Sibel Edmonds destroys Glenn Greenwald

[JackRiddler]

Anyone who actually needs a third-party deconstruction of Scott Creighton's hate screed can't be helped. Even if I had the four hours to do it.

For deconstruction of VK's (the Local Limbaugh) repost earlier today of the shorter pro-NSA smear piece from utdocuments, go here:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37630&start=45#p532340

[seemslikeadream]

add it up jack

What's typical of the farthest reach your thoughts usually go?

Business interests or right wing define "acceptable" discourse.
2
5%
There was a 9/11 cover-up and LIHOP is plausible.
1
3%
The two-party system is a total corporate scam.
1
3%
Conventional propaganda has achieved mass mind control.
3
8%
9/11 was an inside job from within the MIC.
9
24%
All big events and actors, including opposition, are scripted.
1
3%
9/11 was produced as ritual by secret societies.
3
8%
Mass mind control is effected through water/food/radiation.
2
5%
Egregore is not a metaphor, demons or aliens already rule.
5
14%
This whole thing is a simulation / dream / matrix.
10
27%

[slimmouse]

I say we allow Jack Riddler to be the one and only moderator on this board, since that's how it usually works out anyway.

He's tough and he's fair:

JackRiddler » 25 Jan 2014 22:54 wrote: Whereas I invite you to do yourself a favor and kill
yourself tonight.

Wow. How charming. That is the sort of comment that damages the standing of the originator more than the subject.
Meanwhile in other news, the conversion of RI into AD's personal Anti-Semitism crusade blog continues apace.

WR, you made an inestimable contribution to keeping the RI ship running and have my sincerest appreciation and graditude. You have been un an untenable position, because what was required is involved clear leadership from Jeff, of which there has been none.

Jeff, I am reminded of the line from the Rush song "Changes"
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice"

I see it as an understanding of some serious ideas that others simply arent prepared to embrace, when they get to the point where they suggest that their adversary should kill themselves.

In the end of course its no big deal to the Theist, whereas to the Atheist this is the be all and end all.

Didnt Nihls Bohr , a serious hard on physical Scientist who came to understand the nature of quantum physics suggest that , (to paraphrase) - our
attitude to religion ( far better defined as spirituality) reflects our attitude to the world as we understand it?

Each to their own I guess, or stupid is a stupid does - whichever side of the argument you lie on.

Who could ever disagree with that ?

Especially when we are probably the only true ultimate judges of ourselves.

Its a nice way to think about your own life, Jack, as you cast your judgements on people around this board.

To be fair to you, at least you got your very own "God " complex, which might actually stand you in good stead throughout the entirety of your own existence.

"Might" being the operative term.

[JackRiddler]

Really, for the humorlessness and ponderousness alone: Consider self-murder. It will probably advance you by several spiritual stages.

[Searcher08]

Really, for the humorlessness and ponderousness alone: Consider self-murder. It will probably advance you by several spiritual stages.

A post that Illustrates a human who uses the gift of words to to merely demonstrate his ability to be a knob-end. Given the amount of humour (as opposed to vitriol) you have brought, the irony is extreme.

For someone who expouses progressive values, you seem to love to throw verbal acid.

[JackRiddler]

Only at those who first throw piss at an acid fight.

Anyway, it's already pre-determined who's going to think who started what when.

Meanwhile it's become clear enough to me that this thread was started, at least in spirit, by an NSA public relations initiative.

.

[Searcher08]

Only at those who first throw piss at an acid fight.

Anyway, it's already pre-determined who's going to think who started what when.

Meanwhile it's become clear enough to me that this thread was started, at least in spirit, by an NSA public relations initiative.

.

You have more choices than that. It achieves nothing, looks crap and lowers your reputation.

I do not believe in pre-determination of response. People are not machines.

I'm reading you saying that you think Sibel Edmonds is acting as an NSA asset - is that accurate?

