{"id":59692,"date":"2015-06-15T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T11:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=59692"},"modified":"2015-06-22T12:48:05","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T11:48:05","slug":"the-sunday-times-snowden-story-is-journalism-at-its-worst-and-filled-with-falsehoods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/06\/the-sunday-times-snowden-story-is-journalism-at-its-worst-and-filled-with-falsehoods\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sunday Times\u2019 Snowden Story Is Journalism at Its Worst \u2014 And Filled with Falsehoods"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sean<\/a>

Sean Gallup\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

14 Jun 2015 – <\/em>Western journalists claim that the big lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War to the public is that it\u2019s hideous, corrupt and often dangerous journalism to give anonymity to government officials to let them propagandize the public, then uncritically accept\u00a0those anonymously voiced claims as Truth. But they\u2019ve learned no such lesson. That tactic continues to be the staple<\/a> of how major US and British media outlets \u201creport,\u201d especially in the national security area. And journalists who read such reports\u00a0continue to treat self-serving decrees by unnamed, unseen officials \u2013 laundered through their media \u2013 as gospel, no matter how dubious are the claims or factually false is the reporting.<\/p>\n

\"sundaytimes-192x300<\/a>We now have one of the purest examples of this dynamic. Last night, the Murdoch-owned\u00a0Sunday Times<\/em> published their lead front-page Sunday article, headlined<\/a> \u201cBritish Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.\u201d Just as the conventional media narrative was shifting to pro-Snowden sentiment in the wake of a key court ruling<\/a> and a new surveillance law, the article\u00a0(behind a paywall<\/a>: full text here<\/a>) claims in the first paragraph that these two adversaries\u00a0\u201chave cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials<\/strong> in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services.\u201d It continues:<\/p>\n

Western intelligence agencies say<\/em><\/strong> they have been forced into the rescue operations after Moscow gained access to more than 1m classified files held by the former American security contractor, who fled to seek protection from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, after mounting one of the largest leaks in US history.<\/em><\/p>\n

Senior government sources confirmed<\/em><\/strong> that China had also cracked the encrypted documents, which contain details of secret intelligence techniques and information that could allow British and American spies to be identified.<\/em><\/p>\n

One senior Home Office official accused<\/em><\/strong> Snowden of having \u201cblood on his hands\u201d, although Downing Street said there was \u201cno evidence of anyone being harmed\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

Aside from the serious retraction-worthy fabrications on which this article\u00a0depends \u2013 more on those in a minute \u2013 the entire report\u00a0is a self-negating joke. It reads like a parody I might quickly\u00a0whip up\u00a0in order to illustrate the core sickness of western journalism.<\/p>\n

Unless he cooked an extra-juicy steak, how does Snowden \u201chave blood on his hands\u201d if there is \u201cno evidence of anyone being harmed?\u201d As one observer<\/a> put it last night in describing the government instructions these Sunday Times<\/em> journalists appear to have obeyed:\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s no evidence anyone\u2019s been harmed but we\u2019d like the phrase \u2018blood on his hands\u2019 somewhere in the piece.\u201d<\/p>\n

The whole article\u00a0does literally nothing other than\u00a0quote anonymous British officials<\/strong>. It gives voice to banal but inflammatory accusations\u00a0that are made about every whistleblower from Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning. It offers zero evidence or confirmation for any of its claims. The \u201cjournalists\u201d who wrote it\u00a0neither questioned any of the official assertions nor even quoted anyone who denies them. It\u2019s pure stenography of the worst kind: some government officials whispered these inflammatory\u00a0claims in our ears and told us to print them, but not reveal who they are, and we\u2019re obeying. <\/em>Breaking!<\/p>\n

Stephen Colbert captured this exact pathology\u00a0with untoppable\u00a0precision in his 2006 White House Correspondents speech<\/a>, when he mocked\u00a0American journalism to the faces of those who practice it:<\/p>\n

But, listen, let\u2019s review the rules. Here\u2019s how it works.The President makes decisions. He\u2019s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put \u2019em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!<\/em><\/p>\n

