{"id":80223,"date":"2016-09-26T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=80223"},"modified":"2016-09-24T15:38:45","modified_gmt":"2016-09-24T14:38:45","slug":"washington-post-makes-history-first-paper-to-call-for-prosecution-of-its-own-source-after-accepting-pulitzer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/09\/washington-post-makes-history-first-paper-to-call-for-prosecution-of-its-own-source-after-accepting-pulitzer\/","title":{"rendered":"Washington Post Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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18 Sep 2016 – <\/em>Three of the\u00a0four media outlets that\u00a0received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden \u2014\u00a0The Guardian<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>the New York Times<\/a>, and The Intercept<\/a>\u00a0\u2013<\/em>\u2013 have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower\u00a0to return to the U.S. with no charges. That\u2019s the normal\u00a0course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which \u2014 by virtue of accepting the source\u2019s materials and then publishing them \u2014 implicitly declares the source\u2019s information to be in the public interest.<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Gerald Herbert\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

But not the Washington Post.\u00a0<\/em>In the face of a growing ACLU and Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend\u2019s\u00a0release of the Oliver Stone biopic \u201cSnowden,\u201d the\u00a0Post\u00a0editorial page today not only argued<\/a>\u00a0in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden \u2014\u00a0the paper\u2019s own source \u2014<\/em>\u00a0stand trial on espionage charges or, as a \u201csecond-best solution,\u201d accept \u201ca measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.\u201d<\/p>\n

In doing so, the Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in U.S. media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize\u00a0for the criminal prosecution of its\u00a0own source \u2014 one on whose back the\u00a0paper\u00a0won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. But even more staggering than this act of journalistic treachery against the paper\u2019s own source are the claims made to justify it.<\/p>\n

The Post\u00a0editors concede that one \u2014 and only one \u2014 of the programs that\u00a0Snowden enabled to be revealed was justifiably exposed \u2014 namely, the domestic metadata program, because it \u201cwas a stretch, if not an outright violation, of federal surveillance law, and posed risks to privacy.\u201d Regarding the \u201ccorrective legislation\u201d that followed its exposure, the Post acknowledges:\u00a0\u201cWe owe these necessary reforms to Mr. Snowden.\u201d But that metadata program wasn\u2019t revealed by\u00a0the Post, but rather by The Guardian<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"washington-post-no-pardon-edward-snowden\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Other than\u00a0that initial Snowden revelation,\u00a0the Post suggests, there was no public interest whatsoever in revealing any of the other programs. In fact, the editors\u00a0say, real harm was done by\u00a0their exposure. That\u00a0includes PRISM, about which\u00a0the Post says this:<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

In arguing that no public interest was served by exposing PRISM, what did\u00a0the Post\u00a0editors forget to mention? That the newspaper that\u00a0(simultaneous with The Guardian)\u00a0made the choice to expose the PRISM program\u00a0by spreading its operational details and top-secret manual\u00a0all over its front page is called \u2026 the Washington Post<\/a>. Then, once they made the choice to do so, they\u00a0explicitly heralded\u00a0their exposure of the\u00a0PRISM program (along with other revelations) when they asked to be awarded the\u00a0Pulitzer Prize.<\/p>\n

\"wpprism-1000x669-snowden-gchq-nsa-usa-uk-spy-big-brother-surveillance-internet\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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If the Post\u00a0editorial page editors really believe that PRISM was a totally legitimate program and no public interest was served by its exposure, shouldn\u2019t they be attacking their own paper\u2019s news editors for having chosen to make it public, apologizing to the public\u00a0for harming their security, and agitating for a return of the Pulitzer? If the Post editorial page\u00a0editors had any intellectual honesty at all, this is what they would be doing \u2014 accepting institutional responsibility for what they\u00a0apparently regard as a grievous error that endangered the public \u2014 rather than pretending that it was all the doing of their source as a means of advocating for his criminal prosecution.<\/p>\n

Worse than the\u00a0intellectual dishonesty of this editorial is its towering cowardice. After denouncing their own paper\u2019s PRISM revelation, the editors\u00a0proclaim: \u201cWorse \u2014 far worse \u2014 he also leaked details of basically defensible international intelligence operations.\u201d But what they inexcusably omit is that it was not Edward Snowden, but the top editors of the Washington Post\u00a0who decided to make these programs public. Again, just look at the stories for which the Post\u00a0was cited<\/a> when receiving\u00a0a Pulitzer Prize:<\/p>\n

