Edward Snowden, a former contractor to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, has been trapped in the transit lounge of Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow for the past two weeks, while the United States government strives mightily to get him back in its clutches. Recently it even arranged for the plane flying Bolivian President Eve Morales home from Moscow to be diverted to Vienna and searched, mistakenly believing that Snowden was aboard.
Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning is already in the U.S. government's clutches. Having endured 1,100 days of solitary confinement, he is now on trial for "aiding the enemy" by passing a quarter-million U.S. Embassy messages, Afghanistan and Iraq war logs, detainee assessments from Guantanamo and videos of U.S. attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq to the WikiLeaks website.
These two American whistleblowers have a lot in common. They are both young idealists who had access to the inner workings of the U.S. "security community," and were appalled by what they learned. Their intentions were good, but their fate may be harsh. (Bradley faces life in prison without parole.) And there is one big difference between them.