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[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald]Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.
Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning.
For his 2013 NSA reporting, working with his source Edward Snowden, he received the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation Award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win); and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was also awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. A film about the work Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras did with Snowden to report the NSA archive, "CitizenFour," directed by Poitras, was awarded the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
In 2019, he received the Special Prize from the Vladimir Herzog Institute for his reporting on the Bolsonaro government and pervasive corruption inside the prosecutorial task force that led to the imprisonment of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva. The award is named after the Jewish immigrant journalist who was murdered during an interrogation by the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1977. Several months after the reporting began, Lula was ordered released by the Brazilian Supreme Court, and the former President credited the expose's for his liberty. In early 2020, Brazilian prosecutors sought to prosecute Greenwald in connection with the reporting, but the charges were dismissed due to a Supreme Court ruling, based on the Constitutional right of a free press, that barred the Bolsonaro government from making good on its threats to retaliate against Greenwald.
After working as a journalist at Salon and The Guardian, Greenwald co-founded The Intercept in 2013 along with Poitras and journalist Jeremy Scahill, and co-founded The Intercept Brasil in 2016. He resigned fromThe Intercept in October, 2020, to return to independent journalism.
Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with his husband, Congressman David Miranda, their two children, and 26 rescue dogs. In 2017, Greenwald and Miranda created an animal shelter in Brazil supported in part through public donations designed to employ and help exit the streets homeless people who live on the streets with their pets.
(14 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 12, 2012 HSBC, too big to jail, is the new poster child for US two-tiered justice system
The US government is expressly saying that banking giants reside outside of -- above -- the rule of law, that they will not be punished when they get caught red-handed committing criminal offenses for which ordinary people are imprisoned for decades.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 27, 2012 US investigates possible WikiLeaks leaker for "communicating with the enemy"
this odious theory is not confined to Manning. The US military appears to be treating all potential leaks -- at least those to WikiLeaks -- as "aiding" or "communicating with" the enemy. But there is no possible limiting principle that would confine that theory only to such leaks; they would necessarily apply to all leaks of classified information to any media outlets.
(9 comments) SHARE Friday, November 23, 2012 Prosecution of Anonymous activists highlights war for Internet control
This was a case where the US government -- through affirmative steps and/or approving acquiescence to criminal, sophisticated cyber-attacks -- all but destroyed the ability of an adversarial group, convicted of no crime, to function on the internet. Who would possibly consider that power anything other than extremely disturbing?
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 28, 2013 4 quick points about the MSNBC discussion
It's particularly ironic to hear that (a) a journalist is doing something improper ("crossing the line") by defending his source, while (b) it's perfectly proper for journalists to devote their entire careers to defending and venerating the most powerful political official in the nation. Doesn't that reverse the formulation rather radically?
(51 comments) SHARE Monday, August 1, 2011 The myth of Obama's "blunders" and "weakness"
How anyone can claim in the face of all that evidence that the President was "forced" into making these cuts -- as opposed to having eagerly sought them -- is mystifying indeed.
(8 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 20, 2012 The Remarkable, Unfathomable Ignorance of Debbie Wasserman Schultz
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic Congresswoman from Florida and the Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, has managed to remain completely ignorant about the fact that President Obama has asserted and exercised the power to secretly place human beings, including US citizens, on his "kill list" and then order the CIA to extinguish their lives.
(8 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 17, 2013 Carmen Ortiz And Stephen Heymann: Accountability For Prosecutorial Abuse
This immunity for people with power needs to stop. The power of prosecutors is particularly potent, and abuse of that power is consequently devastating. Prosecutorial abuse is widespread in the US, and it's vital that a strong message be sent that it is not acceptable. It would be unconscionable to decide that this should be simply forgotten.
(15 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 5, 2013 Are All Telephone Calls Recorded And Accessible To The US Government?
All digital communications -- meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like -- are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 20, 2014 Meet Alfreda Bikowsky, The Senior Officer At The Center Of The CIA's Torture Scandals
The person described by both NBC and The New Yorker is senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. Multiple news outlets have reported that as the result of a long string of significant errors and malfeasance, her competence and integrity are doubted -- even by some within the agency.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 18, 2011 Three myths about the detention bill
This is the first time this power of indefinite detention is being expressly codified by statute (there's not a word about detention powers in the 2001 AUMF). Indeed, as the ACLU and HRW both pointed out, it's the first time such powers are being codified in a statute since the McCarthy era Internal Security Act of 1950.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 25, 2014 How Former Treasury Officials And The UAE Are Manipulating American Journalists
The key principals of Camstoll have hard-core neoconservative backgrounds. Here they are working hand in hand with neocon journalists to publicly trash a new enemy of Israel, in service of the agenda of Gulf dictators. This is the bizarre neocon/Israel/Gulf-dictator coalition now driving not only U.S. policy but, increasingly, U.S. discourse as well.
(15 comments) SHARE Friday, May 17, 2013 Washington Gets Explicit: Its 'War On Terror' Is Permanent
Each year of endless war that passes further normalizes the endless rights erosions justified in its name. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 17, 2012 Stop pretending the US is an uninvolved, helpless party in the Israeli assault on Gaza
Pretending that the US -- and the Obama administration -- bear no responsibility for what is taking place is sheer self-delusion, total fiction. It has long been the case that the central enabling fact in Israeli lawlessness and aggression is blind US support, and that continues, more than ever, to be the case under the presidency of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 27, 2016 Why Did the Saudi Regime and Other Gulf Tyrannies Donate Millions to the Clinton Foundation?
Hillary Clinton was America's chief diplomat, and tyrannical regimes such as the Saudis and Qataris jointly donated tens of millions of dollars to an organization run by her family and operated in its name, one whose works has been a prominent feature of her public persona. That extremely valuable opportunity to curry favor with the Clintons, and to secure access to them, continues as she runs for president.
(33 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 3, 2012 Who is the worst civil liberties president in US history?
Wars maximize a political leader's power. The absurd contortions invoked by President Obama to fight a war in Libya not only in the absence of Congressional approval, but in the face of formal Congressional disapproval, belongs high on the list of his worst and likely most enduring civil liberties assaults).
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, February 19, 2016 Hillary Clinton, With Little Notice, Vows to Embrace an Extremist Agenda on Israel
Bill Clinton's vow of even greater support for Israel is completely consistent with what Hillary Clinton herself has been telling American Jewish audiences for months. In November, she published an op-ed in The Forward in which she vowed to strengthen relations not only with Israel, but also with its extremist prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 22, 2012 The bizarre, unhealthy, blinding media contempt for Julian Assange
There are several obvious reasons why Assange provokes such unhinged media contempt. The most obvious among them is competition: the resentment generated by watching someone outside their profession generate more critical scoops in a year than all other media outlets combined. Professional and ego-based competition produces personal hatred like nothing else can.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 26, 2015 Netanyahu's Spying Denials Contradicted By Secret NSA Documents
Israel's claim that it does not conduct espionage against the United States is not only incredible on its face. It is also squarely contradicted by top-secret NSA documents, which state that Israel targets the U.S. government for invasive electronic surveillance, and does so more aggressively and threateningly than almost any other country in the world.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 11, 2011 Hillary Clinton and Internet Freedom
What Hillary Clinton is condemning here is exactly that which not only the administration in which she serves, but also she herself, has done in one of the most important Internet freedom cases of the last decade: WikiLeaks. And beyond that case, both Clinton specifically and the Obama administration generally have waged a multi-front war on Internet freedom.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 29, 2011 U.S., Israel escalate threats against flotilla, including U.S. citizens
The type of uncontroversial statement -- you shouldn't shoot our unarmed citizens -- is inconceivable when it comes to the U.S. and Israel. So devoted is the U.S. Government to defending the actions of Israel's that it will even preemptively justify violent attacks on its own citizens, threaten Americans protesting Israel's policies with prosecution for aiding Terrorism, and isolate itself from the world to defend them.
(10 comments) SHARE Monday, April 22, 2013 Why Is Boston "Terrorism" But Not Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson And Columbine?
Over the last two years, the US has witnessed at least three other episodes of mass, indiscriminate violence that killed more people than the Boston bombings did. The word "terrorism" was almost never used to describe that indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people, and none of the perpetrators of those attacks was charged with terrorism-related crimes.
(45 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 23, 2015 What Explains The Power Of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Middle Finger?
This one photo, standing alone, was designed to produce a visceral, bottomless contempt for Tsarnaev which even disgust at his actual crime could not achieve. The expectation was that it would irreversibly establish the jury and public's view of him as not just evil but sub-human, deserving of state-imposed death.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, October 10, 2014 Edward Snowden's Girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, Moved to Moscow to Live With Him
Snowden not only changed how the world thinks about a number of profoundly important political issues by defying its most powerful government, but then was able to build a happy, healthy and fulfilling life for himself. And if he can do that, so can other whistleblowers, which is precisely why so much effort has been devoted to depicting him in all sorts of false lights.
(13 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 26, 2013 As Europe erupts over US spying, NSA chief says government must stop media
Can even President Obama and his most devoted loyalists continue to maintain, with a straight face, that this is all about Terrorism? How are American and British officials, in light of their conduct in all of this, going to maintain the pretense that they are defenders of press freedoms and are in a position to lecture and condemn others for violations?
(28 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 1, 2012 Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies
The candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote -- Barack Obama -- advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, October 26, 2012 Journalism in the Obama age shows the real media bias
The religion, of the US establishment media is adulation of those who wield power, especially military power as personified by the inaptly referred to "commander-in-chief." Brinkley conducted the interview in the Oval Office from his knees because -- with some significant exceptions -- that's the posture which US media culture assumes in the presence of the royal court.
(8 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 25, 2010 What WikiLeaks revealed to the world in 2010
What WikiLeaks exposed to the world just in the last year: the breadth of the corruption, deceit, brutality and criminality on the part of the world's most powerful factions.
(13 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 18, 2017 With New D.C. Policy Group, Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons
ONE OF THE most under-discussed yet consequential changes in the American political landscape is the reunion between the Democratic Party and the country's most extreme and discredited neocons. While the rise of Donald Trump, whom neocons loathe, has accelerated this realignment, it began long before the ascension of Trump and is driven by far more common beliefs than contempt for the current president.
(53 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 6, 2013 Chuck Hagel And Liberals: What Are The Priorities?
Like virtually every prominent politician in both parties, Chuck Hagel had primitive and ugly views on gay issues back in 1998. But shouldn't the question be: does he still hold these views or, like huge numbers of Americans, have his views evolved since then? Hagel has apologized for what he said, an apology which James Hormel accepted.
(16 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 23, 2013 The Untouchables: How The Obama Administration Protected Wall Street From Prosecutions
Obama justice officials acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with immunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.
(13 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 6, 2016 U.S. Admits Israel Is Building Permanent Apartheid Regime -- Weeks After Giving It $38 Billion
This week, with its fresh new $38 billion commitment in hand, the Israeli government announced the approval of an all new settlement in the West Bank, one that is particularly hostile to ostensible U.S. policy, the international consensus, and any prospects for an end to occupation.
SHARE Saturday, July 26, 2014 The NSA's New Partner in Spying: Saudi Arabia's Brutal State Police
U.S. support for the Saudi regime is long-standing. One secret 2007 NSA memo lists Saudi Arabia as one of four countries where the U.S. "has [an] interest in regime continuity." The Saudi Ministry of Defense also relies on the NSA for help with "signals analysis equipment upgrades, decryption capabilities and advanced training on a wide range of topics."
(22 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 23, 2011 Barack Obama is gutting the core principles of the Democratic party
Obama is now on the verge of injecting what until recently was the politically toxic and unattainable dream of Wall Street and the American right -- attacks on the nation's social safety net -- into the heart and soul of the Democratic party's platform.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, December 16, 2011 Bradley Manning Deserves a Medal
The oppressive treatment of Manning is designed to create a climate of fear, to send a signal to those who in the future discover serious wrongdoing committed in secret by the US: if you're thinking about exposing what you've learned, look at what we did to Manning and think twice. The real crimes exposed by this episode are those committed by the prosecuting parties, not the accused.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 8, 2012 The PSY Scandal: Singing About Killing People v. Constantly Doing It
Singing about killing innocent people is not in the same universe as doing it, yet many Americans infuriated about the former express little if any condemnation of the latter when done by their own government. It's so astonishing to watch people express surprise and bewilderment and anger when they discover that this behavior causes people in the world to intensely dislike the United States.
(11 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 10, 2012 US supreme court finalizes gift of immunity to the telecom giants
The US supreme court just consecrated one of the most corrupt acts of the US government over the past decade: its vesting of retroactive legal immunity in the nation's telecom giants after they had been caught red-handed violating multiple US eavesdropping laws.
(8 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 2, 2012 Election 2012 and the media: a vast rightwing conspiracy of stupid
CNN's vapid fixation on the dreaminess of our political leaders and "their beautiful families" dominates political discourse generally, especially during the nation's presidential election cycle, which drags on for a seemingly interminable 18 months -- more than one third of the president's term -- and drowns out virtually all other political issues.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 19, 2012 Unlike Afghan leaders, Obama fights for power of indefinite military detention
Many Americans, particularly in the age of Obama, are content to assume that anyone whom the US government accuses of being a terrorist should, for that reason alone, be assumed to be guilty, and as a result, any punishment the president decides to dole out -- indefinite imprisonment, summary execution -- is warranted and just; no bothersome, obsolete procedures such as "trials" or "indictments" are necessary.
(10 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 6, 2016 Washington Has Been Obsessed With Punishing Secrecy Violations -- until Hillary Clinton
Secrecy is a virtual religion in Washington. Those who violate its dogma have been punished in the harshest and most excessive manner -- at least when they possess little political power or influence. As has been widely noted, the Obama administration has prosecuted more leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined.
(37 comments) SHARE Monday, October 14, 2013 The Perfect Epitaph For Establishment Journalism
National security state officials also decreed that it would "not be in the public interest" to report on the Pentagon Papers, or the My Lai massacre, or the network of CIA black sites in which detainees were tortured, or the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, or the documents negating claims of Iraqi WMDs, or a whole litany of waste, corruption and illegality that once bore the "top secret" label.
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 18, 2012 Chris Dodd's paid SOPA crusading
In his SOPA advocacy, Dodd has resorted to holding up Chinese censorship as the desired model, mouthing the slogans of despots, and even outright lying. Like virtually all extremist, oppressive bills backed by large industry, SOPA and PIPA have full bipartisan support; among its co-sponsors are Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and GOP Rep. Lamar Smith, with many Senators from both parties in support and Harry Reid pushing it
(27 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 29, 2014 Terrorism in the Israeli Attack on Gaza
"Terrorism" is, and from the start was designed to be, almost entirely devoid of discernible meaning. It's a fear-mongering slogan, lacking any consistent application, intended to end rational debate and justify virtually any conduct by those who apply the term. But to the extent it means anything beyond that, it typically refers to the killing of civilians as a means of furthering political or military goals.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 8, 2015 Political Smears in U.S. Never Change: the NYT's 1967 Attack on MLK's Anti-War Speech
The script for smearing never changes -- it stays constant over five decades and through the establishments of both parties -- and it's one of the reasons Ellsberg so closely identifies with Snowden and has become one of his most vocal defenders.
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 26, 2013 Andrew Sullivan, terrorism, and the art of distortion
Americans and westerners have been relentlessly bombarded with the message that We are the Noble and Innocent Victims and those Muslims are the Evil, Primitive, Savage Aggressors, so that's what many people are trained to believe, and view any challenge to that as an assault on their core tribalistic convictions.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, April 6, 2015 Why John Oliver Can't Find Americans Who Know Edward Snowden's Name (It's Not About Snowden)
it's actually not surprising at all that a large number of Americans are unaware of who Snowden is, nor does it say much at all about the surveillance debate. That's because a large number of Americans, by choice, are remarkably unaware of virtually all political matters.
(13 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 28, 2013 Bob Woodward Embodies US Political Culture In A Single Outburst
The decades-old Woodward lore plays a critical role in maintaining the fiction of a watchdog press corps even though he is one of the most faithful servants of the war machine and the national security and surveillance states. Every once and awhile, the mask falls, and it's a good thing when it does.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 10, 2013 Committee to Protect Journalists issues scathing report on Obama administration
A report -- the first-ever on press freedoms in the US -- written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., the report offers a comprehensive survey of the multiple ways that the Obama presidency has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for journalists and sources alike, one that severely threatens the news-gathering process.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 7, 2015 Media Lessons from Snowden Reporting: LA Times Editors Advocate Prosecution of Sources
The LAT editors are opposed to a pardon or to clemency for Edward Snowden. While generously conceding that Snowden has "a strong argument for leniency," they nonetheless insist that "in a society of laws, someone who engages in civil disobedience in a higher cause should be prepared to accept the consequences."
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, August 7, 2015 To Defend Iran Deal, Obama Boasts That He's Bombed Seven Countries
Our nation's Churchillian warriors are such sensitive souls: sociopathically indifferent to the lives they continually extinguish around the world (provided it all takes place far away from their comfort and safety), but deeply, deeply hurt -- "especially insulted" -- by mean words directed at them and their motives.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 13, 2015 Greatest Threat To Free Speech Comes Not From Terrorism, But From Those Claiming To Fight It
Threats to free speech can come from lots of places. But right now, the greatest threat by far in the West to ideals of free expression is coming not from radical Muslims, but from the very Western governments claiming to fight them. The increasingly unhinged, Cheney-sounding governments of the UK, Australia, France, New Zealand and Canada -- joining the U.S. -- have a seemingly insatiable desire to curb freedoms.
(16 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 19, 2011 Here's What Attempted Co-Option of OWS Looks Like
SEIU's effort to convert and degrade the Occupy movement into what SEIU's national leadership is -- a loyal arm of the DNC and the Obama White House -- has become even more overt
WH-aligned groups such as the Center for American Progress have made explicitly clear that they are going to try to convert OWS into a vote-producing arm for the Obama 2012 campaign
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, February 11, 2013 DOJ Kill List Memo Forces Many Dems Out Of The Closet As Overtly Unprincipled Hacks
Obama has embraced and expanded the core premises of the Bush/Cheney global war on terror that Democrats so vehemently claimed to find offensive, radical, a "shredding of the Constitution." And they are now supportive for one reason and one reason only: it's a Democratic president whom they trust--Barack Obama--rather than a Republican president they distrust.
(34 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 7, 2012 Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory?
It is widely expected that Obama intends to pursue a so-called "Grand Bargain" whereby the GOP agrees to some very modest tax increases on the rich in exchange for substantial cuts to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, the crown legislative jewels of American liberalism.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 12, 2015 Maybe Obama's Sanctions on Venezuela are Not Really About His "Deep Concern" Over Suppression of Political Rights
As for Obama's decree that Venezuela now poses an "extraordinary threat to the national security" of the United States, is there anyone, anywhere, that wants to defend the reasonability of that claim? Think about what it says about our discourse that Obama officials know they can issue such insultingly false tripe with no consequences.
