Danimal, that’s the guy. He was thrown in the clink for a while then released, just in the past month IIRC.
Damn brainfades.
I really don’t know what to say about this Edmond Pope. Obviously, I’m unfamiliar with the evidence against him, and have no real idea if he’s falsely accused. Ordinarily I would defer to the court, but then I don’t know what Russian courts are like these days. Under the Communists, Russia had no independent judiciary; I should hope the Russian courts have improved since democracy came, but I can’t point to any hard evidence of such improvement.
Assuming the Russian court got it right and Pope really was a spy, then I couldn’t really blame the Russians for executing him. Ideally, he ought to be treated leniently because Russia and the U.S. aren’t the same threat to one another that they were in the ‘50s; as an old democracy and a fledgling democracy, we ought to be natural allies. But the sad fact is that America has done everything possible to fuel the Russian leaders’ traditional paranoia: we have expanded NATO to their very doorstep, jumped into bed with all their dearest enemies, and conducted a war against their traditional ally Serbia without their consent. I honestly don’t think Washington has any hostile designs on Russia, but the Russians at this point have good reason to believe otherwise. If Pope was a spy, he got off much easier than he had any right to expect.