The F-35 Lightning II, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).(Reuters / Tom Reynolds)

 The US will not try to intercept NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s flight, President Barack Obama said during his tour to Africa.

Obama announced that US will not be using military jets to go after Snowden, rejecting reports that America might force down a plane carrying the NSA leaker.

The president specified that the US will not engage in "wheeling, dealing and trading" to extradite Edward Snowden, adding that extradition will be carried out through legal channels.

"We've got a whole lot of business that we do with China and Russia, and I'm not going to have one case of a suspect who we're trying to extradite suddenly being elevated to the point where I've got to start doing wheeling and dealing and trading on a whole host of other issues," Obama said.

Obama said he has not spoken to Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping or Russia’s President Vladimir Putin about whistleblower Edward Snowden’s extradition, adding that he “shouldn’t have to,” Reuters reported.

The president added he is "still concerned about the other documents" Edward Snowden may have, saying "not all of them have been released."

Edward Snowden was charged with espionage by US federal prosecutors on Friday and currently remains in an airport limbo in Russia’s transit zone after he flew to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport from Hong Kong.

Snowden hasn’t been seen on the latest flight from Moscow to Havana, reports RT’s Irina Galushko, who is among the many journalists hunting for the whistleblower at Moscow’s airport.

Earlier, there were reports that Snowden will be on an Aeroflot’s flight to Havana, Cuba, that will pass through American airspace and that the plane might be forced to land.

Snowden needs to reach Ecuador to get asylum – Interior Minister

 At the same time, Ecuador says it cannot grant asylum to Edward Snowden, since he has not reached “any of its diplomatic premises,” i.e. the country itself or the embassy, Interior Minister revealed in a press conference in the capital city, Quito.

However, entering Ecuadorian soil, including the embassy in Moscow is now impossible for Snowden. The US government revoked his passport, which means he neither has a Russian visa nor can he buy a new flight ticket to Ecuador or Havana, a second transit point, RT’s Lucy Kafanov reports from outside Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.

Earlier, there were reports that Snowden would be on an Aeroflot’s flight to Havana, Cuba, that will pass through American airspace and that the plane might be forced to land.

The government of Ecuador has also renounced US trade benefits to prevent Washington from pressuring the country as it decides over asylum for NSA leaker, Edward Snowden.

"Ecuador will not accept pressures or threats from anyone, and it does not traffic in its values or allow them to be subjugated to mercantile interests," Fernando Alvarado, the Ecuadorian government’s spokesman, said.

Alvarado said that Ecuador has “unilaterally and irrevocably” given up the customs benefits, offering $23 million per year to finance human rights training in the US in return.

The funding would be destined to help "avoid violations of privacy, torture and other actions that are denigrating to humanity," Alvarado explained.

The statement comes after US senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, promised that he would seek to end benefits if Ecuador grants Snowden asylum. 

The US government pulls out all stops to prosecute, hound, and capture those who reveal classified data. This plus constant control and surveillance makes it impossible to keep anything private or secret, Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges told RT.

RT: The US is focused on chasing Snowden, which seems to have distracted from his revelations - is anyone in the States asking whether the surveillance system prism was constitutional?

Chris Hedges: Some people are, but not many, which is quite distressing. You have Glenn Greenwald, the journalist from The Guardian who broke the story. You have lawyers Michael Ratner from the Center of the Constitutional Rights asking those kinds of questions, but I think that for those of us who care about freedom of information, about protecting sources, about stopping wholesale government surveillance, I think it’s been a very lonely time. And I think one of the things that’s been so distressing is that the serious questions that should be asked are not being asked.

RT: Does that play into the hands of the government and what Washington would like to keep secret?

CH: Well they can’t keep it a secret anymore, it’s exposed. But I think what they have done is divert attention to that kind of a mini-soap opera that is now taking place, as Snowden leaps from Hong Kong to Moscow, to ostensibly Cuba, Ecuador. They knew we saw the same thing happening to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to Bradley Manning, who exposed war crimes and is now on trial in military court in Maryland. It’s a very similar and oppressing kind of scenario, where the state propaganda machine has quite effectively diverted attention away from where it should be, which is the effect that there is no more privacy anymore left in the United States, and focused attention on character, on activities of Snowden. Through their lens, it’s not a dispassionate view of either Snowden or what he’s done.

 RT: When do you think Snowden might reveal his whereabouts and where do you think he will go?

CH: He doesn’t have many options: Cuba, Ecuador, maybe Venezuela, that’s about it. He has of course asked for political asylum as [Assange did], although the British government isn’t allowing him to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London. I mean these kinds of questions, again, for me are not the paramount questions as a journalist. The fact that the government sees virtually all the communications, electronic communications of American citizens, means that I can’t work. I think one of the reasons that Snowden went public with his disclosure is that he knew quite well that the US government has all the communications that Glenn Greenwald has made, and there was no way to hide those kind of contacts between himself as a traditional whistleblower and the journalist who wrote up this story of the wholesale spying on most American citizens by the National Security Agency. And that means that in essence you’re shutting down any capacity to shine a light on the internal workings of power. It becomes impossible to challenge the official narrative - and let’s not forget that the government quite selectively leaks classified information all the time to make themselves look good. But once information is exposed, that tarnishes them, and I think it’s quite clearly unconstitutional. Then the security and surveillance state pulls out all stops to prosecute, hound and capture those person or persons who made those revelations, and that’s precisely what we’re seeing, it’s not an uncommon scenario judging by what we’ve seen happening to Julian Assange and given of course what’s been happening to Bradley Manning.

RT: The authorities say surveillance is essential to counter terrorism. But does it justify daily spying on people, including on heads of state?

CH: I covered Al-Qaeda for the New York Times and spent seven years in the Middle East with a variety of Jihadist groups. These people are well aware, acutely aware of the fact that all of their communications is closely monitored by American security and intelligence officials. So there’s nothing new in these revelations to them. What is new is that we as Americans essentially have no privacy left, no capacity to communicate without the eye of the government upon every form of communications that we make – that’s what’s new. And that has nothing to do with terrorism, that has nothing to do with national security, that has to do with control of the population, as we see greater and greater effects - catastrophic effects - from climate change as the very fragile global economy again teeters on the brink of collapse, the security in surveillance state wants the capacity to shut down any form of dissent, and this mechanism of the wholesale surveillance gives them precisely that.