(9 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 15, 2013 Edward Snowden's Worst Fear Has Not Been Realized -- Thankfully
The stories thus far published by the Guardian are already leading to concrete improvements in accountability and transparency. The ACLU quickly filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the legality, including the constitutionality, of the NSA's collection of the phone records of all Americans.
(18 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 30, 2017 Facebook Says it is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments
What makes this censorship particularly consequential is that "96 percent of Palestinians said their primary use of Facebook was for following news." That means that Israeli officials have virtually unfettered control over a key communications forum of Palestinians.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 29, 2013 Will Journalists Take Any Steps To Defend Against Attacks On Press Freedom?
It's always in the interest of political leaders to control the flow of information and to punish those who make them look bad. That's why there is a free press guarantee in the First Amendment. If journalists aren't willing to protect it, why would anyone else?
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 7, 2012 Iran Sanctions Now Causing Food Insecurity, Mass Suffering
Most Americans literally have no idea, because nobody ever told them, that their government's imposition of sanctions in Iraq led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, and they similarly have no idea that the suffering of ordinary Iranians is becoming increasingly substantial.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 23, 2011 The Media and Iran: Familiar Mindlessness
In Washington media circles, being chosen by U.S. officials as the mindless stenographic vessel for the dissemination of anonymous official statements is an honor higher than the Pulitzer. As Seymour Hersh detailed yesterday in an interview on Democracy Now, exactly the same precincts that took the lead in disseminating false claims about Saddam are being used to do so with Iran.
(15 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 21, 2012 America Afghanistan and American imperialism
What is most revealed by the decision to remove Bales from Afghanistan is the American belief that no other country--including those its invades and occupies--can ever impose accountability on Americans. It is apparently what caused the US to quickly remove the accused shooter from Afghanistan.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 9, 2017 The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened
It's hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived -- filled with false news and propaganda -- by the CNN story. But thanks to Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every Trump/Russia claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it's certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims.
(16 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 7, 2014 Key Democrats, Led By Hillary Clinton, Leave No Doubt That Endless War Is Official U.S. Doctrine
The purpose of the War on Terror -- it was designed from the start to be endless. Both Bush and Obama officials have explicitly said that the war will last at least a generation. The nature of the "war," and the theories that have accompanied it, is that it has no discernible enemy and no identifiable limits.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 24, 2013 How Noam Chomsky is discussed
Far from being some sort of brutal, domineering, and angry "alpha-male" savage, Chomsky -- no matter your views of him -- is one of the most soft-spoken and unfailingly civil and polite political advocates on the planet. He is as steadfastly polite and considerate and eager to listen when it comes to interacting with those who are powerless and voiceless.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 8, 2014 4 points about the 1971 FBI break-in
Just as is true of Daniel Ellsberg today, these activists will be widely hailed as heroic, noble, courageous, etc. That's because it's incredibly easy to praise people who challenge governments of the distant past, and much harder to do so for those who challenge those who wield actual power today.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 4, 2012 The US Presidential Debates' Illusion Of Political Choice
Wednesday night's debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney underscored a core truth about America's presidential election season: presidential elections are now conducted almost entirely like a tawdry TV reality show. Personality quirks and trivialities about the candidates dominate coverage, and voter choices, leaving little room for substantive debates.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 22, 2014 Canada, At War For 13 Years, Shocked that "A Terrorist" Attacked Its Soldiers
A country doesn't get to run around for years wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others, without the risk of having violence brought back to it. Rather than being baffling or shocking, that reaction is completely natural and predictable. The only surprising thing about any of it is that it doesn't happen more often.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 4, 2015 The "Snowden Is Ready To Come Home!" Story: A Case Study In Typical Media Deceit
When U.S. political and media figures say Snowden should "man up," come home and argue to a court that he did nothing wrong, they are deceiving the public, since they have made certain that whistleblowers charged with "espionage" are legally barred from even raising that defense.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, April 17, 2015 NBC's Conduct In Engel Kidnapping Story Is More Troubling Than the Brian Williams Scandal
Nobody can blame Engel -- a courageous reporter -- for falling for what appears to be a well-coordinated ruse. When he and his fellow captives believed with good reason that their lives were in immediate danger, it's completely understandable that he believed he had been captured by pro-Assad forces. There is no real evidence that Engel did anything wrong. is most certainly not true of NBC News executives.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, September 21, 2012 Obama officials' spin on Benghazi attack mirrors Bin Laden raid untruths
The Obama administration's claims about the Benghazi attack are but the latest in a long line of falsehoods it has spouted on crucial issues, all in order to serve its interests and advance its agenda. Perhaps it is time to subject those claims to intense skepticism and to demand evidence before believing they are true.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 15, 2012 Zero Dark Thirty: CIA hagiography, pernicious propaganda
Like the bin Laden killing itself, this is a film that tells Americans to feel good about themselves, to feel gratitude for the violence done in their name, to perceive the War-on-Terror-era CIA not as lawless criminals but as honorable heroes.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 12, 2011 The "very scary" Iranian Terror plot
The ironies here are so self-evident it's hard to work up the energy to point them out. Outside of Pentagon reporters, Washington Post Editorial Page Editors, and Brookings "scholars," is there a person on the planet anywhere who can listen with a straight face as drone-addicted U.S. Government officials righteously condemn the evil, illegal act of entering another country to commit an assassination?
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 1, 2012 Extremism Normalized
The New York Times first confirmed Obama's targeting of citizens for assassinations in 2010, it noted, citing "officials," that "it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing." No longer. That presidential power -- literally the most tyrannical power a political leader can seize -- is also now a barely noticed fixture of our political culture.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 10, 2013 US Air Force Veteran, Finally Allowed To Fly Into US, Is Now Banned From Flying Back Home
Now he's just in a no-man's land. He can't contest the accusations against him because there are none. After being blocked for months from visiting his own country and his terminally ill mother, he's now barred from returning to his home, his job, and his own family. All of this is done by his own government without a shred of due process, transparency or accountability.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, April 9, 2012 U.S. filmmaker repeatedly detained at border
DHS routinely singles out individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them and questions them at the airport, often for hours, when they return to the U.S. after an international trip, and then copies and even seizes their electronic devices (laptops, cameras, cellphones) and other papers (notebooks, journals, credit card receipts), forever storing their contents in government files.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, December 2, 2011 Congress endorsing military detention, a new AUMF
The Congress, on a fully bipartisan basis, acting not only to re-affirm the war but to expand it even further: by formally declaring that the entire world (including the U.S.) is a battlefield and the war will essentially go on forever.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 16, 2015 Religious Fanaticism Is A Huge Factor In Americans' Support For Israel
There is no denying that religious extremism plays a very significant role in American attitudes toward Israel. Given its importance, this is a remarkably under-discussed phenomenon, mostly because American media figures are very comfortable maligning other countries as being driven by religious fanaticism while ignoring how much their own country is.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, August 27, 2012 Film Highlights the Temptations and Perils of Blind Obedience to Authority
Oppression is designed to compel obedience and submission to authority. Those who voluntarily put themselves in that state -- by believing that their institutions of authority are just and good and should be followed rather than subverted -- render oppression redundant, unnecessary.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 4, 2016 The Smear Campaign Against Keith Ellison Is Repugnant but Reveals Much About Washington
Three days ago, the now ironically named Anti-Defamation League pronounced Ellison's 2010 comments about Israel "deeply disturbing and disqualifying." Other Israel advocates have now joined in. What are Ellison's terrible sins? He said in a 2010 speech that while he "wanted the U.S. to be friends with Israel," the U.S. "can't allow another country to treat us like we're their ATM."
SHARE Saturday, June 6, 2015 Did Max Boot And Commentary Magazine Lie About Eward Snowden? You Decide.
It's not surprising that someone whose entire adult life is shaped by extreme cowardice would want to accuse others of lacking courage, as it distracts attention away from oneself and provides the comfort of company. Nor is it surprising that government-loyal journalists spew outright falsehoods to smear whistleblowers.
(40 comments) SHARE Friday, January 9, 2015 In Solidarity With a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons
This week's defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself. One should not merely condemn the attacks and defend the right of the cartoonists to publish, but should publish and even celebrate those cartoons.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 5, 2015 Leaked Emails From Pro-Clinton Group Reveal Censorship of Staff on Israel, AIPAC Pandering, Warped Militarism
On Israel, CAP's efforts to manipulate the content of its publications are even more aggressive and overt. Under Tanden, the group has repeatedly demonstrated it will go to almost any length to keep AIPAC and its pro-Israel donors happy, regardless of how such behavior subverts its pretense of independent advocacy.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 25, 2012 New Stanford/NYU study documents the civilian terror from Obama's drones
Obama is claiming the power to decide who should be killed without a shred of transparency, oversight, or due process -- a power that is being continuously used to kill civilians, including children -- and many progressives now actually cheer for that.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 17, 2014 NBC News Pulls Veteran Reporter from Gaza After Witnessing Israeli Attack on Children
Ayman Mohyeldin, the NBC News correspondent who personally witnessed yesterday's killing by Israel of four Palestinian boys on a Gazan beach and who has received widespread praise for his brave and innovative coverage of the conflict, has been told by NBC executives to leave Gaza immediately. Gazans may have no way out of Gaza, but at this point, Mohyeldin seems to have no way back in.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, September 12, 2016 Barbara Lee's Lone Vote on Sept. 14, 2001, Was as Prescient as It Was Brave and Heroic
It's impossible to overstate how correct Rep. Barbara Lee was when she warned that this resolution would constitute "a blank check" to wage war "anywhere, in any country," and "without time limit." Fifteen years later, this "war" is raging as destructively as ever, with no end in sight.
(10 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 30, 2012 Correspondence and collusion between the New York Times and the CIA
Here we have a New York Times reporter who covers the CIA colluding with its spokesperson to plan for the fallout from the reporting by his own newspaper. The relationship between the New York Times and the US government is, as usual, anything but adversarial. Indeed, these emails read like the interactions between a PR representative and his client as they plan in anticipation of a possible crisis.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 18, 2012 New press freedom group is launched to block US government attacks
The primary impetus for the formation of this group was to block the US government from ever again being able to attack and suffocate an independent journalistic enterprise the way it did with WikiLeaks. We will render impotent the government's efforts to use its coercive pressure over corporations to suffocate not only WikiLeaks but any other group it may similarly target in the future.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 10, 2015 The Parties' Role Reversal on "Interfering" with the Commander-in-Chief's Foreign Policy
members of both parties who are trying to subvert a peace agreement with Iran -- out of some warped allegiance to Israeli interests and/or a commitment to endless militarism -- are acting in destructive and dangerous ways. That they have disrespected and undermined our Glorious Commander-in-Chief, or breached precious inter-court protocols for who gets to exercise power are quite misguided positions.
(15 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 14, 2013 Justice Department's Pursuit Of AP's Phone Records Is Both Extreme And Dangerous
What makes the DOJ's actions so stunning here is its breadth. It's the opposite of a narrowly tailored and limited scope. It's a massive, sweeping, boundless invasion which enables the US government to learn the identity of every person whom multiple AP journalists and editors have called for a two-month period.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 16, 2012 The Sham "Terrorism Expert" Industry
The very concept of Terrorism is inherently empty, illegitimate, meaningless. "Terrorism" itself is not an objective term or legitimate object of study, but was conceived of as a highly politicized instrument and has been used that way ever since.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 24, 2013 The Same Motive For Anti-US "Terrorism" Is Cited Over And Over
There seems to be this pervasive belief in the US that we can invade, bomb, drone, kill, occupy, and tyrannize whomever we want, and that they will never respond. If you believe all that militarism and aggression are justified, make that argument. But don't walk around acting surprised, bewildered and confounded when violence is brought to US soil as well.
(16 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 28, 2014 Elizabeth Warren finally speaks on Israel/Gaza, sounds like Netanyahu
In the last week, Israel deliberately destroyed an entire large residential apartment building after giving its residents less than an hour to vacate, leaving more than 40 families homeless, and also destroyed a seven-story office building and two-story shopping center. Warren says, "I believe Israel has a right, at that point, to defend itself." Such carnage is the "last thing Israel wants."
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, March 27, 2015 Court Accepts DOJ's "State Secrets" Claim To Protect Shadowy Neocons: A New Low
A truly stunning debasement of the U.S. justice system just occurred through the joint efforts of the Obama Justice Department and a meek and frightened Obama-appointed federal judge, Edgardo Ramos, all in order to protect an extremist neocon front group from scrutiny and accountability.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, November 27, 2015 Why the CIA is smearing Edward Snowden after the Paris attacks
Snowden did not tell terrorists anything they did not already know. They have known for years that the US government is trying to monitor their communications. What the Snowden disclosures actually revealed was that the US government is monitoring the Internet communications and activities of hundreds of millions of innocent people under the largest program of suspicionless mass surveillance ever created.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 13, 2012 FBI's abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation
What is most disturbing about the whole Petraeus scandal is not the sexual activities that it revealed, but the wildly out-of-control government surveillance powers which enabled these revelations. What requires investigation here is not Petraeus and Allen and their various sexual partners but the FBI and the whole sprawling, unaccountable surveillance system that has been built.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 27, 2014 The Fun of Empire: Fighting on All Sides of a War in Syria
Now the Obama administration and American political class is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the failed "Bomb Assad!" campaign by starting a new campaign to bomb those fighting against Assad -- the very same side the U.S. has been arming over the last two years.
(14 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 5, 2012 Obama Campaign Brags About its Whistleblower Persecutions
Persecuting and abusing whistleblowers. Indefinitely imprisoning people with no charges. Due process-free assassinations of citizens, even teenagers. Continuous killings of innocent people in multiple Muslim countries. This isn't just what Democrats do. It's what they now boast about, what they campaign on, what they celebrate. That, as much as anything, is the Obama legacy.
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 23, 2012 Joe Klein's sociopathic defense of drone killings of children
One of the primary reasons war -- especially protracted war -- is so destructive is not merely that it kills the populations at whom it is aimed, but it also radically degrades the character of the citizenry that wages it. That's what enables one of America's most celebrated pundits to go on the most mainstream of TV programs and coldly justify the killing of 4-year-olds, without so much as batting an eyelash.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 9, 2015 Hillary Clinton Goes To Militaristic, Hawkish Think Tank, Gives Militaristic, Hawkish Speech
The core purpose of Clinton's speech was to assure those nervous precincts that, despite the Iran Deal support, she's still the same aggressive, war-threatening, obsessively Israel-devoted, bellicose hawk they've grown to know and love. To achieve that, Clinton repeatedly invoked the Netanyahu-cartoon image of Iran as a Grave and Evil Terrorist Menace.
(8 comments) SHARE Friday, January 16, 2015 Latest FBI Claim Of Disrupted Terror Plot Deserves Much Scrutiny And Skepticism
The known facts from this latest case seem to fit well within a now-familiar FBI pattern whereby the agency does not disrupt planned domestic terror attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping its own plots. Predictably, political officials instantly exploited the news to justify their powers of domestic surveillance.
(14 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 30, 2014 The Inside Story of Matt Taibbi's Departure From First Look Media
Taibbi's departure means that First Look has lost a talented, unique, and influential journalistic voice before he published a single word. After months of struggle and negotiation, The Intercept has arrived at the point where it can function effectively: with full editorial freedom and an ample budget. But First Look and Taibbi failed to reach a similar mutual understanding.
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 22, 2012 Journalism v. Propaganda
There is no evidence to confirm the American and Israeli accusations. A reader of the New York Times article would not know that, while a reader of the article in the Post would. That's the difference between journalism and propaganadistic stenography. It's really not that difficult or complex, when repeating government claims, to note clearly and prominently that no evidence has been furnished to support those claims.
(12 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 7, 2015 Why Is the U.S. Refusing An Independent Investigation If Its Hospital Airstrike Was An "Accident"?
The U.S. State Department, through its spokesman Mark Toner, insisted that no independent investigation of the hospital bombing was needed on the ground; that the U.S. Government is already investigating itself and everyone knows how trustworthy and reliable this process is.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 22, 2012 Two lessons from the Megaupload seizure
SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill -- the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial -- is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world's largest sites.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, February 18, 2013 The Premises And Purposes Of American Exceptionalism
This belief in the unfettered legal and moral right of the US to use force anywhere in the world for any reason it wants is sustained only by this belief in objective US superiority, this myth of American exceptionalism. And the results are exactly what one would expect from an approach grounded in a belief system so patently irrational.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, December 16, 2019 Watch: Glenn Greenwald's Exclusive Interview With Bolivia's Evo Morales, Who Was Deposed in a Coup
Morales was incredibly thoughtful, reflective, insightful, and analytical about virtually everything we discussed, not only about Bolivia but also regional and world politics. But that expectation proved untrue. Morales was incredibly thoughtful, reflective, insightful, and analytical, not only about Bolivia but also regional and world politics.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 1, 2015 North Korea/Sony Story Shows How Eagerly U.S. Media Still Regurgitate Government claims
None of the expert skepticism made its way into countless media accounts of the Sony hack. Time and again, many journalists mindlessly regurgitated the U.S. Government's accusation against North Korea without a shred of doubt, blindly assuming it to be true, and then discussing, often demanding, strong retaliation.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 8, 2012 The evil of indefinite detention and those wanting to de-prioritize it
This Wednesday will mark the ten-year anniversary of the opening of the Guantanamo prison camp. In The New York Times, one of the camp's former prisoners, Lakhdar Boumediene, has an incredibly powerful Op-Ed recounting the gross injustice of his due-process-free detention, which lasted seven years. It was clear from the start that the accusations against this Bosnian citizen... were false
(10 comments) SHARE Friday, September 14, 2012 The tragic consulate killings in Libya and America's hierarchy of human life
Events like this one are difficult to write about when they first happen because the raw emotion they produce often makes rational discussion impossible. A script quickly emerges from which All Decent People must recite, and any deviations are quickly detected and denounced. But given the magnitude of this event and the important points it raises, it is nonetheless worthwhile to examine it.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 13, 2013 Barbara Boxer, AIPAC Seek To Codify Israel's Right To Discriminate Against Americans
If you're a US politician finding yourself working to allow a foreign government to discriminate against your own fellow citizens -- by vesting that foreign country with a right that no other country (including your own) has -- then you're essentially broadcasting to the world that the interests of that foreign government take precedence over your own and over the equal rights of your own fellow citizens.
SHARE Monday, May 16, 2016 The Intercept Is Broadening Access To The Snowden Archive. Here's Why
FROM THE TIME we began reporting on the archive provided to us in Hong Kong by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we sought to fulfill his two principal requests for how the materials should be handled: that they be released in conjunction with careful reporting that puts the documents in context and makes them digestible to the public, and that the welfare and reputations of innocent people be safeguarded.
