This Week.”
“To take someone’s principal conveyance of citizenship, their passport, away from them is a disgrace. Since Snowden hasn’t been convicted of anything, there are no international warrants out for his arrest – to take a passport from a young man in a difficult situation is a disgrace,” he said.
Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London to avoid extradition to the US for his leaking crusade, said he has “personal sympathy for Mr. Snowden.”
The WikiLeaks legal team also has been aiding Snowden’s quest for political asylum in Ecuador or other countries.
Snowden is being “put through a meat grinder where a new precedent is trying to be set, which is communicating with the press is committing espionage,” he said.
He also denounced it as “unacceptable” that Vice President Joe Biden personally called Ecuadoran Rafael Correa last week to pressure him against granting Snowden’s request for political asylum.
“That is not acceptable,” he said. “Asylum is a right that we all have. It is an international right. The United States has been founded largely on accepting political refugees from other countries and has prospered by it.”
Assange would not say if his group had possession of more of the secret National Security Agency documents that Snowden has been divulging. But he promised that more would be revealed.
“There is no stopping the publishing process at this stage,” he said. “Great care has been taken to make sure that Mr. Snowden cannot be pressured by any state to stop the publication process.”
Snowden, a former NSA contract worker who began leaking details of secret surveillance programs June 2, reportedly has set up a computer archive of documents to automatically go public if anything happens to him.
“He is a hero,” Assange said. “He has told the people of the world and of the United States that there is mass unlawful interception of their communications far beyond anything that happened under Nixon.”