Forum: Whistle-blowers or Traitors?

The intensifying debate over whistle-blowers and the limits of intrusion on privacy in the name of national security has journalists everywhere in a quandary, and the OPC is opening its own debate in hopes of clarifying the issue. In the wake of the sentencing of Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning to 35 years in prison, and with Edward J. Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency still unfolding, the Club invites members to chip in opinions in this new forum. Should Manning and Snowden be seen as traitors, hysterics, self-promoters, or genuine whistle-blowers calling attention to abuses of our Constitutional freedoms? Should journalists help them spill government secrets? And how do they compare with Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1971?

The OPC has taken no position on this issue, and in fact it is not really a question of press freedom – though David Carr pointed out in The New York Times that Glenn Greenwald, the American columnist who has been Snowden’s conduit to The Guardian of London, has been widely attacked for his role in spilling the NSA secrets. But OPC opinions vary widely on the central question: Are Manning, Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange genuine whistle-blowers, and what should journalists do when offered their material? Or, as Steve Coll has written in The New Yorker, is their glamorization just a distraction from the larger issue of the Obama administration’s persecution of the press?

As Carr has noted, Ellsberg too was widely reviled for disclosing government secrets in 1971, and was charged with violating the Espionage Act. The charges were dismissed two years later when it was learned that agents of the Nixon Administration had burgled Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office looking for evidence to discredit him, and that the FBI had wiretapped his phone without a warrant. But it’s fair to say that Ellsberg is widely credited today with helping to bring the Vietnam War to an end.

Snowden’s disclosures triggered at least ten bills in Congress to limit government access to phone and Internet records, or to amend or repeal the Patriot Act. Manning, who has said he wants hormone therapy to help him live as Chelsea, a woman, plans to appeal his court-martial verdict and sentence. Assange is in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, avoiding extradition to Sweden to face charges of rape. Snowden remains in Moscow, where Vladimir Putin’s government has promised to shield him from extradition to the U.S.

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