Tag Archives: greenwald

Julian Assange Didn’t Say WikiLeaks Gives Russia a Pass Because It’s Already Open and Transparent

by Essie46Beeht Posted on December 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Readers who are extremely long in the tooth will remember a blogger named Steven Den Beste from back in the day. He was a gung-ho warblogger who wrote very long, very nerdy pieces about the urgent need to invade Iraq (with occasional forays into cell phone standards), so one day Daniel Davies decided that what we all needed was Shorter Steven Den Beste. Davies’ version was usually a withering sentence or two.

Today, things have changed. I can think of all too many folks who could stand to cut their word count in half, but for now I’d settle for Shorter Glenn Greenwald. Yesterday he wrote this:

The Guardian’s Summary of Julian Assange’s Interview Went Viral and Was Completely False

According to Microsoft Word, the article clocks in at 2,645 words, so here’s the nickel version. A few days ago Julian Assange gave an interview to Italian reporter Stefania Maurizi. (It is illustrated with the photo on the right, which I hope they don’t mind me re-using since it makes me like Assange a little better than I usually do.) Here are the relevant sections:

Most of WikiLeaks’ biggest revelations concern the US military-industrial complex….Why aren’t human rights abuses producing the same effects in regimes like China or Russia, and what can be done to democratise information in those countries?

In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as Alexey Navalny are part of that spectrum…..In Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks, and no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian….WikiLeaks is a predominantly English-speaking organisation with a website predominantly in English. We have published more than 800,000 documents about or referencing Russia and president Putin, so we do have quite a bit of coverage, but the majority of our publications come from Western sources….The real determinant is how distant that culture is from English.

….What about Donald Trump?…What do you think he means?

Hillary Clinton’s election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States. Donald Trump is not a DC insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilising the pre-existing central power network within DC. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better.

The Guardian’s piece, written by Ben Jacobs, made several claims: (1) Assange “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime,” (2) Assange said there was no need for WikiLeaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia “because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there,” and (3) Assange gave “guarded praise” of Trump.

The first is unfounded, and the Guardian has now retracted it. The second is false as well. Whether you choose to believe him or not, what Assange said is that WikiLeaks isn’t a local player in Russia and mostly appeals to English-speaking leakers. The third is hazier. Personally, I’d say Assange is wildly naive about Trump not representing an “existing power structure,” and disingenuous in calling part of Trump’s inner circle “idiosyncratic personalities.” That said, “not a DC insider” plus “destabilising the pre-existing central power network within DC” plus “change for the worse and change for the better” could reasonably be described as “guarded praise.” Those are all things that Assange pretty clearly views favorably.

This is a lot more than two sentences, but I’m not as witty as Dan Davies. In any case, I agree with Greenwald about two out of three of these things, and hopefully corrections will go as viral as the initial article. That’s how things usually work in social media, right?

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Julian Assange Didn’t Say WikiLeaks Gives Russia a Pass Because It’s Already Open and Transparent

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This Declassified CIA Report Shows the Shaky Case for the Iraq War

by Ludie69E Posted on March 20, 2015

Mother Jones

The United States began its invasion of Iraq 12 years ago. Yesterday, a previously classified Central Intelligence Agency report containing supposed proof of the country’s weapons of mass destruction was published by Jason Leopold of Vice News. Put together nine months before the start of the war, the National Intelligence Estimate spells out what the CIA knew about Iraq’s ability to produce biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. It would become the backbone of the Bush administration’s mistaken assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and posed a direct threat to the post-9/11 world.

The report is rife with what now are obvious red flags that the Bush White House oversold the case for war. It asserts that Iraq had an active chemical weapons program at one point, though it admits that the CIA had found no evidence of the program’s continuation. It repeatedly includes caveats like “credible evidence is limited.” It gives little space to the doubts of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which found the CIA’s findings on Iraq’s nuclear program unconvincing and “at best ambiguous.”

This isn’t the first time the report’s been released in full: A version was made public in 2004, but nearly all the text was redacted. Last year, transparency advocate John Greenwald successfully petitioned the CIA for a more complete version. Greenwald shared the document with Leopold.

Here’s the full report:

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CIA 2002 Iraq Report (PDF)

CIA 2002 Iraq Report (Text)

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This Declassified CIA Report Shows the Shaky Case for the Iraq War

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Please Help Me Interpret Michael Kinsley

by MiguelDelgadill Posted on May 29, 2014

Mother Jones

Yesterday I was pondering whether to write something about the great Kinsley-Greenwald-Sullivan-Etc. contretemps related to Michael Kinsley’s unflattering review of Glenn Greenwald’s latest book. Long story short, I think the entire thing is idiotic, and maybe I’ll blather about that at greater length someday. Then again, maybe not.

But there is one thing I’d like to get a crowdsourced opinion about. Here’s a paragraph Kinsley wrote about whether people like Greenwald have the right to expose secrets that the government thinks are dangerous to reveal:

The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay. But ultimately you can’t square this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.

So here’s my question: what do you think Kinsley is trying to say in the bolded passage? Here are a few possibilities:

  1. The government should adopt policies that reduce the number of secrets it keeps.
  2. When the press gets its hands on a secret, it should “tilt” in favor of publication—but the government should still get the final say.
  3. When the press gets its hands on a secret, it should “tilt” in favor of publication—but it should also listen seriously to the government’s arguments in favor of continued secrecy.
  4. Something else.

For what it’s worth, my interpretation of this was #2. Is this wrong? Help me out in comments. What’s your reading of this?

Credit – 

Please Help Me Interpret Michael Kinsley

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What’s the Difference Between Barton Gellman and Glenn Greenwald?

by UXMAnnetta Posted on March 23, 2014

Mother Jones

Glenn Greenwald makes a point worth repeating today about the steady publication of stories based on the documents Edward Snowden provided to several media outlets last year:

(1) Edward Snowden has not leaked a single document to any journalist since he left Hong Kong in June: 9 months ago. Back then, he provided a set of documents to several journalists and asked that we make careful judgments about what should and should not be published based on several criteria. He has played no role since then in deciding which documents are or are not reported.

….(2) Publication of an NSA story constitutes an editorial judgment by the media outlet that the information should be public. By publishing yesterday’s Huawei story, the NYT obviously made the editorial judgment that these revelations are both newsworthy and in the public interest, should be disclosed, and will not unduly harm “American national security.” For reasons I explain below, I agree with that choice. But if you disagree — if you want to argue that this (or any other) NSA story is reckless, dangerous, treasonous or whatever — then have the courage to take it up with the people who reached the opposite conclusion: in this case, the editors and reporters of the NYT.

There’s more at the link, but it’s worth noting that although Greenwald himself is the subject of routine suggestions of treason-esque behavior, very rarely is the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman given the same treatment. But Gellman has been responsible for some of the biggest stories to date based on the Snowden documents.

Why the difference? Obviously Greenwald has placed himself in the public eye more than Gellman has, but that’s hardly sufficient explanation. What matters is what gets published. And the truth is that, as near as I can tell, nearly every single document that Greenwald has published so far would also have been published by the Post or the New York Times if they had gotten to it first. He hasn’t done anything that these pillars of American journalism haven’t done too.

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What’s the Difference Between Barton Gellman and Glenn Greenwald?

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