greenwald glenn bak
bak 3/18
not to be confused w/ robert, koch doc and whistleblowers. Guardian UK
jeez what happened to him? // tulsi gabbard
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yahoo [cda] actually nexstar BS
A Utah software engineer, who runs a massive pro-President Trump social media account that has drawn attention from the likes of Elon Musk, made a sinister declaration in a post on Aug. 21.
The "Deep State" was setting her up to "commit a crime."
"I have never been more angry in my life," Jennica Pounds, who is behind the DataRepublican account that has nearly 1 million followers on social platform X, wrote in a recent thread.
Over the past week, the resulting saga around Pounds's allegations has become an obsession of right-wing social media circles, exposed the blurred lines in Pentagon public relations and raised questions about other MAGA-friendly influencers in the military space.
It all started with an offer from a senior State Department official to Pounds. Did she want to publish documents about allegations of censorship under the Biden administration?
"I wanted to give you the option of 'breaking' the story as sort of a gift," Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers wrote to Pounds.
Pounds initially seemed up for cooperating but later decided the markings on the documents "would have gotten me in big big trouble."
In a post to her X account, Pounds wrote Friday that "they tried to entrap me" while sharing a screenshot of the text exchange.
Rogers replied to Pounds's thread that Friday, revealing herself as the official involved.
"lol, these are my text messages and documents. The 'markings' are FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] redactions required even for voluntary disclosure. To prove this isn't a 'trap,' I will happily disclose the documents myself," she wrote, posting the documents in an ensuing thread.
Pounds had earlier concluded the documents "were nothingburgers that did not benefit them at all to release in public."
Once the exchange went public, the aggregators got to work. Right-wing news aggregator AF Post summarized the back-and-forth between the two women, adding further intrigue by writing that Pounds was an active employee at the Pentagon.
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A Pentagon official has since confirmed to The Hill and other news outlets that Pounds is a special government employee at the Defense Department, a work status she did not publicly disclose to her massive online following. It's unclear if Rogers knew about the job when she offered Pounds the internal documents.
The Hill has reached out to the State Department for comment.
After the revelation, Pounds said her Pentagon press credentials had expired in June, that she did not seek renewal and the next month she began working at the department to "serve the country in a more hands-on way." She said she would defer questions to Joel Valdez, the Pentagon's deputy press secretary.
The Defense Department declined to comment when asked about Pounds's role at the department.
Lauren Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told The Hill that Pounds should have disclosed her special government employee status to her followers because otherwise it "blurs the line between journalism and government PR."
Pounds, too, has championed transparency around potential conflicts of interest.
Late last month, Pounds questioned the alleged friendship between the director of military-leadership blog From the Green Notebook, retired Army Lt. Col. Joe Byerly, and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, with whom Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has clashed since the start of the Trump administration.
The DataRepublican revelations have raised questions around other prominent accounts that often back the Defense secretary.
Adam D'Ortona, an active-duty Army lieutenant colonel, has openly criticized congressional Democrats, backed Hegseth's push to root out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts at the Pentagon and highlighted the Defense secretary's message of going to war against the department's bureaucracy.
D'Ortona, who has more than 100,000 followers on X, defended Pounds after it was revealed that she works for the Pentagon, arguing those concerned about the ethics of the incident are like a "burglar lecturing the homeowner about property rights."
Following the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, USA Today reported in September that D'Ortona works in Hegseth's office. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told the outlet at the time that D'Ortona is not an adviser or spokesperson for the Pentagon.
On Monday, D'Ortona wrote in a response to an X user that "ZERO people are paid" by the Pentagon to "post stories."
The Army referred questions about D'Ortona to the Pentagon. Hegseth's office did not respond to The Hill's request for comment.
Retired Col. Thomas Anderson, who writes under the pseudonym Cynical Publius, has backed Hegseth's anti-DEI crusade and has weighed in on a host of political issues, offering his view to more than 320,000 followers on X.
Anderson defended Pounds's employment at the department in an exchange with journalist Glenn Greenwald.
"I repeat: you do not understand the parameters of being an SGE [special government employee]," Anderson wrote Monday. "It has a specified legal status that she has stayed well within. I'm not your research assistant, I told you what to look up. Go look it up. The truth is never a 'cliché tactic.'"
When asked Tuesday by The Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe if he also has an SGE status, Anderson did not respond.
2026 Nexstar Media, Inc.
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09/30/2025
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Glenn Greenwald says Nick Fuentes' authenticity makes it easy for critics to "demonize and attack you by taking these quotes that can sound not just very racist, but very almost Nazi-like and kind of an extermination rhetoric." Um, yea. People who use Nazi-like rhetoric tend to get labeled a Nazi.
https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/elon-musk-continues-cater-far-right-twitter-accounts-promoting-bigotry-extremism-and
no lnx many twts
elon Musk continues to cater to far-right Twitter accounts promoting bigotry, extremism, and misinformation
WRITTEN BY CHARIS HOARD, AUDREY MCCABE & RUBY SEAVEY
PUBLISHED 12/15/22
Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk has spent the first month and a half of his tenure catering to the far-right by reinstating and interacting with right-wing figures responsible for spreading bigotry and misinformation. Musk engaged with these types of accounts at least 170 times between October 27 and December 13, according to a Media Matters review.
Since gaining control of the platform on October 27, Musk has advanced his vision of Twitter becoming the “digital town square” by unilaterally reinstating over a dozen high-profile right-wing accounts and granting other previously suspended accounts that had spread misinformation “amnesty.”
A month and a half of Musk at the helm of Twitter has also helped conspiracy theorists and toxic posters spread hateful or dangerous rhetoric. Musk himself has even used the platform to amplify multiple conspiracy theories and has employed common QAnon tactics like baselessly accusing a former Twitter executive of promoting pedophilia. Most recently, he tweeted a common QAnon phrase that has given QAnon figures a reason to believe that Musk potentially supports the conspiracy theory.
Media Matters previously found that Musk catered to the far-right by interacting with accounts known to push misinformation and bigotry at least 24 times in the first days of owning Twitter. In an updated review, Media Matters has found that Musk has continued to entertain these types of accounts, engaging with them at least 170 times between October 27 and December 13.
From decrying “wokeism” to sharing right-wing talking points about U.S. immigration policy, below are some examples of Musk interacting with known bad actors.
Musk criticized COVID-19 mitigation efforts and praised an anti-vaccine misinformer
Musk expressed support and admiration for anti-vaccine figure Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and his work. In a four-part thread, Bhattacharya praised Musk for “promis[ing] access to help find out” why he was placed “on the blacklist on the first day” he joined Twitter, in August 2021. Musk responded, “Thank you for your rigorous adherence to science.”
In a thread mocking people concerned about COVID-19, Musk interacted with right-wing troll account Catturd and implicitly criticized pandemic lockdowns.
Musk and Catturd mocking COVID mitigation efforts
Musk decried “wokeism,” pushed conspiracy theories, andcriticized “the culture war” when interacting with right-wing accounts
After Musk tweeted an emoji of a bunny, an explicit nod to QAnon and far-right communities, he tweeted “Lmaooo” at a response from conservative stand-up comedians the “Hodgetwins” mocking a concerned response. Right-wing personality Alex Lorusso – known as ALX – joined in and left a similarly sarcastic tweet, to which Musk responded, “Bunny emojis are hate speech!!”
Musk responding to the Hodetwins and ALX on Twitter making fun of people concerned that Musk tweeted a QAnon reference
Musk agreed with the Hodgetwins and another user calling for people to “speak out” against wokeism. Musk tweeted, “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters,” to which the Hodgetwins commented, “Our future depends on more and more people waking up and speaking out on what’s happening to society. Stop being silent!” Another user added that public figures need to “take an open stand against wokism,” and Musk responded with “Yes.”
Musk expressed support for far-right commentator Ian Miles Cheong’s comment alleging that the media is suppressing “criticism of wokeness.” Musk originally asked, “What do you think of the culture war?” and agreed with Cheong’s response: “A single ideology dominates and silences the rest, branding everything it disapproves of as ‘violence’ and a ‘threat to democracy.’ Criticism of wokeness is ‘stochastic terrorism.’ Only one narrative is allowed to prevail and it is promoted by the media. All dissent is quashed.”
After Musk tweeted a video of shirts saying “#StayWoke” that were found in a closet at Twitter’s headquarters, he agreed with comments made by right-wing figures who mocked or criticized the Black Lives Matter movement. Cheong responded to this thread, “Black Lives Matter (now exposed as a scam, they bought millions of dollars in property and never gave back to the community) was built on a lie,” to which Musk said, “Troublesome.”
Right-wing podcast host Chase Geiser also responded to Musk’s initial video, saying, “You officially bought the world’s largest collection of #StayWoke merch.” Musk responded back to Geiser with two laughing emojis and “worth it.”
Far-right grifter Andy Ngo joined in on the thread, saying, “‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ is one of the biggest hoaxes to come from the American left in the last decade. That big lie has inspired many to become radicalized and militant.” Musk responded, “True.”
Engaging with right-wing accounts, Musk amplified attacks against former Twitter employees and commented on alleged content moderation decision from before his tenure
Musk agreed with election denier Dinesh D’Souza's baseless claim that Twitter before Musk’s leadership banned only conservative accounts. Musk told D’Souza he was “correct” after he tweeted, “We don’t hear much about Democrats and leftists being let back on Twitter. Why? Because they were never kicked off in the first place. Their lies and misinformation simply escaped all scrutiny. Censorship has been deployed as a one-way operation against conservatives.”
In a thread initiated by Tim Young, contributor for far-right nationalist outlet American Greatness, Musk provided context to his decision to reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account. Young tweeted that “the left can’t handle” Trump being back on Twitter. Musk responded to this tweet by saying the reinstatement was intended to “correct a grave mistake in banning his account” and sharing that he “reluctantly” voted for Biden over Trump. In the same thread, a MAGA account asked Musk if he would “support Ron DeSantis in 2024.” Musk said, “Yes,” before noting that “Twitter as a platform must be fair to all.”
Musk compounded the viral hate account Libs of TikTok's attack against a former Twitter employee.Libs of TikTok posted screenshots of a former Twitter employee’s tweets criticizing Musk for laying off Twitter’s infrastructure team. Musk responded to the tweet, saying, “A tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s.”
Musk interacted with white nationalist Paul Ramsey and Andy Ngo in a thread about Antifa accounts on Twitter.Ramsey tweeted, “Twitter is reportedly nuking pedo accounts. This is eliminating much of Antifa Twitter.” In response, Musk expressed his dedication to “removing child exploitation.” In the same thread, Musk responded twice to Ngo after Ngo claimed Antifa uses Twitter to organize violence.
Musk amplified QAnon-spouting conspiracy theorist and Fox News contributor Lara Logan's attack against former Twitter Trust and Safety Council member Anne Collier.
Musk responded to Lara Logan tweet agreeing that Anne Collier should be held accountable
Musk interjected in Twitter threads about U.S. political issues initiated by right-wing accounts
Musk interacted with Fox News reporter Bill Melugin, who reports on and promotes fearmongering around southern border immigration. Melugin tweeted about a migrant caravan passing through El Paso, Texas, claiming it was “the largest single group we have ever seen,” to which Musk responded, “Wow.”
Musk responded to Melugin andprovocateur Kim Dotcom about people crossing the U.S. southern border. After Melugin tweeted a video of migrants crossing the southern border allegedly without authorization, Musk responded twice, saying, “Seems bizarre that it’s so easy enter illegally, but so hard to get a legal work visa.” After Kim Dotcom joined the conversation, sharing an article about “Dems voter farming strategy,” Musk responded, “Behavior follows the incentives for political power.”
Musk interacted with right-wing satirical outlet The Babylon Bee’s account multiple times, once about Hunter Biden and another about the 2022 midterm elections. Both times he agreed with the right-wing outlet and commented with laughing emojis.
Musk responded to a tweet from failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake even though it contained election misinformation. Lake asked Musk why Twitter was “still suppressing election criticism & news,” along with a screenshot of a right-wing reporter’s baseless claims of election fraud. Musk said, “Reasonable criticism of elections and judicial challenges are, of course, lawful. That seems to be the case here. Clear incitement to violence will result in suspension and significant deception should result in a @CommunityNotes correction.”
Musk responding to kari Lake tweet containing election misinformation
Musk agreed with right-wing attacks on mainstream media
Musk expressed support for Ian Miles Cheong's belief that mainstream media outlets are actively upset about Twitter’s new direction under Musk’s leadership. Musk agreed with Cheong's claims that the “establishment media is angry” because Twitter no longer controls “the establishment and its activist allies,” and because the public “can now openly question the narrative."
Musk agreed with Tim Young that CBS – and the mainstream media more generally – is biased.Young called CBS biased for briefly not engaging on Twitter, to which Musk said, “So you say ‘mainstream media’ is biased? Hmm, will have to fact-check that with mainstream media. Nope, they say everything is cool!”
Musk agreed with Breitbart alum Raheem J. Kassam’s claim that mainstream media are intent on “destroying” Twitter. Kassam tweeted that mainstream media is engaging in a “co-ordinated attempt to destroy Twitter,” and Musk responded, “They just can’t stop writing about Twitter, which is driving usage through roof lmao.”
Musk and Cheong exchanged similar views on supposed censorship by the mainstream media. On November 11, Musk tweeted, “As Twitter pursues the goal of elevating citizen journalism, media elite will try everything to stop that from happening.” Cheong replied, “The media elite wants a monopoly on the truth, and citizen journalism threatens their narrative. Can’t have that, so they bully corporations and social media companies into doing their censoring for them by calling it all ‘disinformation.’” Musk replied, “True.”
Musk interacted with right-wing accounts that praised the publication of the Twitter Files
Musk agreed with the Hodgetwins’ baseless claim that the media covered up the Twitter files. After part of the Twitter Files were published, the Hodgetwins claimed the “media is silent” about “one of the biggest political scandals in modern American history” because “the damn media was in on the scandal.” Musk responded with a bullseye emoji.
Musk interacted with Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton multiple times about the Twitter files. Musk agreed with Fitton that the Twitter Files provided “damning evidence” that the platform censored Trump leading up to the 2020 election and said more information was “coming soon” about Twitter’s treatment of former President Donald Trump.
Musk amplified attacks launched against former Twitter executive Yoel Rothby right-wing commentator Glenn Greenwald. In response to a tweet revealing information about how Twitter chose to label information about the 2020 election, Greenwald attacked Roth and “his little censorship minions,” claiming they turned Twitter into a “full-on Democratic Party activist machine” to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Musk agreed, saying “...there is no question that Twitter operated as a Democratic Party activist machine.”
Musk endorsed ALX’s opinion that the public is entitled to know how Twitter made previous content moderation decisions.
Musk saying Twitter files are needed to "restore public trust"responding to a tweet from ALX
The Democrat’s surprising strength in the midterms has been framed mostly as a rebuke of Republicans’ attack on abortion rights and on democracy. The GOP’s flirtation with imperial oligarchic Russian leader Vladimir Putin has, in contrast, received little attention.
That’s not exactly a mistake. Foreign policy rarely drives many votes, and the war between Russia and Ukraine was never a top issue for voters or for candidates on the campaign trail.
And yet the Democratic midterm strength serves as a powerful defeat not just for the GOP, but for Putin. Republican losses in the Senate and narrow gains in the House all but guarantee that the US will continue to lead international support for Ukraine.
READ MORE: Russian propagandists are hoping for 'a political Halloween' if Republicans win the midterms: report
GOP Putinistas
The GOP has been divided on aid for Ukraine. An older, more traditional wing of the party, steeped in Reaganite Cold War antagonism to the Soviet Union, has supported the (much more justified) Ukrainian war against Russia imperial invasion.
But there’s another wing that’s openly pro-Putin.
Putin has long cultivated ties with far-right nationalist groups globally, portraying himself as a defender of manly tradition through shirtless iconography and vicious homophobic policies.
READ MORE: Why support for Ukraine could dwindle in the final months of 2022
He saw a potential ally in wannabe-authoritarian Donald Trump, and tried to aid his campaigns in 2016 and (less successfully) in 2020.
Trump reciprocated by praising Putin consistently over the last six years. Most recently, he called the Russian invasion of Ukraine “genius” and “wonderful.”
Trump’s enthusiasm has affected his partisans.
Between 2015 and 2017, GOP opinions of Putin went up 20 points from 12 percent favorability to 32 percent favorable. A February poll found that Putin’s favorables among Republicans were higher than those of Democratic President Joe Biden.
It’s not just the rank-and-file either. Fox News far-right host Tucker Carlson has ceaselessly pumped out pro-Putin propaganda since the invasion of Ukraine in February. So has Carlson’s frequent guest, erstwhile progressive and current far-right shill Glenn Greenwald.
Many in the GOP conference have followed along. In the House, the chair of the rabid more-MAGA-than-thou Freedom Caucus, Scott Perry, wants to investigate, and potentially spike, US aid to Ukraine.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy signaled support for Perry in an interview in October: “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.”
In May, 57 House Republicans voted against $40 billion in aid to Ukraine. Eleven senators joined them, including Rand Paul and Josh Hawley.
In addition, one of the few midterm contests focused on foreign policy was that of JD Vance, the Ohio Republican Senator-elect, boosted by fash-curious tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who made opposition to Ukraine a centerpiece of his campaign.
Republicans are split
With far-right Putinophilia bubbling up from the MAGA swamp, observers believed Biden might have real trouble continuing support for Ukraine. Reports suggest Russia put off announcing its retreat from Kherson until after the midterms because Putin did not want news of a Ukrainian victory to bolster Democrats.
Republicans who support Ukrainian aid were reportedly nervous that they’d be undercut in a GOP-controlled House. Biden was floating a Ukrainian aid package in the lame-duck session of the Congress, anticipating that further funding might be blocked.
Democrats may still vote on a Ukraine funding bill. But prospects for aid in the new Congress have significantly improved.
First of all, Democrats retained control of the Senate. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has strongly supported aid for Ukraine. Even so, his conference is unpredictable, and the Democrats are in a much better position to buttress Biden’s foreign policy priorities than they would have been had they lost the chamber.
Democrats did lose the House — but it was very close. The GOP majority is likely to be somewhere between 220-215 and 222-213.
McCarthy — or whoever the GOP chooses as speaker — is will block many Democratic initiatives on abortion rights, voting rights and much else. Ukrainian aid is different, though. That’s an issue that sharply divides McCarthy’s own caucus. Even if he wanted to, he’s not going to be able to win a vote striking down Ukrainian aid.
And if he were to try, the Democrats could likely get enough GOP support to bring it to the floor without his say-so.
Opposition to aid would likely expose huge fissures in the Republican caucus and lead to an embarrassing defeat for the speaker.
Stepping away, domestically
If the GOP were a normal party, that would be the end of that.
But the conference is neither normal, so there are caveats.
Representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz hate their more moderate Republican colleagues almost as much as they hate Democrats. They might oppose Ukrainian aid precisely because they know it would put their own speaker in an impossible and humiliating position.
So there could be bumps in the road.
The bottom line is that after their weak showing in the midterms, the Trumpy GOP pro-Putin wing doesn’t have the leverage to successfully advance their dream of global totalitarianism.
The defeat of election deniers in races for governor and secretary of state across the country means that the US has taken a step back from authoritarianism — domestically.
READ MORE: Writer schools Kevin McCarthy on why Ukraine aid isn’t a 'blank check'
2014
https://archives.**cjr.**org/critical_eye/glenn_greenwald_against_the_wo.php
https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-glenn-greenwald-the-new-master-of-right-wing-media
https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-glenn-greenwald-the-new-master-of-right-wing-media
MEDIA
Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media?
FROM HIS MOUTH TO FOX’S EARS?
The leftist scribe has become “a practitioner of manufactured controversy” for outlets like Fox News, say his stunned former colleagues.
Lloyd Grove
Justin Baragona
Media Reporter
Updated Jun. 02, 2021 10:41PM ET / PublishedJun. 02, 2021
“DISGUSTING & DANGEROUS,” screamed the banner headline at the bottom of the television screen, just under the blonde-sheathed visage of Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “GREENWALD BLASTS INTERCEPT FOR SMEARING INGRAHAM GUESTS.”
And so during a recent episode of The Ingraham Angle, Glenn Greenwald—who is so familiar to the top-rated cable channel’s millions of viewers that he requires only a surname—put on a suit and tie in Rio de Janeiro, where he lives, to continue doing what has occupied his energies for much of the past month.
That’s deploying every conceivable platform—from Twitter (where he has 1.6 million followers) to YouTube to Substack to an array of popular conservative websites to the very top of the ziggurat, Rupert Murdoch’s corporate cash cow—to denounce former friends and colleagues at The Intercept, the left-leaning digital news and opinion site he co-founded with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill in 2013.
“These millennial digital liberal outlets like the Intercept, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, so many of them—they think that if you’re a conservative, you’re not really a journalist,” the 54-year-old Greenwald intoned (a tad weirdly, because most of his targets are in their late forties and fifties), while Ingraham could barely contain a gleeful grin. “They think that you’re part of this crypto-fascist movement, that you’re the enemy,” he added—referring to two young conservative videographers whose coverage of Black Lives Matter and other protests came under The Intercept’s withering scrutiny.
This past month has occasioned spectacular success, of a sort,for the pugnacious contrarian pundit, an erstwhile leftist journalist-turned-Donald Trump defender who once again is proving his mastery of the right-wing media ecosystem.
Indeed, in a self-perpetuating feedback loop that runs from Twitter to Fox News and back again, Greenwald has managed, like Trump before him, to orchestrate his very own news cycles.
Last year, following his exit from The Intercept, Greenwald admitted to The Daily Beast that Fox News airs its share of “horrific, toxic, damaging, destructive, and bigoted” content. However, he defended his frequent Fox hits, saying, “I have no doubt that some people at the Intercept were upset that I was going on Fox, but I would no sooner allow anyone to dictate to me which shows I can go on than I would allow anyone to censor my opinions.”
And now he is effectively operating as something of a Fox News assignment editor, as indicated by The Daily Beast’s spot check of the frequency with which Greenwald’s online musings on social media and elsewhere, especially his Substack page, have served as the basis for dozens of articles on Fox News’ website.
He’s become a practitioner of manufactured controversy in the service of the hard right in this country.
— Betsy Reed, The Intercept editor-in-chief
For the most part, the FoxNews.com stories have tended to celebrate Greenwald’s slashing critiques of non-Fox media personalities, such as a recent article inspired by his tweet trashing MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace for misreporting, along with other media outlets, that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was warned by the FBI that he was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign. (MSNBC and other outlets ultimately corrected the error.) A similar piece, written a couple weeks later, highlighted Greenwald’s Substack post in which he blasted “resistance journalism.” Of course, Fox News made sure to identify Greenwald as a “progressive journalist,” apparently to enhance the man-bites-dog credibility of his claims.
Besides obsessively repurposing Greenwald’s complaints about other media personalities—sometimes publishing multiple Greenwald-related pieces in the same day—the network also creates entire outrage cycles from Greenwald tweets, transforming tiny kernels into the media equivalent of a bag of popcorn.
For instance, a January tweet about what Greenwald called the “monster” of so-called “cancel culture” not only prompted his appearance on the Fox News Channel but also an online article about him “sounding the alarm” on the “cancel culture mob.”
The March 7 episode of MediaBuzz, the network’s Sunday media analysis show, provides another example of Greenwald’s Twitter feed inspiring Fox News segments—essentially a programming pipeline from social media-to-cable channel. Fox News’ digital media team had written multiple articles about Greenwald’s online complaints concerning CNN’s “junior high hall-monitor tattling” reporters, New York Times tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, and MSNBC host Joy Reid’s criticism of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Greenwald was then brought on by host Howard Kurtz to weigh in on all three subjects across multiple segments.
And just days after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, Fox News devoted multiple on-air segments across both its opinion and so-called “hard news” programming to discussing a lengthy Greenwald Twitter thread that slammed liberals for being “overwhelmingly supportive” of Big Tech censorship—specifically over the social media bans of Trump and the shuttering of Parler. And, inevitably, Greenwald’s online comments warranted their own FoxNews.com piece.
Fox News in general, and Laura Ingraham’s and Tucker Carlson’s primetime shows in particular, have also provided Greenwald with a vital perch from which to stir the right-wing media cocktail. A review of television transcripts indicates that Greenwald has racked up at least 72 appearances on Fox since December 2017—40 of them on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Ingraham, meanwhile, has booked him on 14 different episodes, followed by nine appearances on Fox News Primetime, three on Kurtz’s MediaBuzz, two each on Sunday Morning Futures with MariaBartiromo and Martha MacCallum’s now-defunct The Story, and one booking each on Watters’ World, the defunct Bill Hemmer Reports and the now-cancelled midnight show, Fox News @ Night. (Those figures do not include insomniac-friendly replays of Greenwald’s segments.)
“I did not see this coming,” said The Nation’s national affairs correspondent, Joan Walsh, who was editor-in-chief of Salon more than a decade ago when Greenwald gave up practicing law to spend five-and-a-half years as a star writer there. “It’s kind of sad. He won awards for us. He was a beacon during those dark days [of the Bush-Cheney military adventures and Barack Obama’s first term]. He was a lovely colleague, he really was. The difference between the cantankerous guy we sometimes had to wrangle with—it wasn’t all roses—and this person? Who’s this?”
Since Greenwald left Salon for The Guardian in 2012, he and Walsh have tangled on Twitter—bitterly at times. Last year, when Walsh was skeptical concerning the claims of Tara Reade, Joe Biden’s sexual-assault accuser, Greenwald couldn’t resist calling his former editor a “partisan opportunistic hack… sent out to try to smear, demean & discredit her.”
[Intercept Staff Roll Eyes Over Greenwald’s Censorship Claim
WAR OF WORDS
Maxwell Tani]
Greenwald’s latest media campaign is ruthlessly marshaling the armies of Twitter, Substack, YouTube and his home away from home, Fox News, to stoke fury against The Intercept’s investigation of the far-right social media platformGab, as well as the news site’s documentary short exploring the questionable tactics and deceptive editing of two young videographers for conservative outlets who call themselves “the riot squad.”
He’s reaping rich rewards in attention and publicity from the right-wing media ecosystem by targeting his erstwhile Intercept comrades in remarkably personal terms.
During a recent appearance on YouTube’s The Jimmy Dore Show, where he prosecuted his indictments against the Intercept’s reporting, Greenwald called out editor-in-chief Betsy Reed as an example of the “shit liberals” and “liberal DNC hacks” who “crave nothing more than mainstream media approval”; Reed’s deputy editors Roger Hodge and Peter Maass, meanwhile, are “those little eunuchs she has working under her,” he claimed.
“This is a totally made-up controversy. It’s manufactured. There’s no there there,” said Reed, who joined The Intercept from The Nation in late 2015 with Greenwald’s blessing. “There’s no kernel of truth to Glenn’s crusade. That is what I think is fundamentally different from the old Glenn, who would often kind of overstate the case, and fall into hyperbole, but there was usually a kernel of truth. And I would say this time, he lost the kernel—or he doesn’t care about having that kernel. He’s become a practitioner of manufactured controversy in the service of the hard right in this country.”
Former New York Times journalist and “Riot Squad” author Robert Mackey—whom Greenwald had personally recruited to The Intercept on the strength of his Times work live-blogging major news events, making documentaries, and analyzing social media—practices his journalism while “sitting on his fat white ass on the couch,” Greenwald told Dore.
“That was his ‘reporting’”—here, Greenwald gestured scare quotes—"that was so innovative and that led The Intercept to hire him,” he added sarcastically. (Needless to say, Greenwald didn’t mention his key role in eagerly lobbying Mackey to leave the Times in 2016.)
In another curious omission on The Jimmy Dore Show, Greenwald went after one of his favorite targets, Times tech reporter (and former Daily Beast staffer) Taylor Lorenz, for her “unhealthy fixation” on billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen—but failed to mention that Andreessen is a major investor, to the tune of $15 million, in Substack, and is leading a new fundraising round of $65 million for Greenwald’s latest journalistic platform.
Hours later on the same day of his Dore guest-shot, Greenwald donned a suit and tie in Rio de Janeiro to trash Mackey some more on The Ingraham Angle and accuse The Intercept of deliberately inciting antifa members to physically assault TownHall.com videographer Julio Rosas and his Daily Caller counterpart, Jorge Ventura, “by dragging their faces into the light.” Never mind that the two young men, who clearly revel in the attention, had just appeared on Ingraham’s show before millions of Fox News viewers.
“I don’t pretend that my life is some avatar of working class values,” Greenwald elaborated in an email to The Daily Beast. “I do, though, think that’s true of Julio and Jorge. And that’s why I find it so repellent to watch a bunch of coddled, highly paid editors and journalists using a billionaire’s money from their $3 million/year office on the 18th floor of a Park Avenue tower to target actual working class journalists doing dangerous reporting about a violent group (Antifa) with which the Intercept ideologically identifies.”
He’s tapped into the rage machine. He understands that there’s no engagement like rage engagement.
— Roger Hodge, The Intercept editor
Greenwald’s most astonishing verbal assault, however, was aimed at computer security engineer Micah Lee, director of information security for the Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media, and author of the Gab story. Lee had been essential to Greenwald’s two greatest journalistic triumphs.
As a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2013, Lee connected Greenwald, then at The Guardian, with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden (after Greenwald hadn’t responded to Snowden’s attempts to contact him), teaching him how to use encrypted communication and helping him navigate Snowden’s classified data dump that revealed the NSA’s widespread surveillance of private citizens—reporting for which The Guardian shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. (The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman, whose Snowden reporting also won the 2014 public service Pulitzer, recounted in Dark Mirror, his book about the episode, several instances of Greenwald’s alleged duplicity in the throes of competition as the two jousted for scoops and credit—oozing charm in a conciliatory email and then bad-mouthing him behind his back to a New York Times reporter.)
In 2019, Lee was instrumental in the Intercept’s blockbuster “Operation Car Wash” series exposing official corruption and wrongdoing by powerful politicians in Brazil. (According to knowledgeable sources, after Greenwald began getting serious death threats from supporters of Brazil’s right-wing populist president Jair Bolsonaro—to say nothing of official prosecutorial harassment—First Look Media spent lavishly, in the six-figure range, to provide him with a team of bodyguards and an armored vehicle. That was in addition to Greenwald’s eye-popping salary of more than $500,000 a year.)
A collaborative project involving Brazilian journalists and Greenwald, who is fluent in Portuguese, the “Car Wash” series depended largely on a massive secret archive (secured, made searchable, and administered by Lee) “of private chats, audio recordings, videos, photos, court proceedings, and other documentation—provided to us by an anonymous source,” as Greenwald, Reed, and Leandro Demori, the executive editor of The Intercept Brasil, wrote upon publication.
Yet after the release of Micah Lee’s Gab story—which, contrary to Greenwald’s indignant claims, doxed no one and simply documented that the platform hosts a range of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, anti-Semites, QAnon conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other extremists—Greenwald tweeted a photo of Lee, along with the warning: “If you, your relatives, or your friends are Gab users, remember that @micahflee is spending his days and nights trolling through your/their personal data with the intent…to expose them if they have the wrong ideology.”
Lee and members of his family had already been hassled by an Internet stalker with a criminal record soon after the Gab story was posted in early May, but in due course the stalking had fizzled—that is, until Greenwald’s tweet which, predictably, inspired a new wave of online harassment.
Internet trolls tried to uncover the personal data of Lee’s sister, and succeeded in doxing Lee and his wife, who were targeted by antisemitic and homophobic slurs and threats; they contacted local and federal law enforcement officials but ultimately decided to hire private security and change their phone numbers, especially after Lee received this voicemail message from an anonymous male: “Hey faggot. You do understand that doxing works both ways. So go ahead and paint a target on your back and there’s lots of people who are willing to take shots at you. You want war? Fine.”
[Glenn Greenwald Speaks: Bolsonaro Is Trying to Silence Me
JOURNALISM UNDER ASSAULT
Lloyd Grove]
“Glenn and I have always disagreed on some things, but at least he used to have consistent principles and respect for basic facts,” Lee told The Daily Beast. “It’s disappointing and tragic that he’s gone so far off the deep end, from what seemed to be an honest and fearless journalist into a conspiracy-peddling pundit that spends all his time misleading people.”
In an email exchange with The Daily Beast—which Greenwald posted preemptively in its entirety on Substack—he was unapologetic about his attack on Lee because, Greenwald complained, he started it. (He was apparently referring to a May 5 tweet in which Lee mercilessly mocked Greenwald’s outrage—duly splashed on Fox News’ website—at an Intercept fundraising letter touting the Gab investigation.)
“Precisely because of my long work relationship and friendship with Micah,” Greenwald wrote to The Daily Beast, “I would never have criticized him personally or even by name under any circumstances. When I co-founded the Intercept back in 2013, Micah was one of the first if not the first people we hired. That’s why I was so disappointed when he decided to start publicly criticizing me by name.After having chosen to do that to great applause from his liberal following, he—like the Intercept generally—wants to play the victim and whine about how he’s being persecuted for something that he himself did.”
Peter Maass, a noted author, experienced war correspondent and Greenwald’s former editor at The Intercept, told The Daily Beast: “Glenn can act in the most vicious ways against people who were loyal to him and essential to his best work. He has to know that his attacks on Micah are going to lead to intimidation and threats.”
Indulging his fondness for insult, Greenwald fired back: “It’s quite hilarious to hear lectures about loyalty from Intercept editors like Peter, making $300,000/year for nothing, when none of them would even [have] jobs if it weren’t for me and my work in creating the news outlet that they now all leech off of.”
As for Walsh, she “is a Democrat who still cries every night that Hillary Clinton isn’t President. She’s just angry that I don’t like Democrats,” Greenwald emailed.
Betsy Reed comes in for the most severe thrashing. “[S]he’s a pathological liar who makes everyone she works with hate her,” Greenwald emailed.
“I have zero respect for the senior editorial leadership of the Intercept—I have contempt for them which I have made quite publicly clear—so it’s hardly a surprise that they’re sniping at me in ways they never had the courage to do when I was there,” he added.
Seven years after eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar enlisted him to help start the web site and pledged $250 million to the project, Greenwald quit The Intercept in a blaze of acrimony last October, days before the presidential election, claiming Maass, Hodge, and Reed had censored his reporting on the presumed contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop to protect their preferred candidate, Joe Biden, and defeat Donald Trump.
Greenwald’s tabloid-ready departure—coupled with a lengthy manifesto-and-denunciation posted on Substack—quickly took on the trappings of a carefully-choreographed media event staged not only for the New York Post, which devoted 1,160 words to the liberal establishment’s attempt to muzzle a truth teller, but also for such Trump-friendly outlets as The Daily Caller, TownHall.com, Newsmax, The Washington Examiner, The Federalist, and of course Fox News, all of which credited Greenwald’s narrative of liberal hypocrisy and suppression.
Greenwald celebrated his exodus with a seven-minute appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show, where he claimed The Intercept’s alleged shielding of Joe Biden from scrutiny was all of a piece with an anti-Trump conspiracy in which “the CIA and the Deep State operatives became heroes of the liberal left, the people that support the Democratic Party, [and are] now in a full union with the neocons, the Bush-Cheney operatives, the CIA, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. That is the union of power, along with mainstream media outlets, that is fully behind the Democratic Party.”
“I totally agree,” Carlson declared. “And I’m ashamed of the times I made apologies for those agencies or this behavior. I really am. You are telling the truth… Glenn Greenwald! Congratulations on getting out of there.”
The real story of Greenwald’s Biden screed and his abrupt departure from the Intercept, however, is a little more complicated. According to several of Greenwald’s former colleagues, he had been musing since last July about the possibility of leaving for the richly financed Substack—where, he’d heard, his close friend and former Intercept colleagueMatt Taibbi was earning close to a million dollars a year. (“It would be inaccurate to say I made anything close to a million,” Taibbi told The Daily Beast. “I don’t know what Glenn told others.”)
“It is absolutely true that I had been talking about leaving the Intercept since at least mid-2020, because I had become disgusted with its servitude to the Democratic Party and the resulting corruption of journalism that that produced,” Greenwald told The Daily Beast. However, he wrote, “it’s absolutely false that I was considering going to Substack” until “24 hours” before making the jump.
When Hunter Biden’s long-lost laptop became a public issue after Rudy Giuliani shared it with the New York Post, Greenwald proposed writing about it and Betsy Reed agreed on condition that the piece would contain actual reporting, not just opinion, and that Greenwald would submit it to an editing process before publication—terms he accepted. However, after he filed the piece to Maass, his nominal editor, Greenwald strenuously objected to Maass’ extensive notes (also posted on Substack) calling for changes, deletions and more facts.
At that point, according to three sources, Greenwald’s Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahillread the draft of the Biden piece and made detailed recommendations of revisions designed to satisfy the concerns of both Maass and Greenwald. The sources said Greenwald largely agreed with Scahill’s suggestions to fix the piece, but instead of submitting a new version, he simply withdrew it, explaining that he had already made the decision to leave the Intercept for Substack—a move he announced the same day as his resignation, leaving former colleagues to believe he had been secretly negotiating a lucrative deal with Substack all along. Scahill declined to comment.
[Glenn Greenwald, Inc.?
MEDIA MATTERS
Lloyd Grove]
In an email to The Daily Beast, Greenwald confirmed that “Betsy was demanding that I submit my article to an editor—the first time in 7 years that she did so,” and that “Jeremy voluntarily went and made suggestions to the article, all of which I told him were acceptable. But Betsy was furious with Jeremy for doing that, telling him that his suggestions were nowhere near sufficient to render the article publishable.”
Reed, who said she was not furious with Scahill for trying to broker peace, added that Greenwald abruptly withdrew the piece before she or Maass had the chance even to see Scahill’s editing suggestions.
Greenwald added: “I never talked to the Substack people until the day before I announced my resignation from the Intercept— - less than 24 hours in advance...And that happened only because it was obvious that they [The Intercept] would only publish my article if I first removed all the parts critical of Joe Biden—the candidate they were desperate to win the election—and only leave the sections about media criticism.”
Meanwhile, readers can subscribe to Greenwald’s Substack writing under a variety of plans ranging from $5 a month to $50 a year to $150 to become a “founding member.” Greenwald has already lined up between 20,000 and 40,000 paid subscribers, according to an estimate by the Financial Times that Greenwald said was accurate, and is reportedly on course to earn up to $2 million a year.
Not bad for a guy who, as Greenwald put it in his email, “grew up in a working-class neighborhood raised by a single mother who worked hourly-wage jobs as a McDonald’s cashier and a defensive driving instructor” and “went to public schools and only could go to college and law school because of a full-time scholarship from the debate team and student loans.”
Intercept editor Roger Hodge theorizes that money is probably behind at least some of Greenwald’s adventures in right-wing media.
“He needs subscribers and he’s giving people what they want, which is hatred and rage,” Hodge told The Daily Beast. “He’s tapped into the rage machine. He understands that there’s no engagement like rage engagement.”
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/journalistic-fact-checking-not-doxxing/
The right-wing is throwing a predictable fit about the Post’s exposé of one of the most influential propaganda accounts on the internet.
Desperate to deflect from valid concerns that its reckless accusations of pedophilia are marking their targets for violence, the right-wing is now denouncing routine journalism as a form of doxxing.
Taylor Lorenz revealed that the author of the notoriously homophobic “Libs of TikTok” account is a woman named Chaya Raichik.
The Twitter feed curates videos of teachers speaking about sex and gender. She adds hateful commentary baselessly accusing them of being “groomers,” tagging their school districts, and openly agitating to get them fired. The creator gloats about destroying their lives.
“To me, the most powerful part of it is exposing the teachers,” Raichik told Fox in December 2021. “When there’s actually action taken, when a teacher gets fired or suspended, it’s a really great feeling.”
Lorenz backed up a damning digital trail establishing Raichik’s identity with shoe-leather reporting to confirm Raichik was indeed the woman behind the account. Faced with overwhelming evidence, Raichik admitted authorship and set about fundraising off her fake victimhood.
The facts are unassailable, so the rightwing can only launch frivolous attacks on her journalistic ethics for – wait for it – door-knocking.
This argument scarcely merits a response.
Lorenz’s critics know perfectly well that door-knocking is a standard reporting tactic. A slightly more sophisticated version of this argument is that door-knocking is OK in principle, but it was wrong to use it on Raichik. She’s just a humble Brooklyn realtor with a passion for homophobia, a private citizen who has the right to remain anonymous.
“Is it now permissible for journalists to investigate and expose the real identity of any anonymous social media user?,” tweeted Glenn Greenwald, a frequent Tucker Carlson guest. “Or is it just permissible if the anonymous social media user has a certain kind of politics?”
Raichik’s own words demolish that argument.
She told the New York Post in February she quit her job and moved to California to pursue Libs of TikTok full-time. In the same interview, she likened her project to that of the notorious operatives at Project Veritas, who wage ideological warfare with covertly recorded videos.
Like Veritas, Raichik has at times identified herself as a journalist and appeared repeatedly as a guest on Fox News prior to her unmasking.
Like most political operatives, Raichik would prefer to operate in the shadows, but the press has no obligation to keep her secrets. Indeed, the responsibility of journalists is to hold power to account.
Libs of TikTok wields power due to its stature in right-wing media and politics as well as its enormous social media footprint.The account has over 900,000 followers, as of this writing. Raichik has power not only over the lives and careers of teachers whom she has smeared as pedophiles, but also over our national discourse and even legislation.
The account serves as a clearinghouse for videos of teachers advocating for sex education and LGBTQ rights. These are a vital resource in the rightwing’s primary domestic policy agenda: demolishing LGBTQ rights as well as the very concept of public education by accusing people they don’t like of being pedophiles.
Libs of TikTik supplies an endless stream of pretexts for “Don’t Say Gay” bills, such as the one Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law last month. DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw promotes Libs of TikTok frequently from her official account.
Fox has effectively outsourced the grubby work of finding a new Main Character for each day’s culture war to Libs of TikTok. Fox regularly runs packages sourced to clips publicized by Raichik. Fox flagship host Tucker Carlson even proclaimed Raichik’s “journalism” more trustworthy than that of the Times.
Libs of TikTok is rightly criticized for exposing private citizens to harassment and potential violence. The right is trying to neutralize attacks by creating an equivalence between reporting on right-wing operatives and falsely accusing private citizens of being pedophiles.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.
1 22 an
no lnx
Echoing ‘Vladimir Putin’s talking points’ is putting Fox News at odds with ‘pro-Ukraine’ Republicans: conservative
Fox News' Tucker Carlson speaking at the 2020 Student Action Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida,
Alex Henderson January 28, 2022
During the George W. Bush years, the right-wing media, including Fox News, were quick to parrot neoconservative talking points. But Fox News has since taken a much more Trumpian turn, and its biggest star, Tucker Carlson, often promotes MAGA isolationism and a hypernationalist “America first” ideology. That isolationism, Never Trump conservative David Frum stresses in an article published by The Atlantic on January 28, is putting Fox News pundits at odds with more hawkish conservatives when it comes to Russia and Ukraine.
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“Night after night,” Frum explains, “the host of the top-rated show on Fox News repeats Vladimir Putin’s talking points justifying aggression against Ukraine and opposing U.S. aid to that threatened sovereign country. Tucker Carlson’s influence is felt across right-wing social media, where it is amplified by figures such as Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Glenn Greenwald and Mollie Hemingway. A highly visible coterie of socially conservative intellectuals also argues the case against helping Ukraine.”
Frum continues, “Meanwhile, day after day, Republican officeholders in the House and the Senate urge more support for Ukraine. That list includes not only traditionalists such as Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, but also, many legislators who got close to former President Donald Trump, such as Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.”
President Joe Biden has had a much more hawkish tone with Russia and President Vladimir Putin than Trump, and Frum notes that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has “backed the Biden Administration’s approach, as have the top Republicans on the House Intelligence and Armed Services Committees.”
“Broadly, Republican elected officials and the think tanks that advise them are staunchly pro-Ukraine; conservative talkers, especially on TV and social media, are varying degrees of anti-Ukraine,” Frum observes. “Russia-Ukraine is becoming a trial of strength, not only between Putin and NATO, but between different parts of the conservative world…. As powerful as Fox News messaging is, scenes of violence after Russian aggression sends Ukrainian refugees streaming westward to safety would be powerful too.”
Frum adds, “Americans are never eager to get involved in other people’s fights, but they remain deeply committed to a vision of their country as a force for good in the world.” many twt
an 621
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson on Friday returned to his debunked conspiracy theory that it was actually the FBI — not Trump and his supporters — who were responsible for the January 6th insurrection.
After Carlson interviewed Glenn Greenwald,the host wondered if maybe the FBI set up not just Donald Trump supporters, but also Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).
"It does kind of make you wonder about Matt Gaetz, actually. Remember Matt Gaetz? He was engaged in child sex trafficking," Carlson said with a mocking voice.
"We know that Matt Gaetz kind of went after the national security state, repeatedly, and then they told us that he was a child sex trafficker — maybe he is, we don't know," Carlson said.
"But if he is, why hasn't he been charged yet?" Carlson asked. "Anyone wonder that?" [just askin']
"What is going on here?" he asked.
Watch:
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/the-u-s-supported-coup-in-bolivia-continues-to-produce-repression-and-tyranny-while-revealing-how-u-s-media-propaganda-works/
https://theintercept.com/2019/03/18/jair-bolsonaro-family-militias-gangs-brazil/
no lnx pix many
BRAZIL’S PRESIDENT JAIR BOLSONARO is in Washington to meet U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. While the trip officially is focused on the joint efforts of the U.S. and Brazil to change the government of Venezuela, it is being billed by the Bolsonaro government as a “restart” of his presidency and image after multiple, serious scandals crippled the first three months of his presidency.
But when it comes to recreating his image, the timing of this trip could hardly be worse. Key news events of the last several weeks — including the arrests of two former Rio de Janeiro police officers for the March 2018 assassination of Rio City Council Councilor Marielle Franco — have highlighted the most damaging and, to many, most terrifying revelations about Bolsonaro and his three politician sons: their extensive, direct, multilayered, and deeply personal ties to the paramilitary gangs and militias responsible for Brazil’s most horrific violence.
Watch our video report on the growing, multilevel, personal, and highly disturbing links between Bolsonaro and his family on the one hand, and the country’s most violent, lawless, and murderous paramilitary gangs on the other:
Just consider how, even before the arrests of Franco’s killers last week, so many deep ties had already emerged between Bolsonaro and his sons, who won office principally on an anti-crime and anti-corruption platform, and the paramilitary gangs composed of current and former military police officers and military members. Bolsonaro himself is a former army captain who served during Brazil’s military dictatorship and left in the 1980s amid allegations of misconduct; yet, even now as the president, he still has his friends and aides address him as “Captain.”
In January, the Rio de Janeiro police executed a full-scale raid against the city’s most dangerous militia, the one that houses within it the terrifying murder-for-hire team known as “the Crime Office.” That assassin team is composed of highly trained police officers who use their specialized knowledge of investigations and assassin skills to carry out murders with very little possibility of detection, and they have long been the leading suspects in Franco’s assassination, given how professional and frighteningly efficient that murder was carried out.
The January raid resulted in the arrest of five of the top six commanders of the militia. The only one who escaped, and is still a fugitive, was the chief of that militia: ex-police captain Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega (pictured right, from a prior arrest). Wanted for other murders, and subject to an Interpol arrest warrant, he has presided as the leader of Rio’s most terrifying militia, the one that police concluded carried out Franco’s assassination with such chilling precision.
That raid led to a shocking revelation: Unbeknownst to the public, the mother and wife of Nóbrega — one of Brazil’s most notorious gangsters — were both receiving salaries from the state. That’s because both of them were formally employed by Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s oldest son, for the entire last decade as he served as a state representative in the Rio de Janeiro state legislature. When Jair Bolsonaro was elected president last November, Flávio moved up to the Federal Senate as a result of winning his election in Rio with a massive vote total.
Shortly after this highly incriminating connection was revealed, a dam collapsed in the interior of Brazil and tragically killed more than 200 people, understandably replacing news coverage of virtually all other events. That resulted in far less attention being paid to Flávio’s close connections to Nóbrega’s family than was deserved. So just reflect on that: Jair Bolsonaro’s son had on his official government payroll the mother and wife of one of the country’s most notorious and psychopathic paramilitary leaders, the fugitive chief of the militia responsible for the assassination of Marielle Franco, among countless other murders.
In February, Flávio’s direct and intimate ties to militias became even more glaring. Checks were found issued in the name of his campaign account signed by the sister of two twin-brother militia members, Alan and Alex Rodrigues de Oliveira, arrested in a large-scale police raid last August. Just months prior to the arrest of these two militia brothers, Flávio posted to his Instagram a photo of himself and his father, then a presidential candidate, at a birthday party for the two militia twins, congratulating them and heaping praise on the family.
IN RETROSPECT, that Flávio had such close personal connections to Rio’s militias that he put the mother and wife of its most notorious chief on his payroll should not have been surprising. As a state legislator, he twice bestowed on the top militia leaders, then police officers, formal awards and honors, praising them for their civil service to their communities.
Far worse, in 2011, Brazilian Judge Patricia Acioli, who, along with Brazil’s left-wing PSOL party, was overseeing a sweeping criminal investigation into militias and heroically sent numerous high-ranking police officers to prison, was brutally murdered outside her home, horrifying not just Brazil but the world. While all Brazilian politicians expressed horror and disgust at this brazen attack on the rule of law — showing that militias could just murder whoever they wanted, even judges sending their leaders to prison — Flávio posted a tweet that basically blamed her for her own murder, criticizing her for provoking the militias:
Jair Bolsonaro himself has a history of multiple ties to Brazil’s militias and several of its key leaders. He has twice, on the floor of the Congress, explicitly praised their death squads as good for the country’s security and crime problems. On one occasion, after various members of Congress from the northern region of Brazil warned of the growth of death squads and extrajudicial murders carried out by growing police-composed militias, Bolsonaro stood to explicitly praise them as crime-fighting patriots and declared them “welcome” in Rio de Janeiro.
Since then, those militias have taken over huge swaths of Brazil’s most critical cities, including Rio. A January investigation from The Intercept Brasil found that militias have virtually taken over the entire city.
In sum, the Bolsonaro movement has been fixated on Brazil’s crime epidemic, and anger over growing violence was arguably one of the two main factors in the rise of that movement (the other being anger over systemic political corruption). But when Bolsonaro and his family speak of crime, they almost always try to focus attention on the primarily black drug traffickers who live in the city’s poor favelas, and virtually never speak of the far more menacing, serious, and terrifying source of criminality carried out by the Bolsonaros’ ideological companions and heroes of the country’s sophisticated and skilled militias:
That Bolsonaro — despite how central his anti-crime posture is to his political popularity — is eager to praise, rather than condemn and combat, militias is not hard to understand. Those militias are ruled by his friends, neighbors, comrades, and closest associates.
The militia member who worked as Flávio’s driver for the last decade and whose large money movements — including one into the account of Jair Bolsonaro’s wife — triggered the first scandal of his presidency, ex-police Officer Fabrício Queiroz, is one of Bolsonaro’s oldest and closest friends. When police sought to question him about those money movements to the Bolsonaro family, he unsurprisingly went into hiding in the precise neighborhood, Rio das Pedras, most notorious for being commanded most thoroughly by Rio’s most violent militia.
WHEN TWO OF FRANCO’S KILLERS were finally apprehended last week, just two days shy of the one-year anniversary of her assassination, nobody was surprised that they had both been members of Brazil’s military police. The extreme professionalism with which that murder was carried out, including the still-unexplained coincidence that numerous public security cameras on the path they chose to pursue her had been turned off in the days before the assassination, left no doubt that militias were responsible.
But almost immediately after the police announced the identity of the two assassins they arrested, ties to Bolsonaro emerged. The shooter himself, police Sgt. Ronnie Lessa, lives on the same street as Bolsonaro’s Rio house, in an exclusive gated community: an extreme coincidence given how massive and sprawling of a city Rio de Janeiro is. In other words, one of Franco’s assassins — the man who pumped four bullets into her head — turned out to be Bolsonaro’s neighbor, both of whom lived in close proximity in a very rich neighborhood despite working their entire adult lives on the public payroll.
Shortly thereafter, a photo emerged of Lessa and Bolsonaro together, posted to Lessa’s social media account. Police then confirmed that Bolsonaro’s 20-year-old son and Lessa’s daughter had been dating. While none of those facts are close to dispositive in terms of linking Bolsonaro to Franco’s murder, those are a lot of coincidental connections to have between a three-decade member of Congress and the current president of the Republic, on the one hand, and the murderers who pumped four bullets into the skull of one of Rio de Janeiro’s most prominent and inspiring left-wing politicians on the other.
As part of the police search of the assassins’ properties, the police apprehended the single largest collection of armaments in the history of Brazil’s democracy: 117 M-16 automatic rifles. Notably, they were apprehended not in the favelas on which the Bolsonaros obsessively fixate when talking about crime, but in a luxury condominium owned by a former police officer who is part of the militia that assassinated Franco and which has multiple ties to the Bolsonaro family:
m16-1552922172Armaments seized from the house of one of the accused assassins of Marielle Franco, including 117 M-16 automatic rifles, from Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Rio Civil Police]
Days later, the police — despite still not having apprehended the people who ordered and paid for Franco’s assassination — insinuated a political motive to her killers. Consistent with Bolsonaro’s denunciation of the sweeping investigation of militias led by Franco’s political mentor, Marcelo Freixo of the left-wing PSOL party (the same party of Jean Wyllys, the gay congressperson who last month fled Brazil and gave up his congressional term under highly specific death threats), reports emerged that Franco’s assassins were overt Bolsonaro supporters.
The police also indicated that they had seized the computers and other electronic devices of the two killers, and discovered that, subsequent to Franco’s assassination, the murderous militia pair had searched and monitored the movements of numerous human rights activists, left-wing journalists, and politicians (one of those specified by the police was my husband, David Miranda, now a congressperson from the same left-wing party as Freixo, Franco, and Wyllys).
All of this mounting evidence — most of which has been unearthed just in the 10 weeks since Bolsonaro’s January 1 inauguration — paints a deeply disturbing and dangerous picture. Brazil — the world’s fifth-largest country, with massive oil reserves and the world’s most critical environmental region in the Amazon that the current government wants to sell off to the highest industrial bidders — is in the hands of a family with multiple, close, and growing connections to the country’s most murderous, criminal, and sociopathic death squads and paramilitary forces.
As Bolsonaro meets Trump at the White House tomorrow, that meeting should be understood first and foremost within this context. Bolsonaro has quickly elevated himself to the top echelon of the world’s most thuggish, violent, and dangerous leaders. And given the stakes raised by Brazil — geopolitically, culturally, economically, environmentally, and militarily — this is clearly one of the most profoundly disturbing developments of the last year. Whatever else is true, the media focus on Bolsonaro’s presence in the White House should feature these facts prominently and centrally if the reporting is to accurately reflect who he is and what he represents.
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capt 318
partner detained airport terrorism 9 hrs
rogers intel comm house denounced, as did clapper?
polk award
wiki:
On the weekend of February 5–6, 2011, Aaron Barr, the chief executive of the security firm HBGary Federal, announced that his firm had successfully infiltrated the Anonymous group, and although he would not hand over details to the police, he would reveal his findings at a later conference in San Francisco. In retaliation for Aaron Barr's claims, members of the groupAnonymous hacked the website of HBGary Federaland replaced the welcome page with a message stating that Anonymous should not be messed with, and that the hacking of the website was necessary to defend itself. Using a variety of techniques, including social engineering and SQL injection,[109]Anonymous also went on to take control of the company's e-mail,dumping 68,000 e-mails from the system, erasing files, and taking down their phone system.[110] The leaked emails revealed the reports and company presentations of other companies in computer security such as Endgame systems who promise high quality offensive software, advertising "subscriptions of $2,500,000 per year for access to 0day exploits".[111]
Among the documents exposed was aPowerPoint presentation entitled "The Wikileaks Threat", put together by HBGary Federal along with two other data intelligence firms forBank of America in December.[112] Within the report, these firms created a list of important contributors to WikiLeaks; they further developed a strategic plan of attack against the site. As TechHerald explains, "the plan included pressing a journalist in order to disrupt his support of the organization, cyber attacks, disinformation, and other potential proactive tactics." The report specifically claims that Glenn Greenwald's support was key to WikiLeaks' ongoing survival
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https://www.alternet.org/media/glenn-greenwald-facebook-operating-arm-israeli-state-removing-palestinian-posts
Facebook is being accused of censoring Palestinian activists who protest the Israeli occupation. This comes as Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked reportedly said in December that Tel Aviv had submitted 158 requests to Facebook over the previous four months asking it to remove content it deemed “incitement,” and said Facebook had granted 95 percent of the requests. We speak with Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald about his new report for The Intercept headlined “Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments.”
...
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hhmn but links to art'ls on fusion of corp/govt
http://www.waronwethepeople.com/hunton-williams/
https://theintercept.com/2017/02/14/the-leakers-who-exposed-gen-flynns-lie-committed-serious-and-wholly-justified-felonies/
TRUMP’S NATIONAL security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications.
In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT — signals intelligence — is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be prosecuted under federal law for disclosing classified information only under the narrowest circumstances; reflecting how serious SIGINT is considered to be, one of those circumstances includes leaking the contents of intercepted communications, as defined this way by 18 § 798 of the U.S. Code:
Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information … obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
That Flynn lied about what he said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was first revealed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has built his career on repeating what his CIA sources tell him. In his January 12 column, Ignatius wrote: “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.”
That “senior U.S. government official” committed a serious felony by leaking to Ignatius the communication activities of Flynn. Similar and even more extreme crimes were committed by what the Washington Post called “nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls,” who told the paper for its February 9 article that “Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The New York Times, also citing anonymous U.S. officials, provided even more details about the contents of Flynn’s telephone calls.
That all of these officials committed major crimes can hardly be disputed. In January, CNN reported that Flynn’s calls with the Russians “were captured by routine U.S. eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats.” That means that the contents of those calls were “obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of [a] foreign government,” which in turn means that anyone who discloses them — or reports them to the public — is guilty of a felony under the statute.
Yet very few people are calling for a criminal investigation or the prosecution of these leakers, nor demanding the leakers step forward and “face the music” — for very good reason: The officials leaking this information acted justifiably, despite the fact that they violated the law. That’s because the leaks revealed that a high government official, Gen. Flynn, blatantly lied to the public about a material matter — his conversations with Russian diplomats — and the public has the absolute right to know this.
This episode underscores a critical point: The mere fact that an act is illegal does not mean it is unjust or even deserving of punishment. Oftentimes, the most just acts are precisely the ones that the law prohibits.
That’s particularly true of whistleblowers — i.e., those who reveal information the law makes it a crime to reveal, when doing so is the only way to demonstrate to the public that powerful officials are acting wrongfully or deceitfully. In those cases, we should cheer those who do it even though they are undertaking exactly those actions that the criminal law prohibits.
This Flynn episode underscores another critical point: The motives of leakers are irrelevant. It’s very possible — indeed, likely — that the leakers here were not acting with benevolent motives. Nobody with a straight face can claim that lying to the public is regarded in official Washington as some sort of mortal sin; if anything, the contrary is true: It’s seen as a job requirement.
Moreover, Gen. Flynn has many enemies throughout the intelligence and defense community. The same is true, of course, of Donald Trump; recall that just a few weeks ago, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer warned Trump that he was being “really dumb” to criticize the intelligence community because “they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
It’s very possible — I’d say likely — that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble. Whatever else is true, this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries in the Trump White House.
But no matter. What matters is not the motive of the leaker but the effects of the leak. Any leak that results in the exposure of high-level wrongdoing — as this one did — should be praised, not scorned and punished.
IT IS, OF COURSE, bizarre to watch this principle now so widely celebrated. Over the last eight years, President Obama implemented the most vindictive and aggressive war on whistleblowers in all of U.S. history. As Leonard Downie, one of the editors at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation, put it in a special report: “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”
It’s hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people — from both parties, across the ideological spectrum — who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn.
It’s even more surreal to watch Democrats act as though lying to the public is some grave firing offense when President Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, got caught red-handed not only lying to the public but also to Congress — about a domestic surveillance program that courts ruled was illegal. And despite the fact that lying to Congress is a felony, he kept his job until the very last day of the Obama presidency.
But this is how political power and the addled partisan brain in D.C. functions. Those in power always regard leaks as a heinous crime, while those out of power regard them as a noble act. They seamlessly shift sides as their position in D.C. changes.
Indeed, while Democrats have suddenly re-discovered the virtues of illegal leaking, Trump-supporting Republicans are insisting that the only thing that matters is rooting out the criminal leakers. Fox News host Steve Doocey and right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham today both demanded to know why the leakers weren’t being hunted, while congressional Republicans are vowing investigations to find the leakers. And Trump himself today — echoing Obama-era Democrats — said that “the real story” isn’t the lies told by his national security adviser but rather the fact that someone leaked information exposing them ... When asked to investigate pro-union websites and WikiLeaks, Barr turned immediately to his social media toolkit and was ready to deploy personas, Facebook scraping, link analysis, and fake websites; he also suggested computer attacks on WikiLeaks infrastructure and pressure be brought upon journalists like Glenn Greenwald.
His compatriots at Palantir and Berico showed, in their many e-mails, few if any qualms about turning their national security techniques upon private dissenting voices. Barr's ideas showed up in Palantir-branded PowerPoints and Berico-branded "scope of work" documents. "Reconnaissance cells" were proposed, network attacks were acceptable, "target dossiers" on "adversaries" would be compiled, and "complex information campaigns" involving fake personas were on the table.
Critics like Glenn Greenwald contend that this nexus of private and public security power is a dangerous mix. "The real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power," he wrote last week.
Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former.
The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It's not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it's worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.
arstechnica
Glenn Greenwald unleashed both barrels of his own, claiming that "what is set forth in these proposal... quite possibly constitutes serious crimes. Manufacturing and submitting fake documents with the intent they be published likely constitutes forgery and fraud. Threatening the careers of journalists and activists in order to force them to be silent is possibly extortion and, depending on the specific means to be used, constitutes other crimes as well. Attacking WikiLeaks' computer infrastructure in an attempt to compromise their sources undoubtedly violates numerous cyber laws."
Intimidating The Press In The Age Of Leaks
Guardian journalist and Snowden liaison Glenn Greenwald's partner being detained is only the latest move on press freedoms.
By Mint Press News Desk | August 20, 2013
In the latest chapter of the unfolding National Security Agency (NSA) leak saga, authorities at London Heathrow Airport detained David Miranda, the partner of Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, for roughly 9 hours, confiscating his cellphone, laptops and memory sticks.
Greenwald has received intense U.S. government scrutiny since he broke the story of widespread government spying through the National Security Agency earlier this summer. He reported the story after he received documents from Edward Snowden, a former Booz Allen Hamilton employee who now resides in Russia after receiving approval for a one-year stay.
Snowden is wanted in the U.S. for crimes that include violating the 1917 Espionage Act, butGreenwald, a reporter who was doing his job as an investigative journalist, has also been targeted by some members of the Senate Foreign Intelligence Committee for reporting the news.
It went a step further when The Associated Press reported that Greenwald’s parter was held under anti-terror legislation at Heathrow Airport, triggering claims from his supporters that British authorities are trying to interfere with Greenwald’s work as a journalist.
“This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism,” Greenwald said in a post on the Guardian website. “It’s bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It’s worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic.”
The attacks against what many consider legitimate investigative journalism began shortly after the leak, with some members of Congress calling for Greenwald’s arrest. “I’m talking about Greenwald,” said Peter King (R-NY) during an interview in June. “Greenwald, not only did he disclose this information, he has said that he has names of CIA agents and assets around the world, and they’re threatening to disclose that. The last time that was done in this country, we saw a CIA station chief murdered in Greece … Yes, there has to be … legal action taken against him.”
Greenwald flatly denied that he revealed the names of CIA agents around the world and has consistently maintained that his reports are well within the parameters of legally sanctioned free speech.
Greenwald isn’t the only journalist who has faced blowback for reporting controversial stories in recent years. Barrett Brown, a journalist who revealed leaked emails from Stratfor could face 105 years in prison for doing his job. Reporters Without Borders, a free speech advocacy organization, says that Brown hasn’t committed any crimes and shouldn’t be targeted.
“Barrett Brown is not a hacker, he is not a criminal” stated Reporters Without Borders General Secretary Christophe Deloire, “He did not infiltrate any systems, nor did he appear to have the technical expertise to do so. Above all, Barrett was an investigative journalist who was merely doing his professional duty by looking into the Stratfor emails, an affair of public interest.
“The sentence of 105 years in prison that he is facing is absurd and dangerous, given that Jeremy Hammond who pleaded guilty for the actual hack on Stratfor is only facing a maximum of 10 years in prison. Threatening a journalist with a possible century-long jail sentence is a scary prospect for journalists investigating the intelligence government contractor industry.”
http://www.mintpressnews.com/intimidating-the-press-in-the-age-of-leaks/167290/
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http://glenngreenwald.net/
Glenn Greenwald is the author of several bestsellers, including How Would a Patriot Act? and With Liberty and Justice for Some. Acclaimed as one of the 25 most influential political commentators by The Atlantic, one of America’s top 10 opinion writers by Newsweek, and one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013 by Foreign Policy, Greenwald is a former constitutional law and civil rights litigator. He was a columnist for The Guardian until October 2013 and is now a founding editor of a new media outlet, The Intercept.. He is a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, and various other television and radio outlets. He has won numerous awards for his NSA reporting, including the 2013 Polk Award for national security reporting, the top 2013 investigative journalism award from the Online News Association, the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting (the Brazilian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), and the 2013 Pioneer Award from Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also received the first annual I. F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2009 and a 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the arrest and detention of Chelsea Manning. In 2013, Greenwald led the Guardian reporting that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service. - See more at: http://glenngreenwald.net/#sthash.Ep24sqt3.dpuf
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Glenn Edward Greenwald (born March 6, 1967) is an American lawyer, journalist and author. He was a columnist for Guardian US from August 2012 to October 2013.[2][3][4] He was a columnist for Salon.com from 2007 to 2012, and an occasional contributor to The Guardian.[5][6][7] Greenwald worked as a constitutional and civil rights litigator. At Salon he contributed as a columnist and blogger, focusing on political and legal topics.[8] He has also contributed to other newspapers and political news magazines, including The New York Times,[9][10][11] the Los Angeles Times,[12] The American Conservative,[13] The National Interest[14] and In These Times.[15][16] In February 2014 he became, along with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, one of the founding editors of The Intercept.[17]
Greenwald was named by *Foreign Policy* magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013.[18] Four of the five books he has written have been on *The New York Times* Best Sellers list. Greenwald is a frequent speaker on college campuses, including Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, the University of Pennsylvania,Brown University, UCLA School of Law, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland. He frequently appears on various radio and television programs.
Greenwald has received awards including the first Izzy Award for independent journalism, in 2009,[19] and the 2010 Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary.[20]
In June 2013 Greenwald became widely known after The Guardian published the first of a series of reports detailing United States and British global surveillanceprograms, based on classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden.[21][22] The series on which Greenwald worked along with others won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.[23][24]
His reporting on the National Security Agency (NSA) won numerous other awards around the world, including top investigative journalism prizes from the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting,[25] the 2013 Online Journalism Awards,[26] the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting in Brazil for his articles in O Globo on NSA mass surveillance of Brazilians (becoming the first foreigner to win the award),[27] the 2013 Libertad de Expresion Internacional award from Argentinian magazinePerfil,[28] and the 2013 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.[29]
His work on the NSA files was in part the subject of the film Citizenfour, which won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Greenwald appeared onstage at the Oscar ceremony with the film's director, Laura Poitras, as she accepted the award.[30]
Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the hometown of his partner, David Michael Miranda.[31][32][33][34][35] Greenwald has stated that his residence in Brazil is the result of an American law, the Defense of Marriage Act, barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages, which prevented his partner from receiving a visa to reside in the United States with him.[32] Greenwald has also cited fears of arrest should he move back to the U.S.[36]
Contents
- 1 Early life
- 2 Career
- 3 Global surveillance disclosure
- 4 Political views
- 5 Religious views
- 6 First Look Media
- 7 Reception
- 8 Awards
- 9 Books
- 10 See also
- 11 References
- 12 Further reading
- 13 External links
Early life
Greenwald was born on March 6, 1967, in New York City to Arlene and Daniel Greenwald.[37] Shortly after his birth, Greenwald moved with his family to Lauderdale Lakes, Florida.[8][31][38] While a senior in high school, at 17, he ran unsuccessfully for the city council.[38] After graduating from high school, Greenwald enrolled in George Washington University where he majored in philosophy. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1990. He then attended the New York University School of Law, earning a Juris Doctor in 1994.[8]
Career
Litigation attorney
Greenwald practiced law in the Litigation Department at:{ Wachtell, Lipton,:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:Rosen & Katz:{ (1994–1995); in 1996 he co-founded his own litigation firm, called Greenwald Christoph & Holland (later renamed Greenwald Christoph PC), where he litigated cases concerning issues of U.S. constitutional law and civil rights.}:[8][31]:{ }::{One of his higher-profile cases was the representation of white supremacist Matthew F. Hale.[39] About his work in First Amendment speech cases, }::{Greenwald told }:Rolling Stone:{, "to me, it's a heroic attribute to be so committed to a principle that you apply it not when it's easy...not when it supports your position, not when it protects people you like, but when it defends and protects people that you hate".}:[40]
Later, according to Greenwald, "I decided voluntarily to wind down my practice in 2005 because I could, and because, after ten years, I was bored with litigating full-time and wanted to do other things which I thought were more engaging and could make more of an impact, including political writing."[31]
In the early 2000s Greenwald was a partner in an LLC.[41]
Unclaimed Territory
In October 2005, he started his blog Unclaimed Territory focusing on the investigation pertaining to the Plame affair, the CIA leak grand jury investigation, the federal indictment of Scooter Libby and the NSA warrantless surveillance (2001–07) controversy. In April 2006, the blog received the 2005 Koufax Award for "Best New Blog".[8]
Salon
In February 2007, Greenwald became a contributing writer at Salon.com, and the new column and blog superseded Unclaimed Territory, though Salon.com prominently features hyperlinks to it in Greenwald's dedicated biographical section.[42][43]
Among the frequent topics of his Salon articles were the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, and the candidacy of former CIA official John O. Brennan for the jobs of either Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (D/CIA) or the next Director of National Intelligence (DNI) after the election of Barack Obama. Brennan withdrew his name from consideration for the post after opposition centered in liberal blogs and led by Greenwald.[44][45][46][46][47][48] Brennan took up the leadership position at the CIA again, in March 2013.
The Guardian
Greenwald left Salon.com on August 20, 2012 for The Guardian, citing "the opportunity to reach a new audience, to further internationalize my readership, and to be re-invigorated by a different environment" as reasons for the move.[49]
On June 5, 2013, Greenwald scooped the story on the top-secret United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order requiring Verizon to provide the National Security Agency with telephone metadata for all calls between the US and abroad, as well as all domestic calls.[50][51][52]
Further information: Verizon Communications: NSA Collection of Phone Records
First Look Media and The Intercept
On October 15, 2013, Greenwald announced and The Guardian confirmed that he was leaving to pursue a "once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline".[4][53] Reutersreported that the philanthropist providing the financial backing for the new venture was Pierre Omidyar,the eBay founder.[54]
That news organization, First Look Media, launched its first online publication, called The Intercept on February 10, 2014.[55] Greenwald serves as editor, alongside Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.
Guest appearances
Greenwald has appeared as a round table guest on ABC's Sunday morning news show This Week, HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, NPR's All Things Considered, as well as numerous times on C-SPAN's Washington Journal; Pacifica Radio's syndicated series Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman;[56] on Public Radio International's To the Point; MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, Up with Chris Hayes, and Dylan Ratigan's Morning Meeting; Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume;.[57] Greenwald has been a regular guest on the Hugh Hewitt Show (and was a friend and favorite guest of Hewitt's frequent guest host, Dean Barnett[citation ^needed]) and on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal.[58][59][60] On 15 September 2014, he was a headline speaker at Kim Dotcom'sMoment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland, New Zealand.[61]
Books
Greenwald's first book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From aPresident Run Amok, was published by Working Assets in 2006. It was a *New York Times* bestseller,[62] and ranked #1 onAmazon.com both before its publication (due to pre-orders based on attention from 'UT' readers and other bloggers) and for several days after its release, ending its first week at #293.[63]
A Tragic Legacy, his second book, examines the presidency of George W. Bush "with an emphasis on his personality traits and beliefs that drove the presidency (along with an emphasis on how and why those personality traits have led to a presidency that has failed to historic proportions)."[64] Published in hardback by Crown (a division of Random House) on June 26, 2007, and reprinted in a paperback edition by Three Rivers Press on April 8, 2008, it too was a New York Times Best Seller, also ranking #1 for a day on Amazon.com's Non-Fiction Best Seller List and #2 the next day (also due to heavy "discussions and promotions by blogs—a campaign catalyzed by Jane Hamsher [at FireDogLake]", according to Greenwald).[65]
His third book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, was published by Random House in April 2008, the same month that Three Rivers Press reissued A Tragic Legacy in paperback.[66][67]
His fourth book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, was released by Metropolitan Books in October 2011.
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State was released in May 2014.[68] It spent 6 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List,[69] and was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by Amazon[70] and Best NonFiction Books of 2014 by Amazon.[71]
Global surveillance disclosure
Main article: 2013 Global surveillance disclosure
Contact with Edward Snowden
Greenwald was first contacted by Edward Snowden, a former contractor of the U.S. National Security Agency, in late 2012.[72] Snowden contacted Greenwald anonymously and said he had "sensitive documents" that he would like to share.[73] Greenwald found the measures that the source asked him to take to secure their communications too annoying to employ.[72] Snowden then contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras about a month later in January 2013.[74]
According to The Guardian, what originally attracted Snowden to both Greenwald and Poitras was a Salon article penned by Greenwald detailing how Poitras' controversial films had made her a "target of the government".[73][75] Greenwald began working with Snowden in either February[76] or in April after Poitras asked Greenwald to meet her in New York City, at which point Snowden began providing documents to them both.[72]
Media publications
Detention of David MirandaAs part of the global surveillance disclosure, the first of Snowden's documents were published on June 5, 2013, by Glenn Greenwald in Britain's The Guardian. According to Greenwald, Snowden's documents exposed the "scale of domestic surveillance under Obama".[77]
Greenwald described his partner's detention as "clearly intended to send a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and GCHQ".[82]Miranda was detained for nine hours and his laptop and other items were seized. He has since attempted to sue the Metropolitan Police for misuse of their powers. According to The Guardian, the claim, "challenging controversial powers used under schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000, maintains that Miranda was not involved in terrorism and says his right to freedom of expression was curtailed".[83]In August 2013 the Metropolitan Police detained Greenwald's partner David Miranda at London's Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, while he was traveling home from Berlin.[78][79][80] His belongings were seized, including an external hard drive said to be containing sensitive documents relevant to the Greenwald's reporting which were encrypted with software called TrueCrypt.[81]
According to a later article in The Guardian, Miranda was found to have been carrying an external hard drive containing 58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents, and his detention was ruled lawful by the UK High Court, which accepted that Miranda's detention and the seizure of computer material was "an indirect interference with press freedom" but said this was justified by legitimate and "very pressing" interests of national security.[84]
Members of the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) in the UK Parliament said that allowing police to stop and search suspects at airports without suspicion was “not inherently incompatible” with human rights. MPs and peers said they agreed anti-terror officers should be able to “stop, question, request documentation and physically search persons and property” even when they did not have reasonable suspicion that an offence had been committed, but urged the government to introduce new restrictions on powers such as strip-searches, detentions and searches of the contents of electronic devices such as laptops and smartphones, and said that these "more intrusive" measures should take place only when officers had reasonable suspicion that someone was involved in terrorism.[85]
In December 2013, Greenwald and Miranda openly advocated for asylum in Brazil for Edward Snowden in exchange for the fugitive leaker's cooperation in investigating the NSA.[86] Brazil responded by saying that it was not interested in investigating the NSA.[87]
Testimony
National Congress of Brazil
In a statement delivered before the National Congress of Brazil in early August 2013, Greenwald testified that the U.S. government had used counter-terrorism as a pretext for clandestine surveillance in order to compete with other countries in the "business, industrial and economic fields".[88][89][90]
European Parliament
On 18 December 2013, Greenwald told the European Union's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs that "most governments around the world are not only turning their backs on Edward Snowden but also on their ethical responsibilities".[91] Speaking via a video link, Greenwald asserted that "It is the UK through their interception of underwater fibre optic cables, that is a primary threat to the privacy ofEuropean citizens when it comes to their telephone and emails". According to a statement given to the European Parliament by Greenwald:
The ultimate goal of the NSA, along with its most loyal, one might say subservient junior partner the British agency GCHQ – when it comes to the reason why the system of suspicion of surveillance is being built and the objective of this system – is nothing less than the elimination of individual privacy worldwide
—Glenn Greenwald[92]
Political views
Bush's election to the U.S. presidency "changed" Greenwald's previous uninvolved political attitude toward the electoral process "completely", and in 2006 he wrote:Greenwald is critical of actions jointly supported by Democrats and Republicans, writing: "The worst and most tyrannical government actions in Washington are equally supported on a fully bipartisan basis."[93] In the preface to his first book, How Would a Patriot Act? (2006), Greenwald opens with some of his own personal political history, describing his 'pre-political' self as neither liberal nor conservative as a whole, voting neither for George W. Bush nor for any of his rivals (indeed, not voting at all).[94]
Over the past five years, a creeping extremism has taken hold of our federal government, and it is threatening to radically alter our system of government and who we are as a nation. This extremism is neither conservative nor liberal in nature, but is instead driven by theories of unlimited presidential power that are wholly alien, and antithetical, to the core political values that have governed this country since its founding"; for, "the fact that this seizure of ever-expanding presidential power is largely justified through endless, rank fear-mongering—fear of terrorists, specifically—means that not only our system of government is radically changing, but so, too, are our national character, our national identity, and what it means to be American."[94]
Believing that "It is incumbent upon all Americans who believe in that system, bequeathed to us by the founders, to defend it when it is under assault and in jeopardy. And today it is", he says: "I did not arrive at these conclusions eagerly or because I was predisposed by any previous partisan viewpoint. Quite the contrary."[94]
Resistant to applying ideological labels to himself, he emphasizes that he is a strong advocate for U.S. constitutional "balance of powers"[16] and for constitutionally-protected civil and political rights in his writings and public appearances.[8]
Greenwald frequently writes about the War on Drugs and criminal justice reform. He is a member of the advisory board of the Brazil chapter of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.[95][96] Greenwald was also the author of a 2009 white paper published by the Cato Institute titled Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies, exploring the role of drug policy of Portugal.[97]
He criticized the policies of the Bush administration and those who supported it, arguing that most of the American "Corporate News Media" excused Bush's policies and echoed the administration's positions rather than asking hard questions.[34][56]
Regarding civil liberties during the Obama presidency, he elaborated on his conception of change when he said, "I think the only means of true political change will come from people working outside of that [two-party electoral] system to undermine it, and subvert it, and weaken it, and destroy it; not try to work within it to change it."[98] He did, however, raise money for Russ Feingold's 2010 Senate re-election bid,[99] Bill Halter's 2010 primary challenge to Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln,[100] as well as several Congressional candidates in 2012 described as "unique".[101]
Greenwald is critical of Israel's foreign policy and influence on U.S. politics,[102] a stance for which he has in turn been the subject of criticism.[103][104]
He is critical of what he calls the distorted version of "Godwin's law" to prima facie reject any comparison to Nazism. He believes there are instances where such comparisons are warranted.[105]
Greenwald criticized the prison conditions in which U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning, the accused WikiLeaks leaker then known as Bradley, was held after Manning's arrest by military authorities.[106] As a supporter of Manning, describing her as "a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of motives", and "a national hero similar to Daniel Ellsberg."[107]
Religious views
Greenwald came from a Jewish background, albeit largely non practicing, and was never Bar Mitzvahed, stating that "My parents tried to inculcate me a little bit into organized Judaism, but they weren't particularly devoted to that, and my grandparents were, but it just never took hold." He says that he does believe in "the spiritual and mystical part of the world", including practicing yoga, but his moral precepts "aren't informed in any way by religious doctrine or, like, organized religion or anything."[108]
First Look Media
Main article: First Look Media
In October 2013, Greenwald announced that he was joining with eBay founder and PayPal owner Pierre Omidyar on a new independent news venture named First Look Media.[109][110] Omidyar has said that he was committing an initial $250m to the venture. Omidyar told media critic Jay Rosen that the decision was fuelled by his "rising concern about press freedoms in the United States and around the world." Greenwald along with his colleagues Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill were initially working on creating a place online to support independent journalism, when they were approached by Omidyar who was looking to start his own media organization. The new venture will be a for-profit one (rather than a non-profit charity) and it will be funded by Omidyar personally instead of through the Omidyar Network.[111]
Reception
Greenwald has been placed on numerous "top 50" and "top 25" lists of columnists in the United States.[112][113][114][115][116][117][118][119][120] In June 2012, Newsweek magazine named him one of America's Top 10 Opinionists, saying that "a righteous, controlled, and razor-sharp fury runs through a great deal" of his writing, and: "His independent persuasion can make him a danger or an asset to both sides of the aisle."[121]
According to Nate Anderson, writing in Ars Technica, around 2010/2011 Aaron Barr of HBGary and Team Themis planned to damage Greenwald's career as a way to respond to a potential dump of Bank of Americadocuments by WikiLeaks, saying that "Without the support of people like Glenn WikiLeaks would fold."[122]
Josh Voorhees, writing in slate.com, reported that in 2013 congressman Peter King (R-NY) suggested Greenwald should be arrested for his reporting on the NSA PRISM program and NSA leaker Edward Snowden.[123] Journalist Andrew Ross:{Sorkin }:said "I would arrest [Snowden] and now I'd almost arrest Glenn Greenwald",[124] but later apologized for his statement, which Greenwald accepted.
Journalist David Gregory accused Greenwald of aiding and abetting Snowden, before asking "why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?"[125]
In an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC's Sunday morning news program This Week, Greenwald said that members of Congress are being "blocked" from getting "the most basic information about what NSA is doing... and what the FISA court has been doing...." and specifically referenced Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), a ranking member of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence("House Intelligence Committee"). Ruppersberger, who was a guest on the show, responded, "We have rules as far as the committee and what you can have and what you cannot have. However, based on that, that statement I just made, is that since this incident occurred with Snowden, we've had three different hearings for members of our Democratic Caucus, and the Republican Caucus.... And we will continue to do that because what we're trying to do now is to get the American public to know more about what's going on." Rep. King, who was also a guest on This Week as a ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, stated: "[T]o me it's unprecedented to have all of these top people from an administration during this time of crisis still come in and answer question after question after question. So anyone who says that Congress is somehow being stonewalled is just wrong and [the question] is generally, I think, raised by people who are trying to make a name for themselves."[126]
In a February 2014 interview Greenwald said he believed he risked detention if he reentered the U.S., but would likely return, should he win a prestigious journalism award.[127] Later that month, it was announced that he was among the recipients of the 2013 Polk Awards, to be conferred April 11, 2014 in Manhattan.[128] In a subsequent interview, Greenwald stated he would attend the ceremony, and added: "I absolutely refuse to be exiled from my own country for the crime of doing journalism and I'm going to force the issue just on principle. And I think going back for a ceremony like the Polk Awards or other forms of journalistic awards would be a really good symbolic test of having to put the government in the position of having to arrest journalists who are coming back to the US to receive awards for the journalism they have done."[129] On April 11, Greenwald and Poitras accepted the Polk award in Manhattan. Although their entry into the United States was trouble-free, they travelled with an ACLU lawyer and a German journalist "to document any unpleasant surprises". Accepting the award, Greenwald said he was "happy to see a table full of Guardian editors and journalists, whose role in this story is much more integral than the publicity generally recognizes".[130] On April 14, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was awarded jointly to The Guardian and The Washington Post for revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the NSA. Greenwald, along with Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, had contributed to The Guardian′s reporting.[131]
Awards
- 2009 Izzy Award for independent journalism[19]
- 2010 Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary[20]
- 2013 EFF Pioneer Award for coverage and analysis of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures[132]
- 2013 George Polk Award[25]
- 2014 Geschwister-Scholl-Preis for No Place to Hide ^[133]^
- 2015 Siebenpfeiffer-Preis ^[134]^
Books
- 2014 No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Metropolitan Books (Div. of Henry Holt and Company), ISBN 1-6277-9073-X (10). ISBN 978-1-62779-073-4 (13).
- 2011 With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. Metropolitan Books (Div. of Henry Holt and Company), ISBN 0-8050-9205-6 (10). ISBN 978-0-8050-9205-9 (13).
- 2008 Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. New York: Random House, ISBN 0-307-40802-7 (10). ISBN 978-0-307-40802-0 (13). (Also available as an E-book.)
- 2007 A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. New York: Crown (Div. of Random House) ISBN 0-307-35419-9 (10). ISBN 978-0-307-35419-8 (13). (Hardback ed.) Three Rivers Press, 2008. ISBN 0-307-35428-8 (10). ISBN 978-0-307-35428-0 (13). (Paperback ed.)
- 2006 How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok. San Francisco: Working Assets (Distrib. by Publishers Group West), ISBN 0-9779440-0-X (10). ISBN 978-0-9779440-0-2(13).
See also
- Citizenfour (2014 documentary film)
- Snowden – a 2015 Biographical drama film directed by Oliver Stone starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden and Zachary Quinto as Greenwald.
==
Even if he made it out of Moscow, he couldn’t have doubted that the full resources of the NSA and other parts of the U.S. government would be turned on him. How many CIA case officers and Joint Special Operations Command types did the U.S. have undercover in Ecuador? After all, the dirty tricks had already started. The partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke Snowden's story, had his laptop stolen from their residence in Brazil. This happened only after Greenwald told him via Skype that he would send him an encrypted copy of Snowden’s documents.
Glenn on 4/13 moyers said transparency must be accompanied by accountability, or power will be abused
AlterNet [1] / By Max Blumenthal [2]
Exposing the Dark Forces Behind the Snowden Smears
June 28, 2013
Since journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed the existence of the National Security Agency’s PRISM domestic surveillance program, he and his source, the whistleblower Edward Snowden, have come in for a series of ugly attacks. On June 26, the day that the New York Daily News published a straightforward smear piece [3] on Greenwald, the website Buzzfeed rolled out a remarkably similar article, [4] a lengthy profile that focused on Greenwald’s personal life and supposed eccentricities.
Both outlets attempted to make hay out of Greenwald’s involvement over a decade ago on the business end of a porn distribution company, an arcane detail that had little, if any, bearing on the domestic spying scandal he sparked. The coordinated nature of the smears prompted Reuters media columnist Jack Shafer to ask if an opposition research firm [5] was behind them. “I wonder who commissioned the file,” he mused on Twitter.
A day before the Greenwald attacks appeared, Buzzfeed published an anonymously sourced story [6] about the government of Ecuador, which had reportedly offered asylum to Snowden (Ecuador has just revoked a temporary travel document [7] issued to Snowden). Written by Rosie Gray and Adrian Carasquillo, the article relied on documents marked as “secret” that were passed to Buzzfeed by sources described as “activists who wished to call attention to the [Ecuadorian] government’s spying practices in the context of its new international role” as the possible future sanctuary of Snowden.
