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Islamic charity founder Pete Seda ‘vindicated’ by ruling saying feds tried to turn tax fraud into terrorism | The Oregonian

By Bryon Denson

A federal appeals court Friday overturned the 2010 criminal conviction of Pete Seda, a key figure in an Ashland charity accused of supporting terrorism by smuggling money 10 years earlier to Chechen guerrillas at war with the Russian Federation.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion accuses federal prosecutors of improperly influencing the outcome of Seda’s trial by concealing that they had paid a witness. The government also exceeded the scope of a search warrant and omitted facts that might have helped the defense, the court ruled.

“This is a tax fraud case that was transformed into a trial on terrorism,” Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote in the panel’s 2-1 opinion.

The Iranian-born Seda, whose formal name is Pirouz Sedaghaty, was charged with falsifying a 2000 tax form filed on behalf of the U.S. wing of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc., a Saudi Arabian charity. The U.S. government accused the charity of sending $150,000 through Saudi Arabia to fund terrorist activities and support the Chechen mujahideen “under the guise of humanitarian aid,” McKeown wrote.

Seda’s defense team, headed by Federal Public Defender Steven T. Wax, argued that Seda’s accountant caused the discrepancy in his client’s 2001 tax form and that Seda had a long, fruitful history as a man peacefully advancing the word of Islam.

A jury in Eugene’s U.S. District Court found Seda guilty of defrauding the U.S. government by making false statements on the tax return. He was later sentenced to 33 months in prison.

Wax told The Oregonian that he and Seda had waited nervously for the 9th Circuit opinion since arguing the case before the panel last December. When he got the news, Wax phoned Seda at a Portland halfway house — where he was serving the final day of his sentence since leaving prison in May.

“Pete was quite pleased to finally have some vindication of his position,” Wax said. “He has denied his guilt from the outset of these proceedings and is quite happy that the circuit has recognized that the trial was not a fair one.”

Amanda Marshall, the U.S. attorney for Oregon, said her office is reviewing the opinion and considering its options. Those range from dismissing the case to holding a new trial to filing appeals that might take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Any decision about whether we will seek further review will have to be made in consultation with the (U.S. Department of Justice) Criminal Division and Solicitor General’s Office,” Marshall said in a prepared statement.

Government prosecutors withheld “significant impeachment evidence” by not telling the trial court that one of its key witnesses had been paid by the FBI, the appeals court found.

The panel also concluded that FBI agents, who obtained a search warrant from a U.S. magistrate for Seda’s home and the charity’s office, “went well beyond” the limitations imposed by the order when they searched Seda’s computer hard drives.

“The appeal illustrates the fine line between the government’s use of relevant evidence to document motive for a cover-up and its use of inflammatory, unrelated evidence about Osama Bin-Laden and terrorist activity that prejudices the jury,” McKeown wrote.

U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan did not properly follow the Classified Information Procedures Act as he tried the Seda case, the appellate panel found.

The law, known as CIPA, is intended to protect government secrets from disclosure at trial while ensuring that defendants are given substitute documents — typically written summaries — of classified materials. The appeals court found that the substitution approved by Hogan did not provide Seda “with substantially the same ability to make his defense as would disclosure of the specified classified information.”

Government prosecutors in Oregon have used CIPA to protect U.S. secrets in a number of national security cases. Those include the 2002 Portland Seven terrorism case, the 2009 spy case against former CIA officer Jim Nicholson and the trial of Mohamed Mohamud, the man found guilty in January of attempting to set off a bomb at Portland’s 2010 holiday tree-lighting ceremony.

The appellate ruling on CIPA won’t change the law, but it’s likely to give judges who find themselves trying national-security cases some pause, said Tung Yin, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School who has followed the Seda case.

The ruling, he said, will serve as “a reminder to pay a little more attention to the substitutions and make sure they are crafted neutrally.”

Source: The Oregonian

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DOJ pursues immunity for Bush and six others for Iraq war crimes | The Examiner

By David Phillips

George W. Bush Speaks At Naturalization Ceremony At Bush Presidential CenterThe Department of Justice has filed a Grant of Immunity for war crimes against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld. The filing for the immunity of war crimes was made with the United States District Court, Northern District of California San Francisco Division.

