Guardian and Greenwald Jump the Shark With Live Chat Interview with Edward Snowden

by Scott Creighton

In what has got to be the most obvious “jump the shark” moment in modern journalism, Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian announced this morning at 9 am eastern that there would be a live chat interview with their fabricated hero Edward Snowden starting at 11 eastern.

It was a credibility infomercial that their little psyop desperately needed considering so many on the left and the right are starting to smell a rat.( See Naomi Wolf ) Imagine Glenn Greenwald in a leather jacket on water-skis flying over a pen with a fake shark in it and you get the picture.

The Real Story Behind the Spying Program: Privatized Hit Lists for Our New Neoliberal Totalitarian State

by Scott Creighton

As I have written before, this is not about catching terrorists before they strike. They have been scoping up your personal data and communications for over a decade knowing full well that you aren’t a terrorist while so-called “terrorist” attacks and lone-wolf mass casualty events occur on a regular basis. The American Gladio operation is well underway as the neoliberalization of America proceeds on schedule.

This isn’t about collecting information to protect us from the terrorists, the people collecting the data and putting it to use are the terrorists.

This is a modern day version of every neoliberalization program the CIA, Chamber of Commerce, the Chicago Boys and the IMF have ever run with a slight twist: privatization. This is about collecting the names of those who will be a problem in the future when the brick of our economic reforms slams down on this country once and for all. It’s about a massive algorithm program that takes all your information in and predicts who the trouble-makers will be. It’s about creating a modern day death squad hit-list for our new totalitarian state and nothing more.

Below are two quick quotes from scholarly articles about two supposedly separate moments in time which are actually connected by a long process of gradual usurpation and unconstitutional power grabbing.

They are the crux of what I have been warning about since I started this website almost 6 years ago to the day.

Manufactured Hero Edward Snowden: Glenn Greenwald Goes “Full Retard”

by Scott Creighton

The other day I wondered if the Guardian set Glenn up for a fall on this one. I figured maybe they told him they vetted this new NSA whistle-blower and sent him off to Hong Kong to meet a high-school drop-out with his Rubic’s Cube in what appeared to be a secret meeting scenario written by the former writing staff of Get Smart. Turn’s out I wasn’t far off…

“Thus far we have revealed four independent programs: the bulk collection of telephone records, the PRISM program, Obama’s implementation of an aggressive foreign and domestic cyber-operations policy, and false claims by NSA officials to Congress. Every one of those articles was vetted by multiple Guardian editors and journalists – not just me. Democratic partisans have raised questions about only one of the stories – the only one that happened to be also published by the Washington Post (and presumably vetted by multiple Post editors and journalists) – in order to claim that an alleged inaccuracy in it means our journalism in general is discredited.” Glenn Greenwald

Yes Mr. Greenwald, when you make an inaccurate statement in your article, your journalism is discredited. If you come out backing some sudden NSA whistle-blower as the next Daniel Elsburg and then it turns out he’s a high school drop-out flake with no real intel to speak of, your really going to be discredited. And unfortunately I fear you don’t really understand that is why you and the filmmaker, the Academy Award-nominated Laura Poitras, were specifically requested by the career NSA employee and manufactured hero… in case you hadn’t figured that out yet.

Top Ten Issues I Have with the Manufactured Hero Edward Snowden Story

by Scott Creighton

The wheels are starting to come off  (H/T boomerang) … just a bit.

While the two biggest frauds from the right and the left, Glenn Beck and Michal Moore, parrot the status quo line telling their supporters to think of Edward Snowden as a “hero” (you will think as we tell you), more and more real people are starting to ask questions about our new manufactured hero’s story.

The tale Edward Snowden recounted to Glenn Greeenwald doesn’t seem to add up. That’s not too say that we shouldn’t all be very concerned and even angry about massive spying programs being run by contractors on behalf of our “national interests”… we should be damn angry about that… and that’s not too say we shouldn’t be fighting for the protections of our civil liberties and constitutional rights, but unfortunately it looks like Glenn and many others may have fallen for something here. What it is just yet, we can’t be clear, but as the song goes, somethin is happenin here.

Top Ten Issues I Have with the Manufactured Hero Edward Snowden Story (there are more)

It’s Conspiracy Theory No More – Greenwald References Church Committee on MSM

Attendees from Intelligence Conference Joke About “Disappearing” Glenn Greenwald for NSA Article – John Negroponte Had Attended Conference

(For those of you who know who John Negroponte is and what he did in Central America and later in Iraq, this is certainly a bad omen. Negroponte created death squads everywhere he went, “disappearing” untold thousands of troublemakers in various countries we had neoliberalized. And here we are…)

from The Huffington Post

Leading foreign policy analyst Steve Clemons said he witnessed a rather disturbing conversation while waiting for a flight at the Dulles airport on Saturday.

