He called around to the various TV networks that employed Henry Kissinger as a commentator or analyst. Ted Koppel was the only one who would speak to him.
Hitchens wanted to know why ABC News was employing a commentator who advised that reporters be barred from covering events in Palestine.
It was the beginning of the first Intifada. Kissinger made a speech calling on Israel to close off the West Bank and Gaza, throw out all reporters, and begin slaughtering Palestinians.
Ted Koppel first tried to deny that Kissinger had actually advocated that, but Hitchens corrected him...I can't remember how Koppel finally weaseled out of it, how he justified Kissinger's continued employment.
And now we have Wikileaks. The American news media is outraged that it's being allowed to report on the news.
On Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald wrote:
On CNN, Wolf Blitzer was beside himself with rage over the fact that the US government had failed to keep all these things secret from him... Then - like the Good Journalist he is - Blitzer demanded assurances that the Government has taken the necessary steps to prevent him, the media generally and the citizenry from finding out any more secrets: "Do we know yet if they've [done] that fix? In other words, somebody right now who has top secret or secret security clearance can no longer download information onto a CD or a thumb drive? Has that been fixed already?" The central concern of Blitzer - one of our nation's most honored "journalists" - is making sure that nobody learns what the US Government is up to.
Now it's been revealed that the New York Times has reported the memo in Wikileaks which claims that Iran received long range missile from North Korea, missiles capable of attacking European capitals. But, at the request of the Obama administration, they did not report that Russia gave a detailed refutation of the claim. Russian Intelligence refuted the claim that Iran had the missiles or that they were interested in developing the capability to attack Europe.
The New York Times didn't get this information from Wikileaks---it got it from The Guardian newspaper in Britain.
So who is the New York Times hiding this information from? It's already been published in Britain and it's there on Wikileaks. None of this information is secret anymore---it's already been published outside the U.S. Only the American public is kept from knowing this.
In general, secrecy laws are aimed at keeping information from a country's own population, not from some foreign government.
In the 1980s, there was the case of the book Spycatcher. It revealed a number of secrets about British Intelligence, such as their plot to assassinate Nasser and their conspiracy with the CIA against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The book was banned in England. It was available everywhere else in the world, including Scotland. But it was banned in England. Newspapers were prosecuted for quoting from the book.
There were the classified human radiation experiments done in the United States during the cold war. Experiments where they exposed impoverished black cancer patients to radiation killed between eight and twenty people. These continued into the 1970s.
The stated reason for keeping the experiments secret is so the victims wouldn't be able to sue and to prevent public outcry against it. According to Wikipedia:
One of the doctors involved in the experiments, Robert Stone, was worried about litigation by the patients, so he only referred to them by their initials on the medical reports. He did this so that, in his words, "there will be no means by which the patients can ever connect themselves up with the report", in order to prevent "either adverse publicity or litigation"
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