The campaign to tar Snowden and Greenwald and help the NSA

[seemslikeadream]

hey nobody has the complaining rights to this thread.....I had both Snowden and Greenwald threads rapped up


you guys fight it out ...I'll stay in the simulation for now

[bks]

Let's keep it civil, ok? I'd like a chance to learn something about any weaknesses of my own position, and I can't do that if we're being assholes to one another.

Jack: it sounds like you're saying that because the NSA is acting exactly in character, and as Snowden himself fully predicted they would, we're supposed to exempt him and anyone associated with him from any form of criticism no matter how constructively intended, even when they make false, and still unretracted comments that can and have been construed as diminishing of a heroic, and deeply suffering fellow whistleblower. If I have it wrong, tell me how.

Everyone here is aware of the main show, I should think. I think it's not relevant to our discussion. The mainstream line of attack won't ever try to co-opt the left-of-Snowden criticisms, because that would require recovering Manning's heroism and accepting the criminality and pure social destructiveness of mass surveillance in its entirety.

IN ITS ENTIRETY. Somehow I don't think Jeffrey Toobin will be making this argument anytime soon. So let's stop pretending some leftish criticism of him is advancing any NSA position.

Luckily no one is asking me how best to stay alive after pissing off the NSA. But the only way he may stand a long-term chance is for all of us to work who give a shit about mass surveillance as hard as we can to make killing him pointless. Snowden can't protect himself against the NSA, as I'm sure he understands way, way better than I do. But that's point, see? We're all in it together. We all HAVE TO BE in it together.

The way to make killing him pointless is encourage the mass leaking of everything, everywhere, and to unflinchingly and unceasingly support everyone who does this, everywhere. That's the deal. Not to responsibly 'curate' it yourself: that has to be a collective activity since it affects everyone. The Wikileaks model, more or less, in other words. If an individual leaker feels differently, they have every right to say so and be part of a debate about it. But I'm not interested in the creation of another brand and with it a set of dynamics mimicking a product battle. Work together, or it's a waste of energy.

[JackRiddler]

Let's keep it civil, ok?

I always will with you and most of the board. As for certain people, I've got Greenwald's syndrome: fire will be returned in kind, memories will be long, grudges may be kept, etc.

I'd like a chance to learn something about any weaknesses of my own position, and I can't do that if we're being assholes to one another.

So I hope I haven't been to you inadvertantly.

Jack: it sounds like you're saying that because the NSA is acting exactly in character, and as Snowden himself fully predicted they would,

Well, this "character" is one of trashing the very possibility of democracy (by establishing a secret state that has the hidden power over politics by means of its total surveillance apparatus), murder and plunder, and facilitating the murder and plunder on a mass scale known as imperialism and the system of warfare practiced by the USG's war department around the world. So the NSA (and the rest of the NSS-MIC/perpetual war machine/global imperialist entity) being "in character" is in this case nothing I'd ever view simply as a background factor. It is a permanent and unforgivable offense. Every day the most important fact to wake up to is that the Pentagon and National Security State are a non-stop crime against democracy and humanity, and a permanent danger to the peace of the world and indeed the survival of the species.

we're supposed to exempt him and anyone associated with him from any form of criticism no matter how constructively intended,

Absolutely not, but at the same time we need to understand that the chances of there being a coordinated smear campaign against Snowden/Greenwald are 100 percent, and be extremely judicious in our criticism, given that it will echo around with said campaign.

even when they make false, and still unretracted comments that can and have been construed as diminishing of a heroic, and deeply suffering fellow whistleblower. If I have it wrong, tell me how.

These comments, even if successfully misconstrued in the way of Tazie, Edmonds et al. are rather unimportant. Unpleasant, but do no damage. More on this later.

Everyone here is aware of the main show, I should think. I think it's not relevant to our discussion. The mainstream line of attack won't ever try to co-opt the left-of-Snowden criticisms, because that would require recovering Manning's heroism and accepting the criminality and pure social destructiveness of mass surveillance in its entirety.

Oh come on. You know the right wing especially has no problems doing that, as when they delight in pointing out ways in which Democrats betray the very same left that they, the right wing, otherwise demonize. It's classic divide-and-conquer.

IN ITS ENTIRETY. Somehow I don't think Jeffrey Toobin will be making this argument anytime soon. So let's stop pretending some leftish criticism of him is advancing any NSA position.

If there are any genuinely leftish criticisms of Snowden-Greenwald, I'd like to see them, and also I'd like to see them strike a proper distance from the exceedingly irrational form of bogus "leftish" (or "oppositionist") criticism fronted by Edmonds, Ryan, Naomi Wolf, et al. and by several posters on this thread. You know, the kind that basically amounts to, Snowden and Greenwald get attention, are therefore THEM.

Luckily no one is asking me how best to stay alive after pissing off the NSA. But the only way he may stand a long-term chance is for all of us to work who give a shit about mass surveillance as hard as we can to make killing him pointless.

Actually, they will never view it as pointless. They will kill people many years later to get the satisfaction and send a message, and if the message is ambiguous, so much the better since uncertainty is even scarier than an obvious hit (see: Hastings, most likely Webb too).

Snowden can't protect himself against the NSA, as I'm sure he understands way, way better than I do. But that's point, see? We're all in it together. We all HAVE TO BE in it together.

