Is Edward Snowden blackmailing America?

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has spent the last several weeks disseminating Edward Snowden's revelations about National Security Agency eavesdropping practices, caused a stir this weekend with an interview he gave to Argentina's La Nación.

"Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the U.S. government in one single minute than any other person has ever had in the history of the United States," Greenwald told La Nación's Alberto Armendariz (my translation). He goes on to talk about how Snowden has to avoid landing in the custody of the "vengeful" U.S. at all costs, how Russia is a good place for him for now, and how Snowden's objective is letting the world know how the NSA is violating privacy rights. Snowden is not out to destroy the U.S., Greenwald says. If Snowden dies, however, Greenwald adds, watch out:

In an interview with The Associated Press, Greenwald elaborated on what Snowden is sitting on: "In order to take documents with him that proved that what he was saying was true he had to take ones that included very sensitive, detailed blueprints of how the NSA does what they do." These documents, Greenwald added, "would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it."

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Greenwald's interview with La Nación reached the U.S. largely through a Reuters article that reported the quotes in English. Greenwald was annoyed enough by this act of translational journalism that he responded in a blog post at The Guardian:

That explanation didn't impress Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, who said on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Monday that the comments from Greenwald (or "that reporter", as he calls him) about the U.S. getting on its knees are "out of line." Despite the considerable respect he has for The Guardian, Bernstein added, "that's an awful statement, and the tone in which he made it."

That, too, prompted a response from Greenwald: "I realize Carl Bernstein hasn't done any actual reporting for a couple decades now, but he should nonetheless take the time to read what he's opining on." Reuters gave "a complete distortion of what I actually said," Greenwald told Politico. "The point I made is the opposite one: That Snowden has been as responsible as a whistleblower can be in ensuring that only information the public should know is revealed."

Let me get this straight, said Elaine Radford at The Inquisitr. Snowden is sitting on the documents that would cause the worst damage to the U.S. in its entire history, and he'll unleash them if anything happens to him — nice government there, pity if anything should happen to it — but it's not blackmail?

First, "considering that the United States wouldn't go on its knees to Nazis, Nikita Khrushchev, or Osama bin Laden, Greenwald seemed to be expecting a bit much," Radford said. Second, if he's trying to make Snowden more sympathetic to Americans, asking America to get on its knees is pretty counterproductive — "most of us think we settled that one sometime around 1776." But the big point, is "I don't see how you can take the claim as anything other than a threat of blackmail."