[vanlose kid]

*

Passing Noam on My Way Out – Part 1
Posted on January 25, 2014 by Tarzie

I wasn’t always the #ChickenPseudoRadical that worshipers of lefty icons love to hate, but there were signs of what the future held for me when I wrote this in my Pulitzer prize-winning post on Chris Hayes:

Somehow lefts that would, on a rainy day, apply the Chomsky/Herman lens to a bag of Doritos are incapable of applying it to establishment lefts at the margins, even when these people are on commercial television. Understandable, really, since I don’t think Chomsky gets how Chomsky applies to Chomsky either.

This line ruffled some feathers. I recall that one person cited it just before telling me I should kill myself, more than a full year before Glenn Greenwald incited the troll fever of 2013 by telling me I should kill myself too.

In the months that passed I’ve concluded that I grossly exaggerated the extent to which the internet left applies the Chomsky/Herman lens, or any lens, for that matter, to any phenomenon it has set its Manichaean hive mind to misapprehending. In an attempt to see if I at least got the bit about Chomsky right, I recently emailed him to solicit his thoughts on this statement:

It is my sincere belief that The Propaganda Model [described by Chomsky and co-author Herman in Manufacturing Consent] applies all the way out to the margins of American discourse, and that it is as useful for analyzing a Democracy Now broadcast or an issue of Jacobin as it is to understanding the Fox News Network. I even think the Propaganda Model can be useful in illuminating your place in public discourse, not simply as an official pariah but as an icon and role model.

Here’s Chomsky’s reply:

The PM is an institutional analysis, really applicable specifically to the corporate media, and in a more limited way to state media. Hard for me to see what the counterpart would be for, say, Democracy Now.

So I was right: Chomsky doesn’t get how Chomsky applies to Chomsky (and Democracy Now), though he didn’t supply anything to provoke a reconsideration on my part. Yeah, I know, it’s his Propaganda Model, but you know me…

The foundation of the Chomsky/Herman Propaganda Model is the Five Filters that operate on media. They are:

[*]Ownership of the medium
[*]Medium’s funding sources
[*]Sourcing
[*]Flak
[*]Fear ideology

Democracy Now is run by Amy Goodman, who grew up in a wealthy family, graduated from Radcliffe , earns over $160,000 a year and appears to be a social democrat. She is dependent on funding from foundations supported and directed largely by wealthy capitalists. She has been the object of discipline campaigns by Pacifica Radio, the network on which DN is hugely dependent for syndication. Pacifica Radio claims to be listener supported, and I venture that most of those supporters are people who are a whole lot like Amy Goodman: white, well off, well-educated social democrats.

Now is there any reason why Democracy Now isn’t as much a creature of these constraints as Fox News is of theirs? And is there any reason to put these constraints in a wholly separate category of media analysis, when the people running things in both cases are in many respects — class and race, for instance — rather alike, and may actually even intersect here and there? Don’t Goodman’s appearances in corporate media as an avatar of the left blur the lines even more? Doesn’t it make more sense to see Fox News and Democracy Now as being on a continuum, where Democracy Now has the final say on what Chomsky and Herman called permissible opinion?

And what of Chomsky, a tenured professor at a university distinguished by its particularly strong ties to militarism, whose iconic stature among American lefts owes variously to his military-funded accomplishments in linguistics; the esteem of celebrity lefts like Michael Moore, Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald; and to the ritualistic opprobrium heaped on him from time to time by riff raff in the mainstream, for whom he functions — particularly during upticks in war fever – as an icon of the wacky, America -hating left?

Don’t calls to listen to Chomsky — either to applaud or to jeer — come mostly from inside, or very near, the beast he and Herman described in Manufacturing Consent? And, if so, doesn’t that mean The Propaganda Model is shaping the margins too, at least in part? Wouldn’t the system define pariahs in the same spirit in which it defines the limits of permissible opinion? That is, if The Propaganda Model applies to all left discourse, wouldn’t it predict pariahs who, in the ways in which it counts, aren’t all too disruptively radical? Does the preponderance of de facto social democrats among left icons, then, tell us anything about what’s going on?

