{"id":493,"date":"2021-12-30T10:36:11","date_gmt":"2021-12-30T09:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/?p=493"},"modified":"2021-12-30T10:36:13","modified_gmt":"2021-12-30T09:36:13","slug":"edwar-snowdens-christmas-letter-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/2021\/12\/30\/edwar-snowdens-christmas-letter-21\/","title":{"rendered":"Edwar Snowden’s Christmas Letter ’21"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

…….the US government has just sought to redefine as acts of heinous criminal conspiracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two-hearted, two-minded creatures: the media is full of them. And too many have been content to accept the US government\u2019s determination that what should properly be the highest purpose of the media \u2014 the uncovering of truth, in the face of attempts to hide it \u2014 is suddenly in doubt and quite possibly illegal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That chill in the air this Christmas season? If Assange\u2019s prosecution is allowed to continue, it will become a freeze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bundle up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.rsn.org\/001\/everything-going-great-bad-faith-worse-news-and-julian-assange.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edward Snowden – Everything Going Great: Bad Faith, Worse News and Julian Assange<\/strong><\/a> Posted: 26 Dec 2021 09:59 by Dilip Simeon PM PST

Gospel, a word from Old English, is a compound that means \u201cgood news.\u201d And it\u2019s gospel that\u2019s been in short-supply as we head into the Christmas season. Whenever this fact gets me down, I remember that finding evil, malfeasance, and even suffering in the headlines is just a sign that the press is doing its job. I don\u2019t think any of us wants to wake up in the morning and read \u201cEverything Going Great!\u201d over our egg-nog-spiked chai \u2014 though even if we do, we know a headline like that is just an indication of all that’s unreported. Coming into this Christmas season, I find myself beset by odd religious yearnings\u2014I say odd, because I\u2019m not much of a believer, not in God, not in governments, not in institutions generally. I try to save my faith for people and principles, but that can lead to some lean years in the slaking of spiritual thirst. I can find a way to attribute my stirrings to the ritualism of Covid \u2014 the ablutions of sanitizing and masking, the penitent isolation, the what-does-it-all-mean?<\/em> that comes from confronting powerlessness and the caprice of illness \u2014 but a more convincing source might be the novelty of parenthood: religion being a stand-in for tradition in general, I ask myself, what am I going to leave my child? What intellectual and emotional inheritance? Along with \u201cgood news,\u201d I\u2019ve been thinking of \u201cbad faith<\/strong><\/a>,\u201d a phrase that always reminds me of the Thomas Pynchon joke, wherein everything bad becomes a German spa: Bad Kissingen, Bad Kreuznach, Baden-Baden\u2026 Bad Karma<\/strong><\/a>. I\u2019d known the phrase mostly through its legal vintage, but I\u2019d started noticing it increasingly applied to politics during the Bush-Obama story arcs: Republicans were always \u201cnegotiating in bad faith,\u201d or \u201coperating in bad faith,\u201d and it only got worse after that \u2014 the phrase only became more prevalent once Trump took office. So I was surprised to find that \u201cbad faith\u201d has roots far deeper than our common law: male fides<\/em>, from the Latin. Its usage, which is fascinating to explore, was originally literal: it was used to characterize someone who was practicing the wrong religion. From there it departed into Whitmanesque<\/strong><\/a> \u2014 but way-pre-Whitmanesque \u2014 contradiction. Someone who was \u201cin bad faith\u201d was divided against themselves; they were of two hearts, or two minds, or more. In this sense, even Jesus might be said to have been in bad faith, being part human and part divine. I\u2019m deeply taken by the generosity of this early definition: there\u2019s a sympathy there \u2014 a sympathy with \u201ca house divided against itself\u201d \u2014 that\u2019s utterly lacking in the contemporary sense, wherein \u201cbad faith\u201d is purposeful malfeasance. This remains, for me at least, a compelling history to decode: how a phrase that roughly meant \u201cunknowingly lying to one\u2019s self\u201d came to roughly mean \u201cknowingly lying to others.\u201d I\u2019m sure we all have our favorite (least-favorite) examples of this duplicitous<\/strong><\/a> (or multiplicitous) practice \u2014 this condition that only later became a practice \u2014 but for me, the bad-faith category that takes the fruitcake has always been the bureaucratic legalism most familiar to me. Perhaps a better way to put it would be: those situations where law opposes justice. You know this phenomenon well, I\u2019m sure: the health insurance rep or DMV clerk who says \u201cmy hands are tied,\u201d the police officer or soldier who unironically invokes some of the most evil law-enforcement of last century when they shrug and say, \u201cI got my orders, bud,\u201d or even those who go on TV to suggest whistleblowers might be protected, if only they would submit themselves to \u201cproper channels,\u201d which is code for standing on a very particular part of the floor suspended above a tank labeled: DANGER! PIRANHAS<\/strong>. It was Jesus who begged forgiveness for his crucifiers by saying, \u201cFather, forgive them, for they know not what they do,\u201d but these excruciating practitioners of bad faith invert the formula: they know exactly what they do, and yet they do it. I wonder if they can even forgive themselves. This Christmas may well be the last that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange<\/strong><\/a> will spend outside US custody. On December 10, the British High Court ruled in favor of extraditing Assange to the United States, where he will be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information. It is clear to me that the charges against Assange are both baseless and dangerous, in unequal measure \u2014 baseless in Assange\u2019s personal case, and dangerous to all. In seeking to prosecute Assange, the US government is purporting to extend its sovereignty to the global stage and hold foreign publishers accountable to US secrecy laws. By doing so, the US government will be establishing a precedent for prosecuting all news organization everywhere \u2014 all