Glenn Greenwald

Exploiting Charlie Hebdo To Attack Civil Liberties

Samuel Hooper11 Comments

 

It is a dirty yet utterly predictable paradox that the terrorist attacks in Paris, which saw so many people flock to the banner of free speech, are even now being exploited by conniving politicians to crack down on our other, equally cherished civil liberties such as the right to privacy.

Once you have seen enough television news reports and read enough commentary to confirm and reinforce your entirely appropriate horror and outrage at the terrorist atrocities in Paris this week, therefore, it is well worth taking some more time out of your schedule to watch at least some of the video above.

Attempting to start a meaningful conversation about the root causes of Islamist terrorism is, apparently, highly unseemly and inappropriate so soon after an attack. And yet those who make this claim never explain why talking about the root causes of Islamist terrorism in its immediate aftermath is opportunistic and wrong, while conveniently it happens to be the perfect time for governments to demand sweeping, draconian new powers. And yet that is exactly what we now see.

As this blog recently noted:

https://twitter.com/SamHooper/status/553967074696265729

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Spot The Bully – Journalism or Government?

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

SPS Polis 2014 journalism conference

The POLIS 2014 Journalism Conference, held on the campus of the London School of Economics, played host to a number of luminaries from the British media establishment and debated some important issues. But among the various items on the agenda – including riveting discussions on the methods and ethics of investigative journalism, an interview with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and a forum on the use of social media in the newsroom – was a slightly incongruous, strangely titled session.

In the second session of the day, the panel – comprised of chair Anne McElvoy (BBC and The Economist), Annette Dittert (German broadcaster ARD), Michael Crick (Channel 4 News) and Ed Lucas (The Economist) debated the following topic:

Journalism after Snowden: Watchdog or thug?

In the wake of the Snowden story and the Leveson Inquiry into the press, we ask whether British journalism is to supine or too aggressive? Was the publication of state secrets justified?

SPS_Polis2014_01

Semi-Partisan Sam, attending the POLIS Journalism Conference for the first time, took the opportunity to ask the following question of the panel:

QUESTION – Given the facts: that Reporters Without Borders downgraded the UK from 29th to 33rd in the World Press Freedoms rankings for 2014;  that the British government now assumes the right to stop and detain partners and relatives of journalists at Heathrow airport under grossly misapplied anti-terror laws; that the Prime Minister last year saw fit to dispatch his Cabinet Secretary to the offices of a major national newspaper in order to threaten it with closure unless they desisted with the publication of materials embarrassing to the government; and that the government forced that same newspaper to destroy their privately owned computers and hard drives under the watchful presence of intelligence and GCHQ officers – why are we sitting here having an introspective debate about whether or not journalists are behaving like thugs when the real thug is clearly the bullying, heavy-handed British government?

The question was extremely well received among the attendees in the hall, prompting a significant round of applause from delegates. Sadly, this did not translate into a a full or robust answer from the panel, who at times had been happier to wander off-topic and waste time debating side issues such as America’s merits as a country and the proper role of the intelligence services.

The panel’s complete answer – such as it was – to the question can be seen in the video below (Semi-Partisan Sam is “the gentleman” referred to by Anne McElvoy):

The Economist’s Ed Lucas, an enthusiastic apologist for anything and everything that the government decides to do in the name of ‘security’, was obviously unsympathetic to the idea that the British government has displayed thuggish behaviour. But since even Lucas was unable to justify what the government has been caught doing without public knowledge or consent, he instead diverted attention by building up and then destroying a straw-man argument of his own creation – namely that those who speak out against government persecution of journalists who expose overreach by the security services are somehow naive pacifists who want to abolish the military and the intelligence services entirely.

Lucas said: “If you want to have a country which has no intelligence and security services, where there are no state secrets or no penalty for stealing state secrets, then fine – I guess that may be the world that the Green Party would like. I suspect it’s a minority point of view.”

This is a patently false and absurd proposition. No serious critic of the British or American governments as pertaining to their secretly allowing their security services to infringe on citizen privacy is suggestion that GCHQ, MI6, the CIA or NSA be disbanded, and Lucas insults our intelligence to cast this aspersion. The issue is not whether we have security and intelligence services, but the lengths to which we as a society are prepared to let them act in our interest.

The other fatuous argument sometimes made by apologists – and indeed by Ed Lucas himself during this same session – goes along the lines of: “Why are people so surprised that we have spies, and that they are involved in acts of spying?” Again, this is a deliberate and misleading attempt to change the terms of the debate. Citizens fully understand the need for foreign and domestic intelligence, but they also have the right to expect that the technology and bureaucracy of surveillance will not be turned inwards upon themselves. While no one expects (or demands) a list of current surveillance targets to be posted and regularly updated on the  internet, the public should have input as to the criteria for targeting through the democratic process.

It is a rather sad statement on the current status of British journalism that the only panellist to seriously engage with the question and agree that it is government – not the press – who have been acting the bully, was Annette Dittert from German broadcaster ARD.

Even the panel chair, Anne McElvoy, felt the need to reframe the question and make the unsubstantiated claim that Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, had been carrying “shedloads of secrets with him” when he was detained at Heathrow airport, and that rather than being an outrage, this was just one of the “more difficult areas” where the public “might begin to have some doubts” and feel that the government has a case to answer.

In her response, Dittert correctly identified the apathy of the British people as being partly responsible for the lack of public outcry at the Edward Snowden revelations, saying that Britain has an “almost romantic relationship with the security services” – our experiences of the fictional James Bond being somewhat different to the German experience of the Stasi.

Responding to the question, Dittert said: “I thought it was really concerning – the Prime Minister threatening in the House of Commons a newspaper and journalists … in case they go on publishing is something that shouldn’t happen in a democracy.”

Dittert then went on to describe the way that The Guardian newspaper was treated as being “entirely wrong”.

It is profoundly worrying that even at a prestigious journalism conference such as POLIS 2014, so few of the attendees (and only one of the panellists – a German television correspondent) felt able to push back against the notion that it is the journalistic profession that has become the bully and the thug rather than the British government, whose track record on secrecy, paranoia and intimidation speaks for itself.

And while the POLIS 2014 conference was excellent, the fact that the whole day passed with virtually no observance or mention of the harrassment and intimidation of the British press by the goverment will only reinforce the belief that the establishment media with their well-connected sources and comfortable positions within the Westminster bubble are, at times, quite incapable of holding to account the government that they simultaneously both depend on and fear.

On Dissent In The Mainstream Media

Samuel Hooper2 Comments
Not in Abby Martin's name
Not in Abby Martin’s name

 

Glenn Greenwald, now writing for The Intercept, makes a very good point about journalistic integrity in the context of the ongoing Russian invasion and occupation of Crimea.

In the midst of this developing story, one of the anchors at Russia Today, the Kremlin-funded English-language news channel presenting a Russian perspective on the world, made news of her own by denouncing Russia’s actions at the end of her segment. The clip is available to view here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHYUPbnSs_0

 

The money quote is this:

I can’t stress enough how strongly I am against any state intervention in a sovereign nation’s affairs. What Russia did is wrong. I admittedly don’t know as much as I should about Ukraine’s history or the cultural dynamics of the region, but what I do know is that military intervention is never the answer. And I will not sit here and apologise or defend military aggression.

Greenwald wonders aloud how so many of those voices condemning Russia for invading a sovereign country can do so with a straight face when they themselves agitated for, or were apologists for the US-led war in Iraq:

Enthusiastic supporters of a wide range of other U.S. interventions in sovereign states, both past and present and in and out of government, are equally righteous in their newfound contempt for invasions – when done by Russia. Secretary of State John Kerry – who stood on the Senate floor in 2002 and voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq because “Saddam Hussein [is] sitting in Baghdad with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction” and there is “little doubt that Saddam Hussein wants to retain his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction” – told Face the Nation on Sunday: “You just don’t in the 21st Century behave in 19th Century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.” The supremely sycophantic Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer – as he demanded to know how Russia would be punished – never once bothered Kerry (or his other Iraq-war-advocating guests, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius) by asking about any of that unpleasantness (is it hard at all for you to sermonize against invasions of sovereign countries given, you know, how often you yourself support them?)

This is just as true for the press as it is for television talking heads or armchair generals. As Greenwald shows by quoting the example of CBS’s Bob Schieffer, the implicit assumption in many questions asked by television news hosts in America (and indeed in Britain) is that the invasion is unprecedented, wrong and contrary to international law. And while the invasion is indeed all of these things, this same level of proper journalistic scepticism was mysteriously missing when we were the aggressor.

Indeed, those few brave American media personalities who did speak out against the impending invasion of Iraq, and who dared to question the legitimacy of the Bush Administration’s every unconstitutional action, soon found themselves banished to the western journalistic equivalent of Siberia. Well known journalists or personalities such as MSNBC’s Phil Donohue and Ashleigh Banfield certainly felt the consequences, as Greenwald points out in an addendum to his piece:

Both Donahue and Arnett were fired because of their opposition to the U.S. war. Arnett was fired instantly by NBC after he made critical comments about the war effort on Iraqi television, while a memo from MSNBC executives made clear they were firing Donahue despite his show being the network’s highest-rated program because he would be “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war”.

During that same time, MSNBC’s rising star Ashleigh Banfield was demoted and then fired after she delivered a stinging rebuke of misleading pro-war TV coverage by U.S. outlets, while Jessica Yellin, at MSNBC during the time of the war, admitted in 2008 that “the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings” and that executives would change stories to make them more pro-war.

While it is too soon to determine the medium-longer term impact of Abby Martin’s words on her career at RT, the contrast between this act of journalistic independence on a news channel so close to the Kremlin and the recent history of the American (and British) news media is sobering and discomforting. Though the post-PATRIOT Act consensus is finally starting to fray given the recent NSA scandals and revelations, at a crucial period in American history significant dissent or journalistic scepticism was almost entirely absent from the domestic press.

That is not to say that press freedom in America/Britain and Russia are in any way comparable – despite a worrying background noise of increasing official encroachments, regulation and intimidation, the press is far more free in America than in Russia, and any sane journalist would wish to operate in the former climate rather than the latter.

But while infinitely preferable to homogenised Russian state propaganda, western media has shown itself capable of being bullied into self-censorship on occasions, be it the panicked urge to appear ‘acceptably’ pro-war and support the policies of George W. Bush in 2003 or the far more recent insidious suggestion by David Gregory in 2013 that journalists who report on leaked classified information should consider themselves co-conspirators.

As always, before climbing atop the highest parapet and waving the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack, we would do well to re-examine our own recent, tarnished history – be it our history of military intervention abroad or journalistic coverage of those adventures.

Doing so will not make Russia’s egregious actions in Crimea any more palatable or legitimate, but it will at least allow us to look Russia in the eye as we denounce them.

Who Really Wants A Free Press?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

MapRSF

 

The United Kingdom has fallen from 29th to 33rd in the world in the World Press Freedoms Index 2014.

The report, compiled annually by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is scrupulous in methodology and incorporates both qualitative and quantitative data. And for a country like Britain, which likes nothing more than to strut around the world proclaiming its comparative virtues, it makes for some dismal reading.

RSF’s summary of Britain is dominated by the British government’s chilling and bullying treatment of the Guardian newspaper as it sought to suppress the publication of information based on the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden, as well as the fallout from the Leveson Enquiry into the press behaviour and the prospect for further stultifying regulation of the industry:

In the United Kingdom, the government sent officials to The Guardian’s basement to supervise destruction of the newspaper’s computer hard disks containing information from whistleblower Edward Snowden about the practices of GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence agency. Shortly thereafter, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian star reporter who had worked closely with Snowden, was held at Heathrow Airport for nine hours under the Terrorism Act. By identifying journalism with terrorism with such disturbing ease, the UK authorities are following one of the most widespread practices of authoritarian regimes. Against this backdrop, civil society could only be alarmed by a Royal Charter for regulating the press. Adopted in response to the outcry about the News of the World tabloid’s scandalous phone hacking, its impact on freedom of information in the UK will be assessed in the next index.

Britain isn’t always called out by name, but there can be little doubt which European country was the intended target of this particularly barbed comment:

These developments showed that, while freedom of information has an excellent legal framework and is exercised in a relatively satisfactory manner overall in the European Union, it is put to a severe test in some member countries including those that most pride themselves on respecting civil liberties.

How true this is. Britain has long been (and has long considered itself) a stalwart defender of free speech, but the recent thuggish attempt to use anti-terrorism laws to detain a relative of a journalist and to threaten a national newspaper with closure unless it destroyed information which had the potential to embarrass the government are more worthy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia than the land of Magna Carta.

The New York Times, on the other hand, looks at the same report and seems to take succour from it, which is very surprising given the fact that their journalists have worked so closely with their beleaguered colleagues at The Guardian.

Their editorial board is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the landmark New York Times vs. Sullivan case, which set the bar for winning libel or defamation claims much higher than in Europe and thus created a bulwark protecting press freedom in the United States. This excerpt from the majority opinion in that case should be mandatory reading for all British politicians and those involved in public life, who are often all too keen to clamp down on free speech at the first sign of discord:

The Supreme Court voted unanimously to overturn that verdict. The country’s founders believed, Justice William Brennan Jr. wrote, quoting an earlier decision, “that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.” Such discussion, he added, must be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” and “may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

While the New York Times is absolutely right to recall and celebrate this landmark victory – libel laws in many other countries, especially Britain, are far too plaintiff-friendly – they seem all too willing to ignore the negative actions that have chipped away at this victory in the intervening half century, the various acts of craven self-censorship or collusion with imperial government overreach or the undermining of factfinding by the ongoing war on whistleblowers.

This selective amnesia leads to the following self-congratulatory pronouncement by the Times editorial board:

Still, American press freedoms rank among the broadest in the world. Citizens and media organizations in countries from China to India to Britain do not enjoy the same protections. In many parts of the world, journalists are censored, harassed, imprisoned and worse, simply for doing their jobs and challenging or criticizing government officials. In this area of the law, at least, the United States remains a laudable example.

The only problem with this statement? The United States ranks thirteen places behind the United Kingdom, at 46th in the world.

