In exchange with Glenn Greenwald
By Barry Grey, wsws.org
Keller: Having it both ways.
Last Sunday, the web site of the New York Times carried an exchange of comments between the newspaper’s former executive editor and current columnist Bill Keller and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who has played the central role in publishing revelations of illegal National Security Agency spying based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
In an introduction and in the course of his comments, Keller presents the exchange with Greenwald as a debate between “traditional” journalism, represented by himself and the Times, and the “more activist, more partisan brand of journalism” that he attributes to Greenwald.
In fact, the exchange is an attempt by Keller to whitewash his role and that of the Times in withholding information at the behest of the government and publishing state propaganda in the guise of “news.”
The Times column appears in the midst of a deepening crisis facing the Obama administration and the entire political and military/intelligence establishment over continuing exposures of massive state spying on the people of the United States and populations all around the world.
The Times and the rest of the establishment media have sought to contain the crisis while attacking Snowden and other whistle-blowers such as Julian Assange and Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, aiding and abetting the efforts of the US government to witch-hunt and silence them. Journalists such as Greenwald who have helped disseminate Snowden’s revelations have been vilified as criminals and traitors.
There is immense concern within the ruling class and the state over popular opposition to the police state programs, the discrediting of the entire political system, and the emergence of figures such as Snowden, who are prepared to sacrifice their careers and even their lives to break the official wall of silence and lies and bring the truth to the people. Keller’s column appears at this time as part of the efforts at damage control and cover-up being carried out by the government, even as the preparations for mass repression are stepped up.
Keller’s basic conceit is the claim that he and the Times embody a tradition of impartial and objective reporting, while Greenwald and his like distort the news in accordance with a political agenda. The supposed proof is the readiness of Greenwald to publish government secrets without proper deference to “national security” concerns.
Keller seeks to adopt a tone of collegial discussion in the exchange, masking the venomous hatred he and the Times harbor for Greenwald and whistle-blowers who expose US government crimes such as Assange, Manning and Snowden.
[pullquote]There is immense concern within the ruling class and the state over popular opposition to the police state programs, the discrediting of the entire political system, and the emergence of figures such as Snowden, who are prepared to sacrifice their careers and even their lives to break the official wall of silence and lies and bring the truth to the people.[/pullquote]
This year alone, the Times‘ chief foreign affairs commentator Thomas Friedman penned a column urging Snowden to turn himself in to US authorities to face prosecution under the Espionage Act, in order to prove that he is not a “traitor,” and Keller himself published a vicious smear of Manningafter the young whistle-blower revealed that he had sought to get the Times to publish his documents revealing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the exchange with Greenwald, Keller disingenuously claims that his modus operandi is to “follow the facts” and let “the evidence speak for itself,” and that as writer and editor he “defined my job not as telling readers what I think, or telling them what they ought to think, but telling them what they needed to know to decide for themselves.”
In his contributions, Greenwald punches gaping holes in Keller’s pretense of impartial devotion to the truth, pointing to the Times’ role in promulgating Bush administration lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 US invasion, when Keller was a senior writer. He also noted Keller’s personal decision as executive editor in 2004 to withhold until after that year’s presidential election a story exposing warrantless NSA spying on Americans that had been authorized by Bush. Keller’s decision followed a meeting at the White House at which Bush asked him to suppress the story.
Keller gives no substantive response to these points, other than to cite, without explanation, “national security” as his reason for suppressing the NSA story for more than a year. And when Greenwald implies that the Times has avoided using the word “torture” in relation to waterboarding and other US atrocities in order to accommodate the US government, Keller seeks to dismiss this as an irrelevancy. Significantly, however, he does not deny the accusation.
After claiming, cynically and dishonestly, to be dedicated to the objective presentation of facts, Keller gets down to the heart of his dispute with Greenwald and other honest journalists who place the right of the public to know above the interests of the state. He writes: “The Times and other major news outlets give serious consideration to arguments that publishing something will endanger national security—that is, might get someone killed.”
