Herstory Begins Now posted:

CommieGIR posted:

Whistleblowing good. And yeah, he should not be extradited to the US for it.

Now justify his supporting and leaking of Russian provided conspiracy theories and Assange openly saying he'll spread whatever he need to in order to tank Hillary Clinton's chances because he personally hated her. To the point that Trumps campaign was rumored to be trying to work with Assange on Opposition research. This isn't about his extradition anymore, its about whether Assange deserves any support or faith.

https://theintercept.com/2017/11/15/wikileaks-julian-assange-donald-trump-jr-hillary-clinton/

Assange has to have been very aware of what Trump was saying and doing, and despite his beef with Hillary, he felt that Trump was a better person....that scary to think about.

Still Dismal posted:

lol thinking there is the no difference between Tucker and Rachel Maddow is just some deeply stupid poo poo. It’s a kind of performative cynicism that ends up leaving you with just as little idea of what’s going as the most wide eyed naivety.

Kavros posted:

To my best present understanding, Greenwald resigned from the Intercept in protest of editors not letting him run full-on disinformation related to the hunter biden laptop. He made interesting claims about the leadership of the magazine, and it got turned into some impressive counterpunches. Apparently, he had become unlikeable.

The timeframe saw him generally compared to Taibbi leaving Rolling Stone and Sullivan leaving New York Magazine to gently caress off to being a full-time ptown grouch.

Sephyr posted:

It's not his reporting. It's by the Intercept, mostly under Leandro Demori.

Glenn has boosted it and helped it reach more people, but he actually had remarkably little penetration and presence in brazilian inside politics. He's also mostly disconnected from the Intercept in the last 2 years, that I know of.

Kavros posted:

The same way it usually was with him, just with extra enthusiasm this time around. A mash of really stretchy fact interpretation and grasping at contrarian straws to justify his previous views on the subject, resulting in an article which was weird, weak, and immediately celebrated by conservatives for his fearless going on tucker carlson to Speak Truth To Power.

The suppositions of the article in question aged poorly, so I don't think there's much more worth saying about it. It's just the specific flashpoint at which he was becoming Taibbi enough that he was no longer even really compatible with the intercept, went off on them and shifted to his current predominant format of mostly substack self pub and right wing media rounds.

Kavros posted:

Probably not to your individual satisfaction, no. But that's going to come down to that the major reason I don't like the article and don't really want to spend a lot of time going over it in detail again is because those conclusions were weak, weird postulations molded to fit his fixative conclusions about several things he became reliably delusional about. And that's disinformation. But generally anyone who basically still buys that Greenwald was correct or mostly correct in his assurances about the falsity of presumed russian disinformation operations and influence is going to disagree with that, and that's going to be that for as long as greenwald threads have to be containment zones.

Panzeh posted:

The fact that he huffs farts about impartial journalism is one of the thing that makes him completely insufferable as a person- he loves to smuglord about how he's totally non-partisan and has no beliefs, just like Matt Taibbi, another chickenshit journalist. If he had any principles about his so-called anti-big media, he'd talk poo poo to Tucker Carlson on the Tucker show, but he's friends with all the other media buddies so he'll never say anything mean about him.

Aruan posted:

hi if it helps i don't like glenn because he's a huge transphobe and bigot who also defends mass shooters by perpetuating right wing talking points about how they're just troubled young men who had a bad day instead of acknowledging that this country has a real problem with fascist violence. i don't think his occasional good treat highlighting hypocrisy amongst liberals when it comes to foreign policy justifies giving him a platform to spew bigotry about how transmen are just confused lesbians. if you need help finding other journalists happy to criticize the us foreign policy who also don't tweet bigotry, i am sure this thread can help you out, because otherwise i am not sure why you find it necessary to defend a noted transphobe like glenn greenwald.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

Glenn supported the Iraq war. From the preface of his 2006 book titled "How Would a Patriot Act?":


Not only that, he later attacked others for supporting it:


...and then had the audacity to deny that that he himself had supported it:


The dude is not just a incredibly annoying moron with deplorable opinions, but also a shameless liar.

quote:

[Claim] I supported the Iraq War and/or George Bush

These claim [sic] are absolutely false. They come from a complete distortion of the Preface I wrote to my own 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act? That book - which was the first book devoted to denouncing the Bush/Cheney executive power theories as radical and lawless - was published a mere six months after I began blogging, so the the purpose of the Preface was to explain where I had come from, why I left my law practice to begin writing about politics, and what my political evolution had been..

The whole point of the Preface was that, before 2004, I had been politically apathetic and indifferent - except for the work I was doing on constitutional law. That's because, while I had no interest in the fights between Democrats and Republicans, I had a basic trust in the American political system and its institutions, such that I devoted my attention and energies to preventing constitutional violations rather than political debates. From the first two paragraphs:

"I never voted for George W. Bush — or for any of his political opponents. I believed that voting was not particularly important. Our country, it seemed to me, was essentially on the right track. Whether Democrats or Republicans held the White House or the majorities in Congress made only the most marginal difference. . . .
I firmly believed that our democratic system of government was sufficiently insulated from any real abuse, by our Constitution and by the checks and balances afforded by having three separate but equal branches of government. My primary political belief was that both parties were plagued by extremists who were equally dangerous and destructive, but that as long as neither extreme acquired real political power, our system would function smoothly and more or less tolerably. For that reason, although I always paid attention to political debates, I was never sufficiently moved to become engaged in the electoral process. I had great faith in the stability and resilience of the constitutional republic that the founders created."