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 21, 2012 US drone strikes target rescuers in Pakistan -- and the west stays silent
It is telling indeed that the Obama administration now routinely uses tactics in Pakistan long denounced as terrorism when used by others, and does so with so little controversy. Yet, in the west, the silence about the Obama administration's attacks on funerals and rescuers is deafening.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, July 27, 2012 Protectors of Wall Street
If you believe the Federal Reserve has done a fine job of managing monetary policy and trust it to continue to exert vast power with no accountability or transparency, then you are probably content with the status quo. But, as Dennis Kucinich says, "It's time that we stood up to the Federal Reserve that right now acts like some kind of high, exalted priesthood, unaccountable to democracy."
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 19, 2012 Newtown kids v Yemenis and Pakistanis: what explains the disparate reactions?
Americans virtually never hear about the Muslims killed by their government's violence. They're never profiled. The New York Times doesn't put powerful graphics showing their names and ages on its front page. Their funerals are never covered. President Obama never delivers teary sermons about how these Muslim children "had their entire lives ahead of them -- birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own."
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, October 29, 2012 US detention of Imran Khan part of trend to harass anti-drone advocates
Bush officials and their supporters equated opposition to their foreign policies with support for the terrorists and a general hatred of and desire to harm the US. During the Obama presidency, many Democratic partisans have adopted the same lowly tactic with vigor. It is designed, above all else, to ensure that the American citizenry does not become exposed to effective critics of what the US is doing in the world.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 23, 2012 Five lessons from the de-listing of MEK as a terrorist group
A large group of prominent former US government officials from both political parties has spent the last several years receiving substantial sums of cash to give speeches to the MEK, and have then become vocal, relentless advocates for the group, specifically for removing them from the terrorist list.
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 7, 2021 The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows
A new and rapidly growing journalistic "beat" has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is the very antithesis of journalism.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, July 17, 2015 The Chattanooga Shootings: Can Attacking Military Sites of a Nation at War be "Terrorism"?
The argument that even attacks on military bases should be regarded as "terrorism" rests on the proposition that soldiers who are not actively engaged in combat when attacked are not legitimate targets. Instead, it is legitimate only to target them when engaging them on a battlefield.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 19, 2015 US Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says
There has been a sustained debate in Germany over whether to grant asylum to Snowden, and a major controversy arose last year when a Parliamentary Committee investigating NSA spying divided as to whether to bring Snowden to testify in person, and then narrowly refused at the behest of the Merkel government.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, July 6, 2015 Today's Civilian Victims In Yemen Will Be Ignored Because U.S. And Its Allies Are Responsible
Because these deaths of innocents are at the hands of the U.S. government and its despotic allies, it is very predictable how they will be covered in the U.S. None of the victims will be profiled in American media; it'll be very surprising if any of their names are even mentioned. No major American television outlet will interview their grieving families.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 18, 2014 What "Democracy" Really Means in U.S. and New York Times Jargon: Latin America Edition
"Tyranny" means "opposing the U.S. agenda" and "refusing U.S. commands," no matter how fair and free the elections are that empower the government. The most tyrannical regimes are celebrated as long as they remain subservient, while the most popular and democratic governments are condemned as despots to the extent that they exercise independence.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 18, 2015 What's Scarier: Terrorism, Or Governments Blocking Websites In Its Name?
Forcibly taking down websites deemed to be supportive of terrorism, or criminalizing speech deemed to "advocate" terrorism, is a major trend in both Europe and the West generally. Last month in Brussels, the European Union's counter-terrorism coordinator issued a memo proclaiming that "Europe is facing an unprecedented, diverse and serious terrorist threat," and argued that control of the Internet is crucial to combating it.
(12 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 28, 2012 AP believes it found evidence of Iran's work on nuclear weapons
At the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Yousaf Butt and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress document that the graph trumpeted by AP "does nothing more than indicate either slipshod analysis or an amateurish hoax." That's because, they explain, "the diagram features quite a massive error, which is unlikely to have been made by research scientists working at a national level."
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, December 5, 2011 George Orwell on the Evil Iranian Menace
The U.S. and Israel has bombarded Iran with multiple acts of war over the last year, including explosions on Iranian soil, the murder of numerous Iranian nuclear scientists (in which even one of their wives was shot), and sophisticated cyberattacks. Iran has not invaded, occupied or air-attacked anyone.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, May 19, 2017 Chelsea Manning Is a Free Woman: Her Heroism Has Expanded Beyond Her Initial Whistleblowing
EVER SINCE Chelsea Manning was revealed as the whistleblower responsible for one of the most important journalistic archives in history, her heroism has been manifest. She was the classic leaker of conscience, someone who went at the age of 20 to fight in the Iraq War believing it was noble, only to discover the dark reality not only of that war but of the U.S. government's actions in the world generally
(29 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 21, 2018 Consensus Emerges: Russia Committed an "Act of War" Like Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Should the U.S. Response Be Similar?
Since last week's indictments alleging that 13 Russian nationals and entities created fake social media accounts and sponsored political events to sow political discord in the U.S., something of a consensus has arisen in the political and media class (with some notable exceptions) that these actions not only constitute an "act of war" against the U.S., but one so grave that it is tantamount to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 23, 2014 Syria Becomes The 7th Predominantly Muslim Country Bombed By 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate
t was just over a year ago that Obama officials were insisting that bombing and attacking Assad was a moral and strategic imperative. Instead, Obama is now bombing Assad's enemies while politely informing his regime of its targets in advance. It seems irrelevant on whom the U.S. wages war; what matters it that it be at war, always and forever.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, October 5, 2015 The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification
Doctors Without Borders are clearly infuriated at the attack on their hospital and the deaths of their colleagues and patients. From the start, they have signaled an unwillingness to be shunted away with the usual "collateral damage" banalities and, more important, have refused to let the U.S. military and its allies get away with spouting obvious falsehoods.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 5, 2017 Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That are False
One of the primary ways that democracy is degraded by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is, for obvious reasons, typically ignored in such discussions: the way they are used by American journalists to endorse factually false claims that quickly spread and become viral, entrenched into narratives, and thus can never be adequately corrected.
SHARE Friday, March 13, 2015 The Orwellian Re-Branding Of "Mass Surveillance" As Merely "Bulk Collection"
Just as the Bush administration and the U.S. media re-labelled "torture" with the Orwellian euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" to make it more palatable, the governments and media of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance are now attempting to re-brand "mass surveillance" as "bulk collection" in order to make it less menacing (and less illegal).
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 21, 2013 This week in press freedoms and privacy rights
In the utter travesty known as "the Bradley Manning court-martial proceeding," the military judge presiding over the proceeding yet again showed her virtually unbreakable loyalty to the US government's case by refusing to dismiss the most serious charge against the 25-year-old Army Private, one that carries a term of life in prison: "aiding and abetting the enemy."
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 26, 2015 Why Does The FBI Have To Manufacture Its Own Plots If Terrorism And ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?
The agency's latest counter-terrorism triumph: the arrest of three Brooklyn men, ages 19 to 30, on charges of conspiring to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS. We should all pause for a moment to thank the brave men and women of the FBI for saving us from their own terror plots.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 1, 2012 Bradley Manning: a tale of liberty lost in America
The government's radical theory is that, although Manning had no intent to do so, the leaked information could have helped al-Qaida, a theory that essentially equates any disclosure of classified information -- by any whistleblower, or a newspaper -- with treason.
(10 comments) SHARE Monday, September 29, 2014 The Fake Terror Threat Used to Justify Bombing Syria
As the Obama Administration prepared to bomb Syria without congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems-- the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, and the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.
SHARE Thursday, October 22, 2015 Israel Calls a Man Its Soldiers Killed a "Terrorist": Until They Realized He Was an Israeli Jew
Killing a man by two IDF soldiers was a mistake. The soldiers claim, he was acting erratically and tried to grab one of their guns. When he was fatally shot by the IDF, says the paper, he was "believed to be an Arab terrorist." As it turns out, he was not an Arab Palestinian but rather an Israeli Jew. Upon learning this, the "terrorist" designation was officially and "immediately" rescinded.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 13, 2017 The Misguided Attacks on ACLU for Defending Neo-Nazis' Free Speech Rights in Charlottesville
Each time horrific political violence is perpetrated that is deemed to be terrorism, a search is immediately conducted for culprits to blame other than those who actually perpetrated the violence or endorsed the group responsible for it. It's usually only a matter of hours before the attack is exploited to declare one's own political views vindicated, and to depict political adversaries as responsible for, if not complicit.
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 20, 2021 Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One
That Russia placed "bounties" on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was one of the most-discussed and consequential news stories of 2020. It was also one of the most baseless as the intelligence agencies who spread it through their media.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, March 29, 2013 Domestic Drones And Their Unique Dangers
It remains to be seen how Americans will react to drones constantly hovering over their homes and their childrens' schools, though by that point, their presence will be so institutionalized that it will be likely be too late to stop.
(8 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 6, 2011 Execution by secret WH committee
Even for those deeply cynical about American political culture: wouldn't you have thought a few years ago that having the President create a White House panel to place Americans on a CIA hit list -- in secret, without a shred of due process -- would be a bridge too far?
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 30, 2017 Why Has Trust in Media Collapsed? Look at Actions of WSJ, Yahoo, Business Insider and Slate.
Contrary to the fable these outlets dispensed to their readers -- that Snowden did not check in to the Mira Hotel on May 21 as he claimed but only did so on June 1, 11 days later -- these new documents, obtained from the Mira, prove that Snowden arrived there exactly when he always said, rendering their published stories factually false.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 18, 2017 Trump Administration Ousts UN Official to Protect Israel From Criticism
Ehud Barak, Israel's former Prime Minister and its most decorated soldier, explicitly warned that Israel was on a path to what he called a permanent "apartheid" state. As he put it: "As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, December 27, 2010 The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired
It is just inconceivable that someone who claims to be a "journalist" -- or who wants to be regarded as one -- would actively conceal from the public, for months on end, the key evidence in a political story that has generated headlines around the world.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 4, 2012 The Obama DOJ and strip searches
The 5-judge conservative faction held that prison officials may strip-search anyone arrested even for the most minor offenses before admitting them to the general population of a jail or prison, even in the absence of a shred of suspicion that they are carrying weapons or contraband.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 15, 2021 The Enduring False Narrative About the PULSE Massacre Shows the Power of Media Propaganda
On the fifth anniversary of the PULSE nightclub massacre in Orlando, numerous senators, politicians and activist groups commemorated that tragic event by propagating an absolute falsehood: namely, that the shooter, Omar Mateen, was motivated by anti-LGBT animus.
(11 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 31, 2016 Russia Hysteria Infects WashPost Again: False Story About Hacking U.S. Electric Grid
The key scary claim of the Post story -- that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid -- was false. All the alarmist tough-guy statements issued by political officials who believed the Post's claim were based on fiction. Even worse, there is zero evidence that Russian hackers were even responsible for the implanting of this malware on this single laptop.
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 26, 2013 Supreme Court Shields Warrantless Eavesdropping Law From Constitutional Challenge
Both the Bush and Obama DOJ's have relied on one tactic in particular to insulate its eavesdropping behavior from judicial review: by draping what it does in total secrecy, it prevents anyone from knowing with certainty who the targets of its surveillance are.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 13, 2016 Facebook Is Collaborating With the Israeli Government to Determine What Should Be Censored
Israel is about to legislatively force Facebook to censor content deemed by Israeli officials to be improper, and Facebook appears eager to appease those threats by working directly with the Israeli government to determine what content should be censored.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 6, 2016 The Unrelenting Pundit-Led Effort to Delegitimize All Negative Reporting About Hillary Clinton
In his New York Times column yesterday, Paul Krugman did something that he made clear he regarded as quite brave: He defended the Democratic Party presidential nominee and likely next U.S. president from journalistic investigations. Complaining about media bias, Krugman claimed that journalists are driven by "the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt...
SHARE Tuesday, February 25, 2014 How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations
No matter your views on Anonymous, “hacktivists†or garden-variety criminals, it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption.
SHARE Wednesday, November 11, 2015 Interview with Charlie Savage on Obama's War on Terror Legacy
Very early on in his administration, I defended Obama from the "he's-just-like-Bush" critique as premature. But six months later, the evidence piled up higher and higher that there was far more continuity with the Bush/Cheney model than almost anyone expected.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, October 30, 2015 Anti-Israel Activism Criminalized in the Land of Charlie Hebdo and "Free Speech"
As more and more people around the world recognize the criminal and brutal nature of the Israeli government, its loyalists have been increasingly trying literally to criminalize activism against the Israeli occupation. For that reason, "pro-Israel" activists this week celebrated this French assault on basic free speech rights.
SHARE Monday, November 2, 2015 Why Is The Daily Beast's Russia Critic Silent About So Many Hideous Abuses?
What could possibly explain Hamad's stunning, disgraceful silence about these massacres, abuses, injustices, and extreme levels of avoidable human suffering? One might conclude from his utter silence that he supports these heinous actions. Or perhaps he is an apologist for the perpetrators, seeking to conceal their culpability by never acknowledging these crimes?
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 6, 2013 Chilling Legal Memo From Obama DOJ Justifies Assassination Of US Citizens
That's all this memo is: Obama-loyal appointees telling their leader that he has the authority to do what he wants. But in the warped world of US politics, this -- secret memos from partisan lackeys -- has replaced judicial review as the means to determine the legality of the president's conduct.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, April 29, 2013 Report: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Repeated Requests For A Lawyer Were Ignored
There is no legal or ethical justification for refusing the request for someone in custody to have a lawyer present. If this report is true, what's most amazing is not that his core rights were so brazenly violated, but that so few people in Washington will care. They're too busy demanding that his rights should have been violated even further.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 16, 2013 Email Exchange Between Edward Snowden And Former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey
Snowden: "My intention, which I outlined when this began, is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. I remain committed to that. Though reporters and officials may never believe it, I have not provided any information that would harm our people -- agent or not -- and I have no intention to do so."
SHARE Wednesday, January 29, 2020 The far-right Bolsonaro movement wants us dead. But we will not give up
Demagogues and despots like Bolsonaro are a dime a dozen. They centrally rely on intimidation, fear and the use of state repression to consolidate power. A refusal to give into that fear, but instead to join hands with those who intend to fight against it, is always the antidote to this toxin.
SHARE Sunday, April 22, 2012 Surveillance State Evils
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, George Bush ordered the NSA to spy on the communications of Americans on American soil, and they've been doing it ever since, with increasing aggression and fewer and fewer constraints. That development is but one arm in the creation of an American Surveillance State...
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 22, 2016 Hillary Clinton's Likely Pentagon Chief Already Advocating for More Bombing and Intervention
note the clinical euphemism Michele Flournoy created -- "military coercion" -- for creating a "no-bomb zone" that would entail "a declaratory policy backed up by the threat of force. 'If you bomb the folks we support, we will retaliate using standoff means to destroy [Russian] proxy forces, or, in this case, Syrian assets,'" she said.
(10 comments) SHARE Monday, December 10, 2012 Zero Dark Thirty: new torture-glorifying film wins raves
What makes all of this so remarkable is that the film's glorifying claims about torture are demonstrably, factually false. That waterboarding and other torture techniques were effective in finding bin Laden is a fabrication.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 9, 2014 Americans Now Fear ISIS Sleeper Cells Are Living In The U.S., Overwhelmingly Support Military Action
In terms of crazed irrationality, how far away from false belief is the current fear on the part of Americans that there are ISIS sleeper cells "living in the United States"? It's as though ISIS and the U.S. media and political class worked in perfect unison to achieve the same goal here when it comes to American public opinion: fully terrorize them.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 29, 2015 Those Demanding Free Speech Limits to Fight ISIS Pose a Greater Threat to U.S. Than ISIS
Gingrich's anti-free-speech remarks were, for the most part, quickly dismissed as unworthy of serious debate. Even National Review, which employs former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, included Gingrich's anti-free speech proposal on its 2011 list of the bad ideas the former speaker has espoused in his career.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 28, 2013 Brian Williams' Iran propaganda
The fact that Iran claims it does not want nuclear weapons is not proof that it will not seek them at some point in the future. What is true is that US intelligence agencies have repeatedly, though secretly, concluded that they do not believe that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, and even top Israeli military officials have expressed serious doubts that Iran is building, or will build, a nuclear weapon.
SHARE Sunday, March 1, 2015 Clapper Calls For Arming Ukrainian Forces: Who Would That Actually Empower?
Anyone pointing out that arming the regime in Kiev would strengthen fascists and neo-Nazis is instantly accused of being a Putin propagandist: exactly like those arguing that the best anti-Assad fighters were al-Qaeda-affiliated were accused of being Assad propagandists (until that became the official position of the US Government).
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 11, 2009 Has There Been a Virtual Coup D'Etat by Wall Street? Who Own Our Government?
The Administration refused to break the power of the big banks, when they had the opportunity, earlier this year. And the regulatory reforms they are now pursuing will turn out to be essentially meaningless.
(19 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 13, 2015 Dianne Feinstein, Strong Advocate Of Leak Prosecutions, Demands Immunity For David Petraeus
Feinstein wanted Julian Assange, who isn't a US citizen and never served in the US Government, prosecuted for espionage for exposing war crimes, and demanded that Edward Snowden be charged with "treason" for exposing illegal eavesdropping which shocked the world. But a four-star general who leaked classified information not for any noble purpose but to his mistress should be protected from any legal consequences.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 26, 2012 Obama's Gift to al-Qaida, Support for Tyranny, and FBI Monitoring of Dissent
In the regions where the US enthusiastically supports even the most repressive regimes provided those regimes show fealty to US dictates, the stench of this hypocrisy, of this radical dishonesty, is so potent that it cannot be evaded.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 28, 2015 Writers Withdraw From Pen Gala To Protest Award To Charlie Hebdo
Numerous prominent writers who were to serve as "table heads," or who are longtime PEN members, have withdrawn from the group's annual awards gala and otherwise expressed anger over PEN's decision to bestow its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, December 9, 2016 A Clinton Fan Manufactured Fake News That MSNBC Personalities Spread to Discredit WikiLeaks Docs
That the emails in the Wikileaks archive were doctored or faked -- and thus should be disregarded -- was classic Fake News, spread not by Macedonian teenagers or Kremlin operatives but by established news outlets such as MSNBC, the Atlantic and Newsweek. And, by design, this Fake News spread like wildfire all over the internet, hungrily clicked and shared by tens of thousands of people eager to believe it was true.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, December 4, 2015 U.S. First Shields Its Torturers and War Criminals From Prosecution, Now Officially Honors Them
he U.S. government unambiguously signaled to the world that not only does it regard itself as entirely exempt from the laws of wars, the principal Nuremberg prohibition against aggressive invasions, and global prohibitions on torture, but believes that the official perpetrators should be honored and memorialized provided they engage in these crimes on behalf of the U.S. government.
