Pulitzer Prize and Polk Award winning investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald continues to make the media rounds as he promotes his new book on the American Stasi entitled "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State" and has yet to be arrested by the Obama administration. The author is not only loathed by authoritarian liars and scum the likes of departing House Intelligence Committee head Mike Rogers, the always loathsome former head of the Bush-Cheney CIA and NSA Michael Hayden, deranged Congressman Peter King and of course the sitting President of the USA, USA, USA himself but he has now acquired new and formidable foes among the Kool Aid drinkers of the Democratic party.
His unforgivable sin was calling out the queen in waiting Hillary Rodham-Clinton in a recent article for GQ Magazine where he blasted Clinton with both barrels: "Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she's been around forever, the Clinton circle. She's a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She's surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere" followed by "But she's going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist". Both statements are true and of the typical nature of the gut punches that Greenwald regularly delivers to the corrupt establishment and hatred of the man has now like the love of war, the expansion of the surveillance state and Wall Street bailouts become one of those cherished "bipartisan" endeavors that offer proof that despite the collapsing system that ' yes we all can live together after all.
Greenwald has developed a reputation of being more than somewhat of a prick for his refusal to knuckle under and toe the line when being attacked by the establishment and its toadies. He is a combative type which he revels in and as a former corporate litigator prior to becoming a crusading journalist he brings a particular vigor to fighting back, a great example of which was this excellent and hilarious comment on the now retired top Nazi at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade: General Keith Alexander. I excerpt the following from the transcript of an interview that he did with Amy Goodman for Democracy Now last week:
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to part two of our special, an extended interview with Glenn Greenwald, author of the new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Four weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald returned to the United States for the first time since breaking the Snowden story. He and filmmaker Laura Poitras flew in from Berlin to accept the George Polk Award. Days later, the Pulitzer Prize was given to The Guardian and Washington Post for their coverage of the Snowden leaks. Former NSA director, General Keith Alexander, criticized the Pulitzer Prize committee; he said, quote, "I’m greatly disappointed that we have rewarded those who have put so many lives at risk." I asked Glenn Greenwald to respond.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, first of all, I mean, as a journalist, I consider it sort of an additional prize that somebody like Keith Alexander is so angry at the journalism I’m doing that he’s willing to make those things up in order to discredit it. I mean, the idea of a journalist is that you ought to be adversarial to people like Keith Alexander. And I would be a lot more worried if he liked the reporting that we did and praised it than I am that he’s saying things like that.
But the thing that I think is so important to realize is, you know, if you go back 40 years and look at what was said about Daniel Ellsberg, who most people across the political spectrum now consider to have been heroic and justified and noble in what he did, the same exact things were said about him. In fact, Nixon officials went before Congress and accused him of being a secret Russian spy. They said that he put lives at risk. They said that people were going to die as a result of these disclosures, that he was a traitor, that he was engaged in treason—all of which have been proven to be utter fabrications.
And every single whistleblowing event that has happened since then, including the 2005 NSA story in which someone in the Justice Department told The New York Times about that program, the blowing the whistle on Abu Ghraib and the torture program and the rendition program, what WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning did, this same rhetoric is constantly invoked, which is, if you shine a light on what we in political power are doing in a way that we haven’t authorized you to do, you’re going to have blood on your hands. I mean, there’s an obvious irony to being accused by a U.S. general who served in Iraq, of all places, of having blood on your hands or resulting—causing the death of innocent people. Nobody could ever surpass Keith Alexander and his fellow generals in their ability to do that. But the claim is made all the time, reflexively, without any evidence, because in reality the only thing that has been harmed by the disclosures is not the lives of innocent people, it’s the reputation and credibility of people like Keith Alexander. And so you can understand why they are so interested in demeaning it.
Touché in calling out the ongoing falsehoods that reporting on the revelations of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden endangering lives. It is about time that these fuckers get called out in that it is their own damned wars that are jeopardizing Americans (as well as killing hundreds of thousands of brown-skinned, non-Christian people) it is only too bad that it was on Democracy Now which doesn’t get the attention of a state-corporate ‘news’ show like NBC’s Meet the Press where Greenwald returned as a guest on Sunday morning.
Being interviewed at length by NBC's so-called "justice correspondent" Pete Williams - since the obnoxious power suckler David Gregory either chickened out or was benched by the network to avoid the public spectacle of having his ass handed to him - Greenwald still was hit with the same stale talking points although with more respect now that the book is a hit and additional serious revelations on the NSA are promised to be coming. The interview was in one of those town hall type of formats where random questions were submitted (likely by government sock puppets) which were answered by Greenwald with follow-up from the interviewer. I excerpt from today's Meet the Press transcript:
PETE WILLIAMS: Here are two related questions: Aliz Koletas asks, "What is his response to critics who call him a traitor for helping Snowden?" And Mary Jane Jones says, "How does he feel about making the U.S. a sitting duck to our enemies?"
GLENN GREENWALD: It is always the case that people who bring unwanted disclosure that makes people in power uncomfortable are called traitors. And I'd look at that, really, as a badge of honor. I think it's a testament to the fact that we're doing our job.
PETE WILLIAMS: As you know, the heads of several U.S. intelligence agencies, and also in the U.K., have said that these disclosures have caused potential terrorists to change their method of communication, which makes it harder to detect. What about that? Does that concern you?
GLENN GREENWALD: This claim that these disclosures have helped the terrorists is the same script from which they always read whenever people shine a light on what they're doing. And I hope nobody is willing to accept it on faith, but instead, demands evidence that that has happened, because there actually is none.
While Pete Williams is a typical subservient government hack – his questions dripping with fealty to the masters of the surveillance machine – Greenwald was at least afforded some of the courtesy that he did not get from the always obnoxious Gregory who subjected him to veiled threats last June. The online streaming of the interview that I watched prominently featured banner ads as well as a short commercial for defense contractor Boeing so it is pretty apparent on who it is exactly who butters the bread of Pete Williams.
But while Greenwald does his book promotion tour the liberals that take their marching orders from the stinking carcass of a political party that are the Democrats are revving up the "misogynist" slander machine in preparation for the two year steel cage death match between Queen Hillary the Inevitable and Jeb Bush. The cyber sewer that is Daily Kos is as usual at the tip of the spear and the soldiers of orange or the Kossacks (there seems to be a rather strange communist ring to that) as they endearingly refer to themselves are trashing Greenwald. The "diary" as they refer to such things has been cross-pollinated to other liberal and progressive websites in a tactic used at times to really hammer home a meme. It is encouraging that it is mocked and called out as bullshit on other sites outside of the domain of Markos Molitsas-Zuniga who really is "left" in the same way that Stalin was and some of the responses at least offer a glimmer of hope that the lies of the two party scam are being recognized and rejected by at least a small and vocal percentage of progressives, the type who are able to put aside differences and work with libertarians in the pursuit of a larger attempt to fight a true enemy of freedom such as the surveillance state.
Greenwald will continue to be slimed by both the red and blue sheep in that his opposition to the menace of the very dangerous fascist element that has embedded itself within the US government remains consistent no matter which phony party is officially in power.
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