At least there was one useful outcome from the war in Iraq: Western governments no longer have the luxury of being able to launch wars based on pretexts that escape careful scrutiny. We are no longer purely at the mercy of rumors from shadowy figures like “Curveball.” We are however still vulnerable to specious lines of reasoning.

Here’s how the current hoax is operating largely without impediment:

President Obama set a “red line” a year ago on Syria’s use of chemical weapons — except it wasn’t red and it wasn’t a line.

In August last year, Obama said:

We have been very clear to the [Assad] regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.

Even if the phrase “being utilized” seemed unambiguous, it certainly wasn’t clear what “whole bunch” and “moving around” were supposed to mean.

Over the following year, following reports of chemical weapons indeed being assembled, moved around, and utilized, Obama’s red line seemed to morph and its implied meaning became that if Assad used chemical weapons and killed a whole bunch of Syrians then the line would have been crossed.

Yet even if an implied definition of the red line emerged, to call it red always suggested that on the other side of the line there was some tangible threat — yet there never was. Obama had said that if Assad crossed the line, this would change Obama’s “calculus” and “equation.” That could mean anything. It could for instance mean that such an action would change Obama’s opinion about Assad and his regime.

When the Bush-style phrase “red line” slipped from Obama’s lips, it seems he instantly recognized he’d made a mistake and so his effort at damage control was to give his red line an indecipherable definition. But it didn’t work. In political discourse, “red line,” is a much stronger meme than “change my calculus.”

So, even if Obama did not think he was committing himself to military action a year ago, that’s what he did.

The argument he had inadvertently constructed was simple and moronic: If Assad uses chemical weapons, America will become directly engaged in the war in Syria.

If the use of chemical weapons by Assad’s forces can be proved, then U.S. military action logically follows.

Almost everyone now, having become slaves to that logic, is insisting on seeing the proof that chemical weapons have been used, yet fewer challenge the logic itself.

Let’s suppose that over the next week or so, the Obama administration can put together a very compelling case based on detailed intelligence and forensic evidence that chemical weapons were used and that they were indeed used by Assad’s own forces. Obama by that point will have won three-quarters of the argument. The doubters will have been sidelined and the proponents of military action further empowered.

Yet military action to what end?

Assad misbehaved and now he’s getting punished and if the punishment is suitably measured he won’t misbehave again?

Sorry, but psychology that might be applicable in a kindergarten probably isn’t applicable to a regime that is fighting for its survival.

Assad didn’t reach into a cookie jar without permission. After which having been appropriately scolded he can’t necessarily be expected to behave properly.

The regime might already be fragmenting and the risk of further use of chemical weapons might not come from them falling into the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra — it may come from units inside the Syrian army who are already in control of these weapons and who start to operate as independent militias.

Obama’s real calculus now is the worst one upon which any decision to engage in military action can be based: how can I avoid looking weak? He wants to fire just enough cruise missiles so that he and the United States can avoid getting mocked and not so many that they provoke retaliation. To accomplish what?

The use of military action for no other purpose than as a show of strength is really a demonstration of the opposite — a fear of appearing weak.

If Obama really wants to engage in an action that could have tangible positive results — though it would require immense political courage — he should set aside his strike plans and target lists and pick up the phone to call Tehran.*

President Hassan Rouhani is fluent in English, has a doctorate in constitutional law, and Iran has more political leverage in Syria than any other country in the region. Iranians also have had the experience of being victims of chemical warfare. If anyone has the power to break the stalemate in Syria, it’s Iran. Indeed, a diplomatic opening between Washington and Tehran would probably act as a much more powerful incentive than any other for Bashar al-Assad to start exercising caution and stop killing so many of his people.

*This suggestion comes from Marsha B. Cohen of Lobe Log.

Remember the popular uprising that began in Iraq in 2001? Remember the peaceful protests and the ruthlessness with which Saddam crushed his opponents? Remember the Free Iraq Army fighting against the Republican Guard and the many cities that were turned to ruble during the two years that preceded the U.S. intervention into what had by then become a civil war? Remember the chemical weapons attack in which hundreds died and the shocking videos that Colin Powell showed at the UN Security Council? Remember how there was atrocity after atrocity and George Bush’s only response was to say he was gravely concerned?