(54 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 15, 2014 Cynics, Step Aside: There is Genuine Excitement Over A Hillary Clinton Candidacy
One shouldn't be jaded. There is genuine and intense excitement over the prospect of (another) Clinton presidency. Many significant American factions regard her elevation to the Oval Office as an opportunity for rejuvenation, as a stirring symbol of hope and change, as the vehicle for vital policy advances.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, March 25, 2013 The Racism That Fuels The "War On Terror"
Many Americans can (a) say that they oppose the targeted killings of Americans on foreign soil while simultaneously (b) supporting the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen because, for them, the term "Americans" doesn't include people like Anwar al-Awlaki.
SHARE Monday, August 4, 2014 Cash, Weapons and Surveillance: the U.S. is a Key Party to Every Israeli Attack
Legal or not, the NSA's extensive, multi-level cooperation with Israeli military and intelligence agencies is part of a broader American policy that actively supports and enables Israeli aggression and militarism. Every Israeli action in Gaza has U.S. fingerprints all over it.
(13 comments) SHARE Friday, September 30, 2011 The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality
What's most amazing is that U.S. citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, July 7, 2017 Rachel Maddow's Exclusive "Scoop" About A Fake NSA Document Raises Several Key Questions
Maddow said her report should serve as a "heads up" to other news organizations that someone is attempting to destroy the credibility of those who report on Trump's connections to Russia by purposely giving them false information. She suggested, without stating, that this may have been what caused CNN and other outlets recently to publish reports about Trump and/or Russia that ended up being retracted.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 18, 2017 The Leakers Who Exposed Gen. Flynn's Lie Committed Serious -- and Wholly Justified -- Felonies
In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT -- signals intelligence -- is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be prosecuted under federal law for disclosing classified information only under the narrowest circumstances.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, September 27, 2013 Sen. Ron Wyden: NSA "repeatedly deceived the American people"
James Clapper lied to the faces of the Senate Intelligence Committee about core NSA matters, and not only was he not prosecuted for that felony, but he did not even lose his job, and continues to be treated with great reverence by the very Committee which he deliberately deceived. That one fact tells you all you need to know about how official Washington functions.
(10 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 11, 2012 Cheapening Bravery, And Drone Pilots
Whatever one thinks of the justifiability of drone attacks, it's one of the least "brave" or courageous modes of warfare ever invented. It's one thing to call it just, but to pretend it's "brave" is Orwellian in the extreme. The whole point of it is to allow large numbers of human beings to be killed without the slightest physical risk to those doing the killing.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, April 8, 2013 Margaret Thatcher And Misapplied Death Etiquette
This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power.
(12 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 20, 2013 What rights should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get and why does it matter?
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been convicted of nothing and is thus entitled to a presumption of innocence. The reason to care what happens to him is because how he is treated creates precedent for what the US government is empowered to do, including to US citizens on US soil. When you cheer for the erosion of his rights, you're cheering for the erosion of your own.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, November 26, 2012 Obama: a GOP president should have rules limiting the kill list
We have had four straight years of a president who has wielded what is literally the most extreme and tyrannical power a government can claim -- to execute anyone the leader wants, even his own citizens, in total secrecy and without a whiff of due process -- and who has resisted all efforts to impose a framework of limits or even transparency.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, April 26, 2013 Bill Moyers interview on Boston Marathon bombing
An interview wherein Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald discuss the Boston Marathon bombing, terrorism and civil liberties, the dangers of secrecy, US foreign policy and general issues relating to US political and media culture:
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 28, 2013 Ongoing NSA work
Given that not even the most ardent interventionists for Syria contend that the bombing is necessary for US national security, how can a military attack on Syria without Congressional approval possibly be reconciled with that position? As is so often the case, there is a much starker debate between candidate Obama and President Obama than there is between the leadership of both political parties in Washington.
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 18, 2016 WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)
In the face of a growing ACLU and Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend's release of the Oliver Stone biopic "Snowden," the Post editorial page today not only argued in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden -- the paper's own source -- stand trial on espionage charges...
(14 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 5, 2013 Revealed: NSA Collecting Phone Records Of Millions Of Americans Daily
Allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 2, 2019 Five Weeks After Guardian's Viral Assange/Manafort Scoop, No Evidence Has Emerged -- Just Stonewalling
That the Guardian story would be seen as an earth-shattering revelation, one that would bring massive amounts of traffic, attention, glory and revenue to the paper was obvious. And that's precisely how it was treated, as it instantly ricocheted around the media ecosystem with predictable viral speed.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, September 14, 2012 US media angrily marvels at the lack of Muslim gratitude
Given the history of the US in Egypt, both long-term and very recent, it takes an extraordinary degree of self-delusion and propaganda to depict Egyptian anger toward the US as "ironic" on the ground that it was the US who freed them and "allowed" them the right to protest. But that is precisely the theme being propagated by most US media outlets.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 8, 2015 Donald Trump's "Ban Muslims" Proposal Is Wildly Dangerous But Not Far Outside the U.S. Mainstream
Given that an ISIS attack in Paris just helped fuel the sweeping election victory of an actually fascist party in France, it's a bit mystifying how someone can be so sanguine about the likelihood of a Trump victory in the U.S. In fact, with a couple of even low-level ISIS attacks successfully carried out on American soil, it's not at all hard to imagine.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 16, 2020 Documents From the Sham Prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn Also Reveal Broad Corruption in the Russia-gate Investigation
There was no valid reason for the FBI to have interrogated Flynn about his conversations with Kislyak in the first place. There is nothing remotely untoward or unusual, let alone criminal, about an incoming senior national security official, three weeks away from taking over, reaching out to a counterpart in a foreign government to try to tamp down tensions.
(8 comments) SHARE Friday, August 23, 2013 Snowden: UK Government Now Leaking Documents About Itself
This is the first time the Independent has published any revelations purportedly from the NSA documents, and it's the type of disclosure which journalists working directly with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have thus far avoided. That leads to the obvious question: who is the source for this disclosure? Snowden this morning said he wants it to be clear that he was not the source for the Independent.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 11, 2017 The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer
When it comes time to expose actual Trump corruption and criminality, who is going to believe the people and institutions who have demonstrated they are willing to endorse any assertions no matter how factually baseless, who deploy any journalistic tactic no matter how unreliable and removed from basic means of ensuring accuracy?
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 11, 2015 Iranians Are Much Talked About On Sunday Morning TV, But Never Heard From
Over the last couple months, the Sunday morning TV shows -- NBC's Meet the Press, CBS's Face The Nation, ABC's This Week, Fox's News Sunday, and CNN's State of the Union -- have focused on a deal with Iran as one of their principal topics. In doing so, they have repeatedly given a platform to fanatical anti-Iran voices, including Israeli officials such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 21, 2012 The "both-sides-are-awful" dismissal of Gaza ignores the key role of the US government
The bombs Israel drops on Gazans, and the planes they use to drop them, and the weapons they use to occupy the West Bank and protect settlements are paid for, in substantial part, by the US taxpayer, and those actions are shielded from recrimination by the UN veto power aggressively wielded in Israel's favor by the US government.
SHARE Saturday, October 4, 2014 After Feigning Love For Egyptian Democracy, U.S. Back To Openly Supporting Tyranny
That's what made the U.S. media coverage of the Arab Spring generally and Tarhir specifically such an astounding feat of propaganda: it successfully let Americans feel good about cheering for democracy in the region while ignoring their government's central role in suppressing it for decades.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, February 15, 2013 Obama, The US And The Muslim World: The Animosity Deepens
A 2012 Pew poll of six predominantly Muslim nations found not only similar or worse perceptions of the US as compared to the Bush years, but also documented that China is vastly more popular in that part of the world than the US. In that region, the US and Israel are still considered, by far, to be the two greatest threats to peace.
(10 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 17, 2013 The Boston Bombing Produces Familiar And Revealing Reactions
One wishes that the empathy for victims, and outrage over the ending of innocent human life that instantly arises when the US is targeted by this sort of violence would at least translate into similar concern when the US is perpetrating it, as it so often does (far, far more often than it is targeted by such violence).
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 20, 2021 The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming
The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting "terrorism" that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly 20 years ago.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 31, 2013 Cameron's Attack On George Galloway Reflects The West's Self-Delusions
Anyone who questions the militarism of western governments is instantly smeared as a sympathizer or even supporter of tyrants. Those who now oppose bombing Iran love the mullahs; those who oppose NATO intervention in Syria or Libya harbor affection for Assad and Ghadaffi -- just as those who opposed the Vietnam War 50 years ago or Reagan's brutal covert wars in Latin America 30 years ago were Communist sympathizers.
SHARE Sunday, November 29, 2015 What Foreign Policy "Debate" Means on "Face the Nation"
There is, needless to say, an enormous amount of viewpoint, experience and mentality homogeneity among these Face the Nation panelists extending far beyond their vocal enthusiasm for the attack on Iraq. The fact that the nation's most watched Sunday morning news TV show convenes such similar "experts" to comment on foreign policy illustrates how illusory is the supposed "free debate" which establishment media outlets permit.
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 23, 2016 Georgetown Law Professors Say Students Are "Traumatized" by Criticisms of Scalia, Demand "Remedies"
A full two days after Scalia's death, Professor Peller wrote an email -- first to the dean and the faculty, and thereafter to the entire law school -- explaining his dissent from the dean's praise. Like a huge number of Americans generally, and legal professionals particularly, Professor Peller viewed Scalia's role on the Supreme Court as toxic in the extreme, and he explained why.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 6, 2017 What's Worse: Trump's Campaign Agenda or Empowering Generals and CIA Operatives to Subvert it?
It was foolish to assume that the campaign vows of any politician, let alone an adept con man like Trump, would be a reliable barometer for what he would do once in office. And, as expected, he has betrayed many of these promises within months of being inaugurated, while the very Wall Street interests he railed against have found a very welcoming embrace in the Oval Office.
SHARE Thursday, January 21, 2016 The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition
Sanders is a more fundamental, systemic critic than the oligarchical power centers are willing to tolerate, and his rejection of corporate dominance over politics, and corporate support for his campaigns, is particularly menacing. He is thus regarded as America's version of a far-left extremist, threatening establishment power.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 29, 2015 Dylann Roof Is Not a "Terrorist" -- But Animal Rights Activists Who Free Minks From Slaughter Are
While some E.U. countries have severely regulated or even banned many of the animal abuses targeted by activists, the U.S. factory farms that produce furs are among the cruelest and most sadistic anywhere, imposing extreme amounts of suffering and torture on the animals they slaughter -- both in terms of how they confine them and then kill them.
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 19, 2014 Who elected them?
Why did all these people - whom we didn't elect - think they had the right to decide which classified information should be disclosed?
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, November 23, 2018 Trump's Amoral Saudi Statement Is a Pure Expression of Decades-Old "U.S. Values" and Foreign Policy Orthodoxies
Trump said, "the United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country." To justify his decision, Trump cited the fact that "Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world" and claimed that "of the $450 billion [the Saudis plan to spend with U.S. companies], $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 3, 2015 One Day After Warning Russia of Civilian Casualties, the U.S. Bombs a Hospital in Afghanistan
This last week has been a particularly gruesome illustration of continuous U.S. conduct under the War on Terror banner. The formula by now is clear: bombing whatever countries it wants, justifying it all by reflexively labeling their targets as "terrorists," and then dishonestly denying or casually dismissing the civilians they slaughter as "collateral damage."
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 5, 2016 Three New Scandals Show How Pervasive and Dangerous Mass Surveillance is in the West, Vindicating Snowden
Just this month, two key members of the Five Eyes alliance have been found by courts and formal investigations to be engaged in mass surveillance that was both illegal and pervasive, as well as, in the case of Canada, abusing surveillance powers to track journalists to uncover their sources. When Snowden first spoke publicly, these were exactly the abuses and crimes he insisted were being committed by mass surveillance.
(13 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 19, 2013 MSNBC Boldly Moves To Plug Its One Remaining Hole
A Pew poll found that in the week leading up to the 2012 election, MSNBC did not air a single story critical of the President or a single positive story about Romney. Obama campaign aides who appeared on MSNBC were typically treated with greater deference than that shown to the British Queen when one of her most adoring subjects is in her presence for the first time.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 14, 2012 The real criminals in the Tarek Mehanna case
In one of the most egregious violations of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech seen in quite some time, Tarek Mehanna, an American Muslim, was convicted this week in a federal court in Boston and then sentenced yesterday to 17 years in prison.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 7, 2016 Perfect End to Democratic Primary: Anonymous Superdelegates Declare Winner Through Media
That the Democratic Party nominating process is declared to be over in such an uninspiring, secretive, and elite-driven manner is perfectly symbolic of what the party, and its likely nominee, actually is. The one positive aspect, though significant, is symbolic, while the actual substance -- rallying behind a Wall Street-funded, status quo-perpetuating, multimillionaire militarist -- is grim in the extreme.
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 27, 2013 Kiriakou And Stuxnet: The Danger Of The Still-Escalating Obama Whistleblower War
The US government reflexively -- really automatically -- hides anything and everything it does behind this wall of secrecy: they have made it a felony to reveal even the most inconsequential and pedestrian information about its actions.
(12 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 14, 2013 Inside look at the internal strife over Al Jazeera America
There is a gaping need for strong, fearless, adversarial journalism in the American TV landscape. There is a huge audience hungry for that type of TV journalism. A well-funded TV network with a new, aggressive, fearless investigative approach and a well-recognized global brand name could certainly succeed. Whether AJAM will seek to fill that need, or will run away from it, remains to be seen.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, November 28, 2014 Talking To James Risen About Pay Any Price, The War On Terror And Press Freedoms
There have been lots of critiques of the War on Terror on its own terms, but Risen's is one of the first to offer large amounts of original reporting on what is almost certainly the most overlooked aspect of this war: the role corporate profiteering plays in ensuring its endless continuation, and how the beneficiaries use rank fear-mongering to sustain it.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, September 1, 2017 In Europe, Hate Speech Laws are Often Used to Suppress and Punish Left-Wing Viewpoints
In 2006, after a series of attacks carried out by Muslims, Republican Newt Gingrich called for "a serious debate about the First Amendment" so that "those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are, in fact, subject to a totally different set of rules."
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 22, 2015 Jeb Bush Praises Obama's Expansion of NSA Surveillance
Jeb Bush appeared on Michael Medved's conservative talk radio program, and was asked by the host what his favorite part of the Obama administration has been. His answer? As McClatchy's Lesley Clark noted on Twitter, Bush hailed "Obama's enhancement of NSA."
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 20, 2012 US battles Iraq and Afghanistan over detention without charges
In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US government is engaged in a fierce and protracted battle over the fundamental right to be free of indefinite detention. Specifically, the US is demanding that the governments of those two nations cease extending this right to their citizens.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 9, 2016 Bernie Sanders Denounces Brazil's Impeachment as Undemocratic, Calls for New Elections
As the Brazilian Senate heads toward a final vote later this month, Sanders described his position, set forth in a statement posted on his Senate site, as "calling on the United States to take a definitive stand against efforts to remove Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff from office."
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 7, 2015 U.S. Journalists Who Instantly Exonerated Their Government of the Kunduz Hospital Attack, Declaring it an "Accident"
What possible motivation would the U.S. government have for submitting to an independent investigation when -- as usual -- it has an army of super-patriotic, uber-nationalistic journalists eager to act as its lawyers and insist, despite the evidence, that Americans could not possibly be guilty of anything other than a terrible "mistake"?
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, July 18, 2016 Would Turkey Be Justified in Kidnapping or Drone-Killing the Turkish Cleric in Pennsylvania?
In light of the presence on U.S. soil of someone the Turkish government regards as a "terrorist" and a direct threat to its national security, would Turkey be justified in dispatching a weaponized drone over Pennsylvania to find and kill Gulen if the U.S. continues to refuse to turn him over, or sending covert operatives to kidnap him?
(14 comments) SHARE Monday, January 21, 2013 MLK's Vehement Condemnations Of US Militarism Are More Relevant Than Ever
A citizenry whose "soul becomes totally poisoned" by endless war is incapable of considering nonviolence as an alternative. One that has been fed a steady diet of war and aggression and demonization is incapable of even entertaining "alternatives" that do not involve causing the deaths of others, of expressing nothing but pure callousness when confronted with the human suffering of the policies they support.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 14, 2017 The Clinton Book Tour Is Largely Ignoring the Vital Role of Endless War in the 2016 Election Result
Calls for Clinton to be quiet and disappear are misguided for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that she is a very smart, informed, and articulate politician, which means her interviews -- especially when she's liberated from programmed campaign mode -- are illuminating about how she, and her fellow establishment Democrats who have driven the party into a ditch, really.
(10 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 30, 2008 Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis
Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets.
SHARE Friday, December 11, 2015 Freedom of Press Launches Fundraiser to Aid Heroic Journalists in Police Brutality Investigations
Freedom of the Press Foundation is announcing a new crowd-sourced fundraising campaign called the Transparency for Police Fund, which "will fund local journalists around the United States to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other transparency lawsuits aimed at uncovering police misconduct and video evidence of brutality against unarmed men and women."
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 18, 2012 Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics
Much is revealed by these media attacks on Assange and RT -- not about Assange or RT but about their media critics. We yet again find, for instance, the revealing paradox that nothing prompts media scorn more than bringing about unauthorized transparency for the U.S. government.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 7, 2017 WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived
IN THE PAST six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor's note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom.
(11 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 10, 2013 Why Are Bob Woodward's WH Sources -- Or Woodward Himself -- Not On Trial Next To Bradley Manning?
Media outlets might want to take a serious interest in and marshal opposition to what is being done to Bradley Manning: if not out of concern for the injustices to which he is being subjected, then out of self-interest, to ensure that their reporters and their past and future whistle-blowing sources cannot be similarly persecuted.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, April 29, 2016 New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
There are numerous psychological studies demonstrating that people who believe they are being watched engage in behavior far more compliant, conformist and submissive than those who believe they are acting without monitoring. Writers are not only overwhelmingly worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship as a result.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, August 24, 2012 The New Statesman must correct its error over Assange and extradition
If there were any real desire to find a resolution, one could be found. It is Sweden's steadfast refusal even to negotiate these matters that led the Ecuadoreans to be suspicious of their motives and to conclude that asylum was necessary here to protect Assange from political prosecution.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 27, 2016 The U.S. Intervention in Libya Was Such a Smashing Success That a Sequel Is Coming
Libya -- so predictably -- has all but completely collapsed, spending years now drowning in instability, anarchy, fractured militia rule, sectarian conflict, and violent extremism. The execution of Saddam Hussein was no vindication of that war nor a sign of improved lives for Iraqis, and the same was true for the mob killing of Qaddafi.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 23, 2011 President Obama speaks on Manning and the rule of law
The impropriety of Obama's public pre-trial declaration of Manning's guilt ("He broke the law") is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 17, 2014 Jeb Bush V. Hillary Clinton: The Perfectly Illustrative Election
Having someone who is the brother of one former president and the son of another run against the wife of still another former president would be sweetly illustrative of all sorts of degraded and illusory aspects of American life, from meritocracy to class mobility.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 27, 2017 Brazil's Latest Outbreak of Drug Gang Violence Highlights the Real Culprit: the War on Drugs
Portugal has definitively won the argument on how ineffective, irrational, and counterproductive drug prohibition is. Portugal's clear success with decriminalization, compared to the tragic failures of countries, such as the U.S. (and Brazil), which continue to treat addiction as a criminal and moral problem rather than a health problem.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 14, 2018 Dutch Official Admits Lying About Meeting With Putin: Is Fake News Used by Russia or About Russia?
Human nature craves a belief in an existential foreign threat because it confers a sense of purpose and cause, strengthens tribal unity and identity, permits scapegoating, shifts blame for maladies from internal to external causes, and (like religion) offers a simplifying theory for understanding a complex world.
(9 comments) SHARE Monday, May 27, 2013 Obama's Terrorism Speech: Seeing What You Want To See
In lieu of substance, the speech was heavy on feel-good rhetoric, mostly designed to signal that unlike the mean and simplistic George Bush -- who presumably pursued these policies thoughtlessly and simplistically -- Obama experiences inner turmoil and deep moral and intellectual conflict as he embraces them.
(16 comments) SHARE Friday, May 23, 2014 A Response to Michael Kinsley
Even the positive reviews of the book in the U.S. took grave offense to its last chapter, which argues that the U.S. media is too close and subservient to the U.S. government and its officials, over whom the press claims to exercise adversarial oversight. This condemnation of the U.S. media, argued even many of the positive reviewers, is unfair.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 27, 2013 Bradley Manning Is Off Limits At SF Gay Pride Parade, But Corporate Sleaze Is Embraced
Apparently, the very high-minded ethical standards of Lisa L Williams and the SF Pride Board apply only to young and powerless Army Privates who engage in an act of conscience against the US war machine, but instantly disappear for large corporations and banks that hand over cash. What we really see here is how the largest and most corrupt corporations own not just the government but also the culture.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, May 13, 2016 Interview With BDS Co-Founder Omar Barghouti: Banned by Israel From Traveling, Threatened With Worse
As one of the pioneers of the increasingly powerful movement to impose boycotts, sanctions and divestment measures (BDS) on Israel, Barghouti, an articulate, English-speaking activist, has frequently traveled around the world advocating his position. The Israeli government's refusal to allow him to travel is obviously intended to suppress his speech and activism.
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 10, 2021 Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor
This week's anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a "whistleblower" for providing internal corporate documents relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.
(9 comments) SHARE Friday, January 17, 2014 Obama's NSA "reforms" are little more than a PR attempt to mollify the public
Obama never hid the real purpose of this process. It is, he and his officials repeatedly acknowledged, "to restore public confidence" in the NSA. In other words, the goal isn't to truly reform the agency; it is deceive people into believing it has been so that they no longer fear it or are angry about it. He's not an agent of change but the soothing branding packaging for it.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, March 1, 2013 Bradley Manning: The Face Of Heroism
Manning knowingly risked his liberty in order to inform the world about what he learned. He endured treatment which the top UN torture investigator deemed "cruel and inhuman," and he now faces decades in prison, if not life. He knew exactly what he was risking, what he was likely subjecting himself to. But he made the choice to do it anyway because of the good he believed he could achieve.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 22, 2015 CNN Punished Its Own Journalist for Fulfilling a Core Duty of Journalism
Labott's crime wasn't that she expressed an opinion. It's that she expressed the wrong opinion: after Paris, defending Muslims, even refugees, is strictly forbidden. I've spoken with friends who work at every cable network and they say the post-Paris climate is indescribably repressive in terms of what they can say and who they can put on air.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 5, 2012 Obama the Pioneer
"President Obama and his advisers have opened the door to violent action against American citizens by future Presidents when the facts may be much less compelling." In fairness to Obama, he did campaign on a promise of change, and vesting the President with the power to order the execution of citizens in secret and with no oversight certainly qualifies as that.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, May 18, 2015 GCHQ's Rainbow Lights: Exploiting Social Issues for Militarism and Imperialism
Gay Brits are now just as free as everyone else to spy on people, covertly disseminate state propaganda, and destroy online privacy. Whatever your views on all this nasty surveillance business might be, how can you not feel good about GCHQ when it drapes itself in the colors of LGBT equality?
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 26, 2015 The Greatest Threat to Campus Free Speech is Coming From Dianne Feinstein and her Military-Contractor Husband
Adoption of this "anti-Semitism" definition clearly would function to prohibit the advocacy of, say, a one-state solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict, or even the questioning of a state's right to exist as a non-secular entity. How can anyone think it's appropriate to declare such ideas off limits in academic classrooms or outlaw them as part of campus activism?
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 27, 2015 Jorge Ramos Commits Journalism, Gets Immediately Attacked by Journalists
What is more noble for a journalist to do: confront a dangerous, powerful billionaire-demagogue spouting hatemongering nonsense about mass deportation, or sit by quietly and pretend to have no opinions on any of it and that "both sides" are equally deserving of respect and have equal claims to validity?
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 18, 2019 Robert Mueller Did Not Merely Reject the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theories. He Obliterated Them.
Mueller's examination of all the so-called "links" between Trump campaign officials and Russia that the U.S. media has spent almost three years depicting as "bombshell" evidence of criminality met the same fate: the evidence could not, and did not, establish that any such links constituted "coordination" or "conspiracy" between Trump and Russia.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, January 15, 2016 U.S. Radically Changes Its Story of the Boats in Iranian Waters: to an Even More Suspicious Version
The U.S. government itself now says this story was false. There was no engine failure, and the boats were never "in distress." Once the sailors were released, AP reported, "In Washington, a defense official said the Navy has ruled out engine or propulsion failure as the reason the boats entered Iranian waters."
SHARE Thursday, October 13, 2016 On WikiLeaks, Journalism, and Privacy: Reporting on the Podesta Archive is an Easy Call
WikiLeaks has always been somewhat controversial but reaction has greatly intensified this year because many of their most significant leaks have had an impact on the U.S. presidential election and, in particular, have focused on Democrats. As a result, Republicans who long vilified them as a grave national security threat have become their biggest fans.
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 15, 2020 The Case For a Pardon of Edward Snowden by President Trump
A U.S. appellate court in September unanimously ruled that the NSA's program of mass domestic surveillance was illegal, as well as likely a violation of the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures."
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, August 1, 2016 As Israel Prospers, Obama Set to Give Billions More in Aid While Netanyahu Demands Even More
Usually, when someone hands you billions of dollars in aid, you're not in much of a position to demand more. But the rules for Israel when it comes to U.S. policy, as is so often the case, are simply different. Even as Israel has aggressively expanded settlements of the West Bank (often in a way designed to most humiliate the U.S.) and slaughtered civilians in Gaza, U.S. aid simply increases more and more.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 26, 2014 The US/UK Campaign To Demonize Social Media Companies As Terrorist Allies
All of this is part of a clear and definitely coordinated campaign by the U.S. and UK Governments to demonize social media companies as terrorist-helpers in order to force them to act as (even more) obedient snooping agents for the National Security State.
(12 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 1, 2015 U.S. Bombs Somehow Keep Falling in the Places Where Obama "Ended Two Wars"
How do you know when you're an out-of-control empire? When you keep bombing and deploying soldiers in places where you boast that you've ended wars. How do you know you have a hackish propagandist for a president? When you celebrate him for "ending two wars" in the very same places that he keeps bombing.
(11 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 22, 2018 Ecuador Will Imminently Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over to the UK. What Comes Next?
The withdrawal of asylum and physical ejection of Assange could come as early as this week. On Friday, RT reported that Ecuador was preparing to enter into such an agreement. It's likely that the UK will extradite Assange to the U.S., where top Trump officials have vowed to prosecute Assange and destroy WikiLeaks.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 25, 2013 Democratic Establishment Unmasked: Prime Defenders Of NSA Bulk Spying
The history of Democratic leaders such as Nancy Pelosi isn't one of opposition to mass NSA spying when Bush was in office, only to change positions now that Obama is. The history is of pretend opposition -- of deceiving their supporters by feigning opposition -- while actually supporting it.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 13, 2014 John Cook Is Leaving The Intercept To Retun To Gawker At The End Of The Year
The Intercept's editor-in-chief, John Cook, who spent the year tripling our staff size and significantly increasing our daily journalistic output, is leaving at the end of the year to return to Gawker Media. Deputy Editor Ryan Tate will continue to work with John and the rest of the newsroom to effect a smooth transition until the search for Cook's permanent replacement, already underway, is completed.
(12 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 31, 2013 XKeyscore: NSA tool collects "nearly everything a user does on the internet"
A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 15, 2013 Inside the mind of NSA chief Gen Keith Alexander
Any casual review of human history proves how deeply irrational it is to believe that powerful factions can be trusted to exercise vast surveillance power with little accountability or transparency. But the more they proudly flaunt their warped imperial hubris, the more irrational it becomes.
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 16, 2012 Conservatives, Democrats and the convenience of denouncing free speech
It would be genuinely nice to believe that these newfound conservative free speech champions would henceforth become consistent allies in the fight against state suppression of political opinions: not just when their own ideas are attacked, but also when those views they hate are, including those of Muslim critics of US foreign policy.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 10, 2018 First France, Now Brazil Unveils Plan to Empower the Government to Censor the Internet in Name of Stopping "Fake News"
Among the most confounding aspects of the Twitter announcement is that it is very difficult to identify any existing law that actually authorizes the federal police to exercise the powers they just announced they intend to wield, particularly over the internet. At least as of now, they are claiming for themselves one of the most extremist powers imaginable.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, February 26, 2021 VIDEO: Trending as a Transphobe and Bi-Phobe
I had the privilege of having my name trend on Twitter for a good part of Wednesday and into Thursday morning because journalists in the liberal sector of media along with left/liberal activists accused me of transphobia and bi-phobia.
(10 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 11, 2013 Three Key Lessons From The Obama Administration's Drone Lies
It's unsurprising that the Obama administration got caught making plainly false statements about its killing program. But for the same reason, it's very significant that it has been caught. In light of this evidence, any journalists who continue to rely on US government statements about its killing program are revealing themselves to be eager propagandists, willing to be lied to and help amplify those lies.
(20 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 18, 2013 Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 15, 2013 On Prism, Partisanship And Propaganda
How can anyone think that it's remotely healthy in a democracy to have the NSA building a massive spying apparatus about which even members of Congress, including Senators on the Homeland Security Committee, are totally ignorant and find "astounding" when they learn of them?
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 16, 2013 Charles Krauthammer's False Statement About The US Constitution
Krauthammer's general claim about the law -- that "outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule" -- is grounded in total ignorance. Many of the War on Terror abuses have been justified with the equally false claim that the US Constitution applies only to US citizens and not to foreign nationals on US soil and US-controlled territory (such as at Guantanamo).
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, February 3, 2017 The CIA's New Deputy Director Ran a Black Site for Torture
The CIA's New Deputy Director was centrally involved in the worst abuses of the CIA's Bush-era torture regime. She was "directly involved in its controversial interrogation program" and had an "extensive role" in torturing detainees.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 29, 2016 Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group
The individuals behind this newly created group are publicly branding journalists and news outlets as tools of Russian propaganda -- even calling on the FBI to investigate them for espionage -- while cowardly hiding their own identities. The group promoted by the Post thus embodies the toxic essence of Joseph McCarthy, but without the courage to attach individual names to the blacklist.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 25, 2013 UK detention of Reprieve activist consistent with NSA's view of drone opponents as "threats" and "adversaries"
The US has previously denounced drone opponents as US adversaries and even terrorist sympathizers. In 2011, the Bureau of Investigative Journalists published a study documenting numerous civilian deaths in Pakistan during the same time period for when John Brennan, then the chief White House counterterrorism adviser and now CIA Director, had falsely asserted there were no such deaths.
SHARE Tuesday, December 16, 2014 U.S. TV Provides Ample Platform For American Torturers, But None To Their Victims
When America is forced to confront its heinous acts, the central strategy is to disappear the victims; render them invisible. That's what robs them of their humanity. That is what enables American elites first to support atrocities, and then, when forced to reckon with them, tell themselves that--despite some isolated and well-intentioned bad acts--they are still really good, elevated, noble, admirable people.
(8 comments) SHARE Friday, July 8, 2016 Chilcot Report and 7/7 London Bombing Anniversary Converge to Highlight Terrorism's Causes
Blair was expressly warned before the invasion that his actions would provoke al Qaeda attacks on the U.K. the report's executive summary quotes Blair confirming he was "aware" of a warning by British intelligence that terrorism would "increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-U.S./anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West."
(8 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 11, 2013 Revealed: How Microsoft Handed The NSA Access To Encrypted Messages
Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.
(17 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 14, 2017 Rand Paul Is Right: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans' Communications Without Warrants
That the NSA is empowered to spy on Americans' communications without a warrant -- in direct contravention of the core Fourth Amendment guarantee that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause" -- is the dirty little secret of the U.S. Surveillance State.
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 16, 2014 Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet
The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, "amplif[y]" sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be "extremist."
SHARE Wednesday, July 5, 2017 CNN Warns It May Expose an Anonymous Critic if He Ever Again Publishes Bad Content
There is something untoward about the fact that CNN -- the subject of the original video -- was the news outlet that uncovered his identity. That fact creates the appearance of vengeance: If you, even as a random and anonymous internet user, post content critical of CNN, then it will use its vast corporate resources to investigate you, uncover your identity, and threaten to expose you if you ever do so again.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 15, 2021 Nancy and Paul Pelosi Making Millions in Stock Trades in Companies She Actively Regulates
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the sixth-richest member of Congress, according to the most recent financial disclosure statements filed in 2019. As Pelosi has risen through party ranks and obtained more and more political power, her personal wealth has risen right along with it.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, May 4, 2012 More Federal Judge Abdication
Of all the American institutions that have so profoundly failed in the wake of 9/11 to protect the most basic liberties -- Congress, both political parties, the establishment media, the Executive Branch, the DOJ specifically -- none has been quite as disgraceful as the federal judiciary, whose life tenure is supposed to insulate them from base political pressures that produce cowardly and corrupted choices.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 14, 2015 The Sunday Times' Snowden Story is Journalism at its Worst -- and Filled with Falsehoods
The official accusers are being hidden by the journalists so nobody can confront them or hold them accountable when it turns out to be false. The evidence can't be analyzed or dissected because there literally is none: they just make the accusation and, because they're state officials, their media-servants will publish it with no evidence needed.
SHARE Tuesday, December 20, 2011 Can the U.S. Government close social media accounts?
The Obama administration and The New York Times are teaming up to expose and combat the grave threat posed by a Twitter account, purportedly operated by the Somali group Shabab, and in doing so, are highlighting the simultaneous absurdity and perniciousness of the War on Terror.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 3, 2013 Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and anti-Muslim animus
A 2004 Pentagon study concluded that "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies" -- specifically "American direct intervention in the Muslim world" -- through the US's "one sided support in favor of Israel"; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, "the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan."
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, September 4, 2015 NYT Claims U.S. Abides by Cluster Bomb Treaty: The Exact Opposite of Reality
As Americans, we should feel proud that our government, though refusing to sign the cluster ban treaty, has nonetheless "abided by its provisions" -- if not for the fact that this claim is totally false. The U.S. has long been and remains one of the world's most aggressive suppliers of cluster munitions, and has used those banned weapons itself in devastating ways.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, February 1, 2016 The "Bernie Bros" Narrative: a Cheap Campaign Tactic Masquerading as Journalism and Social Activism
truth doesn't matter here -- at all. Instead, the goal is to inherently delegitimize all critics of Hillary Clinton by accusing them of, or at least associating them with, sexism, thus distracting attention away from Clinton's policy views, funding, and political history. It's an effective weapon when wielded by Clinton operatives. But, given its blatant falsity, it has zero place in anything purporting to be "journalism."
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 2, 2017 Trump's Use of Navy SEAL's Wife Highlights All the Key Ingredients of U.S. War Propaganda
It was, as intended, an obviously powerful TV moment. Independent of the political intent behind it, any well-functioning human being would feel great empathy watching a grieving spouse mourning and struggling to cope emotionally with the recent, sudden death of her partner.
SHARE Thursday, March 23, 2017 Newly Obtained Documents Prove: Key Claim of Snowden's Accusers Is a Fraud
For almost four years, a cottage industry of media conspiracists has devoted itself to accusing Edward Snowden of being a spy for either Russia and/or China at the time he took and then leaked documents from the National Security Agency. There has never been any evidence presented to substantiate this accusation.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 31, 2020 The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange Exposes U.S. Myths About Freedom and Tyranny
Look at the plight of those who publish secrets designed not to propagandize the population to venerate elites but, instead, those whose publications result in generating mass discontent against them. That is what makes the ongoing imprisonment of Julian Assange a grotesque injustice.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 15, 2015 Hillary Clinton on the Sanctity of Protecting Classified Information
When it comes to low-level government employees with no power, the Obama administration has purposely prosecuted them as harshly as possible to the point of vindictiveness: It has notoriously prosecuted more individuals under the Espionage Act of 1917 for improperly handling classified information than all previous administrations combined.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 22, 2014 Netanyahu's "Telegenically Dead" Comment Is Grotesque but Not Original
American journalism is frequently criticized with great justification, but there are a number of American journalists in Gaza, along with non-western ones, in order to tell the world about what is happening there. That reporting is incredibly brave and difficult, and those who are doing it merit the highest respect.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 23, 2015 U.S. State Department "Welcomes" News That Saudi Arabia Will Head U.N. Human Rights Panel
Saudi Arabia--easily one of the world's most brutally repressive regimes--was chosen to head a UN Human Rights Council panel provoked indignation around the world. Most of the world may be horrified at the selection of Saudi Arabia to head a key U.N. human rights panel, but the U.S. State Department most certainly is not. Quite the contrary: they seem quite pleased about the news.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, May 10, 2013 Attacks on Stephen Hawking, transparency for Manning, Obama's new lobbyist chief
Israeli writer Noam Sheizaf points out that the event from which Hawking withdrew is not really an academic one but rather "an annual celebration of the Israeli business, political and military elites," and he rebuts the principal attacks on Hawking.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 2, 2012 The true reason US fears Iranian nukes: they can deter US attacks
No rational person takes seriously the claim that Iran, even if it did obtain a nuclear weapon, would commit instant and guaranteed national suicide by using it to attack a nation that has a huge nuclear stockpile, which happens to include both the US and Israel.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 27, 2011 WikiLeaks Wins Major Journalism Award in Australia
The Walkley Foundation awarded its highest distinction -- for "Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism" -- to WikiLeaks, whose leader, Julian Assange, is an Australian citizen. What makes this award so notable is that the United States -- for exactly the same reasons the Foundation cited in honoring WikiLeaks' journalism achievements -- has spent the last year trying to criminalize and destroy the group.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 19, 2012 Assange asks Ecuador for asylum
Assange's resolve to avoid extradition to Sweden has nothing to do with a reluctance to face possible sex assault charges there. His concern all along has been that once he's in Swedish custody, he will far more easily be extradited to the U.S.
(10 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 9, 2013 Even A Military Judge Recognizes What Many Progressives Denied: Bradley Manning Was Mistreated
Watching self-proclaimed progressives attack and malign a courageous whistleblower, while defending the US military's patently abusive detention practices and steadfastly defending the government's extreme secrecy powers, is one of the most potent symbols of the Obama presidency. Those who commit serious crimes in government are not punished but rather rewarded. Only those who expose those crimes are punished.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 25, 2015 Email from a Married, Female Ashley Madison User
The private lives and sexual choices of fully formed adults are usually very complicated and thus impossible to understand -- and certainly impossible to judge -- without wallowing around in the most intimate details, none of which are any of your business. That's a very good reason not to try to sit in judgment and condemn from afar.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 13, 2015 Two Short Paragraphs that Summarize the US Approach to Human Rights Advocacy
What baffles me most about U.S. political discourse: how -- whenever it's time to introduce the next "humanitarian war" or other forms of attack against the latest Evil Dictator or Terrorist Group of the Moment -- so many otherwise intelligent and well-reasoning people are willing to believe that the U.S. Government is motivated by opposition to human rights abuses and oppression.
(10 comments) SHARE Friday, June 7, 2013 On Whistleblowers And Government Threats Of Investigation
There seems to be this mentality in Washington that as soon as they stamp TOP SECRET on something they've done we're all supposed to quiver and allow them to do whatever they want without transparency or accountability under its banner. These endless investigations and prosecutions and threats are designed to bolster that fear-driven dynamic. But it isn't working. It's doing the opposite.
SHARE Monday, March 27, 2017 Trump's War on Terror Has Quickly Become as Barbaric and Savage as He Promised
Donald Trump's "war on terror" has entailed the seemingly indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people in the name of killing terrorists. Trump is attempting to liberate the U.S. military from the minimal constraints it observed in order to avoid massive civilian casualties. And this should surprise nobody: Trump explicitly and repeatedly vowed to do exactly this during the campaign.
(11 comments) SHARE Friday, May 24, 2013 Was the London killing of a British soldier "terrorism"?
Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that's not "terrorism," but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism? The US has even imprisoned people at Guantanamo and elsewhere on accusations of "terrorism" who are accused of nothing more than engaging in violence against US soldiers who invaded their country.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 20, 2010 The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks
What makes WikiLeaks particularly threatening to the most powerful factions is that they cannot control it. Even when whistle-blowers in the past have leaked serious corruption and criminal conduct to perfectly good journalists at the nation's largest corporate media outlets, government officials could control how the information was disclosed.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 10, 2015 The U.S. Media And The 13-Year-old Yemeni Boy Burned To Death Last Month By A U.S. Drone
If it were American teenagers rather than Yemeni ones regularly being burned to death -- on American soil rather than Yemeni soil -- does it take any effort to understand why there'd be widespread calls for violence against the perpetrators in response? Consider how much American rage and violence was unleashed by a single-day attack on American soil 13 years ago.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, February 8, 2013 US Media Yet Again Conceals Newsworthy Government Secrets
Extreme levels of subservience to US government authority is embedded in the ethos of the establishment American media. They see themselves not as watchdogs over the state but as loyal agents of it. The entity that is designed to be, and endlessly praises itself for being, a check on US government power is, in fact, its most loyal servant.
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 10, 2013 Three Democratic Myths Used To Demean The Paul Filibuster
Holder's letter begs the question: what do you mean when you accuse someone of being "engaged in combat"? And what are the exact limits of your power to target US citizens for execution without due process? That these questions even need to be asked underscores how urgently needed Paul's filibuster was, and how much more serious push-back is still merited.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 11, 2013 NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel
The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 7, 2016 The Deceptive Debate Over What Causes Terrorism Against the West
Most people need some type of fervor to be willing to risk their lives and kill other people: It can be nationalism, xenophobia, societal pressures, hatred of religion, or religious convictions. But typically, such dogmatic fervor is necessary but not sufficient to commit such violence; one still needs a cause for the targets one selects.
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, July 15, 2013 The Crux Of The NSA Story In One Phrase: "Collect It All"
The NSA is constantly seeking to expand its capabilities without limits. They're currently storing so much, and preparing to store so much more, that they have to build a massive, sprawling new facility in Utah just to hold all the communications from inside the US and around the world that they are collecting -- communications they then have the physical ability to invade any time they want.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 30, 2015 Denny Hastert is Contemptible, But His Indictment Exemplifies America's Over-Criminalization Pathology
Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him. That's it. For those venial acts, he faces five years in a federal prison on each count.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 21, 2013 The Persecution Of Barrett Brown -- And How To Fight It
This prosecution is driven by the same plainly improper purpose that drove the one directed at Aaron Swartz and so many others: the desire to exploit the power of criminal law to deter and severely punish anyone who meaningfully challenges the government's power to control the flow of information on the internet and conceal its vital actions.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 19, 2013 The war on whistleblowers and journalism
Watch the video of the 90-minute event I did this week at the Sydney Opera House on the war on whistleblowers and journalism, along with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning's lawyer David Coombs, the intrepid independent journalist Alexa O'Brien, and the Australian commentator Robert Manne, hosted by the Australian writer Bernard Keane.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 1, 2015 Let's Not Whitewash George W. Bush's Actual, Heinous Record on Muslims in the U.S.
This valid praise for Bush's post-9/11 rhetoric can whitewash many of the truly heinous things he and his administration did to Muslims after that attack. The actions he took outside of the U.S. are obvious, from torture to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib to the invasion and destruction of Iraq.
SHARE Saturday, May 28, 2016 The New York Times's (and Clinton Campaign's) Abject Cowardice on Israel
Essentially the entire world recognizes the reality of Israeli occupation with the exception of a tiny sliver of extremists in Israel and the U.S. That's why Chris Christie had to grovel in apology to GOP billionaire and Israel-devoted fanatic Sheldon Adelson when the New Jersey Governor neutrally described having seen the "occupied territories" during a trip he took to Israel.
SHARE Wednesday, June 3, 2015 In Boston, Media Again Trash a Police Shooting Victim by Uncritically "Reporting" Police Accusations
Major American media outlets converted someone about whom they knew nothing into a dangerous terrorist in the middle of executing an ISIS-related terror plot. And the heroic law enforcement officials didn't just kill an ISIS Terrorist on the loose in America, but likely disrupted a vicious sleeper cell. All of that was achieved without a shred of evidence or investigation.
SHARE Saturday, October 30, 2021 Pierre Omidyar's Financing of the Facebook "Whistleblower" Campaign Reveals a Great Deal
It is completely unsurprisingto learn, as Politico reported last Wednesday, that the major financial supporter of Facebook "whistleblower" Frances Haugen's sprawling P.R. and legal network coordinating her public campaign is the billionaire founder of EBay, Pierre Omidyar.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 30, 2013 Obama's New FBI Chief Approved Bush's NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Scheme
Comey will run the FBI alongside Obama's chief of the CIA, John Brennan, who spent the Bush years advocating multiple torture techniques and rendition. The Agent of Change reaches deep into the bowels of the Bush National Security State and empowers them to run two of the most powerful agencies.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 21, 2013 Al Jazeera Deletes Its Own Controversial Op-Ed, Then Refuses To Comment
Offending people is a necessary part of journalism and the fact that something produces offense is not evidence that it is invalid. Having media outlets afraid to publish opinions which offend people is a menacing state of affairs that nobody should want.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 17, 2018 Ecuador's Ex-President Rafael Correa Denounces Treatment of Julian Assange as "Torture"
Assange has been confined to the embassy for almost six years, when Ecuador granted him asylum in August 2012. The grant of asylum was made on the grounds that Assange's extradition to Sweden for a sexual assault investigation would likely result in being sent to the U.S. for prosecution, where he could face the death penalty.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 15, 2016 Stop Exploiting LGBT Issues to Demonize Islam and Justify Anti-Muslim Policies
Over the last several years, Christian zealots in the U.S. have agitated with both activism and money -- often successfully -- for the implementation of severely repressive anti-LGBT laws in Christian Africa. That includes Uganda, where they tried to implement the death penalty for homosexuals. The law that was passed, criminalizing homosexuality, has led to severe increases in violent attacks against LGBTs.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 3, 2012 Deliberate media propaganda
The word "militant" is being aggressively distorted by deceitful U.S. government propaganda that defines the term to mean: any "military-age males" whom we kill (the use of the phrase "suspected militants" in the body of the article suffers the same infirmity).
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 19, 2014 Congress Is Irrelevant On Mass Surveillance -- Here's What Matters Instead
The pro-NSA Republican senators were actually arguing that if the NSA were no longer allowed to bulk-collect communication records of Americans inside the U.S., then ISIS would kill you and your kids. But because they were speaking in an empty chamber and only to their warped and insulated D.C. circles and sycophantic aides, there was nobody there to cackle contemptuously or tell them how self-evidently moronic it all was.
SHARE Tuesday, September 15, 2015 Hostile BBC Interview of a Saudi Loyalist Shows Prime Journalistic Duty: Scrutiny of One's Own Side
The primary role of journalists is to expose and thus check abuses committed by their own nation and its allies. "The public interest" is served far more by focusing on the bad acts of one's own government than on the acts of foreign governments for which one is not responsible and over which one has little or no control.
SHARE Wednesday, March 20, 2013 Pentagon Papers Lawyer On Obama, Secrecy And Press Freedoms: "Worse Than Nixon"
Goodale, citing Obama's unprecedented war on whistleblowers, targeting of core journalism, and expansion of radical secrecy doctrines, is now sounding the alarm that Obama is worse to the point where basic press freedoms and transparency are seriously threatened.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 26, 2013 The personal side of taking on the NSA: emerging smears
Glenn Greenwald: Distractions about my past and personal life have emerged -- an inevitable side effect for those who challenge the US government. The recent journalist-led "debate" about whether I should be prosecuted for my reporting on these stories was precisely the sort of thing I knew was coming.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 29, 2015 The Petulant Entitlement Syndrome of Journalists
Prior to the advent of blogs, establishment journalists were largely immunized even from hearing criticisms. If a life-tenured New York Times columnist wrote something stupid or vapid, or a Sunday TV news host conducted a sycophantic interview with a government official, there was no real mechanism for the average non-journalist citizen to voice critiques.
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 6, 2012 Attorney General Holder defends execution without charges
The Obama administration believes it has the authority to secretly target U.S. citizens for execution by the CIA without even charging them with a crime, notifying them of the accusations, or affording them an opportunity to respond, instead condemning them to death without a shred of transparency or judicial oversight.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 22, 2013 On The Espionage Act Charges Against Edward Snowden
The Obama administration leaks classified information continuously. They do it to glorify the President, or manipulate public opinion, or even to help produce a pre-election propaganda film about the Osama bin Laden raid. The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing.
SHARE Sunday, October 14, 2012 Various Items: Free Speech v "Community," Lawlessness In Libya, Sprawling Surveillance State
What has always driven repression of speech are the same universal human traits that are now flourishing as part of this latest effort: the tyrannical thirst for the power to silence ideas one dislikes, the self-regarding belief that one can apply objective principles of decency, "community" and Goodness to decide which modes of expression and which ideas should be barred.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 5, 2013 US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet
US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 21, 2013 "Sending a message": what the US and UK are attempting to do
The US and the UK governments go around the world threatening people all the time. It's their modus operandi. They imprison whistleblowers. They try to criminalize journalism. They threatened the Guardian with prior restraint and then forced the paper to physically smash their hard drives in a basement.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, August 12, 2013 Michael Hayden, Bob Schieffer And The Media's Reverence Of National Security Officials
When it comes to people like Michael Hayden, the profoundly unhealthy reverence harbored by TV journalists means that they would never dare utter any such facts. We are thus subjected to "journalism" in which those least qualified to opine, and those with the greatest personal interests in the outcome of debates, are presented as objective experts, while viewers remain entirely uninformed.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 15, 2014 UN Report Finds Mass Surveillance Violates International Treaties And Privacy Rights
The United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights (known as the "Special Rapporteur") issued a formal report to the U.N. General Assembly that condemns mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, August 9, 2013 Email service used by Snowden shuts itself down, warns against using US-based companies
Lavabit has shut itself down rather than participate in what it calls "crimes against the American people," and in doing so, has gone to the legal limits in order to tell us all what has happened. There will undoubtedly be more acts inspired by Snowden's initial choice to unravel his own life to make the world aware of what the US government has been doing in the dark.
SHARE Sunday, July 11, 2021 Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) on Reining In Big Tech and Why Many House Members Refuse
four Silicon Valley companies -- Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple -- are classic monopolies. It was by far the most in-depth and serious governmental attempt in the U.S. to grapple with the unprecedented and increasingly concentrated power of these tech giants.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, March 12, 2021 Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor its Writers: to Bar Critiques of Journalists
Corporate journalists, realizing that the public's increasing contempt for what they do is causing people to turn away in droves, are desperately inventing new tactics to maintain their stranglehold over the dissemination of information and generate captive audiences.
(10 comments) SHARE Friday, February 22, 2013 Obama Officials Refuse To Say If Assassination Power Extends To US Soil
It is repellent to think that any member of the Senate Intelligence Committee -- which claims to conduct oversight over the intelligence community -- would vote to confirm Obama's CIA director while both the president and the nominee simply ignore their most basic question about what the president believes his own powers to be when it comes to targeting US citizens for assassination on US soil.
SHARE Sunday, September 25, 2016 Brazil's Big Media Ignores Temer's Confession -- Except Estadao Columnist Who Falsely Claimed Video Was Altered
Speaking to a group of U.S. business and foreign policy elites, the country's installed president, Michel Temer, admitted that what triggered the impeachment process was not any supposed "budgetary crimes," but rather Dilma's opposition to the neoliberal platform of social program cuts and privatization demanded by Temer's party and the big-business interests that fund it.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 24, 2016 To See the Real Story in Brazil, Look at Who Is Being Installed as President -- and Finance Chiefs
The most important means for understanding the truly anti-democratic nature of what's taking place is to look at the person whom Brazilian oligarchs and their media organs are trying to install as president: the corruption-tainted, deeply unpopular, oligarch-serving Vice President Michel Temer
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 29, 2011 Vote Obama -- If You Want a Centrist Republican for US President
That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 4, 2012 The US and Israel: a short quiz on "rogue nation" status
Essentially, it's the entire planet on one side, versus the US, its new right-wing poodle to the north, Israel, and three tiny, bribed islands on the other side. For those fortunate enough to reside outside of that realm of intense imperial propaganda: who is actually opposed to the consensus of the international community here? In other words, who are the real "rogue nations"?
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 29, 2013 Pentagon's New Massive Expansion Of "Cyber-Security" Unit Is About Everything Except Defense
This new massive expansion has little to do with any actual cyber-threat -- just as the invasion of Iraq and global assassination program have little to do with actual terrorist threats. It is instead all about strengthening the US's offensive cyber-war capabilities, consolidating control over the internet, and ensuring further transfers of massive public wealth to private industry continue unabated.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, October 4, 2013 NSA and GCHQ target Tor network that protects anonymity of web users
Tor -- which stands for The Onion Router -- is an open-source public project that bounces its users' internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls "relays" or "nodes," to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, August 21, 2015 The Puritanical Glee Over the Ashley Madison Hack
That the cheating scoundrels of Ashley Madison got what they deserved was a widespread sentiment yesterday. Despite how common both infidelity and online pornography are, tweets expressing moralistic glee were legion. Websites were created to enable easy searches of the hacked data by email address.
SHARE Thursday, February 14, 2013 Obama DOJ Again Refuses To Tell A Court Whether CIA Drone Program Even Exists
The Obama administration runs around telling journalists how great and precise and devastating the CIA's assassination program is, then tells courts that no disclosure is permissible because they cannot safely confirm in court that the program even exists. Such flagrant abuse of secrecy power is at once Orwellian and tyrannical.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 4, 2013 Members Of Congress Denied Access To Basic Information About NSA
When members of the Intelligence Committee learn of abuses by the NSA, they are barred by law from informing the public. Two Democratic Committee members in the Senate, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, spent years warning Americans that they would be "stunned to learn" of the radical interpretations of secret law the Obama administration had adopted in the secret FISA court to vest themselves with extremist surveillance powers.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 12, 2013 Finally: Hear Bradley Manning In His Own Voice
The US government and its military has carefully ensured that people hear about Manning from the government, but do not hear from Manning himself. It is way past time for Manning's voice to be heard. The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF)received a full, unedited audio recording of the one-hour statement Manning made in court two weeks ago, and this morning has published that recording in full.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 14, 2018 Bay Area Muslim Leader Has Her Award Rescinded by Interfaith Group After Pro-Israel Activists Objected
Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, has had an award rescinded by an interfaith group after pro-Israel activists vehemently objected to the award due to her criticisms of the Israeli government and various pro-Israel groups.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 11, 2012 The revealingly substance-free fight over Susan Rice
She's a rising political star. And a Democrat. And Obama likes her and wants to nominate her. And that is enough to galvanize Democrats and progressives into cheering for her and defending her and working to support her even though she is a standard Brookings war-advocate who has a record and a set of beliefs completely anathema to the ones they claim to hold.
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 7, 2013 Barbara Lee And Dick Durbin's "Nobody-Could-Have-Known" Defense
Immediately after the 9/11 attack, Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California knew exactly that which Durbin now says nobody "could have envisioned." She not only knew it, but she stood up on the floor of the Congress a mere three days after the 9/11 attack in order to cast the lone vote against the AUMF.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 13, 2013 Italy's Ex-Intelligence Chief Given 10-Year Sentence For Role In CIA Kidnapping
Last September, it was Italy's highest court that upheld the convictions of the 23 CIA agents. And yesterday's 10-year sentence for Italy's ex-intelligence chief was also imposed by an appeals court. So what Berlucsoni predicted never happened. Italian courts exercised great independence and courage in applying the law to both the American and Italian kidnappers without regard to their power and position.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, July 14, 2014 Newly Obtained Emails Contradict Administration Claims on Guardian Laptop Destruction
Emails just obtained by Associated Press pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) prove that senior Obama national security officials -- including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-NSA chief Keith Alexander -- not only knew in advance that U.K. officials intended to force The Guardian to destroy their computers, but overtly celebrated it.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 2, 2009 GE's silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC's sleazy use of Richard Wolffe
We have an example of GE's forcibly silencing the top-rated commentator on MSNBC -- ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any longer -- because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own commentators from criticizing GE. The corporations that own our largest news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 8, 2014 Encouraging Words of Regret From Dean Baquet and Weasel Words From James Clapper
Only time will tell whether Baquet's proclamations on this issue result in any actual change for the paper, but it does shed light on an important question I heard many times over the last month as we approached the one-year anniversary of the first NSA story: what has changed as a result of the last year of disclosures?
SHARE Thursday, February 5, 2015 Exclusive Interview: Sami Al-Arian, Professor Who Defeated Controversial Terrorism Charges, Deported From U.S.
