Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 145

Octavia Nasr's firing and what The Liberal Media allows

(updated below)

CNN yesterday ended the 20-year career of Octavia Nasr, its Atlanta-based Senior Middle East News Editor, because of a now-deleted tweet she wrote on Sunday upon learning of the death of one of the Shiite world's most beloved religious figures: "Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah  . . . . One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot."  That message spawned an intense fit of protest from Far Right outlets, Thought Crime enforcers, and...

Octavia Nasr's firing and what the liberal media allows

(updated below)

CNN yesterday ended the 20-year career of Octavia Nasr, its Atlanta-based Senior Middle East News Editor, because of a now-deleted tweet she wrote on Sunday upon learning of the death of one of the Shiite world's most beloved religious figures: "Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah  . . . . One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot."  That message spawned an intense fit of protest from Far Right outlets, Thought Crime enforcers, and...

Adventures in media transparency

Journalists like to claim that they are devoted to transparency, but it's striking how so many of them exempt themselves and their own media outlets from those "principles."  Here are five recent, somewhat similar episodes illustrating that syndrome:

(1) On Monday, I noted that this Associated Press article twice used the word "torture" to describe what the Chinese Government did to Xue Feng, an American geologist now convicted of obtaining China's "state secrets."  AP used the word...

Rules of America's rule of law

The U.S. today charged Bradley Manning with a variety of crimes relating to his alleged leaks of classified material to WikiLeaks, most prominently including the Apache attack video that spawned worldwide debate over the American occupation.  The 22-year-old whistle-blower faces 52 years in prison.  Marcy Wheeler has interesting analysis of the charges, including some contradictions with the account previously offered by Wired, and I'll have more on this shortly, but for now, I just wanted...

The crux of our endless War on Terror

As I wrote last week, the Obama administration finally purported to defend its presidential assassination program aimed at American citizens, when Obama's Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, offered patently misleading claims to justify it.  Yesterday, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff posed several good questions to Leiter about this program and the "War on Terror" generally -- several of which are themes raised often here -- and Leiter's responses compellingly...

The BP/Government police state

(updated below)

Last week, I interviewed Mother Jones' Mac McClelland, who has been covering the BP oil spill in the Gulf since the first day it happened.  She detailed how local police and federal officials work with BP to harass, impede, interrogate and even detain journalists who are covering the impact of the spill and the clean-up efforts.  She documented one incident which was particularly chilling of an activist who -- after being told by a local police officer to stop...

AP owes China an apology

(updated below - Update II)

From an Associated Press article today on the conviction in China of an American citizen accused of spying and collecting "state secrets":

BEIJING – An American geologist held and tortured by China's state security agents was sentenced to eight years in prison Monday for gathering data on the Chinese oil industry in a case that highlights the government's use of vague secrets laws to restrict business information.

In pronouncing Xue Feng...

Bill Keller's self-defense on "torture"

(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV [Sunday:])

In response to the Harvard study documenting how newspapers labeled waterboarding as "torture" for almost 100 years until the Bush administration told them not to, The New York Times issued a statement justifying this behavior on the ground that it did not want to take sides in the debate.  Andrew Sullivan, Greg Sargent and all pointed out that "taking a side" is precisely what the NYT did:  by dutifully...

A cycle of stupidity

(updated below - Update II)

RNC Chairman Michael Steele today lashed out at President Obama by saying:  "if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?"  Of course it's absurd for Steele to voice that criticism without mentioning that it is his own Party which started that war and waged it for 8 years -- as well as the fact that virtually every Congressional member of his Party...

Charles Krauthammer's propaganda

(updated below)

It's anything but news that Charles Kruathammer is a rank propagandist, but his column today is particularly egregious, though quite illustrative of how these issues are discussed.  He lambastes the Obama administration for what he calls its "absurd and embarrassing refusal . . . to acknowledge who out there is trying to kill Americans and why."  Krauthammer -- needless to say and for reasons too obvious to require explanation -- wants to claim that the True Cause ...