Good old Glenn Greenwald remembers what some self-described liberals and progressives have forgotten: that basic rights such as due process of law and the right to a fair trial are meaningless unless they apply to foes and well as friends.
“Those whose worldview is bereft of universally-held principles, and based solely on tribal allegiances, assume everyone else is plagued by this same deficiency.”
“Principles of rehabilitative justice, reform of the carceral state and liberalized criminal justice evaporate when Democrats demand harsh prison for their political adversaries.”
Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent post questioning the constitutionality of the Select Committee on 1/6’s investigation. All the abuses of power of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in an earlier are being repeated, this time with the support of self-described liberals.
The committee’s mandate was to investigate why the Capitol Police were so unprepared to defend the Capitol against rioters, which is a proper and important matter to investigate.
So is the role of the FBI, which had heavily infiltrated three of the major right-wing organizations, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. To what degree did the FBI hold back its knowledge, or even possibly help instigate the riots?
What is not a proper topic for investigation is the activities and beliefs of private citizens. Law enforcement is the function of the executive and judicial branches, not the legislative.
The executive branch is responsible for investigating and prosecuting federal crimes. The judicial branch is responsible for judging criminal charges and sentencing convicted criminals.
The investigative powers of Congress are limited to oversight of the executive branch and to research in connection with legislation. It has no constitutional authority to investigate the activities of individuals just our of curiosity, or the desire to humiliate and punish.
Greenwald points out the extensive legal precedent for this, much of it dating from the McCarthy era.
SECURING DEMOCRACY: My fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazilby Glenn Greenwald (2021)
Glenn Greenwald’s new book tells the story of his latest exploit, the publication in 2019 of leaked information exposing corruption and abuse of power in Brazil, his adopted country.
His reporting on leaked information about abuses of power by President Jair Bolsonro and Justice Minister Sérgio Moro threatens their political power.
The risks he faces—prison and death—are possibly greater than in 2013, when he helped publish Edward Snowden’s leaked information about abuses of power by the NSA, CIA and Britain’s GCHQ.
I’ve long been an admirer of Greenwald, and Securing Democracy is doubly interesting to me because it tells something of his back story.
I started reading his blog, Unclaimed Territory, in the mid-2000s. Its theme was the Bush administration’s abuse of power.
When Barack Obama succeeded George W. Bush, Greenwald held Obama to the same strict standard that he applied to Bush. This won him a following across the political spectrum.
Greenwald was, and is, very lawyer-like. His writing focused on the relevant law and facts, without any evident personal bias. His judgments were without fear or favor.
In fact, I don’t know Greenwald’s political beliefs, beyond a general belief in democracy, freedom of speech and equal justice under law.
I followed Greenwald as his blog was picked up by Salon, then as he became a columnist for The Guardian.
I didn’t know at the time that he was (1) gay and (2) living in Brazil.
In the book, he told how, after quitting his job in a New York law firm in 2005, at age, he went to Rio de Janeiro to unwind on its famous Ipanema beach.
A volleyball knocked over his drink, and a handsome 20-year-old man named David Miranda came up to apologize.
It was love at first sight, and they’ve been together ever since. It is like an ideal love relationship out of Plato’s Socratic dialogues—a mature older man loving and mentoring a handsome and noble younger man.
Miranda grew up in a favela, one of the squatter shantytowns that have grown up around Brazil’s big cities.
Favela residents typically live in shacks build of scrap wood, bricks and other scavenged materials. They usually lack electricity, a public water supply or sewerage, although residents sometimes tap into the electrical grid illegally.
Drug gangs have more power in the favelas that the legal government does, Greenwald wrote. They also are sometimes invaded by private militias financed by wealthy right-wing Brazilians.
Miranda was born in a favela to a poor woman who worked as a prostitute. He never knew his father. His mother died when he was five, and he was raised by an aunt, until he left home at age 13.
At first he slept in the street, but, by means of hard work, talent and charm, he had worked his way up to a stable job in offices at the time he met Greenwald.
After they met, Miranda got through junior high and high school, then got a degree in marketing from a top Brazilian university.
Miranda’s ambition was to design and promote video games. Greenwald was unimpressed by that ambition, until Edward Snowden told him that he got his first ideas of duty, morality and purpose by playing video games as a child.
During the previous four years, Democratic leaders and pro-Democratic newspapers and broadcasters aligned with U.S. intelligence agencies to undermine the Trump administration.
Now that Democrats are in power, the alliance continues. It’s highly improbable that the Biden administration will dial down any of the covert wars now being waged by the United States.
As usual, Glenn Greenwald, who got his start as a civil liberties lawyer, has the facts.
I’m not a supporter of Donald Trump. As one who believes in historic American ideals of freedom and democracy, I’m concerned about the large fraction of the 74 million Trump voters who endorse mob violence or believe in the crazy Q-Anon conspiracy theory.
But trying to suppress people’s basic rights is not a good way to refute their belief that there is a conspiracy to suppress their basic rights.
