There certainly is plenty to read about Glenn Greenwald today. Learning more about his life is kind of interesting but most of it feels voyeuristic to me. I think the most important revelation is that he has admitted that he approaches journalism the same way he pursued lawsuits. His style is litigious and argumentative and intentionally one-sided. If there is a counterargument to his case, it’s your job to describe it, not his.
As a partisan writer, I know that I am going to be writing things from a certain perspective and I am not necessarily interested in being fair. But there is a little voice in my head that tells me when I am writing something that is factually inaccurate or that is grossly incomplete. When that voice speaks, I obey. Greenwald doesn’t. He puts that voice in a little box titled “opposing counsel.”
This trait is more noticeable to me now that he’s trained his sights on a Democratic administration rather than a Republican one, but it can be seen in his style from the beginning. I admire his moral consistency, but his litigious style undermines his credibility in much the same way as George Will and Charles Krauthammer’s partisan style undermines their credibility. It’s not quite the same, however. Will and Krauthammer will basically say anything if they think it will advance their cause. Greenwald doesn’t make things up or change positions whenever it suits him. But he is intentionally unfair. He’s not even remotely interested in being fair.
And that is something his readers need to know when they are evaluating his arguments. Just like a juror shouldn’t take a prosecutor’s word as Gospel, even people who like and admire Greenwald should read him with a skeptical eye.
I posted a link to someone’s examination at DKos of a number of Greenwald pieces. In it, he actually is factually inaccurate 2/30 times and those times themselves are a bit questionable.
So I’m not sure you can say he’s that factually wrong, but he certainly does insinuate to a ludicrous degree. Maybe that’s the attorney in him, but if someone tried to do that in a courtroom I’d think that any half-intelligent person would be able to see how obvious and self-serving it is.
If that’s the same dKos trash Greenwald diary that I read, you might want to take another look at it. It was weak — and even the one charge that I was initially willing to grant the diarist was bogus when I took another look at it.
Yes, it’s the one I mentioned. And as I said above the instances of lies were very small and even those are debatable.
What isn’t is that he insinuates and attributes bad faith.
Ah, I think people should also keep in mind that official washington and their allies will also be gunning for him because whatever his faults he is an equal opportunity thorn in their backsides. And even aside from that, partisans will also attack. So keep that in mind as well and take the other side with as much salt as you do Greenwald himself.
“Greenwald doesn’t make things up or change positions whenever it suits him”
That’s overly generous. He often makes things up
He also changes positions and then denies that he ever held the other position.
Examples? Either of you? Because I haven’t seen any that hold up in the attack pieces I’ve seen so far.
And there’s this from Boo:
This is Boo saying when Greenwald encounters something inaccurate in his argument, he leaves it in. Yet later on he says Greenwald doesn’t make things up. Make up your mind.
And yes, he’s not trying to be fair. He’s a pundit, just like anyone else in that respect, and always has been. What confuses people is two things: he is a partisan for civil liberties, not one or another party; and because both parties abuse civil liberties so there’s little “controversy” in Village eyes, he winds up doing a lot of original source reporting because nobody else is covering it (or is doing so badly). But he’s still writing as a pundit, and he’s a very good and valuable one (unlike most of the Village). And ask yourself: is anything Greenwald’s done as biased as supposedly objective Village hack asking him, to his face, if he should be arrested for his crimes? (That’s also a clue as to how much reporting outside the Village concensus threatens those within.)
All that said – Glenn Greenwald is not the story here. Neither is Snowden. The focus on first Snowden and now Greenwald is an intentional media diversion from the far larger and more relevant story. It’s going after the messengers when you’d rather not contemplate the message. Stop it, all of you.
“The focus on first Snowden and now Greenwald is an intentional media diversion from the far larger and more relevant story.”
One could also say that the attention on irrelevancies is a typical media ploy to keep a story in the headlines when there is little that is newsworthy to add to the main story. They do have to sell papers, after all! So they come up with some BS that is only tangentially related but has some kind of hook to catch the readers eye — ooh, a controversy!– in the absence of anything useful or relevant they could add.
I really wish you wrote more on the front page here.
Here is just one link. There are others. I have a friend who tweeted a picture of the page in his book to Greenwald, but she was then blocked.
http://thedailybanter.com/2013/04/glenn-greenwalds-hilarious-denial-about-his-support-for-iraq-war/
In some ways, I am no longer qualified to write about Greenwald because I stopped reading him in 2009 or so, and only picked him up again with these Guardian pieces, which I have read.
I hear a lot of criticism from people I trust who read him religiously, but I don’t adopt that criticism as my own. In my personal experience, he isn’t prone to making things up. But that’s different from leaving things out. And that’s the internal voice that I am talking about.
