Edward Snowden - Everything Going Great: Bad Faith, Worse News and Julian Assange
Gospel, a word from Old English, is a compound that means “good news.” And it’s gospel that’s been in short-supply as we head into the Christmas season. Whenever this fact gets me down, I remember that finding evil, malfeasance, and even suffering in the headlines is just a sign that the press is doing its job. I don’t think any of us wants to wake up in the morning and read “Everything Going Great!” over our egg-nog-spiked chai — though even if we do, we know a headline like that is just an indication of all that's unreported.
Coming into this
Christmas season, I find myself beset by odd religious yearnings—I say odd,
because I’m not much of a believer, not in God, not in governments, not in
institutions generally. I try to save my faith for people and principles, but
that can lead to some lean years in the slaking of spiritual thirst. I can find
a way to attribute my stirrings to the ritualism of Covid — the ablutions of
sanitizing and masking, the penitent isolation, the what-does-it-all-mean? that
comes from confronting powerlessness and the caprice of illness — but a more
convincing source might be the novelty of parenthood: religion being a stand-in
for tradition in general, I ask myself, what am I going to leave my child? What
intellectual and emotional inheritance?
Along with “good
news,” I’ve been thinking of “bad faith,” a phrase that always reminds me of the Thomas
Pynchon joke, wherein everything bad becomes a German spa: Bad Kissingen, Bad
Kreuznach, Baden-Baden… Bad Karma.
I’d known the phrase
mostly through its legal vintage, but I’d started noticing it increasingly
applied to politics during the Bush-Obama story arcs: Republicans were always
“negotiating in bad faith,” or “operating in bad faith,” and it only got worse
after that — the phrase only became more prevalent once Trump took office. So I
was surprised to find that “bad faith” has roots far deeper than our common
law: male fides, from the Latin. Its usage, which is fascinating to
explore, was originally literal: it was used to characterize someone who was
practicing the wrong religion. From there it departed into Whitmanesque —
but way-pre-Whitmanesque — contradiction. Someone who was “in bad faith” was
divided against themselves; they were of two hearts, or two minds, or more. In
this sense, even Jesus might be said to have been in bad faith, being part
human and part divine.
I’m deeply taken by
the generosity of this early definition: there’s a sympathy there — a sympathy
with “a house divided against itself” — that’s utterly lacking in the
contemporary sense, wherein “bad faith” is purposeful malfeasance. This
remains, for me at least, a compelling history to decode: how a phrase that
roughly meant “unknowingly lying to one’s self” came to roughly mean “knowingly
lying to others.”
I’m sure we all have
our favorite (least-favorite) examples of this duplicitous (or multiplicitous) practice — this
condition that only later became a practice — but for me, the bad-faith
category that takes the fruitcake has always been the bureaucratic legalism
most familiar to me. Perhaps a better way to put it would be: those situations
where law opposes justice.
You know this
phenomenon well, I’m sure: the health insurance rep or DMV clerk who says “my
hands are tied,” the police officer or soldier who unironically invokes some of
the most evil law-enforcement of last century when they shrug and say, “I got
my orders, bud,” or even those who go on TV to suggest whistleblowers might be
protected, if only they would submit themselves to “proper channels,” which is
code for standing on a very particular part of the floor suspended above a tank
labeled: DANGER! PIRANHAS.
It was Jesus who
begged forgiveness for his crucifiers by saying, “Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do,” but these excruciating practitioners of bad faith
invert the formula: they know exactly what they do, and yet they do it. I
wonder if they can even forgive themselves.
This Christmas may
well be the last that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will
spend outside US custody. On December 10, the British High Court ruled in favor
of extraditing Assange to the United States, where he will be prosecuted under
the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information. It is clear to me that
the charges against Assange are both baseless and dangerous, in unequal measure
— baseless in Assange’s personal case, and dangerous to all. In seeking to
prosecute Assange, the US government is purporting to extend its sovereignty to
the global stage and hold foreign publishers accountable to US secrecy laws. By
doing so, the US government will be establishing a precedent for prosecuting
all news organization everywhere — all journalists in every country — who rely
on classified documents to report on, for example, US war crimes, or the US
drone program, or any other governmental or military or intelligence activity
that the State Department, or the CIA, or the NSA, would rather keep locked
away in the classified dark, far from public view, and even from Congressional
oversight.
I agree with my
friends (and lawyers) at the ACLU: the US government’s indictment of Assange
amounts to the criminalization of investigative journalism. And I agree with
myriad friends (and lawyers) throughout the world that at the core of this
criminalization is a cruel and unsual paradox: namely, the fact that many of
the activities that the US government would rather hush up are perpetrated in
foreign countries, whose journalism will now be answerable to the US court
system. And the precedent established here will be exploited by all manner of
authoritarian leaders across the globe. What will be the State Department’s
response when the Republic of Iran demands the extradition of New York
Times reporters for violating Iran’s secrecy laws? How will the United
Kingdom respond when Viktor Orban or Recep Erdogan seeks the extradition
of Guardian reporters? The point is not that the U.S. or U.K
would ever comply with those demands — of course they wouldn’t — but that they
would lack any principled basis for their refusals.
The U.S. attempts to
distinguish Assange’s conduct from that of more mainstream journalism by
characterizing it as a “conspiracy.” But what does that even mean in this
context? Does it mean encouraging someone to uncover information (which is
something done every day by the editors who work for Wikileaks’ old
partners, The New York Times and The Guardian)? Or
does it mean giving someone the tools and techniques to uncover that
information (which, depending on the tools and techniques involved, can also be
construed as a typical part of an editor’s job)? The truth is that all national
security investigative journalism can be branded a conspiracy: the whole point
of the enterprise is for journalists to persuade sources to violate the law in
the public interest. And insisting that Assange is somehow “not a journalist” does nothing to take the teeth out of
this precedent when the activities for which he’s been charged are
indistinguishable from the activities that our most decorated investigative
journalists routinely engage in.
If you’ve been tuning
into the bad news this past week, you’ve certainly encountered a version of
precisely this question, is Assange an X or a journalist? In this inane formula
X can be anything: hacktivist, terrorist, lizard person. It doesn’t matter what
noun you put into this MadLibs, because the entire exercise is pointless.
This kind of sincere,
credulous, smug, and gloating inquiry is just the most recent,
just-in-time-for-Christmas, example of in-the-flesh-and-in-the-word bad faith, presented by media
professionals who are never in worse faith than when they
report on — or pass judgment on — other media.
Obfuscation,
withholding, meaning-manipulation, meaning-denial — these are just some of the
ways in which some journalists, and not just American journalists, have
conspired, yes, conspired to convict Assange in absentia, and, by extension, to
convict their own profession — to convict themselves. Or maybe I shouldn’t be
calling the gelled automatons on Fox, or Bill Maher, “journalists,” because how
often have they done the hard shoe-leather work of cultivating a source, or
protecting a source’s identity, or communicating securely with a source, or of
storing a source's sensitive material securely? All of those activities
comprise the soul of good journalism, and yet those are precisely the
activities the US government has just sought to redefine as acts of heinous
criminal conspiracy.
Two-hearted,
two-minded creatures: the media is full of them. And too many have been content
to accept the US government’s determination that what should properly be the
highest purpose of the media — the uncovering of truth, in the face of attempts
to hide it — is suddenly in doubt and quite possibly illegal.
That chill in the air
this Christmas season? If Assange’s prosecution is allowed to continue, it will
become a freeze.
Bundle up.
https://www.rsn.org/001/everything-going-great-bad-faith-worse-news-and-julian-assange.html
Jesus
sermon from the Rev. Chris Hedges
Chris
Hedges: The Collective Suicide Machine
Chris Hedges: Imploding the myth of
Israel
Seamus Heaney’s Advice to the Young
Alexandre Koyré The Political Function of the Modern
Lie
