By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, August 18 -- The UK detailed journalist Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda for nine hours in Heathrow Airport, citing schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
At the UN, we noted that when on August 6 numerous countries criticized the global espionage that whistleblower Edward Snowden has exposed through Greenwald, Laura Poitras and others, UK Permanent Representative Mark Lyall Grant in his statements did not even mention espionage, focusing on the Falklands or Malvinas Islands: here, here and here.
The Guardian's piece today says Miranda was returning from Berlin. This Sunday's New York Times Magazine in a lengthy piece on the exposure of the spying places Poitras in Berlin editing her documentary. Is this the chilling premise the UK was operating on? So far they haven't said.
The NYT Magazine piece, strangely, does not mention Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, who has written that he was contacted first by Snowden but declined to commit to publishing all of the slides. Is that true? Why did the NYT piece's author Peter Maass not address it?
Greenwald on August 17 highlighted a tweet by TIME's Mike Grunwald that "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange." Grunwald later deleted the tweet, and has gone silent on Sunday. (TIME has said the tweet does not represent its views).
So what is the relation between media mega-corporations'correspondents' on record and anonymous trolling tweets and the corporations?
Finally for now on the UN: could one expect the UN of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to speak against this intimidation of a journalists, through the detention of his significant other?
Hardly - not only does Ban Ki-moon not criticize Permanent Five members of the Security Council (unlike his predecessor), Ban has also said, as quoted by Icelandic parliamentary from a meeting Ban calls "private," that Snowden "misused" information and his position. What a position. Watch this site.
