Over 250 of the nation’s top law professors said the treatment violated the eighth Amendment and amounted to torture. The UN special rapporteur on torture called the treatment of Manning “cruel and inhumane.” So why, exactly, does the Times editorial board expect any different for Edward Snowden? They do not say.

It’s important to point out that the New York Times editorial board is independent of New York Times journalists, many of whom may be ashamed that their paper implicitly told future sources of secret information that they will not protect them under government pressure. Notably, just last week, after Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN that Edward Snowden committed a crime worthy of jail, New York Times reporter James Risen shot back: “We wouldn’t be having this discussion if it wasn’t for him. That’s the thing I don’t understand about the climate in Washington these days, is that people want to have debates on television and elsewhere, but then you want to throw the people who start the debates in jail.”

The same goes for Washington Post journalists, many of whom are doing admirable reporting on the NSA. They surely have been embarrassed by some of their paper's columnists thoughts on journalism, or their editorial board basically begging Snowden and other sources to stop giving them newsworthy secrets.

But regardless of how their journalists feel, the editorial boards of these two august journalism institutions are discouraging vital sources of information from coming forward with such self-defeating statements.

Finally, the New York Times ended its Snowden statement yesterday by saying this: