How Glenn Greenwald Bamboozled People Who Should Know Better

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Let’s start with the obvious: If Glenn Greenwald is a “serious journalist,” I’m a McChicken sandwich with a side order of fries.

He’s an emotionally unbalanced weirdo who knows as much about national security as Andrew Sullivan knows about vaginas.

The proximity of Greenwald to the Snowden story should have aroused more suspicion than it did, but people bought into the narrative and just weren’t sufficiently skeptical:

From the moment I began researching Edward Snowden’s biography, there were hints that the NSA leaker was kind of . . . eccentric. Weird. Flaky.
A lot of computer geeks are kind of flaky, but Snowden’s flakiness is exacerbated by the fact that he dropped out of school in 10th grade and much of his education since then has been autodidactic. And it is this self-taught 29-year-old nerd who decided to leak top-secret information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program because . . . he’s a kook.
Snowden’s buddy Glenn Greenwald has decided to give him more rope to hang himself with, in the form of additional video interview excerpts, some of which have been transcribed by Mandy Nagy at Legal Insurrection. . . .

You can read the rest of that at The American Spectator, but the basic point is that Snowden is a kook, which is directly relevant to Glenn Greenwald’s motives. Lee Stranahan at Breitbart.com:

The technique is simple: throw as much mud as possible, knowing that, when the mud is washed away and the facts are revealed, most people will only remember the mud. The goal is to create lingering doubt. If all that mud was there, there has to be something to the allegations, right? Something?
This is media legerdemain of the highest order and it’s Greenwald’s modus operandi. It feeds on human nature; once people are emotionally invested in a position, it’s very hard to get them to shake it. Nobody likes to admit they were wrong, and ever fewer people like to admit they were fooled. It’s easier for the people who have been conned to attack the person pointing out the con game.
Greenwald desperately wants to deflect from legitimate questions about whether he broke the law in his work with Edward Snowden. The timeline of events shows clearly that Greenwald was working with Snowden prior to Snowden taking a job at NSA contractor Booz Allen for the express purpose of getting classified information. . . .

Go read that whole thing, because Lee has put his finger on the key point: Greenwald got people “emotionally invested in a position” — i.e., that the government was spying on them — and now that we’re seeing facts that don’t seem to support this hyped-up paranoia, Greenwald is playing the martyr, so that to criticize Greenwald and/or Snowden offends people who have bought into their narrative.

GLENN GREENWALD IS AN EXPATRIATE
TAX EVADER AND A RATHER NOTORIOUS LIAR.

If you’re a conservative who is up in arms about NSA surveillance, you’ve been played for a chump by Greenwald, who has shrewdly exploited your anti-Obama sentiments for his own purposes. Again, here’s Lee Stranahan at Breitbart.com:

Here’s a Greenwald column from March of this year entitled “The racism that fuels the ‘war on terror'” — and the title sums up Greenwald’s position concisely: he’s opposed to the war on terror. He doesn’t even believe it’s a real thing, so he puts it in scare quotes. Greenwald believes it is fueled by racism.

You really should read the whole thing, then come to grips with the fact that you’ve been deceived by Greenwald.

 

69 comments

  1. So . . . what you you really think? Why all the diplomatic mushy-talk? I sense you don’t totally trust Greenwald — wish you’d stop dancing around and just be blunt about what you think!

  2. Greenwald, Glenn Greenwald? Would that be the same Glenn Greenwald that is associated with Chamber Watch, a subsidiary activity of Brett Kimberlin’s 501(c)4 Velvet Revolution US?

  3. Eh. They’re flakes, and so’s Twinkie the Kid Manning. That said, entirely aside from them, I still find the notion that I’m supposed to trust the same administration we know used the IRS and the Justice Department for partisan purposes to play it straight with the NSA to be charmingly quaint.

  5. Stacy has been one of the very few who didn’t get caught up in the wave of revelations. I said from the start we should be cautious about the leaks because Greenwald is a known liar and we knew nothing about Snowden except he looks like a hipster dufus.

