On Saturday, Steve Clemons, foreign policy blogger and editor at large at The Atlantic, said in a series of tweets that he overheard four intelligence officials at Dulles airport say that both the reporter and the leaker in the NSA scandal should be "disappeared," the Huffington Post reported Saturday.
Alana Horowitz explained the term is "used to describe secret murders and abductions carried out by authoritarian governments."
"In Dulles UAL lounge listening to 4 US intel officials saying loudly leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should be disappeared recorded a bit," Clemons tweeted.
"Aren't u worried about getting disapeared by tweeting about it? (sic)" one person asked.
"Recent news stories suggest this might not be the best time to report on conversations that aren’t flattering to the administration (and/or compromise national security)," Twitchy said.
Clemons responded by saying the men were speaking very loud, "almost bragging," while lacking circumspection about comments and jokes.
When asked how he was certain the men involved were in the intelligence community, Clemons said "one wore a white knit national counterterrorism center shirt."
"But more importantly, he said, the conversation led him to conclude that they were certainly in the community, especially given the conference they talked about attending," Horowitz wrote. "They discussed former Ambassador John Negroponte as having been in attendance."
Clemons learned the men attended an event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, which lists dress code for the dinner as "black tie or mess dress."
Clemons said he could not identify the men or the agency they were with, but he recorded their conversation and took some photos which, Horowitz said, he plans to post online.
"The incident comes just days after news broke that the NSA had been obtaining millions of phone records daily. The story was first reported by Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian," Horowitz said.
It also happened on the same day that Greenwald identified the leaker as 29-year-old Edward Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA.
http://www.examiner.com/article/report-intel-officials-allegedly-joke-about-making-nsa-leaker-disappear
