by Glenn Greenwald
The
Guardian
When I made
the choice to report aggressively on top-secret NSA programs, I
knew that I would inevitably be the target of all sorts of personal
attacks and smears. You don’t challenge the most powerful state
on earth and expect to do so without being attacked. As a superb
Guardian editorial noted today: “Those who leak official
information will often be denounced, prosecuted or smeared. The
more serious the leak, the fiercer the pursuit and the greater the
punishment.”
One of the
greatest honors I’ve had in my years of writing about politics is
the opportunity to work with and befriend my long-time political
hero, Daniel Ellsberg. I never quite understood why the Nixon administration,
in response to his release of the Pentagon Papers, would want to
break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst and steal his
files. That always seemed like a non sequitur to me: how would disclosing
Ellsberg’s most private thoughts and psychosexual assessments discredit
the revelations of the Pentagon Papers?
When I asked
Ellsberg about that several years ago, he explained that the state
uses those tactics against anyone who dissents from or challenges
it simply to distract from the revelations and personally smear
the person with whatever they can find to make people uncomfortable
with the disclosures.
So I’ve been
fully expecting those kinds of attacks since I began my work on
these NSA leaks. The recent journalist-led “debate” about
whether I should be prosecuted for my reporting on these stories
was precisely the sort of thing I knew was coming.
As a result,
I was not particularly surprised when I received an email last night
from a reporter at the New York Daily News informing me that he
had been “reviewing some old lawsuits” in which I was
involved – “old” as in: more than a decade ago –
and that “the paper wants to do a story on this for tomorrow”.
He asked that I call him right away to discuss this, apologizing
for the very small window he gave me to comment.
Upon calling
him, I learned that he had somehow discovered two events from my
past. The first was my 2002-04 participation in a multi-member LLC
that had an interest in numerous businesses, including the distribution
of adult videos. I was bought out of that company by my partners
roughly nine years ago.
The lawsuit
he referenced was one where the LLC had sued a video producer in
(I believe) 2002 after the producer reneged on a profit-sharing
contract. In response, that producer fabricated abusive and ugly
emails he claimed were from me – they were not – in order
to support his allegation that I had bullied him into entering into
that contract and he should therefore be relieved from adhering
to it. Once our company threatened to retain a forensic expert to
prove that the emails were forgeries, the producer quickly settled
the case by paying some substantial portion of what was owed, and
granting the LLC the rights to use whatever it had obtained when
consulting with him to start its own competing business.
June
28, 2013
Copyright
© 2013 The
Guardian
Republished with permission from:: Lew Rockwell