In equating “national security” with “saving lives,” Keller parrots the stock-in-trade justification of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon and the Obama White House for police state surveillance and war crimes, including drone killings of thousands of civilians. He speaks quite naturally as a representative of the military/intelligence establishment, where, in fact, his true allegiance lies.
At one point in the exchange, he uses the “saving lives” canard to smear WikiLeaks, accusing Assange of “callous indifference” to the fate of “innocent informants” who collaborated with the US occupiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is equivalent to denouncing the anti-fascist resistance in World War II for exposing those who spied on their countrymen and collaborated with the Nazi occupiers.
In November of 2010, at the height of the damning revelations published by WikiLeaks on US actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries, Keller published a piece declaring his unconditional support for the “war on terror” and stressing that in considering whether to disclose state secrets, the Times engages in “extensive and serious discussions with the government.”
He wrote: “We agree wholeheartedly that transparency is not an absolute good. Freedom of the press includes freedom not to publish, and that is a freedom we exercise with some regularity.”
As Keller made clear, he considers that his role and that of the Times is to serve the interests of the state and the ruling class, and not the right of the people to know. Rather than a Fourth Estate that assumes an adversarial relationship to entrenched power and defends the democratic rights of the people against the encroachments of the state, Keller practices a brand of “journalism” that would have no problem functioning under a military or fascist dictatorship.
Somehow, according to Keller, support for the “war on terror,” which, as he is well aware, is a catch-all pretext for military aggression abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home, does not constitute a “political” bias. Nor does an embrace of “national security”—a euphemism for the foreign and domestic agenda of American imperialism.
In his introduction to the exchange with Greenwald, Keller lets slip his real attitude toward Greenwald and other journalists who are not, as he is, wedded to the state, and toward the emergence of the Internet as an alternative source of information to the establishment media. He refers to the “disruptive power” of the Internet.
This reflects a long-standing theme of Keller, who has for years warned the powers-that-be about the danger the Internet poses to keeping the public in the dark about the activities of the government.
In a November, 2006 lecture at the University of Michigan, Keller made the danger of “information anarchy” the center of his talk. The Times had come under attack from the Bush administration and Republican politicians for finally posting the story on NSA domestic spying and publishing a separate report on a secret Treasury Department-CIA program to monitor US and international banks.
Keller’s entire talk was a thinly disguised appeal to the Bush administration to recognize the value of the Times in vetting the news and concealing state secrets. He said:
“Legions of Internet journalists include at least a few who would feel no compunction about disclosing life-threatening information. If a blogger hostile to the Bush administration managed to document sensitive secrets about the war on terror, would he stop to weigh the consequences of making them public? And once the information had rebounded through the blogosphere, how long would the major news organizations hesitate before picking it up?”
To underscore the point, he added, “Most of what the country knows about the secret activities of the government, it knows thanks to serious news organizations that still take their responsibilities seriously.”
Thanks, in other words, to news organizations such as the New York Times that are “responsible” to the state and the ruling class, the people remain in the dark about the illegal and politically criminal actions of the government.
At one point in the exchange with Greenwald, Keller notes with evident satisfaction that whistle-blowers who are determined to expose state secrets must possess “a willingness to risk everything.” He writes: “Manning is serving a 35-year prison sentence for the WikiLeaks disclosures, and Snowden faces a life in exile.”
What Keller does not say is that those brave and principled individuals have to “risk everything” to alert the people about state crimes and conspiracies against their democratic rights precisely because “serious” news organizations such as the Times and pseudo-journalists such as Keller devote their efforts to colluding with the state to keep the people uninformed.
This makes them accomplices in crimes against humanity and co-conspirators in the preparations for police state rule.
