Semi-Partisan Politics

Ruth Marcus from the Washington Post and Glenn Greenwald from the Guardian went head-to-head on CNN this Monday, discussing the recent New York Times editorial calling for clemency for US whistleblower Edward Snowden. As the New York Times rightly concluded in their editorial:

When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government.

This was not the view of Ruth Marcus, who, showing much in common with the self-serving elitists and power fetishists who festoon Washington D.C., seems to swoon at government overreach and seeks to protect her own kind from any kind of scrutiny or consequences of their actions, whilst happily throwing the little guy or the outsider under the bus at the first opportunity:

Snowden … is seized with infuriating certitude about the righteousness of his cause. Not for Snowden any anxiety about the implications for national security of his theft of government secrets, any regrets about his violations of a duty of secrecy.

Quite how she knows that Snowden has no anxiety about these things is not entirely clear, but since she has never met Snowden I think it would be fair to surmise that she made this statement up. It would harm her cause, cheerleading for the Obama administration and the national security apparatus, if she acknowledged the fact that Snowden may have wrestled with his decision to divulge what he knew, that he had to weigh up the pros and cons of his actions.

It’s never good when experienced, professional commentators seek to drag George Orwell into their arguments, but Marcus indulges herself:

George Orwell himself would have told Snowden to chill — and the author of “Animal Farm” surely would have shown more recognition of the irony of Snowden’s sojourn in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Does a man whose life is conducted so much online really believe that Putin’s spies are not cyber-peering over his shoulder?

I believe that the irony, such as it is, is that a man from a supposedly free society has more liberty hiding out in Putin’s oppressive Russia than he would in his own native land, for doing nothing more than exposing the secret and unlawful actions of his government. That fact doesn’t make a mockery of Snowden, but it does make the United States look rather bad.

But it is on her next point that Marcus really overreaches:

On behavior, if Snowden is such a believer in the Constitution, why didn’t he stick around to test the system the Constitution created and deal with the consequences of his actions?

And here is where it gets good, because when CNN host Jake Tapper asked Glenn Greenwald to comment on Marcus’ position, he gave it to her with both barrels:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OouL16eWQvk

 

Temporarily putting aside the correctness of Greenwald’s position, the real money quote, and the thing that really gets to the rub of the matter is this:

I think Ruth Marcus’ argument exemplifies everything that’s really horrible about the D.C. media … People in Washington continuously make excuses for those in power when they break the law.

Yes, we see this time and again, and Greenwald has himself addressed this topic at length in his excellent book “With Liberty and Justice for Some”.

But in terms of refuting Marcus’ fatuous and glib suggestion that if Snowden really valued the US. Constitution he should have been willing to surrender himself and submit himself to the American legal system in order to advance his cause and win his case in the court of public opinion, Greenwald correctly states:

“If he had stayed in the United States, as Daniel Elsberg (widely considered to be a hero by most Americans) argued in the Washington Post, he would have been barred from making the very argument that she just said he should have made. Under the Espionage Act, you’re not allowed to come into court and say “I was justified in disclosing this information”, there is no whistleblower exception in the Espionage Act which is why whistleblowers don’t get justice in the United States.”

May this once and forever do away with the misleading assertion by national security fanatics and civil liberty deniers that Edward Snowden ever had – and spurned – a realistic chance of making his case to the public whilst remaining in the United States, or that his flight to Russia is in any way ironic or detracting from the validity and strength of his arguments. This is not the case.

Mediaite also provides a good summary of the exchange here.