The Guardian: UK Government Tried Intimidation

In a precursor of what we may yet see in America, the editor of the UK newspaper The Guardian - which frequently has better coverage on issues in the USA and crimes by U.S. military personnel than one finds in the America press - has described intimidation efforts by the British government to secure the information leaked to that paper by Edward Snowden.   What makes the story so strange is the leaked information was AMERICAN information, not that of the UK.  One cannot help but wonder whether the Brits were acting in concert with the Obama administration.  It's all very troubling.  Here are highlights from Politico:

The British government intimidated The Guardian newspaper and destroyed material Edward Snowden provided on surveillance programs, editor Alan Rusbridger said Monday.

Writing in a column on The Guardian’s website, Rusbridger said that in June he was contacted by “a very senior” U.K. government official demanding the return or destruction of the material from Snowden. A month ago the tone toughened, Rusbridger wrote, when a government official told Rusbridger “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.”

“There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it,” Rusbridger said. “I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. ‘You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.’

Rusbridger said he was told if he did not destroy the material, the U.K. would move to close down The Guardian’s reporting through the courts. Despite telling government officials most of their reporting on Snowden was being done outside of the U.K., Rusbridger said British officials carried on with attempting to stop the reporting.

Rusbridger said The Guardian will continue reporting on the Snowden documents, just not in London.

Rusbridger wrote the column after David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who broke the Snowden story, was detained for nine hours in London’s Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 of Britain’s terror laws. Rusbridger said the detention of Miranda and the seizure of his electronic materials was just the next event in a long line of intimidation by the U.K. government.

“The detention of Miranda has rightly caused international dismay because it feeds into a perception that the US and UK governments — while claiming to welcome the debate around state surveillance started by Snowden — are also intent on stemming the tide of leaks and on pursuing the whistleblower with a vengeance,” Rusbridger said.

A free press is what protects us from government tyranny and also keeps the government honest - if there is such a thing - and exposes war crimes such as those exposed by Bradley Manning' release of information.   One of the first things dictatorships do is silence the free press (Hitler and the Nazi regime did so as have the ayatollahs in Tehran).  What is happening in the UK and America is disturbing.