Greenwald writes: "In the face of a growing ACLU-and-Amnesty-led campaign to
secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend's release of the Oliver
Stone biopic 'Snowden,' the Post editorial page not only argued today in
opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden - their paper's
own source - stand trial on espionage charges or, as a 'second-best
solution,' 'accept[] a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses
and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.'"
Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. (photo: Mark
Blinch/Reuters)
Washington Post Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its
Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
18 September 16
Three of the four media outlets which received and published large numbers
of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden - The Guardian, The New
York Times and The Intercept - have called for the U.S. Government to allow
the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That's the
normal course for a newspaper, which owes its sources duties of protection,
and which - by virtue of accepting the source's materials and then
publishing them - implicitly declares the source's information to be in the
public interest.
But not The Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU-and-Amnesty-led
campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend's release of
the Oliver Stone biopic "Snowden," the Post Editorial Page not only argued
today in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden -
their paper's own source - stand trial on espionage charges or, as a
"second-best solution," "accept[] a measure of criminal responsibility for
his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency."
In doing so, The Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in U.S.
media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the
criminal prosecution of its own paper's source - one on whose back the paper
won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. But even more
staggering than this act of journalistic treachery against their paper's own
source are the claims made to justify it.
The Post Editors concede that one - and only one - of the programs which
Snowden enabled to be revealed was justifiably exposed - namely, the
domestic metadata program, because it "was a stretch, if not an outright
violation, of federal surveillance law, and posed risks to privacy."
Regarding the "corrective legislation" that followed its exposure, the Post
acknowledges: "we owe these necessary reforms to Mr. Snowden." But that
metadata program wasn't revealed by the Post, but rather by the Guardian.
Other than that initial Snowden revelation, the Post suggests, there was no
public interest whatsoever in revealing any of the other programs. In fact,
they say, real harm was done from their exposure. That includes PRISM, about
which the Post says this:
The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered,
and leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring
program, PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to
privacy. (It was also not permanent; the law authorizing it expires next
year.)
In arguing that no public interest was served by exposing PRISM, what did
the Post editors forget to mention? That the newspaper which (simultaneous
with The Guardian) made the choice to expose the PRISM program by spreading
its operational details and top secret manual all over its front page is
called . . . . The Washington Post. Then, once they made the choice to do
so, they explicitly heralded their exposure of the PRISM program (along with
other revelations) when they asked to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
If the Post Editorial Page editors really believe that PRISM was a totally
legitimate program and that no public interest was served by its exposure,
shouldn't they be attacking their own paper's news editors for having chosen
to make it public, apologizing to the public for harming their security, and
agitating for a return of the Pulitzer? If the Post Editorial Page editors
had any intellectual honesty at all, this is what they would be doing -
accepting institutional responsibility for what they apparently regards as a
grievous error that endangered the public - rather than pretending that it
was all the doing of their source as a means of advocating for his criminal
prosecution.
Worse than the intellectual dishonesty of this Editorial is its towering
cowardice. After denouncing their own paper's PRISM revelation, they
proclaim: "worse - far worse - he also leaked details of basically
defensible international intelligence operations." But what they inexcusably
omit is that it was not Edward Snowden, but the top editors of The
Washington Post, who decided to make these programs public. Again, just look
at the stories for which the Post was cited when receiving a Pulitzer Prize:
Almost every one of those stories entailed the exposure of what The Post
Editors today call "details of international intelligence operations." I
personally think there were very solid justifications for the Post's
decision to reveal those. As Snowden explained in the first online interview
with readers I conducted in July, 2013, he was not only concerned about
privacy infringement of Americans but of all human beings, because - in his
words - "suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's
only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not
write that 'We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are
created equal.'"
So I support the decision of the Post back then to publish documents
exposing "international intelligence operations." That's because I agree
with what Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said in 2014, in an article in
The Washington Post where they celebrated their own Pulitzer:
Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said Monday that the reporting exposed a
national policy "with profound implications for American citizens'
constitutional rights" and the rights of individuals around the world
(emphasis added). "Disclosing the massive expansion of the NSA's
surveillance network absolutely was a public service," Baron said. "In
constructing a surveillance system of breathtaking scope and intrusiveness,
our government also sharply eroded individual privacy. All of this was done
in secret, without public debate, and with clear weaknesses in oversight."
