On the night of Sunday August 18, officers of the London
Metropolitan Police pulled David Miranda, a Brazilian citizen who happens to be
the partner of Guardian journalist Glen Greenwald, out of a transit area of
Heathrow International Airport, held him incommunicado for 9 hours, showering
him with tough questions and barely veiled threats, and denying him access to a
lawyer, or Brazilian diplomats, before seizing his computer, his cellphone and
digital files containing copies of many of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s
stolen documents.
Miranda was held under a British anti-terrorism law, not
because he was a suspected terrorist, or had ever committed any terroristic
crimes, but because the cops suspected, correctly, he might be transporting
files pertaining to official American (and British) security secrets.
That they had struck paydirt, was obvious within the minutes
it took for Miranda to surrender everything in his possession. The extra 8-plus hours of detention was about
payback, again, not so much against the unfortunate file-mule Miranda, but
against Greenwald, his investigative partner Laura Poitras (who had given the
data to Miranda) and The Guardian, the British newspaper which has, with the
Washington Post, been publishing a careful selection of Snowden’s damaging,
revelatory documents.
Implicit in the extraordinary detention was also a clear
message of intimidation aimed at all journalists: “Learn and report information
we want hidden from citizens of the UK, the US and the world, and see what
happens.”
The message was reinforced when British security agents
visited The Guardian, and in a little bit of theater that was simultaneously
tragic, farcical and futile, forced Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to witness
the destruction of computers and accessories which also contained copies of
Bowden-collected documents. Other copies, Rusbridger has said, remain in
journalistic hands in the US, Germany and Brazil, if not other locations.
For a day or 3, this (and the White House’s role of
passively greenlighting the detention before the Bobbies moved in on Miranda)
was big news.
And then, quickly and quietly, the story died, except for
continuing coverage by (unsurprisingly) The Guardian and, to a considerably
lesser degree, the BBC.
The Miranda detention, which, in those heady first few
days, several British experts on the Terrorism Act, the security issues at
stake, human rights, press freedoms and journalism denounced as a gross
overreach and dangerous abuse, all but disappeared from the US and UK media.
The story’s lack of what we newspeople call “legs” is
easily documented.
Since their reporter’s partner’s detention, The Guardian,
which, by the way, had paid for Miranda’s air tickets, has run 85 stories
related to the security shakedown, more than twice as many as the BBC, and
exactly 5 times as many as any other British news organization. But even their vigorous coverage has run out
of gas. Of the 85 stories in The
Guardian since August 19, 74 appeared that month, missing only 2 of 13 remaining
days, and averaging 6 ½ stories a day for August. Since September 1, The Guardian has, by its
own count, published 11 stories in 50 days.
Worse news is that almost half of those stories appeared on
one day, September 18, and 5 of those 11 stories were devoted essentially to
one issue: the angry debate at the annual Directors’ conference of the
Liberal-Democratic Party, in which all the Lib-Dem Directors but one voted for
a resolution demanding changes in the letter and the application of the 13 year
old Terrorism Act.
Coverage of
the conference
included some high Party officials making some pertinent observations: “Home Office minister Jeremy Browne (remember the Lib-Dems are part of the Conservative-led ruling government coalition) condemned schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000 as "too broad and overbearing," [while] Sarah Ludford, the Lib Dem MEP who secured the debate, said she suspected the use of schedule 7 to detain Miranda "was no less than an attempt to intimidate and shut up the Guardian."
And so on, yada, yada, yada.
More recently, The Guardian worked the Miranda story back into the paper through a lengthy analysis of the material relating the British version of the NSA, GCHQ, and by covering an instance of “Miranda-lite” treatment accorded a well-respected Yemeni human rights professional.
“Baraa Shiban, the project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve, was held for an hour and a half and repeatedly questioned about his anti-drone work and political views regarding human rights abuses in Yemen.” He says he was specifically threatened with “the full Miranda,” 9 hours in detention.
Note that Shiban was neither suspected nor accused of terrorism. He got the “locked room, hard questions” treatment because he has annoyed US and UK security bureaucrats by publishing reports documenting the so-called collateral civilian deaths caused by, and angry civilian response to, US-directed drone-borne missile attacks on suspected operatives of Yemen’s Al Qaeda subsidiary.
Aside from this story, and an accompanying comment on it from Guardian reporter Greenwald, the most enterprise The Guardian has shown, in terms of keeping the Miranda Case alive was a recent article by the paper’s ombudsman, Readers Editor Chris Elliot.
Elliot seemed surprised at how little reader response he’d seen to The Guardian’s coverage, not just of Miranda, but the whole Snowden NSA revelations story.
“More than 300 articles have been published since the
first, on 6 June 2013, which revealed that a top-secret court had ordered a US
telephone company, Verizon, to hand over data on millions of calls. However,
since then, the readers' editor's office has received only 108 emails in
relation to the series, of which just 13 were critical. Of the 13, only two
specifically criticised the Guardian for publishing the disclosures, which is
unusual for such a high-profile story.
“Of the rest, 48 were supportive of the Guardian's
reporting, 27 offered further information or further case studies, and seven
wanted to know how they could help Snowden, with some of them offering money,
advice on visas, or even places to stay. A further 13 wanted to know more about
what this kind of surveillance means for them personally.”
So, what about the rest of the UK media coverage?
The BBC, with 37 stories since August 19th, has been by far the most active. But even the Beeb has published only 4 stories since the end of August; and the rest of the Fleet Street and TV mob have been even more AWOL on the Miranda story.