Okay, so he shouldn't say things that could be interpreted as mean against Manning. However, it is not the place of the likes of Tarzie, Edmonds etc. to blow this so out of proportion that they are basically calling him an agent (just like Mike Rogers, by the way, and here U.S. or Soviet agent almost doesn't matter: anything that defames, undermines, confuses and sows mistrust will do!).

The way to make killing him pointless is encourage the mass leaking of everything, everywhere, and to unflinchingly and unceasingly support everyone who does this, everywhere. That's the deal.

Okay, that's a strategy we can discuss as we proceed (not as one you and I can pursue, however, since we don't have that power, but whether it's the morally and politically right thing to do). Basically, it's what Snowden's been attacked for doing! And he's defended himself against the accusation, perhaps mainly as a way to keep up the lines of communication with the pathetically uninformed majority of Americans. Perhaps he should have said, HELL YEAH I'M INDISCRIMINATE?! FUCK THE MIC?! GO CHELSEA!!! YAH!!!! HAXOR NOW!!! Would this have been a better strategy? I don't know, I just see how effective the one that's been followed has been. (Incredibly, in terms of getting attention, compared to all prior media strategies I've seen. Of course, it's all just a fake and a show, if you set up the ridiculous bogus standards of Edmonds, Tarzie, et al. -- i.e., if he hasn't single-handedly overthrown the government then he must be a FAKE, which of course if advanced should first of all be applied to Edmonds, Tarzie, et al.)

Not to responsibly 'curate' it yourself: that has to be a collective activity since it affects everyone. The Wikileaks model, more or less, in other words.

This is not the Wikileaks model, as you should remember. After the Afghan war logs, Wikileaks first redacted the Iraq war logs, and then was doing highly selective releases at a slow pace on the State Department cables -- something that had much the same people here, though not you, complaining that Assange was in control and manipulating their precious brain cells on behalf of The Bad Guys. There was a sudden, total release of all of the cables only because the moron from the Guardian released the password of the insurance file.

If an individual leaker feels differently, they have every right to say so and be part of a debate about it. But I'm not interested in the creation of another brand and with it a set of dynamics mimicking a product battle. Work together, or it's a waste of energy.

Oh my god, what could be more branded than Wikileaks, seriously? Or more picky about with whom it works, and more of a drama queen about the ways it ends alliances that don't work out. And it's a strategy, and it can be questioned, and yet I don't think the motivations are therefore bad or the people doing it evil.

Meanwhile, "work together" is nice, but only some people are going to have the access and the nuts and the willingness to risk their own lives and so go ahead and do the leaking, and they're going to tend to do it on their own terms, if they get to do it at all.

Everything Snowden did shows that he learned from Manning, wanted both to be more effective in how he would do the releasing (which he obviously was!) and to stay free (which he has not quite done, but managed much better so far), which a) is totally right of him to want and b) far more effective than getting himself locked up.

More later.

[JackRiddler]

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Meanwhile VK is on "foe" to make it easier to scroll over the usual flooding, although this function still allows one to check what was written. I'm also going to ignore also this poster's usual projection on to me of things I didn't say about things that are not even the topic of this thread, which I regard as attempts to derail. However, this merits a response:

I don’t care to rehash anything beyond that. Instead, I’ll simply move on and attempt to predict where things will be a year from now:

1. We will all still be under surveillance and we still won’t quite comprehend to what extent. Indeed, the system of surveillance and discipline will likely be stronger, along with protections against more leaking. There will still be official debate, public handwringing and maybe even some policy changes, mostly directed at the NSA, to the exclusion of most of the 15 other agencies in the Intelligence Community, private sector involvement, and surveillance by states and municipalities.

By this logic, Chris Hedges is a shill for Wall Street and RI is a zionist front. And if it's all such a non-event, why are you agitating for a document dump? So that nothing can change faster?

There's no there there.

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[JackRiddler]

Meanwhile, some earlier notes on bks's earlier reply. Meaning, the bit about this Tarzie guy:

I've read that guy's blog. He has no case. Whatever anyone does, it's never enough for him. And he misstates shit constantly:

http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/08/2 ... an-part-1/

After savoring this reverie on the immortalization of his heroism by Hollywood, the reader is still seven paragraphs away from Rusbridger’s bombshell, which is that two months ago, ’a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister’ contacted Rusbridger and in the course of two meetings demanded the return or destruction of the Snowden files. A month later ‘shadowy Whitehall figures’ showed up and after a few more meetings with an allegedly non-compliant Rusbridger -

one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. “We can call off the black helicopters,” joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

There is quite a lot that’s bizarre here, certainly, but not in the way Rusbridger means. There’s that Rusbridger is only just now getting around to telling anyone about this, a full two months after the Cameron government had issued its first threat. There’s also the image of Rusbridger obligingly smashing Guardian computers and sweeping the remains up under the watchful eye of GCHQ goons, chortling to himself about their lack of tech savvy.

Where does that come from? Goons smashed The Guardian's computers in front of Rusbridger to punish him for doing his job! No one knew that because he then went back to doing it, without letting it affect him. And he's not fucking obligated to tell his readers anything that doesn't affect the way he does his job. So what the fucking fuck skin off anybody's ass is it if he waited two months to mention it? It's his business.

Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age.

By that he means, can you believe the keepers of gigantic data repositories don’t know that files can be replicated???

No. He means that it was a pointless, stupid, destructive act, for destruction's sake.

