Possibly still irked that I said he was smug in his self-righteousness in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict, Charles P. Pierce links to me disapprovingly to argue that the vessel that is Glenn Greenwald can be filled with shit as far as he is concerned so long as it keeps pumping out revelations from the Snowden files. Is that how we are on the left now? What is that? Some vestige of the old vanguard reasserting itself? The mainstreaming of Lyndon LaRouche’s standards for journalism? Did Leo Strauss have secret liberal disciples? When did it become okay for “reporters” to libel people and sensationalize stories and selectively omit relevant facts and grind axes?
There may very well be a degree of sheer defensiveness in Greenwald’s critics, and some attack Greenwald to protect the president. But most of us are normal left-wing people who are critical of the press when they get the facts wrong, especially when it’s transparently deliberate. Let’s take the president out of it for a minute and stipulate that some of the information that Snowden divulged is deeply troubling. Let’s further stipulate that we might make some progress in protecting people’s privacy and getting better oversight as a result of the debate and scandal that Snowden’s revelations created.
It isn’t a logical argument to say that we are benefiting from these leaks so all the reporting on the leaks is good, solid reporting. In truth, lousy, hyped, hyperbole allows the government to hit back and undermine its critics. And you can’t blame that people on the left, who are not part of the government, for pointing out that shitty, hyped, hyperbole is being produced on a regular basis by Glenn Greenwald. It’s the exact same standard we used against David Broder, and still use against everyone from Glenn Beck to David Gregory. We see bullshit; we call bullshit.
Are we going to abandon that standard now because we like the underlying facts that aren’t hyped and distorted? “Hey, we’re really getting somewhere with these lies, maybe no one should notice that we’re lying.”
That’s the operating principle of the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer. Is that what we are now? A mirror image of Rush Limbaugh?
When I hear people argue that talking about Greenwald is a distraction from the real scandal, I feel like asking if talking about Judith Miller was a distraction from the real scandal. Shitty reporting is shitty reporting, and if you are going to tolerate it when it suits your purpose then you lose the right to complain about it when it doesn’t suit your purpose.
Apparently it has come to this. It’s not pretty.
Jeez, do you think he could have a bigger photo with his column?
That’s Jeffrey Toobin in the photo, not Pierce.
Thanks.
When did it become okay for “reporters” to libel people and sensationalize stories and selectively omit relevant facts and grind axes?
So you throw your lot in with those people? Or homophobes like John Schindler? People who are pissed just because the revelations embarrass the President?
And you can’t blame that people on the left, who are not part of the government, for pointing out that shitty, hyped, hyperbole is being produced on a regular basis by Glenn Greenwald.
Really? Because Bob Cesca says so? Or Joy Reid? You’ll have to do a lot better.
Judith Miller was not a distraction from the scandal of Iraq because she herself was a key part of the scandal.
Glenn Greenwald IS a distraction from the NSA scandal because he is actually part of a DIFFERENT scandal, the scandal of shitty journalism so well described by you, but not of the mass violation of personal privacy by the NSA.
Perhaps he does detract from the credibility of the issue, etc., for the reasons you state, but only to very minor degree, because the revelations about the NSA are hardly being ignored. It is the US government that is losing credibility worldwide, by its unconvincing denials, not the media.
Your first sentence AGGRESSIVELY misses the point.
OOH, another ggreenwald is not a JOORNOLIST article. Sounds like the push back campaign has started in full force.
The “mirror image of Rush” is focusing on minutia, mostly irrelevant, that may be in error or the tone and feel or presentation style rubs some the wrong way to distract from the larger important issue. That’s how we were subjected to a Presidential impeachment over a blow job. How Gore was trashed.
Snowden tried to work with the paper that once had the courage and sufficient journalistic skill and integrity to publish Watergate revelations. But they shied away from it. When the NYTimes gets anything outside official leaks, they run to the administration and ask pretty please can we publish this?
There are precious few journalists of any stature and skill today. Maybe none other than Greenwald and those he’s been working with at The Guardian that are capable and trustworthy enough to handle these revelations. And handle them in a fashion that doesn’t let them die after an initial flurry of outrage as we saw with Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition and black sites, and the other NSA and FBI spying on citizens leaks.
For all your respect and honor of the Church Committee, much of that information had previously been leaked and people with loud voices on the left, right, and center always found ways to disparage, discount, and deny the information. In real time, Woodward and Bernstein were just a couple of green local reporters. They were easily dismissed by people like Booman.
The one that needs to hold up a mirror is you.
I’m not a fan of Woodward, although I retain a healthy respect for Bernstein, but neither of them engaged in anything close to the dishonesty of Greenwald. And, if they did, Nixon might have survived because their initial reporting would have been dismissed.
Let me give a different example to think about.
People who worked with The Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board were serious researchers who were following an act of Congress. Many of those researchers believe that the CIA (the government) over the years promoted outlandish conspiracy theories in order to debunk and marginalize anyone who didn’t accept the Warren Commission Report.
I don’t know if that is really true, and that’s not my point here. My point is that you can undermine a legitimate debate or investigation by destroying the credibility of the investigators or reporters. You mistake is to think I am doing that to Greenwald instead of him doing it to himself. If he didn’t exist, the NSA would have to create him.
I specifically referenced Woodward and Bernstein wrt Watergate. Not Woodward who alone isn’t much of a journalist or writer. (Wish Bernstein had taken on more interesting and challenging assignments over the years because he’s such a good writer.)
Have no idea what your point is wrt to the Kennedy Assassination Review Board. btw, Obama is the latest POTUS to refuse to release still sealed documents on that issue.
You’re being disingenuous in claiming that Greenwald has made some huge errors and/or lied that render his reporting on the NSA programs unreliable. You’re nitpicking and your animosity towards him is all too obvious even if you can’t see it yourself.
Do you really, honestly, have no idea what my point is?
It’s such a straightforward point that I cannot see how you could fail to understand it.