Remember all of that?

Me neither.

So let’s see Syria for what it is and not like broken record players insist that 2013 is a rerun of 2003.

After all, the search for parallels tends to be an exercise in magical thinking. We say this is like that, as though on the basis of a tenuous symmetry we will then be able to predict the future.

The most significant parallel between 2003 and 2013 is one that applies to virtually all armed conflicts: it’s very difficult to predict how they will end.

So, when President Obama and other U.S. officials begin their earnest sales campaign on the necessity and value of launching some kind of attack on Syria, the thing to view with greatest skepticism is any kind of prediction about the outcome of this intervention.

This operation will send a strong signal to President Assad that he cannot use chemical weapons with impunity.

The implication being that he will be deterred from using CW again. But will that be the outcome? We don’t know. Maybe he’ll use them more often but on a much more limited scale. Maybe there will become an even greater incentive for others to seize and use CW in the hope that the U.S. can be dragged even deeper into the conflict.

This operation will send a signal to tyrants around the world that the international community is willing to take any necessary action in the defense of international law.

The problem is, international law — as far as I’m aware — doesn’t include provisions for punitive military strikes without the authorization of the UNSC. All the U.S. will be demonstrating is that it retains its long-standing view of itself as the world’s policeman. That won’t defend international law — it will merely show that America’s imperialistic tendencies have yet to diminish.

But perhaps even more disturbing than any prediction, Obama may attempt to sell his chosen course of action on the basis of necessity — that even if no one has any idea where this might lead, the President of the United States found himself with no choice but to launch an attack.

We had no choice is always a lie and a cop out. It represents an effort on the part of decision-makers to conceal the manner in which they make their choices. And it represents a refusal to accept responsibility for the consequences of those choices.

Once again the “something must be done” brigade has taken charge. The cruise missiles being readied for strikes against targets unspecified in Syria will carry the message of “accountability.”

CBS News reports:

There was no debate at the Saturday meeting [of President Obama’s national security team] that a military response is necessary. Obama ordered up legal justifications for a military strike, should he order one, outside of the United Nations Security Council. That process is well underway, and particular emphasis is being placed on alleged violations of the Geneva Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention.

And the chances that those legal justifications might not be found? Zero. (It’s worth noting that Syria, like Israel, is not a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention.)

An American intelligence official told Foreign Policy the other day that this was — and presumably remains — the U.S. position on Syria: “As long as they keep body count at a certain level, we won’t do anything.”

That “certain level” presumably meant a relative level. No doubt that level was never going to be specified but from what one can infer from the historical record it meant that if the daily death toll remained in the dozens to low hundreds and Syrians were being killed by conventional weapons, then whatever the absolute body count — be it 100,000 or 200,000 or even 1,000,000 — the United States would do nothing.

With the use of chemical weapons, it appears that Bashar al-Assad has crossed the threshold of an acceptable number of dead and method of killing and so the U.S. and its allies are ready to launch cruise missiles — armed of course with conventional warheads — to impose some form of accountability on the Syrian regime.

The killing can continue, but the further use of chemical weapons is forbidden. Syrians will soon be able to sleep somewhat more comfortably (so long as they don’t get killed by U.S. cruise missiles), reassured that they are less at risk of dying from asphyxiation but still at risk of getting blown up or buried under rubble as their homes are destroyed under artillery fire.

Obama et al can claim they sent a message without having thrust their respective countries directly into another war. Or to be more precise that the West will have only made a cameo appearance in the war in Syria. Widespread public opposition to military intervention will most likely be sufficiently placated by witnessing that direct intervention turned out to be brief.

Indeed, as the cruise missile message is currently being crafted, the focus is on punishment, not intervention.

As the Associated Press reports:

The international community appeared to be considering action that would punish Assad for deploying deadly gases, not sweeping measures aimed at ousting the Syrian leader or strengthening rebel forces. The focus of the internal debate underscores the scant international appetite for a large-scale deployment of forces in Syria and the limited number of other options that could significantly change the trajectory of the conflict.

“We continue to believe that there’s no military solution here that’s good for the people, and that the best path forward is a political solution,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said. “This is about the violation of an international norm against the use of chemical weapons and how we should respond to that.”

Bashar al-Assad, having been forcibly instructed in the international norms that cannot be violated will presumably continue engaging in those actions that were normal before last week’s chemical attacks and have occurred without interruption every day since: 148 people killed today, 80 on Sunday, 114 on Saturday, 86 on Friday, 115 on Thursday — the kinds of death toll that Western governments and the populations they represent can comfortably ignore.

Yes, you read that right: The dehumanizing effect of opposing war. Say what?

A vast amount has been written on the dehumanizing effects of war — essays, commentary, treatises and works of literature many of which deserve to be required reading in every school and college around the world.

Yet the dehumanizing effect of opposing war is a subject on which I haven’t I’ve read a single word.

But how could opposing war be dehumanizing? Isn’t opposition to war one of the most humanitarian of expressions?

Certainly it should be, yet here is where such opposition frequently deviates away from its humanitarian roots: opposition to war morphs into opposition to war makers.

Once the focus becomes the war makers — the governments, the corporate interests, the political lobbies, the opinion makers and so forth — then it becomes possible to view something like the chemical attacks in Damascus as some kind of manufactured event.

Having made that shift, it then becomes that much easier to become emotionally disengaged.

Here’s a small boy struggling for his life:

Do you wonder whether this has been ‘faked’? Are you afraid that the propagation of videos of this type is happening purely for the purposes of political manipulation? Do you think that this kind of suffering reveals something about the barbaric nature of the Middle East? Do you feel that Americans are being coerced into giving attention to an issue that should not involve Americans?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you might want to consider whether you are suffering from the dehumanizing effect of opposing war.

The other day in response to an op-ed on the chemical attack in Damascus, someone wrote a comment on this site which included this:

I do not think any Western government has any moral standing to say anything about the killing of citizens given its own view on killing its own citizens. I’m appalled by the whole mess and the West’s economic and ideological entanglement and the simpering nonsense feed [sic] to the public by the elite media outlets. I just want to stick my head in the ground and not think or know anything about the snafu that is our Western vision, just now, of international affairs.

There is a disarming level of honesty and sense of frustration in anyone admitting that they would prefer to remain ignorant. But to object to the hypocrisy of Western governments does not require that we prevent ourselves from having a human reaction to the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Just because Barack Obama and David Cameron make sanctimonious statements about the use of chemical weapons being intolerable doesn’t mean that we should do the reverse.

If we do that — if we come to regard the slaughter of thousands as somehow inconsequential — it’s time to ask whether our opposition to war is truly that or whether it’s merely a desire that war not intrude on our lives, eat up our tax dollars, and fill our TV screens.

Has opposition to war been reduced to nothing more than a desire that it would go away?

(The videos in this post came from Joanna Paraszczuk’s latest post at EA WorldView.)

A report in The Independent yesterday included this line in reference to a GCHQ project (the construction of a major surveillance center in the Middle East):

Information about the project was contained in 50,000 GCHQ documents that Mr Snowden downloaded during 2012.

Since Edward Snowden issued a statement making it clear that he was not a source for this report, the claim that he obtained 50,000 GCHQ documents (a claim that has not previously been reported) begs two questions:

1. Who is the source of this claim?
2. Is the claim factually correct?

Given that the report says nothing whatsoever about its sourcing, but does include, “The Government claims…,” we can at least conclude that The Independent‘s reporters were speaking to British government officials, most likely inside GCHQ itself.

So how would GCHQ “know” that Snowden downloaded 50,000 GCHQ documents? It’s possible that David Miranda was carrying the whole trove of leaked documents on the laptop that was confiscated from him by British police when he detained in Heathrow airport last weekend. But I’m inclined to doubt that these documents are now being carried around anywhere by anyone unless that is absolutely necessary.

Back in July, Bloomberg reported that NSA chief Keith Alexander “said the NSA has determined which files Snowden took and said they amounted to a lot of information, though he wouldn’t say how much.”

So, the NSA must have informed GCHQ. Right? Not so fast.

The Associated Press now reports:

The U.S. government’s efforts to determine which highly classified materials leaker Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency have been frustrated by Snowden’s sophisticated efforts to cover his digital trail by deleting or bypassing electronic logs, government officials told The Associated Press. Such logs would have showed what information Snowden viewed or downloaded.

The government’s forensic investigation is wrestling with Snowden’s apparent ability to defeat safeguards established to monitor and deter people looking at information without proper permission, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the sensitive developments publicly.

And those 50,000 documents? That’s probably GCHQ fishing for information, feeding a line to a journalist who doesn’t care too much whether it’s true, and then waiting to see whether Glenn Greenwald or Snowden bites the bait and divulges more information about what documents did or did not get leaked.

When a newspaper report appears with four names in the byline, it’s either an indication that the depth of the reporting required a team, or perhaps the opposite — that the report was so suspect, no one person was willing to take responsibility.

Kim Sengupta’s lack of confidence in his own reporting in an “exclusive” for The Independent is evident in the fact that he felt it needed to be backed up with an op-ed. The op-ed itself, while filled judiciously with caveats, amounts to a resounding expression of confidence in the work of Britain’s intelligence services, its “highly professional” employees and their ability to protect the British people “against the ravages of terrorism.”

That GCHQ — Britain’s arm of the NSA which operates nominally under the authority of the British government — having built a massive surveillance center in the Middle East presents no moral dilemmas, according to Sengupta.

People would expect them to do so in a region enmeshed in so much turmoil, which had been the source, at times, of bombings in this country.

By “people”, Sengupta presumably means British people — not the people whose communications are being monitored. The fact that this center has been built with the consent of a host government that most likely is unelected — that presents no moral dilemmas? How about this one: that such a government will expect strong support from the UK and the U.S. if threatened by a homegrown democracy movement? Providing land for a massive GCHQ operation sounds like the kind of insurance policy that many an Arab autocrat would view as a sound investment.

Given that Sengupta positions himself as a fairly unambiguous cheerleader for GCHQ, why would he now being exposing some of its most sensitive operations? The answer, as far as I can tell, is that this is simply a case of: you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

Intelligence sources provided The Independent with enough details for the paper to stitch together an exclusive and in return the paper launched an insidious multipronged attack on The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden. The Guardian is presented as kowtowing to the demands of the British government, Greenwald as a potential threat to Britain’s national security, and Snowden as the purveyor of information that could put lives at risk — and all of this comes right at the time that Scotland Yard is conducting a “terrorism investigation into material found on the computer of David Miranda,” Greenwald’s partner.

At a time when journalism itself is under threat, it might not be surprising yet it is nevertheless depressing that there are so many journalists willing to sell out their own profession.

Does Bashar al-Assad check his approval ratings? Probably not. But that’s no reason to believe that he or his government lack interest in their public image. Indeed, Assad probably pays as much attention to how he is perceived in New York and Washington, as he is in Homs or Alleppo, which is not to say he hopes to make any new American friends but rather that he has a keen interest in the extent to which he can rely on American indifference.

Having already probed the international political and media environment with some exploratory ‘minor’ use of chemical weapons and triggered no major international public or political outcry, the Syrians have likely been looking for the most propitious moment to escalate. As much as people refer to the use of chemical weapons as ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unconscionable,’ the regime quite likely sees this class of weapons as useful in several ways.

Firstly, they are very effective as instruments of terror. To avoid a cloud of dispersing poisonous gas is far more difficult than avoiding artillery fire. Since there’s really no way to take cover, the incentive to flee will be that much higher.

Secondly, if pockets of resistance can be cleared without destroying most of the physical infrastructure, then in a city such as Damascus it will be that much easier for the regime to fool itself into believing that it is avoiding destroying the city.

So, the primary obstacles to the use of chemical weapons are international law and public opinion. International law has little power if the United Nations Security Council does nothing to promote its enforcement, and in the case of Syria there is no consensus among the UNSC’s veto-wielding members.

That leaves the limited effect that public opinion can have on shaping the actions of individual governments.

If Assad wanted to run a test to see what kind of reaction the slaughter of hundreds more of his citizens might have in a world that already seems largely indifferent to the deaths of over 100,000 people, he couldn’t have been better served than he was by General Sisi’s operations in Cairo last week in which hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood protesters were gunned down.

The U.S. cancelled military maneuvers that were due to take place with their Egyptian counterparts next month. A few generals won’t be sharing cocktails together. As for the press reaction, predictably the casualties weren’t ‘Egyptians’ — they were ‘Islamists’ who, we are often led to believe, have a predilection for martyrdom.

For Assad, the signals from Cairo were all positive. Add to that America’s overriding preoccupation with the actions of the NSA and now the sentencing of Bradley Manning, and all of Assad’s advisers must have agreed that this week looked the perfect week to fire off some chemical weapons. A front-page story, but just a one-day story, was probably the assessment.

The New York Times turns out to be have been the only major U.S. newspaper that made this its lead story, yet cautious as ever it played down the casualty size and underlined the uncertainty about the causes of death: “Scores Killed in Syria, With Signs of Chemical War” and “Images of Death, but No Proof of Cause.”

The Washington Post went with “Syrian regime accused of chemical attack” — no mention of the number of casualties and the lead story was on the NSA. Likewise the Los Angeles Times kept numbers out of its headline: “Syrian rebels allege new gas attack.”

USA Today said: “Rebels say chemical attack kills hundreds” — again this ran beneath the lead on the NSA.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution consigned the story to page two.

Assad’s media advisers must be reporting back to their president: Mission accomplished. As we expected, the U.S. government doesn’t care too much about what we do and the American people care even less. The really big news today is that a young American soldier changed his name.

More sarin is on the way.

Update: As Brian Whitaker noted, there is another element in the timing of this attack: it comes on the one-year anniversary of Obama laying down his ‘red line’ on the use or even movement of chemical weapons.

Three weeks ago, the mild-mannered New York Times reporter, James Risen, nailed Jeffrey — Snowden’s a criminal — Toobin, when Risen said:

“That’s the thing I don’t understand about the climate in Washington these days, is that people want to have debates on television and elsewhere, but then you want to throw the people who start the debates in jail.”

Having been left speechless, Toobin seems to have has spent the last three weeks struggling to come up with a come back.

This is what he came up with:

The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy led directly to the passage of a historic law, the Gun Control Act of 1968. Does that change your view of the assassinations? Should we be grateful for the deaths of these two men?

Of course not. That’s lunatic logic. But the same reasoning is now being applied to the actions of Edward Snowden. Yes, the thinking goes, Snowden may have violated the law, but the outcome has been so worthwhile.

Say what? James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan were advocates of gun control? That’s the unintended lunatic logic in Toobin’s reasoning.

Somehow I doubt that Toobin’s capacity to reason is that impaired. His purpose, much more likely, is to make an emotive argument based not on reason, but insinuation. Having already committed himself to the position that Snowden is a criminal, Toobin now wants to up the ante by placing him on a par with infamous assassins.

For Toobin, Snowden’s unforgivable crime was that he stepped out of line. The man who Toobin views with utter contempt is a “thirty-year-old self-appointed arbiter of propriety [who] decided to break the law and disclose what he had sworn to protect. That judgment — in my view — was not Snowden’s to make.” In other words, Snowden’s job was to do as he was told and not have the temerity to question the judgement of his superiors. Snowden’s sole responsibility was to follow his orders, without question.

If Toobin actually believes that the issue at stake here is one of propriety, then he’s even more confused than he already appears.

A state that engages in mass surveillance on its own population, is not merely being intrusive. Those of us who object to the NSA gathering all our personal information are not objecting because we think the NSA is being rude. Information is power and the more information the government acquires, the more likely it becomes that the power which flows from this information will sooner or later be abused.

In a final desperate swipe, Toobin suggests that Snowden can hardly be imagined to have stayed in Hong Kong and now taken up temporary residence in Russia without either the Chinese government or the Russian government gathering the classified information in his possession. They surely snuck into his room and copied his hard drive while he was asleep.

However much Snowden might lack the kind of stature for which Toobin reserves his respect, the former NSA contractor is an expert on one issue about which Toobin knows nothing: cyber security. Snowden knew how to gather the intelligence and how to extract it. I have little doubt in his ability to now maintain its security.

And what Toobin is forgetting, through his fixation on trying to undo his own embarrassment, is that Russia and China do actually have other interests at stake. Hong Kong was only too pleased to be relieved of its Snowden problem by seeing his departure, and Russia’s reluctance to take on the burden was made only too obvious by its insistence that Snowden, while he remained in Moscow airports transit lounge, was not in Russia.

