Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew

[struggle4progress]

What They Really Thought?
BY SEAN WILENTZ
JANUARY 19, 2014

... Snowden’s disgruntlement with Obama, in other words, was fueled by a deep disdain for progressive policies. The available postings by TheTrueHOOHA do show concerns about society’s “unquestioning obedience to spooky types,” but those date to 2010. Contrary to his claims, he seems to have become an anti-secrecy activist only after the White House was won by a liberal Democrat who, in most ways, represented everything that a right-wing Ron Paul admirer would have detested ...

... Along those lines, Greenwald found common ground with the upper echelons of right-wing free-market libertarianism. In August 2007, he appeared at the Cato Institute’s headquarters in Washington. “I’m a real admirer of Cato,” Greenwald declared, “and of the work that Cato does and has done for the last six years under the Bush presidency.” He was not only referring to Cato’s criticism of the war on terror. Under Bush, Greenwald explained, “a political realignment” had occurred, one that rendered “traditional ideological disputes” irrelevant. Politics now turned on a fundamental question: “Are you a believer in the constitutional principles on which the country was founded and a believer in the fact that no political leader can exercise vast and unchecked powers?” To this question, Greenwald had a ready answer: “I find myself on the side of the Cato Institute and other defenders of what in the 1990s was viewed as a more right-wing view of limited government power” ...

... These contacts began when, according to The Guardian, Assange made batches of the State Department cables available to Israel Shamir, a Russian-born Israeli journalist who was involved with WikiLeaks. After Shamir took the cables to Moscow, he traveled to Belarus. There, he met aides to the dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who was then campaigning in a sham election. (Shamir, a controversial figure within WikiLeaks, has evolved into a vociferous Holocaust denier, obsessed with Jewish power.) Not long after Shamir arrived, according to accounts published by the Index on Censorship and the American online magazine Tablet, local news outlets started reporting that the official media was preparing to publish secret documents about the Belarusian opposition ...

... On July 12, having been holed up at the airport for three weeks, Snowden held an event widely described as a press conference to announce that he would be seeking temporary asylum. He spoke not before the hundreds of journalists who had flocked to the airport, but before a carefully selected group of invitees that included “pro-Kremlin figures in the guise of civic activists,” according to a posting on The New Yorker website by Russia expert Masha Lipman. Also in attendance was Anatoly Kucherena, a prominent attorney who serves on the pro-Kremlin Public Chamber and the body appointed to oversee the FSB, and who has since become Snowden’s lawyer and sole spokesman to the world ...

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116253/edward-snowden-glenn-greenwald-julian-assange-what-they-believe

[truebluegreen]

1. Nice try.

[struggle4progress]

2. I consider the article informative and worth a read

but, of course, you are not obliged to read it if you prefer not to do so

[Hissyspit]

6. That's assuming it's not rife with errors, fear-mongering and mischaracterizations.

[truebluegreen]

8. +1 Not to mention involving bright, shiny objects to chase after

that are totally irrelevant: like the personalities and political preferences of the people involved.

[struggle4progress]

12. I'm sure many DUers, who want to belong to a reality-based community,

would rather welcome your effort, were you to debunk (with proof) any factual errors in the article

[bemildred]

3. With the possible exception of Snowden, none of them are my type anyway.

As an introvert, straight, male nerd, I can relate.

Although I do not have much use for adolescent political dogmas like libertarianism (a solution for everything, neat, simple, and wrong, it's almost dumber than the "free market&quot I have known many libertarians, it's where people go when they get annoyed with the nanny state, and they can be sane and even useful about other matters.

[JDPriestly]

4. This is about the NSA, not about Snowden.

Did you ever watch the news conference held by the other whistleblowers on the NSA?


http://new.livestream.com/accuracy/nsa-rebuttal/videos/39824993


This is not about Snowden. Character assassination won't change the bad news about the NSA. Some really awful people can do something great every once in a while. Snowden is not running for office. He just brought us bad news about our unappointed and secret government.

[msongs]

5. if I knew he was a war criminal type responsible for murder of civilians with impunity as well? nt

[Bluenorthwest]

7. This is about our government's policies and actions, not about people you dislike

It is high irony to see such a post out of you, a defender of religious figures who are openly anti gay, anti choice, opposed to birth control. You claim that those right wing stances mean nothing because you support another aspect of the man. But others don't get that same consideration out of you, the consideration you demand for yourself and your clerical hero.

[struggle4progress]

13. This thread is about Wilentz's article

I have sometimes agreed with Wilentz, as was the case with his 2006 assessment of the Bush presidency. And I have sometimes disagreed with him, as was the case with his 2008 attack on Obama in support of Clinton

I will, of course, be happy to discuss with you the politics of the current Pope in a thread actually related to the Pope: with the Pope, as with Willentz, I sometimes find myself in agreement and sometimes find myself in disagreement -- but I am disinclined to waste energy defending myself here against your misrepresentations of my actual views

[Sam1]

9. If that is what it took so be it.

[yurbud]

10. when corporate Dems are running they say, "You don't have to agree with me about everything"

"It's enough that you agree with SOME things--and that I'm better than that scary Republican" (who the corporate Dems agree with more than their own voter base)

But if someone crosses the corporate Dems, one issue the rest of us disagree with is supposed to make us ignore and distrust EVERYTHING else they say.

Assange, Greenwald, Snowden, and Manning aren't running for office or saint.

