A new movie on the subject from Oliver Stone and the imminent retirement of President Obama seem to have concentrated minds on the left: There is a burgeoning movement—confined, for the most part, to journalists—for Obama to pardon Edward Snowden, the fugitive national-security leaker now resident in Moscow.
Some of Snowden’s public admirers are predictable: functionaries from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as the editor of the Nation. None of these is surprising: The Scrapbook cannot remember the last time the ACLU might have recognized that there is something called the national interest; and the Nation has long had a weakness for Americans living in the protective shadow of the Kremlin. Their romantic view of Edward Snowden is no doubt matched by Oliver Stone, the cinematic conspiracy theorist.
Which leads to an interesting difference of opinion on the subject at the Washington Post. One would expect that the Post might hold Snowden in high regard: It was the Post, after all, that published (in conjunction with Britain’s Guardian) some of Snowden’s stolen information about intelligence-gathering in the war on terror, and won a Pulitzer Prize for its trouble. To its credit,
however, the Post sees the larger picture.
In a recent editorial opposing any presidential pardon for Snowden, the Post explains that Snowden did not just reveal privileged information that has led to a continuing debate about privacy and national security; he also leaked stolen information about “basically defensible” global operations, including spying on colleagues of Osama bin Laden and cooperative ventures with European allies. As the Post points out, “no specific harm . . . to any individual American was ever shown to have resulted from the NSA . . . program Mr. Snowden brought to light.” But “revelations about [NSA’s] international operations disrupted lawful intelligence-gathering, causing possibly ‘tremendous damage’ to national security, according to a unanimous, bipartisan report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.”
In other words, the notion that Edward Snowden did nothing but perform a public service, for which he is being persecuted, is nonsense. And the fact that he sought refuge in Moscow, of all places, and does the bidding of the Putin regime affirms the wisdom of the Obama Justice Department in demanding that Snowden return home to answer (and adjudicate in court) the lawful charges against him.
Curiously, the logic and premise of this case seems to elude the Post‘s media columnist, an ex-newspaper editor named Margaret Sullivan. She regards Snowden as a “whistleblower” whose violations of the law—not to mention the oath every public servant swears—are trivial in comparison to the story he delivered to the Post and the Guardian, yielding that Pulitzer Prize. It is an astonishing argument: Because Snowden imperiled national security by flouting the law, enlisting the press in the process, to benefit a cause Margaret Sullivan supports, he deserves to be excused from the legal consequences of his actions.
This is a caricature of the media’s tendency to identify the national interest with its own commercial prerogatives. It is also an elementary lesson in civics: The power of civil disobedience, from Henry David Thoreau through Martin Luther King Jr., lies in the willingness to accept its consequences—and not demand that one citizen be exempt from the law because we happen to agree with him.