If I am writing that no one on the Republican side of the aisle complained when x happened and then I suddenly realize that a couple of Republicans actually did complain, then I either include that caveat or I drop the idea I was pursuing and come it at from a different angle. Greenwald will just plunge ahead, and if someone finds the counterexample that he denied existed, he’ll ignore the corrections. You know, because it’s your job to argue the other side, not his.
The most vicious article I have ever written was 100% factually accurate but it wasn’t fair. I didn’t want to be fair to John McCain that day. And there’s nothing wrong with that genre of writing, although I don’t think people should make a habit of it. It wasn’t fair, but it didn’t omit anything factually that distorted the case I was making. What I omitted were the things that someone might admire about John McCain. I didn’t omit things to make him look worse on the things I was discussing than he is.
This is a subtle difference, but it gets to trust. If you know my perspective, then you know how to filter what you’re reading and not be misled.
I haven’t bothered following the whole Snowden thing that closely, mainly because it’s clear he’s a stupid moron that didn’t tell any informed being anything new. However, it does seem like he was played like a fiddle by GG, who basically used him as a premeditated player in getting a ‘big’ scoop, which, in fact, was hardly a scoop at all.
If there was any justice, GG would be facing extradition requests as well. He’s just as culpable as Snowden is.
You might take a look at the documents that the Guardian has published before you pass judgement.
Sometimes, I suppose, we must stoop to try to teach those pathetic uninformed beings, even though they’re hardly deserving of such generosity.
Why isn’t Barbara Starr under indictment for leaking the information that the US knows that terrorists organizations are changing their tactics because of the NSA leaks?
But glad to see that Gen. Cartwright is facing allegations over his leak of the US responsibility for StuxNet. Reckon he’ll be held in solitary in Quantico for six months or stripped as a “suicide risk”?
Did you get the email too? Any idea who paid for the oppo research on Greenwald because someone went to a lot PI trouble to dig up what they got.
What you need to be reading are the documents that the Guardian has linked to Greenwald’s reporting.
The story is Greenwald only for those who want to dodge the serious issue that it raises for the Obama administration. The Obama administration is still stonewalling–even stonewalling the release of the report on CIA torture that the Senate Intelligence committee prepared. That, quite frankly, is dumb if the Obama administration wants to preserve its reputation. It’s time to come clean and do it in the context of multiple administrations. It’s also time to stop the policy of “official leaks” to approved members of the press. The comparisons with Nixon are beginning to come out even among folks sympathetic to the Obama administration; continuing this line of trying to shut up the messenger will backfire.
Style doesn’t undermine Will’s and Krauthammer’s credibility; playing fast and loose with the facts does.
If you have some facts that Greenwald has misstated, present them and document the source. But deducting style points is acting like an Olympic figure skating judge. It’s totally irrelevant.
And Nader…that is laughable. That is just straining for something anything to make the issue go away.
Jeremy Scahill to the recipients of that email as
dingbat factory attacking Greenwald.
Who said anything about Nader? Not Boo. (Though Boo wrote ‘sites’ instead of ‘sights,’ which is either a typo or kinda clever ..)
Boo’s point is a good one. Greenwald believes in an adversarial process. That’s not really a problem, in my humble. The problem is that he’s the only one who does. Everyone else believes in a either a partisan process or an establishment process.
Read his links:
Glenn Greenwald Is Ralph Nader
By Jonathan Chait
Oops.
Thanks.
Wanna talk about “unfair?” We could start with how unfair it was to bail out the banksters and not even bother to indict any of those crooks. Or the unfairness of the 1% taking an ever greater share of wealth and income. How about unfair it was to invade, occupy, and destroy a country that had never done anything to us? All the while the MSM, Beltway, and Congress cheered that on.
But goodness me, if anyone dares to shine a light on a Democratic POTUS acting like a Republican one, then that truthteller is “unfair.”
If you bothered to listen to Greenwald unfiltered by the hacks and propagandists, it wouldn’t be as easy to claim that “it’s all about Greenwald.”
The entire video is worth listening to (except for the host in the first couple of minutes, who doesn’t seem to understand how a microphone works). Scahill and Greenwald give an extraordinary testimony to what it means to follow the NSA story in anything but a state of denial.
Agree — that’s why I diaried it early this morning as soon as I’d watched it. Have to wonder if the host forgot she wasn’t at an OWS rally without a MIC. A truly unfortunate introduction to two of the best speeches I’ve seen recently. Doubt that many of the unconscious power pleasing contributors here with bother to watch it — preferring their blissful ignorance and smugly trashing the rare demonstrations of courage because the messenger wasn’t perfect even though the message was honest and true. Unconscious in that choosing to be power pleasing putzes that they end up standing with the Ben Ali’s of the world and against the Mohammed Bouazizi’s.
