Glenn Greenwald: The significance of McClatchy's act of journalism [View All]

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Glenn Greenwald
Thursday July 9, 2009 09:10 EDT
The significance of McClatchy's act of journalism

McClatchy's Nancy Youssef has an article today that is a consummate example of excellent journalism. I don't want to excerpt any of it or even summarize what it reports because I really want to encourage everyone to click the link and read it in its entirety (it's not very long: roughly 1,300 words). Please read Youssef's article before reading the following points I think are worth making about it: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/washington/story/71434.html

(1) Note that Wakil was detained at Guantanamo for six years -- until April, 2008. That entire time, and especially into 2007 and 2008, government officials were assuring the public that all remaining Guantanamo prisoners were "the worst of the worst." That claim continues to be made. No matter how many times the statements of government officials are proven false, the assumption remains that the pronouncements from high government officials are true.

(2) Even now, defenders of Obama's preventive detention policy (i.e., indefinitely imprisoning people with no charges) insist that this is necessary because those in Guantanamo are "too dangerous to release" and we cannot convict them in a real court. What's their basis for believing that people who have been convicted of absolutely nothing are nonetheless "too dangerous to release"? The Government -- our trusted leaders -- claim it's true, so it must be. No matter how many stories there are like the one today from McClatchy's -- where emphatic accusations about a detainee turn out to be totally false -- the willingness to believe unproven assertions from government officials about Muslims detainees is never-ending.

(3) The central assumption in our discussions of Guantanamo and detention policy generally has been, and continues to be, that those in Guantanamo are, by definition, Terrorists. No matter how many times that is proven to be false, the assumption endures.

(4) Note the central role The New York Times played -- yet again -- in spreading and given credence to pure government propaganda. And the method used to accomplish that is exactly what led them to help disseminate lies about the "Iraq threat" in the run-up to the war: anonymous government sources leak something, they mindlessly print it without identifying who gave it to them, Dick Cheney cites the NYT article to bolster the lie, and then -- even once the NYT is forced to admit they were used -- they not only protect the identity of the anonymous sources who manipulated them, but they'll use the same exact method tomorrow -- and the day after and the day after that -- to report the "news."

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(5) It cannot be overstated how flimsy is the basis for so many accusations of "enemy combatant" status from the U.S. Government. Wakil is someone who -- as the Bush administration knew and admitted since as early as 2004 when it conducted a status review hearing -- actively opposed the Taliban and al Qaeda:

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/09/guantanamo/index.html