Oliver Stone And Noam Chomsky Start Petition To Urge Ecuador's President Rafael Correa To Grant Asylum To Edward Snowden

A few well-known personalities in political activism are putting their names on a petition to get Ecuador's president to grant asylum to NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, but their efforts could be too late.

Noted film director Oliver Stone; author/political critic Noam Chomsky; and author Tom Hayden, director of the Los Angeles area's Peace and Justice Resource Center, have joined with a political group called Just Foreign Policy to urge Rafael Correa to allow Snowden to travel to Ecuador. Snowden has been holed up in a Moscow airport for more than a week and has applied to more than 20 countries for asylum.

Although Ecuador President Rafael Correa gave early indications that his country could possibly house Snowden, he has since retracted support and deferred to Russia's decision.

Just Foreign Policy has posted the petition online with a submission form that displays the names of supporters as they are added.

"The U.S. government's crackdown on whistle-blowers is a direct threat to our efforts to reform U.S. foreign policy to make it more just," the petition states.

Just Foreign Policy petitioned last year for Ecuador to grant political asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which it did.

The group is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, membership organization that claims U.S. foreign policy should rely "less on raw U.S. military and economic power and more on international law and treaties, cooperation and diplomacy."

This is not the first time it has started a petition concerning Ecuador. On its website it claims that its pressure on Congress to oppose the efforts of Chevron Corporation (NYSE:CVX) "to bully the government of Ecuador over an indigenous environmental lawsuit" resulted in the U.S. not imposing the sanctions on Ecuador that Chevron demanded.