Tom Ricks has a growing suspicion that Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden are up to something.
On Saturday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter posed a question to Greenwald on Twitter.
“Glenn, any comments from you or Edward Snowden on the recent round of media shutdowns in Russia?” Ricks asked.
After initially referring Ricks to Snowden’s representative at the ACLU, Greenwald asked Ricks if he had any comment on “Peruvian police corruption,” “corporate waste dumping in E Africa,” or a U.S. drone strike from last year that killed 13 people en route to a wedding party in Yemen.
Sure, Ricks said, he’d be “happy to comment,” but not before he saw Greenwald denounce Vladmir Putin “and his crackdown.”
The next day, after he evidently didn’t get the response from Greenwald that he was looking for, Ricks took to Twitter to denounce “Peruvian police corruption and US drones that kill innocents.”
“Now [your] turn to discuss Putin,” Ricks said to Greenwald.
By Monday morning, the silence had distressed Ricks so much that he was ready to suggest a pretty harsh criticism of both Greenwald and Snowden.
The clock strikes 13: The longer @ggreenwald and Snowden remain silent on events in Ukraine, the more I suspect their previous motives.
— tom ricks (@tomricks1) March 17, 2014
All of this is a far cry from where Ricks stood in January, when he wrote that he was beginning to “edge toward Snowden.” Those days, apparently, are over.
In a post published Monday on his blog, Ricks once again seemed to insinuate that Greenwald and Snowden are in cahoots with the Russians.
“Bottom line: I am no longer going soft on Greenwald and Snowden,” he wrote. “In fact, rather the opposite, I am beginning to believe the worst about them. If they acting on moral beliefs, now would be the time for both of them to speak out against Putin. It could have a great impact, I think.”
In response to the criticism, Greenwald directed TPM to a quote from Noam Chomsky, who said that his “own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state.”
“Tom Ricks hasn’t condemned corporate waste dumping in East Africa; by his standards, this means he’s probably in cahoots with the polluters and profiteering off of it,” Greenwald said in an email.
Ricks told TPM in an email that his “exchange with Greenwald speaks for itself.”
This post has been updated.