Especially from the 38:00 minute mark. Not the Glenn Greenwald everyone else seems to be talking about.
Still worth a read, this dustup between Al Giordano and Glenn Greenwald from 2008:
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/salons-glenn-greenwald-writes-the-field
I had forgotten about that post. Very entertaining. You have to be a special kind of arrogant to think you will come out looking good after trying to bully Al Giordano.
I’m sorry but Giordano asserted extraordinary claims as facts without evidence and Greenwald merely asked for evidence. In 2002/3 did you trash those that asked for evidence of Iraq WMD and rally around Bush/Cheney and the NYT as they made extraordinary claims without evidence?
Dang! That link was a satisfying re-read including the comments section. It reminds me of when, where and how I started to distrust Greenwald then stopped reading his rants on Salon altogether. Like others who have gone on to lose their minds, he simply couldn’t come to grips with most of us preferring Obama to Hillary as we shifted thru the sands of the most likely candidate to produce actual “progressive change”. We are too often disappointed then stuck with selecting the lesser of two evils…
The irony tastes like rust in my mouth.
There he was accusing Al of making shit up about a pervasive surveillance state and now here he is today presenting it all like it’s NEW knowledge he just discovered via Snowden… like Snowden is proof because he has a FACE!
Which brings up my initial gut instinct that Snowden was a FRAUD. As his narrative has spun out and his self-glorification has sky-rocketed I dislike the boy even more. I am not in denial about his CONTENT–it’s all true! Or mainly. But his INTENT to make himself a romantic martyr figure is appalling. And there’s Greenwald glamorizing himself along with him. Every time someone calls Snowden a hero it makes my skin crawl. Daniel Elsberg was a hero! He stood up and didn’t flee to an enemy country! He went to trial and prison like a man!
Poor Snowden now stuck in the Purgatory of a Moscow airport… Pity the poor boy’s plight in his flight from the consequences of his actions. Oh, someone may say, “Today is different”. Elsberg didn’t face Gitmo or being psycho-tortured in a Quantico cell like Manning. But that does not justify running to China! If Snowden had access to valid documents that prove the US is cyber-attacking China then he also damn-well had access to proof that China is cyber-attacking US! They aren’t blameless victims in the Cyber War and neither is he for consorting with them.
And what’s in it for Greenwald besides his already immense ego-inflation? He’s still on his crusade to pick up any stick handy to whack Obama and by extension the Democratic Party. I’m sure he’ll be so pleased when the result is Rick Perry becoming president or someone like him. THAT will produce excellent righteous leftists rants for him to further his personal agenda as a “brave journalist”.
I’m always happy when people don’t deny the content of the Snowden information, and continue to focus on what’s important.
Are you Team Snowden? I’m totally Team Clapper! He’s dreamy. Greenwald is such a creep, lol!
Does Greenwald still support the faux-libertarian Paul Gang?
Does the White House get ahead of the overall issue that is being raised or does it continue to “lead from behind”?
Here is the best statement of the fundamental issue by Bruce Schneier in a speech at Google. (55 min)
The question is who is NSA working for.
The one thing we know for certain is that the White House really welcomes this whole discussion.
LOL
Primarily the owners of all the vendors it’s enriching.
Just another part of US industrial policy, eh?
.
I haven’t heard of the guy for 18 years, I met him in Dubai.
Is that his real name? If his book is credible and gets any significant attention, he’s in for another bumpy ride.
I googled his name. His escape from Dubai to Amsterdam is a true story. Like I said, no contact for 18 years. The UAE is 100% security proof with intelligence, snooping, microphones and a fascist regime. Only the Mossad could penetrate this bastion, many aliens rot away in their desert prisons.
No contact with whom for 18 years?
the author
Do you mean contact between you and the author? That you were in Dubai eighteen years ago?
True
I’ve only known one person from the UAE and that was when he was at University in the US. He was fun and while here enjoyed a beer or glass of wine. After he went home to his government job, his arranged marriage came next. As he later told me, it didn’t work. He did his second marriage the American way. The last time we spoke, he had a beautiful daughter and on a part-time basis was on some UN NGO commission out of Switzerland.
I’ve been ridiculed for raising this point before, but still I’d like to know why so many people are willing to trust Google where they’re unwilling to trust their government. Which is not to say that you should trust the government so much as it is to ask why the hell you trust Google.
I’ve been told, for instance, that the government, unlike Google, can put you in jail; but that’s true regardless of whether they’re reading your email. Meanwhile, we know that Google has at least been willing to talk to the Chinese about helping them censor the internet. And that’s just one thing that we know about.
