Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 142

Salon Radio: Michael Hastings

(updated below)

Yesterday I wrote about the U.S. military's decision to reverse its approval of Michael Hastings' application to embed with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, clearly in retaliation for the Rolling Stone article he published on Gen. McChrystal and the failing counter-insurgency strategy.  Hastings is my guest today on Salon Radio to discuss this episode and the broader issues it raises relating to embedding and war reporting. 

The discussion, which is roughly 20...

Obama's growing unpopularity in the Muslim world

In June, a Gallup poll revealed a substantial decline in public opinion in the Muslim world toward both the U.S. and Barack Obama personally, with approval ratings in many key nations collapsing to Bush-era levels.  Now, a new poll from the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution -- in conjunction with the University of Maryland and Zogby -- reveals many of the same developments and, in some cases, even worse ones.  The poll, taken during the first two weeks of July in six predominantly...

Re-visiting Project Vigilant

On Monday, I wrote about the expanding private surveillance industry and its relationship with the government, with a focus on something called Project Vigilant as one particularly troubling, illustrative example.  That group's Executive Director, Chet Uter, generated substantial media attention -- in Forbes, Wired and elsewhere -- by appearing at a Defcon conference this weekend and claiming, among other things, that it was he who put Adrian Lamo in touch with his contacts at the "highest...

Michael Hastings' embed permission is revoked

Stars & Stripes, December 18, 2009:

The nominee for the Pentagon's top public affairs job promised Thursday he will review Defense Department policies to ensure that journalists are not being denied embeds with combat troops based on the tenor of their reporting, a practice exposed by Stars and Stripes last summer.

Douglas Wilson, who is expected to be confirmed as the new assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that...

Crazy Muslim conspiracy theories

Politico's Laura Rozen points to this Times of India article, recounting how Rashad Hussain, the Obama administration's envoy to the Muslim world, was angered and "shocked" yesterday when -- as part of a tour of India to promote better relations with Muslims -- "the head of a city-based Muslim institution [Akhtar Hasan Rizvi:] slammed the US' policies, not just in the Middle East, but towards Muslims everywhere":

Rizvi held America responsible for many woes in the Muslim world. "You...

ACLU, CCR seek to have Obama enjoined from killing Awlaki without due process

A major legal challenge to one of the Obama administration's most radical assertions of executive power began this morning in a federal courthouse in Washington, DC.  Early last month, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights were retained by Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Obama assassination target (and U.S. citizen) Anwar al-Awlaki, to seek a federal court order restraining the Obama administration from killing his son without due process of law.  But then, a significant and...

NYT: Pervasive surveillance is a serious threat -- in China

Yesterday, I wrote about the proliferation of the private online surveillance industry, how it furnishes ever more thorough and invasive information to the U.S. Government about citizens' online activities, and why that destruction of privacy is so dangerous  My Salon colleague, Dan Gillmor, yesterday detailed just how comprehensive are the online surveillance capabilities which enable all of this.  Today, The New York Times confronts the same problem of privacy destruction at the hands of a ...

Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy

Forbes' technology writer Andy Greenberg reports that at the Defcon Security Conference yesterday, an individual named Chet Uber appeared with revelations about the case of accused WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning and government informant Adrian Lamo.  These revelations are both remarkable in their own right and, more important, highlighted some extremely significant, under-examined developments.  This is a somewhat complex story and it raises even more complex issues, but it is extremely...

This week in Change

(updated below)

I'm still away for the week working on my book, but in order to create a new comment section and to illustrate our political culture of Change, I'd like to note these three incidents from this week:

First, in Collapsing Empire News, the Democratic House -- not deterred or even slowed in the least by what the WikiLeak-ed documents revealed -- voted overwhelmingly to appropriate unconditionally another $37 billion for the war in Afghanistan while the political...

The WikiLeaks Afghanistan leak

The most consequential news item of the week will obviously be -- or at least should be -- the massive new leak by WikiLeaks of 90,000 pages of classified material chronicling the truth about the war in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2009.  Those documents provide what The New York Times calls "an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal."  The Guardian describes the documents as "a devastating portrait of the...