Boo, people get confused when the subject of JFK’s assassination comes up. The CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer has been playing so long and many people are too comfortable living inside the lie. Expect a lot more of this as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the coup.
http://www.krusch.com/books/kennedy/Harvey_And_Lee.pdf
How is a suspicion (by “credible researchers”) that the CIA promulgated outlandish JFK assassination stories to discredit the work of all other JFK assassination researchers related to your constant harping on how Greenwald presents the information Snowden gave him and his retelling of Snowden’s and Miranda’s encounters with government officials?
Let me try to explain it, real slow.
In the hypothetical case that the Warren Commission’s conclusions were wrong, and somewhat deliberately so, insofar as they relied on a FBI and CIA that fed them bad information, the way to quash widespread public doubt was to discredit the people who were pointing out the obvious errors by grouping them with loony theories.
So, for example, when the public finally saw the Zapruder film, the wide consensus was that it showed a shot from the front that was inconsistent with Oswald firing the coup de grace.
That was a hell of a problem, but suddenly you had these theories that the Zapruder film was doctored in implausible ways. The theory then, is that by calling into question the integrity of the most glaring evidence against the lone nut theory, the waters are muddied and eyes are taken off the ball.
How does that relate to this case?
In this case, the corollary of the Zapruder film is the documents themselves. They tell a fairly straightforward story, although they don’t answer every question and some of them can only be understood with further explanation by experts. Enter Greenwald who exaggerates the story the documents are telling thereby muddying the waters and taking people’s eyes off the ball. It’s pretty much the same exact function of someone who tied to say that the Zapruder film was evidence of a government cover-up because only the government could have doctored it. No! The Zapruder film was only evidence of a cover-up if it hadn’t been doctored. If it had been doctored then none of it could be trusted. Now we’re not talking about “back and to the left” anymore, instead we are talking about the film itself.
In the present case, if you want to take the eyeballs off the documents, you make it about the reporter. That’s what people are criticizing me for doing, right?
But I could shut my mouth forever and the cacophony of criticism would still go on because he’s not honest.
Am I accusing Greenwald of sabotaging his investigation intentionally? No.
But if he didn’t exist, the NSA would be sorely tempted to invent him. He’s that useful to them.
It’s not hypothetical, Marie. Read.
The only correction I would offer here is that I don’t really think that Greenwald’s shtick mars the importance of the issue. Greenwald’s shtick mars Greenwald and the people who insist that if you don’t embrace 100% of Greenwald you’re not a proper leftist. Jim Jones was a nutball, but the ethos he articulated was still appealing, and when Jim Jones took out all his followers, it was only Jim Jones’s fault, not the fault of the ethos.
You mistake is to think I am doing that to Greenwald instead of him doing it to himself. If he didn’t exist, the NSA would have to create him.
That’s bullshit and you know it. You, and Cesca and Reid, read what you want to read and disregard(and Simon and Garfunkel said). The NSA and the President says they don’t spy on Americans. And yet we find out they do. You can try and wave it away all you want but it doesn’t make it disappear. Then again, we know the government has been spying on their citizens for ages, it’s just a lot easier today due to technology. Maybe you don’t give a shit. That doesn’t mean you can wave away the facts that you don’t like, or don’t want to read.
Footnote: Greenwald has trashed Carl Bernstein.
There are two issues.
One is surveillance/privacy.
The other is a fact-based press.
Greenwald contributes to both issues. He has moved the ball forward on the former. He has fucked up royally on the latter, amplifying a well-established pattern that distinguishes his “career.”
The degree to which people line swarm to kiss his ass and defend his every statement is like a parody of how the same people think other people treat Obama.
You can be upset about surveillance and not kiss Glenn Greenwald’s ass. You can be upset about surveillance and not say that everyone not currently part of the ass-kissing swarm is a bootlicking fascist.
Greenwald is a bullshit artist who is a major media figure, and the left blogosphere used to love deflating major media blowhards. The fact that this gross kind of adulation has set in and gone so septic reflects badly on the spaces we built and the people we thought we were.
Greenwald is a bullshit artist who is a major media figure, …
Do you have proof for this, besides Cesca and Reid(who both have axes to grind and therefore are far from impartial)?
Greenwald was a well-known bullshit artist long before the NSA story broke. His likely sock-puppet use, for instance, was documented as far back as 2006.
But don’t take our word for Greenwald’s status as a bullshit artist. Take Wired’s, who ran afoul of GG during the initial Manning/Wikileaks story: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/greenwald/
It’s impossible to revisit that story, incidentally, without noting that Greenwald was bitching about Wired doing with the Manning chat logs exactly what Greenwald himself did with the documents Snowden took from the NSA: only release what they wanted to release, when they wanted to release it. Really, the whole thing is like the bizarro l’affaire Snowden, with Poulson in the Greenwald role and Greenwald in the (insert Greenwald critic here) role, only Greenwald sucks at being a media critic about as much as he sucks at being a journalist.
It’s kind of jawdropping to see that Glenn Greenwald ever used the phrase “insatiable need for self-promotion and media attention” to describe someone whose agenda he didn’t like.
I’ve known Greenwald as a bullshit artist for years, well before this story and continuing through it. This is the routine that made him famous: (1) accumulate facts. (2) make the most aggressive possible interpretation of those facts. (3) await challenges to that interpretation. (4) point to the big pile of facts while dismissing all alternative explanations. (5) declare victory and that the alternative explanation is clearly the work of an authoritarian cult follower. The facts and the interpretation of those facts (motive, associations, other leaps) are distinct entities. We all know this. But not Glenn Greenwald. He inevitably says that his interpretation is the only reasonable possibility.
And that was with facts.
On this story there are a number of claims that we don’t know are facts. “Direct access” for one. Snowden having the “authorities” to wiretap anyone from his desk. It is fine to report claims, but you’re also supposed to validate those claims. Greenwald isn’t really interested in that. He prefers to report claims, then figure out the best way to construe their worst implications, but never preserving even the fig leaf of “if true.” What he thinks is true is true because he’s already thought about it, and if you disagree you’re part of the other side.
And then there are the little moments like when he wrote that Snowden was isolated by being in his cell for 23 hours and then in the one hour he was out wasn’t allowed to watch TV. But of course in the 23 hours in the cell he was allowed to watch TV. Why would you write the story that way? It’s not a major point, it’s a minor one. But he gilded the lily anyway.
