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Greenwald’s Twitter War Over PayPal-NSA Allegations
By: JP Sottile Wednesday December 11, 2013 9:47 pm

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In the interconnected, instantaneous and byte-sized world of internet journalism, both cyber-space and real-time often bend and warp into a self-referential wormhole.

Glenn Greenwald with a microphone
Glenn Greenwald defended his work against sharp Twitter criticism.

And one of those fascinating wormholes just opened on Twitter as super neo-journalist Glenn Greenwald and 9/11 whistleblower Sibel Edmonds exchanged a series of increasingly vitriolic and accusatory tweets over Edmonds’ latest blog on Boiling Frogs Post: BFP Breaking News–Omidyar’s PayPal Corporation Said To Be Implicated in Withheld NSA Document.

In it, Edmonds claims that Greenwald’s soon-to-be financial partner and backer—PayPal billionaire Pierre Omidyar—was, in effect, a knowing partner with NSA spying and financial data-mining efforts:

The 50,000-pages of documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden contain extensive documentation of PayPal Corporation’s partnership and cooperation with the National Security Agency (NSA), according to three NSA veterans.

However, Edmonds also writes:

To date, no information has been released as to the extent of the working relationship and cooperation between the two entities – NSA and PayPal Corporation.

Edmonds implies that this is not a matter of there being no info regarding PayPal’s cooperation with the NSA, but more a notable, perhaps self-serving omission:

What’s more, the billionaire owner of PayPal Corporation has entered into a $250 Million business partnership with two journalists-Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, a journalist duo who possess the entire cache of evidence provided by Edward Snowden. Despite earlier pledges by the journalists in question, only one percent (1%) of Snowden’s documents has been released.

Of course, this didn’t sit well with Greenwald and he unleashed his displeasure in a series of tweets during a sometimes painful to read “cyber-sation” with Edmonds:


Ouch.

Greenwald’s point is that she cannot know what is in the massive trove of Snowden documents and, therefore, is making unsubstantiated claims regarding a possible conflict of interest in his partnering with Omidyar:


Edmonds’s story does quote other notable NSA whistleblowers—William Binney and Russell Tice—on the topic of PayPal which, it should be noted, infamously cut off use of its service to fund Wikileaks after its groundbreaking efforts to shed light on government secrecy.

Although Binney does not respond to what is specifically in the Snowden docs—which makes Greenwald’s point—he does state that financial institutions have long cooperated with the NSA and expresses some concerns about Omidyar:


Sunlight, transparency, is the only cure; the only way to bring about needed changes. This is why the public is entitled to have all the evidence and documents. The partnership with PayPal’s owner, thus, the new ownership of Mr. Snowden’s documents by an individual who is implicated in these documents, presents grave concerns and consequences, and a major conflict of interest for transparency, integrity and whistleblowers.

Edmonds also got Tice to chime in:

For NSA, information from financial institutions such as PayPal is equally if not more valuable and sought after than that obtained from social media and other software companies such as Facebook, Microsoft and Google.” He added, “I wouldn’t doubt the existence of evidence and documents implicating corporations such as PayPal within the large cache obtained by Edward Snowden. The partnership and data collection arrangements have existed for many years.”

Once again, Greenwald’s point is well taken. Neither Edmonds nor her interviewees can state as fact that there is anything in the Snowden docs that shows PayPal-NSA cooperation. However, their point is that—given the statement that only 1% of the documents have been released—the apparent trickle of the information from the trove highlights the need for transparency. Particularly if, in fact, there is anything in there that implicates PayPal.

In fact, Greenwald doesn’t really challenge the claim of PayPal-NSA cooperation, just the claim that he is covering it up by withholding Snowden docs that implicate PayPal:


This is a tricky situation. Unlike Wikileaks and their bulk data-dumps, Greenwald and Co. have released classified information in a more traditional, “sound practices of journalism” sorta way. Government officials get the opportunity to respond. Each story is hashed out and vetted in a normalized editorial process. Then the story is run.