    There is no benefit or revelation about citizens’ privacy concerns in leaks about spying on Russia, China, the G-20, or the EU, is there? These are ONLY intended to hurt the United States, they do not inform us of domestic surveillance in any way. And what little has been “revealed” about domestic “spying” is nonspecific and inflammatory and includes things which have nothing to do with constitutional privacy issues.

    We can insist on oversight and tight rules over the NSA without swallowing everything Greenwald and Snowden spew. Sadly, too many on our side are too invested in their own paranoia to admit they were suckered now, as in Stacy’s analogy of the slung mud which won’t wash off.

  8. So, when was DNI Clapper lying? When he told Congress that the NSA was not (illegally) gathering data on US citizens, or when he recently admitted that his testimony was untrue and that the NSA does gather the info? He doesn’t appear to fall in the flake category to me.

  9. -Snowden is a product of a Leftist educational system – perhaps a bit more out-there then most, but we’re only talking degrees of kookiness.

    -Perhaps you should consider, Stacy, that those of us who are raising Fourth Amendment concerns are merely now doing what should have been done long ago. Too many of we [and I include myself here] conservatives are such Law And Order types that we are guilty of having turned a blind eye to what organizations like the NSA have been up to over the decades. We reflexively defend our national security system because the Left has been so determined to cripple it because they hate The United States so much.

  10. What he said. Greenwald, et al, can be kooky flakes, but that does not diminish the importance of the revelation that our government is engaged in wholesale spying on the American people, in violation of the law. And that is not speculation – they’ve admitted it.

  11. So is Mr. McCain saying that Snowden and Greenwald are lying? That the NSA is not collecting “metadata” from American users? If Mr. McCain is not saying that–then why does it matter whether or not Snowden and Greenwald are “pure at heart” motives?

  12. “If you’re a conservative who is up in arms about NSA surveillance, you’ve been played for a chump by Greenwald, who has shrewdly exploited your anti-Obama sentiments for his own purposes.”

    Yes, Greenwald is an enemy of liberty, and the government agencies empowered to surveil and indefinitely detain its subjects is our protector.

  13. It’s the same Glenn Greenwald who defended white supremacist Matt Hale, currently serving time for trying to solicit the murder of a federal judge.

  14. Have you considered that Greenwald is lying to you?

    Consider that Snowden purposefully took a job in order to conduct espionage against the US. Do you still trust him?

  16. I agree that it taints their claim but only to the extent of what we don’t know and what they are claiming. By that I mean-we do know now that the NSA is collecting “metadata” on all us .And it is collecting much more data from much more people than we had even suspected. We know this because of Snowden and Greenwald.

    We know that the DNI Clapper lied to Congress about the NSA not collecting any data on any American.
    Though I am not a fan of either Snowden or Greenwald, I will give them the benefit of doubt when it comes to believing them or our government until our government proves to me that its is telling the truth

  18. Is Snowden lying about the NSA collecting “metadata” on us? If not, then why does it matter about his motive(s)?

  19. Folks, the government has admitted to the spying – see DNI Clapper. The author of the Patriot Act, Congressman Sensenbrenner, has stated that the type of activities in which the NSA is engaged go beyond their powers vis-a-vis the Patriot Act.

  20. Mm,
    Wait — are you saying the government exceeded its authority?
    Who could’ve seen THAT coming?

  21. Old Rebel did you say that sarcasm was one of the services you render? Every day I become more and more dumbfounded at the utter gall of the empire and their media whores.

  25. Amen Bob! Metadata is data about data. However, without the data, the metadata is pretty much useless. For Sensenbrenner to claim that NSA is going beyond their powers under the misnamed PATRIOT act is at best disingenuous. A cogent argument can be made for collecting the data as well. Frankly, that’s exactly what they have been doing. There is no commercial privacy in this country. Consequently, it is stupid to think we have political privacy and that we are not being watched for that purpose as well.

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