Will Glenn Greenwald Travel to the U.S. to Accept the George Polk Award?

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Muller

Greenwald who has stayed in his second home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, since he had begun launching stories about NSA and GCHQ mass surveillance last year had foretold his former employer Salon.com that he might return to the U.S. if in fact won the Polk Award for Journalism. That happened yesterday. He, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill from The Guardian, and Barton Gellman from The Washington Post got the award for their reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks. This is highly significant. There have been frank attempts to criminalize in particular Greenwald as Snowden’s accomplice, (or was it vice versa?). Greenwald grimly twittered today that the Polk Award is for excellence in terrorism.

The awards (26 other journalists had been awarded for something else) will be presented at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan on April 11. Whether Greenwald and Poitras, who is currently living in Berlin, Germany, will collect the award is unclear. We’ll see how low the U.S., which has dropped to rank 46 (same leage as Romania and Haiti) of the recent World Press Freedom Index 2014 (from a more decent 32 in 2013), has actually sunken as regards the First Amendment of its Constitution. After having been caught in nullifying its Fourth Amendment.

17 February 2014 @ 6:52 pm.
Last modified February 17, 2014.
 
 
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Forces of Evil

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Muller

NSAIn the wake of suggestions, by high-ranked officials, that some journalists may be “accomplices” of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who had helped steal and fenced NSA secrets, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras have launched their counter-attack. Launching, at Pierre Omidyar’s new enterprise First Look Media, The Intercept, one of numerous digital magazines to be published soon.

Forewarned is forearmed seems to apply for citizens as well. As we need to know more about the modern surveilance state, The Intercept’s Trevor Paglen proves that the evil sometimes looks even beautiful. For certain, the U.S. intelligence community won’t be delighted to see their headquarters illuminated.

11 February 2014 @ 7:50 am.
Last modified February 11, 2014.
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What Makes Us Exceptional – “Fuck the E.U.”

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Muller

President Barack Obama who has told world leaders that U.S. Americans are exceptional is overdue to come off the high horse. What Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, thinks about the European Union (“Fuck the EU”; see the above video where she makes her derogative remark at 3:00) is once more revealing and perfectly fits with Obama’s ill manners of wiretapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, after all a strong ally.

That Nuland’s telephone call with the American Ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, about America meddling as usual in the current Ukrainian turmoil had been tapped by Russia is one thing; after all (Snowden etc.) Nuland should have encrypted her phone. That “Fuck the E.U.” has been uploaded to youtube is another, of course. America’s paranoid terror alerts in the run up to the Winter Olympics in Sochi have already poisened the games, and Putin can probably hardly hide schadenfreude about Nuland’s derailment.

7 February 2014 @ 2:02 pm.
Last modified February 7, 2014.
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Troubled German-American Relationships And the Upcoming War With Iraq

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Muller

Yesterday, Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had been wiretapped by NSA in late 2002 when former President George W. Bush had been angered by Schröder who had publicly made sure that Germany’s transatlantic loyalty has its limits and he and his coalition of Social Democrats and the Green Party would not be available for further adventures (the upcoming war with Iraq); and Herta Däubler-Gmelin, then Minister of Justice in Schröder’s Cabinet who had compared G.W. Bush’s propaganda methods with those of Adolf Hitler.

While such a comparison is of course outrageous since Hitler’s WWII and the extermination of six million Jews must not be compared with estimated  just 120,000-134,000 civilian deaths in the illegal war with Iraq with its made-up claims of former dictator Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Däubler-Gmelin had shown remarkable far-sightedness and Schröder was, after all, deadly right. While Däubler-Gmelin had to resign after a sort of apology by her boss, Schröder had been called in 2007 a “political prostitute” by Holocaust survivor and Democratic lawmaker late Tom Lantos for his relationship with the Russian Gazprom Company after his party had lost the 2005 election in Germany.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is well-advised not to downplay the current irritation in German-U.S. American relationship for diplomatic reasons. The ever growing NSA global mass surveillance scandal is not likely to go away by appeasement. Whether her mobile phone had been tapped or that of Schröder or his Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer is rather irrelevant. Merkel represents the people in Germany who do not want to be surveilled. She should show some backbone as her predecessor did.

5 February 2014 @ 6:15 pm.
Last modified February 5, 2014.
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No ‘Plausible Deniability’ Anymore

Posted on January 30, 2014 by Muller

Immediate comments debunking litany-like claims by President Barack Obama about aim and scope of overall inoffensive NSA’s mass surveillance, made in carefully staged public speeches such as yesterday’s State of the Union Address, by those who have access to Edward Snowden’s leaks has two major effects, (i) instantly indicating Obama’s dishonesty (as part of what is known as ‘plausible deniability’) and, on the long run, (ii) preventing him from continuing placating NSA’s misdeeds.

NSA is indeed not primarily engaged in fighting terrorists when spying. Another example for completely different motivation, after tapping of Angela Merkel’s mobile phone which has led to considerable discord between Germany and the US (and, by the way, the UK), is monitoring the communications of other governments ahead of and during the December 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, which has (yet) nothing to do with terrorism. Well, “spying may have contributed to the Americans getting their way in the negotiations” and ultimately put the world’s climate at further risk.

Is it worth to defent boundless spying and risk benevolence of strong allies?

See the leaked (by Snowden) NSA document here.

30 January 2014 @ 7:32 pm.
Last modified January 30 2014.
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