Exposing the Dark Forces Behind the Snowden Smears

[Magda Hassan]

Another hit piece here and the back ground of the writer of said hit piece:

Questions for Snowden

Did Edward Snowden decide on his own to seek out journalists and then a job at Booz Allen Hamilton's Hawaii facility as an IT systems administrator to gather classified documents about the National Security Agency's worldwide surveillance activities?By Walter Pincus, Tuesday, July 9, 10:15 AM


Snowden told the South China Post in June that he took the Booz Allen job in late March or early April because it "granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked."





"That is why I accepted that position," he added.
He worked less than three months at Booz Allen, but by the time he reached Hong Kong in mid-May, Snowden had four computers with NSA documents.
Was he encouraged or directed by WikiLeaks personnel or others to take the job as part of a broader plan to expose NSA operations to selected journalists?
In the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier on trial for disclosing thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, it was Julian Assange and his organization who directed the collection of documents, U.S. prosecutors have alleged. While Manning's lawyers contend there is no evidence to support that finding, prosecutors have said there are hundreds of chats between Manning and Assange and WikiLeaks lists of desired material.
In Manning's case, WikiLeaks and its founder, Assange, determined the news organizations that initially would receive the materials.
How did Snowden select his recipients?
In January, Snowden contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras using encrypted e-mails. Without providing his name, he claimed to have information about the intelligence community. Poitras told an interviewer last month that in February, Snowden had also had a similar first contact with Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for the Guardian newspaper. Greenwald wrote on June 10, "Laura Poitras and I have been working with him [Snowden] since February."
Barton Gellman, a contributing writer for The Washington Post, wrote last month that he, too, was first contacted in February, initially by Poitras and then indirectly by Snowden. Snowden again did not disclose his real name.
How did Snowden decide on these three individuals before he went to work for Booz Allen and before he apparently had all the documents he wanted to release?
Poitras and Greenwald are well-known free-speech activists, with many prior connections, including as founding members in December of the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation. One of its key goals is to support groups that engage in transparency journalism and support whistleblowers, including WikiLeaks.
Poitras had suggested Snowden contact Gellman, who had been part of a fellowship program with her at New York University's Center on Law and Security.
Greenwald had the byline on the initial June 5 Guardian story, and Gellman and Poitras were bylined on The Post's story on June 6.
Did Assange and WikiLeaks personnel help or direct Snowden to those journalists?



Poitras and Greenwald have had close connections with Assange and WikiLeaks. In December 2010, Greenwald said of the British arrest of Assange: "Whatever you think of WikiLeaks, they have not been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted. Yet look what has happened to them. They have been removed from [the] Internet . . . their funds have been frozen . . . media figures and politicians have called for their assassination and to be labeled a terrorist organization."

In a June 2012 Guardian column, Greenwald wrote, "As a foreign national accused of harming U.S. national security, he [Assange] has every reason to want to avoid ending up in the travesty known as the American judicial system."
On April 10, 2012, Greenwald wrote for the WikiLeaks Press's blog about Poitras and WikiLeaks being targeted by U.S. government officials.




Since last year Poitras has been working on a film on post-9/11 America, with a focus on the NSA and in which Assange and WikiLeaks are participating. Assange confirmed this in a May 29 interview on Democracy Now's Web site.
In that same interview, Assange previewed the first Greenwald Guardian story based on Snowden documents that landed a week later. Speaking from Ecuador's embassy in London, Assange described how NSA had been collecting "all the calling records of the United States, every record of everyone calling everyone over years. . . . Those calling records already [are] entered into the national security complex."
Did he know ahead of time of that Guardian story describing the U.S. court order permitting NSA's collection of the telephone toll records of millions of American Verizon customers and storing them for years?
Snowden's releases reflect another WikiLeaks technique: directing materials to suit specific audiences at specific times.
While in Hong Kong, Snowden told the South China Post that the United States was targeting China's mobile-phone systems along with Internet hubs run by two Chinese universities. That release came while U.S. officials were pushing Chinese cyberwarfare as a major issue.
On Sunday, as Snowden seeks asylum possibly in a Latin American country, Greenwald, again on Democracy Now, described an article he co-wrote in Brazil's O Globo newspaper: "NSA is systematically tapping into the telecommunication systems of Brazil and intercepting, storing and monitoring millions upon millions of telephone calls and emails of ordinary Brazilians, the kind . . . that we reported was taking place in the United States, as well."
Meanwhile, Snowden is reportedly in Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport with WikiLeaks handling his legal representation and public relations operations.

What other roles the group played in getting Snowden to this point remain a mystery.

A candid Wiki entry for Walter Pichus...

Walter Pincus

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Walter Haskell Pincus (born December 24, 1932) is a national security journalist for The Washington Post. He has won several prizes including a Polk Award in 1977, a television Emmy in 1981, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in association with otherWashington Post reporters, and the 2010 Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy. Since 2003, he has taught at Stanford University's Stanford in Washington program.[SUP][1][/SUP]


Biography

Pincus was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish parents Jonas Pincus and Clare Glassman. He attended South Side High School, Rockville Centre, New York and graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in 1954.[SUP][2][/SUP] Before being drafted into the U.S. Armyin 1955, where he served in the Counterintelligence Corps in Washington, D.C. from 19551957, he worked as a copy-boy for The New York Times.[SUP][3][/SUP]
In September 1954 he married Betty Meskin, with whom he has a son, and in May 1965, he married his second wife Ann Witsell Terry, who is from Little Rock, Arkansas, with whom he has one daughter and two sons.[SUP][2][/SUP]
Career

