Glenn Greenwald debates WikiLeaks with Frances Townsend on CNN

Joe Lieberman's Campaign To Trample The First Amendment Is Proceeding Right On Schedule

From Zerohedge.

As if it wasn't enough that America's ruling oligarchs were sufficiently happy with abdicating their governing duties to the Federal Reserve, they have now decided to imitate China in every possible way, and in addition to making up economic data as they go (for actual numbers just look around you, for all the other imaginary bullshit there's the BLS), they have now proceeded to wipe their ass with the first amendment, on their way to converting the US to a complete banana republic. After Joe Lieberman made a mockery of Internet freedom of speech (and of Amazon's independence) he has now decided to step up his campaign against un-coopted journalists everywhere, precisely as we suspected would happen next in the USSA. Per MSNBC, the Independent Connecticut senator has told Tableau, a Seattle company that allows Web users to post charts, to remove several charts describing the release of WikiLeaks material. The company removed the charts on Thursday, following the lead of Amazon, which had taken down the WikiLeaks documents themselves. The punchline: none of the charts contained any classified data: "The charts were not produced by WikiLeaks, but by a freelance journalist. And they contained no classified or secret material. The charts merely depicted how many times each country, or topic, was discussed in the cables." In other words, as Bill Dedman concludes: "these charts were journalism."...

And From Salon's Glenn Greenwald


Those are the benign, purely legal documents that have now been removed from the Internet in response to Joe Lieberman's demands and implied threats. He's on some kind of warped mission where he's literally running around single-handedly dictating what political content can and cannot be on the Internet, issuing broad-based threats to "all companies" that -- by design -- are causing suppression of political information. I understand Tableau's behavior here; imagine if you were a small company and Joe Lieberman basically announced: I am Homeland Security and you are to cease being involved with this organization which many say is a Terrorist group and Enemy Combatant. What Lieberman is doing is a severe abuse of power, and even for our anemic, power-revering media, it ought to be a major scandal (though it's not because, as Digby says, all our media stars can process is that "Julian Assange is icky").

If people -- especially journalists -- can't be riled when Joe Lieberman is unilaterally causing the suppression of political content from the Internet, when will they be? After all, as Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out in condemning this, the same rationale Lieberman is using to demand that Amazon and all other companies cease any contact with WikiLeaks would justify similar attacks on The New York Times, since they've published the same exact diplomatic cables on its site as WikiLeaks has on its (added: the only diplomatic cables posted on the WikiLeaks site thus far are the ones published by the newspapers with which WikiLeaks partnered -- such as the NYT, Guardian, Der Spiegel, etc. -- and they include those newspapers' redactions; no other cables have yet been posted to the WikiLeaks site). What Joe Lieberman is doing is indescribably pernicious and if "journalists" cared in the slightest about their own self-interest -- never mind all the noble things they pretend to care about -- they ought to be vociferously objecting to this.

Assange and Greenwald Identify The New York Times As Having Bad Character

Down with the Times. My parents being loyal readers of the Times point out that now and then there is an anti-war article in the Times. Nice, but the main force of the Times is pro-war, pro-Pentagon, helped start the wars for the Bush administration with it's propaganda, and has blood on it's hands. I'm not the only one who has noticed.

From Yahoo

...Burns, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and current London bureau chief, pushed back against Assange's contention that the Times engaged in "tabloid activity" when reporting a profile that Assange calls a error-ridden "hit piece."
Assange said Monday at London's Frontline Club that he wasn't surprised by the Times' recent coverage of him, given what he considers the paper's "absolutely disgusting" August profile of Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old army private suspected of supplying the classified documents to WikiLeaks. The Manning piece, Assange said, "removed all higher-level political motivations from him and psychoanalyzed him down to problems in his childhood and a demand for attention."
The WikiLeaks chief also questioned whether the Times simply employs "journalists with extremely bad character" or whether coverage of him and his whistleblower organization is influenced by the "realpolitik that [Times executive editor] Bill Keller has to go through in order to get out any story that depicts the U.S. military in a negative way."

...Burns said he doesn't "recall ever having been the subject of such absolutely, relentless vituperation" following a story in his 35 years at the Times. He said his email inbox has been full of denunciations from readers and a number of academics at top-tier schools such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Some, he said, used "language that I don't think they would use at their own dinner table." Such heated reactions to the profile, Burns said, shows "just how embittered the American discourse on these two wars has become."

In the 2,000-word piece — "WikiLeaks Chief On Run, Trailed By His Notoriety" — Burns and reporter Ravi Somaiya described Assange as the secretive and brilliant driving force behind the global document clearing house. But they also wrote how "some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood." They also noted the recent sexual assault allegations that two women in Sweden brought against Assange.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald called the profile a "sleazy hit piece" and wrote Sunday that it was "filled with every tawdry, scurrilous tabloid rumor" about the WikiLeaks founder. Greenwald likened Burns to the "Nixonian henchmen" who plotted against Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and described him as "one of the media's most enthusiastic supporters of the occupation of Iraq." (Burns has also received much praise for his years as the paper's Baghdad bureau chief, and I profiled him upon his leaving that position in 2007).
"The Iraq War is John Burns' war, and for the crime of making that war look bad, Julian Assange must have his character smeared and his psychiatric health maligned," Greenwald wrote. "Burns — along with his co-writer Ravi Somaiya — is happy to viciously perform that function."



See also: Iraq War Logs Out, Pathetic New York Times Tries To Make Pro-War Spin
And:
The New York Times Continues To Use The Dubious "Zabiullah Mujahid" As Convenient Source For Anti-Wikileaks Propaganda

How propaganda is disseminated: WikiLeaks Edition

From Salon.

This is how the U.S. government and American media jointly disseminate propaganda: in the immediate wake of some newsworthy War on Terror event, U.S. Government officials (usually anonymous) make wild and reckless -- though unverifiable -- claims. The U.S. media mindlessly trumpets them around the world without question or challenge. Those claims become consecrated as widely accepted fact. And then weeks, months or years later, those claims get quietly exposed as being utter falsehoods, by which point it does not matter, because the goal is already well-achieved: the falsehoods are ingrained as accepted truth...