In the matter of "Edward Snowden, hero or villain?," one person I'm prepared to listen to is Daniel Ellsberg

People seem to forget that back in the day, Daniel Ellsberg was widely held to be just as filthy a traitor as Edward Snowden is now.

"I'm not going to jump into the hero vs. not fray. I think there are important things to be said on both sides. Goodness knows, the arguments on both sides are familiar and mostly obvious, though each side might benefit from listening calmly to the other."

-- me, four weeks ago

by Ken

Oh God, now I'm quoting myself. Next I'll be stopping strangers on the street and reading old blogposts to them.

Still, I stand by the point. Back then we already had a face-off on newyorker.com between John Cassidy ("Why Edward Snowden Is a Hero") and Jeffrey Toobin ("Edward Snowden Is No Hero"), two writers I admire a lot, and they've still made the cases better than anybody I've seen since. Which is another way of saying that, for all the verbiage that's been shoveled onto the pile, I haven't encountered much that adds anything.

And parenthetically I still say that people who see the hero-or-villian question as a no-brainer would benefit from listening a little more closely to the opposite side -- and it doesn't get done a lot better than the Cassidy and Toobin pieces do it.

For the people who reflexively shout, "Hero!": The rule of law is a cornerstone of our system, and there really is such a thing as national security, and ES knowingly broke laws whose breakability individuals really don't get to decide on; can we even imagine the consequences if everybody claimed the right to decide which stolen government secrets should be revealed and which shouldn't. Have you really thought about the implications?

For the people who reflexively shout, "Villain!": Yes, but have you considered the stuff that Snowden, like Bradley Manning (and Julian Assange) before him, made public? Stuff that we had not just a right but a need to know. Stuff that was being suppressed because our government seems to have evolved to the point that in a truly nonpartisan way it believes it's no longer answerable to us the people.

I'm less interested in figuring out which argument is "better" than I am in standing back and suggesting that we're getting the worst of both worlds, and each argument tells us that we've got trouble here in River City.

But all of this, as I say, is old news. And I admit it's possible, since I've tried my best to tune out the infernal squabbling, that somebody has added points of substance to the argument which I've missed. One person, however, caught my attention, and that's Daniel Ellsberg.

By way of reminder, here's how the Washington Post introduced the Ellsberg op-ed piece the paper published yesterday:

Daniel Ellsberg is the author of "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers." He was charged in 1971 under the Espionage Act as well as for theft and conspiracy for copying the Pentagon Papers. The trial was dismissed in 1973 after evidence of government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, was introduced in court.

Ellsberg has come into the Snowden controversy because he is now regularly cited as a classic case of a "good" whistleblower, one who revealed government secrets that need to be revealed and then stood up like a man and turned himself in. For those who see Snowden as a hero, he's following in the footsteps of Ellsberg; for those who see him as a villain, he's a travesty of the sainted whistleblower Ellsberg.

Now I have no quarrel with the view of Ellsberg as a hero for making possible the publication of the Pentagon Papers, that exhaustive inquiry into the history of our involvement in Vietnam which our government went to the extraordinary lengths of having prepared, and which our government thought mustn't under any circumstances be revealed to the American people. (And heroes' badges too to the New York Times for putting its head on the chopping block in defense of its right and obligation to publish those truths.)

As Ellsberg put it in his op-ed piece, his "authorized access" to these extraordinary documents "taught me that Congress and the American people had been lied to by successive presidents and dragged into a hopelessly stalemated war that was illegitimate from the start." When you consider the devastating effects this war had both on the people of Southeast Asia and on the people of the U.S.A., this is kind of a huge deal.

Nevertheless, there's already irony in the anointment of Ellsberg as a good, even sainted, whistleblower, with the only question to be decided whether Edward Snowden is a new Ellsberg or not at all like Ellsberg and therefore a treasonous dog. Because back in the day it was Ellsberg who was widely vilified as a treasonous dog. It's important to remember, as the Post's introductory note to his op-ed piece reminds us, that his legal peril came to an end not because of any sudden official recognition that he didn't deserve to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law but because the government got caught having broken too many laws in its pursuit of him.

Ellsberg himself declares his view of Snowden's actions without hesitation or equivocation:

Snowden believes that he has done nothing wrong. I agree wholeheartedly. More than 40 years after my unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, such leaks remain the lifeblood of a free press and our republic. One lesson of the Pentagon Papers and Snowden's leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts.

And I think Ellsberg's personal credentials in the matter give his view what we might call "standing," and I'm happy he has shared it with us, especially so unequivocally. But I think he has something more important to share: a crucial difference, in his view, between his case and Snowden's.

It's a difference, not between what the two secret-sharers did, but between the climate in the country today and that in "a different America, a long time ago." Ellsberg is speaking particularly to the issue of whether Snowden has failed to follow his example by failing to turn himself in to authorities, as he did. Once again he's solidly behind Snowden. The title on his op-ed piece is "Snowden made the right call when he fled the U.S."

Ellsberg reminds us that he too "went underground" -- with his wife, Patricia, for 13 days.

My purpose (quite like Snowden's in flying to Hong Kong) was to elude surveillance while I was arranging -- with the crucial help of a number of others, still unknown to the FBI -- to distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other newspapers [besides the New York Times and Washington Post, that is, to whom he had already provided copies, which both papers were legally enjoined from publishing], in the face of two more injunctions. The last three days of that period was in defiance of an arrest order: I was, like Snowden now, a "fugitive from justice."

But he's quite certain that Snowden wouldn't be treated the way he was when he turned himself in.

[W]hen I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn't have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind.

There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon's era -- and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment -- but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to "incapacitate me totally").

I hope Snowden's revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning's conditions as "cruel, inhuman and degrading." (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)

Nor, Ellsberg argues, is Snowden's physical presence required to continue making the case for the importance of his disclosures.

As Snowden told the Guardian, "This country is worth dying for." And, if necessary, going to prison for -- for life.

But Snowden's contribution to the noble cause of restoring the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution is in his documents. It depends in no way on his reputation or estimates of his character or motives -- still less, on his presence in a courtroom arguing the current charges, or his living the rest of his life in prison. Nothing worthwhile would be served, in my opinion, by Snowden voluntarily surrendering to U.S. authorities given the current state of the law.

I don't know. Maybe Daniel Ellsberg isn't the ultimate judge of who is or isn't a new Ellsberg. Last month Post columnist Jonathan Capehart dismissed his opinion in a column, "Snowden failed to follow Ellsberg's example":

Enough with the breathless comparisons. Edward Snowden is no Daniel Ellsberg. I know the latter has heaped praise on the former. But the high-mindedness of our present-day national-security leaker is nowhere near the gutsiness of the man who changed the course of the Vietnam War by releasing the Pentagon Papers more than 40 years ago.

Well, I'm not nearly as prepared to dismiss Ellsberg's opinion out of hand. In his view, Snowden's revelations about the NSA surveillance depict "in effect, a global expansion of the Stasi, the Ministry for State Security in the Stalinist 'German Democratic Republic,' whose goal was 'to know everything.' But the cellphones, fiber-optic cables, personal computers and Internet traffic the NSA accesses did not exist in the Stasi's heyday."

Ellsberg says he hopes that Snowden "finds a haven, as safe as possible from kidnapping or assassination by U.S. Special Operations forces, preferably where he can speak freely."

What he has given us is our best chance -- if we respond to his information and his challenge -- to rescue ourselves from out-of-control surveillance that shifts all practical power to the executive branch and its intelligence agencies: a United Stasi of America.

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