Elias Isquith is correct that the fundamental distinction between Glenn Greenwald and his critics is based on how each, respectively, views the current state of the American government. Those that consider our government to be as rotten and illegitimate as France’s Ancien Regime or the Tsar’s Russia are not particularly troubled about defining the correct journalistic line between informing the public and compromising national security.
Defenders of the government are not done any favors by allies like Michael Kinsley, who manages to do little more than arouse sympathy for Greenwald’s side of the argument. Kinsley’s thesis is so sloppy that it allows Greenwald to define himself as engaging in an honest journalistic enterprise that his detractors would make illegal. That kind of dichotomous argument is one that Greenwald could never lose.
The debate ought to be deeper than this. If our national security state is engaged in activities that are not authorized by law, and if they are conducting themselves in ways that do grave damage to our international relations when they are disclosed, do they then forfeit the deference they are otherwise given on what does and does not harm national security?
One of the difficulties here is that when our leaders do things that when disclosed will harm our national security, they aren’t the only ones who are negatively impacted. All Americans are put at risk when our national security is harmed. A journalist has to weigh the benefits of public disclosure versus the potential risks to the general public, and this is a very subjective exercise. That is why people on Greenwald’s side are so intent on countering the idea that the disclosures of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have done any actual, demonstrable harm.
Too often, it seems to me, Greenwald and his strong supporters behave as if the government deserves to be damaged and that our national security ought to suffer, even though all Americans are put at risk as a result. The risk to Americans is not something that can just be shrugged off as if it were indisputable that the country has gained a net-benefit from every single disclosure of classified information.
The reason that Greenwald is getting the better of the argument isn’t because his principles are clearly superior, but because the government lacks credibility. The overall effect of the disclosures has been beneficial, at least so far, because nothing catastrophic has resulted and we now have greater knowledge about what our government has been doing, which is already leading to reforms.
But none of this relieves journalistic enterprises of the responsibility to weigh the risks and benefits of disclosing classified information, nor does it completely vindicate either Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, who both leaked far more information than was necessary to make their points.
Too often, it seems to me, Greenwald and his strong supporters behave as if the government deserves to be damaged and that our national security ought to suffer, even though all Americans are put at risk as a result.
You did see the documents that the State Dept. released last night, right? Stuff like that is why people don’t trust the government. Tell me a left-wing government elsewhere in the world we haven’t tried to sabotage in one way or another?
Yep. Good luck finding one of those.
I prefer the company of people who hold Greenwald, the government, and Google in contempt:
Found Satire
And yes, Kinsley’s arguments are beyond ridiculous. Isn’t he an editor-at-large at the New Republic? Lol.
And why would that be, this lacking of credibility?
Or could it be the ongoing set of lies that this government has promulgated regarding almost every facet of its foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policiy and even its national elections since at least 2000 if not all the way back to the JFK coup and before?
Please.
Even the biggest of lies begin to fray with time, and desperate times need desperate measures. Snowden took a desperate leap. So far…it’s working. You really don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the winds are blowing. You just have to open your eyes. Things they are a’changin’. Bet on it. Give Greenwald, Snowden, Manning and the other leakers their their props, Booman, even if it hurts your allies and employers.
And watch what happens.
AG
“One of the difficulties here is that when our leaders do things that when disclosed will harm our national security, they aren’t the only ones who are negatively impacted.”
If you replace ‘national’ with ‘economic’, that is the precise argument for treating financial institutions as above the law. It’s an argument against disclosing the bad actions of every entrenched institution.
“If our national security state is engaged in activities that are not authorized by law, and if they are conducting themselves in ways that do grave damage to our international relations when they are disclosed, do they then forfeit the deference they are otherwise given on what does and does not harm national security?”
Shorter you: “If our national security state is engaged in criminal acts, should the media report on it?”
That’s the question you’re not sure how to answer.
To be a little less unkind, you’re saying, ‘if the national security state breaks the law, should the media break the law in reporting on the initial law-breaking, or ignore it?”
That strikes me as: ‘in its majesty, the law prohibits both the poor and the rich from stealing bread.’
You follow up with, ‘if reporting on the bad actions of the national security state damages the country, is it not reprehensible for the media to report on it?’
That strikes me as: ‘if a public defender frees a guilty man, isn’t she complicit in any future crimes the man commits?’
Well, no. The point isn’t that government officials who break the law shouldn’t be held accountable. As BooMan noted himself, the disclosures were certainly beneficial in that they showed us the extent of the abuses. It’s more that those who take it upon themselves to make the disclosures also have certain responsibilities, such as making sure they’re going to get as few people killed as possible. And recognizing that they too could be wrong.
This reminds me of a conversation I have with a right-wing relative, who likes to ask how culpable a defense attorney is when her client goes on a rampage after she gets him off on a ‘technicality.’ Surely she has ‘certain responsibilities!’ Like getting as few people killed as possible. Can’t she at least recognize that she, too, might be wrong?