The Editorial Page is separate from the news organization and does not speak
for the latter; I seriously doubt the journalists or editors at the Post who
worked on these news stories would agree with any of that editorial. But
still, if the Post Editorial Page Editors now want to denounce these
revelations, and even call for the imprisonment of their paper's own source
on this ground, then they should at least have the courage to acknowledge
that it was The Washington Post - not Edward Snowden - who made the
editorial and institutional choice to expose those programs to the public.
They might want to denounce their own paper and even possibly call for its
prosecution for revealing top secrets programs that they now are bizarrely
claiming should never have been revealed to the public in the first place.
But this highlights a chronic cowardice that often arises when establishment
figures want to denounce Snowden. As has been amply documented, and as all
newspapers involved in this reporting (including the Post) have made clear,
Snowden himself played no role in deciding which of these programs would be
exposed (beyond providing the materials to newspapers in the first place).
He did not trust himself to make those journalistic determinations, and so
he left it to the newspapers to decide which revelations would and would not
serve the public interest. If a program ended up being revealed, one can
argue that Snowden bears some responsibility (because he provided the
documents in the first place), but the ultimate responsibility lies with the
editors of the paper that made the choice to reveal it, presumably because
they concluded that the public interest was served by doing so.
Yet over and over, Snowden critics - such as Slate's Fred Kaplan, and
today's Post Editorial - omit this crucial fact, and are thus profoundly
misleading. In attacking Snowden this week, for instance, Kaplan again makes
the same point he has made over and over: that Snowden's revelations
extended beyond privacy infringements of Americans.
Leave aside the narcissistic and jingoistic view that whistleblowers and
media outlets should only care about privacy infringements of American
citizens, but not the 95% of the rest of the planet called "non-Americans."
And let's also set to the side the fact that many of the most celebrated
news stories in U.S media history were devoted to revealing secret foreign
operations that had nothing to do with infringing the Constitutional rights
of U.S. citizens (such as the Pentagon Papers, Abu Ghraib, and the Post's
revelations of CIA black sites).
What's critical here is that Kaplan's list of Bad Snowden Revelations (just
like the Post's) invariably involve stories published not by Snowden (or
even by The Intercept or The Guardian), but by The New York Times and The
Washington Post. But like the Post Editorial Page Editors, Kaplan is too
much of a coward to accuse the nation's top editors at those two papers of
treason, helping terrorists, or endangering national security, so he
pretends that it was Snowden, and Snowden alone, who made the choice to
reveal these programs to the public. If Kaplan and the Post editors truly
believe that all of these stories ought to have remained secret and have
endangered people's safety, why are they not attacking the editors and
newspapers which made the ultimate decision to expose them? Snowden himself
never publicly disclosed a single document, so any programs that were
revealed were the ultimate doing of news organizations.
Whatever else is be true, one's loyalty to U.S. government officials has to
be slavish in the extreme in order to consider oneself a journalist while
simultaneously advocating the criminalization of transparency, leaks,
sources, and public debates. But that's not new: there has long been in the
U.S. a large group that ought to call itself U.S. Journalists Against
Transparency: journalists whose loyalty lies far more with the U.S.
Government than with the ostensible objectives of their own profession, and
thus routinely take the side of those keeping official secrets rather than
those who reveal them, even to the point of wanting to see sources
imprisoned.
