Articles by Glenn Greenwald

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NSA Prism Program Taps In to User Data of Apple, Google and Others
Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill – The Guardian, 10 Jun 2013

• Top-secret Prism program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Apple and Facebook
• Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007
• Obama orders US to draw up overseas target list for cyber-attacks

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Why Is Boston ‘Terrorism’ but Not Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine?
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 29 Apr 2013

Can an act of violence be called ‘terrorism’ if the motive is unknown? Neither the President nor the FBI – by their own admission – know the motive here nor have evidence showing it, but Andrew Sullivan, along with hordes of others yelling “terrorism” and “jihad”, insist that they do. That’s the special species of rank irrationality that uniquely shapes public US discourse when the issue is Muslims.

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Bradley Manning Is Off Limits at San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, but Corporate Sleaze Is Embraced
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 29 Apr 2013

A Seemingly Trivial Controversy Reveals Quite A Bit about Pervasive Political Values – I originally had no intention of writing about this episode, but the more I discovered about it, the more revealing it became. First, while even a hint of support for Manning will not be tolerated, there is a long roster of large corporations serving as the event’s sponsors who are welcomed with open arms. The list is here.

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The Fun-Filled Ocean Resort at Guantánamo Bay
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 1 Apr 2013

A growing hunger strike among detainees is mocked by gullible journalists spouting familiar Potemkin Village propaganda. If you’re looking for a fun activity-filled resort to take your family for a summer vacation, you simply cannot do better than Club GTMO, according to a new glossy travel guide just published by Robert Johnson, the Military and Defense Editor of Business Insider, under the guise of a news article.

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Pentagon Papers Lawyer on Obama, Secrecy and Press Freedoms: ‘Worse Than Nixon’
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 25 Mar 2013

Career First Amendment and transparency advocate James Goodale sounds the alarm about the current president. Could you talk a bit about President Obama’s approach to classified information and press freedom? –“Antediluvian, conservative, backwards. Worse than Nixon. He thinks that anyone who leaks is a spy! I mean, it’s cuckoo.”

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Bradley Manning: The Face of Heroism
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 4 Mar 2013

The 25-year-old Army Private, this generation’s Daniel Ellsberg, pleads guilty today to some charges and explains his actions. “Wearing his Army dress uniform, a composed, intense and articulate Pfc. Bradley Manning took ‘full responsibility’ Thursday [28 Feb 2013] for providing the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks with a trove of classified and sensitive military, diplomatic and intelligence cables, videos and documents. . . .

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Is the US Maintaining Death Squads and Torture Militias in Afghanistan?
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 4 Mar 2013

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and local residents insist that the answer is yes.

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Pentagon’s New Massive Expansion of ‘Cyber-Security’ Unit Is About Everything except Defense
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 4 Feb 2013

Cyber-threats are the new pretext to justify expansion of power and profit for the public-private National Security State. As the US government depicts the Defense Department as shrinking due to budgetary constraints, the Washington Post this morning [28 Jan 2013] announces “a major expansion of [the Pentagon’s] cybersecurity force over the next several years, increasing its size more than fivefold.”

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(Português) Bradley Manning e o WikiLeaks Abriram uma Janela na Alma Política dos EUA
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 4 Feb 2013

O tratamento repressivo aplicado a Bradley Manning, soldado que divulgou documentos secretos do governo dos Estados Unidos e que está preso em condições desumanas, é uma das desgraças do primeiro mandato de Obama e demostra muitas das dinâmicas que estão moldando sua presidência. O artigo é do advogado norte-americano Glenn Greenwald, articulista do jornal britânico The Guardian.

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Brooklyn College’s Academic Freedom Increasingly Threatened Over Israel Event
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 4 Feb 2013

The controversy was triggered by the sponsorship of the school’s Political Science department of an event, scheduled for 7 Feb 2013, featuring two advocates of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). One speaker is a Palestinian (Omar Barghouti) and the other a Jewish American philosopher (Judith Butler). Hikind publicly (and falsely) claimed that the event speakers (to whom he referred as “Barghouti and…the lady”) “think Hamas and Hezbollah are nice organizations, and they probably feel the same way about al-Qaida”.