Yes. She, like the rest of us, should try to get as few people killed as possible. She, like the rest of us, should recognize that she might be wrong. Otherwise, she is strident and awful!
I’m just not sure how that changes her job duties.
A defense attorney’s role is not remotely comparable to a whistleblower. Defense attorneys have one responsibility and one responsibility only: advocate for their client to the best of their ability and to the full extent of the law. It’s not their job to see to it that as few people are killed as possible. That’s the job of the prosecutors and the police who must follow proper procedures and gather enough evidence to convict someone beyond reasonable doubt.
Booman is arguing that a national security whistleblower has a responsibility not only to the truth but also to exercise discretion to make their point. If whistleblowers worked in a strictly structured system like the US court system where they would have a clearly defined role, your comparison might be apt. But they don’t, and it isn’t.
Short of crediting the whistleblowers with godlike powers, how exactly would you have them they do that?
Simplistic beyond belief.
Which people?
How would they know who was going to be killed and who wasn’t?
Over how long?
Their only responsibility is to the truth. U.S. entities have been breaking the law. Big time. Snowden found proof of that law-breaking. Massive amounts of proof. If a society is to survive, it must obey its own laws, from the top down. If a society as complex as this one does not survive, lots of people are going to be killed. Maybe millions…nukes do that, you know. Was it Snowden’s task to protect those who were working for the lawbreakers or to protect the members of the society who stood to be harmed as it collapsed under the weight of massive criminality?
I ask again.
Which people?
Osama bin Laden…assuming he actually existed and occupied the position our government claims he had…or someone using his name wrote the following statement over 10 years ago.
Which people, S.S.?
AG
How should I know which people? It all depends on what you’re disclosing. If the disclosures don’t harm national security, fine. The question is how to respond if they ever do.
A secret government will always interpret “national security” as “protecting the prerogatives and the criminal secrets of those of us in power”. Always. The national security apparatus cannot in principle accurately judge what does or does not endanger national security. It can knowledgeably advise a court – a properly adversarial court, not a kangaroo court stacked with its own friends as under FISA – in chambers as to its perspective on that question. If it exercises greater control than that, the slide into tyranny is all but inevitable.
If we allow the government under one noble administration to regularly violate the law in secret for noble ends, that power will only expand under later administrations for less noble ends. Though of course aggrandizing one’s own power nearly always seems like a noble end to the powerful.
It hasn’t been demonstrated that Greenwald, Snowden, and Manning have caused any material harm to US national security interests. But we have no greater national security interest than our preservation as a democracy. Lose that, and you’ve lost the nation.
You know, national security and national interests are hard to define. How would you classify something like this?
The canceled state visit didn’t harm national security in any way that I can fathom, but it wasn’t a positive development. It had negative consequences. It isn’t too hard to envision a similar situation with a different country leading to more serious consequences that could conceivably harm our national security. And, as you know, spying on a foreign head of state is in no way illegal under U.S. law. It may be unwise in some cases and extremely prudent in others. But we ought to have the capability to do it, at least. Wouldn’t we have liked to know what Hitler was planning? Or the top Japanese military brass? So, once you take it upon yourself to be the declassifier-in-chief, you have to take responsibility for the good along with the bad, knowing that the bad can snowball from seemingly small things into a genuine shitstorm.
My problem with Manning and Snowden is not that they saw wrongdoing and wanted the public to know. It’s that they were so indiscriminate in what they disclosed. It would be a lot easier to defend both of them if they had been selective about what they leaked.
Sure, it’s better if leakers exercise prudence and discrimination in what they leak. (I think Snowden was in a better position to do that than a comparative naif like Manning.)
But you’d asked the question of whether the security organizations had forfeited deference on what does or does not constitute national security. And I maintain that not only have they clearly forfeited all such deference at this point, but they inherently forfeit it the instant that they arrange to be the sole judges of what constitutes national security. They must be subject both to meaningful judicial review – which has not been present really at all – and to meaningful legislative oversight – which is essentially gone when they are given the right to silence legislators and have the final word on censoring committee reports, and completely gone when they regularly lie to legislators.
Again, that doesn’t mean that whistleblowers shouldn’t exercise careful judgment concerning what details to release. But that wasn’t the question I saw you asking. It was whether deference is still due. Sure, it’s due to the principle of taking reasonable precautions not to harm national security. It is not due to the opinions of the security organizations by this point – or at any point when they have either been granted or have arrogated to themselves the right not to deference, but to final control.
That said, let me say how much I appreciate the nuance you always bring to these discussions.
Correction for the record of how Manning’s entire trove came to be is in order, something that even Chris Floyd gets wrong (though he corrected the record once he was corrected):
“Manning did not engineer “an indiscriminate ‘data dump”. The history is quite clear on this. She uploaded her files to Wikileaks between February and April 2010 after failing to elicit the interest of the Washington Post and The New York Times. Wikileaks did not make the most controversial part of her trove — the Cablegate files — available until the following November, after Manning was already in jail. Wikileaks released the files in relatively small increments, in cooperation with newspaper partners around the world, and sought input from the US government on security concerns. Though the government declined to provide input, Wikileaks redacted the names of individuals whose lives might be jeopardized.
It was only after a Guardian reporter disclosed a Wikileaks decryption password in August of 2011 that the full trove was released. Wikileaks’ decision to release the trove had nothing to do with Manning, who had been in prison since May of 2010. As for how ‘indiscriminate’ she was in her choice of documents, her statements to the court indicate she was extremely deliberate in how she chose the class of documents she released, most of which had a much lower security classification than anything in Snowden’s trove.”
Link
Manning did not indiscriminately leak shit. I’d appreciate this lie be put to rest.
It won’t be thoroughly put to rest here, seabe. Not unless it is no longer included as one of the PermaGov talking points.
So it goes.
Around and around and around again until it all falls apart.
So it goes.
Later…
AG
Point is that Manning gave all the documents to Wikileaks. How they were released is irrelevant. Once you give out the information you are responsible for what happens even if you are no longer the decision maker.
Once again…same as Snowden. What were Manning’s choices?
To do or not to do.
Dassit.
Neither Manning nor Snowden…nor Assange and the rest of the Wikileaks collective, for that matter…had the time, deep intelligence system insider knowledge or wherewithal to parse through all of their files one by one and make adequately informed judgements about each one’s danger to others. They all believed that the rapidly metastasizing cancer of this massive security state was choking the life out of the country…out of the whole world, really…and they acted. They took action at peril to their own mortal asses, and all…Snowden, Assange and Manning, for sure…have paid a serious price for their actions. What has happened to others involved in this situation but not media-covered is simply another of the many known unknowns regarding the Deep State/Secret State system that is in question here.
Cease being NATO’s cop…cybercop as well as war cop…and all of this foolishness goes away.
All of it.
Continue on the present path and the U.S. is doomed.
Simple as that.
The U.S. already has a mutually assured destruction-level arsenal in place. It must build a similar cybersystem, return to its own borders with a good self-defense system in place and start working on its own problems. The rest is idiocy.
How do I know it’s idiocy?
Because it isn’t fucking working is how I know.
It’s been downhill in the U.S. since Dwight Eisenhower presented his farewell prophecy and no one really listened. (Emphases mine.)
“Statemanship” done failed, Booman. Eisenhower’s “free society” has been replaced by a sleeping, media-tranced, totally surveilled society.
What these whistleblowers have done is good old American Revolution-style guerrilla warfare fought in cyberscale. Nothing more and nothing less.
We have our own King Georges with whom to deal.
Bet on it.
AG
Manning should have released the video proving that the U.S. troops erroneously targeted innocent civilians. There was no reason for him to download a quarter million diplomatic cables.
A quarter million diplomatic cables.
Shocking!!!
Criminal!!!
Reading proof of the general ineptitude of the diplomatic corps is valuable in and of itself.
Another useless bureaucracy taking bread from the mouths of U.S. citizens.
Thank you, Chelsea.
AG
God you’re dense. Look at what you just wrote yourself:
Pray tell, what would that cybersystem look like?
Why do you ask? (As if I didn’t know.)
Ideally they would farm it out to the hackers who have so successfully gotten into the NSA and diplomatic stuff. They seem to know what they are doing.
(Just joking…it’ll never happen. Too logical.)
If the U.S. is going to stop playing World Cop and minimize its military footprint overseas it is going to have to protect its own infrastructure (physical and web-based), people and territory somehow. I am all for defense, S.S. It’s the offense part that bothers me. In a nation of 317 million plus there will of course have to be large organizations of some kind. It would probably look like the current NSA…only supervised instead of being given a blank slate upon which to improvise with no regard for rights and privacy of the innocent.
AG
No, actually you don’t know why I asked. My point isn’t to defend the NSA. The point that I would like to make is that we agree on pretty much everything here except what to make of someone like Edward Snowden. You’re just too busy congratulating yourself on how fucking awake you are to notice.
As for Snowden, I don’t trust him an inch. How come we aren’t considering the possibility that he’s a Russian spy? I know of no reason to think that he is beyond the fact that he fled the country with a trove of classified information and took refuge with the former KGB officer who is now the not-entirely-democratic ruler of Russia. So as long as we’re considering wild-ass speculations like whether Osama bin Laden every existed, we might as well contemplate the possibility that Snowden isn’t what he seems.
I do know why you asked, S.S. You want to complain about me. Play “Gotcha!!!” with me. Which you have done.
I don’t mind. Get off on it. No matter to me.
As far as Snowden is concerned?
I don’t really care who he works for as long as this monstrous PermaGov under which we all suffer is challenged by his revelations. I have been to Russia several times myself…fairly recently, the last time…and frankly, I think that their own problems render them no real threat to the U.S. I only wish neocons like Victoria Nuland and neolibs like her (
supposed) boss Barack Obama felt the same way. But…they most obviously do not or they wouldn’t have gotten in way over their heads with a bunch of right wing Ukrainian cranks and gangsters in an effort to “isolate” Russia.As Ron Paul so plainly put it way back in 2002:
“… the United States is taking sides in the Ukrainian elections.”
Prophecy in action.
Nothing changes except the players.
Sigh.
Oh well. Over and out, Bunky.
Have a nice Memorabilia day.
Yours truly…
Arthur (The Path Of Blame) Gilroy
If only the Paul movement was summarized in whole by relatively reasonable policy positions like the one you mention here re. Ukraine.
Unfortunately, other parts of their foreign policy and the vast majority of their domestic policies are repellent. Arthur, you come here to defend the Paul’s desire to re-establish State’s rights which, under today’s political world, would allow a new version of Jim Crow to run completely rampant in multiple Southern states, and your defense of that position is to say “Well, those States would suffer economic losses so devastating that racism in the U.S. would be done away with! Let’s do it now!”
That is stunningly naïve, and immoral to boot.
Prove that this idea is wrong.
You cannot.
Why?
Because it has not been tried.
I have spent some time in “the south”…lots of it…and it is not so monolithic as the media picture it. Y’gotta go there and dig a little. The so-called “minority populations” in both urban and rural areas are larger, stronger and more well-established in terms of organic internal organization than anyone who has not dug deeply into the area can imagine. Why does that strength not evince itself more strongly in electoral results? My own take is because masses of people in that segment of society are so disgusted with the actions of the Permanent Government and its DemRat/RatPub UniParty…locally, state-wide and in Washington… that they refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils. I do not think that some imaginary “Back to Jim Crow!!!” movement would have a chance except in isolated pockets of the peckerwood south, and those are would go broke more rapidly than anyone can imagine because they are cesspools of gene sink and do not have the wherewithal in terms of talent and intelligence to be able to compete.
I am “stunningly naïve and immoral to boot?”
Where do you live, centerfielddj?
Where have you been during your life and at what levels of the society?
I will never forget an “Ah HA!!!” moment I experienced 20 years or so ago as I drove from NYC to Atlanta. Say 1994 because I had just bought the car I was driving. I drove all day and all night…a close friend had been seriously injured…and stopped somewhere in the piney woods of South Carolina when I simply couldn’t drive anymore. I checked into what had at one time been a Howard Johnson’s motel/restaurant…it still had the red roof…for a couple of hours of sleep and some food. When I awoke it was a beautiful spring Sunday late morning and I went to the restaurant to get some food and coffee. I was still half-blitzed from the long drive and as I walked in all I saw was a room full of customers and one of the finest southern cafeteria-style layouts I had ever encountered. The food was glorious-smelling…cornbread, grits, chicken, collard greens, hushpuppies, ham, eggs, sausages…the works. I ordered up and sat at the counter, facing the room. That’s when I noticed the crowd. Almost all black, almost all families, almost all in church outfits. A happy, strong crowd, in command of their situation on all levels. I thought nothing much of it…hungry and still tired, I just wanted to get back in my car and finish the trip…but halfway through the meal two middle-aged, working class white men sat down at the counter within earshot. They didn’t talk loudly but I could hear their conversation. Maybe they trusted me because I was the only one in earshot and I looked white working class too, I dunno. They were complaining about how “things had changed.” Not emphatically, not with any sort of real anger, just acceptance. They were up now on a Sunday because they were house painters and they had to paint the house of one of the black ministers in the town that day. It seems that the entire town was at that time being run by its black population…black mayor, black businesses like the one I was in, etc. Its majority population. It wasn’t that these men didn’t like what was going down…they had work, the area was thriving and no one was discriminating against them…it just “wasn’t like it was.”
A sea change had occurred, and that was 20 years ago.
Now?
More areas just like it.
Many of them.
Bet on it.
The news media still sell the old “white supremacy” thing on a daily basis…it makes money, don’tcha know, and it’s an easy sell…but the working people with feet on the ground know better. “White supremacy” done run its course in most of the south where votes really matter. Local votes. Bet on that as well. Simple demographics tell the real story. Majority rule on the local level. Jim Crow is never coming back.
Watch.
AG
Look what is happening EXCLUSIVELY in States in full Republican control right now. Your claim of a “sea change” means nothing in the face of attempts to establish mass voter disenfranchisement to “solve” a NONEXISTENT voter fraud problem, huge disinvestment in social programs which disproportionately support minority communities, and attempts to effectively reinstitute forced birth policies which, teamed with the undermining of family planning services, also disproportionately affect minority communities.
I have to go to these States and dig a little? How about if I choose to believe the minorities and women in those States and their mobilized responses to these vicious attacks?
