risking his life to tell you about NSA surveillance [ot]

"There is no logical consistency to Hedge's posts."

A Law Meant for Terrorists Is Used to Detain a Journalist's Partner
Power given to the government for one purpose inevitably ends up being used for other purposes.
Conor Friedersdorf Aug 19 2013, 7:30 AM ET


On Sunday, Britain used a provision of the British Terrorism Act to detain a man no one thinks is a terrorist: David Miranda, a Brazilian citizen and the partner of American journalist Glenn Greenwald. They held him for 9 hours at Heathrow Airport, denied him access to an attorney, and took all his electronics.

That alone is a scandal.

Authorities in various Western nations have been granted extraordinary powers to fight terrorists. This isn't a story about whether one agrees with Edward Snowden's decision to leak classified National Security Agency documents, or what one thinks of Glenn Greenwald's journalism. It is a story about whether sweeping powers passed with the understanding they'd be used against terrorists will henceforth be marshaled against anyone Western governments want to target, even if there is zero chance that they are associated with Al Qaeda or its affiliates. This is a story about whether national security journalism is already being treated as terrorism so that government officials can bring more powerful tools to bear against leaks of classified information*. And it's a story about the impropriety of targeting the loved ones of journalists in adversarial relationships with the government in order to intimidate them or others.

Said Greenwald:



...they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

Worse, they kept David detained right up until the last minute: for the full 9 hours, something they very rarely do. Only at the last minute did they finally release him. We spent all day - as every hour passed - worried that he would be arrested and charged under a terrorism statute. This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.

As yet, it's unclear whether or not the U.S. government put Britain, whose spy agency has also been exposed and embarrassed by Edward Snowden's leaks, up to this. Congress should investigate whether or not Team Obama played any role. Only last month, the U.S. pressured European countries to ground the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales in a thuggish reaction to rumors that Snowden was aboard the aircraft, so nothing is assured, save that Miranda has been treated badly and is owed an apology by the captors. "The thought of his being detained by the British police for nine hours because his partner embarrassed the American government really sickens me at a gut level," Andrew Sullivan writes. "I immediately think of my husband, Aaron, being detained in connection to work I have done, something that would horrify and frighten me. We should, of course, feel this empathy with people we have never known, but the realization is all the more gob-smacking when it comes so close to home."

With every day that passes, I grow more amazed at how many apologists the national security state has. It is transnational and increasingly unaccountable, with Western intelligence agencies and officials sharing more interests with one another than with their own legislatures/parliaments and citizens. Recall The Guardian's scoop on GCHQ from earlier this month:

The US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes. The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands.

"GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight," a GCHQ strategy briefing said. The funding underlines the closeness of the relationship between GCHQ and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency. But it will raise fears about the hold Washington has over the UK's biggest and most important intelligence agency, and whether Britain's dependency on the NSA has become too great.

Was this 9-hour stunt GCHQ pulling its weight?

35 years is the sentence.

All I'm really doing is quoting MSM sources and liberal blogs.

When you guys start to focus your outrage where it belongs (the telco's and ISP's) you might have some credibility. Being outraged that the gov't might know a fraction about you that AT&T, Verizon, Google, Facebook, your bank, et al already knows is - I'm sorry - comical.

Manning released this graphic video of a U.S. Apache helicopter attack on a group of people gathered in Baghdad. Two were employees of the Reuters news agency. A member of the helicopter crew refers to the "dead bastards" he killed, and the crew lights up a passing van that stopped to help victims of the first round of gunfire.

Reuters unsuccessfully requested a copy of the video under the Freedom of Information Act, but only Manning revealed it to the world. An Army investigation into the attack, released only after Manning's leak was published, concluded that the helicopter crew had followed the rules of engagement.

2. The Reykjavik-13 cable
Far less known than the Apache video was this classified 2010 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik released on Feb. 18, 2010. The first of Manning's leaks to be published, it caused an immediate sensation in Iceland for its frank discussion of U.S. indifference toward problems in the small island nation's banking sector.

The cable's release energized the activists in Iceland who edited "Collateral Murder."

3. The Iraq War Logs
As part of his work as an Army intelligence analyst, Manning had access to a wealth of sensitive Army documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Called SIGACTS (significant activities), in military parlance, they detailed nighttime raids and improvised explosives attacks with intimate on-the-ground reports from U.S. troops.

Manning gave WikiLeaks nearly 400,000 SIGACTS from Iraq. They were published in October 2010. The Pentagon had always maintained that it did not keep track of civilian casualties in Iraq, but the independent Iraq Body Count website used the SIGACTS to confirm and update its count of deaths in the conflict.

As of this month, the Iraq Body Count's Josh Dougherty related, the organization had added 4,000 deaths to its database as a result of Manning's leaks and was likely to add another 10,000.

"These and thousands of others like them are known to the world today only because Bradley Manning could no longer in good conscience collude with an official policy of the Bush and Obama administrations to abuse secrecy and 'national security' to erase them from history," Dougherty wrote on the group's website. "If Manning deserves any punishment at all for this, certainly his three years already served, and the disgraceful abuse he was made to suffer during it, is more than enough."

4. The Afghanistan War Logs
On July 25, 2010, just a month after Manning was arrested, WikiLeaks published 75,000 SIGACTS from the Afghanistan battlefield. The New York Times, which participated in their publication, said they offered "an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal."

5. Detention, abuse and torture
Manning's leaks included more than 700 Guantanamo detainee files, many revealing that the U.S. had little reason to continue holding its prisoners. The 250,000 State Department cables he leaked detailed U.S. diplomatic pressure on foreign countries to ignore or excuse extraordinary renditions carried out by the CIA in apparent violation of international law. They also showed that the U.S. routinely failed to investigate reports of prisoner abuse and summary execution by the Iraqi military.

"It brought this issue back into public consciousness again, which is a great thing," Shane Kadidal, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents Guantanamo detainees, told HuffPost in June.

"And then with everything that Manning released, to some extent the volume of the material is part of the story," Kadidal said. "It's one thing to tell a few anecdotes based on a few items being leaked, but to be able to say across the board that most of the men who are there shouldn't be there, were people that could be safely released … that is pretty staggering."

6. U.S. complicity with repressive Arab regimes
It was no surprise to many living in the Arab world that the United States routinely collaborated with Arab dictators behind closed doors while proclaiming its commitment to democracy in public. Manning's leaks of sensitive State Department cables, however, laid bare the American hypocrisy in the Middle East. By some accounts, they served as a catalyst for the regime changes around the region that would come to be known as the Arab Spring.

In particular, the cables highlighted corruption within the regime of former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The first batch of cables about Tunisia was released in November 2010, two months before Ben Ali fled the country.

"Whether it's cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali's family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants," the U.S. embassy reported in a June 2008 cable classified secret. "With Tunisians facing rising inflation and high unemployment, the conspicuous displays of wealth and persistent rumors of corruption have added fuel to the fire."

Poor kid. Tank fodder but he did violate his oath...

Well said, Hedge. The government doesn't care if you're cheating on yer girlfriend, really.

Manning released this graphic video of a U.S. Apache helicopter attack on a group of people gathered in Baghdad. Two were employees of the Reuters news agency.

I guess you never watched the whole unedited video.

A group of jihadis was actively engaging a dismounted Army platoon with RPGs and heavy machine guns. The reporters were taking photos almost over their shoulders.

The video was heavily edited for propaganda purposes and that's all most people have seen.

WTF, man? Name calling? Really? That's as far as you can carry your argument?