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The Untouchables: How the Obama Administration Protected Wall Street from Prosecutions
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 28 Jan 2013

PBS’ Frontline program on Tuesday [22 Jan 2013] night broadcast a new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering.

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MLK’s Vehement Condemnations of US Militarism Are More Relevant Than Ever
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 28 Jan 2013

By Martin Luther King’s own description, his work against US violence and militarism, not only in Vietnam but generally, was central – indispensable – to his worldview and activism, yet it has been almost completely erased from how he is remembered. When it comes to King’s views on US militarism, nothing more potently illustrates that distance than the use of King’s holiday to re-inaugurate the 44th president.

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The Bombing of Mali Highlights All the Lessons of Western Intervention
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 21 Jan 2013

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers – over the last four years alone – have bombed and killed Muslims – after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Philippines.

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The US – Alongside Saudi Arabia – “Fights for Freedom and Democracy” in the Middle East
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 14 Jan 2013

The ability to persuade people that the US opposes tyranny is a testament to the potency of propaganda. The most significant problem in political discourse is not that people embrace destructive beliefs after issues are rationally debated. It’s that the potency of propaganda, by design, often precludes such debates from taking place.

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Newtown Kids vs Yemenis and Pakistanis: What Explains the Disparate Reactions?
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 24 Dec 2012

Over the last several days, numerous commentators have lamented the vastly different reactions in the US to the heinous shooting of children in Newtown, Connecticut as compared to the continuous killing of (far more) children and innocent adults by the US government in Pakistan and Yemen, among other places. What explains it?

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New Press Freedom Group Is Launched to Block US Government Attacks
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 24 Dec 2012

Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power. Few priorities are more important, in my view, than supporting and enabling any efforts to subvert the ability of the US government and other factions to operate in the dark. It’s particularly vital to undercut the US government’s ability to punish and kill groups that succeed in these transparency efforts.

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HSBC, Too Big To Jail, Is the New Poster Child for US Two-Tiered Justice System
Glenn Greenwald - The Guardian, 17 Dec 2012

DOJ officials unblinkingly insist that the banking giant is too powerful and important to subject to the rule of law. The US is the world’s largest prison state, imprisoning more of its citizens than any nation on earth, both in absolute numbers and proportionally, and for longer periods of time, more mercilessly, and for more trivial transgressions than any nation in the west. But it all changes when the nation’s most powerful actors are caught breaking the law. These are gifted with leniency and immunity to punishment.

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(Português) Bradley Manning: ‘Estava certo de que ia morrer naquela cela animalesca’.
Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian – Diário do Centro do Mundo, 17 Dec 2012

Durante os últimos dois anos e meio, passados por ele em uma prisão militar, muito foi dito sobre Bradley Manning, mas nada foi ouvido dele. Isso mudou na semana passada quando o jovem recruta de vinte e três anos, acusado de vazar documentos secretos para o WikiLeaks, testemunhou em seu julgamento sobre as condições de sua detenção.

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AP’s Dangerous Iran Hoax Demands an Accounting and Explanation
Glenn Greenwald – The Guaradian, 3 Dec 2012

Evidence proves that the graph trumpeted by the Associated Press as evidence of Iran’s nuclear weapons program is an obvious sham.

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Bradley Manning: A Tale of Liberty Lost in America
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 3 Dec 2012

The US does nothing to punish those guilty of war crimes or Wall Street fraud, yet demonises the whistleblower. In two and a half years spent in a military prison, much has been said about Bradley Manning, but nothing has been heard from him. That changed on Thursday [29 Nov 2012], when the 23-year-old US army private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks testified at his court martial proceeding about the conditions of his detention.

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Stop Pretending the US Is an Uninvolved, Helpless Party in the Israeli Assault on Gaza
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 19 Nov 2012

The Obama administration’s unstinting financial, military and diplomatic support for Israel is a key enabling force in the conflict.

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CNN Claims Iran Shot at A US Drone, Revealing the News Network’s Mindset
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 12 Nov 2012

Its Pentagon reporter parrots significant, inflammatory government claims without an iota of skepticism or balance. Every paragraph – literally – contains nothing but mindless summaries of US government officials. There is not an iota of skepticism about any of the assertions, including how this incident happened, what the drone was doing at the time, or where it took place. I defy anyone to identify any differences if the US government had issued its own press release directly rather than issuing it masquerading as a leaked CNN report.

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The True Reason US Fears Iranian Nukes: They Can Deter US Attacks
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 8 Oct 2012

GOP Senator Lindsey Graham echoes a long line of US policymakers: Iran must not be allowed to deter US aggression. “They have two goals: one, regime survival. The best way for the regime surviving, in their mind, is having a nuclear weapon, because when you have a nuclear weapon, nobody attacks you.” The second goal is “influence;” people listen to you” when you have a nuclear weapon.

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CNN and the Business of State-Sponsored TV News
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 10 Sep 2012

The network is seriously compromising its journalism in the Gulf states by blurring the line between advertising and editorial.

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Correspondence and Collusion between the New York Times and the CIA
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 3 Sep 2012

Mark Mazzetti’s emails with the CIA expose the degradation of journalism that has lost the imperative to be a check to power. The rightwing transparency group, Judicial Watch, released Tuesday [28 Aug 2012] a new batch of documents showing how eagerly the Obama administration shoveled information to Hollywood film-makers about the Bin Laden raid.

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Human Rights Critics of Russia and Ecuador Parade Their Own Hypocrisy
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 27 Aug 2012

The media’s new converts to civic freedom over the Pussy Riot and Assange asylum affairs show a jingoism blind to US abuses.

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NBC’s War for Fun and Profit
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 20 Aug 2012

A new reality show of soldiers and celebrities playing war games showcases our national religion: military worship.

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The Obama GITMO Myth
Glenn Greenwald – Salon, 30 Jul 2012

Most of the 168 detainees at Guantanamo have been imprisoned by the U.S. Government for close to a decade without charges and with no end in sight to their captivity. Some now die at Guantanamo without ever having had the chance to contest accusations of guilt. Last week [of 16 Jul 2012], the Obama administration imposed new arbitrary rules for Guantanamo detainees who have lost their first habeas corpus challenge. Those new rules eliminate the right of lawyers to visit their clients at the detention facility.

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Journalism vs Propaganda
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 23 Jul 2012

Almost immediately after a suicide bomber killed five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria on Wednesday [Jul 18 2012], Israeli officials, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, blamed Iran, an accusation uncritically repeated by most Western media outlets even as Bulgarian investigators warned it would be a “mistake” to assign blame before the attack could be investigated.

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Bravery and Drone Pilots
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 16 Jul 2012

The Pentagon considers awarding war medals to those who operate America’s death-delivering video games. The effort to depict drone warfare as some sort of courageous and noble act is intensifying: The Pentagon is considering awarding a Distinguished Warfare Medal to drone pilots who work on military bases often far removed from the battlefield. . . .

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Julian Assange’s Right to Asylum
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 25 Jun 2012

If one asks current or former WikiLeaks associates what their greatest fear is, almost none cites prosecution by their own country. The primary fear is being turned over to the US. That is the crucial context for understanding Julian Assange’s 16-month fight to avoid extradition to Sweden, a fight that led him to seek asylum, Tuesday [19 Jun 2012], in the London Embassy of Ecuador.

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The Human Rights “Success” In Libya
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 30 Jan 2012

Doctors Without Borders is halting work in detention centers in the Libyan city of Misrata because detainees are “tortured and denied urgent medical care,” the international aid agency said Thursday [26 Jan 2012]. The agency said it has treated 115 people with torture-related wounds from interrogation sessions. Some of the patients treated were tortured again after they were returned to detention centers, according to the agency.

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End of the Pro-democracy Pretense
Peter Martin – BusinessDay, 9 Jan 2012

A central staple of American domestic propaganda about its foreign policy is that the nation is “pro-democracy” — that’s the banner under which American wars are typically prettified — even though “democracy” in this regard really means “a government which serves American interests regardless of how their power is acquired,” while “despot” means “a government which defies American orders even if they’re democratically elected.”

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Bradley Manning Deserves a Medal
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian, 19 Dec 2011

The prosecution of the whistleblower and alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning is an exercise in intimidation, not justice. After 17 months of pre-trial imprisonment, Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old US army private and accused WikiLeaks source, is finally going to see the inside of a courtroom. This Friday [16 Dec 2011], on an army base in Maryland, the preliminary stage of his military trial will start.