How about if I choose to recall the pre- and post-Reconstruction history, which showed racist education, voting and economic models to be both durable and immoral? How about if I recall William F. Buckley’s lecturing in the late ’50’s from your New York State that Southern States should be allowed to keep black majorities out of power because of their native inferiority as a community? How about if we recognize that those ideas resonate with many to this day, and can be picked up at any time if our Federal government allows it?
Arthur, what is your opinion of Brown v. Board of Education?
What is my opinion of Brown v. Board of Education?
I rate it a resounding failure
How do you rate it?
I teach in some of these schools and so does my not-so-insignificant other. They are cesspools, most of them, holding cells for children many of whom have been driven batshit crazy by the societal segregation that has been applied to their future through massive real estate and welfare frauds disguised as “help for the poor.” They grow up in a police state-like ghetto where unless they are truly gifted they do not have any chance whatsoever of rising above the squalor that surrounds them. They see the good life in the media…a so-called “post-racial” good life that includes all races, a make-believe world created to fool the marks into obeying…and then they look around and it is simply not true. And then? Then many of them lose it. And at that point it is all over for them. Straight to jail, do not pass the imaginary good life’s post-racial GO. Many others just give the fuck up.
I din’t know where you live centerfielddj, but in the urban centers of the U.S.? North and south,east and west? On some very important levels, racial and economic segregation is a living reality.
Bet on it.
AG
Got it. You believe Brown v. Board was wrongly decided. That’s VERY informative!
How about the Voting Rights Act? Good or bad policy? The recent Supreme Court decision striking down the VRA’s section 4 and effectively leaving Section 5 ineffective- good or bad decision?
I did not say that it was “wrongly decided.” I said that it failed.
Its initial intent was fine. Larger forces…economic forces, mainly…made it impossible to enforce. 60 years later it is evident that those economic forces should be the main target of equality legislation. It should also be clear by now that federal laws cannot be well enforced in places where the majority of the controlling populace is not in agreement with them. That principle applies to Little Rock, Chicago or Harlem just as much as it does internationally. Short of continuous armed intervention…which would rapidly turn our Little Rocks into Baghdads…only the inexorable push and pull of economics will make people see the error of their ways.
I believe that an area or state that uses the talents of its entire workforce at the highest level it can manage…which means to me absolutely no racial, religious or sexual preferences applied whatsoever, from preschool right on up into the workplace, only achievement……an area like that will soon economically dominate other areas that do apply preferences to certain groups. If a state’s rights-oriented federal administration took its hands off of these problems, within a decade or less the truth would be quite plain. All groups of people have the same range of talents. Let all people have an equal chance at success and you will reap the rewards of more good work. More good work means economic success, and economic success means a better life for all who live in an area that practices real equality. Soon the loser states would either have a revolt on their hands or such a serious brain drain that they would totally fail and be forced to start over.
The approach that the U.S. is using…government from above…is not working. It hasn’t worked and it is not going to work.
Time for a change.
AG
You deny your opposition to Brown v. Board, but then go on to claim that it was doomed to failure from the start, and that its “initial intent” would be better met through other means. That is a distinction without a meaningful difference.
There should be “absolutely no racial, religious or sexual preferences applied whatsoever”, you write, then go out of your way to ignore that the pre-Brown United States usually applied preferences for white Christian males even more extreme than the ones they currently enjoy. There was a problem to be solved in 1954, even by your own code. If the plaintiff had lost, what was there in U.S. history to make us believe that the arc of justice would have bended toward the justice you describe in the quote above?
“More good work means economic success, and economic success means a better life for all who live in an area that practices real equality.” Before 1860, the South’s use of slavery and other feudalistic frameworks created an economy which sustained itself, however unequally and immorally. Economies elsewhere in the world based on slave labor and/or extremely repressed worker and civil rights have successfully made their ways through decades and centuries. Your claim that “an area like that will soon economically dominate other areas that do apply preferences to certain groups” has not been borne out by history. Modern governmental interventions and regulations based on improved moral codes are the only things which have delivered in sustainable large scale the outcomes you claim to want.
These claims are also false: “Larger forces…economic forces, mainly…made (Brown) impossible to enforce…It should also be clear by now that federal laws cannot be well enforced in places where the majority of the controlling populace is not in agreement with them.”
Reality: “Desegregation efforts reached their peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the South transitioned from complete segregation to being the nation’s most integrated region…From 1968-1980, segregation between blacks and whites in schools declined according to measures of both isolation and imbalance. Measures of isolation within school districts show that school integration peaked in the 1980s and then gradually declined over the course of the 1990s.”
The history shows a series of Supreme Court decisions since Brown which substantially undermined the real gains in school integration. Other factors have been at play as well, chief among them residential re-segregation. The Reagan Revolution that Ron Paul championed took many legislative and judicial actions which reversed post-Brown desegregation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_segregation_in_the_United_States
It is interesting that you failed to respond to the question about your views re. the VRA.
Sigh.
