This Sunday Times article claims “RUSSIA and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services.”
It seems it is the classic psyop journalism we expect from the Murdoch press.
Firstly, here is the response from Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who broke the Snowden story:
Aside from the serious retraction-worthy fabrications on which this article depends – more on those in a minute – the entire report is a self-negating joke. It reads like a parody I might quickly whip up in order to illustrate the core sickness of western journalism.
Unless he cooked an extra-juicy steak, how does Snowden “have blood on his hands” if there is “no evidence of anyone being harmed?” As one observer put it last night in describing the government instructions these Sunday Times journalists appear to have obeyed: “There’s no evidence anyone’s been harmed but we’d like the phrase ‘blood on his hands’ somewhere in the piece.”
The whole article does literally nothing other than quote anonymous British officials. It gives voice to banal but inflammatory accusations that are made about every whistleblower from Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning. It offers zero evidence or confirmation for any of its claims. The “journalists” who wrote it neither questioned any of the official assertions nor even quoted anyone who denies them. It’s pure stenography of the worst kind: some government officials whispered these inflammatory claims in our ears and told us to print them, but not reveal who they are, and we’re obeying. Breaking!
End of quote.
And here is a response from Ryan Gallagher, another journalist who has spent extensive time with the Snowden material:
All in all, for me the Sunday Times story raises more questions than it answers, and more importantly it contains some pretty dubious claims, contradictions, and inaccuracies. The most astonishing thing about it is the total lack of scepticism it shows for these grand government assertions, made behind a veil of anonymity. This sort of credulous regurgitation of government statements is antithetical to good journalism.
The government has an obvious vested interest in portraying Snowden as a terrible person who’s helped “the enemy” — it has been badly stung by his surveillance revelations and the political fallout that has ensued as a result of them. For that reason alone its claims should be treated with caution and not repeated unchallenged. Evidence should be necessary for allegations of this magnitude, which have such big ramifications. The Sunday Times has a long and commendable history of holding the government to account with great investigative journalism. But in this case, sadly, it has allowed itself to be used by faceless officials as a mouthpiece.
End of quote.
Both articles go into much more detail than my quotes indicate, but the conclusions are clear.
There have been many suggestions for the motive behind this article. One thing is clear, and that is, it is being used as fuel for the fire of anti-Russian and anti-Chinese sentiment being stirred up, currently. There is certainly plenty of wargames being played by NATO and the United States in Russia’s backyard. Time will tell where this is leading. And as we know, all wars are bankers’ wars, so it behoves us to keep an eye on the bigger picture, including the fact that even the journalists quoted above continue to be clueless about the game behind the game. So few people seem to be aware of how our world actually works.
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