[Infowarrior] - Greenwald: On NSA claims about misreporting of two slides

[Richard Forno]

On NSA claims about misreporting of two slides

http://ggsidedocs.blogspot.com/2013/10/on-nsa-claims-about-misreporting-of-two.html

NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander asserted yesterday that two "Boundless Informant" slides we published - one in Le Monde and the other in El Mundo - were misunderstood and misinterpreted. The NSA then dispatched various officials to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post to make the same claim, and were (needless to say) given anonymity by those papers to spout off without accountability. Several US journalists (also needless to say) instantly treated the NSA's claims as gospel even though they (a) are accompanied by no evidence, (b) come in the middle of a major scandal for the agency at home and abroad and (c) are from officials with a history of lying to Congress and the media.

That is the deeply authoritarian and government-subservient strain of American political and media culture personified: if a US national security official says something, then it shall mindlessly be deemed tantamount to truth, with no evidence required and without regard to how much those officials have misled in the past. EFF's Trevor Timm last night summarized this bizarre mentality as follows: "Oh, NSA says a story about them is wrong? Well, that settles that! Thankfully, they never lie, obfuscate, mislead, misdirect, or misinform!"

Over the last five months, Laura Poitras and I have published dozens and dozens of articles reporting on NSA documents around the world: with newspapers and a team of editors and other reporters in the US, UK, Germany, Brazil, India, France and Spain. Not a single one of those articles bears even a trivial correction, let alone a substantive one, because we have been meticulous in the reporting, worked on every article with teams of highly experienced editors and reporters, and, most importantly, have published the evidence in the form of NSA documents that prove the reporting true.

It's certainly possible that, like all journalists, we'll make a mistake at some point. And if and when that does happen, we'll do what good journalists do: do further reporting and, if necessary, correct any inaccuracy. But no evidence of any kind (as opposed to unverified NSA accusations) has been presented that this was the case here, and ample evidence strongly suggests it was not:

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Again, it's certainly possible, given the number of reports and the complexity of these matters, that reporters working on these stories will at some point make a mistake. All reporters do. But this thing  called "evidence" should be required before blindly believing the claims and accusations of NSA officials. If that lesson hasn't been learned yet, when will it be?

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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.