Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 90

The liberal betrayal of Bradley Manning

[Glenn Greenwald is on vacation this week and three writers will be filling in for him.]

By Charles Davis

More than three years into the presidency of Barack Obama, it's almost a cliché now to ask: What if George W. Bush did it? From dramatically escalating the war in Afghanistan to institutionalizing the practice of indefinite imprisonment, Obama has dashed hopes he would offer a change from the Bush's national security policies – but he hasn't faced a whole lot of resistance from liberals...

U.S.'s shameful Bahrain policy

[Glenn Greenwald is on vacation this week and three writers will be filling in for him]

By Murtaza Hussain

Behind the walls of a prison compound, the man who helped lead last year's pro-democracy protests in Bahrain is continuing a lonely, painful battle for freedom away from the media spotlight. Abdulhadi AlKhawaja has endured beatings, torture and a life sentence handed down from a military court, all for the "crime" of advocating human rights and democracy in his country. In response to...

Obama targets journalists

[Glenn Greenwald is on vacation this week and three writers will be filling in for him]

By Jesselyn Raddack

For two years I have been writing about the criminalization of whistleblowing, or as Glenn Greenwald has put it more aptly, the "war on whistleblowers."  I'm an attorney with the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower organization.

How did I get into this line of work?  Because I myself was a whistleblower when I worked as a Legal Advisor at the Justice...

This week

I'll be taking the week off from writing at Salon this week, both because I'm traveling to speak at events in Ottawa, Chicago and Washington, D.C. (event information here), and because it's time for a week off. I have arranged for three superb guests to write here in my place:

Murtaza Hussain: Murtaza wrote here the last time I took a week off. He's a Toronto-based writer and commentator on issues related to politics and foreign policy. His work has previously been featured in Salon, Al...

U.S. filmmaker repeatedly detained at border

One of the more extreme government abuses of the post-9/11 era targets U.S. citizens re-entering their own country, and it has received far too little attention. With no oversight or legal framework whatsoever, the Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them and questions them at the airport, often for hours, when they return to the U.S. after an international trip, and then copies and even seizes their electronic devices

Report: U.S. trained terror group

(updated below)

When the U.S. wants to fund, train, arm or otherwise align itself with a Terrorist group or state sponsor of Terror -- as it often does -- it at least usually has the tact to first remove them from its formal terrorist list (as the U.S. did when it wanted to support Saddam in 1982 and work with Libya in 2006), or it just keeps them off the list altogether despite what former Council on Foreign Relations writer Lionel Beehner described as "mounds of evidence that [they] at one t...

State-dominated media and Iran

The New York Times this morning is prominently featuring a long article documenting the Terroristic aggression of Iran, as evidenced by that country's attempts to exert influence and foment unrest in Afghanistan: because, as all decent people know, only tyrannical fanatics would attempt to interfere in Afghanistan (similarly, a couple months ago, President Obama and Secretary Clinton both sternly warned the rest of the world, particularly Iran, not to "interfere" or "meddle" in Iraq; they...

Interview with Rachel Maddow

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has a new book entitled Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, and it examines the recent history of America's policy of perpetual war and the reasons behind it. It's a much different book than a regular viewer of her cable news show would probably expect in that it examines American militarism without any real touchstone to a partisan prism. Her argument is grounded in a truly excellent discussion of the Founders' views of war and the reasons they sought...

The Obama DOJ and strip searches

Numerous progressive commentators are lambasting the Supreme Court for its 5-4 ruling yesterday in Florence v. Bd. of Chosen Freeholders, and rightfully so. The 5-judge conservative faction held that prison officials may strip-search anyone arrested even for the most minor offenses before admitting them to the general population of a jail or prison, even in the absence of a shred of suspicion that they are carrying weapons or contraband. The plaintiff in this case had been erroneously...

Lawsuit filed over discriminatory immigration law

Five legally married, "bi-national" same-sex couples -- one spouse is a U.S. citizen and the other a foreign national -- filed a lawsuit yesterday in federal court seeking the right to live together in the United States. The right of American citizens to have their chosen spouse live with them in the U.S.  is more or less automatically granted when the spouse is of the opposite sex: once evidence is submitted attesting to the authenticity of the marriage, the Immigration and Naturalization...