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    Jeremy Scahill on Assange’s arrest Archived Message

    Posted by brooks on May 27, 2019, 8:26 pm

    He was on Democracy Now the other day, excoriating the attack on a free press and whistleblowers by the Trump and Obama admins in the context of the US charges against Assange and listed some of the whistleblowers Obama targeted:

    Scahill: Obama’s Justice Department indicted eight journalistic sources under the Espionage Act—more than all U.S. presidents before him combined. Among these cases was U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In some of these cases, people were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. In others, the government ruined the lives of the targets.
    https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/24/jeremy_scahill_new_indictment_of_assange

    One of the more prominent and outspoken of those eight who is notably absent from Scahill’s list is John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program and went to prison for two and a half years. Coincidentally. Kiriakou has also been very outspoken against the Intercept:

    Kiriakou: I've come to truly hate The Intercept and everybody associated with it. It is because of the bumbling incompetence of "national security journalists" Matthew Cole and Rich Esposito that Reality Winner is in prison. Matthew Cole was personally responsible for sending me to prison as well. The Intercept does not have the balls to admit its mistakes. The first thing they should have done was to fire Cole and Esposito.
    https://www.facebook.com/johnckiriakou/posts/1925000884426131

    Serious question for The Intercept: Do you secretly work for the FBI? David (sic) Hale, Reality Winner and Terry Albury are all in prison because of you. Is it incompetence or are you compromised? You owe a lot of people an explanation. And an apology.
    https://twitter.com/JohnKiriakou/status/1126832188257972224

    When Aaron Mate asked Intercept journo James Risen in an interview about the Intercept’s role in putting their source Reality Winner in prison, he hung up on him. Scahill too whose (apparently) careless communications with Intercept source Daniel Everett Hale may have led to his arrest seems eager to deflect attention from his publication's dismal record of burning sources, probably the reason he omitted mention of Kiriakou when discussing the war on whistleblowers. I suppose it's not surprising since he works for - and is probably very well remunerated by, if Greenwald's salary is any indication - someone who famously tweeted in 2009:

    Anyone who publishes stolen information should help catch the thief. Shouldn’t publish in the first place.
    -Pierre Omidyar

    What really bugged me about Scahill's comments on DN is the hypocrisy when he says:

    This is a precedent-setting moment, not just legally, but morally, because this is not the end. This is the beginning. And they will eventually come for other news organizations, or they will scare media outlets from doing high-stakes national security reporting. It doesn’t matter what you think of any of these individual whistleblowers. It doesn’t matter what you think of The Intercept. But it does matter that we all recognize that this is an attack on our basic rights to information about what the U.S. government does in our names and with our tax dollars. It matters that people who blow the whistle on crimes and war crimes be defended and not abandoned or portrayed as violent criminals or traitors

    But it does matter Jeremy. Reality Winner apparently thought the Intercept was a credible journalistic outfit and that its national security reporters were safe repositories of leaked information and look where she is. Others who apparently thought similarly were also betrayed. So when even dissidents with an admirable record of foreign policy and national security reporting work for and promote such publications they become - unwittingly or otherwise - agents of such betrayal and contribute to the attack on "our basic rights to information about what the U.S. government does in our names" and to the very chilling climate of fear, secrecy and silence they claim to deplore.

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