Don’t these goons realize how terribly unimportant it is that they’ve forced the editor of the newspaper monopolizing the Snowden story to destroy all local files related to it? Have they not considered that the lead on the story, Glenn Greenwald, lives and works in Brazil??? How DO these morons manage to keep the entire world under surveillance??? Oh har har bloody har.

Let’s put aside the obvious point that forcing a newspaper editor to destroy his own computers has all kinds of political and psychic benefits beyond, well, destroying the computers, and consider instead that David Miranda was detained while acting as a go-between for a manual exchange of local files between Greenwald and his Berlin-based colleague Laura Poitras.

Yes. They're being harassed!

Doesn’t this exchange suggest that this crew isn’t doing the kind of networked file replicating that makes the Guardian raid so cheeringly risible to savvy knowing knowers like Alan Rusbridger and Jay Rosen?

No. It fucking suggests their security is good enough that the state can't eliminate the cache and that they've been careful enough to avoid being shut them legally, so they're being harassed.

Rusbridger's not being a savvy knowing knower. They tried to intimidate him. He's refusing to be affected by it and getting on with his job. That doesn't make him a hero. He's not asking for roses or medals or sympathy. He's just doing his fucking job. What is the problem here?

Recall also that Miranda’s laptop was stolen from his and Greenwald’s home after Greenwald Skyped that he would send Miranda an encrypted copy of the Snowden files. Consider also that Lavabit, Snowden’s email provider, took itself offline, lest it, in the words of its owner, become ‘complicit in crimes against the American people.’

While intimidation is certainly playing a role here, it also seems as if the security establishment has not ruled out getting hold of all the files and destroying them. Nor should we underestimate the file-destroying powers of a global surveillance mob that can burglarize a home in the Rio suburbs or force an encrypted email service off line as easily as it can bully some preening Guardian twit into indifferently smashing his own laptop. Weird things happen. Remember how all those allegedly damning Bank of America files just disappeared? Poof. That story’s gone. We’ll never know what secrets those files disclosed, all because a couple of people thought they knew best when and how information should be disseminated and weren’t about to compromise control by sharing it with anyone else.

Yeah. That's not what happened here. The Guardian twit didn't smash his own computer. (How is that not victim-blaming?)

Snowden gave Greenwald and Poitras the cache on the strength of their work, which presumably inspired his trust. He sacrificed a lot to get those documents out. And they're upholding their end of the deal by doing the job he entrusted them with doing in pretty much the same way that they did the work that earned his trust.

Whining and carrying on about how it's NO FAIR that Greenwald and Poitras get the cache from Snowden, as if that wasn't what happened, as if they just swanned in and took it as a privilege, and as if they weren't fucking being harassed by scary, powerful people while continuing, nevertheless, to do their fucking jobs accomplishes WHAT?

What is the fucking point? That's not a rhetorical question. What is it? Who benefits?

Before we continue further down this rabbit hole, it’s appropriate to ask how much of this repression/defiance theatre is necessary to getting Snowden’s disclosures to the people and to what extent it’s getting in the way. Greenwald and his Guardian colleagues would like you to savor these David and Goliath spectacles without considering that what’s being fought over here is not so much people’s access to Snowden’s disclosures as Greenwald and co’s right to own and profit by them.

There's no sign Greenwald's getting rich off this. He works for a living. He doesn't own the documents. He is making them public. The state is trying to prevent that from happening by making his life unpleasant. And he's not fucking complaining about it. So why should this guy be?!

What makes him think a document dump would be more effective? The way Manning ended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan overnight? Because that didn't happen.

It's just player-hating. He doesn't point to a single injury being inflicted on anyone except on Greenwald et al, by the state, which he blames on Greenwald et al, not the state. And yet, he claims to be so serious about abuses of power in the name of security that he deserves the cache, gimme, gimme, gimme, wah, wah, wah.

It's fucked up.

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[JackRiddler]

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Again, I'm not saying that criticism of Snowden-Greenwald (and by extension the great Poitras, everyone always leaves her out and what she's fucking gone through with this goonball state) is verboten. I am saying that the most genuine criticism is guaranteed to be conducted simultaneous to a biblical shit-flood of fake "criticism" from the establishment media, and from the world's most powerful and authoritarian state agencies who acknowledge no limits whatsoever to their power. So your genuine criticism had better (1) rise to a level well above the trivial, which I do not see in the supposed betrayals of Manning and (2) be fucking logical and grounded in evidence, which I certainly do not see in any of it yet, and (3) at least acknowledge that the biblical shit-flood is underway and that it comes in a great many forms, including the odious entries from "the left" like Edmonds and Ryan (who actually argue classical McCarthy style). And no, I don't know 100 percent that these aren't part of a coordinated campaign. COINTELPRO for example never had any compunctions about giving its disinformation campaigns a dissident guise.

Some more earlier notes I don't have time to patch up into full narrative:

Omidyar is the only possible reason for concern that I see. He's not much of one. But he's a billionaire. So if something suspect was happening, there'd probably be a billion things worth looking at there.

I don't think PayPal's suspension of Wikileaks is enough to convict him. He doesn't really work there. Suspending one account isn't a board-level decision. He's not in a position to veto it by himself. And blah blah blah. But I might have been wrong about PayPal's reason for suspending Wikileaks being primarily legal. I didn't remember that there'd been a DDOS attack. And, you know. They have to stay online to stay in business. So that's enough of a reason.

