I’ve mostly avoided the Snowden story since I don’t give a shit about him personally, and I don’t feel like joining his critics or his defenders, who both annoy the crap out of me. As to his revelations, I look at them as interesting and worthy of debate, but not as anything earth-shattering. If we can get a little more transparency or a better FISA court, or if we can clarify the law somewhat, then some good can come from this controversy.
But I am not going to write about some narcissist who got himself imprisoned at a Moscow airport.
But, Greenwald? He needs to calm down.
I’ve tried to like Greenwald for the better part of a decade.
He’s smart.
He’s a great researcher.
He’s a very good writer.
But he makes it damn near impossible, because he’s just such a righteous f*cking asshole!!!
It’s like the way I feel about religious people.
If you have a quiet faith, and don’t proselytize too much, I can get along with you easily, and really like you.
You can be my friend. And I can be yours.
But if you openly flaunt your faith and religion, and treat everyone who doesn’t agree with you, or meet up to your lofty expectations, then I have no time for you.
I don’t want you as my friend – because you wouldn’t want me as one anyway.
You don’t have to like Greenwald to look at the NSA documents that he’s linked to in his stories. You can even skip his analysis.
If what he reports is true and what he finds is presented transparently, what difference does it make if one likes him? Journalists, good investigative ones at least, are pretty much all egotistic windbags. Who cares?
Good guy man, have you read or listened to Barack Obama’s speeches? They drip with self-righteousness and lecturing individuals and communities around the world about their failings. However, unlike Greenwald, he lies.
Little Green Footballs, really?
Really.
In other words, the people who got so up in arms about “smearing the messenger” are gleefully smearing the messenger.
Why am I not surprised?
I just read that article and then clicked here. I don’t know what to believe anymore. Snowden may even be the human form of fast and furious. Something does not pass the smell test. I cannot understand how this guy comes out of nowhere and gets that kind of access. It does not make sense to me.
As far as the Establishment is concerned, that is the real scandal here. And it’s likely to be the only thing that gets fixed.
Exactly. This whole “crisis” is about the Administration and the military/industrial/finance complex covering its ass and diverting attention to Snowdon’s flaws. They have yet to present the slightest evidence that anything in the leaks damaged national security in the slightest. Except maybe by revealing what a bullyboy clownshow is “keeping us safe”. Secret governments don’t allow that.
It makes sense if you realize the NSA, DHS and most other agencies are about corporate greed and grifting, not about keeping us safe(as if it’s really achievable). Most of the U.S.’s intelligence work is outsourced to private companies. Private companies whose only allegiance is to their owners/shareholders.
Precisely.
In a rotted-out system nothing works well.
“Security?”
Please.
High tech rent-a-cops is what you get.
Then one of those rent-a-cops steals the goods…whether for profit, a certain morality or more likely maybe somewhere in the middle…and the public security firms (Read: The Federal Government apparati) that hired the private security firms go through the roof.
Yawn.
Business as usual.
Hottest thing ever #267 of the last several years. As if anyone with even the remnant of a media-riddled mind didn’t know about the NSA’s massive overreaching.
Please.
The real news? Whatever is happening in Egypt right now. Who is pulling the strings that are pulling the strings. Gemember when CIA 2nd generationer Frank Wisner Jr. (His father practically invented the intelligence asset-owned major media.) publicly supported Mubarak in the face of plain contradiction by the so-called official U.S. government?
I do.
Wisner: Mubarak ‘must stay’
It didn’t work out that way, but now, 1 year later?
In other words:
Business as usual.
Economic imperialist business.
WTFU.
AG
There’s one other member of that coalition–the Salafists. The current question is whether the coalition that toppled Morsi winds up as paralyzed as the Republicans in the House. That is, as long as politics continues in the street.
The thing is, the US does things Western European countries like Germany specifically passed laws against. It is American Paranoia and American Templars mixed together.
We built the German intelligence organization. It’s not like their government doesn’t know pretty much exactly what we’re doing.
And if they don’t, the DGSE does.
And like Deadheads, they all swap tapes.
I’d suggest everyone read The Secret Treaty Of Fort Hunt, which describes the Gehlen Org being absorbed into the CIA. It migrated back to Germany in the fifties, but it was essentially the Nazi intelligence unit for their eastern front. The CIA loved it for supplying info on Eastern Europe and the USSR during the Cold War. I wouldn’t say that we built Germany’s intelligence, we just borrowed it.
Is that the go-to site for White House communications now–Little Green Footballs?
The National Security Agency is breaking the already generous law and violating the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. The Obama administration has already violated seriously two diplomatic traditions in pursuit of their “fugitive”. The Department of Justice has announced rules for violating the First Amendment protections of the press and speech to anyone who is not deemed by the DOJ “news media”.
And you are going to effing Little Green Footballs to complain about Glenn Greenwald’s supposed statement. Just how exactly did you get tipped off to Little Green Footballs’s little green diatribe?
I will say it again. Continued behavior like this by the Obama administration will have them remembered as the administration that gutted our civil liberties in order to protect a former administration and an overbloated military-industrial boondoggle.
And if history cannot write that, it will be because we have totally lost our civil liberties.
This is time of decision for the administration and they are completely blowing it.
Or has someone else already turned the key and Obama is just a front for a military-intelligence coup that happened sometime in the Bush administration? /tinfoilhat
These are fundamental and serious issues that the President needs to deal with forthrightly, and he has been evading them.
If the issues dies, likely so do civil liberties. Which only matter when you want to criticize and petition the government.
You’re not a terribly good hatchet-job man, BooMan. Give it up and get back to substantial analysis.
It’s Reuters, dude.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/13/us-usa-security-snowden-greenwald-idUSBRE96C08Q20130713?fe
edType=RSS&irpc=932
Yeah, but he has to smear the messenger, because Greenwald is great. Of course, this didn’t stop any of the Greenwald cultists from complaining about smearing the messenger before. It’s just that when their ox is gored, their inner authoritarian asshole comes out.
So the message is what?
“Greenwald needs to calm down?”
Why does Greenwald need to calm down? I dealt with the message. It just seems strange to me that the folks supposedly pushing for more and better Democrats are trying to distract from the issue that the NSA is spying and Clapper is lying with impunity and that is contrary to the law and the Constitution.
Maybe you didn’t notice but in Texas the DPS cops saw fit to use a bogus report of feces and urine to relieve every woman protesting against the anti-abortion bill of their tampons and pads. That is a very subtle way of violating the First Amendment.
Folks in NC at Moral Monday are being arrested and put painfully in zipties and bused on a prison bus before being release for citeable offense. That is a more blatant way of violating the First and Eighth Amendments.
The FBI is adding environmental and animal rights groups to terrorist watch lists. Violation of First and Fourth Amendments.
The NSA is collecting information on everyone for search sooner or later. Violation of Fourth Amendment.
Congress is effectively shut down. The Supreme Court has effectively delivered politics to the corporations.
And the Democrats in power are completely powerless to do anything about all of these things.
What has happened to Democrats? Has everyone become Scoop Jackson and Joe Lieberman? Where is the RFK who will use federal power to ensure civil liberties for people being abused by state power? What happened to that Democratic Party?
Ironically in that article Greenwald confirms the claim that Al Giordano made in a comment section on one of his posts years ago that had Greenwald furious and attacking Giordano.