No, I did not “claim that it was doomed to failure from the start.” Its relative success or failure was up in the air at the beginning, as are all great efforts of mankind. But fail it has.
By the numbers.
Next try?
Who knows.
Not me. I’ll support any rational attempt at real equality, myself.
Then you write:
No. It is not interesting, centerfielddj. Your style of argument is without merit. You put words in my mouth that I did not say and then go on about your own preconceptions of how things are or should be. OK by me, but…you are not interesting. Never were, to tell the truth. You are just another leftiness lemming as far as I am concerned, without a single original thought in your head and unable to read what is plainly written without spinning it off through your own prejudices.
This conversation is over.
Go haunt some other poster.
I’ve got work to do.
AG
Brown v. Board’s enforcements delivered a much more integrated public educational system in the U.S. up until the 1980’s. That’s not my preconception- it’s a demonstrable fact. The gains have not been sustained in large part because the Reagan Revolution throttled Brown’s continued implementation- that’s my interpretation. There is much in the record to support my interpretation.
You wrote: “Larger forces…made it impossible to enforce…”, and went on to claim that Federal solutions are not the way to achieve Brown’s goals, citing both economic and cultural blockades. You went so far as to write that only “continuous armed intervention…which would rapidly turn our Little Rocks into Baghdads…” could successfully enforce Brown’s guidelines. It is strange that you leave the factual success of Brown’s implementation by the 1980’s unresponded to in your latest post.
Describing your responses as a “claim that it was doomed to failure from the start” accurately summarizes the inflammatory language you used to defend what clearly comes off as your personal opposition to Brown.
I’m happy to let our Frog Ponders interpret our positions, based on the record here.
Surely you know that the trove of information that was unilaterally declassified by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden contained about 99.9% legal activity.
Surely you know that the trove of information that was unilaterally declassified by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden contained about 99.9% legal activity.
Says who?
Says me. Why don’t you open the WikiLeaks folder and start reading. After maybe a month of reading it for ten hours a day you might find something on dubious legality. Maybe.
If it’s all legal, what is the government afraid of?
This gets to the fine point of “legality.” If a law is passed that is contrary to the good of the people who live under its juridstiction, should its real ramifications not be brought to the attention of those people? The government is afraid that its subjects will discover that “legality” no longer has the force of moral correctness behind it, that “legality” has only become a smokescreen to hide a vicious, massive for-profit enterprise that has no interest in protecting its people or their belongings and aspirations other than whatever causes them to accede to its wishes.
No “American Dream,” just corporate control up and down the line.
Slavery…whether using chains, wages or information as the control tool…is still slavery.
When a country does this through force of arms it is called a dictatorship or a unitary monarchy. We have something going on here that is completely different. There is of course force of arms behind it, but until recently the controllers believed that they had found a way around the old dictum “You can fool some of the people all of the time; you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” The exact tools that they had used to do the fooling…the so-called “Information Age” tools…were turned against them by some of the very people who had been working inside of the myth-creation system, and it scared the shit out of them.
AG
They’re afraid that they won’t be able to collect as much information anymore, both because Congress is curtailing what they can do and because disclosures allow bad guys to figure out how to avoid detection. They’re afraid that people won’t spy for us because we can’t keep our internal deliberations off the internet. They’re afraid allies won’t allow us to hunt bad guys on their turf because the whole enterprise will be published on the internet. They’re afraid that foreign leaders will cancel state visits or give us the cold shoulder because it was revealed that we’re bugging their phones. They’re afraid that analysts won’t be candid in their cables because the cables are not secure.
But, when you look at what was leaked, only about .1% of it has anything to do with any of this, and even most of what was damaging was in fact legal, whether it was wise and moral or not.
Bullshit. “Legality” has no meaning here anymore. Was the Iraq War “legal?” No, of course it wasn’t. Was the whole yellowcake/Judith Miller/etc. farce “legal?” Please. It was a total lie. How much of what the CIA does is “legal” in any sense of the word? Please. Did that illegality in any way stop the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the ruination of millions of lives? Not a chance.
Bullshit, Booman.
And you know it.
AG
Boiling things down to legality is bullshit anyway. Constitutionalism isn’t a hill I will die on. What if the courts say that it IS legal? What then?
Fuck if it’s “legal”. It’s wrong. If the Iraq war was “legal” it still would have been immoral and wrong.
Do words have any meaning for you, or do you just say any damn thing?
When I say that the leaks detailed 99.9% legal activity it’s because 99.9% of what embassy staffers write to each other is mundane everyday drudgery.
Does it matter if some embassy official says the First Lady of Tunisia is getting fat and treats her staff like shit? No, it doesn’t. But it’s not like that staffer expects their little snarky memo to be put up on the internet so that it can cause a national embarrassment.
Most of the information wasn’t even exciting enough to be embarrassing. It was just a massive document dump of over a quarter million cables. There was no discrimination about it whatsoever.