But daily revelations about the NSA using every imaginable electronic device to collect data are breeding suspicion and a growing sense that nothing is sacred (although dildos, electric razors and Magic Bullet food processors still seem safely anonymous). It seems that everything is in question, particularly in that redacted zone between the public and its national security minders at the helm of the United States of Surveillance.

Thus, withholding information is an increasingly hard thing to defend.

This creates a bit of a problem for Greenwald and his association with Omyidar which, it seems, is fair to question given what we know about the NSA’s penchant for doing business with many different businesses. Full disclosure of the Snowden documents may be, in the final analysis, the only antiseptic that will calm suspicions amongst allies.

And that’s the sad part of this Twitter tempest. Edmonds was, in fact, an important whistleblower during a very difficult time of post-9/11 hyper-patriotism. William Binney and Russell Tice are also important whistleblowers who both preceded Snowden and, it would seem, are on the same team as Greenwald and Co.

Ultimately, if Greenwald does use that $250m war-chest to create a new journalistic venture, Greenwald and Omyidar will have to address the skepticism expressed by Edmonds:


Greenwald has already mounted a strong defense against accusations that the slow, methodical release of Snowden’s treasure-trove is a self-serving, profit-making process that, unlike a massive and direct data-dump, only serves the interests of his newspaper and his career.

But these claims are likely to dog him—both from those who simply seek to punish him through proxies and by those who earnestly criticize a traditional “sound practices of journalism” approach to information that relies on the role of gatekeepers to decide how and when information is released over the Wikileaks-style which emphasizes the public’s inherent right to see immediately what lies behind the veil of secrecy.

In this age of Twitterati, instant attacks, rapid-fire counter-attacks and Matrix-like convolution regarding who is plugged into whom, transparency is the only way to short-circuit festering suspicion—not just for governments, but also for the journalists, whistleblowers and the public they try to serve. Now it seems it’s up to Greenwald to clarify his association with Omidyar and for Omidyar to shine a bright light on PayPal’s associations with NSA.

Photo by Gage Skidmore released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

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TAGS: SNOWDEN DOCUMENTS, WIKILEAKS PAYPAL, WILLIAM BINNEY, SIBEL EDMONDS, PIERRE OMIDYAR, GREENWALD OMIDYAR, PAYPAL NSA, BOILING FROGS POST