The Sunday Times<\/em> article is even worse because it protects\u00a0the officials they\u2019re serving with anonymity.\u00a0The beauty of this tactic is that the accusations can\u2019t be challenged. The official accusers are being hidden by the journalists so nobody can confront\u00a0them or hold them accountable when it turns out to be false. The evidence can\u2019t be analyzed or dissected because there literally is none: they just make the accusation and, because they\u2019re state officials,\u00a0their media-servants will publish it with no evidence needed. And as is always true, there is no way to prove the negative. It\u2019s like being smeared by a ghost with a substance that you can\u2019t touch.<\/p>\n

This is the very opposite of journalism. Ponder how dumb someone has to be at this point to read an anonymous government accusation, made with zero evidence, and accept it as true.<\/p>\n

But it works. Other news agencies mindlessly repeated<\/a>\u00a0the Sunday Times<\/em> claims far and wide<\/a>.\u00a0I watched last night as American and British journalists of all kinds reacted to the report on Twitter: by questioning none of it. They did the opposite: they immediately assumed it to be true, then spent hours engaged in somber, self-serious discussions with one another\u00a0over what the geopolitical implications are, how the breach happened, what it means for Snowden, etc. This is the formula that\u00a0shapes\u00a0their brains: anonymous self-serving government assertions = Truth.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

By definition, authoritarians reflexively believe official claims \u2013 no matter how dubious or obviously self-serving, even when made while\u00a0hiding behind anonymity<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 because that\u2019s how their submission functions. Journalists who practice this sort of primitive\u00a0reporting \u2013 I uncritically print what government officials tell me, and give them anonymity so they have no accountability for any it \u2013\u00a0<\/em>do so out of a similar authoritarianism, or uber-nationalism, or laziness, or careerism. Whatever the motives, the results are the same: government officials know they can propagandize the public at any time because subservient journalists will give them anonymity to do so and will uncritically disseminate and accept their claims.<\/p>\n

At this point, it\u2019s hard to avoid the conclusion that journalists want it this way. It\u2019s impossible that they don\u2019t know better. The exact kinds of accusations laundered in the Sunday Times<\/em>\u00a0today are made \u2013 and then disproven \u2013 in every case where someone leaks unflattering information about government officials.<\/p>\n

\"ellsbeg-265x300<\/a>\"ellsberg-261x300<\/a>In the early 1970s,\u00a0Nixon officials such as John Ehrlichman and Henry Kissinger planted accusations\u00a0in the U.S. media<\/a> that Daniel Ellsberg had secretly given the Pentagon Papers and other key documents to the Soviet Union; everyone now knows this was a lie, but at the time, American journalists repeated it constantly, helping to smear Ellsberg. That\u2019s why Ellsberg has constantly defended Snowden and Chelsea Manning from the start: because the same tactics were used to smear him.<\/p>\n

The same thing happened with Chelsea Manning. When\u00a0WikiLeaks first began publishing the Afghan War logs, U.S. officials screamed<\/a> that they \u2013 all together now \u2013 had \u201cblood on their hands.\u201d But when some journalists decided to scrutinize rather than mindlessly repeat the official accusation (i.e., some decided to do journalism), they\u00a0found it was a fabrication.<\/p>\n

\"reuters-300x93<\/a>Writing under the headline \u201cUS officials privately say WikiLeaks damage limited,\u201d Reuters\u2019 Mark Hosenball reported that<\/a> \u201cinternal U.S. government reviews have determined that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration\u2019s public statements to the contrary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"wikileaks-300x160<\/a>An AP report<\/a>\u00a0was headlined \u201cAP review finds no WikiLeaks sources threatened,\u201d and explained that \u201can Associated Press review of those sources raises doubts about the scope of the danger posed by WikiLeaks\u2019 disclosures and the Obama administration\u2019s angry claims<\/strong>, going back more than a year, that the revelations are life-threatening.\u201d Months earlier, McClatchy\u2019s Nancy Youssef\u00a0wrote an article<\/a> headlined \u201cOfficials may be\u00a0overstating the dangers from WikiLeaks,\u201d and she noted that \u201cdespite similar warnings ahead of the previous two massive releases of classified U.S. intelligence reports by the website, U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone\u2019s death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now we have\u00a0exactly\u00a0<\/em>the same thing here. There\u2019s an anonymously made claim that Russia and China\u00a0\u201ccracked the top-secret cache of files\u201d\u00a0from\u00a0Snowden\u2019s, but there is literally zero evidence<\/strong> for that claim. These hidden officials also claim that American and British agents were unmasked and had to be rescued, but\u00a0not a single one is identified.<\/strong>\u00a0There is speculation<\/strong>\u00a0that Russia and China learned things from obtaining the Snowden files, but how could these officials possibly know that, particularly since other government officials are constantly accusing both countries<\/a> of successfully hacking sensitive government databases<\/a>?<\/p>\n

