Where's Edward?

Anybody getting Cold War deja vu from this cat-and-mouse chase of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who let the cat out of the bag about our government’s deeply Orwellian domestic spying?

He’s likely to get caught eventually. In fact, if half of what he said is true, the government can neither afford not to catch him nor to let him go to a speedy trial, which was the case with another American patriot/spy, Bradley Manning, who is being tried for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks.

Let’s not get into the debate of whether these men are American heroes. We’re a newspaper, so our belief that information that improves the American democracy should be available to the public is set in stone. Both these men threw away their comfortable lives for something. And there is no question as to whether their lives were the first things sacrificed.

But can we at least get one thing out of the way? It’s too stupid to be part of the discussion, and the Obama administration’s use of this argument is so intellectually dishonest, it’s got to be pointed out lest they say it enough that people start to believe it.

Edward Snowden’s running to China or Russia or Ecuador is not proof he is a traitor. Snowden is by all measures a smart guy. But he, like the rest of us, has had four years of examples of how this administration treats whistleblowers, and this administration’s penchants for spying on truth disseminators, like journalists. Bradley Manning, for instance, was at least subjected to extreme solitary confinement, which a pre-trial judge found should take time off his final sentence. It’s torture, by a euphemistic name. This is America, and such treatment used to be called cruel and unusual punishment.

There is not a judge in the United States who would say a human being does not have the right to defend him- or herself against physical harm or death. So running to logical places to avoid harm at the hands of the United States government isn’t proof of anything except that the person is neither an idiot nor suffering from a messianic complex that would require him to seek crucifixion.

On the other hand, news outlets have reported that he has said that he specifically took the job in order to get proof of the government’s surveillance programs. It’s pretty hard to use that fact, and the fact that he swore an oath to protect the government’s secrets, to call him anything but a spy. That the accusation is being made by a government that is spying on its own citizens somewhat undercuts its moral power.

Recent disclosures, like Snowden’s, and including those that showed the government monitored Associated Press phone records, clearly show that our government is taking irredeemable steps toward a fascist, authoritarian view of its citizens.

A Benjamin Franklin paraphrase, “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither,” gets bandied about quite a bit in these post 9-11 years. These days we have to ask what people who gave up liberty but didn’t get security deserve.