Not to mention, top management at Google is proud of not paying taxes, which does not imply a strict loyalty to American interests.
I’m not really trying to paint Google as something sinister, by the way. What they’ve done is extremely impressive, but they are what they are. They’re a corporation, they’re gigantic, they have their own interests, and their basic business model is to sell your data to advertisers.
Listen to the Bruce Schneier YouTube I linked to. It deals with exactly this question.
It is not a matter of trusting Google, it is the availability of services that folks want to use and Google’s terms of service are that advertising subsidizes email, YouTube, Google+, Google Search, and so on. And the fine print about terms of service and privacy are so buried and so arcane that no one is conscious of it.
Plus, folks think as citizens they have control over government where as mere customers or users, they have little control over Google. Google gets cut slack.
Google’s tax avoidance is a completely separate issue, which goes to another of Schneier’s points. Governments are using commercial law to avoid Constitutional accountability and corporations are using the Constitution to avoid taxation and regulation.
There are a few reasons, as I think I said earlier (without any ridicule!).
1) Google is opt-in. As it happens, I don’t trust Google, so I don’t use Google, or Facebook. NSA snooping is not opt-in. I cannot avoid NSA snooping unless I remove all electronic communication from my life.
1a) It it perfectly reasonable for someone to trust Google, and to give all their dick pics and extramarital emails to Google, and still not want to give it to the NSA. We have a right to choose with whom we share our more private communications. Some people choose unwisely (in my opinion) but they still have that right.
Your fundamental question seems to be, ‘Why do some people trust Google?’ Fundamentally, I think the answer is, ‘Because they’re idiots.’ But that has nothing to do with the NSA issue.
“Google is opt-in.”
The ENTIRE internet is opt-in. You can stop using it. It’s not hard. It’s easy.
But you wont because you’re not really concerned at all. This is just an intellectual exercise. It’s part of your indentity to appear outraged about this.
If you were actually as concnered as you puport to be, you’d be reading a book or flying a kite or throwing a ball around or going to church or fishing or meeting friends for drinks et al. Not parking your ass in front of a computer connected to the internet.
It is not true that the entire internet is opt-in. Many employers require online applications and submissions of resumes. You can call it opt-in in that you need not work for those companies, but it does make job-hunting more difficult.
And they are very specifically asking for your personal information to be transmitted over the internet.
This is why there’s no trouble with wiretapping telephone calls; the phone is opt-in. And why ‘hate the sin, not the sinner’ makes sense: gay sex is opt-in. The vast majority of modern life is opt-in by your definition. The electrical grid. The post office. Driving. Voting.
You know perfectly well what I mean by ‘opt-in’. I wonder why you’re pretending you don’t.
(You’re right about the part where I’m not personally concerned, though. I lead an incredibly privileged life. I also don’t have to worry about cops beating my ass if I look at them funny. That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem.)
I won’t ridicule you. You raise a valid point. It’s not that I TRUST Google. I must like them because my retina gets flashed with a subliminal imprint when I click my Chrome icon and hit my Google Homepage. And you know those amusing animations must be loaded with neural-triggering suggestions. Har!
I’m not entirely joking and offer no defense of Google or my apparent enthrallment BY them. The fact that the data they sell to advertisers is ALSO available to the government is not any more alarming than the world in general as we ride the crest of the technological wave into a dystopian future of being corporate slaves… as many of us already ARE.
I have no answers to securing our liberties since anarchy is so very unappealing. Lucifer declares in “Paradise Lost”, “Better to be free in Hell than a slave in Heaven.” But is it really better? I would sorely miss surfing the Web after the power grid goes down not to mention the number of people I would need to kill to defend the ownership of my vegetable garden.
Covers a lot of ground and the technology “feudalism” analogy has merit. Also abundantly clear that the audience of “best and brightest” at Google just do not get any of it. I’m re-bookmarking Schneier’s blog and buying his book. He was well on top of the Stuxnet story at the time; was reading him regularly throughout.
Clearly we are looking at a “co-mingling” of corporate and government incentives in leveraging technology; the distinctions will be increasingly blurred.
Worth pointing out that Ecuador is trying to punish their own leakers:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130627/22382723648/ecuador-using-copyright-to-try-to-take-down-leaked-do
cuments-about-its-surveillance-practices.shtml
I don’t understand how that is related.
The dude is seeking asylum in Ecuador. Not to mention Correa has been lambasting the US in recent days over the entire situation. He’s come under fire for more public control over media — I frankly don’t care about that; it might even be a better model than the corporate state media we experience here. But beyond such changes in media landscape comes down to the fact that any state is going to go after those who leak shit, no matter the nation-state.
