No smoking gun in hacked emails of UAE envoy in Washington

The site was launched by journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras — best known for their roles in the series of reports concerning the documents disclosed by Edward Snowden — and Jeremy Scahill.

The Intercept claims to give “its journalists the editorial freedom and legal support they need to pursue investigations that expose corruption and injustice wherever they find it and hold the powerful accountable.”

Despite this professed agenda, it is nonetheless said to have a proIranian agenda based on its archive of stories, suggesting an uneven balance in terms of which powers it chooses to hold “accountable.”

While many of its stories are anti-Saudi, the same cannot be said with regard to its archive on Iran. In one lengthy story from 2016 entitled “US media condemns Iran’s ‘aggression’ in intercepting US naval ships — in Iranian waters,” Greenwald goes to great lengths to defend Tehran’s naval actions.

“It goes without saying that every country has the right to patrol and defend its territorial waters and to intercept other nations’ military boats that enter without permission,” he wrote. “But somehow, the US media instantly converted the invasion of Iranian waters by US ships into an act of aggression by Iran.”

Another article on Iran, from 2015, was headlined “Benjamin Netanyahu’s long history of crying wolf about Iran’s nuclear weapons.”

The Intercept’s editorial agenda was grounds for the resignation of some journalists such as Washington-based investigative reporter Ken Silverstein. After nearly 14 months working at The Intercept, Silverstein went on record to criticize his time at the Iranian-American businessman’s venture.

Silverstein announced his resignation from The Intercept in a series of Facebook posts in which he called his former employers a “pathetic joke.” Expressing anger and disillusionment with the company, Silverstein stated: “I am one of many employees who was hired under what were essentially false pretenses; we were told we would be given all the financial and other support we needed to do independent, important journalism, but instead found ourselves blocked at every step of the way by management’s incompetence and bad faith.”