This Democracy Now video from 2012 may help illustrate what kind of results the elite-shaping of the margins delivers. In the video, Amy Goodman asks Chomsky about his recent trip to Gaza, which he describes in soul-crushing detail. A sample:

It’s kind of amazing and inspiring to see people managing somehow to survive in—as essentially caged animals and subject to constant, random, sadistic punishment only to humiliate them, no pretext…They’re—Israel and the United States keep them alive, basically. They don’t want them to starve to death…It’s an open-air prison.

On and on he goes in his patience-wearing monotone until Amy Goodman abruptly changes the subject and seeks his thoughts on Obama’s reelection:

Well, there are two good things about it. One is, the worst didn’t happen, and it might have. The second is, it’s over. So we can put it behind us and get back to work, exactly what you said today. I mean, the whole electoral extravaganza, in my view, ought to take maybe five minutes of the time of an activist, because it’s a farce. I mean, there are some differences; it’s not zero impact, you know.

At the end of the interview, Goodman asks if there is anything in Gaza that gives him hope:

…They just don’t give up. Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don’t just succumb. And, you know, it’s a lesson for people from the West. I mean, you know, we talk about repression, but, you know, undetectable by comparison with what most people in the world face. And if they can struggle on under really harsh and brutal conditions, tells us we ought to be doing a lot more.

This exchange shows Goodman and Chomsky doing what they each do best. For Goodman, that’s drawing out boatloads of depressing information — most of it already well-known to her viewers — while insuring that it remains disconnected from anything resembling a systemic analysis or genuine militance. Watch a lot of Goodman interviews and you might be struck by the weird intermingling of horror and bathos, which her sudden question about the election in this interview embodies. Note how she abruptly dumbs things down when Chomsky hits on how pretexts for the subjugation of the Palestinians don’t withstand scrutiny.

Chomsky’s specialty is vividly describing the numbing horror of something like Gaza and lightly sprinkling anguished endorsement of state power that makes that horror possible. So in addition to reminding us that the U.S. and Israel maintain Palestinians in an ‘open-air prison’, Chomsky tells us Obama’s reelection means ‘the worst didn’t happen’ and that elections, though farcical, actually matter. We also learn that by comparison to the horrors state power visits on the Palestinians, government repression at home is ‘undetectable’, which must certainly be news to the one in one hundred adults currently languishing in U. S. prisons for, among other things, drug use, debt and political dissidence. ‘We ought to be doing a lot more’, he says, seemingly oblivious to how domestic political repression is ‘undetectable’ in direct proportion to resistance and without specifying what we should do, exactly, besides voting for Democrats.

The whole conversation very usefully encapsulates lefty media as a whole: Top heavy with gory, mostly familiar details; light on analysis; light on prescription; and perhaps most importantly, ultimately compliant with state authority via disaffected endorsement of lesser-evil voting, and the helpful whitewashing of domestic repression. Learn this template and maybe you can be a lefty icon too, wringing your hands over decades-old problems, counseling unconditional support of the political party that will allegedly make them least worse and never considering in thirty years of mounting crises that perhaps you should try something else.

End of Part 1

http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2014/01/2 ... ut-part-1/

*

[vanlose kid]

Only at those who first throw piss at an acid fight.

Anyway, it's already pre-determined who's going to think who started what when.

Meanwhile it's become clear enough to me that this thread was started, at least in spirit, by an NSA public relations initiative.

.

You have more choices than that. It achieves nothing, looks crap and lowers your reputation.

I do not believe in pre-determination of response. People are not machines.

I'm reading you saying that you think Sibel Edmonds is acting as an NSA asset - is that accurate?

Nah, he's saying posters on this board (thread), myself at least, are NSA assets.
I recall there being rules for that. Fortunately the rules here don't apply to him. No big deal.

*

[JackRiddler]

I'm reading you saying that you think Sibel Edmonds is acting as an NSA asset - is that accurate?

An asset is someone placed on an organizational chart or table as such. An asset isn't necessarily aware of their status as an asset to a given organization. I see no indication that Sibel Edmonds is an agent of the NSA, and very much doubt it. The former FBI employee and whistleblower, clearly, has devolved into a conspiracy merchandiser of rather minor importance.

In this case, she is undeniably acting in the interests of the NSA, and thus can be called an asset. Her bizarroland rants (like those of Ryan and others) serve to divert attention from the essential question of what the NSA does to the very minor question of what documents Greenwald may have (because Snowden picked him) that he has yet to share with Sibel Edmonds. She insinuates or just straight-up says that Greenwald is a limited hangout agent, a greedy ambulance chasing Marxist-Leninist libertarian cash-grubby lawyer, a gay party animal making "millions of dollars" (repeat, repeat, repeat!) by twisting the truth on Omidyar's behalf, etc. etc.

She seems to have timed these contributions (which are baseless and illogical, but in conformity with stereotypes about Jews and gays) to the rhythms of an ongoing, separate, much larger campaign, in which the government and the mainstream media are smearing Greenwald and Snowden as reckless traitors with "stolen" documents, Russian spies, profiteers, etc. etc. It's interesting that Ryan straight-up adopts the NSA line that these documents (of government crime) were "stolen" by Snowden. It is an appalling and highly irresponsible display. How could the NSA not be loving this?

[JackRiddler]

Nah, he's saying posters on this board (thread), myself at least, are NSA assets.
I recall there being rules for that. Fortunately the rules here don't apply to him. No big deal.

Please, assets and agents are two different concepts. Assets don't necessarily think of themselves as such, and I certainly haven't said you do. I also don't think the NSA has specifically placed you on their chart of smart, useful idiots who are providing supporting fire to their current Kill Snowden campaign from the camp of the ostensible dissidents. But that is what you are doing, and if they're any good at psyops and cointelpro (the CIA and FBI are obviously much more experienced), then they probably do have a box charted for the category of smart, useful idiots of your kind. And you are providing this service at a pretty decent level of obscurantism and sophistry. Easily a cut above most of the other bozos on this thread. With a serious thug factor, but that's okay. Here it's actually true: I'd know whereof I speak, since I have no compunctions about dishing out abuse in kind, at least on message boards. (It's fascinating to see all the hand-wringing about it. As with Greenwald and Edmonds, everyone leaves out the provocations and pretends to be shocked, shocked that he would call her names!)

Also, score another point for Greenwald. Tarzie absolutely should kill himself.

.

[Nordic]

Only at those who first throw piss at an acid fight.

Anyway, it's already pre-determined who's going to think who started what when.

Meanwhile it's become clear enough to me that this thread was started, at least in spirit, by an NSA public relations initiative.

.

You have more choices than that. It achieves nothing, looks crap and lowers your reputation.

I do not believe in pre-determination of response. People are not machines.

I'm reading you saying that you think Sibel Edmonds is acting as an NSA asset - is that accurate?

That's exactly what he said.

He's also saying that Sibel Edmonds is a conspiro-porn monger.

He also deleted, or heavily edited, one of his posts where he went on, and on, and on, about how stupid he thought Slimmouse was.

And how he's claiming he didn't do that.

Then he went back almost four years into the history of this board to find a quote of mine that he assumed he could use against me.

Basically, Jack Rippler is self-destructing, rather spectacularly, here on RI, and playing the martyr at the same time.

It's a wonderful show.

[coffin_dodger]

the casual character assassination of his detractors as 'homophobic racists'.

Why did those nefarious secret forces make poor Sibel Edmonds include all that gay-hating rhetoric in her otherwise totally logically sound and sober discourses on Greenwald?

