The job of the newspaper (in re: Greenwald and Snowden and the sanctity of secrets)

[WilliamPitt]

"The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

- Finley Peter Dunne

[KG]

1. those agreeing with kinsleys assertions are knaves.

[billhicks76]

5. Even MSNBC

...have become stenographers and not journalists at this point when it comes to national security issues.

[Maedhros]

6. "Mewling authoritarian toadies" has a nicer ring to it. [n/t]

[WillyT]

2. Oh Will... Now Ya Gone And Done It...

Inherit The Wind - Spencer Tracy Speech

Inherit the wind: what is holy?

& REC !!!

[Luminous Animal]

3. Bart Gellman talks about it, brilliantly, here...

Publishing Secrets

There is nothing anomalous here. I’m a projects reporter, and now my project is the weapons hunt. Nearly everything I want to know, and much of what I write, is classified. One day my adopted survey team seized a suspicious document, handwritten in Arabic and illustrated with sketches of laboratory glass. The document turned out to be a high school science exercise. The survey team’s report was classified. The school-book exercise was appended to that report—which means that some Iraqi teenager’s description of Boyle’s Law is a classified U.S. government secret. A qualified authority made a binding judgment that disclosure of this text would do “serious damage to national security.” So don’t ask me about the relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas held at constant temperature. I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you.

The same survey team found a distillery where a biological warfare factory was supposed to be—that’s classified—and a swimming pool U.S. intelligence called a chemical bunker. Classified. Looting, as you’ve read, has been an enormous problem for the weapons hunters. When I was there, Central Command had forces available to guard 153 of the 372 buildings it considered important. That’s classified, too.

All these are secrets, and I put them in The Washington Post. What are we to make of that? What the Defense Department made of it was clear enough. Today the weapons hunting team, the Iraq Survey Group, receives no visitors. It will not disclose the number of its personnel, the military and intelligence units involved, or any of the evidence it is collecting. My question: Was the Pentagon right? Was I wrong to publish things the government tried to withhold? You’re waiting for me to cite the First Amendment. You can stop waiting. Today, at least, I will look elsewhere. …

I do not need you to believe that governments measure wrongly the risks of disclosure, or that publication of secrets does no harm, or that any particular story is essential to public debate. What I want to consider is how to navigate disputes over national security secrecy and who gets to hold the rudder. And my answer, or part of it, is that government is incompetent to do so on its own. By incompetent, I do not mean unskilled. I mean that government has no legitimate claim to sole control of secrecy decisions, even on matters of common defense. The lawful application of a classified stamp is the beginning, not the end, of my inquiry.

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100824

[m-lekktor]

4. Michael Kinsley begs to differ.

[Whisp]

7. I didn't feel comforted when Karl Rove wasn't indicted afterall.

Pain was inflicted on the believers.

[KoKo]

8. Recommend!

[rhett o rick]

9. When those that own Washington the DC also own the media, you're going to get

propaganda. And the loyalists among us wallow in the media lies because the lies dont disturb their denial bubble. Journalists that dare to confront our exalted authoritarian leaders like Greenwald are demonized.

Say it with me, "Long live the NSA/CIA/FBI cabal"

[Spitfire of ATJ]

10. Every time I hear the media claim "access" is what matters I think "cooperate".

[WilliamPitt]

11. .