Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 78

The Bin Laden raid exposes the Obama administration's selective secrecy | Glenn Greenwald

The White House punishes whistleblowers even as it permits flattering leaks. So which will it be for a Navy Seal's new book?

Earlier this year, the Obama administration responded to a lawsuit seeking videos and photographs of the Osama bin Laden raid by claiming (as usual) that it was all too secret to disclose. A federal court (as usual) acquiesced to those assertions and dismissed the suit, finding that "the release of the images and/or videos 'reasonably could be expected to cause exception...

The bizarre, unhealthy, blinding media contempt for Julian Assange | Glenn Greenwald

It is possible to protect the rights of the complainants in Sweden and Assange's rights against political persecution, but a vindictive thirst for vengeance is preventing that

Earlier this week, British lawyer and legal correspondent for the New Statesman David Allen Green generated a fair amount of attention by announcing that he would use his objective legal expertise to bust what he called "legal myths about the Assange extradition." These myths, he said, are being irresponsibly spread by A...

Nationalists promote their agenda by masquerading as rights advocates | Glenn Greenwald

The media's new converts to civic freedom over the Pussy Riot and Assange asylum affairs show a jingoism blind to US abuses

Readers of the American and British press over the past month have been inundated with righteous condemnations of Ecuador's poor record on press freedoms. Is this because western media outlets have suddenly developed a new-found devotion to defending civil liberties in Latin America? Please. To pose the question is to mock it.

It's because feigning concern for these oppre...

US drone strikes target rescuers in Pakistan – and the west stays silent | Glenn Greenwald

Attacking rescuers – a tactic long deemed by the US a hallmark of terrorism – is now routinely used by the Obama administration

The US government has long maintained, reasonably enough, that a defining tactic of terrorism is to launch a follow-up attack aimed at those who go to the scene of the original attack to rescue the wounded and remove the dead. Morally, such methods have also been widely condemned by the west as a hallmark of savagery. Yet, as was demonstrated yet again this weekend in...

Last day at Salon

After 5 1/2 great years, today is my last day atSalon. As I noted several weeks ago, I'm joining The Guardian, and will start there this Monday, August 20. Beginning on that date, you can find my column here. Thanks to everyone at Salonand to my readers for making my time here so enjoyable.

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The sham “terrorism expert” industry

Shortly prior to the start of the London Olympics, there was an outburst of hysteria over the failure to provide sufficient security against Terrorism, but as Harvard Professor Stephen Walt noted yesterday in Foreign Policy, this was all driven, as usual, by severe exaggerations of the threat: "Well, surprise, surprise. Not only was there no terrorist attack, the Games themselves came off rather well." Walt then urges this lesson be learned:

[W]e continue to over-react to the "terrorist threat...

Secrecy creep

That the Obama administration has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers is by now well-known and well-documented, as is its general fixation on not just maintaining but increasingeven the most extreme and absurd levels of secrecy. Unsurprisingly, this ethos -- that the real criminals are those who expose government wrongdoing, not those who engage in that wrongdoing -- now pervades lower levels of the Executive Branch as well.

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NBC’s war for fun and profit

(updated below - Update II)

A new military-themed reality show from NBC, entitled "Stars Earn Stripes," debuts tonight. The show "enthusiastically melds warfare and fame," as a Washington Post review today put it.It features eight celebrities (using the loosest definition of that term) -- such as husband-of-Sarah Todd Palin, former Superman Dean Cain, and former boy band member Nick Lachey -- paired up with "military and law enforcement veterans, including a Green Beret, a SWAT officer, two Ma...

The Right’s brittle heroes

(updated below)

The contrast between (a) how Paul Ryan is depicted by worshipful Republicans and media figures alike -- as a principled fiscal conservative and advocate of Randian self-sufficiency -- and the reality of what he's done in his life is as stark as it is typical. The American Right has an amazing ability to lionize leaders whose lives are the precise antithesis of the political values that define their image.

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Combating Islamophobic violence

(updated below)

Shortly after the Islamic Society of Joplin openeda mosque in 2007 in Joplin, a small town in Southwest Missouri, the sign in front was set on fire, an actdetermined to be arson. On the 4th of July of this year, someone who is undoubtedly a deeply patriotic person was filmed by a surveillance camera throwing a flaming object onto the roof of the mosque in an attempt to burn it down, causing some fire damage (see the video below); despite a $15,000 reward offered by the FBI for...