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5 posts tagged glenn greenwald
thesheeportheshepherd says:
What has Wikileaks revealed besides gossip?
I don’t necessarily support everything Wikileaks is doing, but Glenn Greenwald has put together a list of some of the stories it has revealed that would be major news stories in their own right, in contrast with the mainstream media message that we already knew everything in the documents and that the cables were just “gossip.”
(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA’s kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA’s torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch today about this: “The day Barack Obama Lied to me”);
(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War “investigation”;
(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
(6) “American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world” about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post’s own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
(7) the U.S.’s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal — a coup — but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;
(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,
(9) Hillary Clinton’s State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.
(10) The US essentially approved the military coup that toppled democratically elected Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and instated a more business-friendly monarchy on September 19, 2006, while publicly distancing itself from the takeover
That’s just a sampling.
This is what Joe Lieberman and his comrades are desperately trying to suppress — literally prevent it from being accessible on the Internet. And “journalists” like Capehart play along by continuing to insist there’s “nothing new” being revealed by WikiLeaks despite their never having reported any of this. And since the disclosures, does anyone believe that any of these revelations have received anything close to meaningful attention by the American establishment media? But remember — as Capehart’s newspaper taught us today — “revelations by the organization WikiLeaks have received blanket coverage this week on television, in newspapers” in Free America — showing what a Vibrant, Adversarial Press we are blessed with — but “in many Arab countries, the mainstream media have largely avoided reporting on the sensitive contents of the cables.”
Source salon.com
Reblogged from whipporwill-deactivated20111220
Democracy Now: Glenn Greenwald on the Julian Assange Arrest
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That’s really the only relevant question: how much longer will Americans sit by passively and watch as a tiny elite become more bloated, more powerful, greedier, more corrupt and more unaccountable — as the little economic security, privacy and freedom most citizens possess vanish further still?
The answer, unfortunately, is probably this: a lot longer. And one primary reason is that our media-shaped political discourse is so alternatively distracted and distorted that even shining light on all of this matters little. The New York Times’ Peter Baker had a good article this weekend on how totally inconsequential squabbles dominate the news more or less continuously: last week’s riveting drama was the bickering between the White House and Nancy Pelosi over Robert Gibbs’ warning that Democratic control of the House was endangered. Baker quotes Democratic strategist Chris Lehane as follows: “Politics in D.C. have become Seinfeldesque. Fights about nothing.”
“But the U.S. media’s willingness to mindlessly apply the term “terrorist” in exactly the subjective, self-serving way the U.S. Government dictates — starkly contrasted with their refusal to use the far more objective term ”torture” on the ground that the term is in dispute (i.e., disputed by the U.S. Government torturers) — illustrates the establishment media’s principal function: to serve American political power and justify whatever our government does. That’s a major reason — perhaps the primary one — why the U.S. Government has been able to get away with everything it’s done over the last decade. Those unseen victims of torture, rendition, indefinite detention and other government crimes are all just “terrorists,” so who cares? In reporting on these convictions, CNN immediately and helpfully proclaims Nasr to be a “suspected terrorist” in a way that guts any meaningful definition of that term and — in many minds — justifies whatever was done to him, no matter how illegal. It’s worth asking this question: which sounds more like actual “terrorism”: (a) kidnapping people literally off the street and shipping them thousands of miles away to be tortured with no legal process, or (b) what Nasr is “suspected” of having done?”
The Art of Language
Reblogged from “Throughout the Bush years, those who said patently true things were continuously dismissed as fringe, conspiracy-driven leftist-losers: those who questioned whether Saddam really had WMDs; those who argued that the invasion of Iraq would lead to long-term military bases in that country; those who worried that warrantless eavesdropping and Patriot Act powers would lead to abuses; those who opposed the war in Afghanistan on the ground that it would be drag on for years with no resolution, etc. etc. Having been proven right about all of those things hasn’t changed perceptions any at all.”
