When Edward Snowden decided he wanted to release details about the NSA's intelligence operations to the public, he reached out to Laura Poitras, a 49-year-old film maker and political activist opposed to the war on terror. As the Washington Post noted on Monday, Poitras had "the odd distinction of sharing a byline in The Washington Post and in London’s Guardian newspaper last week on two blockbuster stories."
Poitras said in an interview on Monday with Salon that Snowden contacted her in particular because he had learned that she has been interrogated at the U.S. border dozens of times by the Department of Homeland Security. "[Snowden] told me he’d contacted me because my border harassment meant that I’d been a person who had been selected," Poitras told Salon. "To be selected — and he went through a whole litany of things — means that everything you do, every friend you have, every purchase you make, every street you cross means you’re being watched. 'You probably don’t like how this system works, I think you can tell the story.' … Of course I was suspicious, I worried that it was entrapment, it’s crazy, all the normal responses you have to someone reaching out making, claims."
Glenn Greenwald, Poitras's co-author for the The Guardian's NSA story, wrote a story about Poitras's border interrogations in April 2012. "With no oversight or legal framework whatsoever, the Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them and questions them at the airport, often for hours, when they return to the U.S. after an international trip," Greenwald wrote. Poitras was one of these individuals who was interrogatd by DHS officials "at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke" more than 40 times since the 2006 release of her Iraq war documentary, My Country, My Country. In 2010, Poitras released another documentary about Osama bin Laden's former bodyguard and driver, "two Yemenis caught up in America’s War on Terror," in the words of Glenn Greenwald.
Greenwald declared that the U.S. government had created a "climate of fear" for an "incredibly accomplished journalist and filmmaker who has never been accused, let alone convicted, of any wrongdoing whatsoever."
"It’s hard to overstate how oppressive it is for the U.S. Government to be able to target journalists, film-makers and activists and, without a shred of suspicion of wrongdoing," Greenwald wrote. "The ongoing, and escalating, treatment of Laura Poitras is a testament to how severe that abuse is."
But perhaps it isn't such a mystery why the U.S. government might want to question Poitras if you simply crack open John R. Bruning's 2006 book, The Devil's Sandbox: With the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry at War in Iraq. Contary to Greenwald's claim that Poitras has never been accused of any wrongdoing, Devil's Sandbox details the explosive allegation that Poitras had foreknowledge of a November 20, 2004 ambush of U.S. troops but did nothing to warn them.
Brandon Ditto led the platoon that came under fire that day. Speaking Tuesday evening by phone with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Ditto said it seemed that Poitras "had pre-knowledge" of the ambush. He recalled the events he witnessed that day, confirming the details described in Devil's Sandbox.
During a patrol of Adhamiya early in the morning of November 20, two soldiers in Ditto's platoon noticed a woman standing on a rooftop next to a man while holding a camera. They found that very odd. "Usually when you see someone planted on a rooftop with a camera, they're waiting for something, and right after that is when we got ambushed just down the road," Ditto told me Tuesday night. "So it seems that she had pre-knowledge that our convoy, or our patrol, was going to get hit."
"We took multiple casualties," Ditto said. "Things kind of erupted."