Snowden may have done a little better in targeting things than Manning did, although I can’t say for sure. He definitely scooped up a lot more information that he ever even had a chance to look at.
Do words have any meaning for you?
You wrote:
If one were to wiretap say a successful urban gangster boss and his crew, about 99.9% of those conversations would be 99.9% “legal” as well. What’s for dinner, that bartender is a jerk, you wanna go catch the Yankees tonight, my wife’s getting wise, etc. In a well-functioning justice system that 99.9% would mostly be ignored by the authorities as they methodically attempted to gather sufficient evidence to prosecute the members of that criminal organization. But Snowden wasn’t working in a well-functioning system. in fact, he was gathering evidence from inside a rotted-out system that had it been directly presented to the supposed “correct people” would have been disappeared along with him and all of his helpers. He didn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing, especially given the mass and depth of the kinds of criminal activities to which he was privy as an insider. To whom was he going to go to? The Justice Department? ? The FBI? The CIA? NSA? Superman? Please. He had only two choices. Shut the fuck up or spill all the beans and run for his life. He chose the latter.
He did what he could.
You have consistently attacked him…and Greenwald as well…since the first moment that this document dump hit the news. Thus you have appeared to be demonstrably on the side of the rotted-out system about which they have been reporting. I call you on it.
AG
I agree that Snowden couldn’t just approach his congressman or try to talk to some Inspector General. But this is not a binary argument. His choice wasn’t simply between what he did and doing nothing. To argue that way is to miss the entire point of this post.
Have you presented a practical tertiary choice for Snowden?
Tell me about it.
I’m all ears.
AG
I assume that he became aware of some specific things that the NSA was doing that he considered to be against the law. Perhaps there were some other things he discovered that they were doing that might have been legal but that he thought would not be legal if people knew about it.
Had he restricted himself to disclosing just those things, he’s be on a solid footing as a whistleblower. But he just hoovered up terabytes of information about all kinds of things and leaked it all.
An old Irish proverb applies here. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
All of these words and phrases…especially the idea of “legality” in this society as it now stands…are so nonspecific as to be totally inapplicable.
Had the federal government “restricted itself” to the letter of the law since the JFK assassination we wouldn’t be in the awful position in which we presently reside in the first place. Only since the fairly recent technological surge has there been any real chance for dissenting citizens to broadly publicize the truth of what has been happening here. Sure, an occasional brave soul like Daniel Berrigan might manage to venture into one of the PermaGov file rooms and find a little piece of the whole Big Lie enchilada, but that kind of thing was easily covered up and dismissed by the media because there was insufficient correlating evidence available to the general public of what the whistleblower Sibel Edmonds so accurately called “a vast criminal conspiracy” within our government.
But now that evidence exists. It exists publicly, already in the hands of far too many people for the PermaGov to be able to manage a surgical strike that would expunge it from public view. Hung by their own technological petard, they have no other option than resorting to blatant lies to defend their position. (Emphasis mine below.)
Months later Clapper tried to “clarify” his lie.
“”When are you going to start- stop beating your wife…” and “…I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner…”
Nice.
Like watching a trapped animal chew off its own foot to escape the trap.
I am sorry, Booman.
Your position is indefensible. You have been trying to walk back from the edge of the Snowden-produced cliff on which you find yourself due to your loyalty to the DemRat machine as it now stands, but as long as that machine is deployed entirely in the preservation of the PermaGov you will fid that cliff in front of you every time you look down. We have not come to the end of this process yet, but it draws nearer with every mealy-mouthed lie utterd by a PermaGov functionary.
“He can run but he can’t hide” said the boxer Joe Louis about one of his opponents.
Yup.
Technology has put us all inside the ring now. There is no longer anywhere to hide.
Sorry, but there it is.
Deal wid it.
You be bettah off.
Later…
AG
that and not running to hostile foreign powers
If he felt strongly enough to disclose all that info then he should have stayed, I have more respect for Manning because of that fact even if I don’t agree with what was done
If he wasn’t such a coward he could come home and face the music. The point I would make is that, first of all, no one is defending any lawbreaking here. (Except you, actually, but you consider the laws that Manning and Snowden broke technicalities.) But honestly, if Snowden really wanted to bring the whole thing crashing down, it would be much more effective for him to come home and stand trial than to continue living under the protection of fucking Vladimir Putin, of all people. Let the government come down on him. Let the awakened and outraged masses rise to his defense.
(Incidentally, why the fuck is Snowden willing to help Putin spread propaganda?)
No state, no problem. Because there’s then no need to worry about whether your state is illegitimate or not.
It’s easy. You just stop having governments and stuff.
PS I am not an undergraduate.
Besides, everyone knows that without the NSA there’s no such thing as mass-surveillance. And if there was, surely the people doing the spying would need prodding from the government…
Yeah, and then the Russians and Chinese will realize that they don’t have to do cyber-espionage anymore if we aren’t doing it. It’ll be awesome!
