Did Greenwald really vow vengeance? [View all]

[cthulu2016]

Last edited Mon Aug 19, 2013, 06:14 PM - Edit history (1)

It is an interesting nuance. The Huffington Post decided to go full tabloid in claiming that Greenwald vowed vengeance.

Khaaaannnnnn!!!

But the Reuters article all the English language reporting is based on offers a truly meaningless headline: "Snowden journalist to publish UK secrets after Britain detains partner"

This structure implies a connection bur really says nothing at all. "Joe Smith to leave America after Patriots lose Superbowl" implies a fit of pique, but if Smith was planning to travel abroad in February anyway and didn't even follow football then the statement would still be true, though the Superbowl outcome would not be a factor.

The Reuters lede paragraph is more of the same:

(Reuters) - The journalist who first published secrets leaked by fugitive former U.S. intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden vowed on Monday to publish more documents and said Britain will "regret" detaining his partner for nine hours.

We have the melodramatic word "vowed" and the implicatory "regret" but no actual information. I think we already knew that Greenwald was planning to publish more stuff at some point.

...Asked by a reporter if the detention of his partner would deter him from future reporting, Greenwald said the opposite would happen.

"I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England, too. I have many documents on England's spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did," Greenwald, speaking in Portuguese, told reporters at Rio de Janeiro's airport where he met Miranda upon his return to Brazil.

Greenwald said in a subsequent email to Reuters that the Portuguese word "arrepender" should have been translated as "come to regret" not "be sorry for."

"I was asked what the outcome would be for the UK, and I said they'd come to regret this because of the world reaction, how it made them look, and how it will embolden me - not that I would start publishing documents as punishment or revenge that I wouldn't otherwise have published," he said in the email...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/19/us-usa-security-snowden-brazil-idUSBRE97I0LZ20130819

Oh... so Greenwald says the Reuters article is not representative of his meaning, and there is no real explicit threat on what Greenwald actually said, so the whole Reuters piece is kind of "meh."

That said, Greenwald's clean-up feels somewhat disingenuous to me. "I have many documents on England's spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did" does have an implicit threatening tone in the sequence of sentences, and a listener would not be unusual in hearing an implicit threat despite there being no literal threat specified. Assuming the Reuters transcript is accurate insofar as the order of the sentences (leaving aside the translation question) then there is an, "I know where you live" sort of implication, and it strains credulity that no hint of such was intended.

But the only "vow" one can read in what Greenwald said is not revenge, but to not be intimidated, which is, for a journalist, about as newsworthy as an athlete "vowing" "to give 110%" in an upcoming game. So the Huffington Post headline seems a rather willful distortion... much like what we expect from pot-stirring tabloid Sports pages.


So the rhubarb here is about Reuters bootstrapping an implicit tone into an implicit specific threat, and then the Huffington Post boot-strapping Reuters into some professional wrestling taunt. (Despite Greenwald's challenge of the Reuters interpretation, which renders the HuffPost headline Drudge-level stuff.)

And so on.