By Craig Murray
April 19, 2023:
Information Clearing House
-- Ten years ago Edward
Snowden was helped to escape by Wikileaks and to
publish his revelations by The Intercept,
Guardian, New York Times and others.
In 2023 Jack Texeira is
tracked down by UK secret service front
Bellingcat in conjunction with the New York
Times and in parallel with the Washington Post,
not to help him escape or help him publish or
tell people his motives, but to help the state
arrest him.
Those outlets have accessed a cache of at
least 300 additional secret documents in doing
so – and have kept them secret, with the
exception of a couple of snippets that forward
the official state narrative.
That contrast with ten years ago tells a very
real and glaring truth. The idea that the legacy
media in any way serves the truth or the public
interest is now completely buried. The legacy
media serves the state, and the state serves the
billionaires.
Wikileaks is now so hamstrung by attacks on
its finances, personnel and logistics as to be
almost inoperable. Propaganda outfit Bellingcat
was conceived as a way to counter it, by
producing material with the frisson of secret
access but actually as an outlet for the
security services. An astonishing amount of
“liberal opinion” falls for it.
Similarly the Intercept, like the Guardian,
was subject to an internal takeover that
delivered it entirely into the hands of the
neo-conservatives.
Neither the alleged journalists of New York
Times, Washington Post, nor Bellingcat did the
most basic things a real journalist would do.
They did not contact Texeira, speak to him,
ask him to explain his motivation, and look
through the other secret material to which he
had access, to get Texeira’s view on its meaning
and implications, and to publish what in it was
in the public interest.
Instead they simply shopped him to the FBI
and closed down the remaining documents.
I am not at all surprised by Bellingcat,
which is plainly a spook organisation. I hope
this enables more people to see through them.
But the behaviour of the New York Times and
Washington Post is truly shocking. They now see
their mission as to serve the security state,
not public knowledge.
In the ten years between Snowden and Texeira,
the world has changed hugely for the worse. Not
only has a huge amount of freedom disappeared,
freedom’s former Guardians have been subverted.
It has been ten years of disaster.
A cache of twitter images of some of the
leaked documents
is here. I am not aware of any broader cache
– feel free to insert links to any in the
comments.
The initial reaction to the leaked documents
was
to rubbish them with the memes routinely
applied to all information embarrassing to the
state nowadays – they were either “Russian
hacks” or “faked or amended disinformation”.
These attacks were particularly important as
the message that came over clearly from these
Texeira leaks was precisely the same as that
which came over from Daniel Ellsberg’s original
Pentagon Papers leak 50 years ago – that the
public is being lied to about how the war is
going.
(It is worth reflecting that in today’s world
the NYT and Washington Post would have condemned
Ellsberg and emphasised those bits of the
Pentagon Papers which reflect badly on the
VietCong).
Ukraine was particularly concerned about US
official figures showing Ukrainian casualties
much higher, and Russian casualties much lower,
than the Ukrainian official figures the US
ostensibly endorsed.
I have to say I always find both Ukrainian
and Russian casualty figures laughably false.
The idea that either side is telling the truth
appears to me one that no half-sensible person
could entertain. I had presumed that was the
general view.
Revelations about the fragility of Ukrainian
air defences and supply lines similarly seemed
to me a statement of the blindingly obvious.
It is also unhelpful for the US to have
revealed that it is actively spying on President
Zelensky, as well as allies like South Korea and
Israel. But again, this is embarrassing in the
sense it is embarrassing if somebody publishes
pictures of you on the toilet; it is not that
nobody thought you used the toilet.
There is not a diplomat alive who did not
know the US does this stuff.
Eventually the media and security services,
with Bellingcat in the vanguard, decided the
best way forward was to admit the papers are
genuine, but only tell us about very selected
ones, and then with a positive spin.
So we have stories about
how brilliant the US secret services are at
penetrating Russian power structures and
communications, and how the real danger from the
leaks is revealing to the Russians the extent of
American success.
That line has been splashed all over legacy
and social media these last few days. As the
public is being denied the original documents
this conclusion is extrapolated from, it is
difficult to assess. The journalists of course
have not assessed it; they have just copied and
pasted the line.
Other helpful snippets for the security
services are published, such as an assessment
that the UN Secretary General is pro-Russian, or
standard stuff on North Korean nuclear
ambitions. In the last week it is noticeable
that, since original documents stopped surfacing
into public view, nothing has been published
that does not serve US propaganda narratives.
There remains the mystery that the sources of
these documents seem particularly diverse – in
particular some being apparently internal CIA –
for an intelligence officer in the Air National
Guard to access, but it is not impossible.
Jack Texeira is at the centre of this puzzle
but remains the missing piece. We have heard
nothing from him. A rather unconvincing
interview with a suspiciously fluent, pixeled
out acquaintance grassing him up to the
Washington Post stated that he was a right wing
patriot.
Texeira has been portrayed both as some kind
of rampant Trump supporter incensed at the
state, and as an inadequate jock revealing
documents just to boast to fellow gaming nerds.
We should remain suspicious of attempts to
characterise him: I am acutely aware of media
portrayals of Julian Assange which are entirely
untrue.
It is a shame the Washington Post, New York
Times, Guardian and Bellingcat each had no
interest whatsoever in the journalistic pursuit
of the truth behind this extraordinary episode.
We live entirely in security states: there is no
doubt about it.
Craig Murray is a Scottish author, human
rights campaigner, journalist, and former
diplomat for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth
Office. Between 2002 and 2004, he was the
British ambassador to Uzbekistan during which
time he exposed the violations of human rights
in Uzbekistan by the Karimov administration.
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Views expressed in this article are
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reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
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