Tough shit. Her choice. If you want to defend or distract from it: your problem. In articles about Greenwald, Snowden et al, there was no need for her to (further handicap herself) express prejudices about gay people that were completely irrelevant to her argument (whatever that ostensibly was supposed to be). But that is what she did. No one made her. You want to distract from it? You want to pretend it's just "political correctness" at work, and throw in something about unfounded accusations of racism that no one has actually raised? (Gays, blacks, whatever. Some Jew ambulance chaser is always complaining on their behalf, right?) Well then fuck you too. Some of us ain't going to tolerate that crap any more. There have been enough victims of it. Tough shit. New year. New age. Marijuana and gay marriage be legal now. You're going to have to learn how to transport your conspiracy merchandising theses without including gratuitous insults or "jokes" against gays, or you'll find that this obstacle keeps coming up.

Jack, I know it seems like you're being ganged up on, (not that you'd care, of course), but I'm genuinely surprised at your reaction to this event. I don't see how anyone can be certain of anything.

You said earlier in this thread:

If it was up to me to help the NSA come up with a campaign to tar Greenwald I'd start by asking myself where he was vulnerable.

That job would be a walk in the park. He's a gay, Jewish lawyer who knows he's right

This doesn't make sense to me. The NSA cannot use these attributes against Greenwald, because it's not the 1950's any more (as you outline in the first quote above). The NSA would have unleashed a campaign against Greenwald using these attributes from the get-go if this was an option - why would they have waited a year (and a supposedly very painful year at that) to then 'seed' the conspiracy realm when the damage had already been done? And I'm questioning the amount of 'damage' done myself, right now. On the flip side, it makes Greenwald a very difficult target to criticize without drawing accusations of homophobia and racism.

We already knew what the NSA was up to, the finer details learned through leakage is the depth. And contemplating the depth reveals a powerful, scary message - beware, we have records of everything you're doing (for future use, as necessary). I remain to be convinced that these documents contain anything game-changing. For instance, the 'zombies with iphones' NSA document that elfismiles posted on the Zombies thread was laughable - seemingly written for, and perfectly pitched at, the conspirazone. (thanks for posting it, elf).

I look at Assange and see a man confined to a metaphorical cell in London, starved of information and sunlight, facing a bleak future of persecution that includes a tenuous, possibly trumped-up, rape charge.

I look at Greenwald and see a free man.

How can that be?

[JackRiddler]

Yeah, why isn't Greenwald as fucked as Assange yet? How is that possible? Only if he's working for THEM, obviously. If he's not been Guantanamo'ed or Wellstoned, he must not be real!

This is the same kind of divide-and-divert bullshit that was used all the time against Assange. Now that Greenwald's the target, Assange is recast as a good guy that is supposed to make Greenwald look bad by contrast. (Meanwhile they are all action figures in the hands of wankers staging fights among their dolls and speaking imagined lines for them.)

Just in case anyone wants to talk about the subject...

Further to Nordic's spectacular misunderstanding of what it means that Rusbridger was hauled in and given a public show-interrogation by a state threatening to invoke terrorism charges (the same state that has Assange holed up in the embassy for all these years...)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/ ... 0T20131203

LONDON, Dec 3 (Reuters) - British police are examining whether Guardian newspaper staff should be investigated for terrorism offences over their handling of data leaked by Edward Snowden, Britain's senior counter-terrorism officer said on Tuesday.

The disclosure came after Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, summoned to give evidence at a parliamentary inquiry, was accused by lawmakers of helping terrorists by making top secret information public and sharing it with other news organisations.

That might have been more than theater. See bolded section below.

The Guardian was among several newspapers which published leaks from U.S. spy agency contractor Snowden about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain's eavesdropping agency GCHQ.

Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick

(wow that's a hell of a name, sorry can't help saying that)

who heads London's Specialist Operations unit, told lawmakers the police were looking to see whether any offences had been committed, following the brief detention in August of a man carrying data on behalf of a Guardian journalist.