journalists in every country \u2014 who rely on classified documents to report on, for example, US war crimes, or the US drone program, or any other governmental or military or intelligence activity that the State Department, or the CIA, or the NSA, would rather keep locked away in the classified dark, far from public view, and even from Congressional oversight. I agree with my friends (and lawyers) at the ACLU: the US government\u2019s indictment of Assange amounts to the criminalization of investigative journalism. And I agree with myriad friends (and lawyers) throughout the world that at the core of this criminalization is a cruel and unsual paradox: namely, the fact that many of the activities that the US government would rather hush up are perpetrated in foreign countries, whose journalism will now be answerable to the US court system. And the precedent established here will be exploited by all manner of authoritarian leaders across the globe. What will be the State Department\u2019s response when the Republic of Iran demands the extradition of New York Times<\/em> reporters for violating Iran\u2019s secrecy laws? How will the United Kingdom respond when Viktor Orban or Recep Erdogan seeks the extradition of Guardian<\/em> reporters? The point is not that the U.S. or U.K would ever comply with those demands \u2014 of course they wouldn\u2019t \u2014 but that they would lack any principled basis for their refusals. The U.S. attempts to distinguish Assange\u2019s conduct from that of more mainstream journalism by characterizing it as a \u201cconspiracy.\u201d But what does that even mean in this context? Does it mean encouraging someone to uncover information (which is something done every day by the editors who work for Wikileaks\u2019 old partners, The New York Times<\/em> and The Guardian<\/em>)? Or does it mean giving someone the tools and techniques to uncover that information (which, depending on the tools and techniques involved, can also be construed as a typical part of an editor\u2019s job)? The truth is that all national security investigative journalism can be branded a conspiracy: the whole point of the enterprise is for journalists to persuade sources to violate the law in the public interest. And insisting that Assange is somehow \u201cnot a journalist<\/strong><\/a>\u201d does nothing to take the teeth out of this precedent when the activities for which he\u2019s been charged are indistinguishable from the activities that our most decorated investigative journalists routinely engage in. If you\u2019ve been tuning into the bad news this past week, you\u2019ve certainly encountered a version of precisely this question, is Assange an X or a journalist? In this inane formula X can be anything: hacktivist, terrorist, lizard person. It doesn\u2019t matter what noun you put into this MadLibs, because the entire exercise is pointless. This kind of sincere, credulous, smug, and gloating inquiry is just the most recent, just-in-time-for-Christmas, example of in-the-flesh-and-in-the-word bad faith<\/strong><\/a>, presented by media professionals who are never in worse faith<\/em> than when they report on \u2014 or pass judgment on \u2014 other media. Obfuscation, withholding, meaning-manipulation, meaning-denial \u2014 these are just some of the ways in which some journalists, and not just American journalists, have conspired, yes, conspired to convict Assange in absentia, and, by extension, to convict their own profession \u2014 to convict themselves. Or maybe I shouldn\u2019t be calling the gelled automatons on Fox, or Bill Maher, \u201cjournalists,\u201d because how often have they done the hard shoe-leather work of cultivating a source, or protecting a source\u2019s identity, or communicating securely with a source, or of storing a source’s sensitive material securely? All of those activities comprise the soul of good journalism, and yet those are precisely the activities the US government has just sought to redefine as acts of heinous criminal conspiracy. Two-hearted, two-minded creatures: the media is full of them. And too many have been content to accept the US government\u2019s determination that what should properly be the highest purpose of the media \u2014 the uncovering of truth, in the face of attempts to hide it \u2014 is suddenly in doubt and quite possibly illegal. That chill in the air this Christmas season? If Assange\u2019s prosecution is allowed to continue, it will become a freeze. Bundle up. https:\/\/www.rsn.org\/001\/everything-going-great-bad-faith-worse-news-and-julian-assange.html<\/strong><\/a> Jesus sermon from the Rev. Chris Hedges<\/strong><\/a> CHRIS HEDGES – The execution of Julian Assange: He exposed the crimes of empire; and that can’t be tolerated<\/strong><\/a> Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide Machine<\/strong><\/a> Chris Hedges: Imploding the myth of Israel<\/strong><\/a> Chris Hedges – Israel’s big lie: This isn’t self defense, it’s a war crime, aided and abetted by the U.S.<\/strong><\/a> William Astore: The U.S. Military\u2019s Lost Wars \/\/ Chris Hedges: The American Empire Will Collapse Within a Decade, Two at Most<\/strong><\/a> Seamus Heaney\u2019s Advice to the Young<\/strong><\/a> Alexandre Koyr\u00e9 The Political Function of the Modern Lie<\/strong><\/a> Avay Shukla: LEST WE FORGET<\/strong><\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…….the US government has just sought to redefine as acts of heinous criminal conspiracy. Two-hearted, two-minded creatures: the media is full of them. And too many have been content to accept the US government\u2019s determination that what should properly be the highest purpose of the media \u2014 the uncovering of truth, in the face of attempts to hide it \u2014 is suddenly in doubt and quite possibly illegal. That chill in the air this Christmas season? If Assange\u2019s prosecution is allowed to continue, it will become a freeze. Bundle up. https:\/\/www.rsn.org\/001\/everything-going-great-bad-faith-worse-news-and-julian-assange.html Edward Snowden – Everything Going Great: Bad Faith, Worse Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,34,48],"tags":[217,216,149,42],"class_list":["post-493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-giraffe","category-human-rights-civil-disobedience-courage-honesty","category-politics","tag-double-tongued","tag-edward-snowden","tag-giraffe-heroes-2","tag-julian-assange"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":494,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions\/494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}