Manufactured Hero Edward Snowden: Glenn Greenwald Goes “Full Retard”
by Scott Creighton
The other day I wondered if the Guardian set Glenn up for a fall on this one. I figured maybe they told him they vetted this new NSA whistle-blower and sent him off to Hong Kong to meet a high-school drop-out with his Rubic’s Cube in what appeared to be a secret meeting scenario written by the former writing staff of Get Smart. Turn’s out I wasn’t far off…
“Thus far we have revealed four independent programs: the bulk collection of telephone records, the PRISM program, Obama’s implementation of an aggressive foreign and domestic cyber-operations policy, and false claims by NSA officials to Congress. Every one of those articles was vetted by multiple Guardian editors and journalists – not just me. Democratic partisans have raised questions about only one of the stories – the only one that happened to be also published by the Washington Post (and presumably vetted by multiple Post editors and journalists) – in order to claim that an alleged inaccuracy in it means our journalism in general is discredited.” Glenn Greenwald
Yes Mr. Greenwald, when you make an inaccurate statement in your article, your journalism is discredited. If you come out backing some sudden NSA whistle-blower as the next Daniel Elsburg and then it turns out he’s a high school drop-out flake with no real intel to speak of, your really going to be discredited. And unfortunately I fear you don’t really understand that is why you and the filmmaker, the Academy Award-nominated Laura Poitras, were specifically requested by the career NSA employee and manufactured hero… in case you hadn’t figured that out yet.
Poitras has a long history of making films that expose various horrific aspects of our new Global War OF Terror… to a point. Her preoccupation with the “blow back” meme is troubling to me as is her recent payday (more in the quote below) and to my knowledge she doesn’t focus on the fact that we own and support many of the terrorist destabilization campaigns across the globe. How can an investigative journalist have that much access, that many frequent flier miles and not know the most basic fundamental foundation of the manufactured War Of Terror? For that matter, how does she explain being such a thorn in the side of the establishment and keep flying around the world without a care talking to “terrorists”? Oh yeah, they take her aside when she goes through customs sometimes. That’s her credibility story.
Most recently she did a film featuring a real whistle-blower, William Binney. The NSA just couldn’t WAIT to tar and feather her or at least to appear to.
“But her role as the first point of contact for disclosures about U.S. surveillance programs has drawn the glare of attention to the independent filmmaker who, abruptly, has pushed documentaries deeper into the realm of journalistic immediacy.
For peers and backers of Poitras, the 2012 recipient of a $500,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, it’s unsurprising that she has seized a story worth telling. However, her crucial involvement with a confidential source and two newspapers on the same big exclusive is extraordinary.” Huffington Post
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a 5.6 billion dollar slush fund financing NGOs in over 60 countries across the world. MacArthur was a banker owning Bankers Life and Casualty and other businesses. Their focus is on the media and public affairs.
When you want to silence an outspoken critic, the best and least troublesome way to do it is to buy them off with a foundation grant. Just ask Amy Goodman about that. And Poitras got a half million dollars last year?
Curiously, it was Poitras herself who reportedly brought in the Post reporter and Greenwald on this story after having been anonymously emailed by Snowden back in Jan of this year.
Snowden understands that no email is absolutely untraceable and he sent her and Greenwald emails explaining his desire to snitch out the NSA?
Greenwald has had a target painted on his back for a long time. At least since the Stratfor files leaks and the HBGary scandal. They’ve wanted to shut Glenn up for years. Now’s their chance.
What seems obvious to most of us out here writing or blogging about this story seems to go right over Glenn Greenwald’s head. He even says it in his latest article where he lets us all know the Guardian is going to milk the 41 amateurish Power Point slides for weeks of ratings…
I mean he hits right at the probable motive behind this manufacture hero story and it still seems to evade him. Has he gone “full retard” or what?
(1) Much of US politics, and most of the pundit reaction to the NSA stories, are summarized by this one single visual from Pew:
The most vocal media critics of our NSA reporting, and the most vehement defenders of NSA surveillance, have been, by far, Democratic (especially Obama-loyal) pundits. As I’ve written many times, one of the most significant aspects of the Obama legacy has been the transformation of Democrats from pretend-opponents of the Bush War on Terror and National Security State into their biggest proponents: exactly what the CIA presciently and excitedly predicted in 2008 would happen with Obama’s election. Glenn Greenwald
With Obamagod talking about “welcoming the discussion” and saying things like “you can’t have 100% security and 100% privacy” it seems pretty clear that what is happening isn’t about exposing the NSA but rather modifying the public opinion toward the Big Brother state we live in.
And for the record, the NSA may have predicted this would be the real CHANGE of the Obama presidency, but so did MANY of us while independent journalists like Greenwald welcomed the ushering in of George W Obama. So that wasn’t too difficult to see even back then… meaning you didn’t need to work for the NSA to figure it out.
The only question surrounding this story at this point, at least for me, as a not-so Obama-loyal democrat, is how much does Greenwald really understand about all of this crap he’s found himself in and how deep is he willing to dig himself into the sludge before he can bring himself to admit he’s been set-up with a Bush gone AWOL document?
Does he have his own MacArthur Foundation paycheck? Is he just too damn proud to admit he’s been had? Is he fighting to push this thing beyond it’s reasonable limits because he fears it will destroy the last remaining opposition to our slide toward Big Brother or has he just gone full retard in his effort to finally land that big ground-breaking world changing story?
The trouble with passion sometimes is that it can be manipulated by people skilled at doing so in ways that leave you blind to reason. The harder you try to defend what you feel passionate about, the looser your grip becomes on the rational. Ask any fundamentalist religious fanatic how that works. Ask any of the remaining Obamaites. Or a Redskins fan (not really fair now that we have RG3… but for two decades it was an apt comparison)
So Mr. Greenwald, you never go full retard. Not as a journalist. And I know I don’t qualify because I don’t get weekly direct deposits from such noble institutions like the Guardian that supported NATO’s merciless bombing of Libya and the ongoing terrorist destabilization campaign in Syria (to say nothing of the WMD claims of yesteryear)
But take the advice of a little lowly blogger who got it right back in 2008 when so many others didn’t… this is not about exposing the NSA. It’s about exposing you Mr. Greenwald and us by association.
In short, the question isn’t is Edward Snowden a legitimate whistle-blower… the question is whether or not Glenn Greenwald is a legitimate journalist or just another tool?
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Filed under: fake war on terror, Glenn Greenwald, Neoliberalizing America, NSA "Leak" Scandal, Scott Creighton