A Journalist With a Mission
By ROGER COHEN
RIO DE JANEIRO — A young American lawyer comes to Brazil in 2005, falls in love, finds that his gay relationship confers greater legal rights than back home, starts a blog called Unclaimed Territory focusing on illegal warrantless eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, takes a place in the hills of Rio with a bunch of rescue dogs, denounces the cozy compromises of “establishment journalists,” gets hired to write a column by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, is sought out by the N.S.A. whistle-blower Edward J. Snowden, becomes the main chronicler of Snowden’s revelations of global American surveillance, is lionized for work that prompts a far-reaching debate on security and freedom, files repeated thunderbolts from his leafy Brazilian perch, and ends up, in just eight years, as perhaps the most famous journalist of his generation.
These things happen. At least they happen in the empowering digital age, and they happen to Glenn Greenwald.
With his gray shirt, black backpack, regular features and medium build, he merges into the Rio crowd, the ordinary man. Over a Thai lunch, he tells me he is sleeping five hours a night, running on adrenaline. So what does he do to relax? “Roll around in the mud with my 10 dogs.”
Unwinding is hard. The five months since he met Snowden in Hong Kong have been relentless; they talk almost every day. He lives in limbo. “I feel like if I went back to the United States there is a more than trivial chance I would be arrested,” he says. “Not one of 20 lawyers I have spoken to has said, ‘Oh, you are being paranoid; of course they would never think of arresting you.’ ”
Would Greenwald enjoy First Amendment protection after publishing top-secret information? The record of the Obama administration is ominous. He says his lawyers are unable to get clarification. His mother in Florida asks: “What if I am on my deathbed and cannot see you?”
Greenwald lives with a sense of exile but is pesky in his determination not to relent. He has been embraced as a hero by Brazil after revealing American spying on President Dilma Rousseff (who postponed a planned state visit to Washington), but he has resisted one request to hand over documents and is determined, here as elsewhere, to keep his distance from power.
He is on a double mission: to push back in the name of freedom against the post-9/11 “surveillance state” with its dragnet data trawling, and to reinvigorate journalism through “an aggressive and adversarial position to political and corporate power,” an undertaking he will pursue through a new online publication backed with $250 million from the eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, the same amount Jeff Bezos of Amazon paid for The Washington Post (a sobering reflection on the standing of legacy newspapers today).
On the first of these fronts, he says he is only halfway through the reporting of Snowden’s documents “with a lot of huge revelations to come.” On the second, explored in a recent exchange with my colleague Bill Keller that will be taught in journalism schools, he has already made about 10 hires. (He and Omidyar have never met, which must be some sort of first for such a venture.)
“Our style will be to encourage and empower combative journalism that can be a real force against powerful people,” he says. “We want our journalists to follow their passion.”
He continued: “The reason why journalism is important, why it is protected in the Constitution, is to be one of the institutional checks on abuse of power, and for that you have to keep those in power at arm’s length, hold them accountable.”
For Greenwald, American journalism has been defanged by the “patriotism compulsion” after 9/11 and by the culture of big media corporations. He alludes to David Halberstam’s speech at Columbia University in 2005: “Never, never, never let them intimidate you. People are always going to try in all kinds of ways. Sheriffs, generals, presidents of universities, presidents of countries, secretaries of defense. Don’t let them.”
Of course, this admonition is sacred to plenty of old-school journalists. Greenwald overstates the conformity of mainstream papers, whose investigative journalism is often vigorous and fearless. But he is right that journalism got engulfed, with grave consequences, in America’s great post-9/11 disorientation. And there is no question that journalism will benefit from having the personal, open-with-its-bias reporting Greenwald proposes alongside the impartiality-seeking traditional media. “Biased and balanced” — the Andrew Sullivan blog formula — is an important component of the new media landscape. Each form can spur the other, keep it honest.
American society will also benefit from Greenwald’s ongoing revelations about out-of-control surveillance. He has testified before the Brazilian Senate, and should be allowed to testify before the U.S. Senate. He says, “I am definitely going back, I refuse to be exiled for a lie.”
He deserves assurance that he can return to the United States without facing arrest.
