Where is he complaining about it? I see this:

"Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American"

There was something about not being able to get a fair trial stateside.

Although, I don't know what the laws are like in the States, but in Canada you can go to jail if you have security clearance and reveal information that if true would be classified. If the legal situation is similar in the US, he's pretty clearly guilty.

You're saying he shouldn't get a fair trial because it's a "clear-cut case" of him being a traitor. That is kind of the point, without a fair trial there is NO "case"; there is just power, blackmail and a whole lot of bootlicking.

What he did was disclose classified information. Which itself is illegal. But its a jump to automatically assume that disclosure of classified information is treason.

Now if he turns around and starts helping China with the information he has, then he will be pretty much done for.

And if you don't set morality aside? There can be such a gap between "legal" and "just", and before anyone asks me to set morality aside, I would love to first hear their arguments for me doing that, other than that they do it.

I was merely saying that I don't feel like arguing the morality of it, whereas he'd need a very clever lawyer and a sympathetic judge to get out of the treason charge should he ever stand trial.

Actually, it looks like treason will be a hard sell in Snowden's case: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/edward-snowden-92687.h...

From someone who is a lawyer:

“I do not believe it is treason,” said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. “There is nothing to suggest that his motivation was to assist our enemies or a foreign power.”

The gist of the article is that they would most likely prosecute him for espionage (which doesn't require him to be spying "for" anybody), and that the treason/traitor allegations by officials are for rhetorical effect (though they mention it isn't entirely impossible to charge him with treason using some very tortured logic).

Interesting. Thanks for the heads up.