You know, for all I know, he's awful. But that's not the point. I don't know it. So it's just McCarthyism. Nobody's pointing to anything anyone did wrong. They're just merging Greenwald, Omidyar and/or Snowden with Booz Hamilton by putting their names in the same sentence, then convicting them.

Meanwhile, let's look at the BFP masthead. Why look, Paul Craig Roberts! He once worked somewhere that's known for its ties to the CIA -- i.e., the Reagan administration. He proudly admits to receiving an award from the American Legislative Council, known for its ties to you-name-it: Scientology. Scaife. Everybody. And he's proud of his role in setting up the 1973 Pinochet coup, which he has even defended recently in articles for Counterpunch! What's my point? If you play the McCarthy guilt-by-association game, it's easier to hit Sibel Edmonds than it is Greenwald.

So let's start by judging him not on those associations, but on his words and deeds, of course.

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[vanlose kid]

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Meanwhile VK is on "foe" to make it easier to scroll over the usual flooding, although this function still allows one to check what was written. I'm also going to ignore also this poster's usual projection on to me of things I didn't say about things that are not even the topic of this thread, which I regard as attempts to derail...

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I'm on "foe"? Guess you won't be reading this then.

As for the bolded (that you obviously won't notice) it would do you good to actually read what it is you write and compare it to what it is you do. Dunce.

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PS: for the assholes (no one in particular): Criticizing GG and Omidyar is helping the NSA? Omidyar is the f***ing NSA.

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[vanlose kid]

A review of a film by another of Omidyar's "news" partners, practitioner extraordinaire of postmodern journalism, making full use of his First Amendment rights (Omidyar's thing you know, first amendments and rights and stuff).

Dirty Wars and Self-indulgence

by Douglas Valentine / June 7th, 2013

Let me begin with some background not covered in the film. Dirty War derives from La Sale Guerre, the term the French applied to their counter-terror campaign in Algeria, circa 1954-1961. Algeria wanted independence, and France resisted.

Like subject people everywhere, the Algerians were badly outgunned and resorted to guerrilla tactics including “selective terrorism,” a hallmark of the Viet Minh, who fought the French until 1954, when America claimed Vietnam as its rightful property. Viet Minh tactics were derived largely from Mao’s precepts for fighting a People’s War.

Selective terrorism meant the murder of low-ranking officials – collaborators – who worked closely with the people; policemen, mailmen, teachers, etc. The murders were gruesome – a bullet in the belly or a grenade lobbed into a café – designed to achieve maximum publicity and demonstrate to the people the power of the nationalists to strike crippling blows against their oppressors.

Whether the Great White Fathers are French or American or English, they agree that putting down a People’s War means torturing and slaughtering the people – despite the fact that most people are not engaged in terrorism or guerrilla action and have no blood on their hands.

As John Stockwell taught us years ago, Dirty War means destabilizing a targeted nation through covert methods, the type the CIA has practiced around the world for 66 years. Destabilizing means “hiring agents to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country.

“What we’re talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can’t get his produce to market; where children can’t go to school; where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside; where government administered programs grind to a complete halt; where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people; where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt.”

Economic warfare – strangling nations like Cuba, Iraq and Iran in Medieval fashion – is a type of Dirty Warfare beloved by the Great White Fathers who control the world’s finances. Though no less deadly than atomic bombs, or firebombing Dresden, it is easier to sell to the bourgeoisie.

You’ll hear no mention of this in Scahill’s film, nor will you hear any references to Phil Agee, or the countless others who have explained Dirty War to each generation of Americans since World War Two.

You will not hear about psychological warfare, the essence of Dirty War.

America’s first was terror guru was Ed Lansdale, the advertising executive who made Levi’s blue jeans a national craze in the 1930’s. He applied his sales skills to propaganda in the OSS and after WW II, concocted a new generation of psywar tactics as an agent of the Office of Policy Coordination assigned to the Philippines under military cover. Lansdale’s bottomless black bag of dirty tricks included a “skull squadron” death squad that roamed the countryside, torturing and murdering Communist terrorists.

One of Lansdale’s counter-terror “psywar” tactics was to string a captured Communist guerrilla upside down from a tree, stab him in the neck with a stiletto, and drain his blood. The terrorized Commies fled the area and the terrified villagers, who believed in vampires, begged the government for protection.

Lansdale referred to his sadism as “low humor,” an excuse borrowed liberally by American officialdom during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Lansdale formalized “black propaganda” practices to vilify the Communists: one of his Filipino commando units would dress as rebels and commit atrocities, and then another unit would arrive with cameras to record the staged scenes and chase the “terrorists” away.

Lansdale brought his black propaganda and passion for atrocity to Saigon in 1954, along with a goon squad of Filipinos mercenaries packaged as “Freedom Company.”

Under Lansdale’s guidance, Freedom Company sent Vietnamese commandoes into North Vietnam, under cover as relief workers, to activate stay-behind agent nets and conduct all manner of sabotage and subversion. Disinformation was a Lansdale specialty, and his agents spread lurid tales of Vietminh soldiers’ disemboweling pregnant Catholic women, castrating priests, and sticking bamboo slivers in the ears of children so they could not hear the Word of God.

In the South, with the help of the American media, Lansdale re-branded the heroic Vietminh as the beastly Viet Cong.

