The following essay may have to be read
with a “sarcasm alert”.
I am sorry, I just could not resist. Back when Ed Snowden was newsworthy and before he disappeared off the media radar, I was hearing him compared to Dr. Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers' fame. Now Danny Ellsberg used to smoke dope on the beach with a good friend of mine who was at RAND at the same time, so I feel a certain, close, personal relationship. And even though Danny has publicly congratulated Snowden, as all truly committed lefties are required to do, I just had to write this post comparing the two people and events because ... well you will see.
None of this particularly addresses the issue of whether the various materials should have been leaked. That is a topic for another day.
So I am now going to compare the two men in the areas of education, experience, knowledge in the domain, and so forth. Lets see where it goes.
1. Education.
Dr. Ellsberg was scholarship to Harvard
in Economics where he was summa cum laude, went to Cambridge
University on a Woodrow Wilson scholarship and completed his PhD in
Economics at Harvard. Ed Snowden dropped out of Arundel High
School in Maryland.
2. Prior Experience.
In 1959, Dr. Ellsberg became a
strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the
Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of
the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and
crisis decision-making. In 1961 he drafted the guidance from
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on
the operational plans for general nuclear war. He was a member of two
of the three working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of
the National Security Council (EXCOM) during the Cuban Missile Crisis
in 1962. Ellsberg joined the Defense Department in 1964 as Special
Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security
Affairs) John McNaughton, working on the escalation of the war in
Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two
years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. On return to the RAND
Corporation in 1967, Ellsberg worked on the top secret McNamara study
of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be
known as the Pentagon Papers. Ed Snowden dropped out of high school
to be a sysadmin for the CIA and later for the NSA through a
contracting agency. The CIA identified Snowden as a security risk
and terminated his involvement but failed to communicate that
information to the NSA.
3. Depth of Knowledge in the Area
Dr. Ellsberg was a recognized member of
the national security apparatus and co-author of the report in
question. Ed Snowden simply vacuumed up everything he could get his
hands on, including stealing security keys from other people, and
dumped the material in the public domain. He has no credentials in
any of the areas where he released material.
4. Role That They Played in Creating
the Material
Dr. Ellsberg was one of the authors of
the report that became known as the Pentagon Papers. Ed Snowden had
no role whatsoever in the materials he copied without permission and
released.
5. The Process By Which the Material
Was Released
Ellsberg approach various members of
congress to try and get them to both read and release in the
Congressional Record the report (thus making it difficult to
prosecute anyone). Whoever Ellsberg approached would not do it.
Eventually he gave a copy to a NY Times reporter with the (supposed)
intent that it not be published, more as background, I suppose. Well
the NY Times decided to publish it. I dont know the truth of the
matter, but I suspect hairs are / were being split on who could
legally be prosecuted. Snowden fled the country before releasing
anything and found someone who in my opinion is highly motivated to
release material no matter how much it hurts this country, Greenwald.
That Greenwald received the Pulitzer prize for this is a disgrace
and lowers the credibility of the Pulitzer, IMHO. In any case,
Snowden was no where near as clever or responsible as Ellsberg. He
leaked everything and then fled to the most oppressive surveillance
state on the planet. Many knowledgable people believe that he was
working for Russian intelligence more or less all along. Dismiss
that as paranoia if you will, that is what they believe, and the people who believe it have access to much more information than you or I do.
6. The Nature of the Material Released
Dr. Ellsberg released a report that was
primarily about the history of the Vietnam war and the decision
making that led to our involvement. Because the report had
information from very secret sources it did compromise sources that
were directly involved with this area and (supposedly) led to the
death of many people (possibly a few hundred) of people who risked
their lives to help us. Ed Snowden released information on a vast
number of current operations and activities, activities for which he
should not have had access, and released them indiscriminately. The
full impact will not be known for years, but it is likely that the
death toll will be huge. The impact on foreign policy and
international relationships is far afield from what Snowden claimed he
was interested in, which is to say domestic surveillance, will also
be huge. In fact, very little of the Snowden material released
pertains to domestic surveillance and no one could seriously take
that as a motivation for his activities. In other words, Ellsberg's
leaked information about the past in order to demonstrate that the
POTUS was not completely honest with the American people. Snowden
released information about the present, in a vast number of areas,
completely unrelated to his announced motivation for the release.
7. Actions after the Release of the Material
Dr. Ellsberg stayed in the United
States and said he would take responsibility for his actions. His
trial was thrown out of court by the judge due to the famous misdeeds
of the Nixon Administration and his Plumbers. Arguably this was one
aspect of the Watergate scandal that led ultimately to Nixon's
resignation. Snowden fled the country and, demonstrating his unique
hypocrisy, took asylum in a country with the most oppressive internal
surveillance in the world. He regularly states that he can not get
a fair trial in the USA but I think his real concern is that he is
likely to get a fair trial in the USA.
8. Other Service
Ellsberg had been ROTC to Harvard and
spent two years in the USMC as an officer. Snowden has no service
to his country other than as a consultant where he violated his oath.
So as you can see and, in summary, the two cases are very, very similar.
Actually, that was a lie. The two cases are about as dissimilar as they could be. So you can conclude at least that anyone who claims to you that they are similar is just an idiot. From top to bottom, soup to nuts, materials released, credibility of the person who released them, impact on our country, and so forth and so on, they are completely and utterly different. About the only thing you can say that they had in common is that they both involved the unauthorized release of highly classified material.
Of course, this discussion does not go
into the more interesting question, about whether they were right to
release the material they did. My short answer to that question, which is of course of very little interest to the world, will be the subject of another post.