What kind of person would read evidence-free accusations of this sort from anonymous government officials\u00a0\u2013 designed to smear a whistleblower they hate \u2013\u00a0and believe them? That\u2019s a particularly compelling question given that Vice\u2019s Jason Leopold just last week obtained and published previously secret documents revealing a coordinated smear campaign in Washington<\/a> to malign Snowden. Describing those documents, he reported: \u201cA bipartisan group of Washington\u00a0lawmakers solicited details from Pentagon officials that they could use\u00a0to \u2018damage\u2019 former\u00a0NSA contractor Edward Snowden\u2019s \u2018credibility in the press and the court of public opinion.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Manifestly then, the \u201cjournalism\u201d in this\u00a0Sunday Times <\/em>articles is as shoddy and unreliable as it gets. Worse, its key accusations depend on retraction-level lies.<\/p>\n

The government accusers behind this story have a big obstacle to overcome: namely, Snowden has said unequivocally<\/a> that when he left Hong Kong, he took no files with him, having given them to the journalists with whom he worked, and then destroying his copy precisely so that it wouldn\u2019t be vulnerable as he traveled. How, then, could Russia have obtained\u00a0Snowden\u2019s\u00a0files as the story claims \u2013 \u201chis documents were encrypted but they weren\u2019t completely secure \u201d \u2013 if he did not even have physical possession of them?<\/p>\n

The only way this smear works is if they claim Snowden lied, and that he did in fact have files with him after he left Hong Kong. The\u00a0Sunday Times<\/em> journalists thus include a paragraph that is designed to prove Snowden lied about this, that he did possess these files while living in Moscow:<\/p>\n

It is not clear whether Russia and China stole Snowden\u2019s data, or whether he voluntarily handed over his secret documents in order to remain at liberty in Hong Kong and Moscow.<\/em><\/p>\n

David Miranda, the boyfriend of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was seized at Heathrow in 2013 in possession of 58,000 \u201chighly classified\u201d intelligence documents after visiting Snowden in Moscow.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

What\u2019s the problem with that Sunday Times\u00a0<\/em>passage? It\u2019s an utter lie. David did not visit Snowden in Moscow before being detained. As of the time he was detained in Heathrow, David had never been to Moscow and had never met Snowden. The only city\u00a0David visited on that trip before being detained was Berlin, where he stayed in the apartment of Laura Poitras.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Sunday Times<\/em> \u201cjournalists\u201d printed\u00a0an outright fabrication in order to\u00a0support\u00a0their key point: that Snowden had files with him in Moscow. This is the only \u201cfact\u201d included in their story that suggests Snowden had files with him when he left Hong Kong, and it\u2019s completely, demonstrably false (and just by the way: it\u2019s 2015, not 1971, so referring to gay men in a 10-year spousal relationship with the belittling term \u201cboyfriends\u201d is just gross).<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the Sunday Times<\/em>\u00a0claim that \u201cSnowden, a former contractor at the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA), downloaded 1.7m secret documents from western intelligence agencies in 2013.\u201d Even the NSA<\/em> admits this claim is a lie. The NSA has repeatedly said that it has no idea how many documents Snowden downloaded and has no way to find out. As the NSA itself admits, the 1.7 million number\u00a0is not the number the NSA claims Snowden downloaded<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 they admit they don\u2019t and can\u2019t know that number \u2013 but merely the amount of documents he interacted with in his years of working at NSA. Here\u2019s then-NSA chief Keith Alexander explaining exactly that in a 2014 interview<\/a> with the\u00a0Australian Financial Review<\/em>:<\/p>\n