Oy veh.
What claim did Giordano make?
Here is the link.
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/salons-glenn-greenwald-writes-the-field
Thanks!
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/salons-glenn-greenwald-writes-the-field
Yeah, I noticed he made that switch a couple of weeks ago.
This is part of why he is so frustrating. There have been a lot of journalists and organizers dealing with these issues for years–while Greenwald was still giving George W. the benefit of the doubt, supporting the Iraq war, opposing immigration reform, representing a white supremacist and getting in trouble for illegally recording someone (more irony).
As soon as he finds a crusade–it is the most important, worst abuse, biggest scandal ever.
BooMan’s link goes to Little Green Footballs
What is wrong with littlegreenfootballs?
I’m not that familiar with LGF, but my general impression is that it used to be a far-right cesspool. The thing is, though, it isn’t anymore. Anybody who’s freaking out about the link to the site should go there and take a look at what they’re writing now.
I don’t post there but I do skim the stories occasionally. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary there.
They were pretty bad a few years ago. Full-on “Why do you hate America?” Iraq hawks, no different from Red State.
They did a John Cole a few years ago, though.
That’s for a simple reason. It was there that I saw the Reuter’s link. Credit where it’s due. Simple blogging courtesy.
You need to get over your LGF aversion and deal with the substance of what Greenwald said.
As for Snowden, the government hasn’t done anything to him but rip up his passport and quite understandably ask our allies not to assist in his flight from justice. He broke the law.
The FISA court has authorized the NSA’s catch-all snooping and if Congress doesn’t like it then they can rewrite the law.
I think Snowden is a fool, but he made his bed and he can live in it. I have no interest in him. He’s neither a hero nor a victim.
Greenwald, on the other hand, is getting pretty close to declaring himself an enemy of the United States. He ought to take a valium before he really crosses a line.
Oh, we have “enemies of the state” now do we? Better research the history of that concept.
Oh, we have “enemies of the state” now do we?
We do, according to Greenwald. When you tell someone to get down on their knees and beg, or you’ll hurt them, that’s not generally a friendly gesture.
But he’s negotiating with the entire US government. See below. One huge bluff deserves another.
So now Snowden is the Rosenbergs? That isn’t an argument. Of course the government has overreached before, but that doesn’t change the fact that there really are American citizens out there who are hostile to the federal government and eager to do it harm.
I’m not saying Snowden is in that category, but I’m certainly saying I don’t trust him.
Forget it, BooMan. As my own blogging experience can attest to, there’s no analysis about Snowden/Greenwald that you can post that won’t turn into half your readers calling you a fascist pig and the other half calling you an anarchist traitor.
I’ve given up posting about him and stopped caring altogether.
Yes, I agree completely. Obama is blowing it. I think this issue is so powerful Obama has lost his creditability. I say that because of my reaction to Obama’s ‘management speech’ where he talked about how he wanted to enlist the private sector to streamline government. All I could think about while he was speaking was how he has already used that private sector, i.e. contractors, to spy on our every communication. I turned him off, same way I turned Bill Clinton off when I realized what a bullshit artist he really was. And I had such high hopes he would be our best President ever. Booman, this is more serious than you realize.
This seems to be an emerging pattern among some kind of new mutation of liberal. Seems to me we go into high irony when we see Nader whining for rich people to save us, then Obama wants to hire the military/industrial/finance complex to save us. Birds of a feather after all these years?
I detested Ralph Nader except for his crusade against Ford exposing them for building a car that was `unsafe at any speed.’ His run for President cost us dearly so I never expected him or any rich people to save us. Obama knows better. He says one thing, always the right thing, then does another. Enough. We’re talking about the ultimate Big Brother police surveillance machine ever devised here, might I add, run by private contractors. What could go wrong? Digital Blackwater anyone? He can use his power to at least try to stop this if he wants the place in history he thinks he deserves. I thank Snowden because we really needed to have this serious conversation about our future way of life in a `free’ society.
Why is everyone on about Obama? The laws we need to address were passed under Bush – it’s about changing the law. why blame Obama for this? (btw have you noticed that he’s Black?) (oh I forgot, he is the legislative branch. my bad)
Because Obama is President of the United States, Commander In Chief of our Armed Forces. I thought that NSA head was some kind of General level officer of that same military doing all this crap. Who asked that secret FISA court for permission anyway? Did they think this up on their own, was it the military or could it be DOJ, another agency reporting to Obama at the cabinet level. Who? And what about that secret court, our new Shadow Supreme Court that can’t be challenged and hears only one side, in secret. When they decided to rewrite the law going from foreign surveillance to domestic surveillance, Obama keeps this SECRET, not only the reasoning but the new invented law itself. Obama has the executive power to stop this in its tracks and the executive power to declassify this entire mess so we can have the conversation we need to have. Maybe then we can fix this law so that a future President won’t be tempted to say, look, it’s legal, no one is listening to your phone calls. Trust us. Just where should this buck stop anyway? Obama is blowing it.
Essentially, there is no difference between Obama and Dubya when it comes to the NSA/CIA. And the ECHELON program started under Clinton. And if you go back to Reagan-Bush I we had PROMIS.
So that three Republican Presidents and two Dems. Does the power reside with the President? If it doesn’t appear to make any difference it’s because, when it comes to national security it doesn’t. Those things were decided fifty years ago. You just didn’t notice it.
Yes, not only I did notice on that painful day fifty years ago in Dallas but then I spent decades reading everything I could find on the topic. Unfortunately that was only the visible tip of this iceberg. The only thing slowing them down was technology. The technology is now here, probably the most important thing Snowden pointed out. This thing of “I agree with you, now make me do it” has always been with us and will always be with us. This the real reason to go off on Obama on this issue because this is the real freedom issue of our time.
The place in history Obama ultimately achieves could be that of Bill Clinton, our best Republican President ever. I was already disgusted with Obama for putting chained CPI on the table when he wasn’t even asked for it but this is worse, far worse. As long as this was hidden Obama could just do nothing. No need to go out and pick a fight he may not be able to win or for that matter want to win. The reason the Snowden revelations are so important is because it’s now out in the open. He can’t just unring that bell. What he does now, not what he says will be what defines him forever in the public mind. So far, he’s blowing it.
“so far”, however, is only a month into the event. here we’ve got over 100 substantial comments on the complexity of the problem and ppl are wringing their hands that Obama blew it already
I never saw definitive proof of who ordered what vis a vis the Bolivian jet. And the intelligence community is pretty independent. That’s why making it a personal thing with Obama may be inaccurate.
If the intelligence community is acting that much independent of Obama and through a US ambassador, then we have bigger problems that I thought.
In fact, we do.
Having been in the Vietnam anti-war movement and having my Student Peace Union spied on, and then having my union, my bookstore, my US Representative and my public TV station all spied on, I just can’t get very alarmed by recent developments.
But the military coup didn’t occur during the Bush Administration. It occurred on November 22, 1963.
So we should stop going through the charade of having elections and pretending we are democracy and recognize our brave and loyal junta?
Fifty years ago there was a coup. The people behind it didn’t go back to their desks the next Monday. We pretend a lot in America. We pretended Dubya was elected.
Actually, recognizing the truth shouldn’t be something to fear.
“I don’t feel like joining his critics … I am not going to write about some narcissist who got himself imprisoned at a Moscow airport.”
