The drone-strike defense already largely been written, not in tweets but in executive memos and classified opinions.

How much more proof does one need to see that the famed "Free Press" the Americans Boast about, is just an echo chamber of the Powers that be. Powers that think nothing of taking out anyone across the world. Death by Drone is they way they deal with  any problem. Journalists not excluded. 

MICHAEL GRUNWALD AND THE 

ASSANGE PRECEDENT PROBLEM

POSTED BY AMY DAVIDSON

People say reckless things on Twitter, as Grunwald’s defenders pointed out and as some of his more extreme critics, who posted that they couldn’t wait to write a similar defense regarding the drone strike that hit him and other gruesome things, demonstrated. If dumbness were the only issue we’d be done. But this one deserves being talked about a bit more, less because Grunwald still seems a bit oblivious as to what was wrong with what he said (though there’s that) than because it encapsulated something hazardous about the current moment, for journalists, for anyone who cares about civil liberties, and for the political culture more generally. And there’s the issue of the lack of civility on Twitter—but we already knew that one.

Still, let’s start with the tweets. Many people read it as a call to kill Assange, a founder of WIkiLeaks; that isn’t quite right, but “can’t wait to write a defense” implies a certain eager anticipation. And “takes out” is one of those terms—like “ice,” which Grunwald used, with regard to Anwar al-Awlaki, in a post he cited Saturday to explain his position as a “statist”—that makes its user feel blunt while serving as a distancing euphemism. (The Time spokesperson said that he wouldn’t be saying anything more on this for now.) Killing is killing; and this isn’t just Grunwald’s problem. The language reflects one of the problems with drone strikes—they seem like the clap of a hand, tough and sharp, but they are so much uglier and more complicated than that.

It was troubling, too, to read Grunwald’s tweet on a day when journalists were being threatened, detained, and set upon in Cairo, accused of being terrorist sympathizers or spies, underminers of public safety, for reporting on the violence of the government’s assault on the Muslim Brotherhood. Would words like those have appeared in Grunwald’s defense of a drone strike? This is a dangerous time for journalists; Time itself sends people places where missile strikes and bombs are not just rhetorical ammunition.

Journalists are in legal danger, too. The Obama Administration has, in its practices, embraced the position that the leaking of classified information to reporters is a problem properly addressed with the Espionage Act. Bradley Manning was convicted under it even though the government failed on a charge of aiding the enemy. Edward Snowden, the N.S.A. leaker, has been charged with two violations of the Espionage Act, for starters. Snowden’s leaks made a crucial discussion about the N.S.A.’s overreach possible. President Obama said in a press conference last week that he didn’t consider him a “patriot”; others have openly called him a traitor. And the Administration has come close to calling reporters who work with leakers members of spy rings.

Peter Maass, in a profile of Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker to whom Snowden turned with his files, describes how she was stopped and harassed at border crossings for years before even meeting him, perhaps because of filming she did in Iraq—but who knows why. [Update: David Miranda, a Brazilian citizen, was detained for nine hours Sunday while transiting Heathrow under a section of the U.K.’s Terrorism Act, apparently because he is the partner of Glenn Greenwald, who also worked with Snowden, and had just visited Poitras; British authorities questioned him about the N.S.A. leaks, according to the Guardian.]

The other part of the equation is our drone regimen and the legal rationales the Obama Administration has constructed for targeted killings—including the killings of Americans. In a post a few months ago, I asked whether an Administration white paper explaining why it thought it could extra-judicially kill Americans abroad—ones whom it had decided were a threat and involved with Al Qaeda or “associated forces”—could be used to justify, say, a drone strike against a journalist who was about to reveal classified information. Despite the Administration’s denial that this is its intention, it appears that it could; it is too easy to imagine a future President pointing to the language of the white paper as a precedent. And that is for Americans: foreigners have less protection.

Put those two halves together—pushing investigative journalism into the category of espionage and enemy activity; targeted killings to chase threats—and it seems possible that Grunwald could someday get a chance to write that defense, perhaps not with regard to Assange (we are not about to launch a drone strike on London, where he is now) but someone similar to him.

“Similar,” here, has a few aspects. The simplest is that Assange is not American—he is Australian, a critical foreigner and so, again, less legally protected. That is an argument for defending foreign journalists, in writing and politically (see the work of groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists) not for shrugging or rationalizing when their lives are at risk. Part of the online rage that greeted Grunwald’s tweet, especially overnight, was at a sense of American privilege.

Then there is the argument that to be like Assange means to not really be a journalist—that WikiLeaks is no media enterprise, either because it has a point of view or does things with computers that confuse people or publicizes classified information. None of those objections hold up; they are true, or soon will be, of any number of brand-name journalistic organizations.The New Yorker has used classified information in stories; the WikiLeaks files, obtained from Bradley Manning, were also published in a large-scale way by the Guardian, the Post, and others. They were important contributions. And outlets that are highly critical of a government are the ones ultimately most in need of constitutional protection, not least. Although there are other criteria, I can’t imagine a defense of a drone strike on Assange that would keep the people I work with every day safe.

Being similar to Assange can mean something else: being complicated, problematic, abrasive, difficult, arrogant—easy to dislike. (I’ll defer to Raffi Khatchadourian’s great profile, written before Assange became quite so prominent, for a sense of how complicated.) Grunwald first tweeted that he was removing the post by way of quoting another tweet disparaging “Assange supporters”:

Fair point. I'll delete. @rober1236Jua my main problem with this is it gives Assange supporters a nice safe persecution complex to hide in

He followed that up with four tweets calling himself “dumb,” three straightforwardly regretful—

It was a dumb tweet. I'm sorry. I deserve the backlash. (Maybe not the anti-Semitic stuff but otherwise I asked for it.)

—and one in which he wouldn’t quite let go: quoting someone else who’d tweeted, “I thought it was hilarious. Rapist dudebros are no victims.” Grunwald wrote, “No, but it was dumb anyway.” One can be strongly against killing Assange or prosecuting him as a spy or calling him anything other than a journalist and still be troubled by the rape allegations against him in Sweden—I know that I’m troubled by them, and put off by the way his some of his supporters have talked about the nature of rape and the character of the women involved. If Assange is icky, or anything involving the word “dudebro,” is part of the drone-strike defense that Grunwald had planned, then the thread has really been lost, dangerously so.

Is it supposed to be reassuring to think that the government, with what might be called an Assange precedent, would be sure never to use it against someone sweet and amiable? Never mind that investigative reporters are—often have to be—people who push and aren’t polite. And how crucial it is that they are? When these become the terms in which we discuss whether the government may kill a journalist or anyone, we are very much in trouble.

Perhaps this is a lot to put on Grunwald, who has, again, apologized. He is a journalist whose previous work, on subjects like the Florida Everglades, has gained respect. He certainly does not deserve the personal threats and wishes for physical harm directed against him now on Twitter, some of which are baroque and all of which ought to stop. The other side of that, of course, is that he’s experienced enough to know a whole lot better. And his tweet resonated, perhaps unluckily for him, because of the timing and tone, and above all because it did, concisely and unpleasantly, state the terms of a debate that, partly because of Edward Snowden, is at a critical point. The drone-strike defense, should it come to that, has already largely been written, not in tweets but in executive memos and classified opinions.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/michael-grunwald-and-the-assange-precedent-problem.html