AFR:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Can you now quantify the number of documents [Snowden] stole?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Gen. Alexander: Well, I don\u2019t think anybody really knows what he actually took with him<\/strong>, because the way he did it, we don\u2019t have an accurate way of counting<\/strong>. What we do have an accurate way of counting is what he touched, what he may have downloaded, and that was more than a million documents.<\/em><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s repeat that: \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody really knows what he actually took with him<\/strong>, because the way he did it, we don\u2019t have an accurate way of counting<\/strong>.\u201d\u00a0Yet someone whispered to\u00a0the Sunday Times<\/em>\u00a0reporters that Snowden downloaded 1.7 million documents, so like the liars and propagandists that they are, they mindlessly printed it as fact. That\u2019s what this whole article is.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the claim that the Russian and Chinese governments learned the names of covert agents by cracking the Snowden file, \u201cforcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries.\u201d This appears quite clearly to be a fabrication by the Sunday Times<\/em> for purposes of sensationalism, because if you read the actual anonymous quotes they include, not even the anonymous officials\u00a0claim that Russia and China hacked the entire archive, instead offering only vague assertions that Russian and China \u201chave information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond that, how could these hidden British officials possibly know that China and Russia learned things from the Snowden files as opposed to all the other hacking and spying those countries do?\u00a0Moreover, as pointed out last night<\/a> by my colleague Ryan Gallagher\u00a0\u2013 who has worked for well over a year with the full Snowden archive \u2013 \u201cI\u2019ve reviewed the Snowden documents and I\u2019ve never seen anything in there naming active MI6 agents.\u201d He also said: \u201cI\u2019ve seen nothing in the region of 1m documents in the Snowden archive, so I don\u2019t know where that number has come from.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, none of what\u2019s in\u00a0the Sunday Times<\/em> is remotely new. US and UK government officials and their favorite journalists have tried for two years to smear\u00a0Snowden with these same claims. In June, 2013,\u00a0the New York Times<\/em> gave anonymity to<\/a>\u00a0\u201ctwo Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy agencies\u201d who\u00a0\u201csaid they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong.\u201d The NYT<\/em>\u2018s Public Editor chided the paper<\/a> for printing that garbage, and\u00a0as I reported in my book,\u00a0then-editor-in-chief Jill Abramson told\u00a0the Guardian<\/em>\u2018s Janine Gibson that they should not have printed that, calling it \u201cirresponsible.\u201d (And that\u2019s to say nothing of the woefully ignorant notion that Snowden \u2013 or anyone else these days \u2013 stores massive amounts of data on \u201cfour laptops\u201d as opposed to tiny thumb drives).<\/p>\n

The GOP\u2019s right-wing extremist Congressman Mike Rogers constantly did the same thing. He once announced with no evidence<\/a> that \u201cSnowden is working with Russia\u201d \u2013 a claim even former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell denies<\/a> \u2013 and also argued <\/a>that\u00a0Snowden should \u201cbe charged with murder\u201d for causing unknown deaths. My personal favorite example of this genre of reckless, desperate smears is the Op-Ed<\/a> which the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em> published in May, 2014, by neocon Edward Jay Epstein, which had this\u00a0still-hilarious\u00a0paragraph:<\/p>\n

A former member of President Obama\u2019s cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.<\/em><\/p>\n

It must be one of those, an anonymous official told me! It must be! Either Russia did it. Or China did it. Or they did it together!\u00a0That<\/em> is American journalism.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Sunday Times<\/em>\u00a0today merely\u00a0recycled the same evidence-free smears that have been used by government officials for years \u2013 not only against Snowden, but all whistleblowers \u2013 and added a dose of sensationalism and then baked it with demonstrable lies. That\u2019s just how western journalism works, and it\u2019s the opposite of surprising. But what is surprising, and grotesque, is how many people (including other journalists) continue to be so plagued by some combination of stupidity and gullibility, so that no matter how many times this trick is revealed, they keep falling for\u00a0it.\u00a0If some anonymous government officials said it, and journalists repeat it while hiding who they are, I guess it must be true.<\/em><\/p>\n

________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

Email the author: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

14 Jun 2015 – The British Murdoch-owned paper publishes a report trying to exploit this mindset: \u201cIf some anonymous government officials said it, and journalists repeat it while hiding who they are, I guess it must be true.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}