The filing is for procedural immunity in a case alleging that they planned and waged the Iraq War in violation of international law.

The Plaintiff in this case is Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi single mother and refugee now living in Jordan. She filed a complaint in March 2013 in a San Francisco federal court alleging that the planning and waging of the war constituted a “crime of aggression” against Iraq, a legal theory that was used by the Nuremberg Tribunal to convict Nazi war criminals after World War II.

In her lawsuit, Saleh alleges that:

  • Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz began planning the Iraq War in 1998 through their involvement with the “Project for the New American Century,” a Washington DC non-profit that advocated for the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
  • Once they came to power, Saleh alleges that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz convinced other Bush officials to invade Iraq by using 9/11 as an excuse to mislead and scare the American public into supporting a war.
  • Finally, she claims that the United States failed to obtain United Nations approval prior to the invasion, rendering the invasion illegal and an act of impermissible aggression.

“The DOJ claims that in planning and waging the Iraq War, ex-President Bush and key members of his Administration were acting within the legitimate scope of their employment and are thus immune from suit,” chief counsel Inder Comar of Comar Law said.

The “Westfall Act certification,” submitted pursuant to the Westfall Act of 1988, permits the Attorney General, at his or her discretion, to substitute the United States as the defendant and essentially grant absolute immunity to government employees for actions taken within the scope of their employment.

“The good news is that while we were disappointed with the certification, we were prepared for it,” Comar stated. “We do not see how a Westfall Act certification is appropriate given that Ms. Saleh alleges that the conduct at issue began prior to these defendants even entering into office. I think the Nuremberg prosecutors, particularly American Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson, would be surprised to learn that planning a war of aggression at a private non-profit, misleading a fearful public, and foregoing proper legal authorization somehow constitute lawful employment duties for the American president and his or her cabinet.”

The case is Saleh v. Bush (N.D. Cal. Mar. 13, 2013, No. C 13 1124 JST).

Source: The Examiner

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Bradley Manning: a sentence both unjust and unfair | The Guardian

Bradley ManningPfc Manning sought to hold his country to the values it claims to uphold, yet his prison term dwarfs other military convictions

Bradley Manning has received a prison sentence that was 10 years longer than the period of time after which many of the documents he released would have been automatically declassified. The military judge handed down the longest ever sentence for a leak of US government information.

Mr Manning, according to this logic, did more harm than the soldier who gave a Jordanian intelligence agent information on the build-up to the first Iraq war, or the marine who gave the KGB the identities of CIA agents and floorplans of the embassies in Moscow and Vienna. Mr Manning did three times as much harm in transmitting to WikiLeaks in 2010 the war logs or field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, as Charles Graner did. He was the army reserve corporal who became ringleader of the Abu Ghraib abuse ring and was set free after serving six and a half years of his 10-year sentence.

Among the 700,000 classified documents Mr Manning downloaded while stationed in Iraq was a video that showed a US Apache helicopter in Baghdad opening fire on a group of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists and their children, who had attempted to rescue a severely injured man. More devastating than the film was the cockpit chatter of the soldiers who joked as they shot people in the streets.

“Look at those dead bastards,” said one. “Nice,” said another.

The Apache crew has never been charged with any offence (all their adult targets were listed as insurgents) and neither has any other individual as a result of Mr Manning’s revelations. But the shortened 17-minute version of the video has been viewed more than 3m times on YouTube.

So, the central question to answer in judging the proportionality of this sentence is whether the desire to punish a whistleblower driven by moral outrage stems from the alleged harm he did US military and diplomatic interests, or whether it derives more from sheer embarrassment. The judge presiding, Col Denise Lind, had already thrown out the gravest charge, that of “aiding the enemy”. Col Lind had also limited the admissibility of evidence regarding the “chilling effects” that Mr Manning’s actions had on US diplomacy by releasing 250,000 state department cables. A military witness conceded there was no evidence that anyone had been killed after being named in the releases.