UK Channel 4, probably the best television source for daily news coverage in English has done only 9 stories overall, one since the end of August.
SkyNews, Rupert Murdoch’s all-things-English satellite news channel has offered its viewers a total of 6 stories, none since August.
On the print side, Murdoch’s Times of London (once upon a time a “paper or record,”) has also totaled 6 Miranda-related stories, 2 this month (both on the arrest of the Yemeni drone-tracker).
The Daily Mail and The Telegraph have had 17 Miranda-related stories each, but only a single story (Yemeni arrested) in the Mail, this month, while The Independent has had 13 Miranda stories since August 19, none after August 30.
There is, of course, an American angle to this story. The detention was done largely in America’s interest, and, as we noted above, with passive approval from President Obama’s White House. But this has been of scant interest to American news outlets.
A search of the NY Times database shows 11 Miranda Case-related stories in all, none since August; while the Washington Post archive coughs up just 6 references. Again, no mention of the the case since the end of August. As for America’s so-called “news channels,” CNN has had 15 stories, MSNBC 5 and Fox News 3, but with the exception of one Fox story, none has said a thing since August 22, and only 1 story on CNN even mentioned the US’ enabling role.
As for that one September Fox story, it was merely a pass-along of an AFP report on the European Commission’s unease at the treatment British authorities had given Miranda. There has been no American newschannel coverage of the White House green light.
It’s not like the Miranda matter has gone completely unnoticed. In addition to the European Commission, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, and Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, have written to David Cameron's government requesting further information on the legality of Miranda's detention, and The Guardian reported,
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/sep/04/un-press-intimidation-state-secrets
they have warned the British government that the protection of state secrets must not be used as an excuse to "intimidate the press into silence."
These comments got zero coverage from the US news media, print or TV.
And there is this comment made to BBC’s radio 4 soon
after Miranda’s Heathrow detention, by David
Anderson QC, the British government’s independent reviewer of terrorist
legislation: “The police, I'm sure, do their best,” he
said, “But at the end of the day, there is the Independent Police Complaints
Commission, which can look into the exercise of this power, there is the courts,
and there is my function.”
If anyone in the British news media is
curious about what the terrorism law reviewer or the Police Complaints
Commission, the courts or Parliament is thinking about the Miranda case or the
Terrorism Act, they’re keeping it to themselves. Not a word has been published, not a question
has been asked in print, or on radio or TV. 7 weeks now, and no sign anyone in
the British media is waiting for results.
Until darkness fell, most of the coverage of the Miranda detention in the British print press (except in The Guardian) was harshly unsympathetic. Typical was this from The Telegraph’s Dan Hodges:
“Should
being a relative of Glenn Greenwald place you above the law? I ask the question
because this morning many people are arguing Greenwald’s partner David Miranda
should, in effect, enjoy immunity from investigation solely because his spouse
writes very lengthy articles for The Guardian.”
And,
on August 30th, when Oliver Robbins, deputy national security adviser at the
Cabinet Office, went on the record to warn that ‘lives’ had been ‘put at risk’
by Miranda, ‘if the documents’ he was carrying had fallen ‘into the wrong
hands,’ The Times, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail all rushed into stenography
mode with uncritical repetitions of the charge, often adding Robbins’ comment
that Miranda had ‘showed very bad judgment’ by, as David Barrett
wrote in the Telegraph: ‘http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10276460/David-Miranda-was-carrying-password-for-secret-files-on-piece-of-paper.html
“carrying
thousands of British intelligence documents through Heathrow airport
[while] also holding the password to an
encrypted file written on a piece of paper.”
If Barrett or any
of the other British journalists who wrote about Robbins’ charges had bothered
to check with Greenwald, or any expert on digital security, they would have
learned that for encrypted files like those Miranda was ferrying, one code word
is not enough. Usually 2 or more keys
are required to open the secured materials.
Suffice it to say, that weeks after seizing Miranda’s copies, the UK
security services had managed to read, according to the notes taken by The
Telegraph’s Tim Stanley:
“just a small portion of an astonishing 58,000 pages of
intelligence documents.”
In all of American journalism, the only substantive look at
the Miranda case this month came from CJR.org’s Ryan Chittum:
Chittum
seemed spurred by, and led with, the fact that the British Spook-in-Chief
Robbins had misquoted him (admittedly with egregious carelessness or
dishonesty). But, Chittum did take the
opportunity to add that “only a dozen” or so of the encrypted documents had by
then been accessed by UK Security because Miranda’s “bad judgment” had been
trumped by Poitras’ encryption tradecraft, and to note the fundamental
stupidity of Oliver Robbins’ on-the-record rant:
“’Indeed it is
impossible for a journalist alone to form a proper judgment about what
disclosure of protectively marked intelligence does or does not damage national
security,’ [Robbins said.]
“This is misleading, [says Chittum]. It’s not as if Greenwald is
doing a Wikileaks-style document dump and crowd-sourcing the reporting (that’s
one major difference between Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, by the way). The
Guardian is vetting the information, and you can be sure the paper is going
back and forth with the government, perhaps even with Robbins himself, before
it reports anything.”
So, as CJR has always put it, “laurels” to Chittum (with an
ink-stained cluster for pointing out why Manning was a “leaker,” and Bowden a
“whistleblower,”) and “dart” after dart after dart to just about everyone else
in journalism for cutting the “legs” out from under one of the year’s most
important stories.
Silence means consent.
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