(Newswire.net — June 16, 2015) — The Guardian’s Glen Greenwald who broke the story on documents leaked by Edward Snowden debunks the Sunday Times allegations that those documents exposed US and MI6 spy networks in Russia and China. Greenwald called the report a lie aimed to smear the whistleblower.
The Sunday Times cited a UK government source claiming that British agents in Russia and China had to be removed after Beijing and Moscow had gained access to Snowden’s top secret documents.
Greenwald is convinced that Snowden had no files when he fled to Moscow. He claims Snowden destroyed all copies after he handed them to the journalists.
“Snowden has said unequivocally that when he left Hong Kong, he took no files with him, having given them to the journalists with whom he was working, and then destroying his copy precisely so that he wouldn’t be vulnerable. How, then, could Russia have obtained Snowden’s files as the story claims… if he did not even have possession of them? The only way this smear works is if they claim Snowden lied, and that he did in fact have files with him after he left Hong Kong,” Greenwald said.
Calling the claims by the Sunday Times “an utter lie,” Greenwald debunked the newspaper’s claim that David Miranda had some 58,000 intelligence files on him when he was detained at Heathrow Airport after visiting Edward Snowden in Moscow.
“As of the time he was detained in Heathrow, David had never been to Moscow and had never met Snowden,” Greenwald claimed.
Calling the Sunday Times reporting “shoddy” and “primitive”, Greenwald points out that the newspaper “quietly deleted” the report, however, the printed version of still exists claiming a lie.
Finally, the Sunday Times quotes an anonymous government source claiming Snowden took 1.7 million documents. In reality, even NSA claims that it is impossible to determine the quantity of the documents Snowden may have downloaded.
“I don’t think anybody really knows what he actually took with him, because the way he did it, we don’t have an accurate way of counting,“ Keith Alexander former NSA chief said in an interview in 2014 with the Australian Financial Review.
The Guardian’s Greenwald claims he destroyed the Snowden’s files and he never seen anything in there naming active MI6 agents.”
“I’ve seen nothing in the region of 1 million documents in the Snowden archive, so I don’t know where that number has come from,” Greenwald said.