You joined his critics immediately, Boo. I very much hope you accidentally overshot the mark, by claiming any degree of neutrality, and you’re not actually deluding yourself.
Though that is a terrible thing that Greenwald said. What a bully, making such troubling threats against a weak and vulnerable opponent.
I’ve never done anything half so important–for good or ill, if that’s how you roll–as Snowden and Greenwald did in this case. Perhaps you, very calmly, have.
As a history nerd, I feel the need to point out that McArdle has gotten the basic history fact wrong. Both Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge were also succeeded by members of their own party. This error is in keeping with the general right wing tendency to block out the fact that the disastrous 1920’s (under laissez-faire Republican leadership) ever occurred.
Sorry, I incorrectly attached this comment to the wrong article.
Well, it’s a good comment anyway!
That is crazy. What is wrong with Greenwald?
Worth reading Greenwald’s own exegesis of the interview, link courtesy of TarheelDem below. It seems different, somehow.
Personally I am having grave misgivings about the public response to this story and am beginning to doubt the sincerity of some of Snowden’s and Greenwald’s detractors. Not that I am accusing them of intentional deceit but that there is some subtle psychology of denial at play. I wonder how many of the critics of these two, or those who minimise or dismiss the staggering implications of their revelations, can truthfully say they have had no change of attitude towards their social media activity or hesitated before publishing some personal information or provocative statement.
In an economy of permanent unemployment the motive to self-censure must be powerful. In the presence of ubiquitous but hidden surveillance it is called “panopticonism” and has a fairly rich literature:
This is now arguably a significant component of our collective reality; I can understand how categorical denial might seem an attractive alternative.
The way I see it, when the journalist becomes the story, he’s no longer a journalist. He just can’t shut up, can he?
Next thing you know Greenwald will be seeking asylum somewhere.
It is the establishment press and the friends of the White House that have made Greenwald the story.
Greenwald lives in Brazil.
And Brazil doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S.? Regardless who made him the story, he needs to shut up, now that HE is the story. It only makes it easy for his critics to point at him instead of themselves.
His critics intend to shut him up. That’s the point of the continued focus on Snowden and Greenwald in the Wall Street media and folks pushing the White House communications operation line.
If he shuts up the issue dies. If the issue dies, what have we gained?
If the revelations are not earth-shattering the military-financial complex had no business classifying them in the first place. If they did reveal secret and illegal overreach by the complex, Snowdon did the right thing, just as Ellsberg, Deep Throat, and many others did, often with dubious legal justification.
A little better transparency? Is that a joke? Clarify the law somewhat? Like not running a secret government kept in check only by its wholly owned secret courts? I have no personal love of Snowdon (as opposed to your personal hate), but I do care about secret and illegal government and I do care about justice. Guess that makes me a narcissist too.
Sorry but this post sinks its way into DowdLand.
There are other possibilities, you know. For instance, what if Snowden and Greenwald are full of shit? Why do you take it for granted that Snowden really can do more harm to the US government than anyone in history?
That’s exactly what I’m saying: there’s no evidence available that shows any harm from the leaks at all. I think the proof that Snowdon’s information is real is the government’s hysterical reaction. Which doesn’t mean “security” is involved, but rather revelations about malfeasance by the military/industrial/finance complex.
I suspect that Snowden is working for some intelligence agency, considering the timing of his revelations, such as they were, coincided with Obama’s various diplomatic meetings.
I’d also suggest that closer examination of what “Deep Throat” told Woodward was more than the information that was available to Mark Felt, and Woodward’s identification of Felt as his source was conveniently after Felt was dead. Woodward, in telling how he met Felt goes back to his days as a courier from the Pentagon to the White House. I’d suggest that Woodward’s sources in the intelligence community made more sense than the FBI. And considering the number of people who were CIA-connected who played large roles in the dismantling of Nixon’s regime, I think that might be a better place to search for Woodward’s sources.
In other words, Bob Woodward may have been the same scumbag then that he is now. No need perpetuating that myth.
Mark Felt “outed” himself when he was still alive.
Why would “some intelligence agency” hire Snowden to get all that data and disclose it to the public? “Intelligence agencies” hire spies to pass data/information to them. That’s how the game works and all of them work hard to keep the public in the dark.
I have had a nagging doubt that if, say, the intelligence industry had known in advance that these revelations would be met with a collective “meh” they would certainly have had a motive for leaking the material themselves; noting that Snowden and Greenwald both seem to suit a hypothetical profile for unintended instruments of such a move. It certainly explains how someone of Snowden’s temperament and recent employment might gain access to so much secret meta-organisational material so quickly and get away, which is otherwise somewhat difficult to explain. Just sayin’.
One of the interesting alignments of these revelations with Faucault’s definition of panopticonism is that the subjects must be aware of the ubiquity of their surveillance but not the specificity of their actually being watched; the same rationale for investing in dummy surveillance cameras. The circumstances we reasonably believe we experience in all of our on-line communication and social interactions now arguably satisfy that requirement. That this information is ultimately accessible by at least some powerful corporations is the next logical step in our civic disempowerment; let’s see what happens.
First of all there isn’t a collective “meh” and that’s in spite of a massive federal propaganda campaign to both discount the information and smear Snowden and Greenwald and the MSM endlessly repeating “meh.” As the State Dept hired people to post “likes” on Facebook, can’t imagine that several federal agencies wouldn’t have workers all over the internet to spout the PR are lines.
As for how could get capture all that top secret information so quickly — didn’t we hear the same thing wrt Manning? And Manning was much younger, less experienced, and operationally had little time in his position in Iraq. Snowden had years of experience with access to information. Who knows how much he captured on his last job — or if that was where he obtained the final pieces to put the puzzle together.
While possible, I would be surprised if Snowden woke up one day and decided to grab all that data within a few weeks and then high tail it to Hong Kong.
Doubt we know Snowden’s full story and it’s possible that he hasn’t shared it with Greenwald either. Protecting those that go out on a limb with one is a responsible thing to to do.
As I said it is just a nagging doubt which seems to fit a plausible motive. Not sure about the absence of the collective “meh,” however. Evident here and elsewhere with what I would guess anecdotally was slender majority, at least; and the obsession with Snowden and Greenwald seems almost universal in the blogosphere of both factions and the mainstream media. How do you explain that?
A very different frame of reference than the one this story receives internationally.
I recall when Daniel Ellsberg as opposed to the content of the Pentagon Papers was turned into The Story
When John Dean (and his wife) was more the story than what he disclosed.
They weren’t so successful in making Alexander Butterfield the story.
Didn’t Woodward, Bernstein and “Deep Throat” become part of the Watergate story? So much so, that later it could be turned into a “third rate burglary” for the next generation and those that hadn’t paid any attention to the crimes.
And what became the story with the release of the Collateral Murder video and the State Dept e-mails? Manning put under lock and key and Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian London Embassy.
“Shoot the messenger” is a tried and true formula for deflecting attention from political scandals. Particularly for Americans that “can’t handle the truth” about their government.
Tried and true, but now the progressive blogosphere is in on the same act and apparently doing so completely voluntarily. It gives me the creeps. No pun intended.
There have always been authoritarians that self-style themselves as liberals. They can’t even see when their spots are showing.
Would also factor in that there are official trolls on left wing blogs. Have been around since the early days.
