Greenwald is getting testy, and I don't blame him.
The evil press, of which he is supposed by many to be part, is now snooping into his personal background, which will lighten the heavy hearts of more than a few NSA defenders, who will promptly spot some saintliness in the heretofore evil.
But, what the hell, that's politics--a rather vulgar game, played by vulgar, unchanging rules. They don't bother me (much).
What did bother me about Greenwald's defense, however, is this passage of unbelievable naivete:
I never quite understood why the Nixon administration, in response to his release of the Pentagon Papers, would want to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychoanalyst and steal his files. That always seemed like a non sequitur to me: how would disclosing Ellsberg's most private thoughts and psychosexual assessments discredit the revelations of the Pentagon Papers?
It is a non sequitur (in logic, not politics). There's nothing "seeming" about it. And Greenwald, being of a linear, lawyerly mind, had to know that. So why the feigned puzzlement?
I can only guess. I could be magnificently wrong, but my guess is that he needed to find a way to compare the Ellsberg case to his own, in the Snowden story. Thus from the baffling Ellsberg Question, we get Ellsberg's answer:
When I asked Ellsberg about that several years ago, he explained that the state uses those tactics against anyone who dissents from or challenges it simply to distract from the revelations and personally smear the person with whatever they can find to make people uncomfortable with the disclosures.
Well, as they say, fucking duh.
Yet here--to me--is the really fascinating part. Greenwald needn't have played that game. He could have taken a more direct route: The Ellsberg and Snowden cases are similar in that both men revealed what was already, commonly suspected--that, in the first instance, successive presidential administrations had consistently lied to the American public about our involvement in Southeast Asia; in the second instance, that the government was "secretly" amassing vast amounts of private data as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.
The commonality lies not in the subject material itself, of course, but in the reality that most everyone sorta "knew" this stuff, prior to its blockbuster revelations. Which says something paradoxic about secrecy.