Gray and Carasquillo reported that Ecuador’s intelligence service had attempted to procure surveillance technology from two Israeli firms. Without firm proof that the system was ever put into use, the authors claimed the documents “suggest a commitment to domestic surveillance that rivals the practices by the United States’ National Security Agency.” (Buzzfeed has never published a critical report on the $3 billion in aid the US provides to Israel each year, which is used to buy equipment explicitly designed for repressing, spying on and killing occupied Palestinians).
Buzzfeed’s Ecuador expose supported a theme increasingly advanced [8] by Snowden’s critics -- that the hero of civil libertarians and government transparency activists was, in fact, a self-interested hypocrite content to seek sanctuary from undemocratic regimes. Curiously, those who seized on the story had no problem with Buzzfeed’s reporters relying on leaked government documents marked as classified. For some Snowden detractors, the issue was apparently not his leaking, but which government his leaks embarrassed.
Questionable journalism ethics, evidence of smears
At first glance, Buzzfeed's Ecuador expose might have seemed like riveting material. Upon closer examination, however, the story turned out to be anything but the exclusive the website promoted it as. In fact, the news of Ecuador’s possible deal with Israeli surveillance firms was reported [9] hours before Buzzfeed’s piece appeared by Aleksander Boyd, a blogger and activist with close ties to right-wing elements in South America. “Rafael Correa's Ecuadorian regime spies on its citizens in a way strikingly similar to what Snowden accuses the U.S. of doing,” claimed Boyd.
Later in the day, Boyd contacted Buzzfeed’s Gray through Twitter, complimenting her piece before commenting, [10] “Evidently Ecuadorian source leaked same info to you guys, seems I jumped the gun before you…”
Since Boyd contacted Gray, who has not publicly responded, Buzzfeed has not credited him or altered its headline to acknowledge that its story was not an exclusive. Buzzfeed’s refusal to acknowledge Boyd was not only a testament to the kind of questionable practices [11] that have plagued the outlet [12] since its inception, it helped obscure the story’s disturbing origins.
Boyd’s disclosure that a single source shopped opposition research to him and Buzzfeed at the same time confirmed the existence of a coordinated campaign orchestrated by elements exploiting the Snowden drama for political gain. Boyd’s remark that he “jumped the gun” suggests that the source intended for Buzzfeed to be the first to publish the story, and that he inadvertently embarrassed the site by running with it before them. There is also the possibility that Boyd was the source all along, and that his tweet to Gray was designed to establish deniability. Either way, the source seemed to be carefully managing the operation, wielding Snowden as a cudgel against the Ecuadorian government and timing the story for maximum impact.
Soliciting smears, dreaming of headless opponents
Who is Boyd, and how did he appear in the middle of the Snowden saga?
A London-based representative of Venezuela’s political opposition, Boyd solicits his services as an opposition researcher, informing potential clients through his official bio, [13] “Alek can be contracted to do due diligence on individuals and companies in Venezuela and LatAm.”
As I reported for The Electronic Intifada [14], Boyd has repeatedly promoted terrorism and assassination against members of the elected government of Venezuela. Back in 2004, Boyd wrote, “I wish I could decapitate in public plazas [Venezuelan politicians] Lina Ron and Diosdado Cabello. I wish I could torture for the rest of his remaining existence Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel … I wish I could fly over Caracas slums throwing the dead bodies of the criminals that have destroyed my country … Only barbaric practices will neutralize them, much the same way [Genghis] Khan did. I wish I was him.” A year later, he declared, “Re: advocating for violence yes I have mentioned in many occasions that in my view that is the only solution left for dealing with [Hugo] Chavez.”
In 2008, Boyd’s services were contracted by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an NGO run by a veteran conservative activist named Thor Halvorssen. [14] The son of a Venezuelan oligarch and former CIA asset who funneled money to the Nicaraguan Contras, Halvorssen founded HRF to publicize the human rights abuses of Hugo Chavez’s government. His first cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, the son of an oil industry executive, is one of the most visible leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, and as such, has received substantial financial support from the US. In 2002, Lopez was among the politicians who momentarily seized power from Chavez during a failed coup attempt. At the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum, a yearly confab Halvorssen promotes as “the Davos of human rights,” Lopez was presented to an audience of foreign correspondents and diplomats as a “human rights leader.”
Boyd claimed [15] that during his year and a half working for Halvorssen, he successfully campaigned for the release of Guadelupe Llori, an Ecuadorian opposition politician jailed by Correa under charges of sabotage and terrorism for her role in leading a crippling oil workers’ strike. (After her release, Llori was junketed to Halvorssen’s Oslo Freedom Forum). During this time Boyd visited Llori in prison in Ecuador while meeting [16] opposition activists “to coordinate future projects,” as he told an interviewer. Whether this was how he made initial contact with the source that supplied him and Buzzfeed with the documents on Ecuador’s deal with the Israeli surveillance firms is unknown.
Boyd may have never met Buzzfeed’s Gray, however, each are well acquainted with Halvorssen. This May, Gray was among the select cadre of journalists flown to the Oslo Freedom Forum to provide positive PR for Halvorssen and his global operation. Gray returned with a fawning profile [17] of Halvorssen, portraying him as an iconoclastic activist whose “job of opposing strongmen is arguably more media-friendly than that of anyone doing human rights work today.”
In contrast to Buzzfeed’s profile of Greenwald, Gray cast Halvorssen’s eccentricities as charming quirks that bore little relevance to the larger story. And his intimate ties to the right-wing Venezuelan opposition and the oligarchic forces seeking to topple socialist-oriented governments in South America went unmentioned.
Right-wing corporate lobbyists target Correa
Ecuador’s Correa is among the most popular of the Latin American leaders to embrace Hugo Chavez’s socialist economic model. Having defiantly defaulted on $3.2 billion in foreign loans, he has been able to leverage his country’s oil wealth to drastically expand social programs, improving access to education and doubling spending on healthcare while lowering poverty rates by a remarkable five percent since he took office in 2007. Naturally, Correa’s rejection of neoliberal policies has earned him a fair share of enemies, especially among the elites who have traditionally governed Ecuador. In 2010, he resisted a coup attempt [18] led by Lucio Gutierrez, a former president who earned the wrath of Ecuador’s poor by implementing crushing IMF-imposed austerity measures.
Correa’s opponents may have resorted to zero-sum politics, but his response has not always been judicious. He has, for example, advanced [19] criminal libel laws as a means of punishing opposition media and has battled indigenous groups that protested his attempts to open their land up to wide-scale state mining operations. The Committee to Protect Journalists has accused [20] Correa of leading Ecuador “into a new era of widespread repression.”
Of all the enemies Correa has earned, some of his fiercest reside not in Quito, but in the conservative think tanks of Washington. They include George W. Bush’s former Latin America handlers and a coterie of corporate-bankrolled right-wing radicals determined to unravel the South American socialist bloc.
Ezequiel Vazquez Ger, [21] an Argentina-born economist, is among the most aggressive of Correa’s antagonists. Vazquez Ger works for a DC-based lobbying firm run by Otto Reich, a Cuban exile who served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs under the second Bush administration. In 1987, Reich was singled out [22] during the US Comptroller General’s investigation of Iran-Contra for having “engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities” on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras. He is also suspected [23] of helping the anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch escape prosecution in Venezuela.
Reich contracted Vazquez Ger in 2011 to help him oversee a portfolio of corporate clients [24] that included Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobil, and Bacardi International, the rum company whose lawyers drafted much of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act tightening the US embargo of Cuba. Before he partnered with Reich, Vazquez Ger served as a Latin American fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, [25] a corporate funded think tank that promotes climate change denialism and sweeping deregulation policies.
To compliment their lobbying operation, Vazquez Ger and Reich have churned out a steady stream [21] of op-eds for publications from Foreign Policy to Fox News to the Miami Herald, [26] demonizing the socialist leaders of South America who have stifled the ambitions of multi-national corporations. During the past year, they homed in on Correa, assailing him for sheltering Assange while he cracked down on opposition media. In a June 2012 op-ed [27] for the right-wing Newsmax website, Reich and Vazquez Ger cited Assange as a key reason why the US should refuse to sign any further trade agreements with Ecuador. “Signing or renewing trade agreements with Ecuador will only allow Rafael Correa to continue undermining US foreign policy,” they wrote, “trading with our enemies, and destroying his country’s democracy.” (Following threats from Congress over its alleged offer to shelter Snowden, Ecuador’s government unilaterally rejected [28] US trade preferences).
When Buzzfeed published its expose on Ecuador, Vazquez Ger was overjoyed. A heavily trafficked US news site had recycled he and Reich’s attacks on Correa’s support for Assange, this time framing Ecuador’s president as a hypocrite for supposedly offering asylum to Snowden. At 7:28 PM on June 25 -- a full 27 minutes after the article appeared -- Vazquez Ger took to Twitter to promote [29] the piece to his Spanish-language followers. Next, he personally thanked [30] Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith “for unmasking [Correa’s] hypocrisy.”
The following day, at a press conference in Ecuador, Interior Minister Jose Serrano was asked to answer for the Buzzfeed report. Buzzfeed’s Gray quickly picked up Serrano’s defensive comments, quoting them [31] in a follow-up story alongside a strident denunciation of Correa’s sheltering of Assange by Cléver Jiménez, a key opposition leader. Meanwhile, Alek Boyd projected the story of Ecuador’s surveillance deal into South American media, publishing it as an “exclusive” [32] in Semana, a leading Colombian daily.
Whoever planted the story with Buzzfeed appeared to have scored a major success, exploiting the Snowden drama to tarnish the image of Ecuador’s government. Though the identity of the source that triggered the operation may never be known, their agenda does not seem to be much of a mystery anymore.
See more stories tagged with:
buzzfeed [33],
Snowden [34],
ben smith [35]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/exposing-dark-forces-behind-snowden-smears
Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[3] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/greenwald-reporter-broke-nsa-story-lawyer-sued-porn-biz-article-1.1383448
[4] http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/how-glenn-greenwald-became-glenn-greenwald
[5] https://twitter.com/jackshafer/status/350058336105934848
[6] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/exclusive-documents-illuminate-ecuadors-spying-practices
[7] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/28/edward-snowden-ecuador-julian-assange
[8] http://www.vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/06/errors-edward-snowden-global-hypocrisy-tour
[9] http://alekboyd.blogspot.com/2013/06/edward-snowden-ecuador-rafael-correa-julian-assange-wikileaks.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AlekBoyd+(Alek+Boyd)
[10] https://twitter.com/alekboyd/status/349832582873088000
[11] http://gawker.com/5922038/remix-everything-buzzfeed-and-the-plagiarism-problem
[12] http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/my-final-word-buzzfeed-and-emad-burnats-detention-lax
[13] http://alekboyd.blogspot.com/
[14] http://electronicintifada.net/content/oslo-freedom-forum-founders-ties-islamophobes-who-inspired-mass-killer-anders-breivik/12451
[15] http://alekboyd.blogspot.com/2010/06/guadalupe-llori-and-justice-in-ecuador.html
[16] http://jodca-venezuela.blogspot.com/2008/07/alek-boyd-visits-venezuela-interview.html
[17] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/is-this-the-face-of-a-new-global-human-rights-movement
[18] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/01/rafael-correa-ecuador-coup
[19] http://www.hrw.org/americas/ecuador
[20] http://www.cpj.org/reports/2011/09/confrontation-repression-correa-ecuador.php
[21] http://www.americas-forum.com/opinion/ezequiel-vazquez-ger/
[22] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/10/14/021014fa_fact1?currentPage=all
[23] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/feb/08/britainand911.usa
[24] http://www.ottoreich.com/www.ottoreichassociates.com/Samples_of_Work.html
[25] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Atlas_Economic_Research_Foundation
[26] http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/02/3377184/ecuadors-correa-a-continued-assault.html#.UYgWrGnNCys.twitter
[27] http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Ecuador-trade-Assange-Correa/2012/06/22/id/443202#ixzz2XV3nUe3D
[28] http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/27/v-print/3473295/ecuador-rejects-us-trade-preferences.html
[29] https://twitter.com/ezequielvazquez/status/349670392266358784
[30] https://twitter.com/ezequielvazquez/status/350080341056299008
[31] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/ecuador-defends-domestic-surveillance
[32] http://www.semana.com/mundo/articulo/rafael-correa-tambien-espia-ciudadanos/348935-3
[33] http://www.alternet.org/tags/buzzfeed
[34] http://www.alternet.org/tags/snowden
[35] http://www.alternet.org/tags/ben-smith
[36] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B