Mr Manning’s recent apology for his actions does not, and should not, detract from the initial defence he gave for them, when he spoke of his shock at the “delightful bloodlust” displayed by that helicopter crew, or his belief that stimulating a debate about the wars was the right thing to do. We know what his motives as a whistleblower were and we have applauded them. They are certainly not akin to treachery or any act fit to be judged – if anything is – by an espionage act rushed onto the statute book in 1917 after America entered the first world war.

Mr Manning exposed the abuse of detainees by Iraqi officers under the watch of US minders. He showed that civilian deaths during the Iraq war were much higher than the official estimates. If they were published today, these claims would be uncontentious. They have already slipped into the official history of this war. But the author of this orthodoxy will continue to pay for the record he helped establish by a prison term that he will serve well into the next decade, which is when the first date for his parole application becomes due. Mr Manning was seeking to hold his country and its army to the values they claim to uphold.

It is unclear what the US military hopes to achieve by securing a sentence that dwarfs those of other military convictions. Deterrence features large in its thinking. Whistleblowing will not only endanger your career, it wants to say, but your freedom – for most of your adult life. In 2008, one could have hoped that the US had a president whose administration would distinguish between leaks in the public interest and treason. But this sentence tells a different story. Mr Manning’s sentence, which is both unjust and unfair, can still be reduced on appeal. Let us hope that it is.

Source: The Guardian

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CIA admits role in 1953 Iranian coup | The Guardian

Editor’s Note: The hatred and resentment towards the USA started long ago in the Middle East. The consequences of foreign interventions and foreign wars continue to haunt the USA today.

The CIA has publicly admitted for the first time that it was behind the notorious 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, in documents that also show how the British government tried to block the release of information about its own involvement in his overthrow.

On the 60th anniversary of an event often invoked by Iranians as evidence of western meddling, the US national security archive at George Washington University published a series of declassified CIA documents.

“The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” reads a previously excised section of an internal CIA history titled The Battle for Iran.

The documents, published on the archive’s website under freedom of information laws, describe in detail how the US – with British help – engineered the coup, codenamed TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by Britain’s MI6.

Britain, and in particular Sir Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, regarded Mosaddeq as a serious threat to its strategic and economic interests after the Iranian leader nationalised the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, latterly known as BP. But the UK needed US support. The Eisenhower administration in Washington was easily persuaded.

British documents show how senior officials in the 1970s tried to stop Washington from releasing documents that would be “very embarrassing” to the UK.

Official papers in the UK remain secret, even though accounts of Britain’s role in the coup are widespread. In 2009 the former foreign secretary Jack Straw publicly referred to many British “interferences” in 20th-century Iranian affairs. On Monday the Foreign Office said it could neither confirm nor deny Britain’s involvement in the coup.

The previously classified US documents include telegrams from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup. Others, including a draft in-house CIA history by Scott Kock titled Zendebad, Shah! (Viva, Shah!), say that according to Monty Woodhouse, MI6’s station chief in Tehran at the time, Britain needed US support for a coup. Eden agreed. “Woodhouse took his words as tantamount to permission to pursue the idea” with the US, Kock wrote.

Mosaddeq’s overthrow, still given as a reason for the Iranian mistrust of British and American politicians, consolidated the Shah’s rule for the next 26 years until the 1979 Islamic revolution. It was aimed at making sure the Iranian monarchy would safeguard the west’s oil interests in the country.

The archived CIA documents include a draft internal history of the coup titled “Campaign to install a pro-western government in Iran”, which defines the objective of the campaign as “through legal, or quasi-legal, methods to effect the fall of the Mosaddeq government; and to replace it with a pro-western government under the Shah’s leadership with Zahedi as its prime minister”.

One document describes Mosaddeq as one of the “most mercurial, maddening, adroit and provocative leaders with whom they [the US and Britain] had ever dealt”. The document says Mosaddeq “found the British evil, not incomprehensible” and “he and millions of Iranians believed that for centuries Britain had manipulated their country for British ends”. Another document refers to conducting a “war of nerves” against Mossadeq.

The Iranian-Armenian historian Ervand Abrahamian, author of The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, said in a recent interview that the coup was designed “to get rid of a nationalist figure who insisted that oil should be nationalised”.

Unlike other nationalist leaders, including Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mosaddeq epitomised a unique “anti-colonial” figure who was also committed to democratic values and human rights, Abrahamian argued.

