| Let's not get cute here. If the United States wanted him extracted (on the way to Hong Kong) or worse, killed during his sojourn in HK, Snowden would have already faced a fate several orders worse than Alexander V. Litvinenko. It isn't a huge tab for the U.S. to foot in the way of deploying deep cover teams to "take care" of Snowden - for what had been alleged to be the biggest U.S. intelligence leak in a generation - in the least suspicion-arousing manner long before Greenwald ever published his story. For a nation that outspends the next ten defense budgets combined (even with the off late sequestration cuts accounted for) this is not much of a task. The top brass could have taken care of this in a manner several orders more believable than the 2006 killing of Alexander V. Litvinenko in which the uber rare, and thus strictly available to only government bodies, Polonium-210 was used. They could have made it seem like a forlorn affair of unrequited love with that dancer-acrobat girlfriend of his. It is acutely nonsensical to assume that movements of sensitive personnel, like Snowden, are not tracked, especially to far-flung locations like HK given that he is not a field operative of any kind. The NSA and other assorted intelligence/military organizations probably have a protocol for dealing with these things,in conjunction with the Justice department. If they didn't before, Manning's case would have elicited the need for one. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/world/europe/03russian.htm... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinen... http://nation.time.com/2012/09/25/comparing-defense-budgets-... http://www.forensicmag.com/articles/2009/06/polonium-210-and... http://www.buzzfeed.com/mbvd/this-might-be-the-girlfriend-ed... |