According to Clemons, four men sitting near him were discussing an intelligence conference they had just attended, and turned to the topic of the NSA leaks. One said that both the reporter and leaker should be “disappeared,” a term used to describe secret murders and abductions carried out by authoritarian governments. Clemons said on Twitter the suggestion seemed to be “bravado” and a “disturbing joke.” He said that the officials were talking loudly, “almost bragging.”

HuffPost asked Clemons via Twitter how he could be sure they were in the intelligence community and he noted that “one wore a white knit national counterterrorism center shirt.” But more importantly, he said, the conversation led him to conclude that they were certainly in the community, especially given the conference they talked about attending. They discussed former Ambassador John Negroponte as having been in attendance.

[read the rest, here]

The US Government Has Constructed a Ubiquitous Surveillance State

(In keeping with the article I just posted about how the Reagan White House helped the fascist state in Guatemala set up death squads and in understanding what the government did in conjunction with the brutally murderous state of Indonesia and so many others, here is a little current events note to make you think about the VERY NEAR future this country is racing to meet)

by Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian

The five right-wing justices hand Obama a victory by accepting his DOJ’s secrecy-based demand for dismissal…

Well, Hat’s Off to the Mockingbirds! Atlantic “Journalist” Praises “Dark Thirty” for Colluding with CIA before Admitting He’s a Mockingbird Himself

by Scott Creighton

I was listening to a debate (and by “debate” I don’t mean a raving screeching Alex Jones trying to make our side look bad on national TV in order to make Bloomberg and Dershowitz look reasonable by comparison) between the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and the Atlantic’s Mark Bowden on the subject of the CIA written and produced “Zero Dark Thirty” this morning when this little tidbit jumped out at me; Bowden admitted to being a CIA Mockingbird during the interview.

John Brennan’s extremism and dishonesty rewarded with CIA Director nomination

by Glenn Greenwald, Guardian

Prior to President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, a controversy erupted over reports that he intended to appoint John Brennan as CIA director. That controversy, in which I participated, centered around the fact that Brennan, as a Bush-era CIA official, had expressly endorsed Bush’s programs of torture (other than waterboarding) and rendition and also was a vocal advocate of immunizing lawbreaking telecoms for their role in the illegal Bush NSA eavesdropping program. As a result, Brennan withdrew his name from consideration, issuing a bitter letter blaming “strong criticism in some quarters prompted by [his] previous service with the” CIA.

This “victory” of forcing Brennan’s withdrawal proved somewhat Pyrrhic, as Obama then appointed him as his top counter-terrorism adviser, where he exerted at least as much influence as he would have had as CIA Director, if not more. In that position, Brennan last year got caught outright lying when he claimed Obama’s drone program caused no civilian deaths in Pakistan over the prior year. He also spouted complete though highly influential falsehoods to the world in the immediate aftermath of the Osama bin Laden killing, including claiming that bin Laden “engaged in a firefight” with Navy SEALS and had “used his wife as a human shield”. Brennan has also been in charge of many of Obama’s most controversial and radical policies, including “signature strikes” in Yemen – targeting people without even knowing who they are – and generally seizing the power to determine who will be marked for execution without any due process, oversight or transparency.

As it typically does in the US National Security State, all of that deceit and radicalism is resulting not in recrimination or loss of credibility for Brennan, but in reward and promotion. At 1 pm EST today, Obama will announce that he has selected Brennan to replace Gen. David Petraeus as CIA chief: the same position for which, four short years ago, Brennan’s pro-torture-and-rendition past rendered him unfit and unconfirmable.

[read the rest, here]

Farah’s Barbaric Demise: How Pathetic the Left has Become in the Age of Obama

by Scott Creighton

Terror Tuesday comes to Syria? Attacking funerals? Destabilization campaigns? Regime change at all costs? Left Cover?

Reading the various few Western media reports on Tuesday’s cowardly terrorist attack on a funeral procession in the Jaramana suburb of Damascus, I am struck by two things: (1) how widespread and universally accepted the lies about Bashir Assad have become in spite of countless reports and proof to the contrary from a variety of sources including the MSM… and (2) how completely devoid the American people are of even the slightest remnants of instinctual human empathy.

I credit the second observation with the fact that the so-called “left’ in America obviously cares less for their professed love of human rights and dignity than they do for their all encompassing desire to “win’ the upcoming election to stop the dreaded “Romney/Ryan War on Women”

Irony? Obama’s surrogates in Syria just murdered at least a dozen women and girls who were guilty of doing nothing more than walking down the street attending a funeral, wounding and maiming still dozens more.

