Glenn Greenwald has a blistering evisceration of the recent (UK) Sunday Times front page article claiming that the Russians and Chinese have cracked the Top Secret cache of Snowden documents and that MI6 is pulling out their officers to prevent them from being killed. One Home Official official even claimed that Snowden had blood on his hands although the government admits that there is no evidence of anyone being harmed.
I.F. Stone famously said, “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” This appears to be a case in point. The article depends entirely on anonymous British officials without a shred of evidence for their lurid claims.
Although Greenwald’s diatribe is mainly aimed at what he considers journalistic malfeasance, he does describe many of the factual problems with the article. First, Snowden has always insisted that when he left Hong Kong he took no documents with him specifically so that the couldn’t be forced to turn them over to hostile governments. He gave the documents to Greenwald and Laura Poitras but kept no copies for himself.
Then they claim that David Miranda, Greenwald’s spouse, was seized at Heathrow Airport with 58,000 stolen documents after he visited Snowden in Moscow in 2013. The problem is that Miranda hadn’t been in Moscow in 2013 and, in fact, had been stopped at Heathrow after he visited Poitras in Germany.
They also report that Snowden stole 1.7 million documents but even the NSA says that they don’t know how many he took. The 1.7 million figure is an estimate of what he had access to, not what he took.
Greenwald’s article is a fascinating read and well worth your time, especially if you need your eyes opened as to the veracity of what passes for reporting on the Snowden matter.
As they say on those television offers, “But wait; there’s more!” Craig Murray, who has extensive experience in these matters, has an outstanding post on Five Reasons the MI6 Story is a Lie. The most important of these are that the quotes from “knowledgeable sources” use incorrect terminology that a real intelligence officer simply wouldn’t use and that the whole premise of MI6 officers being in danger is simply nonsense. That’s because 99% of such officers operate under diplomatic cover and are well known to the the Russians and Chinese. Furthermore, no officer has been killed by the Russians or Chinese in 50 years.
If you want to read a devastating takedown of the Sunday Times’ article, be sure to read Murray’s piece. It’s terrific.
UPDATE: MI-5 → MI6