Greenwald has just weighed in again on this issue:
I found that whole article at odds with the presentation here and elsewhere of Greenwald’s “extortion.” Sheesh.
Once again — primary sources are one’s friend.
But not eyewitnesses, eh Marie?
Generally no because the research on eyewitness reports is large and consistent. It’s uniformly poor even when the observer isn’t personally under threat. As we just saw with the plane crash at SFO, the initial eyewitness reports were wrong. The error rate increases significantly the more chaotic the situation, the more vulnerable the observer, the poorer the lighting, and many other variables.
Undistracted and trained observers do better, at least on the largest elements. Humans just aren’t all that good at quickly taking in a large volume of information. Particularly in sudden and unexpected situations.
I was teasing you Marie. As a historian I love reading first-person accounts written before the ‘verdict of history’ is returned on any particular event; I find they are refreshingly ambiguous of the narratives and agenda satisfying spin which is accreted to subsequent reports. Not saying they are accurate of themselves but often point to intentional oversights by others which can often be independently verified once exposed.
In the case of our Benghasi story, for example, the evidence of eyewitnesses to the rescue and aftermath was flawed but clearly at odds with the official report. I found that instructive.
Agree that those Benghazi eyewitness accounts were interesting. Once filtered for imprecision, mushiness, and unreasonableness, there were enough individual reports that a few “dots” appeared solid enough to accept and those were inconsistent with the narrative that was pushed by the CIA. The State Dept report seemed reasonably good — and it, correctly IMHO, was vague and/or imprecise on those unconfirmed details from the CIA.
I stand corrected about Felt saying that he was Deep Throat. He denied it for decades.
Why would an intelligence agency hire someone to reveal information to the public? Marie, read up about the CIA’s false defector program run in the late fifties. The second defector was Lee Harvey Oswald. He allegedly had with him secrets about the U-2 spy plane operation. Oswald even threatened to reveal that information when he defected. While he was in the USSR Gary Powers was shot down. As a result the Paris Peace conference that Eisenhower wanted with Khrushchev to end the Cold War.
Eisenhower had ordered a halt to all flights over the USSR a month prior to the conference. It was a CIA plane that went down. Some context: It was a little after this that Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex. You might also remember that Oswald waltzed right back into the US.
So the CIA gave up a U-2 (although they took out the high tech camera gear from Powers’ U-2 so they didn’t give that up, but they gave up the U-2. Dulles et al wanted the Cold War to continue. So they gave up something and got another thirty years of Cold War. Anyone who’s given much time to the JFK assassination knows it was done by the CIA. Signs point to the CIA being behind Watergate. Then the October Surprise. Since then things have been fairly quiet, Reagan had been a spokesperson for a CIA Nazi importation program in the early fifties, GHW Bush is CIA, Dubya is son-of-CIA, and Clinton watched over Mena as Arkansas governor, so I presume anyone who gets near the White House knows the rules.
There are other intelligence agencies around the world who would want to hurt the US, too.
Non-responsive.
I have no respect for the operational sector of the CIA. However, it’s beyond implausible to me that they would hire anyone as young, uneducated, not so smart, and psychologically immature and unbalanced as Oswald for a “false defector program.”
Have no difficulty finding it plausible that Oswald was a patsy in the JFK assassination. However, unless or until that conspiracy is unraveled, we won’t know what if any role Oswald played.
Some of the circumstantial evidence is a matter of public record since the HSCA report in 1978 and the JFK Assassination Records Act. Not saying Oswald was definitively part of the false defector program but he was as likely a “dangle” as any of them.
His CIA file is exhaustively combed by John Newman in his encyclopaedic Oswald and the CIA from 1995; inconclusive but very, very interesting reading. That Oswald’s CIA 201 file was opened in December 1960 by CI/SIG suggests that one hand may not have known what the other hand was doing. Yet we also know that various agencies, including Naval Intelligence and the FBI, as well as the State Department had been regularly copying the CIA documents relating to Oswald’s earlier service history and defection for months; where did they go? That these never showed up in any of their numerous files on American defectors or Soviet counter-intelligence subsequently released under FoI and Congressional investigation is a bit of a tell.
Bear in mind that Oswald was a radar operator at Atsugi and regularly followed the flight path of the secret U-2s based there immediately prior to his defection. He was intelligence ‘candy.’
Not to the KGB. A twenty year old radar operator wouldn’t even have been able to tell them anything they didn’t already know.
Oswald would have been easily identified as a good patsy for any one of several possible groups conspiring to assassinate JFK. (Personally, my guess is it was hatched and executed by Dallas locals.) The RFK assassination was either a much slicker operation or the act of a lone nut. If the former, would like to know how the conspirators found and chose Sirhan Sirhan for the task.
From Oswald’s officer in command at Santa Ana:
That’s without even acknowledgement of his familiarity with the U-2 program which the Warren Commission steered well clear of during testimony.
So? That list looks impressive, but it’s really low level.
If he were a CIA false defector, all those signals would have been changed when he defected. If he were an actual defector — and it’s not as if it were unknown that he had defected — any vulnerable intelligence that he could have taken with him would have been changed.
It’s always seemed possible to me that the Warren Commission members feared that Oswald was a USSR asset. As bad as the assassination of a US President was for the nation, if the USSR had ordered the kill and it were known, it left only one very bad option.
Still doesn’t explain the absence of a 201 file on Oswald from the time of his defection to December 1960. Read Newman’s book, it is anti-sensationalist. You can get an e-version even though it is long out of print. Then we’ll talk. I love murder mysteries and the JFK assassination is a humdinger.
I don’t really want to invest any time reading and/or thinking about it because it always circles back to one of several hypotheses without enough evidence to either support it or shoot down any of the others. There are:
Did find this extract from Prof Newman’s 1993 testimony before Conyers’ subcommittee interesting.
You forgot mobster jealousy.
Is that one still an active hypothesis? Thought it had been dumped years ago.
Yes, well that testimony sets out the crux of the argument implicating the CIA, at least tangentially. And it establishes Newman’s style, the indefatigable administrative forensics of reasonableness.
I found his book fascinating. As for your menu, the likeliest hypothesis seems to be a rogue Right-wing faction of former CIA Bay of Pigs operatives. But given, as Bob pointed out earlier, that this was indeed a turning point in American political and cultural history the assassination evidence seems appropriately woven through a sampler of American society and makes compelling reading, even today.
Even in the tiny fragment you cited you have a hobo, a small denomination Mafioso and two guys arrested with stolen weapons from a National Guard armoury. While I agree there are more ‘rabbit holes’ than substance in most of the literature on this subject the post-modernist in me suggests that the thwarted pursuit of this story is the long sought ‘great American novel’ in the form of an unfinished, crowd-sourced, conceptual multi-media work which has unfolded over decades.
Amazing how many various individuals, groups, factions had reasons enough to want to kill JFK. Also amazing that those right-wing crazies in the CIA and DOD didn’t get us all killed in a nuclear conflagration. Could the Vietnam War have been to keep them busy and out of the way?
We don’t know who killed Olaf Palme either.
In January of 1961, the Cuban missile crisis was in October 1962, by July 1963 the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed and by October 1964 both Kennedy and Khrushchev were gone.
Well anyone who’s sufficiently read on the responsible assassination literature should by now, 50 yrs later, be able to eliminate #1 as a reasonable likelihood. Or at least it should be assigned a very low probability.
