As for Snowden, he had a contract of trust with his employees and he broke that contract, as such, he is technically a traitor. You can debate all day whether or not he betrayed the US as a nation, but it is indisputable that he betrayed his employees.
Now that is just you looking for any excuse to call Snowden a traitor. A traitor to his employees? What next? Calling someone a deserter for quitting his job? As you said, you can debate all day if he betrayed the US as a nation, and at the end of the day, that is the only kind of betrayal that anyone cares about here.
And no China (and Russia) should not give Snowden asylum. Here is a man who risked his life to expose what he believed was wrong, namely; state surveillance and breach of privacy rights. What the hell do you think the CCP and the Putin administration is doing? The EXACT same thing, and on a larger scale. It would be extremely ironic and hypocritical for China and Russia to grant him asylum.
Water bounding and other 'enhanced interrogation methods' are all torture in the eyes of everyone except the most rabid of American nationalists or their sympathisers, so does that make it wrong for America to grant asylum to people who might be at risk of being tortured if sent back to their own countries?
It would indeed be ironic and hypocritical for China or Russia to do so, but then, since when has a little irony or hypocrisy stopped the US or its cronies from doing things that advanced their interests?
Is it not ironic and hypocritical to insist that those who you so plainly feel are morally inferior should instead act more honestly and selflessly than the supposed paragons of principle and virtue?
The reason China passed on Snowden was pragmatic, not principle. China likely have assessed that he was indeed an idealist and patriot, and a very junior one at that. Thus, he is unlikely to have known about much more than what he has already put out in the public domain, but more importantly, he is unlikely to willingly share truly useful information with Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies.
As an intelligence asset, he has almost no value, and China is not interested in playing petty PR games with the US, so it was not worth the trouble. Especially since the US is probably going to shoot itself in the foot even worse when it does finally get Snowden in its hands.
You would have to be deluded or the biggest optimists alive to think that Snowden will get anything other than a guilty verdict and a lengthy sentence, and probably suffer similar needless and petty torments as Manning, and that will damage America's image far more than what China or Russia could do by giving him asylum and keeping him safe.
But Russians are Russians, so I didn't expect any rational thought to be given to this matter. What the Russians are doing is a knee-jerk reaction to anything related to the US. They will act in any way possible to embarrass or troll the US regardless of any side effects.
Oh please, as if the US does not hold precisely the same position vis-a-vis China and Russia. If the Russians are indeed doing what you have described, it will only be giving as good as it got.
