At Crikey, we’ve built a career holding the powerful to account by publishing inconvenient and controversial truths (even when they’re about us) and exposing the facts other media companies won’t.
In this new occasional segment, we’ll run letters to the editor that were knocked back by other publications. Had your views rejected by the Oz, the tabloids or the Fairfax papers? Send them our way.
First up, this letter binned by The Australian:
Your editorial (“Edward Snowden is no hero“, 16/6) illustrates a crucial difference between journalism and the historical record.
In support of your argument that the whistleblower’s release of US National Security Agency files two years ago was an act of treachery and cowardice, you cite a recent front-page report in the Sunday Times. That story claimed the Snowden material had forced Western intelligence agencies to shut down vital operations, withdraw agents whose lives were now at risk, and had compromised their information-gathering techniques.
But there is not a single confirmed new fact in the whole Sunday Times “expose”. It relies entirely on unsourced quotes from “senior officials”, “senior government sources” and “one senior Home Office official”. In other words, the whole report is based on unverified anonymous leaks. Yet mainstream media outlets around the world — including The Australian — immediately accepted and re-published those assertions as fact.
By contrast, the material obtained by Snowden is direct documentary source material — the stuff of history — released in the belief that the public have the right to make their own unfiltered judgments as to its veracity and significance.
David Salter, Hunter’s Hill, NSW
David Salter’s letter is another instance of the use of the intelligence community’s reluctance to talk on the record to attack western governments.
If a western intelligence operation is required to shut down a vital operation or withdraw agents whose lives are now at risk because of Snowden’s theft of secret documents, they’re not going to put out a press release about it with names and addresses are they.
The fact that sources are not identified does not make them anonymous, nor does it make the information untrue. It is up to the reader to decide if such reports have credibility or not.
This hero worship of Snowden reduces such letters as this to be mere anti western activism and I’m not surprised the Australian decided it wasn’t worth publishing.
The following is taken from Craig Murray’s excellent blogspot http://www.craigmurray.org. He makes the very valid point that this article has been read literally millions of times since he first published it. The same is true of Glenn Greenwald’s article in The Intercept demolishing the wholly spurious article in the New York Times making a whole series of outrageous claims about Edward Snowden.
In both cases our supine media publish to original stories uncritically, but utterly fail to acknowledge detailed criticisms that reveal them for the corporate hatchet jobs that they are.
Five Reasons the MI6 Story is a Lie
The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie.
1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by officers. Their informants are agents. In real life, James Bond would not be a secret agent. He would be an MI6 officer. Those whose knowledge comes from fiction frequently confuse the two. Nobody really working with the intelligence services would do so, as the Sunday Times source does. The story is a lie.
2) The argument that MI6 officers are at danger of being killed by the Russians or Chinese is a nonsense. No MI6 officer has been killed by the Russians or Chinese for 50 years. The worst that could happen is they would be sent home. Agents’ – generally local people, as opposed to MI6 officers – identities would not be revealed in the Snowden documents. Rule No.1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that agents’ identities are never, ever written down, neither their names nor a description that would allow them to be identified. I once got very, very severely carpeted for adding an agents’ name to my copy of an intelligence report in handwriting, suggesting he was a useless gossip and MI6 should not be wasting their money on bribing him. And that was in post communist Poland, not a high risk situation.
3) MI6 officers work under diplomatic cover 99% of the time. Their alias is as members of the British Embassy, or other diplomatic status mission. A portion are declared to the host country. The truth is that Embassies of different powers very quickly identify who are the spies in other missions. MI6 have huge dossiers on the members of the Russian security services – I have seen and handled them. The Russians have the same. In past mass expulsions, the British government has expelled 20 or 30 spies from the Russian Embassy in London. The Russians retaliated by expelling the same number of British diplomats from Moscow, all of whom were not spies! As a third of our “diplomats” in Russia are spies, this was not coincidence. This was deliberate to send the message that they knew precisely who the spies were, and they did not fear them.
4) This anti Snowden non-story – even the Sunday Times admits there is no evidence anybody has been harmed – is timed precisely to coincide with the government’s new Snooper’s Charter act, enabling the security services to access all our internet activity. Remember that GCHQ already has an archive of 800,000 perfectly innocent British people engaged in sex chats online.
5) The paper publishing the story is owned by Rupert Murdoch. It is sourced to the people who brought you the dossier on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, every single “fact” in which proved to be a fabrication. Why would you believe the liars now?
There you have five reasons the story is a lie.
In OneHand World – the absence of proof is proof of absence. Must be sooo warm & comfy, magic ponies & unicorns.
The Australian have backed a deadbeat government for their own selfish ends using such appalling bias and LNP spin journalism. It will be hard for them to recover when Abbott takes down the LNP with him when he goes.
I have to agree with Mr Hand here – unidentified sources not make the information untrue, more likely fabricated in it’s entirety.