I can admire what Ron Paul said before the Iraq War that most Democrats were afraid to say or Pat Buchanan's criticism of NAFTA without agreeing with their racial or economic views.

This kind of smear post is an insult to the intelligence of DUers as much as it is to the people you are trying to smear.

[struggle4progress]

11. Mr Assange actually did run for office recently: he even got a bit more than 1% of the vote!

Based on the assumption he could gather more than 4% of the vote, he had expected to win the seat, due to anticipated preferences thrown his way under Australia's preference voting system

The exact reasons for this razor-thin rejection of Assange, by the Australian electorate, are not really clear

Some observers suspect the fact, that he threw his preferences to the nazis before the greens, may have cost him votes: in support of this view, one could point to the fact that, immediately before the election, a number of his prominent party members loudly objected to the preference filing and resigned from the party, complaining that it had ignored the preferences chosen according the party's own democratic procedures

Another possibility is that Assange was the victim of a political gender gap, with some radical feminist Australian women just unwilling to vote for an accused rapist currently avoiding prosecution in Sweden by refusing to leave an embassy into which he fled several years ago: some polls, in other countries, do seem to show such a gender gap in public opinion about Assange

A third explanation is that Australians did not believe Assange, who has spent only a few days total in Australia in recent years, and whose foreseeable travel plans seem limited to treadmill workouts in a small Knightsbridge apartment, could adequately address constituent concerns through occasional chats by videolink

But aside from those strange and unproven suggestions, there is another theory behind Assange's surprising loss: many Australians feared voting for Assange, lest Obama detain them as terrorists and send them to GITMO for torture

[yurbud]

14. your third one seems most likely. it is also possible to admire what he's done through Wikileaks bu

not necessarily want to elect him to anything.

[Luminous Animal]

15. Sean Wilentz? Obama hater? Strange company you keep.

http://crookedtimber.org/2014/01/19/the-liberal-surveillance-state/

The Liberal Surveillance State

Long time readers of Sean Wilentz will remember him for greatest hits like his notorious piece on the “cutthroat, fraudulent politics that lie at the foundation of Obama’s supposedly uplifting campaign,” involving “the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton ad campaign in 1988 and the most insidious since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, praising states’ rights,” or his claim that not only was Obama’s “most obvious change to liberal politics” the color of his skin, but Obama was the second coming of Jimmy Carter and a starry-eyed Russia-hugger to boot. So it’s very, very weird to see Wilentz criticizing Edward Snowden on the grounds that his “disgruntlement with Obama … was fueled by a deep disdain for progressive politics” – given his own track record on Obama’s brand of progressivism, why on earth would he believe this to be a problem?

But then the whole article – an attempted hack job on Snowden, Greenwald, Assange and the liberals who like them – is weird like that. In one sense, I can understand why the New Republic went for it – it’s perhaps the purest exercise in even~the~liberal~New Republic~ism that the magazine has published since its change in ownership. Yet it’s also so obviously intellectually shoddy and incoherently argued that you’d have thought that any half-way competent editor would have decided that no amount of contrarianism was worth the damage to the magazine’s brand.

Wilentz’s self-appointed task is clear enough – he wants to tell liberals why they shouldn’t trust the hidden agenda of people like Snowden, Greenwald and Assange. The problems come in the execution.

[struggle4progress]

16. I already mentioned a bit of Wilentz's history in my #13 yesterday

But your suggestion -- that we should ignore Wilentz's comments on the grounds that he was attacking Obama in 2008 -- seems entirely incoherent to me, insofar as Assange, Greenwald, and Snowden seem never to liked Obama

[rgbecker]

17. Thanks for posting this NSA propaganda. It helps us understand what we are up against.

This paragraph is indicative of the author's bias in relation to the work of the NSA.


"A similar pattern recurs with other supposedly damning documents. Among those cited by The New York Times, in its editorial supporting clemency for Snowden, is one that purportedly proves “the N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its authority, thousands of times per year, according to the agency’s own internal auditor.” But the Times was drawing on a Washington Post report that failed to say whether the “thousands” of violations amounted to a significant proportion of the total uses of the database, or only a relative handful, within the margin for human error. The Times also failed to emphasize that, according to the document, the vast majority those violations, as audited in the first quarter of 2012, were due to simple human or mechanical error and that there was no way of knowing whether the balance involved serious, as opposed to technical, violations of law. The findings, finally, came from an internal audit by the NSA—an indication that the NSA takes steps to police itself."


Somehow, the author thinks that if a thousand violations per year could only be a handful or within a random "Margin of human error", everything is just fine...as long as the NSA takes steps to police itself. If the subject were racial profiling, an issue that has also been brought to the public's attention, would you be happy that the police were policing that without public oversight?

Surely by this time, after reading the history about the founders of the American Revolution, you realize that radical events aren't perpetrated by even handed, mild mannered members of the establishment. After all it was Nazi generals who tried to blow up Hitler in 1944. Were Jews across the world not supposed to applaud the attempt?

[jakeXT]

18. Some people point the Pentagon Papers as an example

Thanks to Daniel Ellsberg, those of us who have not seen a National Intelligence Estimate for many years, or who have never seen one, can address the matter with somewhat more confidence than we could have a few months ago. Although it probably did not cross Ellsberg's mind when he released the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, he succeeded in doing what the Agency, on its own, has rarely been able to do for more than twenty years: he made the CIA 'look good' through what inhabitants of the Pickle Factory themselves would call a 'highly credible source'."

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp8.html