Despite the personal harm he suffered and the intense surveillance to which he had been subjected since as early as 1993, the government ultimately failed to produce any evidence of Al-Arian's involvement in terrorist activities, instead relying at trial overwhelmingly on the pro-Palestinian writing and speaking he had done over the years.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, December 3, 2012 Progressive media claims they'll be 'tougher' on Obama now
There are truly few things I'd like to see more than progressives holding Obama accountable and trying to compel him to change behavior, but their past conduct -- and especially the reasoning they offered to justify it -- leaves little reason to believe that this can or will happen.
SHARE Wednesday, March 26, 2014 Obama's New NSA Proposal and Democratic Partisan Hackery
Whatever test exists for determining whether “unauthorized†disclosures of classified information are justified, Snowden’s revelations pass the test with ease. That President Obama now proclaims the need to end a domestic spying program that would still be a secret in the absence of Snowden’s whistleblowing proves that quite compellingly.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 7, 2013 The NSA's Mass And Indiscriminate Spying On Brazilians
NSA has, for years, systematically tapped into the Brazilian telecommunication network and indiscriminately intercepted, collected and stored the email and telephone records of millions of Brazilians. The claim that any other nation is engaging in anything remotely approaching indiscriminate worldwide surveillance of this sort is baseless.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, March 18, 2013 David Frum, The Iraq War And Oil
At exactly the time that virtually all of official Washington was mocking and scorning anyone who suggested that oil was a significant factor in Washington's designs on Iraq, Cheney and Chalabi were spending "long hours" together, "contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq" as "an additional source of oil.
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 19, 2018 Texas Elementary School Pathologist Refused to Sign a Pro-Israel Oath, Mandatory in Many States -- so She Lost Her Job
The child language specialist, Bahia Amawi, who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told that she can no longer work, after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she "does not" and "will not" engage in a boycott of Israel.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 30, 2016 The Joke of U.S. Justice and "Accountability" When They Bomb a Hospital
Ever since the U.S. last October bombed a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the U.S. vehemently denied guilt while acting exactly like a guilty party would. First, it changed its story repeatedly. Then, it blocked every effort -- including repeated demands from MSF -- to have an independent investigation determine what really happened.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, February 10, 2012 Israel, MEK and state sponsor of Terror groups
Those who are politically and financially well-connected are free to commit even the most egregious crimes; for that reason, the very idea of prosecuting Giuliani, Rendell, Ridge, Townsend, Dean and friends for their paid labor on behalf of a Terrorist group is unthinkable, a suggestion not fit for decent company, even though powerless Muslims have been viciously prosecuted for far less egregious connections to such groups.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 10, 2013 Snowden: I never gave any information to Chinese or Russian governments
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in an interview on Saturday and then again Tuesday afternoon, vehemently denied media claims that he gave classified information to the governments of China or Russia. He also denied assertions that one or both governments had succeeded in "draining the contents of his laptops." "I never gave any information to either government, and they never took anything from my laptops," he said.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 7, 2014 Release of Six Detainees After Twelve Years Highlights the Historic Evil of Guantanamo
The U.S. military overnight transferred six Guantanamo detainees to Uruguay. All of them had been imprisoned since 2002 -- more than 12 years. None has ever been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of any wrongdoing. They had all been cleared for release years ago by the Pentagon itself, but nonetheless remained in cages until today.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, April 30, 2012 Celebrating our "Warrior President"
Most Democratic praise for "Obama's foreign policy successes" fails even to acknowledge, let alone condemn, the thousands of innocent people whose lives have been extinguished by his militarism. These deaths simply do not exist in their world.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 19, 2013 Fisa Court Oversight: A Look Inside A Secret And Empty Process
Once the NSA has this court approval, it can then target anyone chosen by their analysts, and can even order telecoms and internet companies to turn over to them the emails, chats and calls of those they target. The Fisa court plays no role whatsoever in reviewing whether the procedures it approved are actually complied with when the NSA starts eavesdropping on calls and reading people's emails.
SHARE Sunday, November 15, 2015 Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits Who Empowered ISIS
We've entered the inevitable "U.S. Officials Say" stage of the "reporting" on the Paris attack -- i.e., journalists mindlessly and uncritically repeat whatever U.S. officials whisper in their ear about what happened. So now credible news sites are regurgitating the claim that the Paris Terrorists were enabled by Snowden leaks -- based on no evidence or specific proof of any kind.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 2, 2010 Joe Lieberman emulates Chinese dictators
That Joe Lieberman is abusing his position as Homeland Security Chairman to thuggishly dictate to private companies which websites they should and should not host -- and, more important, what you can and cannot read on the Internet -- is one of the most pernicious acts by a U.S. Senator in quite some time.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 7, 2015 Tony Blair and the Self-Exalting Mindset of the West: in Two Paragraphs
While the leading lights of the West love to celebrate themselves as beacons of civilized, progressive rationality, their overriding mentality is just the crassest and most primitive form of tribalism: when Our Side does it, it is right, and when Their Side does it, it is wrong. That is the primitive, banal formulation that lies at the heart of the vast, vast majority of foreign policy discourse in the West.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 13, 2016 U.S. Media Condemns Iran's "Aggression" in Intercepting U.S. Naval Ships -- in Iranian Waters
Most U.S. news accounts last night quickly skimmed over -- or outright ignored -- the rather critical fact that the U.S. ships had "drifted into" Iranian waters. Instead, all sorts of TV news personalities and U.S. establishment figures puffed out their chest and instantly donned their Tough Warrior pose to proclaim that this was an act of aggression -- virtually an act of war: not by the U.S., but by Iran.
SHARE Thursday, November 19, 2015 NYT Editorial Slams "Disgraceful" CIA Exploitation of Paris Attacks, But Submissive Media Role Is Key
Why do the CIA and other U.S. government factions believe -- accurately -- that they can get away with such blatant misleading and lying? The answer is clear: because, particularly after a terror attack, large parts of the U.S. media treat U.S. intelligence and military officials with the reverence usually reserved for cult leaders, whereby their every utterance is treated as Gospel.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, September 10, 2012 America's refusal to extradite Bolivia's ex-president to face genocide charges
The protection of this accused former leader will likely generate little controversy in the US because it was the by-product of the actions of both the Bush and Obama administrations, and because it comports so fully with how American justice functions. The only surprising thing would have been if there had been a different outcome.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 12, 2013 The US -- Alongside Saudi Arabia -- Fights For Freedom And Democracy In The Middle East
The US is not committed to spreading democracy and freedom in the world. "Freedom" and "democracy" are concepts it exploits to undermine regimes that refuse to serve its interests. Indeed, there is virtually an inverse relationship between how democratic a country is in the Muslim world and how closely allied the US is to it.
SHARE Monday, February 25, 2013 Zero Dark Thirty, The CIA And Film Critics Have A Very Bad Evening
The film is unsurprisingly a box office success, earning in excess of $100 million. But still, it's both gratifying and a bit surprising to see that this CIA-shaped jingoistic celebration of America's proudest moment of the last decade -- finding bin Laden, pumping his skull full of bullets, and then dumping his corpse into the ocean -- ended up with the stigma it deserves.
SHARE Saturday, June 4, 2016 Credibility of Brazil's Interim President Collapses as He Receives 8-Year Ban on Running for Office
President Michel Temer, overwhelming evidence has emerged proving that to be true: Already, two of the interim ministers in Temer's all-white-male cabinet, including his anti-corruption minister, have been forced to resign after the emergence of secret recordings showing them plotting to obstruct that investigation, which they, along with one-third of his cabinet, are personally implicated.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 12, 2015 Democrats Continue to Delude Themselves About Obama's Failed Guantanamo Vow
Obama's current Guantanamo plan -- like all his previous ones -- does not seek to end indefinite detention. It does the opposite: It insists on the right to continue to indefinitely imprison detainees, most of whom have already been kept in a cage for more than a decade with no charges or trial.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 1, 2016 Apple Wins Major Court Victory Against FBI in a Case Similar to San Bernardino
Apple scored a major legal victory in its ongoing battle against the FBI on Monday when a federal magistrate judge in New York rejected the U.S. government's request as part of a drug case to force the company to help it extract data from a locked iPhone.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 5, 2013 The "War on terror" -- By Design -- Can Never End
There's no question that this "war" will continue indefinitely. There is no question that US actions are the cause of that, the gasoline that fuels the fire. The only question -- and it's becoming less of a question for me all the time -- is whether this endless war is the intended result of US actions or just an unwanted miscalculation.
SHARE Monday, November 28, 2016 In Brazil, Major New Corruption Scandals Engulf the Faction that Impeached Dilma
Dilma Rousseff's impeachment was not designed to punish corruption but to protect it. The last two weeks have produced new corruption scandals that have vindicated that view beyond what even its proponents imagined was possible. In his short time in office, Michel Temer has already lost five ministers to scandal, but these new controversies are the most serious yet.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 30, 2017 Trump's Muslim Ban Is Culmination of War on Terror Mentality but Still Uniquely Shameful
Trump's own defense secretary, Gen. James Mattis, said when Trump first advocated his Muslim ban back in August that "we have lost faith in reason," adding: "This kind of thing is causing us great damage right now, and it's sending shock waves through this international system."
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 13, 2013 About the Reuters article
The oft-repeated claim that Snowden's intent is to harm the US is completely negated by the reality that he has all sorts of documents that could quickly and seriously harm the US if disclosed, yet he has published none of those. e could have sold all the documents he had for a great deal of money, or indiscriminately published them, or passed them to a foreign adversary. He did none of that.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, February 16, 2015 Hailed As A Model For Successful Intervention, Libya Proves To Be The Exact Opposite
What we see here is what we've seen over and over: the west's wars creating and empowering an endless supply of enemies, which in turn justify endless war by the west. It was the invasion of Iraq that ushered in "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and ultimately ISIS. It has been the brutal, civilian-slaughtering drone bombing of Yemen which spawned Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in that country.
SHARE Monday, September 23, 2013 Various items: NSA stories around the world
It's worth remembering that as the US and UK run around the world protesting the hacking activities of others and warning of the dangers of cyber-attacks, that duo is one of the most aggressive and malicious, if not the most aggressive and malicious, perpetrators of those attacks of anyone on the planet.
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 9, 2016 Nobody Knows the Identities of the 150 People Killed by U.S. in Somalia, but Most Are Certain They Deserved It
The U.S. used drones and manned aircraft yesterday [Mar 7] to drop bombs and missiles on Somalia, ending the lives of at least 150 people. As it virtually always does, the Obama administration instantly claimed that the people killed were "terrorists" and militants -- members of the Somali group al Shabaab -- but provided no evidence to support that assertion.
SHARE Thursday, May 17, 2012 Federal court enjoins NDAA
The court here repeatedly told the DOJ that it could preclude standing for the plaintiffs if they were willing to state clearly that none of the journalistic and free speech conduct that the plaintiffs engage in could subject them to indefinite detention. But the Government refused to make any such representation.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 31, 2012 Impressive integrity from two New York Times writers over BBC scandal
Journalistic malfeasance is all too common, so it is worth taking a moment to behold, and applaud, what real journalistic courage and integrity looks like. Let us hope that the integrity displayed by Sullivan and Nocera prove to be contagious.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 3, 2013 James Clapper, EU Play-Acting, And Political Priorities
If you're spending your time calling for Ed Snowden's head but not James Clapper's, or if you're obsessed with Snowden's fabricated personality attributes (narcissist!) but apathetic about rampant, out-of-control NSA surveillance, it's probably worth spending a few moments thinking about what this priority scheme reveals.
SHARE Tuesday, January 5, 2016 A Redaction Re-Visited: NSA Targeted "The Two Leading" Encryption Chips
The NSA vehemently argued that any reporting of any kind on this program would jeopardize national security by alerting terrorists to the fact that encryption products had been successfully compromised. After the stories were published, U.S. officials aggressively attacked the newspapers for endangering national security and helping terrorists with these revelations.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 9, 2014 Live Coverage Of The Senate Torture Report
American torture was not confined to a handful of aberrational cases or techniques, nor was it the work of rogue CIA agents. It was an officially sanctioned, worldwide regime of torture that had the acquiescence, if not explicit approval, of the top members of both political parties in Congress. It was motivated by far more than interrogation.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, November 20, 2009 The Washington establishment suffers a serious defeat
Populist anger over elite-favoring economic policies has long been brewing on both the Right and Left (and in between), but neither political party can capitalize on it because they're both dependent upon and subservient to the same elite interests which benefit from those policies.
SHARE Wednesday, May 15, 2013 The Major Sea Change In Media Discussions Of Obama And Civil Liberties
Leave to the side how morally grotesque it is to oppose rights assaults only when they affect you. The pragmatic point is that it is vital to oppose such assaults in the first instance no matter who is targeted because such assaults, when unopposed, become institutionalized. Once that happens, they are impossible to stop when they expand beyond the group originally targeted.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 31, 2013 The Message Sent By America's Invisible Victims
The most propagandistic aspect of the US War on Terror is that its victims are rendered invisible and voiceless. Evidence is overwhelming that what has radicalized huge numbers of previously peaceful and moderate Muslims is growing rage at seeing a continuous stream of innocent victims, including children, at the hands of the seemingly endless US commitment to violence.
SHARE Monday, October 26, 2015 BBC Protects U.K.'s Close Ally Saudi Arabia With Incredibly Dishonest and Biased Editing
the Saudis, says the anonymous official, are only arming groups such as the "Army of Conquest," but not the al Qaeda affiliate the Nusra Front. What's the problem with this claim? It's obvious, though the BBC would not be so impolite as to point it out: The Army of Conquest includes the Nusra Front as one of its most potent components. This is not even in remote dispute.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 17, 2016 Two Former U.S. Presidents Simultaneously Advocate for a Close Family Member as the Next U.S. President
Dynastic power is not a new phenomenon in the U.S., but this past week featured a particularly vivid illustration of how potent it is. The two U.S. presidents prior to President Obama -- Bill Clinton and George W. Bush -- made appearances on the campaign trail to urge Americans to elect their favorite candidate, which, in both cases, happens to be a close family member.
SHARE Saturday, October 15, 2011 The LA Times notices the "double standard" on Iran
As the United States continues down the path of state-sponsored assassination far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, all sorts of tricky moral questions are likely to arise. But this much is clear: The world is unlikely to accept that the United States has a right to behave as it wishes without accountability all around the globe and that other nations do not.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, March 4, 2016 Donald Trump's Policies Are Not Anathema to U.S. Mainstream but an Uncomfortable Reflection of It
Trump is self-evidently a toxic authoritarian demagogue advocating morally monstrous positions, but in most cases where elite outrage is being vented, he is merely a natural extension of the mainstream rhetorical and policy framework that has been laid, not some radical departure from it. He's their id.
SHARE Thursday, June 20, 2013 Revealed: The Top Secret Rules That Allow NSA To Use US Data Without A Warrant
The Fisa court plays no role in the selection of individuals, nor does it monitor who is selected by the NSA. The NSA's ability to collect and retain the communications of people in the US, even without a warrant, has fueled congressional demands for an estimate of how many Americans have been caught up in surveillance.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 22, 2015 The Spirit of Judy Miller is Alive and Well at the NYT, and It Does Great Damage
That the New York Times mindlessly disseminates claims from anonymous officials with great regularity is, at this point, too well-documented to require much discussion. But it is worth observing how damaging it continues to be, because, shockingly, all sorts of self-identified "journalists" -- both within the paper and outside of it -- continue to equate un-verified assertions from government officials as Proven Truth.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 19, 2013 Brookings' Bruce Riedel Urges Intensified US Support For Saudi Despots
the rationale for this steadfast US support for Arab tyranny is dubious at best. It's ironic indeed that the only government with valid links to the 9/11 perpetrators has become the closest US ally in the "war on terror," while governments with no such links -- starting with Iran -- have become perpetual US enemies.
SHARE Tuesday, April 5, 2016 A Key Similarity Between Snowden Leak and Panama Papers: Scandal Is What's Been Legalized
dozens of newspapers around the world reported on the Panama Papers: a gargantuan leak of documents from a Panama-based law firm that specializes in creating offshore shell companies. The documents reveal billions of dollars funneled to offshore tax havens by leading governmental and corporate officials (the U.S. was oddly missing from the initial reporting, though journalists vow that will change shortly).
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 27, 2011 The military/media attacks on the Hastings article
Last June, when Rolling Stone published Michael Hastings' article which ended the career of Obama's Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- an article which was just awarded the prestigious Polk Award -- the attacks on Hastings were led not by military officials but by some of Hastings' most celebrated journalistic colleagues.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 8, 2020 Biden's Choice For Pentagon Chief Further Erodes a Key U.S. Norm: Civilian Control
Before Gen. Austin can be confirmed, Biden will need a special waiver from Congress under the National Security Act of 1947. That law, a cornerstone of the post-World War II national security state, provides that "a person who has within 10 years been on active duty as a commissioned officer in a Regular component of the armed services shall not be eligible for appointment as Secretary of Defense."
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 26, 2016 Highlighting Western Victims While Ignoring Victims of Western Violence
No famous American TV correspondents will be sent to the places where people have their lives ended by the bombs of the U.S. and its allies. At most, you'll hear small, clinical news stories briefly and coldly describing what happened -- usually accompanied by a justifying claim from U.S. officials, uncritically conveyed, about why the bombing was noble.
SHARE Thursday, April 14, 2016 To Protect Hillary Clinton, Democrats Wage War on Their Own Core Citizens United Argument
The key argument of the right-wing justices in Citizens United has now become the key argument of the Clinton campaign and its media supporters to justify her personal and political receipt of millions upon millions of dollars in corporate money: "Expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption" -- at least when the candidate in question is Hillary Clinton.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 3, 2012 End of the pro-democracy pretense
one of the prime aims of America's support for Arab dictators has been to ensure that the actual views and beliefs of those nations' populations remain suppressed, because those views are often so antithetical to the perceived national interests of the U.S. government. The last thing the U.S. government has wanted (or wants now) is actual democracy in the Arab world...
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 31, 2013 On leaving the Guardian
As I leave, I really urge everyone to take note of, and stand against, what I and others have written about for years, but which is becoming increasingly more threatening: namely, a sustained and unprecedented attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process in the US.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 3, 2016 Fighting Israeli Occupying Forces Is "Terrorism." Boycotting Is "Anti-Semitism." What's Allowed?
Even ardent defenders of Israel admit that "the West Bank is under a legal regime of belligerent occupation" and "Israel's settlement enterprise is, and has always been, grossly illegal under international law." Despite this world consensus, Israeli settlements continue to grow rapidly. Israel is not engaged in any meaningful efforts to negotiate an agreement to end the occupation.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 21, 2016 Watch: First Interview With Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff Since the Senate's Impeachment Vote
Rousseff's suspension will last up to 180 days as her Senate impeachment trial takes place, at which point she will either be acquitted or (as is widely expected) convicted and permanently removed from her office. Rousseff -- who was imprisoned and tortured for three years in the 1970s by the U.S.-supported military dictatorship that ruled the country for 21 years -- is more combative, defiant, and resolute than ever.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, December 28, 2012 GOP and Feinstein Join to Fulfill Obama's Demand for Renewed Warrantless Eavesdropping
Feinstein repeatedly argued that requiring even basic disclosure about the eavesdropping program -- such as telling Americans how many of them are targeted by it -- would, as she put it, "destroy the program." But if "the program" is being conducted properly and lawfully, why would that kind of transparency kill the program?