Where is the outrage and the calls for resignations when our seconds in Syria bomb funerals killing women and children leaving mothers to weep in the blood and ash?

The outrage is mute because the left is temporarily blind by choice.

We Trained Terrorists In Nevada (and in Afghanistan and in Vietnam and in El Salvadore and in Miami and in the SOA)

by Scott Creighton

Seymour Hersh has an interesting article in the New Yorker magazine about how the Joint Special Operations Command conducted training starting in 2005 for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, the MEK for short. The MEK is a known terrorist organization listed as such by the U.S. government. His article is well sourced and seems to be accurate at least, that’s what people like Glenn Greenwald are saying.

I recently wrote about the MEK and how leading political figures in this country are pushing to have them removed from the list of known terrorist organizations so they can be funded by us to commit terrorist acts inside Iran on behalf of the Israeli government.

Training and funding terrorists to attack civilian targets and infrastructure inside various countries that don’t look after our “national interests” the way we want them to is nothing new for the CIA and those kinds of capitalist “heroes” we have running our show.

More Disinformation from CIA Honeypot Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald

by Scott Creighton

(H/T Gretavo from WTCdemolition)

Peppered into the mix with information we already know, the CIA backed psyop called “Wikileaks” likes to toss out some pure disinformation which helps their various causes. In today’s case it’s nothing less than trying, once again, to connect 9/11 to Saddam Hussain in an obvious attempt to provide cover for the Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq.

Back in April, the Weekly Standard (neocon shill rag) published an article titled “WikiLeaks: The Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection Confirmed, Again“.  As the story goes, an Iraqi named Jawad Jabber Sadkhan was identified by others who were tortured (they leave that part out) as a key link between Saddam’s organization and al Qaeda, the Taliban, 9/11, the London Bombings,and of course let’s not forget… Iran.

Freedom is the Freedom to Say 2+2=4

by Scott Creighton

What happens to a country when it doesn’t hold it’s leaders responsible for criminal acts and outright lies told to their own people? The people get more outrageous lies and criminal behavior from their government. It is an unavoidable cycle.

In a world devoid of accountability and the rule of law, the most ruthless will ultimately rule. This is the physics of fascism. It is as inescapable as the law of gravity and even more unforgiving.

Glenn Greenwald recently wrote about how surprised he was at the Obama administration’s desperate need to continue with the controversial build-up of the security/surveillance state in America since Osama bin Laden has now been officially declared dead. It’s a good article, one in which Greenwald highlights the recent bi-partisan congressional agreement to a 4 year extension of the controversial Patriot Act and a drastic expansion of the powers of the “National Security Letters” program which allows the FBI greater and easier access to spy on what we all say and do on the internet without a court order. The problem is, Greenwald doesn’t seem to understand their continued grasp for absolute power in the wake of the undocumented murder of Osama bin Laden.

We can fix that.

How propagandists function: Exhibit A

by Glenn Greenwald, Salon

Jeffrey Goldberg, in the new cover story in The Atlantic, on an Israeli attack on Iran:

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting — forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean-built reactor in Syria.  An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

Good news!  Israel can successfully end a country’s nuclear program by bombing them, as proven by its 1981 attack on Iraq, which, says Goldberg, halted “forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2002, trying to convince Americans to fear Iraq:

Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program.

 When it suited him back then, Goldberg made the exact opposite claim, literally, of the one he makes today.  Back then, Goldberg wouldn’t possibly claim what he claims now — that the 1981 strike permanently halted Saddam’s “nuclear ambitions” — because, back then, his goal was to scare Americans about The Threat of Saddam.  So in 2002, Goldberg warned Americans that Saddam had “redoubled” his efforts to turn Iraq into a nuclear power after the Israeli attack, i.e., that Saddam had a scarier nuclear program than ever before after the 1981 bombing raid.  But now, Goldberg has a different goal:  to convince Americans of the efficacy of bombing Iran, and thus, without batting an eye, he simply asserts the exact opposite factual premise:  that the Israelis successfully and permanently ended Saddam’s nuclear ambition back in 1981 by bombing it out of existence (and, therefore, we can do something similar now to Iran).

This is what a propagandist, by definition, does:  asserts any claim as fact in service of a concealed agenda without the slightest concern for whether it’s true. 

What collapsing empire looks like

by Glenn Greenwald, Salon

As we enter our ninth year of the War in Afghanistan with an escalated force, and continue to occupy Iraq indefinitely, and feed an endlessly growing Surveillance State, reports are emerging of the Deficit Commission hard at work planning how to cut Social Security, Medicare, and now even to freeze military pay.  But a new New York Times article today illustrates as vividly as anything else what a collapsing empire looks like, as it profiles just a few of the budget cuts which cities around the country are being forced to make.  This is a sampling of what one finds: