Having successfully forced the hand of the US power structure in returning to America despite threats of his arrest and imprisonment - where he likely would have been tortured - Glenn Greenwald has been hitting the media circuit to speak and promote his book "No Place to Hide". This really must burn the Obama regime although they due to their own arrogance and foolhardy recklessness have other fish to fry with percolating foreign opportunities for regime change in Russia, Syria and now Iraq but having Greenwald hauled in by government thugs and disappeared into the bowels of our massive prison system would have just been too much bad publicity - especially in an election year.
Greenwald has let slip that a new story, with shocking details as to who exactly is being spied on by the NSA Stasi and their bogus "anti-terrorist" mass surveillance and data-mining programs is "imminent". In an interview with FOX News in which the host Sheppard Smith continued to pepper Greenwald with talking points by protectors of the fascist state who still peddle the hogwash that former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower being some sort of sinister Russian operative and the most recently "why doesn't he come home to face the judicial system" or to as the insidious Skull and Bones pedigreed US Secretary of State John Kerry puts it "man up". Greenwald was attacked by the sleazy anti-Muslim bigot Bill Maher on HBO over the weekend along with the media's go-to veteran "activist" Paul Reickhoff who accused Snowden of helping "terrorists" and posed the same question. Of course any fair trial of Snowden is a joke and only food for the lemmings because he would be disappeared into some military prison and tortured, never to be heard from again except for the obligatory show trial -where under the archaic and anti-American 1917 Espionage Act that Obama and Holder so adore - he would not even be able to defend himself. Greenwald continues to emphasize this but it will not resonate with Americans who are historically ignorant of all but the state sanctioned indoctrination of exceptionalist glory.
Waiting for Greenwald's big revelations, originally promised by the Pulitzer Prize winner in a GQ interview "The Man Who Knows Too Much" as well as in another interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now has been an exercise in frustration. It does appear from Greenwald's reference to "imminent" that something big is finally, after all of this time coming. For reference I excerpt from the GQ article:
We published the first article [about the NSA collecting Verizon phone records] while I was in Hong Kong last June and won’t stop until we’re done. I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.
As well as from Democracy Now:
AMY GOODMAN: And the document you include from October 3rd, 2012, about the NSA targeting of, quote, "radicals"?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, one of the interesting things is, obviously, people are very aware of the COINTEL abuses. I know you’ve had people on your show who actually participated in the break-in of the FBI and took the documents that unveiled that program. People are aware of J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses. The nature of that series of events is that the United States government looks at people who oppose what they do as being, quote-unquote, "threats." That’s the nature of power, is to regard anybody who’s a threat to your power as a broad national security threat. And a lot of times people will say, "We don’t yet have the reporting in this case that shows that kind of abuse." And a lot of that reporting is still reporting that we’re working on and that I promise you is coming.
I suspect that the story will divulge what many have long suspected in that political dissidents, activists and any who represent a threat to the new post-September 11, 2001 order of fascism at home and militarism and murder abroad will be the ones who are targeted. I also suspect that journalists will be among the targets, there was a program that was revealed several years back FIRSTFRUITS that specifically targeted members of the media. Washington's Blog recently ran a series of pieces based on interviews conducted with pre-Snowden NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and I except at length from the first of the pieces:
But after 9/11, NSA instead adopted the competing “Stellar Wind” system, which didn’t protect Americans’ privacy, and was less effective and more expensive.
THOMAS DRAKE: Part of what I discovered is that part of the surveillance system, part of the Stellar Wind system – and that’s an umbrella term in itself – there were offshoots of that.
It metastasized. It grew like a cancer on the body politic.
One of the things that was done was [along the lines of]: “You know what? We’ve got to make sure” (because they were paranoid) “we’ve got to make sure that this stuff doesn’t get out … oh yeah, the press. Let’s violate the Fourth Amendment and just monitor the press.”
The whole story of that has not come out.
There was a program called “First Fruits”. They’ve no doubt changed the name of the program [since then.]
And that First Fruits program was a cutout which was designed from all of the domestic surveillance take. “Let’s just pipe off from all” that is involving designated [reporters] … or in some cases whole groups of reporters and journalists.
So you’re targeting actual newspapers. You’re targeting media outlets.
And you’re monitoring – on a persistent basis – their communications.
The surveillance of reporters and news organizations who can't simply be bought off like the plethora of dishonest and dishonorable scumbags who are eager to serve the state for money, celebrity and inclusion at the right events, dinners and cocktail parties of the Beltway elite is a given and while Obama has escalated it the programs had their roots under Bush-Cheney and even before. Obama and the longtime fixer Eric Holder have waged a war against journalism that is unprecedented in the history of this country or at least since Woodrow Wilson's filthy Espionage Act was passed. Let's hope that Greenwald's "imminent" story finally provides a wake up call that can no longer be ignored despite the thorough corruption of the domestic "mainstream" media.
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