Fortunately for the New York Times and the reputation of the American press, the RSF world press freedom index does not take quality of journalism into account, only the ability of the journalist to practice their trade freely – otherwise they could have found themselves docked another few positions for that howler of an America-must-be-best presumption.

The truth is that neither Britain or America have anything to be proud of faced with this latest report. In an ideal world, David Cameron and Barack Obama would be held to account and hauled over the coals for presiding over such a poor performance. A backbench MP looking to bolster his or her civil liberties credentials could do worse than to ask the prime minister to defend or account for his government’s performance on press freedom at Prime Minister’s Questions this coming Wednesday.

But regrettably, a place in the mid-low 30s ranking is exactly where David Cameron, Barack Obama and many of those in power in Britain and America want their respective countries to sit. It allows for a press that is boisterous and noisy in all of the areas that don’t really matter (and so showing every outward appearance of being free), but that meekly tows the line when it comes to critical issues such as national security, civil liberties and holding those in power to account for their actions.

We in Britain or America may not think of countries such as Finland, Norway, Luxembourg or Liechtenstein as shining role models to emulate, if indeed we ever think about them at all. But in some key aspects, it is they who now carry the torch for freedom of speech and the free press, not the traditional Anglo-American partnership who held it aloft so dutifully for so long.

Snowden vs The Elite

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Ruth Marcus from the Washington Post and Glenn Greenwald from the Guardian went head-to-head on CNN this Monday, discussing the recent New York Times editorial calling for clemency for US whistleblower Edward Snowden. As the New York Times rightly concluded in their editorial:

When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government.

This was not the view of Ruth Marcus, who, showing much in common with the self-serving elitists and power fetishists who festoon Washington D.C., seems to swoon at government overreach and seeks to protect her own kind from any kind of scrutiny or consequences of their actions, whilst happily throwing the little guy or the outsider under the bus at the first opportunity:

Snowden … is seized with infuriating certitude about the righteousness of his cause. Not for Snowden any anxiety about the implications for national security of his theft of government secrets, any regrets about his violations of a duty of secrecy.

Quite how she knows that Snowden has no anxiety about these things is not entirely clear, but since she has never met Snowden I think it would be fair to surmise that she made this statement up. It would harm her cause, cheerleading for the Obama administration and the national security apparatus, if she acknowledged the fact that Snowden may have wrestled with his decision to divulge what he knew, that he had to weigh up the pros and cons of his actions.

It’s never good when experienced, professional commentators seek to drag George Orwell into their arguments, but Marcus indulges herself:

George Orwell himself would have told Snowden to chill — and the author of “Animal Farm” surely would have shown more recognition of the irony of Snowden’s sojourn in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Does a man whose life is conducted so much online really believe that Putin’s spies are not cyber-peering over his shoulder?

I believe that the irony, such as it is, is that a man from a supposedly free society has more liberty hiding out in Putin’s oppressive Russia than he would in his own native land, for doing nothing more than exposing the secret and unlawful actions of his government. That fact doesn’t make a mockery of Snowden, but it does make the United States look rather bad.

But it is on her next point that Marcus really overreaches:

On behavior, if Snowden is such a believer in the Constitution, why didn’t he stick around to test the system the Constitution created and deal with the consequences of his actions?

And here is where it gets good, because when CNN host Jake Tapper asked Glenn Greenwald to comment on Marcus’ position, he gave it to her with both barrels:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OouL16eWQvk

 

Temporarily putting aside the correctness of Greenwald’s position, the real money quote, and the thing that really gets to the rub of the matter is this:

I think Ruth Marcus’ argument exemplifies everything that’s really horrible about the D.C. media … People in Washington continuously make excuses for those in power when they break the law.

Yes, we see this time and again, and Greenwald has himself addressed this topic at length in his excellent book “With Liberty and Justice for Some”.

But in terms of refuting Marcus’ fatuous and glib suggestion that if Snowden really valued the US. Constitution he should have been willing to surrender himself and submit himself to the American legal system in order to advance his cause and win his case in the court of public opinion, Greenwald correctly states:

“If he had stayed in the United States, as Daniel Elsberg (widely considered to be a hero by most Americans) argued in the Washington Post, he would have been barred from making the very argument that she just said he should have made. Under the Espionage Act, you’re not allowed to come into court and say “I was justified in disclosing this information”, there is no whistleblower exception in the Espionage Act which is why whistleblowers don’t get justice in the United States.”

May this once and forever do away with the misleading assertion by national security fanatics and civil liberty deniers that Edward Snowden ever had – and spurned – a realistic chance of making his case to the public whilst remaining in the United States, or that his flight to Russia is in any way ironic or detracting from the validity and strength of his arguments. This is not the case.

Mediaite also provides a good summary of the exchange here.