Some analysts argue that Mosaddeq failed to compromise with the west and the coup took place against the backdrop of communism fears in Iran. “My study of the documents proves to me that there was never really a fair compromise offered to Mosaddeq, what they wanted Mosaddeq to do is to give up oil nationalisation and if he’d given that of course then the national movement would have been meaningless,” he told the Iranian online publication, Tableau magazine.

“My argument is that there was never really a realistic threat of communism … discourse and the way justifying any act was to talk about communist danger, so it was something used for the public, especially the American and the British public.”

Despite the latest releases, a significant number of documents about the coup remain secret. Malcolm Byrne, deputy director of the national security archive, has called on the US intelligence authorities to release the remaining records and documents.

“There is no longer good reason to keep secrets about such a critical episode in our recent past. The basic facts are widely known to every school child in Iran,” he said. “Suppressing the details only distorts the history, and feeds into myth-making on all sides.”

In recent years Iranian politicians have sought to compare the dispute over the country’s nuclear activities to that of the oil nationalisation under Mosaddeq: supporters of the former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad often invoke the coup.

US officials have previously expressed regret about the coup but have fallen short of issuing an official apology. The British government has never acknowledged its role.

America faces an epic choice…

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Rampant disinformation, partisan news sources and social media’s tsunami of fake news is no basis on which to inform the American public in 2020. The need for a robust, independent press has never been greater, and with your help we can continue to provide fact-based reporting that offers public scrutiny and oversight. Our journalism is free and open for all, but it’s made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers like you across America in all 50 states.

“America is at a tipping point, finely balanced between truth and lies, hope and hate, civility and nastiness. Many vital aspects of American public life are in play – the Supreme Court, abortion rights, climate policy, wealth inequality, Big Tech and much more. The stakes could hardly be higher. As that choice nears, the Guardian, as it has done for 200 years, and with your continued support, will continue to argue for the values we hold dear – facts, science, diversity, equality and fairness.” – US editor, John Mulholland

On the occasion of its 100th birthday in 1921 the editor of the Guardian said, “Perhaps the chief virtue of a newspaper is its independence. It should have a soul of its own.” That is more true than ever. Freed from the influence of an owner or shareholders, the Guardian’s editorial independence is our unique driving force and guiding principle.

We also want to say a huge thank you to everyone who supported the Guardian in 2019. You provide us with the motivation and financial support to keep doing what we do. We’re asking our readers to help us raise $1.5m to support our rigorous journalism in the new year. Every contribution, big or small, will help us reach it.

Source: The Guardian

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SWAT Team Raids Organic Farm, Confiscates Blueberries | Huffington Post

By Radley Balko

SWATTeamA small organic farm in Arlington, Texas, was the target of a massive police action last week that included aerial surveillance, a SWAT raid and a 10-hour search.

Members of the local police raiding party had a search warrant for marijuana plants, which they failed to find at the Garden of Eden farm. But farm owners and residents who live on the property told a Dallas-Ft. Worth NBC station that the real reason for the law enforcement exercise appears to have been code enforcement. The police seized “17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, 14 tomatillo plants … native grasses and sunflowers,” after holding residents inside at gunpoint for at least a half-hour, property owner Shellie Smith said in a statement. The raid lasted about 10 hours, she said.

Local authorities had cited the Garden of Eden in recent weeks for code violations, including “grass that was too tall, bushes growing too close to the street, a couch and piano in the yard, chopped wood that was not properly stacked, a piece of siding that was missing from the side of the house, and generally unclean premises,” Smith’s statement said. She said the police didn’t produce a warrant until two hours after the raid began, and officers shielded their name tags so they couldn’t be identified. According to ABC affiliate WFAA, resident Quinn Eaker was the only person arrested — for outstanding traffic violations.

The city of Arlington said in a statement that the code citations were issued to the farm following complaints by neighbors, who were “concerned that the conditions” at the farm “interfere with the useful enjoyment of their properties and are detrimental to property values and community appearance.” The police SWAT raid came after “the Arlington Police Department received a number of complaints that the same property owner was cultivating marijuana plants on the premises,” the city’s statement said. “No cultivated marijuana plants were located on the premises,” the statement acknowledged.

The raid on the Garden of Eden farm appears to be the latest example of police departments using SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics to enforce less serious crimes. A Fox television affiliate reported this week, for example, that police in St. Louis County, Mo., brought out the SWAT team to serve an administrative warrant. The report went on to explain that all felony warrants are served with a SWAT team, regardless whether the crime being alleged involves violence.

In recent years, SWAT teams have been called out to perform regulatory alcohol inspections at a bar in Manassas Park, Va.; to raid bars for suspected underage drinking in New Haven, Conn.; to perform license inspections at barbershops in Orlando, Fla.; and to raid a gay bar in Atlanta where police suspected customers and employees were having public sex. A federal investigation later found that Atlanta police had made up the allegations of public sex.

Other raids have been conducted on food co-ops and Amish farms suspected of selling unpasteurized milk products. The federal government has for years been conducting raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in states that have legalized them, even though the businesses operate openly and are unlikely to pose any threat to the safety of federal enforcers.

Radley Balko is a senior writer and investigative reporter for The Huffington Post. He is also the author of the new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.

Sources: Huffington Post

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DOJ Sues Bank Of America Over Mortgage-Backed Securities | Reuters

BankofAmericaBy David Ingram

The U.S. government on Tuesday filed two civil lawsuits against Bank of America for what the Justice Department and securities regulators said was a fraud on investors involving $850 million of residential mortgage-backed securities.

The Justice Department and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed the parallel suits in U.S. District Court in Charlotte, according to the court filings.

The securities date to about January 2008, the government said, putting them just at the beginning of the global financial crisis.

Bank of America responded to the lawsuits with a statement: “These were prime mortgages sold to sophisticated investors who had ample access to the underlying data, and we will demonstrate that.

“The loans in this pool performed better than loans with similar characteristics originated and securitized at the same time by other financial institutions. We are not responsible for the housing market collapse that caused mortgage loans to default at unprecedented rates and these securities to lose value as a result.”

Bank of America had warned in a securities filing on Thursday about possible new civil charges linked to a sale of one or two mortgage bonds.

The two suits accuse Bank of America of making misleading statements and failing to disclose important facts about the mortgages underlying a securitization named BOAMS 2008-A.

“These misstatements and omissions concerned the quality and safety of the mortgages collateralizing the BOAMS 2008-A securitization, how it originated those mortgages and the likelihood that the ‘prime’ loans would perform as expected,” the Justice Department said in its statement.

A “material number” of mortgages in the pool “failed to materially adhere to Bank of America’s underwriting standards,” the statement said.

Bank of America has announced a series of settlements with investors and the U.S. government, including an $8.5 billion settlement with investors in mortgage-backed securities and a $1.6 billion deal with bond insurer MBIA Inc.

Source: Reuters

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Aetna announced last Friday that it was pulling out of Maryland’s health insurance exchange | Washington Examiner

Photo - Aetna announced last Friday that it was pulling out of Maryland’s health insurance exchange after regulators demanded that it slash premiums the company had proposed by 29 percent (AP/Wilfredo Lee)By Phillip Klein

Aetna, one of the nation’s largest insurers, announced last Friday that it was pulling out of Maryland’s health insurance exchange after regulators demanded that it slash premiums the company had proposed by 29 percent, the Baltimore Sun. The company, which recently purchased Coventry Health Care, said that it wouldn’t be able to cover its costs if it charged what regulators were demanding.

As I wrote in a column last month, a number of insurers have been opting not to participate in the health insurance exchanges created by President Obama’s health care law and in some cases, they have been exiting state individual insurance markets entirely.

For instance, Aetna – along with UnitedHealth – has already announced it was pulling out of the individual market in California. On July 19, Anthem Blue Cross, California’s largest insurer of small businesses, pulled out of the Obamacare small business exchange.

The design of Obamacare was premised on the idea that the new exchanges would attract many insurers, giving consumers a wide array of choices that would foster the type of competition that would drive down premiums. Instead, trends over the past few months suggest the law, if anything, will increase consolidation in state insurance markets.

And as an early an enthusiastic adopter of Obamacare, Maryland is a state that the law’s supporters are holding up as a model.

Source:  Washington Examiner

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It’s Official: US Funding Al Qaeda and Taliban |Charleston Voice

Afghanistan$$$By Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall

It’s extremely ironic for the US State Department to be issuing travel alerts for US citizens in the Middle East and North Africa the same week we learn that the Pentagon is contracting with Al Qaeda and Taliban supporters to carry out Afghan reconstruction projects.

Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News cites a quarterly report to Congress by Special Inspector for Afghan Reconstruction John Sopko.

The report reveals Sopko asked the US Army Suspension and Disbarment office to cancel 43 contracts to known Al Qaeda and Taliban supporters. They refused. The reason? The Suspension and Disbarment Office claims it would violate Al Qaeda and Taliban “due process rights.”

Curious, isn’t it? Official terrorist groups have due process rights, but not whistleblowers, Guantanamo detainees, or ordinary Americans subject to continual surveillance by NSA.

The intelligence community has been quietly leaking evidence for more than a decade that the US is secretly funding Al Qaeda to promote political instability (and justify continued military intervention) in the Middle East. In the last two years the CIA has been caught red-handed funding and training Al Qaeda militants in Libya and Syria.

Based on Sopko’s report, Pentagon support for Al Qaeda and the Taliban is official as of August 1.

Let me see if I can think this through: the Pentagon is giving Al Qaeda and the Taliban funding, even though Al Qaeda and the Taliban are planning to carry out attacks on US citizens. How can this be happening? It would appear the US government is at war with their own people.

The 236 page quarterly report Sopko submitted to Congress also raises grave concerns about Obama’s request for $10.7 billion in 2014 for Afghan reconstruction projects. All would be carrying out by civilian contractors, of which 30-40% would be local Afghan businesses.

Sopko argues the Pentagon already fails abysmally in monitoring an existing $32 million program to install bars or gratings in culverts to prevent insurgents from planting roadside bombs in them. He thinks at bare minimum the Department of Defense should now how many contracts they have issued under this program. They don’t. Thus is seems pretty obvious they aren’t vetting the contractors, much less monitoring where the money is going.

Source: Charleston Voice

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Edward Snowden asylum: US ‘disappointed’ by Russian decision | The Guardian

Edward Snowden's lawyer

By in Moscow, , and in Washington

Edward Snowden’s lawyer Anatoly Kucherena shows a copy of a temporary document allowing the whistleblower to cross the border into Russia. Photograph: AP

The White House expressed anger and dismay on Thursday after Russia granted temporary asylum to the American whistleblower Edward Snowden and allowed him to leave the Moscow airport where he had been holed up for over a month.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the US was “extremely disappointed” by the decision, almost certainly taken personally by President Vladimir Putin. He said Moscow should hand Snowden back and hinted that Barack Obama might now boycott a bilateral meeting with Putin in September, due to be held when the US president travels to Russia for a G20 summit.

Carney added that Snowden had arrived in both China and Russia carrying with him thousands of top secret US documents. He said: “Simply the possession of that kind of highly sensitive classified information outside of secure areas is both a huge risk and a violation.

“As we know he’s been in Russia now for many weeks. There is a huge risk associated with … removing that information from secure areas. You shouldn’t do it, you can’t do it, it’s wrong.”

With US-Russian relations now at a cold war-style low, Snowden slipped out of Sheremetyevo airport on Thursday afternoon. His lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said Russia’s federal migration service had granted him temporary asylum for one year. Snowden had left the airport to stay at an undisclosed location with expatriate Americans, he added.

Putin made no immediate comment. But having weighed Russia’s options for some weeks, he appears to have decided that Snowden’s propaganda value outweighs any possible US repercussions. Obama’s already floundering attempts to “reset”, or improve, relations with Moscow are in effect over.

In a statement released by WikiLeaks, Snowden thanked the Russian authorities and accused the US of behaving illegally. He made no explicit mention of the trial of Bradley Manning, who this week was convicted of espionage and faces 136 years in jail.

Snowden said: “Over the past eight weeks we have seen the Obama administration show no respect for international or domestic law, but in the end the law is winning.”

