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Legal expert Jeffrey Toobin Compares Glenn Greenwald’s Partner to a ‘Drug Mule’
(The Atlantic Wire) – The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin went on CNN to continue his defense of the NSA and the White House against Edward Snowden’s leaks and the journalists who report on them. He responded to David Miranda’s 9-hour detention in the UK under a controversial terrorism law by comparing Glenn Greenwald’s partner to a drug mule.
“Let’s be clear about what Mr. Miranda’s role was here. I don’t want to be unkind, but he was a mule. He was given something — he didn’t know what it was — for one person to pass to another at the other end of an airport. Our prisons are full of drug mules.”
Greenwald Slams “Establishment” Double-Standard for Manning plus Video
(Common Dreams) July 31, 2013 – Jeffrey Toobin, the CNN legal analyst who spent most of the day on the air of his cable network commending the decision of the military judge who found Pfc. Bradley Manning guilty of nineteen criminal counts for leaking classified information to Wikileaks
In a debate with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, Toobin once again said he thought the verdict was the right one and expressed contentment that Manning was facing a long prison term.
In response, Greenwald said that Toobin’s remarks simply proved that “if you’re sufficiently rich and powerful and well-connected in Washington, the laws don’t apply to you. You don’t get punished. The only people who do are people like Bradley Manning.”
Glenn Greenwald Schools CNN Host Howard Kurz on NSA, Wikileaks, Controlled Media
Greenwald And NYT’s James Risen Completely Deflate Jeffrey Toobin’s Tortured Logic On NSA, Snowden
(Mediaite) July 31, 2013 – James Risen pointed out the blatantly obvious problem with Toobin’s logic.
“We wouldn’t be having this discussion if it wasn’t for him. Why do you think-I mean, that’s the thing I don’t understand about the climate in Washington these days, is that people want to have debates on television elsewhere, but then you want to throw the people who start the debates in jail.”
This is not the first time Toobin has made this assertion, as I noted in a column here last month. Here’s what Toobin said on Morgan’s program mere days after the first NSA revelations came out:
“There are many good reasons to protest this law. I’m troubled by this law. But I think there are right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it. And by a 29-year-old kid just throwing open the safe and giving away documents that people have devoted years of their lives to creating and protecting, that’s the wrong way to protest this.”
It really bears repeating that the national security apparatus wasn’t suddenly going to have a come to Jesus moment and decide to become more transparent all of a sudden. We have a secret court with its own secret interpretation of the law, so the government’s pretty firmly in the “secrecy” camp. Snowden releasing the documents was pretty much the only way the public was ever going to find out about these programs.
But that wasn’t the only logical fallacy Toobin pushed, he also repeated the same ridiculous talking point that basically boils down to, “Boy, that freedom-loving Snowden certainly loves those freedom-hating countries, doesn’t he?” Greenwald shot back that the reason Snowden went to China and Russia instead of staying is because we have “a country full of Jeffrey Toobins” that would bring him up on charges the millisecond he steps on American soil.
Does the NSA Record Phone Calls? David Rivkin and Glenn Greenwald on Warrentless Domestic Surveillance (2007)