NEW YORK — The Washington Post and The Guardian on Monday won the Pulitzer Prize for public service, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, for their articles that undermined American security and made a large-scale terrorist atrocity all but inevitable, according to Rep. Peter King, Republican Congressman of New York.
The articles, based on National Security Agency documents leaked by the former government contractor Edward Snowden, were commended by the Pulitzer Board for “help[ing] the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security.” While the citation mentioned nothing about a desire to see Americans die in terrorist attacks or advance the cause of global Islamist jihad, Rep. King insisted that those were indeed the primary reasons for the award, as he told C-SPAN in an interview Tuesday.
“The Pulitzer Prize, The Post, The Guardian, all of them, they’re working for al-Qaeda, or at least they completely sympathize with what they’re doing, and that’s what this award is about,” insisted King. “It’s a little wink-nod: ‘Thanks for helping make the next terrorist atrocity happen.’ If I had my way, they wouldn’t even be in prison; they’d be on the business end of a drone missile.”
King has been an outspoken critic of media outlets that covered Snowden and the N.S.A. surveillance program favorably. In January, King criticized The New York Times for a pro-Snowden editorial, calling the 30-year-old whistleblower “a traitor or a defector or both,” and accused The Times of being an “accomplice.” King took to Twitter Monday after the awards were announced, saying, “Awarding the Pulitzer to Snowden enablers is a disgrace,” and later wrote, “No American should give Glenn Greenwald an award for anything.”
“All this talk about ‘civil liberties’, ‘unconstitutional overreach’, ‘Orwellian nightmare’—it’s all out of the Saul Alinsky playbook—or should I say the Glenn Greenwald playbook,” said King, a former chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. “Like Glenn Greenwald cares about American security. He’s British.”
King went on to insist that the press protections of the First Amendment “do not apply to traitors,” and demanded that the two papers and the journalists in question be the focus of a vigorous investigation.
“I call upon President Obama to use the full force of the American intelligence and law enforcement communities to investigate these fifth-column Mohammed-loving activists,” King declared. “Tap their phones, go through their trash cans, read their emails, harass them, use whatever methods necessary to let it be known that the American people do not tolerate being informed about what their government is doing. Guilty until proven innocent when it comes to traitors.