He added: “I thank the Russian Federation for granting me asylum in accordance with its laws and international obligations.”

Snowden has been given a temporary Russian travel document, with his name in Cyrillic and a fresh passport photo. “This gave him the right to temporary asylum on the territory of the Russian Federation, Kucherena said, holding up a copy of the document. US authorities had cancelled his American passport.

Security officials said Snowden officially crossed the border into Russia from the airport’s transit zone at about 3.30pm local time. Russia had apparently not informed the US of the move in advance. The state TV channel Rossiya 24 showed a photograph of Snowden’s departure, as he clambered into a grey unmarked car.

Despite being pictured from behind Snowden was instantly recognisable wearing his trademark grey shirt and carrying a black backpack. Next to him was Sarah Harrison, the WikiLeaks representative who accompanied him last month on his flight from Hong Kong.

Kucherena declined to provide details on where Snowden was heading, citing safety concerns. “Since he is the most hunted person in the world, he will address the question of security today,” he told journalists.

The former NSA employee will himself choose his place of residence and forms of protection, he added. Previously, some speculated that the Russian government was keeping Snowden hidden, although the whistleblower and his lawyer have denied that, adding that he has had no contact with Russian security services.

The whistleblower’s father, Lon Snowden, had reportedly been planning to visit his son. Kucherena said on Wednesday that he was sending an invitation to Snowden’s father so he could obtain a Russian visa. Kucherena told Rossiya 24 on Thursday that he would be speaking to the father later in the day to arrange his visit.

US authorities have repeatedly called on Moscow to return the fugitive to face charges in America. Last week America’s attorney general, Eric Holder, sent a letter to Russia’s justice minister promising that Snowden would not be tortured and that he would not face the death penalty if handed over to the US.

Russian officials previously said they had no jurisdiction to return Snowden, as he was not officially located on Russian territory, and that the US had not filed an official extradition request.

The Kremlin did not immediately comment on Snowden’s temporary asylum. Putin has previously said repeatedly that to remain in Russia, Snowden must stop activities harming the United States. His lawyer suggested that fresh revelations published by the Guardian on Wednesday and Thursday had come from documents that Snowden had already given the paper before Putin made his comments.

Russia’s decision has emboldened hawkish critics of the White House, who have long dubbed Obama’s attempts to improve relations with Putin as naive and inappropriate. In a statement on his website, Senator John McCain said: “Russia’s action today is a disgrace and a deliberate effort to embarrass the United States. It is a slap in the face of all Americans. Now is the time to fundamentally rethink our relationship with Putin’s Russia.”

He proposed in response to expand the Magnitsky Act list of banned Russian officials, push for Georgia’s acceptance into Nato and implement US missile defence programmes in Europe.

At the White House, Carney made it clear that President Obama was frustrated by the decision by Russia to allow Snowden to enter the country, and that a planned presidential summit was now in jeopardy.

Obama is scheduled to travel to Russia in September for at meeting of G20 leaders in St Petersburg. He also planned to meet Putin for a bilateral summit during the trip in what would have been a sign of improving relations between the two powers.

That meeting is now under review. “Obviously this is not a positive development,” Carney said. “We have a wide range of interests with the Russians. We are evaluating the utility of the summit.”

Amnesty International called for the focus to switch from Snowden’s asylum plight to the “sweeping nature and unlawfulness” of the US government’s surveillance programmes.

Widney Brown, senior director for international law and policy at Amnesty, said in a statement: “Now that Edward Snowden has left the airport and has protected status in Russia, the focus really needs to be on the US government’s surveillance programs. Snowden would not have needed temporary asylum but for revealing the sweeping nature and unlawfulness of a massive system of domestic and international surveillance by the United States government.”

A survey showed that 43% of Russians supported granting Snowden asylum and 51% approved of his whistleblowing activities. Kucherena said he had received numerous letters from Russians offering Snowden lodging, protection and money, as well as from women interested in Snowden romantically.

Pavel Durov, the founder of Russia’s most popular social network, VKontakte, invited Snowden to come work as a programmer at the network, in a post on his VKontakte page on Thursday.

Source: The Guardian