Snowden’s strategy is pretty straight-forward. He is trying to keep the issue alive long enough to get legs with enough members of Congress and the public so that it doesn’t drop from sight again like it did in 2008. He is also protecting his person by being very public; no one is going to render him quietly somewhere without public notice.
The countries that he has sought refuge in are matters of convenience, not necessarily principle. He is seeking asylum in Ecuador because Assange already has asylum in Ecuador on similar legal grounds relative to Ecuadorian law and because Wikileaks is providing a legal team to Snowden.
I don’t think he has a strategy.
The issue is still alive after a month. Snowden is not yet in US custody. Something seems to be working for him.
I’m basing this mostly on what his lawyer in Hong Kong said. He seeme quite naive about what was possible about his movement in HK, and decided to leave after it not being what he expected. And u suspect China took his shit, then allowed him to leave. He’s making it up along as he goes, not really some thought out elaborate scheme. Didn’t have much beyond “gtfo US to country that won’t extradite right away”. Hawaii doesn’t have many countries nearby.
The issue of Snowden and what to do about him is still alive. The issue of the NSA the security state? Not so much.
Today (Sunday) WaPo article on more details about PRISM. Salt Lake City Tribune article on NSA growing number of sites and storage power. And those are just two that I happen to notice.
Assange and Radack on Stephanopolous.
If you confine yourself to certain media (MSNBC is one of them) you will completely miss the fact that the issue is growing.
Still don’t see how it’s related.
You’re saying that because the guy who made the allegations is seeking asylum with creeps and tyrants … then what?
I honestly don’t see how that matters. We used to say ‘the personal is political.’ The new rule is ‘politics is personalities.’
State power works like that these days, doesn’t it?
There are leaks and leaks. There are official leaks that are never punished. There are leaks that are never punished because they occur in turf wars between powers in the government. There are leaks that can seriously compromise security (like the design of the F-35 of acknowledgement that the US carried out a malware cyberattack on on Iran). There are leaks that correct history (the Pentagon Papers). There are leaks that let citizens know that their government has assumed unreasonable power (like the fact that a bunch of White House operatives burgled the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee during an election campaign for President). Or that the government is engaged in illegal activities, like the transporting of heroin out of the Golden Triangle in Indochina to pay off drug smugglers who were acting as intelligence agents. Or unconstitutional activities.
All governments at all times (likely even George Washington’s) hate leaks and seek to punish them.
Your point?
“All governments at all times (likely even George Washington’s) hate leaks and seek to punish them.”
That’s the point.
That’s not a point, that’s a given.
Tarheel Dem’s comment at the top speaks for me, but I have to say something more general before I leave this blog.
Your response to the two most important progressive movements since Obama’s election — the Occupy Movement to challenge wealth and power inequality and the emerging challenge to the suspicionless surveillance state — have been characterized by avoidance of the substantive issues and flimsy criticism. At first I thought your political instincts were leading you astray. How else could your initial reaction to the Guardian and Washington Post articles be to call the revelations a nothin burger? But I’ve come to believe that in both cases, you’ve actively promoted arguments that have the function of propaganda in order to stay true to your overarching objective:
As for Glenn Greenwald, this some-people-say post is beneath you. I’ve read all of the links in your post, and the links in those links. It’s mostly a swamp of tripe. This is the quote that for you damns Glenn Greenwald’s writing:
What you don’t mention is that this is exactly how Greenwald described approaching Snowden:
What for you is a verdict on his lack of credibility is actually a process by which he maximizes his credibility. I suggest you try it the next time you’re inclined to disseminate administration talking points.
This blog has had a lot of value for me, and I’ve continued participating in it for far longer than it’s been obvious that I belong here. I genuinely wish you well.
It may not be comfortable here, but that’s all the more reason to stay and sing a more honest tune for those chanting la-la-la with their fingers in their ears.
Perhaps you just aren’t clear on my view of progressivism.
If progressivism is anti-Establishment and/or apolitical, then I’m not interested because it isn’t going to achieve my goals. The Occupy Movement and the Anonymous/WikiLeak Movement are not unimportant, but they have nothing to do really with the Progressive Caucus or any of the issues that are hotly contested between the two parties. That those issues aren’t hotly debated within the Establishment is the reason why those groups emerged to attack the Establishment from the outside.
So, what is progressive within the Establishment?
Civil rights. Access to health care. Protecting the safety net. Consumer protection. Environmentalism. Less defense spending and less military intervention. Separation of church and state. Science-based education. Urban renewal/issues, including transportation. Equity in sentencing. Support for labor. Add your own pet issue.