Security officials have said Snowden's data included details of British spies and its disclosure would put lives at risk. Rusbridger told the committee his paper had withheld that information from publication.

"It appears possible once we look at the material that some people may have committed offences," Dick said. "We need to establish whether they have or they haven't."

David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald who brought the Snowden leaks to world attention, was questioned under anti-terrorism law when he landed at London's Heathrow Airport en route from Berlin to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, and computer material he was carrying was seized.

Lawmakers put it to Rusbridger that he had committed an offence under Section 58A of the Terrorism Act which says it is a crime to publish or communicate any information about members of the armed forces or intelligence services.

"It isn't only about what you've published, it's about what you've communicated. That is what amounts, or can amount, to a criminal offence," said committee member Michael Ellis.

Asked later by Ellis whether detectives were considering Section 58A offences, Dick said: "Yes, indeed we are looking at that."

That's fucking heavy. The UK is threatening to prosecute the editor of The Guardian for keeping the public informed about what the state is up to.

This, I submit, is about a thousand times more important than whether Greenwald has shared whatever files he has access to adequately with Tarzie and Edmonds, in the judgement of Tarzie and Edmonds (who of course would be well advised to run, run, run away if anyone tried to feed them these documents).

And clearly, if he were to release everything at once, there are those in power who would want to invoke the terrorism and espionage statutes. There are those in power who want to do so anyway!

Earlier on Tuesday, the Guardian published a letter of support from Carl Bernstein, the U.S. journalist who helped expose the Watergate scandal in the 1970s.

Bernstein, 69, said Rusbridger's appearance before the committee was a "dangerously pernicious" attempt by British authorities to shift the focus of the surveillance debate from excessive government secrecy to the conduct of the press.

STORED SECURELY

During his testimony, Rusbridger defended his decision to publish the leaks and said the paper had used less than one percent of the information and kept the rest stored securely.

"We have published I think 26 documents so far out of the 58,000 we've seen, or 58,000 plus. So we have made very selective judgements about what to print," he said. "We have published no names and we have lost control of no names."

Guardian articles over the last six months have shown that the United States and some of its allies, including Britain, were monitoring phone, email and social media communications on a previously unimagined scale.

There you go.

And why have they only published less than one percent of the information, some bloggers demand to know?

As if the possibility that the answer was "because that's how far they got before the state could make a criminal case against them, which is pretty impressive, considering," had never fucking occurred to them.

But it does explain why Greenwald left.

Looks like The Guardian did something that inadvertently created a legal opening for the state. So Greenwald took the docs and left. That protects the documents, mostly. But The Guardian's also less likely to face the music if it no longer has what the state wants.

So. They outsmarted the state, did something no one else was willing to do, and preserved the documents so that they could keep doing it, with a bare minimum of personal drama, showboating and carrying on throughout.

Let's kick them repeatedly.

The revelations provoked diplomatic rows and stirred an international debate on civil liberties. Britain's security chiefs said the leaks were a boon to the country's enemies who were "rubbing their hands with glee".

Snowden, who is believed to have downloaded between 50,000 and 200,000 classified NSA and British government documents, is living in Russia under temporary asylum. He has been charged in the United States under the Espionage Act.

You don't say. Gosh. That's a federal charge. Could that be why there were hundreds of conversations between The Guardian and the FBI prior to publication? Do ya think?

(That they talked to GCHQ and the Cabinet Office is not exactly astonishing. The stories raise questions about them.)

Countering criticism by lawmakers, Rusbridger said more emphasis was being given to the Guardian's decision to publish the leaks than to the fact they had been so easily obtained in the first place.

"We were told that 850,000 people ... had access to the information that a 29-year-old in Hawaii who wasn't even employed by the American government had access," he said. (Additional reporting by Freya Berry and Silvia Antonioli; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

[dada]

I think Jack is doing a great job. The NSA should be the focus here, not Snowden/Greenwald.