Maybe it’s time for Jeffrey Toobin to follow Snowden’s lead and go into hiding for a while.

When the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, published an op-ed yesterday on the arrest of Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda at Heathrow airport on Sunday, Rusbridger waited until paragraph nine before describing the heavy-handed response of the British government to the Snowden leaks.

That the paper would be under pressure from the highest levels of government to shut down the story and that GCHQ goons would oversee the destruction of hard drives in The Guardian’s basement, would surely have warranted detailed coverage at the time of these events, accompanied by at least one strongly-worded editorial. So why did the paper’s editor wait two months to say anything, and why did he partially bury the story by reporting on it in the middle of the outcry following Miranda’s detention?

The short answer is: I don’t know. But the likely explanation is that The Guardian did not believe it was at liberty to disclose the latest example of Britain’s operation as a police state.

Prior to the incidents Rusbridger recounted, the Ministry of Defence had already moved to silence the press on June 7 by issuing a DA-Notice.

This is Britain’s Orwellian system of “guided media self-regulation”. Secret notices are issued advising newspaper editors when they should keep their mouths shut through a “voluntary” system which, if not followed, places an editor at risk of prosecution. It’s a bit like the friendly advice a Mafia enforcer gives someone on how to avoid getting his kneecaps shattered.

In the age of the internet, censorship is clearly an anachronism, but the fact that information might be widely available outside the UK is not in the eyes of the Ministry of Defence a justification for the same information to be disseminated further by British publications. The DA-Notice System cryptically advises: “just because something is on a foreign website, it does not necessarily mean that it has immediately been widely seen.” Which seems to imply, for instance, that just because a story appears in the New York Times, that doesn’t justify The Guardian covering it too.

On June 7, Jeff Stein reported:

The June 7 “DA-Notice,” or Defence Advisory Notice, which was itself confidential, accepted that the U.S. National Security Agency was sharing information gleaned from the surveillance programs with its British counterparts, and said UK intelligence organizations were worried about revelations of their own roles in the programs.

“There have been a number of articles recently in connection with some of the ways in which the UK Intelligence Services obtain information from foreign sources,” said the notice issued by the Defence Advisory Committee, a joint body with media organizations.

“Although none of these recent articles has contravened any of the guidelines contained within the Defence Advisory Notice System, the intelligence services are concerned that further developments of this same theme may begin to jeopardize both national security and possibly UK personnel,” it said.

The notice itself was marked “Private and Confidential: Not for publication, broadcast or use on social media.”

It warned British media not to publish information on “specific covert operations, sources and methods of the security services, SIS and GCHQ [the NSA’s British counterpart], Defence Intelligence Units, Special Forces and those involved with them, the application of those methods, including the interception of communications and their targets; the same applies to those engaged on counter-terrorist operations.”

British news organizations are concerned about the tenor of the advance warning.

“They’re sending out a notice saying nothing’s been published that damages national security but we’re concerned the press might (and on the back of developments in the US, no less),” said a media source.

The worry is that British authorities may be preparing to pursue reporters through the courts if they publish details on UK participation in the massive US electronic surveillance programs, code-named “PRISM” and “BLARNEY,” according to a report in The Washington Post.

At Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum writes:

Prior restraint is the nuclear option in government relations with the press and unfortunately, the British don’t have a First Amendment. But Rusbridger, having gone through the fire with Wikileaks, was prepared for that. The paper’s journalism is mostly being done in New York and the Snowden documents are dispersed in other countries.

Combine Rusbridger’s revelations with news of the detention of Greenwald’s partner David Miranda by UK authorities and you have a DEFCON 2 journalism event.

Miranda was serving as a human passenger pigeon, shuttling encrypted files on USB drives between filmmaker Laura Poitras and Greenwald because, as the whole world now knows, the Internet is fully bugged by the US and UK governments. So the UK, using an anti-terrorism statute, arrested Miranda on arrival at Heathrow, interrogated him for 9 hours, threatened to arrest him, and took his stuff. The war on whistleblowers has now escalated to disrupting journalists’ communications.

In light of Rusbridger’s disclosures, it’s even clearer that the detention of Miranda is part of an attack on American journalists authorized at the highest levels of the British government, and it’s an attack that is at the very least implicitly backed by the Obama administration.