Also, progressives and left-wingers are naive if they think the social media crackdown is going to be limited to their enemies.
Donald Trump was a very bad President. I’m glad he’s no longer in office. But I don’t believe in attacking historic constitutional liberties in the name of preventing Trump supporters from destroying historic constitutional liberties.
It is not true that Officer Brian Sicknick was beaten to death by a pro-Trump mob during the storming of the Capitol, Glenn Greenwald reported last night.
This raises big questions about the credibility of reporting of the event and the justification for a “domestic war on terror.”
The report in the New York Times on Jan. 8, based on quotes from two anonymous law enforcement officials, and in a follow-up article. It was cited as fact in the articles of impeachment against ex-President Donald Trump.
But on the same day, ProPublica published an article quoting Sicknick’s brother as having received a text from SIcknick after the riot saying he was okay, in spite of having been pepper-sprayed. But then later they got word he had a blot clot and was on a ventilator. He died that night.
Nobody has produced video evidence of the alleged beating of Sicknick. Many of the rioters have been charged, but nobody has yet been charged with Sicknick’s murder.
On Feb. 2, CNN published an article, noting in passing that the medical examiner’s report on Sicknick’s death has not been released, but quoting one investigator that there were no signs of head injuries and investigators no longer believe the fire extinguisher story.
I am not making excuses for Donald Trump or for the rioters. It is clear to me that Trump intended the mob to storm the Capitol in order to intimidate Vice President Pence and the Senate into refusing to certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory. This was wrong. It was a symbolic and real attack on the democratic process.
Neither am I trying to trivialize the tragedy of Officer Sicknick’s death or deny that it was duty-related.
However, nothing is gained by false reporting or by believing false reporting. You only weaken your cause.
I don’t fault the reporters of the initial NYT article. When you’re reporting on deadline, you go with the information you’ve got. But I do fault the NYT and the rest of the Washington press corps for not trying to check or verify the facts the next day.
The great temptation for any reporter, as I know from my own experience, is to come across information that seems to confirm your biases and assumptions, and look no further. This is the great fault of the so-called mainstream press in the Trump era.
The New York Times over many decades built a reputation as a reliable source of information by taking great care to be fair and accurate. But it is much more easy to lose a good reputation than to gain one, and that is what is happening now.
Self-described liberals mock President Trump for talking about fake news. They can’t understand why so many people believe things like the Q-Anon conspiracy. But if respected institutions such as the NYT can’t be troubled to get things right, its editors and reporters shouldn’t be surprised if some people turn to disreputable sources.
Those who want to insist that Trump’s evils are unprecedented — such that their own service to or support for prior presidents should not exclude them from the realm of the Patriotic, the Decent and the Noble — should be prepared to explain which acts of Trump’s compete with the destruction of Iraq, or the implementation of a global regime of torture, or the “rendition” kidnappings and CIA black sites and illegal domestic eavesdropping under Bush and Obama, or imprisoning people for decades with no due process, and on and on and on.
The Intercept’s attempted censorship of Glenn Greenwald is a symptom of the state of freedom of the press in the USA.
Greenwald wrote an article about how major broadcasters and publications refused to acknowledge new information about Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s ties to a corrupt businessman in Ukraine. His editors at The Intercept refused to publish it unless he deleted information derogatory to Joe Biden.
This is a big deal because Greenwald joined The Intercept, a news web site bankrolled by a billionaire named Pierre Omidyar, because it promised him freedom from censorship.
Greenwald originally was a civil liberties lawyer with a blog. It became so popular that he was invited to join Salon and then The Guardian. to which he agreed only on condition of complete freedom to express his opinion, within the limits of libel law. Omidyar’s FIrst Look Media promised him the same freedom.
His critics say it is wrong of him to criticize Joe Biden in the run-up to the election because it is all-important to defeat Donald Trump. It is “not helpful to the left,” as one of his editors wrote.
Actually the New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s computer was not all that important in itself. It only added circumstantial evidence to what was already known. If not for the effort to suppress the article, it probably would be forgotten by now.
∞∞
Greenwald originally gained favor with self-described leftists because of his writing about the George W. Bush administration’s attack on civil liberties. He lost favor when he held the Barack Obama administration to the same standard. He remains in disfavor because of his skepticism about the Russiagate conspiracy theory, even though he has been vindicated by the facts.
Other independent reporters also were marginalized. Seymour Hersh was a top investigative reporter for the New York Times and then for the New Yorker magazine. His Russiagate skepticism cost him that position. His writings appeared in The Guardian for a time. The last article of his that I read was in the English-language edition of a German newspaper.
Matt Taibbi is another Russiagate skeptic. He backed out of an invitation to join The Intercept when it was first organized. He recently started a new blog on the Substack platform, which Greenwald also has joined.
I don’t see Greenwald, Hersh or Taibbi as part of “the left,” whatever that may be. I’ve never seen any indication that any of them has any particular ideology, except intolerance of tyranny, atrocities and high-level corruption and a keen nose for BS.
