Why Snowden Fled: Maybe Because He’s Sane

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that Edward Snowden is no whistleblower and should "come back and face the music".

Taking care to stay on the right side of government to preserve his access to the mighty, Fareed Zakaria, said on his Sunday “GPS” television program that Edward Snowden “is no hero” because “he has tried by every method possible to escape any judgment or punishment for his actions”. He cited Gandhi
and Nehru, who had been imprisoned, and Daniel Ellsberg who “did not hop on a plane to Hong Kong or Moscow”, who instead “stood trial and faced the possibility of more than a hundred years in prison”. On the program and in his Time magazine column, he then went on to say how "shocked" Americans are "by the revelation that the U.S. government is collecting massive quantities of their digital signatures - billions of phone calls and e-mails and Internet searches".

It is an ambiguity which Zakaria shares with others who effectively thank Snowden for bringing us the truth of government spying on our lives all these years behind our backs, but who then curiously conclude that to become a hero he must spend the rest of his life in prison.

When Snowden contemplated what he would do after releasing documents to Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, he had before him the record of the Obama administration, which has conducted “unprecedented” surveillance of journalists and has prosecuted more federal employees under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined. Previously used only three times by all presidents since its enactment in 1917, Obama has wielded it six times and Snowden now makes it seven.

If it were possible in today’s climate to “face the music” in the expectation of a trial where Snowden’s criminality of releasing classified documents would be fairly weighed against the criminality of the NSA going well beyond the letter and intent of the laws in violation of the Constitution, then Snowden seems to be the sort who would very likely want to challenge the system on home turf.

But the home country has changed, and Snowden is fully aware. Daniel Ellsberg was acquitted. He had turned over to The New York Times in 1971 thousands of pages of documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers which said the Vietnam War could not be won, contrary to the lies of the Johnson administration. Given the Obama administration’s vengeful pursuit of whistleblowers and journalists, it is unimaginable that Snowden would have any chance of acquittal. Symptomatic of our much changed view of government, there is even open speculation that if Snowden manages to reach a South American country that has offered asylum, Obama might have him assassinated, as he did with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen living in Yemen.

If that seems exaggerated, just ask Ellsberg. "I see Edward Snowden as someone who has chosen, at best, exile from the country he loves — with a serious risk of his assassination by agents of his government or life in prison (in solitary confinement) — to awaken us to the danger of our loss of democracy to a total-surveillance state," Ellsberg said. Snowden did not follow Ellsberg’s path because he saw what was happening to others who dared report on the malefactions of this government.

Snowden saw the treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, imprisoned in its most brutal form, solitary confinement, for a year, a total of two years by the military before he was finally brought to trial. And now the judge in the trial has declined to dismiss the most serious charge that Manning “aided the enemy” merely by making documents public and available to “the enemy” without any proof of just how an enemy was aided and which enemy. How does that differ from any information reported by any journalist in the media?

Snowden was certainly aware of how the government treated Thomas Drake. A former employee of the NSA, Drake told a reporter from the Baltimore Sun of the government’s intention to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to an outside vendor to develop data mining software instead of using an internal product that cost far less and was less invasive of privacy. Even this was classified. For this attempt to save taxpayers’ money, Drake was looking at 35 years in prison. The case was so weak that the government settled for a face-saving misdemeanor charge but Drake had been fired, had lost his pension and was ruined financially by legal costs.

Snowden certainly knows that John Kiriakou sits in jail for accidentally revealing to a reporter the names of two still-active CIA agents whom he thought had left the service. No consideration was given to Kiriakou, a former CIA agent himself, who had risked his life in the service of his country (unlike this president, might we point out?). Kiriakou, in the midst of a bloody shootout in Pakistan, stormed a house, captured a badly wounded man, and sent a cell phone photo of his ear to identify his captive as Abu Zubaydah, a prize catch in the early moments of war against al Qaeda in 2002. So why the vengeful treatment of a man who we routinely think of as a hero? Because those two agents had been involved in waterboarding interrogations, and the Obama administration sees fit to keep the lid on Bush administration violations of international law and what have for the U.S. have become the quaint Geneva Conventions. The Obama Justice Department has never prosecuted anyone for waterboarding prisoners, yet it sent Kiriakou to prison for 30 months for exposing witnesses to a reporter. "In truth, this is my punishment for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s illegal torture program and for telling the public that torture was official US government policy", he said in a letter just recently sent from prison.

Snowden also sees what the Obama administration is doing to thwart his applications for asylum in other countries. The U.S. pressured three European countries to block the airspace of the flight home of a sovereign country’s head of state, Evo Morales of Bolivia, followed by Vice President Joe Biden’s calling the leaders of other South American countries to dissuade them of offering asylum. “There is not a country in the hemisphere whose government does not understand” that helping Mr. Snowden “would put relations in a very bad place for a long time to come”, a senior State Department official was quoted as saying by The New York Times. Snowden must be asking why he should sacrifice himself to his country when it has used these bullying tactics against him, jettisoned its own constitutional safeguards and cast aside international laws that it now finds inconvenient.