Ditto #s 2 and 4. Neither country’s leader would have been so reckless or stupid — with all the (surface) fingerprints of Oswald connecting him to both countries — to send out as assassin so easily traceable back to them. No to mention the lack of motive by 1963, with Kennedy and Khrushchev undertaking the beginning of detente, and JFK secretly sending emissaries to Castro trying to establish a softer relationship. Very low probability, but an early (60s) favorite of a few in the Establishment not wanting to seem to Wacky Conspiracist, people like Earl Warren for instance.
#s 3 and 5 are far more likely, given the most and best evidence we have today. Throw in elements of US Military Intel, the Secret Service (vital to have them on board to ensure success), plus of course the Mafia, probably as mechanics and of course to silence the patsy. And we should be thinking in terms of overlap of these groups, not just one (small) group alone carrying this out. See, e.g., the secret attempts at killing Castro — CIA, Mafia and probably elements of military intel involved.
As for John Newman, he’s a fine scholar in the Kennedy field, if a bit of a dry writer and heavily into govt document deep analysis. Not an easy or quick read.
I always like to rec to skeptics that they read the more recent, and more readable, JFK and the Unspeakable, by James Douglass, which ties together the whys of the assass’n with JFK’s FP proposals, most of which the mainstream historians and media have been slow/reluctant to embrace as real.
Agree that a Cuban and/or USSR plot is low probability. And yet here we have a brand new book Castro’s Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, & the Assassination of John F. Kennedy by a former CIA agent making that claim.
Scanning some short pieces by and about Newman’s book got the impression that he agrees that Oswald was the shooter.
Well it’s not surprising that the CIA disinfo machinery is still actively working to misdirect on this case. There’s still a strong motive to send people away from a very strong suspect, the Agency, and towards dead ends like Castro and Khrushchev/KGB. And we’ll likely see more of it as the 50th anniv approaches this fall.
As for Newman, he’s far less a Whodunnit researcher of the events of Dealey Plaza than a careful analyst of govt/military docs in very discrete areas, such as Kennedy and Vietnam, and Oswald and the CIA. And it would be surprising he’d conclude like the WC on Oswald’s guilt since he was a major researcher for the Oliver Stone movie positing conspiracy. I have both his books, original ones, but I understand he put out a later paper edition of his Oswald book, which I haven’t read, which is more specific in certain conclusions about the assass’n than the hardcover.
Has an epilogue which sheds some more light on Newman’s conclusions:
Inconclusive, to be sure. As far as I can determine Angleton was mad as a hatter.
LOL. Also appeared that he had company at the mad tea party.
No better time than the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the assassination to try to cash with a book on a pet hypothesis.
Yes, noticed that there’s supposedly something new and startling in latest edition of Newman’s book. But apparently one has to buy and read the book to find out what it is. The transcript of a talk he gave a couple of months ago demonstrates his focus and attention on minutia – this concerned the Mexico City visit by Oswald — but at the end he concedes that he and nobody seems to know if it was Oswald or an Oswald impersonator. So we have the CIA tracking him for years in Russia, the FBI tracking him when he returned, and then both agencies dropped the ball in October 1963. Sort of like those AQ operatives picked up in KL and then roomed with an FBI informant in San Diego and then they suddenly drop off the radar.
Quite a bit like that, actually. Except now we have a legislature which will never delve into the evidence.
That’s an interesting Oct 2001 report. Our “good friend” Pakistan again.
Not sure except for brief moments in time that we’ve ever had a legislature willing to delve into anything except for politically opportune boogiemen.
Remaining JFK assassination papers scheduled for release in 2017. Odds that they will?
Even in the Nineties investigators were coming up against classification obstacles. We’ll see. This is not your parents United States any more, since 9/11 all bets are off.
One document contained information about Marguerite Oswald, New Jersey, Bund meetings, Nazis and 1940. It was blocked from release by Henry Hyde and the HUAC.
Ponder that. The real Marguerite Oswald was never in New Jersey (except on her way to NYC in the fifties). Why would Henry Hyde want to block the release of that document?
The compelling thing about Newman’s ‘dry’ analysis, my emphasis:
The link cited gives a pretty good summary of Newman’s case for those interested. As for #3 and #5 I think it has to be acknowledged that Oswald’s association with various intelligence agencies prior to the assassination was a rather brilliant feature of the conspiracy that forced the entire national security apparatus into a ‘damage control’ of obfuscation and misinformation that successfully concealed the tracks of the actual perpetrators.
Okay, Marie. You don’t want to invest any time on the JFK assassination. You answered my question. People who demand answers and then refuse to read them don’t have much of a leg to stand on.
Why should you invest in the JFK assassination? In early October 1963 the CIA in Mexico City took pictures of someone impersonating Oswald at the Soviet embassy and Cuban consulate. The pictures are widely available, google them. Apply some logic here. Why would anyone impersonate Oswald a month and a half BEFORE the assassination? Why would anyone try to connect him to the Soviets and Cubans? Why would someone impersonate a “nobody” BEFORE the nobody became an international figure?
In addition to Newman’s book you could pick up James DiEugenio’s most recent edition of DESTINY BETRAYED. Also, you could read HARVEY AND LEE, a thousand pages of documentation about the creation of the Oswald myth.
But you’re right, Marie. Why should you waste any time on a coup fifty years ago when you can complain about the dysfunction of the executive branch?
Like the vast majority of Americans, I agree that Oswald as a lone shooter nut case isn’t satisfactory. We’re all waiting for one or more of all the people that have been and continue to be working on it for almost fifty years to solve it. Until then, the best we can contribute is our continued skepticism of the single assassin.
Marie, please use some logic.
I’ve read quite a bit of all this stuff and it seems pretty clear to me that it was directly related to the thwarted Bay of Pigs faction of CIA operations and their Right-wing allies within the military and law enforcement in the Gulf states at the time.
That’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen.
I like my conspiracies a bit smaller. Easier to contain and control.
A handful. Occam’s razor points to a lot of unwitting associates whom had no idea what was actually afoot. After the fact the ass-covering was endemic.
Yes. But which handful. That’s the question that’s confounded researchers for decades.
On a personal level, was there anybody with more reasons to loathe JFK than Gen Walker?
Basically David Atlee Phillips, a number of the Watergate burglars and some expendable Cubans. Yeah, food for thought there. That the Birchers wanted to murder JFK too just gave the conspirators a bit of breathing space.
Not so smart? Smart enough apparently for the Marine Corps to give him Top Secret security clearance at Atsugi and access to U-2 codes. Smart enough for the Marines to send him to foreign language school at Monterey to perfect his Russian, a notoriously difficult language to learn for native English speakers. And some evidence from native Russian speakers suggests he spoke the language fluently. Not smart?
Immature and unbalanced? Sounds like the psychological profile the WC and lapdog MSM wanted to feed the public, but his filmed interviews in NOLA in the summer of ’63 and his public statements, often made hurriedly and under great duress in front of the cameras in the Dallas police station, show a rather composed and stable person given the extraordinary circumstances he suddenly found himself in. The police interrogators also noted how composed he was — almost as if he’d been trained how to respond, one noted.
