Brave New World
by digby
And I do mean brave:
The journalists had been threatened, cajoled and condemned by the British and American governments. Their work together had set off a hunt for their source and a debate on both sides of the Atlantic about government surveillance.
But they had never met — until Friday.
That was when Glenn Greenwald, the journalist, lawyer and civil liberties crusader, and Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian newspaper, finally shook hands after months of working remotely on articles based on material from the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. The two were in New York for the prestigious Polk Award presented to Mr. Greenwald and his colleagues, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, and the Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, for national security reporting.
[...]
The crowd of journalists at the Polk ceremony at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan cheered and applauded when it was announced that Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras had cleared customs and were en route. They arrived just after 1 p.m., trailed by flashing cameras. With the ceremony already underway, Guardian editors, including Mr. Rusbridger, welcomed the two.
Oh my goodness. Cheering? How unpatriotic of them.
I probably wouldn't have come back. Not just because I was afraid of what the government might do --- arresting journalists as they are accepting a prestigious award for exposing government wrongdoing would be beyond foolish --- but because this country is full of loons who are armed to the teeth who might think it was a patriotic act to take down a high profile "traitor," a claim which, after all, is something that quite a few high government officials (and even people who erroneously think of themselves as journalists) have validated all over the TV. You just don't know these days.
Read the whole NY Times piece which talks about the difficulty of doing such a complicated story remotely from various places all over the world and not being able to trust that your communications are secure. I can only imagine the hoops they went through. But it was important and somebody had to do it.
My warmest congratulations to Glenn, Laura, Barton and the others for being acknowledged for their journalistic achievement. It is well deserved. This is the story of a lifetime, for sure, but it took real guts to do it anyway. I hope they win the Pulitzer as well.
Oh, and about that once in a lifetime thing. I'm sure people said that about Seymour Hersh's expose of My Lai. But lookee here: he's got a new story out about Syria.
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