\"pulitzer3-540x284-washington-post-edward-snowden\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Almost every one of those stories entailed the exposure of what\u00a0the Post\u00a0editors today call \u201cdetails of international intelligence operations.\u201d I personally think there were very solid justifications for the Post\u2019s\u00a0decision to reveal those. As Snowden explained<\/a>\u00a0in 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 \u2014 in his words \u2014 \u201csuspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it\u2019s only victimizing 95 percent of the world instead of 100 percent. Our founders did not write that \u2018We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all U.S. Persons are created equal.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

So I support the decision of the\u00a0Post\u00a0back then to publish documents exposing \u201cinternational intelligence operations.\u201d That\u2019s because I agree with what\u00a0Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said in 2014, in an article in\u00a0the Washington Post<\/a> where they celebrated their own Pulitzer:<\/p>\n

Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said Monday that the reporting exposed a national policy \u201cwith profound implications for American citizens\u2019 constitutional rights\u201d and the rights of individuals around the world <\/em>(emphasis added).\u00a0\u201cDisclosing the massive expansion of the NSA\u2019s surveillance network absolutely was a public service,\u201d Baron said. \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The editorial page is separate from the news organization\u00a0and 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.\u00a0But still, if\u00a0the Post editorial page editors now want to denounce these revelations, and even call for the imprisonment of their paper\u2019s own source on this ground, then they should at least\u00a0have the courage to acknowledge that it was the Washington Post \u2014 not Edward Snowden \u2014 who made the editorial and institutional choice to expose those programs to the public. They might want to denounce their own paper\u00a0and even possibly call for its\u00a0prosecution for revealing top-secret programs they now are bizarrely claiming should never have been revealed to the public in the first place.<\/p>\n

But this highlights\u00a0a chronic cowardice that often arises when establishment figures want to denounce Snowden.\u00a0As has been amply documented<\/a>, and as all newspapers involved in this reporting (including the Post)\u00a0have 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.<\/p>\n

Yet over and over, Snowden critics \u2014 such as\u00a0Slate\u2019s Fred Kaplan and today\u2019s Post editorial\u00a0\u2014 omit this crucial fact, and are thus profoundly misleading. In attacking Snowden this week, for instance, Kaplan again makes the same point<\/a> he has made over and over<\/a>: that Snowden\u2019s revelations extended beyond privacy infringements of Americans.<\/p>\n

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 percent of the rest of the planet called \u201cnon-Americans.\u201d And let\u2019s 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\u00a0Post\u2019s revelations of CIA black sites).<\/p>\n

What\u2019s critical here is that Kaplan\u2019s list of Bad Snowden Revelations (just like the Post\u2019s)\u00a0invariably involves stories published not by Snowden (or even by The Intercept or\u00a0The Guardian),\u00a0but by the New York Times\u00a0and the Washington Post<\/a>. But like the Post editorial page\u00a0<\/em>editors, <\/em>Kaplan is too much of a coward to accuse the nation\u2019s top editors at those two papers of treason, helping terrorists, or endangering national security,\u00a0s<\/em>o he pretends that it was Snowden, and Snowden alone, who made the choice to reveal these programs to the public. If Kaplan and the\u00a0Post editors truly believe that all of these stories ought to have remained secret and have endangered people\u2019s safety, why are they not attacking the editors and newspapers that\u00a0made 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.<\/p>\n

Whatever else may be true, one\u2019s 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\u2019s not new: There has long been in the U.S. a large group<\/a> that ought to call itself U.S. Journalists Against Transparency: journalists\u00a0whose 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But what makes today\u2019s\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0editorial so remarkable, such a\u00a0tour de force, is that the editors are literally calling for the criminal prosecution of one of the\u00a0most important sources in their own newspaper\u2019s history. Having basked in the glory of awards and accolades, and benefited from untold millions of clicks, the editorial page editors of the Post\u00a0<\/em>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.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/p>\n

Glenn Greenwald<\/a> – \u2709glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Leia em portugu\u00eas \u27f6<\/a><\/p>\n

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

The Washington Post received countless benefits off Snowden\u2019s back; now its editorial page wants him imprisoned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80223","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=80223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}