Washington Post Writer Gets It Right: Snowden is No Whistleblower

I’ve been struggling recently to get through “No Place to Hide,” an extremely misleading and pompous book on the Snowden leaks by former London Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald. I hope to publish my review of this book next week.

It was therefore an unexpected pleasure to read an op-ed about the Snowden affair in today’s Washington Post by Walter Pincus titled “How to Define a Whistleblower.”

After reading Greenwald’s gibberish on what he claims was a brave and noble decision by Edward Snowden to steal 1.7 million classified documents and leak them to the news media, it was gratifying to see a distinguished national security reporter like Pincus take issue with this phony claim.

Pincus notes that Snowden can’t prove he tried to go through proper channels to raise his concerns about alleged NSA wrongdoing and that he hasn’t produced emails to back up this claim.

Pincus also points out that Snowden refused to tell NBC’s Brian Williams when he started stealing U.S. secrets “due to an ongoing Federal investigation.” It doesn’t make sense that Snowden is worried about a U.S. government investigation at this point. More likely is that he started stealing secrets long ago and revealing this fact would undercut his story on when he decided to become an intelligence whistleblower.

The most important point Pincus makes is why Snowden stole and leaked such huge numbers of classified documents when 50 or 100 would have proved his point about NSA abuses. Pincus says Greenwald explained this by saying Snowden “was determined to expose the extremity of NSA spying revealed by the documents, so as to enable an enduring public debate with real consequences, rather than a one-off scoop that would accomplish nothing beyond accolades for the reporters.”

Pincus doesn’t buy this explanation. Neither do I. In my view, the huge numbers of documents leaked by Snowden and published by Greenwald was all about the self-promotion of Snowden and Greenwald and doing as much damage to U.S. national security as possible. It had nothing to do with whistleblowing.

Pincus concluded his article by writing, “A real whistleblower would have selected the documents to be published, made certain that they didn’t harm national security, and remained in the country to face the consequences of his actions.” Pincus is exactly right.

Thank you Walter Pincus for saying what needed to be said about Edward Snowden’s treachery and calling attention to the nonsensical justifications of his actions by his accomplice Glenn Greenwald.