When the Iraq War was debated and then commenced, I was not a writer. I was not a journalist. I was not politically engaged or active. I never played any role in political debates or controversies. Unlike the countless beloved Democrats who actually did support the war - including Obama's Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - I had no platform or role in politics of any kind.

I never once wrote in favor of the Iraq War or argued for it in any way, shape or form. Ask anyone who claims that I "supported" the Iraq War to point to a single instance where I ever supported or defended it in any way. There is no such instance. It's a pure fabrication.

At the time, I was basically a standard passive consumer of political news: I read The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic: the journals that I thought high-end consumers of news would read and which I assumed were generally reliable for getting the basic truth. What I explained in the Preface was that I had major objections to the Iraq war when it was being debated:

During the lead-up to the invasion, I was concerned that the hell-bent focus on invading Iraq was being driven by agendas and strategic objectives that had nothing to do with terrorism or the 9/11 attacks. The overt rationale for the invasion was exceedingly weak, particularly given that it would lead to an open-ended, incalculably costly, and intensely risky preemptive war. Around the same time, it was revealed that an invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein had been high on the agenda of various senior administration officials long before September 11.

Nonetheless, because of the general faith I had in political and media institutions, I assumed - since both political parties and media outlets and journalists from across the ideological spectrum were united in support of the war - that there must be some valid basis to the claim that Saddam posed a threat. My basic trust in these institutions neutralized the objections I had and led me to passively acquiesce to what was being done ("I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country.").

Like many people, I became radicalized by those early years of the Bush administration. The Preface recounts that it was the 2002 due-process-free imprisonment of US citizen Jose Padilla and the 2003 Iraq War that caused me to realize the full extent of the government's radicalism and the media's malfeasance: "I developed, for the first time in my life, a sense of urgency about the need to take a stand for our country and its defining principles."

As I recount in the Preface, I stopped practicing law and pursued political writing precisely because those people who had an obligation to act as adversarial checks on the Bush administration during the start of the war on civil liberties and the run-up to the Iraq War - namely, Congress, courts, and the media - were profoundly failing to fulfill that obligation.

I wasn't a journalist or government official during these radical power abuses and the run-up to the Iraq War, and wasn't working in a profession supposedly devoted to serving as watchdog over government claims and abuses. I relied on those people to learn what was going on and to prevent extremism. But I quickly concluded that those who held those positions in politics and journalism were failing in their duties. Read the last six paragraphs of the Preface: I started writing about politics to bring light to these issues and to try to contribute to a real adversarial force against the Bush administration and its blind followers.

It is true that, like 90% of Americans, I did support the war in Afghanistan and, living in New York, believed the rhetoric about the threat of Islamic extremism: those were obvious mistakes. It's also true that one can legitimately criticize me for not having actively opposed the Iraq War at a time when many people were doing so. Martin Luther King, in his 1967 speech explaining why his activism against the Vietnam War was indispensable to his civil rights work, acknowledged that he had been too slow to pay attention to or oppose the war and that he thus felt obligated to work with particular vigor against it once he realized the need ("Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam").

I've often spoken about the prime benefit of writing about political matters full-time: namely, it enables you to examine first-hand sources and not have to rely upon media or political mediators when forming beliefs. That process has been and continues to be very eye-opening for me.

Like most people who do not work on politics or journalism full-time, I had to rely back then on standard political and media venues to form my political impressions of the world. When I first began writing about politics, I had a whole slew of conventional political beliefs that came from lazy ingestion of the false and misleading claims of these conventional political and media sources. Having the time to examine political realities first-hand has led me to realize how many of those former beliefs I held were based on myth or worse, and I've radically changed how I think about a whole slew of issues as a result of that re-examination.

The purpose of the Preface was to publicly explain that evolution. Indeed, the first sentence of this Preface was this quote from Abraham Lincoln: "I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday." When I still trusted and relied upon the claims of the political and media class - when I was basically apolitical and passive - I tacitly accepted all sorts of views which I've come to see are warped and misleading. I've talked often about this process and am proud of this evolution. I have zero interest in hiding it or concealing it. Quite the contrary: I want readers to know about it. That's why I wrote the Preface.

But anyone using this Preface to claim I was a "supporter" of the Iraq War is simply fabricating. At worst, I was guilty of apathy and passivity. I did nothing for or against it because I assumed that those in positions to exercise adversarial scrutiny - in journalism and politics - were doing that. It's precisely my realization of how profoundly deceitful and failed are American political and media institutions that motivated me to begin working on politics, and it's those realizations which continue to motivate me now.

Fritz Coldcockin posted:

Funny how Glenn can use "I gave the President the benefit of the doubt" as an excuse and his defenders will allow it, and yet none of the Senators who used it are given the same courtesy. He loves to pretend that he's the smartest person in the room, and yet he fell for the big lie just like a lot of other people and tried to pretend he didn't because he "wasn't political".

You don't get to say this and bill yourself as some sort of crusader against government overreach in the foreign policy arena, hope that helps.

SpiritOfLenin posted:

so glenn is only as informed as the average citizen, good to know. we can safely ignore him completely then