I’m not sure what “left” or “right” mean any more, beyond adherence to one of two political factions. Evidently the current “right” position is that business monopolies such as Facebook and Twitter should not have the power to stifle opinions their executives don’t approve of, while the “left” position is that freedom of speech only applies to freedom from government censorship.
Glenn Greenwald has resigned from The Intercept, a news organization he co-founded in 2014, because of its refusal to publish an article he wrote about Hunter and Joe Biden.
Ironically, the original idea behind The Intercept was that journalists would be able to write without editorial censorship of content.
I’ve long admired Greenwald and have read his writings since he was just a lawyer with his own WordPress blog. He is going back to being an individual blogger. Here are the first three posts on his new blog, plus The Intercept’s response.
The Extraordinary Pierre Omidyar by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine for MSFW Corp. [Added 10/30/2020] A 2013 article about the billionaire who bankrolled Greenwald and The Intercept.
The Aftermath of My Move Back to Independent Journalism by Glenn Greenwald. [Added 10/31/2020] Greenwald already is among the top 10 Substack bloggers in terms of number of subscribers. He took a big risk. His former employer not only paid him a six-figure salary, but provided security to protect him from kidnapping and assassination attempts—a real danger for him because he lives in Brazil and has fearlessly criticized its authoritarian government.
Ebay Founder Pierre Omidyar Is Funding a Global Media Information War by Alexander Rubenstein and Max Blumenthal for Mint Press News. [Added 11/1/2020] A 2019 article about The Intercept’s owner. This is bad stuff, but I doubt if Greenwald would have kept his independence if he had remained with The Guardian.
Last night I saw Citizenfour, the documentary movie about Edward Snowden. Laura Poitras, the maker of the documentary, never appears on camera, but, next to Snowden himself, she deserves the most credit for bringing his information to light. She understood that she had to adopt the same mentality and procedures as somebody in an earlier era operating behind the Iron Curtain.
Poitras lives in Berlin, Germany. The journalist Glenn Greenwald, who wrote most of the articles about the Snowden leaks, lives in Rio de Janeiro. Snowden had to flee to Hong Kong and then to Moscow. It is striking that these truth-tellers live outside the United States so as to be outside the reach of the U.S. government, while people who have committed actual crimes have nothing to fear.
The documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras was the key figure in bringing Edward Snowden’s information before the public. Glenn Greenwald is brave enough, but she was the one with the skills to evade the surveillance state. She is like the heroine of some dystopian science fiction novel about a totalitarian state of the future. This well-written, informative article is worth reading in its entirety.
Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who at one time was so close to the Bush family that George W. Bush nicknamed him “Bandar Bush,” flew to Moscow to offer to buy huge amounts of Russian weapons if the Russian government would withdraw its support for the Assad regime in Syria. As Pepe Escobar noted, this will never happen. Vladimir Putin would never tolerate Syria being taken over by radical jihadists, whose next target undoubtedly would be Chechnia, less than 600 miles away.
Three Serbian generals were acquitted of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia because they did not give orders for the atrocities committed by troops under their command.
An editorial writer said that the Theravada Buddhist clergy are governed by an autocratic system that tolerates corruption and misconduct but not dissent and reform. Accountability is needed, she wrote; one starting point would be for Thais to only contribute to temples with transparent accounting systems.
I was surprised to learn that “Messiah” is one of the 1.000 most common first names for newborn male babies in the United States. The Tennessee judge is out of line, but perhaps the parents could settle for naming their baby “Senator,” “Colonel,” “Professor” or “Doctor”.
President Obama has ordered the assassination of Anwar Awlaki, a Muslim cleric in Yemen who reportedly supports, and recruits for, al-Qaeda. He is a U.S. citizen, he has not been charged with any crime and his father has filed a lawsuit asking for a court injunction against his son being summarily killed. The Washington Post reported that the Department of Justice asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit without a hearing, on the grounds of “state secrets.”
If the President has the power to order American citizens killed with no due process, and to do so in such complete secrecy that no courts can even review his decisions, then what doesn’t he have the power to do?
What doesn’t the President have the power to do? He doesn’t have the power to take action on global climate change. He doesn’t have the power to enact a stimulus program sufficient to make a dent in 9 percent unemployment. He doesn’t have the power to carry on the routine business of government. He doesn’t have the power to get confirmation of appointments to key governmental positions or federal judgeships. The Federal Reserve Board lacks a quorum, key positions such as director of Office of Management and Budget are unfilled, and vacancies in federal judgeships go unfilled because the Republican minority in the Senate obstructs votes on confirmations.
The Republican Party leadership and the Tea Party faction say that requiring all Americans to buy health insurance is tyranny. But the Obama administration, even more than the Bush administration before it, gets a pass on actual acts of tyranny – torture, assassination, universal Big Brother-type surveillance of private citizens.
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