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 1, 2013 Obama, Congress and Syria
The Congressional vote which Obama said he would seek appears, in his mind, to have no binding force at all. There is no reason to believe that a Congressional rejection of the war's authorization would constrain Obama in any way, other than perhaps politically.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 12, 2011 U.S. Takes the Lead on Behalf of Cluster Bombs
Obama's Defense Secretary is actually running around the country trying to scare Americans into believing that if the U.S. cuts military spending, the nation will be attacked. So you better support cluster bombs and demand that your Social Security benefits and other domestic services -- rather than military spending -- be cut.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 28, 2011 FBI serves Grand Jury subpoena likely relating to WikiLeaks
The FBI yesterday served a Grand Jury subpoena in Boston on a Cambridge resident, compelling his appearance to testify in Alexandria, Virgina. The individual served has been publicly linked to the WikiLeaks case, and it is highly likely that the Subpoena was issued in connection with that investigation.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 4, 2015 NSA's Top Brazilian Political and Financial Targets Revealed by New WikiLeaks Disclosure
That Rousseff's personal cell phone was successfully targeted by NSA spying was previously reported in 2013. That revelation -- along with others exposing NSA mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Brazilians, and the targeting of the country's state-owned oil company Petrobras and its Ministry of Mines and Energy -- caused a major rupture in relations between the two nations.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 7, 2013 On Obama's cancellation of summit with Putin and extradition
President Obama today canceled a long-scheduled summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in part because the US president is upset that Russia defied his personal directive to hand over Edward Snowden despite the lack of an extradition treaty between the two nations.
SHARE Tuesday, April 2, 2013 Follow-up on prior stories and a few new items
The Swedish government should agree that it will not use Assange's appearance on its soil as a ruse to turn him over to the US, and Assange should then board the next possible plane to Stockholm to face the accusations against him.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 1, 2013 A young Yemeni writer on the impact and morality of drone-bombing his country
Even natural allies of the United States feel that the targeted killings infringe on Yemen's sovereignty. Many ruefully repeat a line from President Obama's press conference on November 18, 2012: "There is no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders."
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 27, 2010 How many Americans are targeted for assassination?
Senator Obama said the President lacks the power merely to detain U.S. citizens without charges; indeed, when asked if "the Constitution permit[s]" that, he responded: "no." Yet now, as President, he claims the power to assassinate them without charges.
SHARE Monday, January 14, 2013 The Bombing Of Mali Highlights All The Lessons Of Western Intervention
The west is once again at war with the very forces that it trained, funded and armed. Nobody is better at creating its own enemies than the US and its allies. To believe that the US and its allies can just continue to go around the world, in country after country, and bomb and kill innocent people -- Muslims -- and not be targeted with "terrorist" attacks is, for obvious reasons, lunacy.
SHARE Sunday, August 2, 2015 Listen to WSJ's Bret Stephens Secretly Plot With "Pro-Israel" Evangelical Group Against Iran Deal
yet again we find journalists at newspapers claiming the pretense of objectivity who are in fact full-on activists: here, to the point of colluding with a right-wing group to sink the Iran Deal -- there's nothing wrong with that on its own terms, other than the conceit that journalism is distinct from activism.
SHARE Thursday, May 8, 2014 Keith Alexander Unplugged: on Bush/Obama, 1.7 million stolen documents and other matters
They know how many documents he accessed in his entire career at NSA, which is radically different from how many documents he took. But that hasn't stopped media outlets from repeatedly affirming the evidence-free claim that Snowden took 1.7 million documents. Even the most blatantly unreliable claims from National Security officials are treated as infallible papal pronouncements by our Adversarial Watchdog Press.
SHARE Sunday, June 12, 2011 In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war
Why would we, to use the President's phrase, "stand idly by" while numerous other regimes -- including our close allies in Bahrain and Yemen and the one in Syria -- engage in attacks on their own people at least as heinous as those threatened by Gaddafi, yet be so devoted to targeting the Libyan leader?
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 13, 2013 The Inspiring Heroism of Aaron Swartz
Whatever else is true, Swartz was destroyed by a "justice" system that fully protects the most egregious criminals as long as they are members of or useful to the nation's most powerful factions, but punishes with incomparable mercilessness and harshness those who lack power and, most of all, those who challenge power.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 19, 2016 Meet Debbie Wasserman Schultz's First-Ever Primary Challenger: Tim Canova
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is widely perceived to have breached her duty of neutrality as DNC chair by taking multiple steps to advance the Clinton campaign, including severely limiting the number of Democratic debates and scheduling them so as to ensure low viewership (she was co-chair of Clinton's 2008 campaign).
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, May 6, 2013 Israeli Bombing Of Syria And Moral Relativism
Few things are more ludicrous than the attempt by advocates of US and Israeli militarism to pretend that they're applying anything remotely resembling "principles." Their only cognizable "principle" is rank tribalism: My Side is superior, and therefore we are entitled to do things that Our Enemies are not.
SHARE Saturday, October 17, 2020 Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line Far More Dangerous Than What They Censor
There is the practical impact of Twitter and Facebook uniting to block content published by a major newspaper. It is true in theory that one can still read the suppressed article, but the stranglehold that these companies exert over our discourse is so dominant that their censorship amounts to effective suppression of the reporting.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, January 8, 2021 Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath
From the Cold War to the War on Terror: the harms from authoritarian "solutions" are often greater than the threats they are ostensibly designed to combat.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 9, 2013 Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind The NSA Surveillance Revelations
The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 8, 2013 NSA encryption story, Latin American fallout and US/UK attacks on press freedoms
One big problem the NSA and US government generally have had since our reporting began is that their defenses offered in response to each individual story are quickly proven to be false by the next story, which just further undermines their credibility around the world.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, July 29, 2013 Major opinion shifts, in the US and Congress, on NSA surveillance and privacy
The only ones defending the NSA at this point are the party loyalists and institutional authoritarians in both parties. That's enough for the moment to control Washington outcomes -- as epitomized by the unholy trinity that saved the NSA in the House last week: Pelosi, John Bohener and the Obama White House -- but it is clearly not enough to stem the rapidly changing tide of public opinion.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 16, 2011 Homeland Security's laptop seizures: Interview with Rep. Sanchez
It's simply inconceivable that the U.S. Government gets away with seizing someone's laptop, digging through it, recording it all, storing the data somewhere, and then distributing it to various agencies is about the most invasive, privacy-destroying measure imaginable.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 14, 2016 Al Jazeera America Terminates All TV and Digital Operations
While AJAM has struggled with its television programming, its online reporting and digital opinion sites have been successful, finding relatively large audiences among American news consumers. Nonetheless, all of AJAM is terminating, and both the TV and digital employees are expected to lose their jobs.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 30, 2014 Does Obama administration view journalists as Snowden's "accomplices"? It seems so.
Is it now the official view of the Obama administration that these journalists and media outlets are "accomplices" in what they regard as Snowden's crimes? If so, that is a rather stunning and extremist statement. Is there any other possible interpretation of Clapper's remarks?
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 21, 2009 The Pulitzer-winning investigation that dare not be uttered on TV
The NYT David Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for two articles that were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show--tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and TV analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.
SHARE Tuesday, June 25, 2013 Liberal Icon Frank Church On The NSA
Virtually nothing was known at the time about the National Security Agency. The Beltway joke was that "NSA" stood for "no such agency." The conditional part of Church's warning -- "that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people" -- is precisely what is happening, one might even say: is what has already happened. That seems well worth considering.
SHARE Monday, April 11, 2016 WATCH: Exclusive Interview by Glenn Greenwald with Former Brazilian President Lula da Silva
Nobody who has watched Lula's career -- including those who want to see him imprisoned -- can be dismissive of the prospect that he will again be Brazil's president (a new poll released today shows Lula leading the 2018 presidential race along with the evangelical/environmentalist Marina Silva).
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, March 14, 2016 The Rise of Trump Shows the Danger and Sham of Compelled Journalistic "Neutrality"
Imagine calling yourself a journalist, and then--as you watch an authoritarian politician get closer to power by threatening and unleashing violence and stoking the ugliest impulses--denouncing journalists who warn of the dangers. That is the embodiment of the ethos of corporate journalism in America, and a potent illustration of why its fetishized reverence for "objectivity" is so rotted and even dangerous.
SHARE Tuesday, November 23, 2010 Government yells "Terrorism" to justify TSA procedures
The all-justifying, cure-all solution for every problem: government officials run to the nearest media outlet they can find and anonymously scream "TERRORISM." No evidence is needed; the anonymity precludes all accountability; fear levels are quickly ratcheted up; and everything the Government wants to do then becomes justifiable in its name.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 14, 2015 Iranians' View Of The Nuclear Deal: Optimistic, With Significant Caveats
U.S. media coverage of the Iran deal is, as usual, overwhelmingly focused on American and Israeli voices, with the hard-liner fanatics in each country issuing apocalyptic decrees, insisting that the deal is far too lenient on Iran and provides it with far too many benefits. The optimistic Iranian view is grounded in the expectation that the deal will usher in a normalization of relations between Iran and the Wes
SHARE Monday, July 8, 2013 Edward Snowden: US Surveillance "Not Something I'm Willing To Live Under"
Snowden had not fallen out of love with America, only its government. "America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics."
SHARE Friday, March 15, 2013 Obama's secrecy fixation causing Sunshine Week implosion
In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration. his secrecy has become so oppressive and extreme that even the most faithful Democratic operatives are now angrily exploding with public denunciations.
SHARE Tuesday, October 1, 2013 Reddit Q-and-A on NSA reporting
Leaks from Edward Snowden earlier this year have lead to hundreds of stories by the Guardian and other news outlets that examine the tension between personal privacy and national security. Our reporting has sparked a global debate about the full extent of the NSA's actions to collect personal data. The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and Janine Gibson engage in a 90-minute Q&A with readers.
SHARE Saturday, October 22, 2011 A Remaining Realm Of American Excellence
Such a rare display of unified, chest-beating national celebration is now possible only when the government produces a corpse for us to dance over. The American citizenry rarely finds cause to exude nationalistic pride except when the government succeeds in ending someone's life.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 15, 2010 New target of rights erosions: U.S. citizens
There is, of course, no moral difference between subjecting citizens and non-citizens to abusive or tyrannical treatment. But as a practical matter, the dangers intensify when the denial of rights is aimed at a government's own population.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 26, 2013 The Gay Marriage Snowball And Political Change
There are reasons why such radical change on this issue is easier than on many others. Social issues don't threaten entrenched ruling interests: allowing same-sex couples to marry doesn't undermine oligarchs, the National Security State, or the wildly unequal distribution of financial and political power.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 5, 2013 NYC officials threaten funding of Brooklyn College over Israel event
Plainly, this entire controversy has only one "principle" and one purpose: to threaten, intimidate and bully professors, school administrators and academic institutions out of any involvement in criticisms of Israel. The claim that this is driven by the belief that colleges should avoid taking positions on controversial issues is a ridiculous joke.
SHARE Thursday, June 27, 2013 NSA Collected US Email Records In Bulk For More Than Two Years Under Obama
One function of the internet record collection is what is commonly referred to as "data mining," and which the NSA calls "contact chaining." The agency "analyzed networks with two degrees of separation (two hops) from the target," the report says. In other words, the NSA studied the online records of people who communicated with people who communicated with targeted individuals.
(16 comments) SHARE Friday, April 24, 2009 Democratic complicity and what "politicizing justice" really means
Those who make that argument are clearly projecting. They view everything in partisan and political terms -- it's why virtually all media discussions are about what David Gregory calls "the politics of the torture debate" rather than the substantive issues surrounding these serious crimes -- and they are thus incapable of understanding that not everyone is burdened by the same sad affliction that plagues them.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, September 2, 2011 Facts and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga
As usual, many of those running around righteously condemning WikiLeaks for the potential, prospective, unintentional harm to innocents caused by this leak will have nothing to say about these actual, deliberate acts of wanton slaughter by the U.S.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 6, 2007 Angry, uncivil liberal bloggers
any talk by right wingers about the left's hatred for the right is pretty clearly balanced out by this New Republic Cover calling Judith Plame, the C Word-- and that doesn't satnd for conservative. It's time, on this issue, for the right to STFU.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 29, 2009 Rove: Champion of "traditional" divorce
If Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and their friends and followers actually were required by law to stay married to their wives -- the way that "traditional marriage" was generally supposed to work -- the movement to have our secular laws conform to "traditional marriage" principles would almost certainly die a quick, quiet and well-deserved death.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 27, 2015 Court Ruling, Though Expected, Is Still Shocking -- Especially For Those Who Grew Up LGBT In The U.S.
All the legal debates over the ruling are predictable and banal. Most people proclaim -- in the words of Justice Scalia's bizarre and somewhat deranged dissent -- that it is a "threat to democracy" and a "judicial putsch" whenever laws they like are judicially invalidated, but a profound vindication for freedom when laws they dislike are nullified.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, January 7, 2013 John Brennan's Extremism And Dishonesty Rewarded With CIA Director Nomination
It is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush's most radical policies is not only Obama's choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. The reason Obama needs a new CIA chief is because David Petraeus was forced to resign.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 9, 2014 Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On
A three-month investigation by The Intercept -- including interviews with more than a dozen current and former federal law enforcement officials involved in the FISA process -- reveals that in practice, the system for authorizing NSA surveillance affords the government wide latitude in spying on U.S. citizens.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 3, 2014 What Excuse Remains for Obama's Failure to Close GITMO?
Obama's last signing statement concluded with this cryptic vow: "In the event that the restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo detainees in sections 1034 and 1035 operate in a manner that violates constitutional separation of powers principles, my Administration will implement them in a manner that avoids the constitutional conflict."
SHARE Thursday, July 16, 2015 Announcing Our Matching Fund Donation to Chelsea Manning's Legal Defense
Chelsea Manning could have enriched herself by selling those documents to a foreign intelligence agency or media outlet for enormous sums, but did none of that. That's because she had only one motive: to inform citizens around the world of what their governments are doing in the dark. For her noble choice, Manning has been persecuted, brutalized and imprisoned by the U.S. government.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, April 5, 2013 The Soft, Weak Chinese Cite Concerns For International Law And Due Process
What kind of weak, soft, overly legalistic government worries about trivial concerns like international law and "sovereignty issues" when it comes to drone-killing heinous murderers for whom capture is difficult? Why not just shoot Hellfire missiles wherever you think he might be hiding in weaker countries and kill him and anyone who happens to be near him?
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 15, 2015 When the State Department Tries to Choose Muslim Thought Leaders to Win "Hearts and Minds"
Last year, the State Department announced with great fanfare a new social media campaign to counter ISIS' online messaging. They called it "Think Again, Turn Away," and created Twitter and Facebook accounts in that name. Its self-described purpose on Facebook: "Our mission is to expose the facts about terrorists and their propaganda."
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 30, 2011 Ruth Marcus Reveals Another Journalistic Value
Brownback's staff monitors Twitter for references to their boss, saw Sullivan's tweet, and then creepily complained about it to school authorities. The school's principal demanded that Sullivan apologize to Brownback, but she steadfastly refused.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 20, 2012 Various matters: cyberwar, last gasps, and hate speech
There are several brief matters worth noting today: An Obama official seems to justify an Iranian attack on the US; Panetta channels Cheney; Tom Friedman writes from expertise
SHARE Monday, July 27, 2015 A Crucial Realization About Journalism is Learned by Being its Subject
For the past decade, I've been writing critically about the American media, usually with a focus on the specific policy and legal topics I know best. So like most politically engaged people, I've long been rationally aware of how frequently deceitful and inaccurate claims are passed off by the most respected media outlets as fact, using highly authoritative tones.
SHARE Friday, September 25, 2009 Victory on preventive detention law: in context
Obama is continuing the unconstitutional practice begun by the Bush Administration of imprisoning "suspects" without charges and without a public trial. He recently backed down from seeking a law that would pretend to legitimize this practice. "Preventive detention" is indefensible militariliy, morally, and legally.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 25, 2010 The absence of debate over war
One significant cause of America's indifference to the wars we are waging is that those wars have virtually no effect on the overwhelming majority of Americans (at least no recognized effect), while they impose a huge cost on a tiny sliver of the population: those who fight the wars and their families.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 4, 2010 Bill Keller's self-defense on "torture"
To justify his paper's conduct, Keller adds "that defenders of the practice of water-boarding, 'including senior officials of the Bush administration,' insisted that it did not constitute torture." Kudos to Keller for admitting who dictates what his newspaper says and does not say.
SHARE Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Khader Adnan and now-normalized Western justice
Even random glances at State Department Human Rights reports will lead one to the most suffocatingly hypocritical denunciations by the U.S. Government. The United States of America, hold more human beings in long-term solitary confinement than any other country in the world.
SHARE Wednesday, July 22, 2009 Stephen Colbert on Chuck Todd and torture investigations
It was the regime itself, implemented at the highest levels of our government, that was criminal. Prosecuting only low-level interrogators who followed the torturing spirit of those policies but transgressed some bureaucratic guidelines would be a travesty.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 31, 2010 "Reporting" on Iran should seem familiar
It would be irrational for Iran not to want a nuclear weapon capability. What else would a rational Iranian leader conclude as they look at the US military's invasion and occupation of two of its neighboring, non-nuclear countries? If our goal were to create a world where Iran was incentivized to obtain nuclear weapons, we couldn't do a better job than we're doing now.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 3, 2010 The degrading effects of terrorism fears
What inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet of fear and terror for years. It regresses into pure childhood. The result is a citizenry far more terrorized by our own institutions than foreign Terrorists could ever dream of achieving on their own.
SHARE Sunday, June 21, 2009 Obama, the Right and defendants' rights
This was yet another case where the Obama DOJ sided with the Bush administration and advocated the position that the conservative justices adopted. The Obama DOJ aggressively argued before the Court that convicted criminals have no constitutional right to access evidence for DNA analysis.
(12 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 8, 2009 Glenn Greenwald: The Obama Justice System
...what has clearly emerged as the core "principle" of Obama justice when it comes to accused Terrorists -- namely, "due process" is pure window dressing with only one goal: to ensure that anyone the President wants to keep imprisoned will remain in prison.
SHARE Friday, October 9, 2009 A historian's account of Democrats and Bush-era war crimes
This war on transparency is all culminating with a White House-backed effort -- spearheaded by key ally Joe Lieberman -- to sweep aside two federal court rulings and to write a new exemption for FOIA that has no purpose but to prevent the world from seeing new and critical evidence of systematic American war crimes.