The Democratic Party is not a progressive party. It is a party that includes pragmatic progressives.
It is, however, the only vehicle available to prevent this country from being governed by people like Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. Or Santorum, Gingrich, Cain, Bachmann, and Perry.
Now, if you want me to get off this rampart and go stand on the one braying against the current Establishment, I am going to turn you down. Because I am not going to turn on the one thing in existence that keeps my worst terrors at bay. I saw what people like Dick Cheney can do to this country, and I’ve seen the difference with Barack Obama.
I want a progressive movement that wants and expects to be in power. I want a progressive movement that the people trust to be in power. And I want to hold that power for a long time. There are no Eisenhowers in the wings here. It’s up to us.
Marginally less bad — and taking advantage of a socio-cultural shift since 1993 and 1996 when Clinton supported the regressive DADT and DOMA — isn’t progressive. Calling a whistleblower on the massive secret spying and data collection on all Americans a traitor isn’t progressive, it’s fascist. All those lovely “progressive” socio-economic policies/programs that you support just aren’t “pragmatic” as long as corporate contractors are running massive federal intelligence and defense programs. First because those contractors are expensive. They take away from the real economy. They enrich the “haves” who then can purchase, in a variety of ways, low or no taxes for themselves and their corporations. And they ain’t giving it up as long as the opposition maintains that they earned it.
Obama is a fascist?
Okay, Marie, it’s hard to converse with you when you say things like that.
And when you say marginally less bad, it makes you sound stupid, which you most certainly are not.
Okay fine, massive federal data collection, analysis, and storage of the electronic communications of everybody managed by corporate contractors and kept secret from the public and most members of Congress doesn’t meet your “progressive” definition of fascist. But it does mine.
Then there’s the President’s secret “kill list.” Heh — to think that I once considered Nixon’s secret “enemies list” a gross violation of the principles of this country. Nixon would be licking his chops from wherever (if there were hereafter) imagining what he could have done with his enemies list if given 2013 technology and legal precedent. Dan Shorr and John Dean would have had a drone up their butts.
My definition of fascist includes a nationalistic party that appeals to ethnic, racial or religious purity, detests and demonizes minorities, is highly militaristic, is economically aligned with business owners and highly opposed to labor rights, has absolutely no regard for human rights, and disallows internal political opposition. They also tend to have a fondness for pseudoscience.
IOW Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were the only fascist states.
Any definition of fascist which excludes Mussolini’s Italy is rather missing the point, no? It could be argued that his was the only ‘fascist’ state, strictly speaking. Other candidates are merely oligarchic tyrannies where state security organs are aligned with the aspirations of the capitalist elite masked by a populist, nationalistic and pseudo-religious political party.
No, Italy, Spain, Syria, Iraq, the Kataeb Party in Lebanon. Plus numerous Latin American regimes.
Would that be Iraq today, when Bremer was running it, or Saddam when he was our “friend” or when he was our foe?
Which Latin American regimes and when?
Why doesn’t Saudi Arabia make your list? Or are absolute monarchies exempt?
I am referring to the Ba’ath Party in both Syria and Iraq, although Saddam’s regime had a better claim sectarian hatred than Assad’s (until very recently).
I forgot Portugal, too.
As for Latin America regimes, they have a little different flavor from the European and Arab regimes. But there have been fascist-like regimes in Brazil, Argentian, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. I don’t know if you want to put Panama’s Noriega in that category.
One could define all dictatorships as fascist — but then the word becomes not so descriptive.
Spain under Franco was a totalitarian dictatorship and operated with church influence. Missing that industrialized corporate class that is interdependent with the state that runs (rigs?) the courts, the police and military, and prints the money. Fascism also tends to be expansionary — in part because running police states in a privatized economy when the wealth holders don’t pay taxes and costs more than the peons can pay.
Do you know what “contubernio” meant when Franco said it?
Perhaps because Spain was (and remains) so fractious, it didn’t have extraterritorial claims.
“marginally less bad?” I stopped reading right there.
Have you yet figured how truly horrible Bill Clinton was?
That there is any substantial distinction between the two major political parties when it comes to the intrusion of the corporate elite into the privacy, prosperity and quality of life of their constituents dies hard. There are differences, to be sure, on how each would deal with the marginalised and impoverished citizenry the policies of their corporate partnerships will inevitably create; the harsh law and order approach vs the charitable crumbs of social welfare on the other. But the objective remains the same, these are just the ideological differences over how to manage the intended disenfranchisement of the majority in the most efficient and least troublesome manner.
To those experiencing the transition from middle-class to chronically indebted and unemployed the distinction is little more than having the ‘invisible hand’ picking your pockets from the left vs from the right.