But what makes today's Washington Post Editorial so remarkable, such a tour
de force, is that they are literally calling for the criminal prosecution of
one of the most important sources in their own newspaper's history. Having
basked in the glory of awards and accolades, and benefitted from untold
millions of clicks, the Editorial Page Editors of the Post now want to see
the source who enabled all of that be put in an American cage and branded a
felon. That is warped beyond anything that can be described.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. (photo: Mark
Blinch/Reuters)
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/18/washpost-makes-history-first-paper-to-ca
ll-for-prosecution-of-its-own-source-after-accepting-pulitzer/https://theint
ercept.com/2016/09/18/washpost-makes-history-first-paper-to-call-for-prosecu
tion-of-its-own-source-after-accepting-pulitzer/
Washington Post Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its
Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
18 September 16
hree of the four media outlets which received and published large numbers
of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden - The Guardian, The New
York Times and The Intercept - have called for the U.S. Government to allow
the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That's the
normal course for a newspaper, which owes its sources duties of protection,
and which - by virtue of accepting the source's materials and then
publishing them - implicitly declares the source's information to be in the
public interest.
But not The Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU-and-Amnesty-led
campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend's release of
the Oliver Stone biopic "Snowden," the Post Editorial Page not only argued
today in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden -
their paper's own source - stand trial on espionage charges or, as a
"second-best solution," "accept[] a measure of criminal responsibility for
his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency."
In doing so, The Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in U.S.
media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the
criminal prosecution of its own paper's source - one on whose back the paper
won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. But even more
staggering than this act of journalistic treachery against their paper's own
source are the claims made to justify it.
The Post Editors concede that one - and only one - of the programs which
Snowden enabled to be revealed was justifiably exposed - namely, the
domestic metadata program, because it "was a stretch, if not an outright
violation, of federal surveillance law, and posed risks to privacy."
Regarding the "corrective legislation" that followed its exposure, the Post
acknowledges: "we owe these necessary reforms to Mr. Snowden." But that
metadata program wasn't revealed by the Post, but rather by the Guardian.
Other than that initial Snowden revelation, the Post suggests, there was no
public interest whatsoever in revealing any of the other programs. In fact,
they say, real harm was done from their exposure. That includes PRISM, about
which the Post says this:
The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered,
and leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring
program, PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to
privacy. (It was also not permanent; the law authorizing it expires next
year.)
In arguing that no public interest was served by exposing PRISM, what did
the Post editors forget to mention? That the newspaper which (simultaneous
with The Guardian) made the choice to expose the PRISM program by spreading
its operational details and top secret manual all over its front page is
called . . . . The Washington Post. Then, once they made the choice to do
so, they explicitly heralded their exposure of the PRISM program (along with
other revelations) when they asked to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
If the Post Editorial Page editors really believe that PRISM was a totally
legitimate program and that no public interest was served by its exposure,
shouldn't they be attacking their own paper's news editors for having chosen
to make it public, apologizing to the public for harming their security, and
agitating for a return of the Pulitzer? If the Post Editorial Page editors
had any intellectual honesty at all, this is what they would be doing -
accepting institutional responsibility for what they apparently regards as a
grievous error that endangered the public - rather than pretending that it
was all the doing of their source as a means of advocating for his criminal
prosecution.
Worse than the intellectual dishonesty of this Editorial is its towering
cowardice. After denouncing their own paper's PRISM revelation, they
proclaim: "worse - far worse - he also leaked details of basically
defensible international intelligence operations." But what they inexcusably
omit is that it was not Edward Snowden, but the top editors of The
Washington Post, who decided to make these programs public. Again, just look
at the stories for which the Post was cited when receiving a Pulitzer Prize:
Almost every one of those stories entailed the exposure of what The Post
Editors today call "details of international intelligence operations." I
personally think there were very solid justifications for the Post's
decision to reveal those. As Snowden explained in the first online interview
with readers I conducted in July, 2013, he was not only concerned about
privacy infringement of Americans but of all human beings, because - in his
words - "suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's
only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not
write that 'We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are
created equal.'"
So I support the decision of the Post back then to publish documents
exposing "international intelligence operations." That's because I agree
with what Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said in 2014, in an article in
The Washington Post where they celebrated their own Pulitzer:
Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said Monday that the reporting exposed a
national policy "with profound implications for American citizens'
constitutional rights" and the rights of individuals around the world
(emphasis added). "Disclosing the massive expansion of the NSA's
surveillance network absolutely was a public service," Baron said. "In
constructing a surveillance system of breathtaking scope and intrusiveness,
our government also sharply eroded individual privacy. All of this was done
in secret, without public debate, and with clear weaknesses in oversight."
