Some key excerpts for you: GLENN GREENWALD: …Secondly, the idea that he has harmed national security is truly laughable. If you go and look at what it is that we published, the only things that we published were reports that the U.S. government is spying, not on the terrorists or the Chinese government, but on American citizens indiscriminately—hundreds of millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions at a time. The terrorists have long known that the U.S. government is trying to listen in on their telephone calls and emails. We didn’t tell them anything they didn’t know. The only thing that wasn’t known was that the bulk of the spying apparatus is directed not at the terrorists, but at the American citizenry and at innocent people around the world. That’s the only thing that has been damaged, not the national security of the United States, but the reputation and credibility of American political officials like Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein and all the executive branch officials who have lied about this program to Congress and who have implemented it in secret. And then the final issue is the idea that he could have used whistleblower channels. He would have ended up having to go to the very same members of Congress who think that not only are these programs good, but that they ought to remain secret. And you have two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee—Ron Wyden and Mark Udall—who have been screaming for three years, saying there are secret things going on inside the NSA based on secret law of the Obama administration that is so warped and distorted that Americans would be stunned to learn what the government is doing to them in terms of the spying, and that even those members of the Intelligence Committee—Senators Udall and Wyden—either lacked the courage or were incapable of even disclosing to the American people what they had discovered that was so alarming to them. It took Edward Snowden to come forward the way he did and make us all, as citizens around the world, publicly aware of what the government is doing to us, so that we could have an open and informed debate about what is being done. Anyone who says that it should have been done in another way has the obligation to identify what this other way was that could have informed the people of this country and the world about what the NSA is doing. GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, Dianne Feinstein is outright lying when she says that she doesn’t know of any instances of abuse at the National Security Agency. Leaving aside the fact that there have been several different reports by ABC News, by The New York Times, of the NSA abusing its eavesdropping powers over the last four years, there is a 2011 opinion, 80 pages long, from theFISA court, the secret court that oversees the NSA. And what it ruled, although the court—the opinion is top-secret and hasn’t been publicly released. What it ruled is that the way in which the NSAis spying on American citizens is in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, as well as in excess of the limitations imposed by the statute, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. In other words, what the NSA is doing is both unconstitutional and illegal. And so, although the public doesn’t have access to that opinion—shockingly, that in a democracy you could have a court rule the government has violated the law and the Constitution and keep it all a secret—Dianne Feinstein has access to that opinion. And so, when she says into the camera that there’s no evidence that she is aware of that the NSA has abused its spying powers, she’s simply lying, because she knows that the claim she’s making is false. GLENN GREENWALD: Espionage is when you work for and at the behest of a foreign government to steal secrets—there’s zero evidence he did that—or when you covertly pass secrets to an adversary government—he never did that—or when you sell secrets to another country, which he could have done for millions of dollars to enrich himself and yet never did. It is not espionage in any sense of the word. And, of course, the irony here is that the ones who are engaged in massive spying is the U.S. government. Mr. Snowden essentially refused to engage in spying, and now they’re accusing him of espionage. GLENN GREENWALD: The Insider Threat Program is a program implemented by the Obama administration that is very consistent with their overall unprecedented attack on leakers and whistleblowers—that is even what The New York Times this morning called it, an unprecedented attack on leaks—in which government employees are encouraged—in fact, required—to report to authorities any other government employees that they even suspect might be thinking about leaking. And what makes it so pernicious is that it defines people who leak as being enemies of the state. So, if any government employee sees wrongdoing and brings that wrongdoing to light, then if that wrongdoing was conducted behind a wall of secrecy by having it be called classified or anything else, they are deemed by the U.S. government to be essentially enemies of the state. That’s the term that this program uses for them. And this is the vital context for everything that is happening with Mr. Snowden, for WikiLeaks, for this entire story, which is that the reason why we need Ed Snowdens, the reason why he came forward in the way that he did and the reason why he felt he had to flee the United States is precisely because there are no people in the United States more persecuted at the moment than those who bring transparency to what the U.S. government is doing. They are treated as enemies of the state. They are called traitors, as John Kerry called Mr. Snowden today. And that’s the reason that investigative journalism is being so threatened by the policies of the Obama administration. I hope all of your viewers will go to Google and type "McClatchy, Obama and leaks" and read that McClatchy report on what the Obama administration is doing to wage a war on transparency like no other president has ever done.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 04:56:44 +0000
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