That’s like asking “When did you stop beating your wife?” The assumption is he was truly horrible, and he wasn’t. I didn’t like NAFTA, CAFTA, and DADT, and other policies, but he was a far, far better president than the Republican alternatives before and after.
Welfare “reform”
energy dereg (direct line from that to Enron, etc.)
telecom dereg (Murdoch and Faux “news” appreciated that)
capital gains tax reduction (a gift to the 1%)
Gramm-Leach-Bliley (banksters unleashed to go wild)
commodity futures dereg (derivatives unleashed)
Threw Sister Souljah, Lani Guinere, Joycelyn Elders under the bus.
“Poppy” Bush only dreamed of passing NAFTA, a capital gains tax reduction, and a silly flag burning constitutional amendment none of which he could get through a DEM House.
What were the good things?
Well said.
If that is the mission, how did stonewalling work for Richard Nixon? OK, got Jimmy Carter and the conservative revolution went roaring on. Somehow I don’t sense that confidence in your statement of mission. It’s a finger-in-the-dike sort of statement.
If the NSA actions become a true scandal (and Steve Forbes is hopping on the criticism of government snooping from his perverted context), then the Obama administration will be branded with it unless it gets ahead of its and starts dealing with it.
If the NSA actions are swept under the rug once again, none of us might want to live in the corporate feudalism that results. And the Obama administration will be remembered at best as a missed opportunity like the Carter administration is on climate change.
Republicans could capitalize on either of those really easily.
Denial that there is a serious issue at NSA is politically suicidal.
I really think you’ve gone around the bend.
Who is attacking the president over the NSA?
You make me a list of those people and tell me if any of them pose any kind of threat to the Democratic majority presidential-level coalition.
The right is criticizing Obama for not sending a Seal team to the Moscow airport to shoot Snowden and dump him in the Moskva River. They want Greenwald prosecuted. You think they are going to become the defenders of privacy?
If there is stonewalling, the Republicans are hauling the stones.
If you want to worry about something, worry about Syria and Afghanistan.
You are so busy playing defense that you really don’t get it, do you?
Make a list of the Democrats in August of 1972 who were saying out loud that White House operatives broke into the Watergate offices of DNC.
This is that early in the game and you and apparently the White House do not understand what’s coming. This is not going away.
So, you’re saying that Snowden led with the lame stuff that no one cares about but some really juicy stuff is coming that will just blow the barn doors off this administration?
What’s your basis for thinking that? Snowden had his say and no one gives a shit. Most people want him hanged.
I read Roll Call and The Hill all week long and I can’t recall anyone talking about holding hearings or even introducing any bills. There is some stuff to get the NSA to reveal more information, but it has no momentum. John Boehner doesn’t care.
Almost all the focus is on Snowden or Greenwald.
And their revelations don’t interest anyone beyond the news cycle. There is no constituency for this information.
The essential problem here is that there is no crime. If anything, the story is about the NSA’s sloppy security procedures and the problem with too many people having clearances to see shit. That’s what might actually change as a result of this scandal.
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NSA snooping ain’t over by our European allies, not by a long shot. The more you keep repeating: “Move along, nothing to see here”, the more you and Obama will lose credibility.
NSA doing some snooping in Ecuadorean diplomatic emails, revealed by corporate WSJ.
Yes, certain European politicians get to act surprised and outraged when people have known about Echelon for fifteen years. In any case, I didn’t say that these revelations don’t cause problems for international relations. What I said is that no one here in the United States cares that the FISA court is a rubber stamp or that all our metadata is preserved for examination if the need might arise. Most people assumed that anyway. They’d be pissed if something happened and the government said, “Ah shit, that was more than six months ago, and that data got erased.”
As for Clapper, like Helms, he has to decide which oath he is going to honor. And no one on the Republican side is going to question his choice, so we can cry about it all we want but it isn’t going to make a difference.
Wait..
We have SPIES?? In other countries?? Against their ‘will’??????
Color me shocked.
Go back to 1972 and read The Hill and Roll Call in July and August of that year. Did Hale Boggs or Tip O’Neill start going for the White House in August 1972? Were there any hearings about conventiently timed break-ins? The answer is that there was nothing. And this in spite of this salient fact:
This random event changed the tone of the discussion:
And in March 1973, ten months after the break-in, Judge Sirica confirmed through a letter from McCord that perjury had been committed in the trial. And then was when it started to point back to the White House.
Pressure on Congress from the public had mounted enough by January 1973 that the Senate established an investigative committee in February 1973, a month before Sirica’s confirmation of the confession of perjury.