Same goes for the timeline about Miranda’s lawyer: he was willing to wait, then got his lawyer near the end of the ordeal. People might be sympathetic to him on that basis already. But, no, Greenwald has to spin it so that he’s being prevented from seeing a lawyer. Why do that kind of petty stuff in your writing?
His claims are often questionable, his facts are often questionably assembled, his arguments require leaps, and he plays around with minor details to tell a better story. Bullshit artist.
And yet people lavish praise on him — he’s so brave, he’s so bold, he’s one of a select few reporters worth reading, all that stuff. You can’t point out his flaws without the subject immediately becoming “you’re an apologist, you’re a cult follower, you’re an authoritarian,” all that. It’s bonkers.
Just read him critically the same way you read any other reporter or pundit and watch for the leaps even when, maybe especially when, you like the conclusions he reaches.
Hmm — and exactly how was GG supposed to validate that claim by Snowden? Is the same standard being applied to all those reported the WH/NSA/FBI claim that they don’t spy on ordinary citizens? Are you calling all of those reporters liars? To be really fair, based on a century of federal government spying on writers, journalists, social activists, union organizers,and scientists (Einstein,Vollman, Chomsky, …), didn’t those reporters have a duty to include the massive list of those known to have been spied on? Perhaps Snowden exaggerated or perhaps not. We don’t really know except so far he hasn’t made any other false claims.
If you can’t validate the claim, you need to hedge your bets with statements like “if true” or “evidence suggests.” You’re not supposed to speculate unless you signal that you’re speculating. He doesn’t do that. He actively refuses to do that, choosing instead — and virtually every piece I’ve ever read from him does this — to say that there can only be one defensible conclusion, his conclusion, which, having been proven true by his own logic, retroactively validates the original proposition. Given A, B must follow, so treat B as given, proving A, proving B. If B doesn’t follow, the whole loop would break down, so he suggests that only wrong-thinking people could believe anything but B. Watch for it. It’s his stock in trade.
No they don’t. They just keep repeating “bullshit artist” and “GG schtick” like dittoheads. There was one dKos diary that had a list of all Greenwald’s pre-Snowden failings and when I went through it carefully, not one of those claims held up or was more than exceedingly insignificant.
The degree to which people line swarm to kiss his ass and defend his every statement is like a parody of how the same people think other people treat Obama.
I don’t think that’s coincidental.
The sliver of Obama supporters from 2008 who actually fit the McCain campaign’s characterization of cult-like, utopian followers of a charismatic leader became disenchanted with Obama and switched their allegiance.
Oh, Dr. Krauthammer, I think we’ve found your sock puppet!
As always, there is nothing to you except your personal grudges.
What a fine analysis, Dr. K!
Stay with those ad hominems, your credibility will only rise!
You must be the least self-aware person on the planet.
After your response to my point “We’ve found Charles Krauthammer’s sock puppet,” you accuse me of ad hominem because I complained?
Is this performance art?
Do you even understand the reference? I was going after you for making a Krauthammer-like pseudo-psychological AD HOMINEM.
But if I accuse you of making an ad hominem, that’s an ad hominem, I guess. Terrific.
“The degree to which people line swarm to kiss his ass and defend his every statement”
Name one person who comments here for whom this is true. Or one major media or political figure. Otherwise this is just projection.
You.
Calvin.
Ooops, that’s two.
Well, now you’re simply lying.
I guess the readership can make up its own mind about whether I’ve characterized you fairly.
I’m not worried.
I don’t even kiss Bernie Sanders’ ass. He’s good on most issues, but far from perfect.
It’s actually the Edwards supporters who are worshiping at the altar of Greenwald. They have just replaced their misplaced worship of Edwards the “true progressive” with Greenwald. It’s bizarre to see how many vocal Edwards supporters have turned around and jumped on Greenwald’s bandwagon. They still have the same anti-Obama talking points too. Weird.
Even the Edwards supporters weren’t really caught up in the Edwards-ness of Edwards. They’re caught up in finding Someone Else. Remember when, in a more heteronormative era, people used to say that certain celebrities, like Jan Smithers, were “the thinking man’s sex symbol”? It’s like, “Anyone can lust after Loni Anderson, but I have superior taste, depth, and intelligence.” In liberal-left politics this has become “Anyone can like Barack Obama, but I know better, as proven by the many ways I can indicate my disappointment, thereby signaling my superior taste, depth, and intelligence.”
You know why I supported Edwards at the outset? Because he was talking about then what we all know to be true now. How the rich and powerful and f–king over the rest of us. How there is indeed Two Americas. At least he was talking about it. That counts for something.
With statements like It’s actually the Edwards supporters who are worshiping at the altar of Greenwald. you have the audacity to criticize Greenwald’s writings? Where’s your evidence that “Edwards supporters” = Greenwald’s supporters? (FWIW, I opposed Edwards for POTUS in 2002-04 and 2007-08 and VP in 2004.) And where do you get this “worshiping at the alter of Greenwald” crap? Seems to me to flow right out of the same old mind set that once called people like me that supported MLK, Jr. “n-lovers” and that opposed the Vietnam War and Nixon, “pinko commie lovers.”
Is that the same mindset that calls people who defend Obama “Obama-bots” and calls Obama “Dear Leader” as though people who like him are brainwashed adorers of a totalitarian despot? Because if you want to pretend that name-calling about worship and adoration are so very offensive, one person you might want to same a moment to castigate is… Glenn Greenwald. And there are a few dozen people right behind him flinging the same insults day after day after day after day. So come off it.
What Greenwald has to do with the issue except tangentially. The NSA and the administration never disputed the authenticity of the material Snowden released so it seems a stretch to make any part of the story about Greenwald’s integrity. It’s not like we have to take his word for anything but the circumstantial context.
As much as I admire your prudence in most matters, Booman, it seems to me that every word on the subject of Greenwald detracts from the weighty issue of national security versus civil liberty now before us. And it doesn’t take much scepticism to assume that it suits the intelligence community just fine to be discussing the cut of Greenwald’s jib rather than the minutiae of the razor-thin legal arguments put forward to justify all of this.
For weeks Marcy Wheeler has been doing yeoman work getting down into the weeds of the legality and the time-line of NSA activity based on leaked material, testimony and statements from the administration and has detailed a lot of issues which need to be addressed. And she has done so without getting caught up in the “he said-she said” of Greenwald’s public commentary. That seems a much more useful application of the limited resources of the progressive blogosphere.
For weeks Marcy Wheeler has been doing yeoman work getting down into the weeds of the legality and the time-line of NSA activity based on leaked material, testimony and statements from the administration and has detailed a lot of issues which need to be addressed.
And any blip that reporting might possibly have created has been completely swamped over the past two weeks by the sensationalized Heathrow Airport story and the argument about whether it was ok for Greenwald to write about it so misleadingly.
He thinks that shouting the most dramatic things he can, even if they’re not true, is a good way to draw attention to his cause. Well, they sure do draw attention. How pleased are you with the discussion over the past two weeks?
And how many times have I used my front-page to criticize Marcy?
First of all, she’s quite open about the fact that she is theorizing rather than reporting. Maybe people give Greenwald a pass because they still think of him as a blogger rather than a reporter and, so, they don’t hold him to the same standard they hold Adam Nagourney to. I don’t know.
In fact you have linked to her. And much of what she is doing is valuable analysis with theorising largely constrained to assessing potential lines of further enquiry for herself and others.
But every word wasted on Greenwald is a lost opportunity, it seems to me. And time is short.
.
PS If I were you Martin, I would strongly object being mentioned in the same sentence with Bob Cesca and in an article about Jeffrey Toobin. Not good for your karma.
.
How different a discussion can be across the big pond. My diary with 90+ comments:
Bloggers pro-Obama and anti-Greenwald – A Distraction on Issue
The other story about NSA spying – Lavabit and the Strong Arm of Big Brother USA.
Since you brought up the subject of the helicopter video, do you agree with Assange’s decision to heavily edit that video before releasing it?
Why not release the full video unedited and let the people decide for themselves what it shows?
Stop lying!
The Weekly Standard first tried to peddle this lie and even they admitted that in fact Wikileaks released both the edited 17-minute video and the full 38-minute video on the same page at the same time.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/wikileaks-edits-out-21-minutes-baghdad-strike-video
It’s fine to point out the flaws in Greenwald’s reporting. But you’re rather aggressively missing the larger context – that by doing so you are, in most people’s eyes, indistinguishable from the many mainstream establishment journalists and politicos who would charge Greenwald with treason if they could, and whose attacks on his credibility are based solely on the fact that he has opinions and states them and that he doesn’t go quietly away in the face of off-the-record denials from unnamed government sources.
Greenwald’s reporting – which has been accurate, so far as we know (and the NSA hasn’t challenged any of it) on the big issues – has been an enormous threat to The Village media, simply because he’s willing to do what they like to pretend they might someday maybe do and because he’s willing to state his opinions clearly rather than hide behind a myth of objectivity. Your concern about Greenwald’s prosecutorial style and inconsistencies like the timeline of Miranda’s detention are fair game to point out – but by fixating on them right now, you’re also aligning yourself with and helping legitimize the worst elements of Beltway sycophancy and stenography. Methinks you should pick your battles more carefully.
Exactly the same dynamic surfaced with WikiLeaks – because Assange in particular was and is a flawed messenger, the journalists whose job he did when they wouldn’t were able to dismiss literally thousands of never-denied accounts of US government wrongdoing, some of them extremely serious. Because Greenwald’s revelations include impacts on Americans (and Europeans) and not primarily a bunch of anonymous brown people in countries with weird names, the Snowden files haven’t been dismissed as easily. But the same effort is underway. And even though it’s for defensible reasons, you’re helping.
Greenwald’s reporting – which has been accurate, so far as we know (and the NSA hasn’t challenged any of it) on the big issues – has been an enormous threat to The Village media, simply because he’s willing to do what they like to pretend they might someday maybe do and because he’s willing to state his opinions clearly rather than hide behind a myth of objectivity.
There’s been a ton of pushback on the PRISM reporting in particular, though naturally it hasn’t come in the form of National Security Agency press releases. There’s plenty of reason to think that Greenwald got the story wrong, and that the reality a lot less sensational than what he initially reported.
As for the larger context, that’s exactly the problem. The fact that you’re on the other side of an issue from the Village courtiers doesn’t imply that Greenwald is actually doing a good job reporting the issue. Saying that BooMan or anyone else should refrain from criticizing Greenwald’s frequently lousy reporting because Greenwald is on the right side is committing exactly the same error that you’re complaining about from the mainstream media.
Geov- your standard for being right “on the big issues” is pretty strange.
Without going back to detail the many walk-backs and corrections and contradictions in the reporting of both Greenwald and the Guardian, the “big issues” are spelled out by documents. Barton Gellman isn’t getting blasted for writing about those documents. No one is calling Spencer Ackerman a hack. As far as I know, the only reporter who is getting criticized for their coverage of the NSA scandal is Greenwald.
If I were interested in running interference for the NSA, then I would poke holes in all the reporting.
Imagine that you were on trial for a crime you didn’t commit and your lawyer kept lying needlessly instead of just doing his best to describe the truth of the matter. Would you be happy?
Those that let Greenwald be the lead on this issue are making a mistake. He will be marginalized because he isn’t honest.
“… the only reporter who is getting criticized for their coverage of the NSA scandal is Greenwald.”
Exactly. So why so much attention on Greenwald?
That’s why the analogies with the role of the press corpse in the JFK coverup and the Iraq war cheerleading fall flat. Greenwald, whatever he is, is obviously not a government flack. I take your point that he’s a magnet for criticism, but the story long ago went way beyond Greenwald.
Is that what the problem is? He’s criticizing the government so he must be in the right? Whereas, Judith Miller was parroting the government so she must be wrong?
So, the key is whether you are pro or anti-government, not whether or not what you write can be believed?
Okay. Got it.
No, that’s not my point at all.
My point is more like this: Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. That has very little to do with the clock. So fuck Greenwald, let’s talk about the NSA.
Okay. What specifically do want to talk about with regard to the NSA?
Crickets.
The crickets were silent only because they didn’t read your post until now.
Well, let’s see, what can we talk about regarding the NSA? I don’t know, let me see. Oh yes, how about the same things the whole world press is talking about? — and that if Greenwald would vanish into thin air, they would still be talking about, because it has essentially nothing to do with Greenwald?
Just about every country in the world is pissed off at the USA because it is now PUBLICLY known that the NSA is hacking all internet traffic. But that was only the beginning. US intelligence fucked things up even worse when they started bullying governments to fork over Snowden. Alienating, particularly, just about all of Latin America; ruffling the feathers, at least, of Portugal and Austria. Then getting their friends in the UK to do the same with Miranda, causing a bit of a scandal in the UK. Giving Putin the opportunity to stick it to us for our lack of freedom of speech. (RIch irony there,) And allowing China to turn the tables when it emerged that we had been hacking China way more than they ever hacked us.
None of this was aimed at Obama, it was aimed at US intelligence. Kind of like Wikileaks or Bradley Manning. It’s only people like Greenwald, and those (on the right and the left) who take him seriously, that think it is really about Obama.
Sorry, I meant to say the crickets were chirping because I didn’t read your post until now.
If I thought Greenwald would be satisfied with any level of oversight, then maybe we could chalk up his excesses to zeal. But Greenwald (and Snowden, too, apparently) aren’t interested in a national security system that protects civil liberties – and neither are his online Myrmidons.
The Snowden stuff is valuable only to the degree it helps re-shape our understanding of what the NSA actually does. Every time we get a plaintiff’s attorney brief from Greenwald that skews the facts, that makes it harder to get the necessary momentum for things like the Merkley-Widen reforms.
Which is fine with Greenwald, because I don’t get the sense that ANY reforms would matter. Nothing less than the elimination of the NSA would satisfy him and the hard-line anti-state acolytes that follow him.
This is a very hard issue to debate, because too much is hidden and that allows too much to be twisted.
Once again, when you become the story, you are no longer a journalist.
Judith Miller might be a shitty reporter, but at least in the last case of shitty reporting she engaged in, she just did shitty reporting and did not insert herself into the story.
You don’t have a lot of credibility to talk about anything, as far as I’m concerned. After your stupid transgender position from the other day. Lay off the attempts to start a pissing match with Pierce, as I don’t see him reciprocating. You should be flattered he links to you.
“Judith Miller might be a shitty reporter, but at least in the last case of shitty reporting she engaged in, she just did shitty reporting and did not insert herself into the story.”
“At least …”? Booman’s analogy, which was false to begin with, is now turned completely inside out.
Of course Judith Miller did not assert herself into the story. She was inserted (“embedded”) into the story in reality, and her whole job was to pretend that she was doing objective reporting.
Greenwald, on te othe rhand, is no NSA flack. He’s just a shitty, self-promoting journalist.
Well, something is turned inside out. I got whiplash from that comment.
I was actually thinking of Maureen Dowd’s recent shitty reporting.
Judith Miller is still a shitty reporter, though, but yes I agree with your point.
Here’s my question: if you genuinely believe that Greenwald’s bullshit is not an issue and irrelevant, why waste your time defending him?
Any time someone attacks his credibility, just re-direct them to another source (as Shaun did above).
Greenwald himself, by virtue of being himself, is a distraction from the NSA story. Let’s all agree to cut him out of the loop going forward. Surely that won’t be a problem for anyone… ?
Surely, at this point, Greenwald must be aware that the focus of the story has shifted from the NSA to him. His critics realize this. His supporters realize this, and complain about it.
So has he tried to keep his head down, and let the focus shift off of him, now that so many reporters at so many magazines and papers are pursuing the NSA story?
Someone should tell Charlie Savage. He’s written 4 stories on surveillance since the Miranda detention, and not one of them mentions Greenwald. Or Barton Gellman. He’s written 2 in the same time period (nothing on Miranda), and neither mentions GG. I’m pretty sure these were all front page stories.
Sorry, but your outrage doesn’t seem to be moving the needle, much as you wish it to.
He’s written 4 stories on surveillance since the Miranda detention, and not one of them mentions Greenwald. Or Barton Gellman. He’s written 2 in the same time period (nothing on Miranda), and neither mentions GG.
Has anyone read them?
How about the OH MY GOD, THE BRITISH THUGS JUST WANT TO INTIMIDATE ME! story? Think anyone read that?
Sorry, but your outrage doesn’t seem to be moving the needle, much as you wish it to.
My outrage? You must be the least self-aware person on the planet. You don’t even realize what you’re doing, do you?
“I demolishes your point (that the criticism of Greenwald is shutting down coverage of the NSA story”
Probably just Wyden, Udall, and a bunch of other senators, and a bunch of people at the White House. No one who has a clue as to the REAL ISSUE.
That should read:
“Has anybody read them”
Probably just Wyden, Udall, and a bunch of other senators, and a bunch of people at the White House. No one who has a clue as to the REAL ISSUE.
” ,,, the story has shifted from the NSA to him.”
Well on this blog, anyway.
on pretty much every blog
If GG is a “vessel of shit” and his reporting on the NSA fiasco “shitty” (your phrasing and choice of words again indicates your bias) then WHO I wonder has done a great job of reporting on this issue?
Nobody worth mentioning– just the NYT and WaPo. Who clearly take their marching orders from Greenwald, as always.
It’s sort of embarrassing that you don’t realize you just scored an own-goal.
I don’t know if you’re too dense to understand sarcasm, just pretending to not understand, actually believe that Greenwald controls the Times and WaPo, or are just trolling.
I understood your point exactly, and that’s why I’m mocking you.
You actually do think “People having nothing to do with Glenn Greenwald are writing about the story” undermines the point you objected to.
No, toasters, it doesn’t. It proves it. I demolishes your point (that the criticism of Greenwald is shutting down coverage of the NSA story) and supports the point that Greenwald’s shouting is adding anything to the conversation.
You don’t know. No, you don’t. You are staring at the world in befuddlement, and concluding that the people you can’t understand must be really stupid.
“I demolishes your point (that the criticism of Greenwald is shutting down coverage of the NSA story)”
OK, I’ll use small words. The harping on Greenwald is shutting down talking about the actual issues ON THIS BLOG. The actual issues are being covered IN OTHER PLACES. Because the actual issues are the story to people serious about what is going on, while certain people on this blog are only serious about attacking Greenwald and anyone who wishes to talk about the actual issues.
Exactly right. Fuck Greenwald.
LOL…but this is all basically moot.
Here, I’ll post this piece by Walter Russell Mead from this weekend’s Wall St. Journal, “The Failed Grand Strategy in the Middle East”.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324619504579028923699568400.html
Martin can freak out and attack this guy as well for “bad journalism”.
Thanks for the link, I could have written it. Besides Obama, foreign policy during the first four years had the signature of Ms Clinton who failed miserably. I never understood her love affair with the Muslim Brothers. The security situation and how to work with the tribal leaders in Libya was another miscalculation. The US will be pushed out of the Middle-East because of failed policy. Washington still plays the Neocon game, hear the war drums on Syria. A military action outside the UN and based on the Kosovo principle and the R2P formula. Create chaos in Syria through 2.5 years of meddling and react due to the humanitarian crisis. More than 100,000 have died, millions displaced persons and the country devastated. For what purpose UK, France, Turkey, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the USA? A miscalculation, there were protestors out on the street, it will be over in a matter of weeks … it’s worse than Iraq. Never mind Obama’s legacy and it aint over yet! Obama was going to interact with our adversaries … wait till the bombs fall on Damascus.
BTW How many days was the Taliban representation open for negotiations in Qatar? Another failed mission.
We have two issues here. One is perhaps one of the most important and defining issues of our age – the degree to which surveillance programs are undermining civil liberties and democracy itself.
The other is about the journalistic ethics and skill set of Glenn Greenwald, a journalist I almost never read. There has been so much written on this, that I have virtually stopped reading Booman and all others who have commented on it.
It seems to me that if Greenwald wasn’t such a self aggrandizing self-publicist, he would be in a good deal more danger of covert assassination or otherwise being put out of business.
But that a journalist might be less than precise about some minor facts, or that he should seek to sensationalize some aspects of the story is hardly a big news story and reeks of being an attempt to distract from the really big story. And to blame Greenwald himself for this is being really disingenuous. He simply isn’t the issue.
I have no difficulty with Booman being an apologist for the Obama regime, because he usually has a good story to tell and a reasonable case to make. But he has really gone off the deep end on Greenwald – so much so that I now doubt his objectivity on other matters. I have simply stopped reading him on the topic now, and I find this to be very sad.
It’s Booman’s credibility as an independent commentator that is now on the line – and that matter to me a lot more than Greenwald’s reputation as a journalist. I don’t have time to read people who simply shill for the Obama regime regardless of the merits – and I can see very little merit in Obama’s record on this issue.
I think the best that can be said for Obama on this is that he’s not the one driving the issue either. He’s just saying what he, as chief executive, has to say.
“The buck stops here”. But it always stops there, doesn’t it?
Nobody likes that argument, including me, but I think it’s a lot closer to the truth of the situation than blaming either Obama or Greenwald. I blame the NSA, frankly.
See, this just sums up why people use the #whitepeopleproblems tag …
You forgetting the assault on voting rights? Oh, but ‘we can do both’… then WHY AREN’T WE.
Without seeking to minimise the issue, would it be tendentious to say that voter suppression might reduce the vote by 1% (and change the outcome in even less cases) whilst the erosion of civil liberties and democracy itself effects us all?
You think the NSA storing metadata on personal communications is more corrosive to “democracy itself” than ACTIVELY AND DIRECTLY STOPPING PEOPLE FROM VOTING? That’s gonzo.
You perhaps don’t realise that I write from an Irish and European perspective, and that the NSA activities effect us and our societies far more than voter suppression in NC.
And that is precisely the rub: the NSA activities go far beyond the US borders. Our international contributors – such as Frank and Oui – offer a much needed perspective on its global implications. We would be wise to listen, rather than to be casually dismissive.
What’s particularly telling is Pierce’s elision of “Greenwald is dishonest and his assertions unreliable” with “Greenwald is a dick,” as if the reason to be wary of a liar is about moral opprobrium or social discomfort, and not concern for the truth.
I remember when “The press shouldn’t bullshit, and we should call it out when it does” was something everyone on the left agreed upon.
It’s like the Guardian and the Times have no say over what goes in their news sections. Why? Because a relentless campaign of nit-picking of what Greenwald puts in his COMMENTARY yields some near-nuggets. Good god.
Pie fight. Pie fight. Pie fight.
Start popping the popcorn when folks start mentioning Leo Strauss’s liberal disciples. Because then a lot of people are gonna have go Wikipedia Leo Strauss to figure out what the heck you are asserting.
This should get funny before it’s done.
Whenever the name GG comes up in anything but glowing terms the same exact people always are at the ready to accuse Booman of being an Obama apologist on the sole basis that his cynicism of GG “journalistic integrity”, even if he acknowledges that the information garnered from GG/Snowden warrants discussion, doesn’t matter by mere questioning of GG means Booman can no lonfer be trusted.
Now replace where I said GG with Obama and Obama with GG and seems like the Obots have been replaced by Glen-bots. Its beginning to remind me of the way you can always count on the resident Paul-bots to come out whenever RPaul is mentioned
Oh and I am already pretty sure what responses I will get from this comment (if anyone reads it that is) & im even pretty sure which commenters will say what, but rest assured I’ve already been accused of being a mindless Obot a good number of times here anyway so…
So, to sum up: he who smelt it dealt it. That’s fantastic. I am now convinced that even though I read Greenwald about once a year, everything I do is in defense of him. Hail Greenwald!
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Are you my 13 year old nephew, cause you sound like a child. Don’t you have some Yo Gabba Gabba to watch?
Oh and I am already pretty sure what responses I will get from this comment (if anyone reads it that is) & im even pretty sure which commenters will say what
Yeah, well, I bet you didn’t see a fart joke coming.
Actually yeah I kinda did. This new commenter already has an MO.
I agree that it is frustrating the way these discussions always play out as if one cannot be supportive of this President, wanting to discuss the balance between security and privacy and frustrated by the inaccuracies of Greenwald’s reporting. I’m quite frustrated that three months after the President called for the repeal of the AUMF, there has been so little discussion of it. Repealing the AUMF would facilitate changes to the Patriot Act and FISA.
I also don’t understand why we can’t be critical of Obama administration policy, the NSA, Congress, the Chinese, Russia, Snowden, and Greenwald. Why can’t we offer constructive criticism to all of the actors in this?
What you said.
If only a real newspaper with real reporters like the 中日新聞 had published those stories you would be ok with that.
Instead a fake newspaper with fake reporters the Guardian published them instead.
I guess that’s why the totally fake New York Times is doing joint publication with the Guardian now.
Who’s next, Mad Magazine?
It’s notable to me that the usual suspects cannot conceive of a piece objecting to journalistic bullshitting in other terms than “He’s on the other side.”
It reminds me of the runup to the Iraq war. “What do you mean the aluminum tubes have other uses? Why do you love Saddam?”
Yes. This is what it has come to.
“Is that what we are now? A mirror image of Rush Limbaugh?”
And you could see it coming.
Except that Greenwald isn’t even on the left…
So very very true.
Thank you, Booman. Great post.
It is a stupid, wasteful exercise because, frankly, the vessel doesn’t matter to me. The information that it carries is the only thing that matters.
Boo, I don’t read that as meaning Greenwald’s faults are entirely irrelevant to all, but that for Pierce it is small beer in relation to a larger and more important issue.
Yes, I think Pierce has latched on to you as a foil. And I think this post of yours will be used as fodder down the line. Cripes sake Boo, “Is that what we are now? A mirror image of Rush Limbaugh?“??
Before you figure it out you’re going to get skewered.
Maybe it is time to get off of a high horse and pursue something else?
Mr. Pierce is a fantastic writer. Much better than me. He’ll do whatever he wants to do.
The vast majority of the American public does not care one shit about any of this. Keep yakking, you all look like idiots.
.
People who want to connect the NSA scandal to Obama essentially proves the point why people should study and understand the murder of JFK. The President has not been in charge of our intelligence or military, or the foreign policy they impose, for the last fifty years.
If you followed the October Surprise you’d know that the CIA undermined Carter’s Administration by dealing with Iran BEFORE the 1980 election. The drugs for ordinance that occurred on both ends of the Iran-contra shows what happened when Congress explicitly ended our involvement in Nicaragua. The Boland Amendment meant nothing. Those wonderful freedom fighters were loading up cocaine at Ilopango for the kids in South Central on the return flights for weapons illegally brought down to the contras. On the other end of the arc we had weapons going from Israel and NATO to Iran. And arms dealers like Monzer al-Kassar ran the heroin routes from Beruit back to the US.
Gee, with all the drugs coming into the US, let’s have a drug war against the poor and the minorities.
All of this and much more have gone on since the coup.
To accuse Obama of the sins of the intelligence community, which have gone on for the last fifty years, is to narrow your focus and miss the forest.
There are so many tells for our present situation. No President has been able to let his Justice Dept. go after criminals of the last administration. We live in a country where large swaths of people can’t remember if Obama was or wasn’t President during Katrina. How are they going to be able to get their lobes around what happened twenty or thirty or forty or fifty years ago.
What I find amusing about the whole Snowden Affair is that it is reminiscent of the false defector program of the late fifties that the CIA ran. My only question is who are Snowden’s real sponsors? That’s when you should ask “Cui bono”, because although this crap (spying on citizens) has been going on for decades the blame for this falls on Obama. Just like he caused Katrina.
Who benefits? Well, it could be a wing of our intelligence services who realize that the stuff that Greenwald keeps exposing is small stuff, and they can hurt Obama without losing much. But I suspect that a knowledge of the Fort Hunt Treaty and the Gehlen Org might be a better explanation. Please note that Greenwald claims to be what passes for a libertarian, and early in his career made a name defending Nazis in court. The Cold War is over and Germany can now aim its guns and banks to the west. Now Germany has conquered Europe all the way to the English Channel. Not surprising that the targets of Greenwald’s venom are the US and Britain.
If this issue does not come out with an honest independent investigation and we get to the end of the Obama term with no changes in policy, Obama owns it.
If this issue causes independent investigation and a transformation of US national security and intelligence policy to deal with current realities instead of contractor boondoggles, Obama owns the credit for that transformation.
If the intelligence community has a gun to the President’s head, we need a whistleblower with huge cojones to fess up and find a place of refuge.
There likely are other options that Obama has that are not yet being discussed.
WTF?
So now we have Leo Strauss liberals, the revanchist Edwards supporters, and the German menace as what is driving this story.
The hilarity continues. And the popcorn is excellent. Best popped with coconut oil.
If you’ve didn’t understand that WWII was for financial gain then you missed the point.
“To accuse Obama of the sins of the intelligence community, which have gone on for the last fifty years, is to narrow your focus and miss the forest.”
Thanks for this. You say much more eloquently, and in more detail, what I was trying to hint at up thread (search phrase, “the buck stops here”.)
As for your interpretation of Snowden, though, I’m not so sure. The NSA itself is tainted by the Gehlen legacy. The idea of the NSA spilling its own beans in order to damage Obama may be a bit of a stretch.
If anybody’s behind Snowden, it would be the stratum of the international intelligence establishment trying to do something about the fact that certain aspects of intelligence are totally out of control. Not unlike this guy:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/03/208602113/pentagon-papers-leaker-daniel-ellsberg-prai
ses-snowden-manning
When the CIA was doing its false defector program in the late fifties, to include LH Oswald going to the USSR with (supposedly) secrets of the U-2 program in his head, the CIA, against Eisenhower’s explicit orders leading up to the Paris Peace Conference, ran Francis Gary Powers on a flight over the USSR. Powers crashed and in the ensuing bad publicity that made Eisenhower look like a liar the Soviets cancelled the conference.
