Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 146

The administration defends its assassination program

In the wake of Leon Panetta's public defense of the targeting of American citizens suspected (but never charged or convicted) of Terrorism, Obama officials are now apparently going around the country and, with chest-beating rhetoric, overtly defending their right to target Americans for assassination with no due process of any kind:

"If someone like Anwar al-Awlaki is responsible" for part of a plot "to kill more than 300 people over the city of Detroit," [director of the National...

The odiousness of the distorted Godwin's Law

(updated below - Update II)

Responding to the neocon objections to my post on the universality of war-justifying propaganda, Kevin Drum writes that it's "time to repeal Godwin's Law" -- at least the distorted version which purports to prohibit all comparisons to German crimes -- labeling it an "an endlessly tiresome way of feigning moral indignation."  Kevin adds:  "WWII analogies are extremely useful because they're familiar to almost everyone."  I agree:  the very notion that a ...

New study documents media's servitude to government

(updated below)

A newly released study from students at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials.  This new study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by America's four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as "torture" -...

New study documents media's servitude to Government

A newly released study from students at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials.  This new study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by America's four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as "torture" -- until the U.S. Government...

The universality of war propaganda

Jeffrey Goldberg responded yesterday to my post detailing his long list of journalistic malfeasance by telling me that he and the Prime Minister of Iraqi Kuridstan would like me to travel there to hear how much the Kurds appreciate the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  Leaving aside the complete non sequitur that is his response -- how does that remotely pertain to Goldberg's granting of anonymity to his friends to smear people they don't like or the serial fear-mongering fabrications he spread about t...

Fun and games with the "terrorism" label

(updated below)

I've written numerous times about how "terrorism" is the most meaningless and most manipulated word in the political lexicon; the best demonstration of this dynamic is the work of NYU's Remi Brulin, whose dissertation documents how Western governments and media outlets have applied the term so inconsistently and self-servingly.  One of the principal dangers of the Supreme Court's recent, free-speech-deciminating decision in Humanitarian Law Project -- which held...

Salon Radio: Mac McClelland on BP's blocking of media coverage

Mac McClelland is a Mother Jones reporter who has been providing some of the nation's best on-the-scene coverage of the BP oil spill from the day the rig collapsed more than two months ago.  She has been particularly tenacious about chronicling the joint BP/government efforts to block media coverage of both the spill and the inadequate clean-up efforts.  Last week, she reported on a truly disturbing incident where a local police officer first warned an environmental activist not to film near ...

The two poles of journalism

With his Rolling Stone article on Gen. McChrystal, Michael Hastings has become both the personification of, and spokesperson for, Real Journalism, and as a result, has provoked intense animosity from establishment-serving "reporters" everywhere.  He apparently committed the gravest sin:  he exposed and embarrassed rather than flattered and protected a powerful government official, and in our upside-down media culture, doing that is a sign of irresponsibility rather than fulfillment of the...

The Jeffrey Goldberg Media

In a stunning display of self-unawareness, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg pointed to last week's forced "resignation" by Dave Weigel from The Washington Post as evidence that the Post, "in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training."  Goldberg then solemnly expressed hope that "this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards."  Numerous commentators

The Jeffrey Goldberg media

In a stunning display of self-unawareness, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg pointed to last week's forced "resignation" by Dave Weigel from The Washington Post as evidence that the Post, "in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training."  Goldberg then solemnly expressed hope that "this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards."  Numerous commentators