This Wednesday on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald was given a chance to respond to Rep. Peter King's calls for the criminal prosecution of those who report on classified information on that same show the prior evening.
Apparently King showed up on Fox the following day as well and told host Megyn Kelly that he didn't want them to go after just any journalists, but that he specifically wanted Greenwald and the Washington Post's Barton Gellman, who also wrote about the NSA, to be prosecuted for publishing the leaks. Lord knows he's not going to tell Megyn Kelly he thinks they should go after anyone at Fox for leaks on our contacts inside North Korea.
Greenwald pushed back at King's allegations that he was threatening to reveal the identities of CIA agents and he also got a shot in on him for his past support of those Irish terrorists when it suited him.
Greenwald admitted he was “really staggered” that a member of Congress, let alone the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, would “fabricate” this information calling for Greenwald to be arrested and tried for “the crime of doing journalism.” Cooper noted that King’s office declined to comment, and asked if any of Greenwald’s future revelations will reveal the identities of anyone in the field. Greenwald insisted it will not, and defended Edward Snowden as, contrary to popular belief, actually taking national security into account in deciding to reveal the classified information.
Cooper asked whether King is making it up or just mistaken, but Greenwald said he didn’t want to think about what’s going on in “the swamp of Peter King’s brain.” He mentioned how King has actually supported terrorist activity by the Irish Republican Army.
Cooper noted how while everyone accused WikiLeaks of damaging national security and putting people at risk, U.S. officials admitted that they couldn’t name anyone who died as a result of the info that WikiLeaks released. Greenwald argued that every time people release secret government information, the government responds by scaring people into blindly trusting whoever’s in charge to protect them, but ultimately journalists should be calling them out and demanding to know “what specifically has jeopardized national security."
I don't expect we'll see anyone in our corporate media take his advice any time soon. They constantly allow Republicans to come on the air and lie without being called out, or have segments like this one, where it's a day later before and they bother to let their audience know the politician was lying like a rug.