Lansdale’s greatest innovation, still used today, was to conduct all manner of espionage and terror under cover of “civic action.” As a way of attacking Viet Minh agents in the South, Lansdale launched “Operation Brotherhood,” a Filipino paramedical team patterned on the typical Special Forces A team. With CIA money, Operation Brotherhood built medical dispensaries that the CIA used as cover for terror operations, as depicted in the book and movie The Quiet American.

Levis never went out of fashion, nor did Lansdale’s dirty tricks. Think Saddam Hussein killing babies in their incubators. Such disinformation invariably works on an American public looking for any excuse to rationalize its urge for racist genocide.

Think Argo and Zero Dark Thirty and every Rambo and Bruce Willis film.

Only Americans were fooled by the propaganda, and the Vietnamese quickly caught on. So the CIA in 1956 launched the Denunciation of Communists campaign, which compelled the Vietnamese people to inform on Commies or get tortured and murdered. The campaign was managed by CIA agents who could arrest, confiscate land from, and execute Communists and their sympathizers on the CIA’s master list. In determining who was a Communist, the CIA used a three-part classification system: A for dangerous party members, B for less dangerous party members, and C for loyal citizens.

As happened later in the Phoenix program, the threat of an A or B classification was used to extort innocent civilians, while category A and B offenders were put to work building houses and offices for CIA officers and their lackeys. And, of course, the puppet Vietnamese President used his CIA created, funded and trained security forces to eliminate his political rivals.

As Lansdale confessed, “it became a repressive tool to liquidate any opponent.”

“This development was political,” Lansdale observes. “My first inkling came when several families appeared at my phoenixhouse one morning to tell me about the arrest at midnight of their men-folk, all of whom were political figures. The arrests had a strange aspect to them, having come when the city was asleep and being made by heavily armed men who were identified as `special police.””‘

Lansdale complained, but he was told that a “U.S. policy decision had been made. We Americans were to give what assistance we could to the building of a strong nationalistic party that would support Diem. Since Diem was now the elected president, he needed to have his own party. ”

How We Got to Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

By 1962, as the US expanded its Dirty Wars in the Far East and South America, the military replaced its Office of Special Operations with an up-dated Special Assistant for Counter-insurgency and Special Activities (SACSA). SACSA assigned unconventional warfare forces to the CIA and regular army commanders, who initially resisted.

The development of psychological warfare and special operations is explained in Michael McClintock’s Secret Warriors (1988).

JSOC’s mission, conducted on the Phoenix model with the CIA, is identifying and destroying terrorists and terror cells worldwide. Paramilitary personnel are often exchanged between JSOC and CIA.

By the early 1980s, CIA and military veterans of the Phoenix program were running counter-insurgency and counter-terror ops worldwide.

General Paul Gorman, who commanded U.S. forces in Central America in the mid-1980′s, defined this advanced form of Dirty War as “a form of warfare repugnant to Americans, a conflict which involves innocents, in which non-combatant casualties may be an explicit object.” (Toledo Blade 1 Jan 1987)

All of which brings me to my review.

Dirty Wars

Dirty Wars is a post-modern film by Jeremy Scahill, about himself, starring himself in many poses.

The film owes more to Sergio Leone and Kathryn Bigelow than Constantinos Gavras. Scahill certainly is no Leslie Cockburn: there is no Tony Poe telling how the CIA facilitates heroin shipments; no Richard Secord suing him for unraveling the financial intrigues of the CIA’s secret operators. The CIA is rarely mentioned.

There is no reference to the Guerra Sucia in Argentina.

Scahill is no Franz Fanon documenting the devastating psychological effects of racism on society. There are no cameos by Jean-Paul Sartre advocating violent retribution on Hollywood, no mingling with the Taliban in their caves as they conspire against their Yankee oppressors at the Sundance Film Festival.

We get the first taste of his self-indulgent idiocy when he says it is “hard to tell” when the Dirty War began. He does tell us, however, that he is on the “front lines” of the war on terror.

Scahill (hereafter JS) brags that he wasn’t going to find the front lines in Kabul, although he could have, if he knew where to look. Instead he just looks around furtively on his way to the scene of a war crime. We see a close-up of his face.

The endless close-ups artfully convey the feeling that our hero is utterly alone, on some mythic journey of self-discovery, without a film crew or interpreters. There is no evidence that anyone went to Gardez to make sure everyone was waiting and not toiling in the fields or tending the flocks, or whatever they do. And we’ll never find out what the victims do. The stage isn’t big enough for JS and anyone else.

This is a major theme throughout the story – JS is doing all this alone and the isolation preys on him. He bears this heavy burden alone, with many soulless looks.

Initially, there is no mention that journalist Jerome Starkey reported what happened in Gardez. JS is too busy establishing himself as the courageous super-sleuth. As we drive along the road, he reminds us how much danger he is in. Two journalists were kidnapped here, he says. This area is “beyond” NATO control. He must get in and out before nightfall or the Taliban will surely kill him like the Capitalist dog he is.

In my drinking days, we referred to this type of behavior as grandiosity. Telling everyone how you defied death, so the guys would talk about your exploits in the bars, and the girls would fall at your feet. For JS, this formula is working – a visit to his Facebook page reveals scores of “Millennial girls” wringing their hands and fretting for his safety as he strides across America’s secret battlefields in search of the truth. His carefully crafted Wiki bio furthers the legend.

Using the material gathered by Starkey (whom he eventually acknowledges), JS shows that in February 2010, American soldiers murdered five people in Gardez, including two pregnant women, and tried to cover it up by digging the bullets out of the targeted man’s body. He interviews the surviving family members. They weep. Violin music plays. They seem more like props than human beings.

