Is Glenn Greenwald trying to save face? [View all]

Media, drones and rank propaganda
As usual, the leading spokespeople for government policies are disguised as the nation's Adversarial Watchdog Press

By Glenn Greenwald

Several items today relate to the issue of gross U.S. media propaganda and Obama’s national security policies:

(1) I have an Op-Ed in The Guardian today on how the American media has been repeatedly and willingly coopted in the Obama administration’s propagandistic abuse of its secrecy powers, with a focus on the recent high-profile, Obama-flattering national security scoops from The New York Times.

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http://www.salon.com/2012/06/08/media_drones_and_rank_propaganda/singleton/

Probing Obama’s secrecy games
Will high-level Obama officials who leak for political gain be punished on equal terms with actual whistleblowers?

By Glenn Greenwald

Over the past several months, including just last week, I’ve written numerous times about the two glaring contradictions that drive the Obama administration’s manipulative game-playing with its secrecy powers: (1) at the very same time that they wage an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, they themselves continuously leak national security secrets exclusively designed to glorify Obama purely for political gain; and (2) at the very same time they insist to federal courts that these programs are too secret even to confirm or deny their existence (thereby shielding them from judicial review or basic disclosure), they run around publicly boasting about their actions. Just over the past month alone, they have done precisely this by leaking key details about Obama’s commanding role in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, drone attacks that have killed allegedly key Al Qaeda figures, sophisticated cyber-attacks on Iran’s nuclear program, and the selection of targets for Obama “kill list”: all programs that are classified and which the White House has insisted cannot be subjected to judicial review or any form of public scrutiny.

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http://www.salon.com/2012/06/07/probing_obamas_secrecy_games/singleton/

Raw Story’s liberal rhetoric
Sliming critics of the President's policies as Terrorist-lovers was once an exclusively right-wing tactic: no more

By Glenn Greenwald

Raw Story is a moderately well-read political outlet that touts itself as “a progressive news site that focuses on stories often ignored in the mainstream media.” It recently began publishing a blog devoted exclusively to venerating the President and sliming his critics: because that’s so edgy, brave and rare; after all, the meek “MSM” would never dare glorify the nation’s most powerful political official and the party in power, so we really need a brave, dissident anti-MSM site like Raw Story to provide that. That blog promptly humiliated Raw Story this week by publishing a totally false and baseless Internet “rumor” that Wisconsin’s GOP Gov. Scott Walker “impregnant his college girlfriend and, after encouraging her to get an abortion, abandon her.” Andrew Breitbart might be dead, but his spirit is alive and well at Raw Story. In response, Raw Story‘s Executive Editor Megan Carpentier eagerly (and understandably) disclaimed any responsibility for publication of that blog, insisting (credibly) that the decision to publish it was made by Raw Story ”management.”

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http://www.salon.com/2012/06/06/raw_storys_liberal_rhetoric/singleton/

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Soon after our invasion of Iraq, when it became apparent that, contrary to Bush administration claims, there were no weapons of mass destruction, I began concluding, reluctantly, that the administration had veered far off course from defending the country against the threats of Muslim extremism. It appeared that in the great national unity the September 11 attacks had engendered, the administration had seen not a historically unique opportunity to renew a sense of national identity and cohesion, but instead a potent political weapon with which to impose upon our citizens a whole series of policies and programs that had nothing to do with terrorism, but that could be rationalized through an appeal to the nation's fear of further terrorist attacks.

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The 9/11 attacks were not the first time our nation has had to face a new and amoral enemy. Throughout our history, we have vanquished numerous enemies at least as strong and as threatening as a group of jihadist terrorists without having the president seize the power to break the law. As a nation, we have triumphed over a series of external enemies and overcome internal struggles, and we have done so not by abandoning our core principles in the name of fear but by insisting on an adherence to our fundamental political values.

http://www.bookbrowse.com/excerpts/index.cfm?fuseaction=printable&book_number=1812

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It is little known that Greenwald supported the Iraq War, and the war in Afghanistan before it. He does not mention it in writing anymore and rarely speaks of it. He supported the war for the same reason I did: he believed that Iraq possessed WMD and that the potential consequences of that possession could not be risked. When no WMD were found, it made no difference to Hitchens, who too characteristically belittled the significance of the non-finding, and those to whom it mattered, and continued to promote many other rationales for the war that were forceful and honorable, but for me circumstantially undeterminative. Without a belief in the existence of WMD I would not have supported the war and neither, it appears, would Greenwald have. For Greenwald, however, the knowledge that a government in which he had placed a level of trust, had, at the very least, gotten it so wrong – if not manipulated the nation into war – has led to an abiding campaign of extraordinary vituperation against not just the government officials responsible, but others, outside of government, particularly journalists, who had argued for action and the rightness of it.

http://sadredearth.com/christopher-hitchens-glenn-greenwald-and-the-war-of-ideas/