The whistleblowers are winning

I'll say it again: I have yet to hear any American say, "I wish I didn't know about the NSA's spying on us."  And if more and more Americans are turning against the NSA's domestic spying, then that means the whistleblowers are winning:

Meanwhile, Snowden and Glenn Greenwald and Wikileaks are winning. At the outset Snowden said his biggest fear was that people would see "the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society and that 'nothing will change'". But his disclosures have already created a new debate, and political change will follow. 

Two weeks ago there was a surprisingly close call in the US House of Representatives, with the majority of House Democrats and 94 of 234 Republicans defying their House (and Senate) leadership, the White House, and the national security establishment in a vote to end the NSA's mass collection of phone records. The amendment was narrowly defeated by a vote of 205 to 217, but it was clear that "this is only the beginning," as John Conyers (D-MI), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee announced. 

A week later Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Democratic Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called a hearing where he challenged the Obama administration's claims that the NSA dragnet had been effective in disrupting terrorist plots. According to Leahy, the classified list that he had been shown of "terrorist events" did not show that "dozens or even several terrorist plots" had been thwarted by the NSA's surveillance of domestic phone calls.

It is beginning to sink in that the main target of the NSA's massive spying programmes is not terrorism but the American people themselves (as well as other non-terrorist populations throughout the world). 

Weisbrot sums it up with a few provocative questions:

And as Washington threatens to worsen relations with Russia - which together with the United States has most of the nuclear weapons in the world - over Snowden's asylum there, it's hard not to wonder about this fanatical pursuit of someone Obama dismissed as a "29-year-old hacker". Is it because he out-smarted a multi-billion dollar "intelligence community" of people who think they are really very smart but are now looking rather incompetent? 

If Snowden really leaked information that harmed US national security, why haven't any of these "really very smart" people been fired? Are we to believe that punishing this whistleblower is important enough to damage relations with other countries and put at risk all kinds of foreign policy goals, but the breach of security isn't enough for anyone important to be fired? Or is this another indication, like thegenerals telling Obama what his options were in Afghanistan, of the increasing power of the military/national security apparatus over our elected officials?

It's another matter that whistleblowers and journalists themselves may suffer personally for their revelations.  For their suffering for the sake of our liberty we can only thank them.

UPDATE (08.11.2013): Julian Assange called Obama's decision to reform Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act a victory for Edward Snowden, despite Obama's denials that it has anything to do with Snowden. Yeah, right.

Snowden, Greenwald and Wikileaks are winning

By Mark Weisbrot

August 7, 2013 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/08/201387957162873.html

Taibbi: All journalists are 'advocacy journalists'

Yes, yes, yes!  Taibbi makes a great point about "objective" journalists, in the context of Glenn Greenwald's scoops on the NSA domestic spying story [emphasis mine]:

... because all reporters are advocates. If we're only talking about people like Glenn Greenwald, who are open about their advocacy, that's a crazy thing to say. People should be skeptical of everything they read. In fact, people should be more skeptical of reporters who claim not to be advocates, because those people are almost always lying, whether they know it or not.

[...] That's what makes this new debate about Greenwald and advocacy journalism so insidious. Journalists of all kinds have long enjoyed certain legal protections, and those protections are essential to a functioning free press. The easiest way around those protections is simply to declare some people "not journalists." Ten years ago, I would have thought the idea is crazy, but now any journalist would be nuts not to worry about it. Who are these people to decide who's a journalist and who isn't? Is there anything more obnoxious than a priesthood?

Journalists are supposed to be fair, not objective.  "Objectivity" is impossible, so let's not set the bar there.  I would much rather have a journalist be honest with me about his convictions (aka biases), then I can filter his reporting as I like, instead of looking for his "hidden" messages.  

This is similar, yet also unrelated, to my personal practice of prefacing any discussion of politics with strangers with, "I'm a big lefty liberal who voted for Obama twice."  Why do I do that?  Because why not?  It's the truth, and I have nothing to hide.  Surprisingly, things go much better after that.  At least my interlocutor knows where I'm coming from.  Then it's all about the merit or weight of my arguments.  Plus people just appreciate honesty.  People are funny that way.  

Hey, MSM: All Journalism is Advocacy Journalism

By Matt Taibbi

June 27, 2013 | Rolling Stone

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/hey-msm-all-journalism-is-advocacy-journalism-20130627

Greenwald: Dems are hypocrites on NSA spying

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the Snowden-NSA story, is right: many Democrats and liberals are being hypocritical in defending Obama's vast program of spying on innocent Americans without probable cause, totally trashing the 4th Amendment and any semblance of privacy we had left.

For stark evidence of how a majority of Democrats have flip-flopped on whether they like the NSA spying on them, Greenwald offers us two Pew polls, one during Dubya's reign and one this month:

P.S. -- Respect to Yahoo, who, according to the New York Times, went to court to fight the PRISM program directive to turn over its users' info to the NSA.  Yahoo lost.

On PRISM, partisanship and propaganda

By Glenn Greenwald

June 14, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3gt5x

Greenwald: Elites debate, Is AUMF awesome or totally awesome?

Here's how Greenwald sums up the "Dr. Strangelove" absurdity of the AUMF hearings in Congress, and the thinktank-media-judicial-political elite that wants to keep and expand it:

Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.

In response to that, the only real movement in Congress is to think about how to enact a new law to expand the authorization even further. But it's a worthless and illusory debate, affecting nothing other than the pretexts and symbols used to justify what will, in all cases, be a permanent and limitless war. The Washington AUMF debate is about nothing other than whether more fig leafs are needed to make it all pretty and legal.

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence - Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class - clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it. That will continue unless and until Americans begin to realize just what a mammoth price they're paying for this ongoing splurge of war spending and endless aggression.

Like I said, Congress ought to have thought twice before it handed the Executive branch carte blanche and an undated, blank check to wage war on anybody all over the globe...including at home.  And we citizens should have been screaming at our Congress for years now.

Washington gets explicit: its 'war on terror' is permanent

By Glenn Greenwald

May 17, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3fqqb

Greenwald: 434 wrongs don't make a right

Glenn Greenwald implores us to remember Rep. Barbara Lee's lonely "no" vote in Congress in 2001, just three days after 9/11, when cooler heads unfortunately did not prevail.  

Here's her speech on 9/14 explaining her vote; you can clearly hear her holding back her tears in the beginning:

All too predictably, she suffered for being right in a time when everybody wanted to be wrong.  

A Washington Times op-ed said she was "a long-practicing supporter of America's enemies - from Fidel Castro on down." 

Conservative activist David Horowitz said, "Barbara Lee is not an anti-war activist, she is an anti-American communist who supports America's enemies and has actively collaborated with them in their war against America."

Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin called her "treacherous."

Glenn Greenwald notes that Lee "was deluged with so many death threats that she was given around-the-clock police protection."

Let's learn from Barbara Lee's profile in courage and not repeat past mistakes. We mustn't get involved militarily in Syria!

Barbara Lee and Dick Durbin's 'nobody-could-have-known' defense

By Glenn Greenwald

May 7, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3fk37

Greenwald: Constitution doesn't stop at U.S. border

All you so-called constitutional conservatives and Paulites, here's what the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1957 on the question of whether the U.S. Government is obligated to follow the Constitution beyond its borders:

At the beginning, we reject the idea that, when the United States acts against citizens abroad, it can do so free of the Bill of Rights. The United States is entirely a creature of the Constitution.  Its power and authority have no other source. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution. When the Government reaches out to punish a citizen who is abroad, the shield which the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution provide to protect his life and liberty should not be stripped away just because he happens to be in another land.

This goes for all our constitutional rights:

This Court and other federal courts have held or asserted that various constitutional limitations apply to the Government when it acts outside the continental United States. While it has been suggested that only those constitutional rights which are 'fundamental' protect Americans abroad, we can find no warrant, in logic or otherwise, for picking and choosing among the remarkable collection of 'Thou shalt nots' which were explicitly fastened on all departments and agencies of the Federal Government by the Constitution and its Amendments. Moreover, in view of our heritage and the history of the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it seems peculiarly anomalous to say that trial before a civilian judge and by an independent jury picked from the common citizenry is not a fundamental right. . . . Trial by jury in a court of law and in accordance with traditional modes of procedure after an indictment by grand jury has served and remains one of our most vital barriers to governmental arbitrariness. These elemental procedural safeguards were embedded in our Constitution to secure their inviolateness and sanctity against the passing demands of expediency or convenience.

Glenn Greenwald makes clear the absurdity of contrary claims by neocons and Obama admin. officials:

[D]oes anyone think it would be constitutionally permissible under the First Amendment for the US government to wait until an American critic of the Pentagon travels on vacation to London and then kill him, or to bomb a bureau of the New York Times located in Paris in retaliation for a news article it disliked [Republicans would celebrate in the streets! - J] , or to indefinitely detain with no trial an American who travels to Beijing or Lima or Oslo and who is suspected of committing a crime? 

Charles Krauthammer's false statement about the US Constitution

By Glenn Greenwald

March 15, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3ef4e