My sense of some of the things suggestive of an unstable or even violent personality — such as at one point (in the Marines or in Russia, I’ve forgotten) a “suicide” attempt (a gunshot to a harmless part of his body) — were part of the intel program to layer on a “kinda crazy nut” aspect to his profile, for several reasons including possibly strategic use later.
Finally, the assassination was just too big and complex and frought with peril for the perpetrators not to involve more than just “Dallas locals” (presumably DPD?). Just look at the curiously passive and criminally negligent behavior that day of the US Secret Service for one thing. And how the pieces neatly fell into place to cover up the crime — establishing the WC, the non-investigative attitude of a compliant press corps, the passive attitude of the liberals in Congress, etc. I very much doubt the Dallas “locals” had either the power or sophistication to pull off the crime by themselves and then cover it all up so successfully immediately thereafter and for 5 decades since.
Marie, I just gave you an example. The CIA is willing to sacrifice one thing for another, especially if they’ve got something better in the pipeline. Maybe it’s not that I’m non-responsive. Maybe you’re unresponsive.
We have racists in Congress. You don’t think that there are no racists in the intelligence services? You think that the entire intelligence division marches in lockstep with Obama? You ever wonder how beneficial it is for the racists to blame a black President for things that happened during the Bush regime?
In the summer of 2008 the odds looked pretty good that a Democrat was going to be elected to the White House. The Senate Republicans voted unanimously for the FISA extension/enhancement bill. Do you think that the Republicans were so dumb that they would willingly give enormous surveillance powers to Obama or H. Clinton? (Remember, these are the clowns who’ve been wringing their hands over the IRS under a Bush appointee checking groups with “Tea Party” in their names.) Or that they would even risk it? Of course not. They knew that the power of the NSA/CIA doesn’t accrue to a Democratic President. That puts them a step ahead of you.
As far as Oswald is concerned, your disbelief is not proof of anything but your lack of knowledge. If you don’t know about the false defector program you should read up on it. For example, at one point Marina Oswald, when asked how she met Lee, inadvertently gave an account of her meeting with Robert Webster, a RAND employee who defected before Oswald. Think about it. The Russians knew the US was sending false defectors, and Marina was part of a honeypot operation.
Really, you should study up on American history, specifically what happened to this country over the last fifty years.
And none of the above removes the possibility that another intelligence agency (domestic or foreign) was behind Snowden. After all, he shows up in Hong Kong in time to embarrass Obama when meeting with the Chinese leader. Go back and match Snowden’s revelations with Obama’s foreign policy initiatives. After all those coincidences go back and read up all the stuff he heaped on the Bush Administration.
What do you think the Snowden event is about then?
I’ll put on my tinfoil hat for a minute. Snowden worked at CIA then NSA. CIA wants to remove Alexander from NSA.
Alternative scenario: Brennan, now head of CIA could be appointed DNI if Clapper were removed like Petraeus was conveniently removed from CIA. Where did that information to remove Petraeus from CIA come from if not through NSA? Snowden sent to NSA to remove Alexander and blackmail of Brennan and also remove Clapper. A two-fer.
You walk into the hall of mirrors you can go on all night. Tis why Bob of Portland needs to show some more evidence before he has credibility on this narrative.
very interesting, thanks.
Your two scenarios are interesting, but both suggest that Obama is merely a bystander in departmental internecine warfare, and he’s clearly drawing political damage from power extended to the NSA during the previous administration.
You may be right, but whoever’s directing Snowden seems to be wanting to injure Obama’s administration. So you would still be in same position of the intelligence services being independent of the White House.
If you wait for me to provide you with information about the NSA you may as well wait another fifty years. It’s clear that the CIA held a coup and removed JFK in 1963. They didn’t go away. It took awhile to completely solidify their control of the government, a few more assassinations, fixed elections and political sabotage.
This is what Jim Garrison said in 1967:
“What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity.
“But in the final analysis, it’s based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we’ve built since 1945, the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we’ve seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution. In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society.”
Anyone want to argue that Congress isn’t a debating society?
Wow. I’d forgotten those remarks. BUt Garrison really nailed it by identifying the Pentagon and CIA as virtual secret govts inside the public one.
I think it was true then, and still true today. They allow the president some leeway in FP and nat’l security concerns, but at key points they (somehow) insist on their hardline position.
Three separate and not always equal govts, only one operating in the open and accountable to the public (mostly).
I think with Kennedy it was 2 perceived weak sister failures with Cuba, then hearing about his secret backchannel to Castro, plus the final straw probably being JFK’s clear intention to get the hell out of SVN. Or maybe the final one was JFK’s Test Ban Treaty. Or his plan to bring in the Soviets on a joint US-USSR mission to the Moon.
Re Obama, there was a brief discussion this a.m. on Pacifica Radio from a normally very left and mostly anti-Obama host who offered that O’s recent speech about national security and the Gitmo situation — the one which was interrupted by a Code Pink protester, where he said in the end You know, she really does make a point worth listening to — seemed to be Obama saying I’d like to do all that too, but forces inside the govt are preventing me.
His Code Pink guest did not entirely disagree. Nor do I.
Brodie, get yourself to a copy of the revised DESTINY BETRAYED. And if you can scrounge up the money and track down a copy, get HARVEY AND LEE by John Armstrong. It’s self-published and there are a lot of typos over the thousand pages, but the author uses lots of documents released in the 90s and tears apart the official version of events.
Will do on Destiny.
Re Armstrong, familiar with the basics of his book. I think I was waiting for an updated more recent version, as I’d heard the original sells for mucho big bucks.
Lotsa Kennedy related books coming out this year, esp in the fall. Maybe not many good or useful ones. SUpposedly one will be by a former NYTman, taking the WC to task. We’ll see if that’s all or if he goes further.
And of course the one by the colorful GOP/Nixon political operative Roger Stone, alleging LBJ up to his neck in involvement in the plotting, which is what he says his former boss also believed. Not expecting much by way of proof, but will probably check that one out too since I’ve always suspecting Lyndon of at least foreknowledge — as does James Douglass and also, interestingly, author Gerald McKnight (Breach of Trust).
I understand that Armstrong will be putting all of his documents online in a year or so, which certainly would make it cheaper than 200 bucks for his book. I wish he’d e-book it.
Armstrong points out that a month before the assassination Allen Dulles had a very public meeting with LBJ at LBJ’s ranch. If they were both complicit in assassination planning they wouldn’t put it on the front page. More likely, Dulles was setting LBJ up for blackmail. Johnson couldn’t just get rid of the plotters because they could dirty him up too, but he certainly cooperated after the fact. Before his ascension to the White House Johnson was in line to be dropped from the ticket and indicted.
Armstrong has a website with some of his stuff. If you read his section on Mexico City you’ll see the detail with which he examines the evidence.
http://www.mindserpent.com/American_History/books/Armstrong/index.html
Another anecdote. Years ago I met a guy who had been an Army Ranger in the early sixties. He said they used to send his unit to places in the Carribean where coups were happening and told to shoot anyone on the streets with a black face. One day his unit was sent up in the air and stayed airborne for 24 hours, flying around the country without touching down. When they finally landed they found out that JFK had been assassinated. His considered opinion was that the military wanted a backup plan in case people started rioting over JFK’s assassination, and had them airborne to immediately fly into any city that might break out in civil unrest.
I didn’t assert either or any, just that they were possible. In both, it would be Obama, as President/commander-in-chief who would settle the internecine conflict either by retiring one or keeping them in place.