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The Human Toll of the U.S. Drone Campaign
Glenn Greenwald – Salon, 7 Nov 2011

It’s easy to cheer for a leader who regularly extinguishes the lives of innocent men, women, teenagers and young children when you can remain blissfully free of hearing about the victims. It’s even easier when the victims all have Muslim-ish names and live in the parts of the Muslim world we’ve been taught to view as a cauldron of sub-human demons.

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The “Very Scary” Iranian Terror Plot
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 17 Oct 2011

The most difficult challenge in writing about the Iranian Terror Plot unveiled yesterday [11 Oct 2011] is to take it seriously enough to analyze it. Iranian Muslims in the Quds Force sending marauding bands of Mexican drug cartel assassins onto sacred American soil to commit Terrorism — against Saudi Arabia and possibly Israel — is what Bill Kristol and John Bolton would feverishly dream up while dropping acid and madly cackling at the possibility that they could get someone to believe it.

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Major Discovery: A Purpose of the War in Afghanistan
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 19 Sep 2011

Our invasion and occupation is what enables the Taliban to recruit massive numbers of Afghan teenagers into their cause. And now, we have to stay until we either kill all the people who hate us and want us gone from their country or propagandize deradicalize them into meekly accepting our presence.

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Facts and Myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian Saga
Glenn Greenwald – Salon, 5 Sep 2011

A series of unintentional though negligent acts by multiple parties — WikiLeaks, The Guardian’s investigative reporter David Leigh, and Open Leaks’ Daniel Domscheit-Berg — has resulted in the publication of all 251,287 diplomatic cables, in unredacted form, leaked last year to WikiLeaks (allegedly by Bradley Manning). Der Spiegel (in English) has the best and most comprehensive step-by-step account of how this occurred.

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Nobel Peace Drones
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 25 Apr 2011

When I saw that, I was going to ask how the NYT could possibly know that the people whose lives the U.S. just ended were “militants,” but then I read further in the article and it said this: “A government official in North Waziristan told Pakistani reporters that five children and four women were among the 23 who were killed.” So at least 9 of the 23 people we killed — at least — were presumably not “militants” at all, but rather innocent civilians (contrast how the NYT characterizes Libya’s attacks in its headlines: “Qaddafi Troops Fire Cluster Bombs Into Civilian Areas”).

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Bradley Manning’s Forced Nudity to Occur Daily
Glenn Greenwald – Salon, 7 Mar 2011

Let’s review Manning’s detention over the last nine straight months: 23-hour/day solitary confinement; barred even from exercising in his cell; one hour total outside his cell per day where he’s allowed to walk around in circles in a room alone while shackled, and is returned to his cell the minute he stops walking; forced to respond to guards’ inquiries literally every 5 minutes, all day, everyday; and awakened at night each time he is curled up in the corner of his bed or otherwise outside the guards’ full view. Is there anyone who doubts that these measures — and especially this prolonged forced nudity — are punitive and designed to further erode his mental health, physical health and will?

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Government-Created Climate of Fear
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 17 Jan 2011

That a large percentage of those brutalized by this system turned out to be innocent — knowingly innocent — is a feature, not a bug: that one can end up being subjected to these lawless horrors despite doing nothing wrong only intensifies the fear and makes it more effective. The power being asserted is not merely unlimited and tyrannical, but arbitrary…. This is the same reason for keeping Bradley Manning in such inhumane, brutal conditions despite there being no security justification for it: they want to intimidate any future whistleblowers who discover secret American criminality and corruption from exposing it (you’ll end up erased like Bradley Manning).

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The Merger of Journalists and Government Officials
Glenn Greenwald – Salon, 3 Jan 2011

The video of the CNN debate I did last night [Dec 27 2010] about WikiLeaks with former Bush Homeland Security Adviser (and CNN contributor) Fran Townsend and CNN anchor Jessica Yellin is posted below. The way it proceeded was quite instructive to me and I want to make four observations about the discussion:

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The Worsening Journalistic Disgrace at Wired
Glenn Greenwald – Salon, 3 Jan 2011

For more than six months, Wired’s Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed — but refuses to publish — the key evidence in one of the year’s most significant political stories: the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks’ source…. This is easily one of the worst journalistic disgraces of the year: it is just inconceivable that someone who claims to be a “journalist” — or who wants to be regarded as one — would actively conceal from the public, for months on end, the key evidence in a political story that has generated headlines around the world.