The tell is that before Powers was sent over the USSR the CIA (it was a CIA flight, not Air Force) took out their most sophisticated camera and replaced it with a mediocre one.
So the CIA was willing to give up the fact that we were flying spy flights over the USSR (the Russians knew anyway), and were willing to give up a U-2, but they weren’t going to give up their best surveillance camera. Losing the U-2 was worth it to continue the Cold War.
Look at Snowden. If you’ve followed the information, there’s nothing much new there. The NSA is vacuuming up information on everybody. Bamford’s been writing about this for the last thirty years. When Echelon went online back in the 90s it was pretty clear how they were going to suck up more information.
So is Snowden a good citizen or someone’s agent? His history in the intelligence community would suggest the latter. So WHO’S agent? The most natural choice would be our own services. It reminds me of the false defector program. He even winds up in Russia! But I think his handlers might very well be a wing of the intelligence community that’s been aligned with the Germans. After all, take a look at how the publicity has been aimed specifically at Obama and the results of the publicity have hacked ten points off Obama’s popularity. Britain has also taken collateral damage and Germany, whose bankers are laying to Europe, is becoming a beacon of freedom.
The CIA essentially couped Carter out of the White House. We know how they took out JFK. And Nixon, bless his dishonest soul, was sunk by the CIA, many of the same characters that were around Dealey Plaza in 1963. There is a strong element in the CIA, I’d say the dominant element, that has been undercutting Obama like they’ve been undercutting other past Presidents. There’s all sorts of ways to assassinate a President, and having one who’s both “weak” and a “mouth-foaming black zombie commie foreigner” to kick around is great for the forces of reaction.
I’d also suggest that if one looks at Mo Atta’s background, from the time he spent in Germany in the BND milieu to the time he spent in Florida at Huffman Aviation (which undoubtedly was running CIA/DEA-protected drug runs out of the Carribean), you can probably put the authors of 9/11 in the same group.
I can well believe there was international fascist (including German) involvement in both JFK and 9/11. I have read Jim Di Eugenio, John Newman, Dick Russell on RC Nagell, and the excellent work of Daniel Hopsicker on Atta. But these were false flag operations intended mainly for domestic consumption. I don’t see any such MO here.
According to your scenario, the CIA sacrificing its own U2 program would be a better analogy. And yes, it does certainly appear they did that in order to embarrass the president and thereby prevent detente with the Soviets. By that analogy, they would now be trying to embarrass Obama in order to prevent some important movement on … on … what exactly? A little meeting with Putin? Something to do with Israel? The Europeans are much tougher on Israel than we are, and this doesn’t change that at all. The Euro? I don’t see any obvious candidates here.
If anybody is behind Snowden, you have to ask cui bono? Maybe China. Why? Because even if, as you say, all this stuff was already known, it was not PUBLIC knowledge, and when it hit the international press one of the few definite “touchés” was the revelation that the US was hacking into Chinese computers way more than the reverse, which the USA used as a severe embarrassment to China and suddenly became a way bigger embarrassment to the USA. The Chinese definitely scored one here. Snowden’s flight to Hong Kong, of all places, may be relevant. But things got too hot for him.
Another thing that’s been noticed by clear-minded observers is that the US intelligence establishment is really, truly, hopping mad at Snowden. They’re not faking it. On the contrary, they are bumbling all over like a bull in a china shop, pressuring governments around the world, making the US look a lot worse than Obama ever did. It was Obama who eventually somewhat defused this saying finally that we were not going to make any special efforts to get Snowden.
Whatever is really behind L’affaire Snowden, I do not think it was especially designed to damage Obama, except in the fevered minds of people like Greenwald and the many who seem to think he is of some great importance.It was designed to embarrass the US and US intelligence. It was more like a Wikileaks thing, although they were not involved in this one.
Obama’s popularity has occasionally taken hits like this before, but he’s sticking up for national security, in his inimitable fashion. If his popularity has gone down this past week, it was perhaps mainly among the Emoprog left (if they actually amount to 10%).
I hope you see my logic, Bob, but that is as far as logic can take me, as the actual facts of the case remain extremely obscure.
I’m not sure how much we disagree because I haven’t quite figured out who’s behind Snowden. But at least you see what I’m saying.
Conveniently ignoring stories published in the WSJ and Washington Post, not by Greenwald.
Stories showing that Greenwald is a bullshit artist are often by Greenwald. Stories about surveillance are often by others. Sometimes it’s important to the greater cause of media criticism to pick on Greenwald’s bullshit. Media criticism is a longstanding preoccupation of the liberal-left blogosphere.
Ergo, stories by Greenwald that are about surveillance sometimes get classified among “stories that commit journalistic faux pas” and sometimes among “stories about surveillance and intrusive government.” They’re both, but different people highlight different aspects, depending on their interest in media/narrative vs. surveillance/security/civil liberties.
Stories about surveillance that aren’t by Greenwald can also be, as we used to say, “fisked,” and should be. But, again, not every piece about how Greenwald tells his stories is a defense of surveillance. IMHO almost none of them are. Anti-surveillance people just assume that anti-Greenwald people are pro-surveillance because they all too often mix up the messenger and the message. Ironic, no?
Not really ironic in this case, as Booman was steadfastly pro surveillance until the UN thing now on the front page. That’s his most biting criticism of the issue in weeks.
I started a dissenting reply to this post, and it grew.
Now a stand-alone article.
A href=”http://www.boomantribune.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2013/8/25/104736/663″>Is Glenn Greenwald Really The Story Here? Please!!!
Later…
AG
Bad link above.
Duh!!!
Sorry.
Here it is, corrected:
Is Glenn Greenwald Really The Story Here? Please!!!
AG
If people think the ‘government is evil’, ‘government as them’ crowd aren’t winning then have a look at what’s going on in the UK (ironically from the Guardian).
I’ll link to you, buddy.