And what better venue to denounce your accusers than the communist Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, which is the most anti-American news outlet this side of MSNBC?
The occasion for Greenwald's cries and accusations is the launch of his much-touted, Pierre Omidyar-backed media venture, "The Intercept."
They've got three pieces up at the website, which launched today: "Welcome to The Intercept"; "New Photos of the NSA and Other Top Intelligence Agencies Revealed for First Time"; and "The NSA's Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program." (At Memeorandum.)
Both Greenwald and partner Jeremy Scahill stress the intense urgency of getting their Omidyar-backed media project off the ground as soon as possibly, purportedly in order to mount an aggressive push-back against what Greenwald calls the "criminalization of journalism."
The problem, of course, is that their program's in fact cyberterrorism disguised under the cloak of journalism, and is thus arguably shielded by the First Amendment protections afforded to those who speak out against U.S. power.
The next problem, obviously, is that Greenwald's patent panoply of lies is pathetically enabled by a virtually unified left-wing partisan press that has continued its work of tearing down the United States since at least 2003 and the Bush administration's enforcement of the 1991 U.N.-backed armistice against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Recall that the entire mountain of lies surrounding Greenwald, his husband David Miranda, and the latter's intelligence-running to Berlin-based activist Laura Poitras, came crashing down under the withering and dogged reporting of blogger and columnist Louise Mensch. The facts are not in dispute. It's only Greenwald et al.'s disgusting and insipid spin that has worked to obscure the true scale of criminality here. Louise has the goods, at the Telegraph UK, "David Miranda detention: Why I believe the Guardian has smeared Britain's security services," and at Unfashionista, "David Miranda – Snowden’s Mule, and physical data," where she writes:
Look, boys and girls, you hold politicians to account, hold YOUR OWN to account too. No fear no favour – stop turning a blind eye and swallowing the spin so uncritically.Read it all at the link.
Ask yourselves this damned obvious question. If the data was copied everywhere and it didn’t matter, why is Rusbridger talking about “copies in New York and Rio”?
Why is David Miranda carrying it on encrypted thumb drives?
Why is David Miranda acting as a go-between at all?
Haven’t Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenberg and the Guardian heard of Dropbox? Or P2P filesharing sites? There are a million ways to store locked data in the cloud.
Let’s review:
He was returning to their home in Rio de Janeiro when he was stopped at Heathrow and officials confiscated electronics equipment, including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.This Guardian quote does not say “rolls of film… written notebooks” etc. It describes only electronic storage devices for data. They could have saved David Miranda “He is my partner, he is not a journalist” ‘s ticket price and expenses by, you know, storing all that in the cloud or shipping it via FedEx.
Glenn Greenwald to the New York Times:
Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden.But Miranda and Poitras used a human mule (if indeed we believe him, I absolutely don’t, that he didn’t know what he was carrying).
Why?
Yes, I realise I’m asking journalists to ask hard questions about another journalist and they like to keep those for people outside their club. Thank goodness for blogging and Twitter – and the smashing of big media’s gatekeeping hold on information.
Ask yourselves if Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras, are actively assisting Edward Snowden in his treacherous dissemination of classified, incredibly sensitive US and UK intelligence? From where I’m sitting, it looks like an attempt to fight charges in advance – by claiming that they are journalists and everything they do is covered by the First Amendment. Hence the New York Times putting Poitras on the cover of its magazine supplement this week and Greenwald’s repeated lies about the role of his husband and the events and aftermath of the detention to British journalists, unchallenged anywhere in the UK press, until I started tweeting about it & wrote my last blog on the topic.
They hope that claiming a journalistic role will protect them when they are stealing, storing and disseminating classified intel about not just NSA snooping but America’s intelligence programmes against China, Russia and so forth. They are, in doing so, risking countless lives. So are the Guardian newspaper. As Malcom Rifkind said countering BBC bias yesterday on the Today programme, the Guardian had no right to store that stolen intelligence or to report even on GCHQ data collection (legal, not illegal, data collection). As he said, the Guardian’s angle was the GCHQ could legally penetrate comms in a deeper way than was known – and of course the Guardian let Al Qaeda and others know that, meaning that terrorists will start protecting their communications. Some terrorists are sophisticated – others, like many extremist Islamist cells, are not. The latter have been warned off by the Guardian from ways that UK spooks were tracking them.
As Louise notes, "If Obama were Bush, the U.S. media would be all over" this --- from the failure to prevent Edward Snowden's treasonous pilfering of top-secret intelligence, to the criminal dissemination of vital data on all aspects of the U.S. national security regime, including most diabolically the release of confidential information identifying human assets in American and British governmental organizations, putting lives gravely at risk.
BONUS: There's some background on the launch from Lloyd Grove, at the Daily Beast, "Welcome to Glenn Greenwald, Inc.?"
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