The Editorial Page is separate from the news organization and does not speak
for the latter; I seriously doubt the journalists or editors at the Post who
worked on these news stories would agree with any of that editorial. But
still, if the Post Editorial Page Editors now want to denounce these
revelations, and even call for the imprisonment of their paper's own source
on this ground, then they should at least have the courage to acknowledge
that it was The Washington Post - not Edward Snowden - who made the
editorial and institutional choice to expose those programs to the public.
They might want to denounce their own paper and even possibly call for its
prosecution for revealing top secrets programs that they now are bizarrely
claiming should never have been revealed to the public in the first place.
But this highlights a chronic cowardice that often arises when establishment
figures want to denounce Snowden. As has been amply documented, and as all
newspapers involved in this reporting (including the Post) have made clear,
Snowden himself played no role in deciding which of these programs would be
exposed (beyond providing the materials to newspapers in the first place).
He did not trust himself to make those journalistic determinations, and so
he left it to the newspapers to decide which revelations would and would not
serve the public interest. If a program ended up being revealed, one can
argue that Snowden bears some responsibility (because he provided the
documents in the first place), but the ultimate responsibility lies with the
editors of the paper that made the choice to reveal it, presumably because
they concluded that the public interest was served by doing so.
Yet over and over, Snowden critics - such as Slate's Fred Kaplan, and
today's Post Editorial - omit this crucial fact, and are thus profoundly
misleading. In attacking Snowden this week, for instance, Kaplan again makes
the same point he has made over and over: that Snowden's revelations
extended beyond privacy infringements of Americans.
Leave aside the narcissistic and jingoistic view that whistleblowers and
media outlets should only care about privacy infringements of American
citizens, but not the 95% of the rest of the planet called "non-Americans."
And let's also set to the side the fact that many of the most celebrated
news stories in U.S media history were devoted to revealing secret foreign
operations that had nothing to do with infringing the Constitutional rights
of U.S. citizens (such as the Pentagon Papers, Abu Ghraib, and the Post's
revelations of CIA black sites).
What's critical here is that Kaplan's list of Bad Snowden Revelations (just
like the Post's) invariably involve stories published not by Snowden (or
even by The Intercept or The Guardian), but by The New York Times and The
Washington Post. But like the Post Editorial Page Editors, Kaplan is too
much of a coward to accuse the nation's top editors at those two papers of
treason, helping terrorists, or endangering national security, so he
pretends that it was Snowden, and Snowden alone, who made the choice to
reveal these programs to the public. If Kaplan and the Post editors truly
believe that all of these stories ought to have remained secret and have
endangered people's safety, why are they not attacking the editors and
newspapers which made the ultimate decision to expose them? Snowden himself
never publicly disclosed a single document, so any programs that were
revealed were the ultimate doing of news organizations.
Whatever else is be true, one's loyalty to U.S. government officials has to
be slavish in the extreme in order to consider oneself a journalist while
simultaneously advocating the criminalization of transparency, leaks,
sources, and public debates. But that's not new: there has long been in the
U.S. a large group that ought to call itself U.S. Journalists Against
Transparency: journalists whose loyalty lies far more with the U.S.
Government than with the ostensible objectives of their own profession, and
thus routinely take the side of those keeping official secrets rather than
those who reveal them, even to the point of wanting to see sources
imprisoned.
But what makes today's Washington Post Editorial so remarkable, such a tour
de force, is that they are literally calling for the criminal prosecution of
one of the most important sources in their own newspaper's history. Having
basked in the glory of awards and accolades, and benefitted from untold
millions of clicks, the Editorial Page Editors of the Post now want to see
the source who enabled all of that be put in an American cage and branded a
felon. That is warped beyond anything that can be described.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
