It appears that you are no longer using "decorated war hero" as justification for why Petraeus shouldn't be charged for the felonies that he committed. Is that because you no longer believe that it should be a get-out-of-jail card that lets war heroes commit a felony?

Instead, it's okay to commit a felony so long as there's "very little damage"? (I suppose also that he needs to feel real sorry about it.)

That's very odd ethics. When it happens to lower ranked people they get sent to jail. Foreigners as well, as the case of Wen Ho Lee, where government misconduct and misrepresentations meant that Lee couldn't apply for bail and was put into solitary confinement, on charges of stealing secrets that in the end were false accusations.

For that matter, Martha Stewart "was found guilty in March 2004 of felony charges of conspiracy, obstruction of an agency proceeding, and making false statements to federal investigators". Certainly that also only caused "very little damage." Why is she a felon for (among other things) lying to investigators, when Petraeus lied to the FBI but will only get a misdemeanor charge for all of the crimes he committed?

The original commentary said that hard punishment is justified to prevent "copycats from recklessly harming national security". If that logic is correct, then I again ask why the same doesn't hold for ex-heads of CIA? What's to prevent future CIA heads from doing the same thing? Their future lover might be a Mata Hari instead of a fawning biographer.

I noticed, btw, that Petraeus caused "very little damage" while Snowden "changed the intelligence world forever". You didn't, however, say if that was good change or bad change. Did Snowden cause more damage than Petraeus? Can you quantify the damage?

And this brings me back to my first point. The Espionage Act of 1917 is a horrid piece of legislation. It doesn't consider any balancing of factors. If the change to the intelligent world turned it into a paragon of respect for the ideals of freedom, liberty, etc., then none of that would count in Snowden's favor. We know that from the Pentagon Papers, where, Daniel Ellsberg (who published the Papers) says (see http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/30/daniel-... ):

> But when I finally heard my lawyer ask the prearranged question in direct examination – Why did you copy the Pentagon Papers? – I was silenced before I could begin to answer. The government prosecutor objected – irrelevant – and the judge sustained. My lawyer, exasperated, said he "had never heard of a case where a defendant was not permitted to tell the jury why he did what he did." The judge responded: well, you're hearing one now.

> And so it has been with every subsequent whistleblower under indictment, and so it would be if Edward Snowden was on trial in an American courtroom now.

> Indeed, in recent years, the silencing effect of the Espionage Act has only become worse. The other NSA whistleblower prosecuted, Thomas Drake, was barred from uttering the words "whistleblowing" and "overclassification" in his trial. (Thankfully, the Justice Department's case fell apart one day before it was to begin). In the recent case of the State Department contractor Stephen Kim, the presiding judge ruled the prosecution "need not show that the information he allegedly leaked could damage US national security or benefit a foreign power, even potentially."

For whistle blowers, the government prosecutors don't need to show any damage at all. Not even a little. Why wasn't Petraeus charged under the same interpretation of the same laws? Are we not all equal under the law?