12 Responses to Greenwald’s Twitter War Over PayPal-NSA Allegations

wendydavis December 11th, 2013 at 10:02 pm 1
Lord luv a duck, jpsottile; it IS twitter war, and I’ve been watching it since I ever posted here about my concerns about the ‘new venture’. No, it doesn’t seem there’s any evidence that shows that NSA and PayPal have any relationship, at least as far as the links you showed (if I clicked into all of them). But I have been curious enough to have watched “Pierre’s” tweets on WikiLeaks embargoed PayPal account (dunno how much further it went after that one), which is very different than the ‘few months’ he alluded to in his HuffPo piece, in which he claimed to be calling for a lenient sentence for the PayPal 14.
I did watch Alexa O’brien’s interview with Stanley Cohen, attorney for the PayPal 14, and he…er…disagrees with Pierre as any hero of their lighter sentencing. But as one oped asked, “Is the WikiLeaks model being threatened by subsumption into the culture industry?” The author makes a case, although one of my e-friends does challenge his/her understanding of myth and Enlightment; I dunno about all that, myself.
Wouldn’t it would be healthy if we could ask questions and not be considered ‘attacking’ Greenwald, Poitras, Scahill, et.al.? Even one in aid of allowing them to be cautious of Omidyar himself?
Rec’d; I hope that a non-hyberbolic discussion in which folks don’t feel compelled to choose ‘sides’ can occur for the good of us all.
Reply
wendydavis December 11th, 2013 at 10:35 pm 2
In response to wendydavis @ 1
And sussing out the truth is hard, as is…life.
Reply
Bill_Owen December 11th, 2013 at 10:58 pm 3
Sibel Edmonds ‏@sibeledmonds
@MonaHol 3 years after he kept screwing Wikileaks nonstop, 2 yrs screwing Bradley Manning Fund & Supporters? The billionaire found Jesus?!!
And 12 years after she left the FBI, Edmonds discovered civil rights?
That’s bullshit thinking even though I tweeted that to her tonight. People do change.
I am disgusted by Edmonds’ attacks. They lack substance, facts, and are, in fact, fucking deranged.
Reply
yellowsnapdragon December 12th, 2013 at 2:22 am 4
In response to Bill_Owen @ 3
Wait, wait. Not so fast. Although I tend to approve of Greenwald’s careful vetting prior to releasing stories on the leaked docs, Edmonds has a very legitimate concern about GG’s funder. Considering the depth of corruption she has experienced first hand, she has good reason to trust no one.
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Kit OConnell December 12th, 2013 at 2:49 am 5
This is a good article, thanks for writing it. I did some cleanup so the actual tweets now appear.
I’m glad all these concerns have been raised by you and other writers. Now I’m ready to sit back and see what Greenwald & co. actually do with all that phat Paypal cash.
Reply
wendydavis December 12th, 2013 at 6:49 am 6
I hadn’t seen Sarah Harrison’s piece at the Guardian earlier, and while she does seem to have gotten a couple things wrong, she’s been in the thick of it all, hasn’t she? She’s worked on behalf of both Wilileaks and Snowden himself, which gives her some credibility.
What I don’t see from Tice and Binney is anything of definite probative value, just blanket knowledge of credit institutions and the NSA and other security state acronyms. Would that Sibel’s anonymous source surface, and tell what he says he knows.
Yah, what a mess: a Twitter War in which credibility of the players is at the core. Reading Omidyar’s Twitter arguments with Wikileaks over when or if PayPal ever ended the blockade against their account was exasperating.
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wigwam December 12th, 2013 at 6:59 am 7
I like the way that Greenwald has been managing the release of this information: the slow drip, drip, drip of it all. Obama Administration officials can’t lie to Congress with confident impugnity, because they don’t know how much he’s got. The next day he might release a document exposing/documenting their perjury.
Were Greenwald and company to release everything, the other side would know the extent of their case. Thus far, the accused do not have the right of discovery and are twisting slowly in the breeze. Which is right and proper, since this is not a criminal trial.
Were this to turn into a trial, the judge could subpoena the evidence, which could put quite a different spin on the situation. Hmmmm.
Reply
kapock December 12th, 2013 at 8:02 am 8
Good post!
I have no suspicions or accusations regarding GG, but ultimately I disagree with him. I’m hoping some intern at the new outfit dumps the whole lot onto the net.
Reply
normanb December 12th, 2013 at 7:37 am 9
Good work.
It’s hard to trust PayPal, looking at its associations with both Elon Musk and EBay. I used to use PayPal, but I haven’t since its action against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
It would be nice to have a quarter of a billion dollars dedicated to pushing investigative journalism. It would be even nicer if it were all done honest and above-board. That’s what I’m hoping for.
Reply
msmolly December 12th, 2013 at 8:23 am 10
I don’t see why it necessarily follows that because Greenwald entered into a new business venture with Omidyar, that Omidyar “owns” Snowden’s documents. Glenn made it pretty clear that The Guardian didn’t own them when he was there.
And I agree 100% with his decision to release documents slowly and carefully. In addition to vetting, this also creates the opportunity to focus on each revelation and not be swamped with way too much to sort through.
Reply
tomallen December 12th, 2013 at 8:59 am 11
Even Glenn Greenwald doesn’t doubt that PayPal cooperates with the NSA. (See his tweet above.) Now the billionaire owner of eBay (which owns PayPal) is funding a venture employing the very journalists who are reporting on NSA leaks. Shouldn’t this raise an eyebrow or two?
GG denies that he’s being “paid to withhold” documents. Even granting that to be true, it’s scarcely the only possible criticism. More to the point is “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” — in other words, will this journalistic venture NewCo cover/emphasize corporate collaboration as assiduously as it will government spying? Perhaps so; but the corporate ties of its owner — like those of the WaPo (Amazon’s Bezos), NBC (General Electric), Fox (Rupert Murdoch) — open its coverage to skepticism. Surely that’s to be expected.
Finally, after decades of seeing major polluters fund environmental initiatives to ally criticism of their practices (“greenwashing”), it seems only reasonable to be doubtful of the motives of corporate owners suspected of complicity with the NSA (like Omidyar and Bezos) when they suddenly buy ventures that champion NSA leakers. I don’t think “leakwashing” is a word yet, but those of us with a jaundiced view of corporations think that something of the sort may be going on here.
Reply
ChePasa December 12th, 2013 at 11:19 am 12
In response to tomallen @ 11
Maintaining skepticism in the midst of a “war” — on Twitter or elsewhere — is difficult; one is expected to take sides and root for one’s home team. We see the process all the time in connection with just about anything Greenwald is involved with. And so it is now with Greenwald/Edmonds.
I’ve been skeptical of both of them for some time.
As for the NSA/PayPal connection, Greenwald “doesn’t doubt it” as you (and he) say. He stipulates the truth of the core point Edmonds asserts. What he objects to is her claim to “know” what’s in the Snowden docs he holds.
It’s a “war” over what, then?
Reply