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They Hate Us for Our Occupations
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 18 Oct 2010

In 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld commissioned a task force to study what causes Terrorism, and it concluded that “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies”: specifically, “American direct intervention in the Muslim world” through our “one sided support in favor of Israel”; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, “the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan” (the full report is here).

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War on Terror logic
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 11 Oct 2010

Bombing Muslims more and more causes more and more Muslims to want to bomb the countries responsible. That, of course, has long been the perverse “logic” driving the War on Terror. The very idea that we’re going to reduce Terrorism by more intensively bombing more Muslim countries is one of the most patently absurd, self-contradicting premises that exist. It’s exactly like announcing that the cure for lung cancer is to quadruple the number of cigarettes one smokes each day.

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New Study Documents Media’s Servitude to Government
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 5 Jul 2010

A newly released study from students at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials. This new study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by America’s four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as “torture” — until the U.S. Government began openly using it and insisting that it was not torture, at which time these newspapers obediently ceased describing it that way.

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Countering Israeli Propaganda
Glenn Greenwald – Salon, 7 Jun 2010

I was just on MSNBC talking about Israel, the Gaza blockade and the flotilla attack with Eliot Spitzer, who was guest-hosting for Dylan Ratigan. It was a rather contentious discussion, though quite illustrative of how Israel is (and is not) typically discussed on American television, so I’m posting the whole 8-minute segment below.

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“REPORTING” ON IRAN SHOULD SEEM FAMILIAR
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 5 Apr 2010

Fox News currently has an article at the top of its website that is headlined:  "CIA: Iran Moving Closer to Nuclear Weapon."  The report, by DOD and State Department correspondent Justin Fishel, begins with this alarming claim: A recently published report by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iran is still working on building a nuclear […]

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TERRORISM: THE MOST MEANINGLESS AND MANIPULATED WORD
Glenn Greenwald – Salon, 20 Feb 2010

Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto.  Stack’s worldview contained elements of the tea party’s anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with "the Left" (rage over bailouts, the suffering […]

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HELEN THOMAS DEVIATES FROM THE TERRORISM SCRIPT
Glenn Greenwald – Salon, 12 Jan 2010

Following up on Thursday’s post [Jan 7 2010] concerning our collective refusal to discuss how American actions and policies fuel Terrorism:  at a White House press conference yesterday [8 Jan 2010] with Janet Napolitano and John Brennan, Helen Thomas shows — yet again — that she’s one of the very few White House reporters willing […]

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DETAINEES TO GET ‘THE-STATE-ALWAYS-WINS’ SYSTEM OF ‘JUSTICE’
Glenn Greenwald - Salon, 15 Nov 2009

Obama’s announcement to try 9/11 defendants would be commendable if it applied to all, rather than some, detainees. What we have here is not an announcement that all terrorism suspects are entitled to real trials in a real American court. Instead, what we have is a multi-tiered justice system, where only certain individuals are entitled […]

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WHAT IF THE UIGHURS WERE CHRISTIAN RATHER THAN MUSLIM?
Glenn Greenwald, 8 Jul 2009

According to The New York Times this morning [Jul 6 09], violent clashes between Chinese government forces and Muslim Uighurs — that country’s long-oppressed minority — have left at least 140 people dead and close to 1,000 injured.  This incident in Western China highlights an important fact about America’s "War on Terror." Just imagine if […]

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TRIBALISTIC SELF-ABSORPTION
Glenn Greenwald, 13 Jun 2009

The most predominant mentality in right-wing discourse finds expression in this form:  "I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X — my group — is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly."  This claim persists — indeed, is often intensified —  even when Group X is clearly the strongest, most […]

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DRUG DECRIMINALIZATION IN PORTUGAL: LESSONS FOR CREATING FAIR AND SUCCESSFUL DRUG POLICIES
Glenn Greenwald, 3 Apr 2009

On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative […]

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