Staggering. You can either vanish or kill yourself. Which is it? Neither oversight nor possibility of recourse to an ‘objective’ arbiter: corporate dictatorship.
Indeed. I wish the Snowden et al understood that. Corporate spying isn’t “bad” or immoral to them.
I think the point is that it’s all one. Look how much of what the security state does is farmed out to contractors(like who Snowden worked for). It’s more for corporate surveillance and sabotage then protecting us from terrorist attacks.
Check the link dude. Nothing to do with contractors. Just corporate tools doing it all on their own. Googles entire business model is spying, completely separate from the NSA and government.
Indeed, “I wanted to thank GG’s reporting for allowing me to turn down an NSA job. But I took one with google instead!”
A parallel state. Not a deep state within the constutional state, you know, the whole founders bit. But one entirely outside it. A whole independent structure of power and wealth which slowly, peacefully, tenaciously, absorbs and supplants the constituional state. Mussolini was really up on this stuff.
Edward Snowden, and by agency Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, placed the responsibility on journalistic decision-making by reputable journalistic organizations (The Guardian, Der Spiegel, New York Times, Washington Post, El Pais, El Globo) to vet the articles that have been published. That same process went to The Intercept.
James Risen is in legal trouble unrelated to the Manning or Snowden leaks.
It is the government’s standards that have changed and changed contrary to the Constitution, not the standards of journalists.
Kinsley is a long-term sycophant of power. Glenn Greenwald is a long-term critic of power.
It is uncertain who will actually prevail as long as the “on the one hand…on the the other hand” logic continues even on the progressive side of things.
But it is not a personality issue, it is a government policy issue. If the government wants to make the case that damage has been done, it’s got to show its cards. Because what has come out so far is pretty weak tea.
Snowden and Manning made several key points, the first one being the most important:
The credibility of these people was not shot by Snowden, he just put the latest log on the fire, bigger than most to be sure, but bigger than other intelligence failures? No WMD’s?
Snowden shown considerably more judgment-to-resource ratio than the national security apparatus has shown, of course the judgment side of that equation includes allowing a non-governmental contractor access to all this information, while Snowden realized that the establishment could react very quickly to selected leaks but would be slow to react to volumes of data that they couldn’t process quickly enough to seem coherent in responding.
Snowden has simply held up a mirror to these operations and they are reaping the natural consequences of their incompetence, poor and unethical judgment (legalities aside), and lack of restraint on virtually any dimension.
Sometimes these people just need a large sized bucket of ice water thrown on them to understand how stupid and immoral they’ve become:
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge
“The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”
I’m beginning to appreciate Ms Sullivan …
○ The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
○ Daniel Ellsberg meets Henry Kissinger: Knowledge Corrupts
Eisenhower warned for the Military-Industrial complex. That was in the fifties, like the Rand Corporation and the large corporations pressing politicians for sustaining their monopolies and oppression of populations and nations. See Central- and South America and most third-world countries. ITT managed to gain CIA support to overthrow Allende in Chile. The oil companies had their agreements known as the Seven Sisters alliance or cartel. The intelligence community has become a stand-alone entity as was seen in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy assassinations and the lead up to the 9/11 attacks. After these attacks, Bush-Cheney usurped all power from US Congress and the Judiciary to an Executive that behaved badly contrary to International Law.
Due to the fact that US leadership can execute these powers with impunity, there is no way to expose the evil acts than breaking the law. The US is not a model democracy anymore, the system is broken and US Congress doesn’t perform their task for We The People. US foreign policy has been flawed for decades and the economic might of the US bears down on any dissent as is witnessed in the UN voting both in the Security Council and the General Assembly.
The strong trade ties with the European Union has made it possible for the US to dictate NATO policy as seen in the Ukraine. The new containment policy for Russia, making it a pariah state, has been in the making for nearly a decade inside NATO, the Atlantic Council and all right-wing NGOs and think-tanks. Obama is just following
ordersadvice. The new trade deals with Europe called TTIP and in Asia called TTP will seal the economic deal to hand power to large corporations and make them immune to lawsuits and liability clauses.In my opinion, the US oligarchs who have been leveraged by the Supreme Court to undercut the principles of one man, one vote. US corporations and the oligarchs have much in common with their counterparts in the Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Israel, UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The European Election has made it clear, the people will not stand for irresponsible economic liberalisation and expansion of the EU. Ukraine will be left holding an empty bag and for Turkey there is no future to join the EU. The Socialist government of Hollande has fallen to new depths in the polls and the Front National of Marine Le Pen profited by becoming the largest party in France. The UKIP in the UK passed the Conservative government of Cameron on the right to send the most delegates to Brussels.
○ Bilderberg and Transatlantic Trade: a Lobbying Scandal Waiting to Happen
○ TTIP: EU and US Prepare to Enhance Global Corporatocracy With Free Trade Deal
.
○ Snowden Joins Ellsberg, Greenwald At Press Freedom Foundation