Greenwald:Newly Obtained Emails Contradict Administration Claims on Guardian Laptop Destruction
By Glenn Greenwald
11 Jul 2014, 11:46 AM EDT
On July 20, 2013, agents of the U.K. government entered The Guardian newsroom in London and compelled them to physically destroy the computers they were using to report on the Edward Snowden archive. The Guardian reported this a month later after my partner, David Miranda, was detained at Heathrow Airport for 11 hours under a British terrorism law and had all of his electronic equipment seized. At the time, the Obama administration—while admitting that it was told in advance of the Heathrow detention—pretended that it knew nothing about the forced laptop destruction and would never approve of such attacks on press freedom. From the August 20, 2013, press briefing by then-deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest:
MR. EARNEST: I’ve seen the published reports of those accusations, but I don’t have any information for you on that.
Q: And does the U.S. government think it’s appropriate for a government, especially one of our allies, to go in and destroy hard drives? Is that something this administration would do?
MR. EARNEST: The only thing I know about this are the public reports about this, so it’s hard for me to evaluate the propriety of what they did based on incomplete knowledge of what happened.
Q: But this administration would not do that, would not go into an American media company and destroy hard drives, even if it meant trying to protect national security, you don’t think?
MR. EARNEST: It’s very difficult to imagine a scenario in which that would be appropriate.
But emails just obtained by Associated Press pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) prove that senior Obama national security officials— including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-NSA chief Keith Alexander—not only knew in advance that U.K. officials intended to force The Guardian to destroy their computers, but overtly celebrated it.
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https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/11/newly-obtained-emails-contradict-administration-claims-guardian-laptop-destruction/
= new reply since forum marked as read
LIARS !!!
of course. ... story is too long for me to get through tonight... Will come back to tomorrow.
written by someone who I'd call, simply on the basis of that story, a timeless philosopher.
Whether it has immediate relevance???? I doubt it.
