Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 61

The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties | Glenn Greenwald

The controversies over the IRS and especially the AP phone records appear to have long-lasting effects

Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ's attack on AP's news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record on civil liberties, transparency, press freedoms, and a whole variety of other issues on which he based his first campaign. The first two paragraphs of this Washington Post article from yesterday, expressed in t...

Justice Department's pursuit of AP's phone records is both extreme and dangerous | Glenn Greenwald

The claimed legal basis for these actions is unknown, but the threats they pose to a free press and the newsgathering process are clear

Associated Press on Monday revealed that the Department of Justice (DOJ) "secretly obtained two months of telephone records of [its] reporters and editors", denouncing it as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into the news gathering process. In a letter sent yesterday to Attorney General Eric Holder, AP's President, Gary Pruitt, detailed that the phone re...

Debating Bill Maher on Muslims, Islam and US foreign policy | Glenn Greenwald

The HBO host has become a leading advocate of the view that Islam is uniquely violent and threatening. Does that hold up under critical scrutiny?

Last night I was on Bill Maher's HBO show "Real Time". There have always been numerous views of Maher's with which I agree. But he has become one of the most vocal and extreme advocates of the view that - while religion generally should be criticized - Islam is a uniquely threatening and destructive force and that Muslims are uniquely oppressive and...

Attacks on Stephen Hawking, transparency for Manning, Obama's new lobbyist chief | Glenn Greenwald

Debates over Israel and activism in defense of transparency and journalism heat up this week

I'm traveling rather extensively this week - the last week of travel I have for quite some time, thankfully - so here are several brief items worthy of note:

(1) As the Guardian was the first to report, the physicist Stephen Hawking withdrew from "a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians." The resulting attacks on Hawking were...

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

The standard Beltway excuse to justify bad acts fails to explain the radically overbroad 2001 AUMF

Various senators are reportedly considering changes to the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) in light of how far beyond its scope US military action is now routinely deployed. That may seem like a welcome development, but as Marcy Wheeler notes, the officials involved and the "experts" on whom they're relying strongly suggest that any changes would entail expanding and broadening th...

Israeli bombing of Syria and moral relativism | Glenn Greenwald

No universally applied principle justifies the Israeli attack on Damascus. Only self-flattering tribalism does that

On Sunday, Israel dropped massive bombs near Damascus, ones which the New York Times, quoting residents, originally reported (then evidently deleted) resulted in explosions "more massive than anything the residents of the city. . . have witnessed during more than two years of war." The Jerusalem Post this morning quoted "a senior Syrian military source" as claiming that "Israel u...

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? | Glenn Greenwald

A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case

The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities...

The bad joke called 'the FISA court' shows how a 'drone court' would work | Glenn Greenwald

Newly released data show that the government submitted 1,789 eavesdropping requests last year, and none was rejected

(updated below)

In the mid-1970s, an investigation by the US Senate, conducted by the Church Committee, uncovered decades of serious, systemic abuse by the US government of its eavesdropping powers: listening in on the telephone calls of civil rights leaders, reading the mail of political opponents, spying on anti-war groups. The supposed lesson learned from this was that politic...

A young Yemeni writer on the impact and morality of drone-bombing his country | Glenn Greenwald

The 24-year-old Ibrahim Mothana speaks eloquently and insightfully about what the US is doing to his country. We should listen

Ibrahim Mothana is a 24-year-old Yemeni writer and activist. I first became aware of him when he wrote an extraordinary Op-Ed in the New York Times last year urging Americans to realize how self-destructive and counter-productive was Obama's escalating drone campaign in his country, writing:

Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radica...

Report: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's repeated requests for a lawyer were ignored | Glenn Greenwald

There is zero legal or ethical justification for denying a suspect in custody this fundamental right

(updated below - Update II [Tues.])

The initial debate over the treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev focused on whether he should be advised of his Miranda rights or whether the "public safety exception" justified delaying it. In the wake of news reports that he had been Mirandized and would be charged in a federal court, I credited the Obama DOJ for handling the case reasonably well thus far. As it t...