It is also clear that NSA and CIA might not be on the same team, or they might (affaire Petraeus).
I’m more of the opinion that the coup occurred when hapless Harry Truman took over and relied on Jimmy Byrnes for advice. And then a succession of folks who architected the national security state. But that’s when I’m in a tinfoil hat mood.
One could equally argue that it occurred on the domestic side when Woodrow Wilson obtained the Espionage Act of 1917 (goldbugs would add the Federal Reserve Act of 1913) and unleashed Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer and his protege J. Edgar Hoover.
The extent to which one introduces state secrets into government is the extent to which you lose democracy. The extent to which arbitrary police power has impunity is the extent to which a coup has occurred. It’s shades of gray, and it’s always reversible–sometimes dramatically. See Honecker, Erich.
We’re not in disagreement, Tarheel. The evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the JFK assassination is there for all to see if anyone wants to look. And going back you can point to all sorts of moments in history where the plutocrats connived for their advantage. Allen Dulles was a banker before he headed the CIA, and all those coups in the fifties were done for the benefit of corporations.
You could argue that the status quo of all civilizations in history has been a few at the top benefiting from the sweat of the rest. Does anyone really think that the Pharoah was God, and that the power of the state wasn’t used to enforce that belief on the peons? Or that the kings of Europe were there at the top of the heap by the grace of God, or that Bush sent our troops into Iraq and Afghanistan with blessings of God? In the end the history of civilization has more to do with “The Sopranos” than Gandhi.
Yes, you could point to all sorts of moments in history when our country turned away from democracy towards fascism. But the assassination of the President in broad daylight in the oil capitol of our country is pretty clear, and explanations for the dysfunction of American democracy today go directly back to 1963. Like I’ve said elsewhere, the coup plotters didn’t return to their desks on the Monday after the assassination. Once you commit there’s no going back. If you eliminate the President. you cover your tracks, you want you make sure the next guy cooperates. You find your allies in Congress. You blackmail or otherwise control J. Edgar and the FBI. You put your people in other agencies, whether it was E. Howard Hunt helping Nixon to staff the DEA or putting judges friendly to intelligence agencies put on the court. A President wants too much power for himself (Nixon)? You make sure you’ve got an ally in place as Vice President before you remove Nixon. When Carter and Stansfield Turner tried to trim back the cowboys in CIA operations you get the October Surprise and a decade of cocaine smuggling by the self-same cowboys. Eventually, between the plutocrats and their handmaidens in intelligence your two parties don’t nominate anyone who’ll stir up trouble.
I remember that the week before the FISA vote in 2008 Obama’s campaign plane suffered a “malfunction” and then the Secret Service “forgot” to use the metal detectors at one of his rallies in DALLAS. Message received. Obama switched votes and supported the FISA extension/expansion.
Do you have the precise dates of those events in 2008. It might be more than the FISA vote that was at stake.
A story that most of you seem to be missing is how the United States violated conventional diplomatic immunity and asylum procedures, which has put Snowden in the position of being held hostage in the transit area of the Moscow airport. So what is going on in the media is a hostage negotiation between the largest superpower and its formal allies, a Russia caught in an uncomfortable situation, a China that has passed off the problem to Russia and some Latin American nations so angry that their populations know that the US has been spying on them and wanting to get a minor geopolitical victory against the US.
Snowden, Wikileaks, Greenwald and are using what media power they have in this negotiation to ensure the protection of Greenwald’s and WaPo’s and NYT’s and O Globo’s and Der Spiegel’s and Guardian’s and Le Monde’s source against reprisals from the United States. Journalists who help whiste-blowers find it harder to get additional scoops if one of their sources is punished.
It is becoming apparent that the US really doesn’t know what Snowden took and is using the “worst case scenario” to try to shut the story down in the media. Greenwald, other media and civil liberties advocates seek to keep the story alive (the media to draw eyeballs and the civil liberties advocates to get governmental reforms).
Snowden yesterday invoked the Nuremberg principle, the Fourth Amendment, and the similar principle that the US itself had written into the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in saying that he felt compelled to do what he did because all other means of reform had been systematically shut off by a security-conscious state. He asked for asylum from any country willing to give it to him and for temporary Russian asylum and safe passage to some other asylum country. This had to be done publicly in a big splash because attempts to work behind the scenes had resulted in US allies intercepting and forcing down the airplane of a head of state returning to his country and a forced inspection of his airplane to see if Snowden was on board. The rumor that caused the incident came from the US ambassador to Vienna.
Regardless of what any American thinks, under international law Snowden has the right of asylum in any country that provides him asylum. It is up to those nations to evaluate whether being charged a criminal in the US is a reason for denying asylum. The US used that power a lot during the Cold War as dissidents for the Warsaw Pact countries seeking asylum often came with criminal charges.
In response to the statement of Edward Snowden in his meeting with human rights organizations, transmitted to the world through Wikileaks and the human rights organizations who were there, the White House Press Secretary standing at the pre-eminent propaganda platform in the world attacked Snowden for using the transit area of an airport as a propaganda platform.
No doubt, the Brazil speech by Greenwald was a reply in which he takes the US assertion of worst case scenario and uses it to attempt to gain safe passage for his source to a country of asylum.
Greenwald is using the biggest stick in his possession to protect a source. That is what is going on here.
And likely Obama is behaving to provide cover for the intelligence community to demonstrate that he has their back so that they will have his.
But it is time to start dealing with the Constitutional issues now and not put them off to a future administration.
Is a security state with total surveillance the world you want your kids and grandkids to grow up in? Because that is where we are headed if we don’t have that conversation.
If you have not read through the documents that have been posted, especially the NSA Inspector General’s report, it is well worth your time to just as in 2009 reading the ACA put forward by the Senate was well worth your time.
We are not playing team sports here. We indeed do have a problem.
“Greenwald is using the biggest stick in his possession to protect a source. That is what is going on here.”
I am actually quite worried for Snowden now. I think Greenwald is putting him at risk and showing little concern for his well being.
I don’t think that Greenwald is acting without Snowden’s knowledge, but there is a general concern best expressed in Yves Smith’s Has Snowden just misplayed his cards? that Snowden is not getting the best strategic, tactical, and legal advice under the circumstances.
Snowden in his statement is quite self-conscious of the risk he placed himself in from the beginning. He’s worked CIA and NSA and has almost 12 years in intelligence organizations in one role or another; he is not naive.
Just for the record:
About the Reuters article
The tragic thing is, we’ve finally reached the point where “damage to the US government” does not equal “damage to the United States”.
I completely fail to understand the constant attention being paid to Snowden and Greenwald and the consequent avoidance of the revealed material and the implications thereof. None of the arguments that these are inconsequential make sense to me; the confirmation of a suspicion as fact is news.
I would be grossly underestimating my feelings about the progressive/blogging community to say I was disappointed with the reaction to this case. It has confirmed my worst fears about the arc of history being traced for all of us here and I refuse to believe, in spite of a chorus of denials, that the “panopticon effect” is not already functional in our daily lives. One might review the various arguments regarding the usefulness of the progressive blogosphere fruitlessly for evidence that it was ever perceived as an instrument of our accelerating descent into corporatism but that now seems a negligent omission.