JS ingenuously asks various Afghan and American officials, why the cover-up? The officials suggest that the targeted man was working for the Taliban – and if you play that double-game, you risk your family and friends. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tells JS they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. He says there will be no investigation.

Cut to Capitol Hill where, by his own account, JS has greatness thrust upon him. “It is imperative,” he tells Chairman John Conyers, “that Congress investigates this shadow war to examine its legality.”

What, one wonders, was Conyers thinking? Forty-two years earlier, after hearing testimony from Bart Osborn and Michael Uhl about the Phoenix program, Conyers and three other U.S. representatives stated their belief that “The people of these United States … have deliberately imposed on the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly denies due process of law …. In so doing, we appear to have violated the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian peoples.”

His testimony, JS tells us, “throws him into the public arena,” ever so reluctantly. He revisits his Blackwater testimony and shows pictures of himself with numerous celebrities on TV.

B-takes of Scahill walking among the common folk in Brooklyn, plotting his next move. Haunted by the horror of Gardez, he files FOIA requests and discovers that William McRaven is head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He’s stunned. He’s been a national security reporter for over a decade, and he’s never heard of JSOC before. It’s covert. The story has been hidden in the shadows, he says.

This was the turning point of the film for me. For a National Security correspondent, this is an admission akin to a botanist saying he’d never heard of flowers. It’s an admission that fairly sums up the sorry state of reporting in America today. Has JS ever read a book?

JS discovers that Gardez is not an isolated incident, and that JSOC rampages across Afghanistan with “unprecedented authority.” He talks to a former JSOC soldier about its activities in Iraq, where it had hit lists and conducted night raids. This revelation, and the fact that McRaven took responsibility for Gardez, leads JS to conclude that JSOC is responsible for Gardez. It certainly wasn’t Congress, which according to JS, has no control over JSOC. JSOC money comes from rich donors.

JS learns that JSOC is not only in Afghanistan, but that it operates worldwide, and that its hit lists get bigger all the time. And we hear, for the first time, the catchy phrase, “the world is a battlefield.”

At this point JS decides, with the help of The Nation brain trust, to investigate JSOC in Yemen where CIA drones are wiping out people by the score.

B-take of JS sipping tea thoughtfully. He’s going to talk to the most powerful man in South Yemen. We view of scene of a drone strike: 46 killed, including five pregnant women. A woman in a black veil says her entire family, save one daughter, were wiped out. Violin music. But there’s no cover-up here. In fact, Obama personally kept the journalist in prison who reported the strike.

What will Obama do to JS?

Once again, we fear for JS. Luckily he lives to talk to Rachel Maddow and Morning Joe. The greatness thrust upon him forces him onto TV shows everywhere. There he is with Amy Goodman!

More close-ups. We count the pores on his nose, the hairs in his eyebrows. We feel the fear. He gets a strange call. Someone tells him JSOC tortures people without telling the CIA or regular army, which are too busy torturing people to care.

As he studies the hit lists, he comes across radical America Muslim, Anwar al-Awlaki. After talking to Tony Schaffer, he realizes JSOC targets Muslims and that is why, along with the US invasion of Iraq, Awlaki is pissed off. Awlaki is an American but is inciting people to revolution in Yemen, so Yemen allows the CIA to kill him.

Note – the CIA is mentioned maybe twice in the film. Apparently it is so covert it escaped his notice.

We see JS in an exotic location. An airplane lands. JS is back in the USA. He’s been traumatized by what he’s seen. He tells anyone who will listen that the US cannot kill its way to peace, as if peace is the objective. The war on terror, he concludes, is creating enemies, which of course is the objective.

Before the American people can rally to JS’s clarion call, Obama sends some guys to kill Osama bin Laden. This is too much of a coincidence to ignore. Was it done to subvert his investigation? In any event, McRaven and JSOC are now heroes. He meets a knowledgeable person who tells him the Dirty War will go on forever. He tells us about signature strikes that kill people randomly (but not that the CIA conducts them) and that the war on terror is out of control.

Pictures of JS pointing to countries on a map where JSOC operates. He decides to visit Somalia, where JSOC is snatching bodies and taking them to ships in the Arabian Sea, and outsourcing its Dirty War to mercenaries. He visits mercenaries wearing camo fatigues. There are no other journalists here, it is too dangerous. Someone hands JS a flak jacket. Someone tells him they bury traitors alive. The tension soars. He’s surrounded by armed men. There’s a gunshot. He ducks behind sandbags.

We wonder who arranged for JS to meet these guys? Where did he get an interpreter? What’s the quid pro quo?

JS goes to a hospital morgue and look at a mutilated body. After which he wants to go home. But he learns that Awlaki’s son has been killed and reluctantly he returns to Yemen.

I liked this part of the film. It seemed genuine. We see home videos of Awlaki’s son doing youthful happy things. JS tries to understand why the US would deliberately kill a 16 year old kid? Which is a good question. Perhaps America is ruled by a murderous Cult of Death.

We see pictures of young girls smiling, and we revert back to the contrived scenes and monologue that drag the documentary down into gratuitous self-promotion. JS says he never had any idea where the story would lead, as if all this happened magically, like a rabbit pulled out of a hat.

