Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 48

Maybe Obama’s Sanctions on Venezuela are Not Really About His “Deep Concern” Over Suppression of Political Rights

The White House on Monday announced the imposition of new sanctions on various Venezuelan officials, pronouncing itself “deeply concernedby the Venezuelan government’s efforts to escalate intimidation of its political opponents”:deeply concerned. President Obama also, reportedly with a straight face, officially declaredthat Venezuela poses “anextraordinary threat to the national security” of the U.S. —a declaration necessary to legally justify the sanctions.

Today, one of the Obama administra...

The Parties’ Role Reversal on “Interfering” with the Commander-in-Chief’s Foreign Policy

Senate Republicans, obsessed as always with carrying out the agenda of the Israeli government and leading the U.S. into more militarism and war, yesterdaywrote a letter to “the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” designed to derail aninternational agreement governing that country’s nuclear program.Numerous leading Democrats — in Congress and the media — are today using the language of criminality, sedition and even treason to denounce that letter, insisting that it is a violation of Amer...

The Parties’ Role Reversal on ‘Interfering’ with the Commander-in-Chief’s Foreign Policy

Senate Republicans, obsessed as always with carrying out the agenda of the Israeli government and leading the U.S. into more militarism and war, yesterdaywrote a letter to “the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” designed to derail aninternational agreement governing that country’s nuclear program.Numerous leading Democrats – in Congress and the media – are today using the language of criminality, sedition and even treason to denounce that letter, insisting that it is a violation of Amer...

New Zealand Prime Minister Retracts Vow To Resign if Mass Surveillance Is Shown

In August, 2013, as evidenceemergedof the active participation by New Zealand in the “Five Eyes” mass surveillance program exposed by Edward Snowden, the country’s conservative Prime Minister, John Key, vehemently denied that his government engages in such spying. He went beyond mere denials, expressly vowing to resign if it were ever proven that his government engages in mass surveillance of New Zealanders. He issued that denial, and the accompanying resignation vow, in order to re-assure th...

The “Snowden is Ready to Come Home!” Story: a Case Study in Typical Media Deceit

Most sentient people rationally accept that the U.S. media routinely disseminates misleading stories and outright falsehoods in the mostauthoritative tones.Butit’s nonetheless valuable to examine particularly egregious case studies to see how that works. In that spirit, let’s take yesterday’s numerous, breathless reportstrumpeting the “BREAKING”newsthat “Edward Snowden now wants to come home!” and is “now negotiating the terms of his return!”

Ever since Snowden revealed himself to the public 2...

UK Media Regulator Again Threatens RT for “Bias”: This Time, Airing “Anti-Western Views”

In 2001, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth IIused the occasion ofthe annual “Queen’s Speech” to unveila new statutory proposal to regulate allmedia operatinginher realm, one provision of which was the creation of the “Office of Communications” (Ofcom) to monitor and punish television outlets which exhibit “bias.” In 2008, the BBC heraldedthe Queen’s Speech as “one of the high points of the parliamentary calendar, unrivalled in its spectacle and tradition,” as the monarch “delivers the speech from t...

Clapper Calls for Arming Ukrainian Forces: Who Would That Actually Empower?

It’s easy to forget that just two years ago, President Obama was determined to bomb Syria and remove the Assad regime, and U.S. establishment institutions were working to laythe groundwork for that campaign. NPR began dutifully publishing reports from anonymous U.S. officials that Syria had stockpiled large amounts of chemical weapons; theNYTwas reporting that Obama was “increasing aid to the rebels and redoubling efforts to rally a coalition of like-minded countries to forcibly bring down” A...

Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?

The FBI and major media outletsyesterdaytrumpeted the agency’slatest counter-terrorism triumph: the arrest of three Brooklyn men, ages 19 to 30, on charges of conspiring to travel to Syria tofight forISIS (photo of joint FBI/NYPD press conference, above). As my colleague Murtaza Hussain ably documents,“it appears that none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant.” One of thefrightening terrorist villainstold the FBI inf...

Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails in Secret Security Sweep

Canada’s electronic surveillance agency is covertly monitoring vast amounts of Canadians’ emails as part of a sweeping domestic cybersecurity operation, according to top-secret documents.

The surveillance initiative, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, is sifting through millions of emails sent to Canadian government agencies and departments, archiving details about them on a database for months or even years.

The data mining operation is carried out by the Commu...

Hailed as a Model for Successful Intervention, Libya Proves to be the Exact Opposite

When Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003 by U.S. forces, Iraq War advocates boastfully celebrated the event as proof that they were right and used it to mock war opponents (Joe Lieberman and John Kerry, for instance,gleefully exploited the event to demand that Howard Dean admit his war opposition was wrong). WhenMuammar Gaddafi wasforced by NATO bombing in August, 2011 to flee Tripoli, advocates of U.S. intervention played the same game(ThinkProgress gleefully exploited the occasionto try to...