After his discharge from the Army, Pincus spied on American students abroad for the Central Intelligence Agency, writing an article which appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on February 18th, 1967, the headline, "How I Traveled Abroad on C.I.A. Subsidy. "I had been briefed in Washington on each of them," he wrote "None was remotely aware of CIA's interest." (See "Dark Alliance" - Gary Webb p. 464-466 if you are interested in more than the tip of the iceberg.)
Pincus worked at the copy desk of the Wall Street Journal's Washington edition, leaving in 1959 to become Washington correspondent for three North Carolina newspapers. In a 18-month sabbatical he took in 1962, he directed his first of two investigations for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under J. William Fulbright. The investigations into foreign government lobbying led to a revision of theForeign Agents Registration Act. In 1963, he joined the Washington Star, and in 1966 he moved to the Washington Post, where he worked till 1969. In 1969 till 1970 he directed another investigation for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, looking into U.S. military and security commitments abroad and their effect on U.S. foreign policy, which eventually led to the McGovern-Hatfield amendment to end the Vietnam War.[SUP][3][/SUP]
In 1973 Pincus tried to establish a newspaper, aiming at University towns with bad local newspapers, but without success.[SUP][4][/SUP] Believing that he would later buy the magazine,[SUP][5][/SUP] he had become executive editor of The New Republic in 1972, where he covered the WatergateSenate hearings, the House impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon and the Watergate trial. In 1975, after he was fired from the New Republic,[SUP][6][/SUP] he went to work as consultant to NBC News and later CBS News, developing, writing or producing television segments for network evening news, magazine shows and hour documentaries, and joined the Washington Post the same year.[SUP][3][/SUP]
At the Washington Post, Pincus reports on intelligence, defense and foreign policy.[SUP][7][/SUP] He has written about a variety of news subjects ranging from nuclear weapons and arms control to political campaigns to the American hostages in Iran to investigations of Congressand the Executive Branch. For six years he covered the Iran-contra affair. He covered the intelligence community and its problems arising out of the case of confessed spy Aldrich Ames, allegations of Chinese espionage at the nuclear weapons laboratories.[SUP][3][/SUP]
Pincus attended Georgetown Law School part-time beginning in 1995 and graduated in 2001, at the age of sixty-eight.[SUP][8][/SUP] He has been a visiting lecturer at Yale University and since 2002 has taught a seminar at Stanford University's Stanford-in-Washington program.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP]
Involvement in the Plame affair

Main article: Plame affair
In October 2003, Pincus cowrote a story for the Washington Post which described a July 12, 2003 conversation between an unnamed administration official and an unnamed Washington Post reporter. The official told the reporter that Iraq war critic Joe Wilson's wifeValerie Plame worked for the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) nonproliferation division, and suggested that Plame had recommended her husband to investigate reports that Iraq's government had tried to buy uranium in Niger. It later became clear that Pincus himself was the Post reporter in question. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald issued a grand jury subpoena to Pincus on August 9, 2004, in an attempt to discover the identity of Pincus' secret informant. On August 20, 2004, the Post filed a motion to quash the subpoena, but after Pincus' source came forward to speak with investigators, Pincus gave a deposition to Fitzgerald on September 15, 2004; he recounted the 2003 conversation to Fitzgerald but still did not name the administration official.[SUP][9][/SUP] In a public statement afterward, Pincus said that the special prosecutor had dropped his demand that Pincus reveal his source.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP] On February 12, 2007, Pincus testified in court that it was then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, swerving off topic during an interview, who had told him of Plame's identity.[SUP][10][/SUP] Pincus was interviewed about his involvement in the Plame affair, and his refusal to identify his source, in the first episode of Frontline's "News War".[SUP][6][/SUP]
Honors and awards

Pincus has won several newspaper prizes including the 1961 Page One award for magazine reporting in The Reporter, the George Polk Award in 1977 for stories in the Washington Post exposing the neutron warhead, a television Emmy for writing on the 1981 CBS News documentary series, "Defense of the United States", and in 1999 he was awarded the first Stewart Alsop Award given by the Association of Foreign Intelligence Officers for his coverage of national security affairs. In 2002 he was one of six Washington Postreporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting,[SUP][11][/SUP] and in 2010 the Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy.[SUP][12][/SUP]
See also

• Operation Mockingbird
  

References

• ^ "Walter Pincus". American Academy in Berlin.
  
• ^ [SUP]a[/SUP] [SUP]b[/SUP] "Walter Pincus". NNDB Profile. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  
• ^ [SUP]a[/SUP] [SUP]b[/SUP] [SUP]c[/SUP] [SUP]d[/SUP] "Walter Pincus". Nieman Watchdog. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  
• ^ Seibel, Andrea (March 7, 2009). "Der Online-Journalismus wird überschätzt". Die Welt (in German). Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  
• ^ Sherrill, Robert (March/April 1976, Vol. 14 Issue 6). "The new regime at The New Republic". Columbia Journalism Review. p. 23.
  
• ^ [SUP]a[/SUP] [SUP]b[/SUP] "Interview Walter Pincus". Frontline. July 14, 2006. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  
• ^ "Walter Pincus". The Washington Post.
  
• ^ "Georgetown Law Establishes Degree Program for Journalists". Georgetown University. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  
• ^ "Profile: Walter Pincus". History Commons. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  
• ^ Sniffen, Michael J. (February 12, 2007). "Journalists Name Additional Leak Sources". Associated Press.
  
• ^ "The 2002 Pulitzer Prize Winners: National Reporting (Citation)". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2008-09-10.
  
• ^ "Arthur Ross Award for Distinguished Reporting & Analysis on Foreign Affairs". The American Academy of Diplomacy. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  

External links

• Walter Haskell Pincus Spartacus Educational Biography
  
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Pincus, August 19, 2012