The film ends and I wonder what he could have produced if he hadn’t melodramatized and spent so much time and film on close-ups. I wonder what he could have done if he’d read a few history books.

Ultimately, the film is so devoid of historical context, and so contrived, as to render it a work of art, rather than political commentary. And as art, it is pure self-indulgence.

And in this sense, it is a perfect slice of modern American life.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/06/dirty ... ndulgence/

*

[JackRiddler]

.

Meanwhile VK is on "foe" to make it easier to scroll over the usual flooding, although this function still allows one to check what was written. I'm also going to ignore also this poster's usual projection on to me of things I didn't say about things that are not even the topic of this thread, which I regard as attempts to derail...

.

I'm on "foe"? Guess you won't be reading this then.

Who's not able to read even short texts, apparently? It's just convenient for scrolling past your nonsense in an active thread. Doesn't stop me from seeing your naked ass, however.

.

[seemslikeadream]

SNOWDEN CALLS RUSSIAN-SPY STORY “ABSURD”
POSTED BY JANE MAYER


Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower, strongly denies allegations made by members of Congress that he was acting as a spy, perhaps for a foreign power, when he took hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents. Speaking from Moscow, where he is a fugitive from American justice, Snowden told The New Yorker, “This ‘Russian spy’ push is absurd.”

On NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Mike Rogers, a Republican congressman from Michigan who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, described Snowden as a “thief, who we believe had some help.” The show’s host, David Gregory, interjected, “You think the Russians helped Ed Snowden?” Rogers replied that he believed it was neither “coincidence” nor “a gee-whiz luck event that he ended up in Moscow under the handling of the F.S.B.”

Snowden, in a rare interview that he conducted by encrypted means from Moscow, denied the allegations outright, stressing that he “clearly and unambiguously acted alone, with no assistance from anyone, much less a government.” He added, “It won’t stick…. Because it’s clearly false, and the American people are smarter than politicians think they are.”

If he was a Russian spy, Snowden asked, “Why Hong Kong?” And why, then, was he “stuck in the airport forever” when he reached Moscow? (He spent forty days in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo International Airport.) “Spies get treated better than that.”

In the nine months since Snowden first surfaced, there has been intense speculation about his motives and methods. But “a senior F.B.I. official said on Sunday that it was still the bureau’s conclusion that Mr. Snowden acted alone,” the New York Times reported this weekend, adding that the agency has not publicly revealed any evidence that he was working in conjunction with any foreign intelligence agency or government. The issue is key to shaping the public’s perceptions of Snowden. Congressman Rogers, on “Meet the Press,” went on to allege that “some of the things he did were beyond his technical capabilities. Raises more questions. How he arranged travel before he left. How he was ready to go—he had a go bag, if you will.” Gregory then asked Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, and who was also a guest on the show, whether she agreed that Snowden may have had help from the Russians. She did not dismiss the notion. “He may well have,” she said. “We don’t know at this stage.” On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Rogers made similar allegations, saying, “This wasn’t a random smash and grab, run down the road, end up in China, the bastion of Internet freedom, and then Russia, of course, the bastion of Internet freedom.”

Asked today to elaborate on his reasons for alleging that Snowden “had help,” Congressman Rogers, through a press aide, declined to comment.

An aide to Senator Feinstein, meanwhile, stressed that she did no more than ask questions. “Senator Feinstein said, ‘We don’t know at this stage.’ In light of the comments from Chairman Rogers, it is reasonable for Senator Feinstein to say that we should find out.”

Some observers, looking at the possibility that Snowden was in league with the Russian government before taking asylum there, have pointed to a report in a Russian newspaper, Kommersant, that before leaving Hong Kong last June Snowden stayed at the Russian consulate. Snowden’s legal adviser, Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, denied that report, however, saying, “Every news organization in the world has been trying to confirm that story. They haven’t been able to, because it’s false.”

Snowden told me that having a “go bag” packed—something that Rogers described as highly suspicious—reflected his work deployed overseas for the C.I.A. He’d had a “go bag packed since 2007. It’s not an exotic practice for people who have lived undercover on government orders,” Snowden said.

“It’s not the smears that mystify me,” Snowden told me. “It’s that outlets report statements that the speakers themselves admit are sheer speculation.” Snowden went on to poke fun at the range of allegations that have been made against him in the media without intelligence officials providing some kind of factual basis: “ ‘We don’t know if he had help from aliens.’ ‘You know, I have serious questions about whether he really exists.’ ”

Snowden went on, “It’s just amazing that these massive media institutions don’t have any sort of editorial position on this. I mean these are pretty serious allegations, you know?” He continued, “The media has a major role to play in American society, and they’re really abdicating their responsibility to hold power to account.”

Asked about this, George Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC’s “This Week,” defended the coverage. Stephanopoulos pointed out that when the congressman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, alleged that Snowden was “cultivated by a foreign power” and “helped by others,” Stephanopoulos pressed him for details, twice. “I did two follow-ups,” Stephanopoulos said, “and got as much as the congressman was going to give up.”

From Moscow, Snowden explained that “Russia was never intended” to be his place of asylum, but he “was stopped en route.” He said, “I was only transiting through Russia. I was ticketed for onward travel via Havana—a planeload of reporters documented the seat I was supposed to be in—but the State Department decided they wanted me in Moscow, and cancelled my passport.”

As for why he remains there, he said, “When we were talking about possibilities for asylum in Latin America, the United States forced down the Bolivian President’s plane.” If he could travel without U.S. interference, “I would of course do so.”

