Can you provide a link to the story where this happened or give a time or place? We have to look at the specifics in order to judge whether a story is in the public interest, whether the reporting was endangering the lives of US personnel, and whether this reporting was harming the ability of the military to carry out its operations.
Where does Barton Gellman “acknowledge the damage that may be done by his reporting”? I don’t see that in the text of the article. What I see is a journalist who interviewed Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake to get the evidence that the US government was violating the 4th Amendment rights of millions of Americans. What is the “shitty and irresponsible behavior” by Gellman? From what I can see, Gellman is performing a public service that is vital for democratic oversight of the government.
There is always a balance between the need for secrecy of operations and the need for the public to know, but Gellman’s reporting was clearly in the public interest as far as I can tell.
If we have to find that proper balance between secrecy and informing the public, it is generally better to err on the side of informing the public.
Let me give you a couple examples of when not reporting on secret government operations actually caused more harm than good. When the CIA overthrew the governments of Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) and then tried to do it in Cuba in 1961, there was not a robust debate in American civil society about whether the CIA should be violating international law by overthrowing foreign governments, because the CIA’s role was poorly reported in the US press at the time. The CIA’s action in Iran overthrew a democratically elected government in order to place a brutal dictator in power and created a wave of anti-American sentiment that led to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which is why Iran has been an enemy of the US ever since. The CIA’s overthrow of democracy in Guatemala led to 32 years of dictatorship and a brutal civil war in the 1980s that killed 200,000 people and destroyed 400 Maya villages. There are roughly 1 million Guatemalans living in the US today, partly because the US refused to allow the government of Jacobo Arbenz to carry out land reform and social reforms in the 1950s that would have solved its social and economic conflicts and prevented the subsequent civil war. In contrast, the US didn’t repress the reforms of Costa Rica in the 1950s, which is part of the reason why Costa Rica is a well functioning country today, whereas Guatemala is riddled with social and economic problems. Guatemala City is the only Latin American city that I ever visited where everyone gets off the streets in the center of the city by 7pm due to fear of the gangs at night.
Unlike the CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala, the US press did some reporting beforehand on the US efforts to overthrow Castro. However, the American press failed to report that Eisenhower authorized in August 1960 that $13 million be spent to overthrow Cuba’s government. There were reports in the US press about Cuban exiles who were training in Guatemala to invade Cuba, but Americans didn’t know the details. Turner Catledge, the managing editor at the New York Times decided to suppress many of the details about the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, in an article written by Tad Szulc on April 7, 1961. He deleted from the article the fact that it was the CIA which was financing and training the invasion force and he deleted that the invasion was expected to happen on April 18. He changed the article from half of the front page (4 out of 8 columns) to just one column. Reporters and staff at the NYT argued with Catledge, but he said his "reasons were those of national security, national interest and, above all, concern for the safety of the men who were preparing to offer their lives on the beaches of Cuba.”
The NYT wasn’t going to tell the Cuban government anything that it didn’t already know, since it had spies among the Cuban exiles being trained in Guatemala. The details of the invasion were an open secret in Miami and Guatemala, which is why Szulc stumbled so easily onto the story during a brief stop in Miami. The Nation and the NYT had already reported in January that there were Cuban exiles training in Guatemala in order to invade Cuba, so Szulc’s article with the details deleted did not add anything new. Two weeks after the Bay of Pigs invasion failed, JFK called a meeting with the editors of the major newspapers and berated them for disclosing government security information, but when Catledge pointed out that he hadn’t published anything new that wasn’t already published by The Nation, JFK responded, "But it wasn’t news until it appeared in The Times.” The reality was that JFK was not trying to keep the news from the Cubans, but from the American people, because he didn’t want Americans to discuss and question whether their government should be overthrowing the Cuban government. Then, JFK said something even more revealing to Catledge: “Maybe if you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.” The implication is that the Kennedy administration would have cancelled or changed the invasion plan if the NYT had reported the details.
By not publishing the details in the name of national security, the NYT allowed a poorly-planned invasion to go forward, where 8 Americans and roughly 265 Cubans lost their lives. More importantly, the invasion convinced Castro that the only way to survive was to openly put Soviet military installations on the island to deter another US invasion, which ultimately led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In other words, the decision to not publish the details of the invasion, led to an event that threatened the lives of millions of people around the planet. By capturing the invading force at the Bay of Pigs, Castro garnered more support and prestige among Cubans, and he gained a rhetorical tool to justify his dictatorship, because everything his regime did after the Bay of Pigs was deemed necessary to protect Cubans from the American empire.
What the CIA operations in Iran, Guatemala and Cuba show is that we shouldn’t automatically assume that the press shouldn’t report on secret government operations. If there had been proper reporting in these 3 cases, there would have probably been a better outcome not only for the people of Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba, but arguably for Americans as well. Iran would have been a democracy in the MiddleEast and with the money from its nationalized oil would have investing in social programs. Guatemala would have avoided 32 of dictatorship and a civil war that lasted till 1996, and have used social reforms and land reform to make a better society. Cuba would have been less tied to the USSR and we could have avoided the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This pattern continues to the present day. The US is currently carrying out wars in 8 countries in the MiddleEast, and most Americans know almost nothing about what US troops are doing in those countries due to the lack of adequate reporting. The US government was involved in coups in Haiti (1991), Haiti (2004), and Honduras (2009), plus attempted coups in Venezuela in 2002 and 2003, but these coups got very little press coverage in the US and there was no robust debate in American civil society about whether the US government should be overthrowing Latin American governments. When Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump demonized Honduran refugees, most Americans had no idea that their government helped create the later refugee crisis by participating in the overthrow of the government of Mel Zelaya in 2009.
either way bluff or no bluff if he is correct then we’ve been trolled all along 