Greenwald and Snowden have nothing to do with the rather stunning implications of this revealed information; the authenticity of which is not even denied by the administration or agencies named. Nothing to see here? When fascism comes to America, it seems, we will be sucking our thumbs and holding our favourite blankets.
Well put, which is why I keep insisting that President Obama must deal with this directly and stop denying it in order to avoid a Watergate-like calamity to his Presidency.
His major role in all this has been to perpetuate it and defend it and become too comfortable as a chief executive with these powers at his disposal.
A staunch Obama supporter since February of 2007 but I am willing to accept his legacy as strong evidence that the mechanisms of state have taken on an irreversible trajectory of their own. The arc of history still bends towards justice but it does so largely as a result of unintended consequences. Those that reach up and grab that arc seem to let go or end up martyrs.
I worry that if that is the choice facing the President — let go or end up as a martyr — that we are more far gone as a democracy than most of us imagine.
I personally do not think there is a great risk in the commander-in-chief ordering a unit of the military to obey the law and the Constitution and to do so within its current budget. That is the minimal change that would make this go away. Start using specific suspicion for cause and do the social networking off of that for citizens worldwide. Purge data immediately for those cleared of suspicion. Purge all of the data obtained illegally during the Bush administration and unconstitutionally under the color of law during the Obama administration. Do not try to defend the suit that the ACLU is making based on its being a Verizon Business Systems customer by invoking the trump card of “state secrets”. And in general, stop using “state secrets” as a way of preventing cases from moving forward in the court system.
That and providing Congress promptly with the information that it has been requesting would go a long way to defusing the political ramifications of this scandal.
Other steps would be to fire Gen. Alexander on two counts of incompetency: (1) overreaching legal and Constitutional authority (essentially a violation of his oath) and (2) misadministration to the point that leak of this magnitude occurred.
When it comes down to it, the power that sysadmins have over the systems and data is such that they are on the honor system (unless you want to invest large sums in two-person-required redundancy). But honor is a two-way street. It is very clear that at some point in his career, Snowden saw a bunch of things that a gung-ho patriotic American would be appalled at–and it changed him into a gung-ho patriotic American who wanted to do something about it. We older, wiser, cynical folks understand the romanticism in both attitudes. And understand how easily it flips. It’s how the McCarthy period and enforced Americanism produced the eruption of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
It seems the first place one would have to begin is in the catch-22 realm of the secret FISC court. That institution and process strikes me as the sole arbiter of the avowed legality of all of these activities. It would need to be carefully disarmed and dismantled.
On a broader basis, however, it seems that the post-9/11 rot has really set in; that no executive would dare to expose themselves even tangentially to the risk of being perceived as imperilling American lives or property from foreign threats. The change has been substantial and comprehensive and has affected every nuance of our culture, civics and self-awareness.
It would be hard to argue that this environment has been detrimental to private power among our largest corporate entities either; those to whom activism is synonymous with terrorism.
The FISC court requires a change in the law, which requires the action of a Congress that is right at the moment dysfunctional.
Having a section III court order the declassification of the FISA courts records would be a way to put pressure on Congress, but that requires action from outside plaintiffs and the DOJ not invoking “state secrets” to block court action.
And part of that is the successful prying open of the “state secrets” defense that has a preliminary ruling in Perry v. United States, brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The political culture needs to start having a more sober look at what the real national security threats are instead of being led around in Pavlovian style by invocation of the words “terrorists” and “bad guys”.
Yep, the corporate purchase of the Congress does make things a mite more difficult.
Armando, Daily Kos: Liberalism, the surveillance state, the Living Constitution and balance
Armando, another abrasive personality, on skepticism about the surveillance state and wanting to regulate guns. Includes a reference to Louis Brandeis.
It’s almost as if people who comport themselves with a polite and modest deference don’t spend much time rocking the boat. Which is weird, because that’s the only sort of person with the moral standing to raise this sort of issue, right?
Does Snowden Have Granite Countertops?
The Brandeis quote is incredibly apt for this series of events: “Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.” It also illuminates why the Administration’s behavior is so maddening and heartbreaking.
Did you bother to look up the meaning of “narcissist” before using it?
Hint – a narcissist would never ever put his/her financial well-being, life, and/or liberty on the line for a principle or for the benefit others. Only an idiot — and Greenwald made sure in his interviews with Snowden that he fully understood the ramifications of going public with the NSA information before he agreed to publish it — would choose to be a whistleblower for self-aggrandizement.
Narcissists are sneaky, manipulative, and greedy. It’s always “me-me-me” for them which is why many of them are substance abusers. Their social conscience is weak {and when non-existent the narcissist is a sociopath}. Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames are classic types. Wall Street is filled with narcissists only too happy to impoverish “Grandma Millie” so that they can have mansions, yachts, etc.
uhm, narcisissists do that all the time.
as the daughter of a particularly nasty one, I can verify that they often do things that appear generous or brave because they value their own image above all else – and one of the most seductive things for a narcissist is to appear to be the “hero.” People on the far end of this spectrum, like my father, also often possess astoundingly poor judgement and assume that everything will turn out all right for them, even if it is obvious to everyone else that it will not. They often have the irrational belief that only they can save (the world) (the company) (the family) (etc).
In the case of my father, his narcissism – which I believe rises to the level of a true personality disorder – has basically ruined his life. He’s now living in HUD housing with very little social support because he’s driven so many of us away. He has no money, despite a long and prosperous career, due to astoundingly idiotic decisions, all based on his assumption in his own infallibility.
I don’t have any specific evidence that Snowden is a narcissist, but the idea isn’t out of the question. I do wonder about what appear to be very naiive assumptions that he could somehow find refuge in Hong Kong. That smacks me of someone who was making irrational decisions, and who imagines himself to be important enough to somehow get around the normal rules. Reminds me a bit of my dad.
In any case, as I’ve said here before, I hope he gets to South America. But nobody’s smelling like a rose in this mess. he did break the law, and there are consequences. I just hope he doesn’t end up like bradley manning. That doesn’t benefit anyone.
If you watch the Snowden interviews, you’ll see that he had no illusion of being invulnerable and understood that he could pay a very high price for what he was about to do.
It’s easy for narcissists to appear altruistic towards an individual when they are in fact being manipulative. However, that only works when the observer group is small and one or more in that group is or expects to be a beneficiary of the largesse.
Will have to wait for the full story on why Snowden chose Hong Kong. What we do know is that he never intended to remain anonymous. Because he desired notoriety or a recognition that anonymous information leaks are quickly deep sixed? He did know enough about Hong Kong that it was unlikely he’d be quickly nabbed and deported from there. He was buying time and possibly was surprised at how quickly the safe window closed on him and determined that being nabbed that soon would undermine what he’d done so far. It’s also possible that he learned that his theft was detected faster than he expected and Hong Kong was the best he could do to make a hasty retreat. Or he could have had a decent exit plan from Hong Kong that fell apart. It appeared that the flight to Russia was a decision made on the fly, but it could also have been pre-planned but executed too late to complete the journey to wherever he intended to get to.
There’s no roadmap for those in a position to choose to be a whistleblower. It’s a lonely place and requires the sort of fortitude that few of us have.
http://blog.rarenewspapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Oswald_Defects1.gif
Consider the source:
http://www.redstate.com/hardcorepreppie/2011/05/01/lee-harvey-oswald-and-left-wing-violence/
http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/journey.htm