Snowden was adamant that he wants to help, not hurt, the United States. “Due to extraordinary planning involved, in nine months, no one has credibly shown any harm to national security” from the revelations, he said, “nor any ill intent.” Moreover, he pointed out that “the President himself admitted both that changes are necessary and that he is certain the debate my actions started will make us stronger.”

“If any individual who objects to government policy can take it into their own hands to publicly disclose classified information, then we will not be able to keep our people safe, or conduct foreign policy,” Obama said on Friday. “Moreover, the sensational way in which these disclosures have come out has often shed more heat than light, while revealing methods to our adversaries that could impact our operations in ways that we may not fully understand for years to come.” And Obama told David Remnick, in an interview for The New Yorker, that the leaks “put people at risk” and that, in his view, the benefit of the debate Snowden generated “was not worth the damage done, because there was another way of doing it.”

In the end, Snowden said that he “knew what he was getting into” when he became a whistleblower. “At least the American public has a seat at the table now,” he said. “It may sound trite,” but if “I end up disgraced in a ditch somewhere, but it helps the country, it will still be worth it.”

[Nordic]

Jack, do you really have to be such a fucking ASS? Seriously, this is probably why this site has died out, nobody wants to deal with you. You're pompous, you're abusive, you're a know-it-all, and you try to control the board to your liking.

Really, why can't you be polite here and go start your own fucking forum where you can be its little dicktator.

In short: You're a bully.

I don't like bullies.



Thanks in advance.

[JackRiddler]

While there is no evidence the board has died ("RI died and it's because of YOU" is probably the second oldest RI meme) if it did, it would be because of the constant valorization of the stupid by the naive. The latter, that would be you. If you think providing a different frame for this subject than the one you put out is "bullying," that's too bad for you.

[JackRiddler]

So, bks, earlier you mentioned the argument for Snowden-didn't-vet-the-docs. Presumably you mean this from Tarzie?

But for arguments sake, let’s restrict ourselves to the Times’ trove. And also for the sake of argument, let’s assume that by some weird good fortune, each document Snowden selected for review passed his test for inclusion, despite how completely unlikely this is. By most accounts, Snowden began downloading documents in 2012, his last year at Dell but, for the sake of argument, let’s be really generous and assume that Snowden has been gathering documents since first going to work for Dell in 2009.

If you assume that Snowden spent every working day of four 50-week years meticulously selecting documents, and that each document he looked at ended up in the trove, he would have had to review 50-60 documents per working day. Remember, we are talking about ‘documents’ not pages, and that they are, in Greenwald’s words, ‘very, very complete and very long.‘ It is not simply unlikely that Snowden vetted each of these documents. It is impossible.

http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/2 ... leblowing/

This is the statement he's challenging, in Snowden's words:

[Snowden:]“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,”

http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/1 ... ent-trove/

And that doesn't necessarily mean he did more than check to see if the document described a program that was based on data-mining the general public.

They're technical documents, in his area. He'd know what sub-heading to check, or whatever. To read it as meaning: "He read each and every document from start to finish and thought about it carefully" is adding a lot to the statement that isn't there. It really does depend on what his standards for careful evaluation that ensures something is legitimately in the public interest are.

Greenwald went further with the rhetoric:

Thomas Roberts: What makes Bradley Manning any different from Edward Snowden . . . because Manning is widely considered to be a traitor and not a whistleblower?

Greenwald: … if you ask [Snowden] what the difference is, he will say that he spent months meticulously studying every document. When he handed us those documents they were all in very detailed files by topic. He had read over every single one and used his expertise to make judgments about what he thought should be public–and then didn’t just upload them to the internet–he gave them to journalists who, he knew, and wanted to go through them each one by one and make journalistic judgments about what should be public and what wasn’t, so that harm wouldn’t come gratuitously, but that the public would be informed, and that he was very careful and meticulous about doing that.

"Meticulously" might be laying it on a little thick. But he's speaking extemporaneously. And he's a litigator. He always sounds like he thinks he's saying: "THIS man is INNOCENT" to a bunch of dim-witted old ladies on the jury. And that can be annoying. But I don't see any sign that he's lying. Or that he has a motive for selling the point apart from the obvious one: As pushback against charges of treachery, endangering the nation, causing harm, being with the terrorists not against them, etc.

He doesn't say Manning is a traitor, and I think it's a stretch to impute that meaning to him or to call him a liar for saying it. He's just responding to the implication about Snowden. That's what he was really being asked, and what he was there to talk about.

The rest of it is just the Rancid Honeytrap (geez, you try not to namecall and then the author chooses such a name) deciding a few stray comments amount to the whole story and ignoring everything else. Cherry-picking, in other words.

.

[Wombaticus Rex]

God, I don't give a fuck. Not even a fraction thereof.

I think this is moderator burnout. I keep thinking about how you're all older than me, and yet I'm the motherfucker you complain to.

This is too much like my day job. I'm gonna go apply to be a civilian again in the mod forum: fuck you all. Honestly, no sarcasm.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Sound and fury, signifying nothing, Wombaticus. Don't sweat it. Greenwald wants to be the New Mainstream and Edmonds wants to be the New Alternative. Fuck 'em both, for different reasons. I'm done giving a fuck about it all since last year. And I would appreciate you staying on as a mod precisely for NOT giving a fuck about such tawdry shit.