Just two weeks after the melodrama of Edward Snowden’s bizarre trans-Asian sojourn came to a rather anti-climactic conclusion at a Moscow airport, the melodrama of David Miranda’s airport detention began in earnest.
Miranda, the husband of polemicist Glenn Greenwald for whom he served as a top secret NSA document courier, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by British law enforcement for transporting “tens of thousands of pages of digital material” to Brazil. He was detained for nine hours and questioned at Heathrow airport in London on Sunday.
U.K. authorities can’t possibly believe that by seizing the documents from Miranda that they’re somehow obstructing the ability of The Guardian and Greenwald to write about the content of the documents. Clearly, they’re simply attempting to ascertain which specific stolen documents were attained by Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras from Snowden. Greenwald himself told the New York Times on Sunday that Miranda was delivering and receiving Snowden documents in Berlin where Poitras is working on a trilogy of documentaries about post-9/11 national security issues.
This is so vastly different than what everyone was led to believe by The Guardian and Greenwald in the hours after Miranda’s detention ended. During that time, these self-proclaimed truth-and-justice seekers wailed about how the U.K. was attempting to intimidate Greenwald by harassing his innocent spouse who was only detained because of his relationship with Greenwald — a tactic that not even the Mafia uses, Greenwald wrote. They even denied Miranda the use of a lawyer, Greenwald and The Guardian reported, but, like most things orbiting this story, the lawyer thing turned out to be untrue… [CONTINUE READING]