There is a crime here that needs to be investigated and that is James Clapper’s assertion to Congress that Americans were not having their information swept up in bulk. That investigation needs to look at the NSA programs and FBI programs and determine whether Clapper perjured himself.
And there is movement in Congress. A letter from 22 Democratic Senators and 4 Republican Senators has gone out asking for more information. Sen. Udall and Sen. Wyden have some serious concerns about the legality of the program that deserve a public hearing.
There are issues being raised in New Zealand about the Five Eyes agreement that permits the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to dodge their country’s prohibitions on collecting data on their citizens by just swapping data.
If you are correct that the outcome is a strengthening of US state secrets and no change in the policy of wholesale Hoovering of suspicionless Americans information through telecom switches, then the technological platform of turnkey tyranny will remain in place and the reason for your fear of ever letting Republicans into power again is many-times amplified.
Or maybe it will be a national-security-oriented Scoop-o-crat who leads us into tyranny. It doesn’t really matter as long as the technology, policy laxness, legal authority contrary to the Constitution, and venality are there.
That hasn’t happened yet. But it would be far better if the current President dismantled that technological and legal potential.
You are not alone about this troubling position on Greenwald. Attacking the Messenger is like raising the white flag on courage.
Don’t move away from this blog. I’ve always appreciated your contribution and we need a strong voice.
See my diary – NSA-GCHQ Espionage – Deceiving the Nation and the World.
As far as I can tell, the ‘messangers’ all get a good swipe on a regular basis here. Wanker of the day and all that.
Gee, a major media offensive against Greenwald. This latest set of revelations has had a bigger impact on the spy-industrial complex than I thought.
Gee, staunch supporters of Obama ganging up on Greenwald. What will happen next – the sun rising in the east?
There’s so little constituency for this story that Barton Gellmann just released a story on four more of the 41 PRISM slides. Shows that FBI is inserted in flow to sort out US identities from data stream.
NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program
Barton Gellmann has a more thorough description of PRISM and more slides are coming.
In addition, Der Spiegel has this:
Attacks from America: NSA Spied on European Union Offices
The documents were likely supplied by Laura Poitras, who is in the byline.
If there is any hope in countering the US universal spying initiative it will come from western European countries like Germany. Japan and the 2nd world basically are used to government spying on all aspects of their lives, the 3rd world has other concerns, and the English-speaking first world countries are all thoroughly Murdoch-ized.
Go Der Spiegel (literally, “the mirror”), go.
The problem is that it runs into the “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail” sort of reaction. You know, of course all countries do it and they just envy US technology and capability.
Where it hits a nerve in Germany is that it is total surveillance without suspicion, just like the the Stasi used to do. Germans are very clear that its indiscriminate nature has nothing to do with catching bad guys and everything to do with social control.
Not the best way to try to shut down the issue.
Susan Rice: Fallout From NSA Leaks Not `That Significant’
Not the best way to continue to stonewall.
In response to this:
I’m guessing Europeans are not quite as anaesthetised to this kind of thing as US audiences are from watching CNN and Meet the Press all these years.
I didn’t read all the links, but I don’t see the support for this statement, which seems to be based on the Chait article:
” I think the most important revelation is that he has admitted that he approaches journalism the same way he pursued lawsuits. His style is litigious and argumentative and intentionally one-sided. If there is a counterargument to his case, it’s your job to describe it, not his. “
The fist sentence is correct, but should be properly qualified by the “same way” in what respects, since it obviously cannot be the same in all. He said in the respect that he treats claims made by all players skeptically. That this means he is intentionally unfair to the other side and never gives counter-arguments seems to be Chait’s interpretation of what the litigious style means, not something he “admitted to”. Although given that you also admit being unfair, I’m not sure what the distinction you are drawing is. You say there is a little voice that tells you when you are being factually inaccurate, but then you concede that Greenwald does not make stuff up. You say that he is not necessarily fair, but you are not necessarily interested in being fair either. Does it come down to “grossly incomplete”. Given the impossibility of a “complete” account of anything, “grossly” is doing all the work, and is a pretty subjective term to be working so hard.
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What happened to this BooMan?? Excellent frontpage story – A Conspiracy of Patriotism.
CONSPIRACY!!! http://linkapp.me/Gui5Z
It would behoove your argument to back that up with bullet-proof evidence. Otherwise, you’re just another partisan Greenwald basher, as easily dismissible as Mista Driftglass McSmear.
In short, Greenwald is a liar and thinks it’s OK because he’s a lawyer.
Hmm.
Hoo boy, you really stepped in it now, Booman.
Glenn Greenwald is the warmest, kindest, most decent human being I have ever met in my life. And also the most honest.
Just keep repeating that if you want to stay out of trouble. Why don’t you pass the time by playing some solitaire?