Last Minute US Govt Claims Put Halt To Greenwald ‘Bombshell’
Journalist says his team is investigating objections raised.
Glenn Greenwald speaks to reporters at his hotel in Hong Kong Monday, June 10, 2013. (AP/Vincent Yu)
At midday on Monday, journalist Glenn Greenwald announced that revelations he has termed among “the most important” to result from documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden would be published at midnight.
After 3 months working on our story, USG today suddenly began making new last-minute claims which we intend to investigate before publishing
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 1, 2014
However, despite the growing anticipation on Monday and just hours prior to the expected publication, Greenwald went back to Twitter and announced:
As of noon on Tuesday, the reporting was still not showing on The Intercept, the online outlet edited by Greenwald where much of his most recent reporting on the documents has appeared, and no additional updates on the status of the reporting were seen on Twitter.
In various venues in recent months, Greenwald has suggested that the most explosive ‘bombshell‘ reporting based on the documents would come last and recently discussed how the focus of the reporting will reveal the specific individuals or kinds of people that the NSA is targeting inside the United States with its “collect it all” approach to digital surveillance.
In an interview with The Sunday Times of London at the end of May, Greenwald said the “finale” of his NSA reporting would answer specific questions about those targeted.
“One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying,” he told the Times, “is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’
“Are they political critics and dissidents and activists?” he continued. “Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer.”
Last week, Greenwald’s spoke MSNBC’s Ronan Farrow where amidst a conversation about U.S. foreign policy and the implications of the so-called “war on terrorism” the award-winning journalist said that his most explosive reporting based on the Snowden documents —which he called “the most or one of the most important in the archive”—was “imminent”.
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