How to identify CIA limited hangout op?

The operations of secret intelligence agencies aiming at the manipulation of public opinion generally involve a combination of cynical deception with the pathetic gullibility of the targeted populations.


There is ample reason to believe that the case of Edward Joseph Snowden fits into this pattern. We are likely dealing here with a limited hangout operation, in which carefully selected and falsified documents and other materials are deliberately revealed by an insider who pretends to be a fugitive rebelling against the excesses of some oppressive or dangerous government agency.

But the revelations turn out to have been prepared with a view to shaping the public consciousness in a way which is advantageous to the intelligence agency involved. At the same time, gullible young people can be duped into supporting a personality cult of the leaker, more commonly referred to as a “whistleblower.” A further variation on the theme can be the attempt of the sponsoring intelligence agency to introduce their chosen conduit, now posing as a defector, into the intelligence apparatus of a targeted foreign government. In this case, the leaker or whistleblower attains the status of a triple agent.

Any attempt to educate public opinion about the dynamics of limited hangout operations inevitably collides with the residue left in the minds of millions by recent successful examples of this technique. It will be hard for many to understand Snowden, precisely because they will insist on seeing him as the latest courageous example in a line of development which includes Daniel Ellsberg and Julian Assange, both still viewed by large swaths of naïve opinion as authentic challengers of oppressive government.

This is because the landmark limited hangout operation at the beginning of the current post-Cold War era was that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers, which laid the groundwork for the CIA’s Watergate attack on the Nixon administration, and more broadly, on the office of the presidency itself. More recently, we have had the case of Assange and Wikileaks. Using these two cases primarily, we can develop a simple typology of the limited hangout operation which can be of significant value to those striving to avoid the role of useful idiots amidst the current cascade of whistleblowers and limited hangout artists.

In this analysis, we should also recall that limited hangouts have been around for a very long time. In 1620 Fra Paolo Sarpi, the dominant figure of the Venetian intelligence establishment of his time, advised the Venetian senate that the best way to defeat anti-Venetian propaganda was indirectly. He recommended the method of saying something good about a person or institution while pretending to say something bad. An example might be criticizing a bloody dictator for beating his dog - the real dimensions of his crimes are thus totally underplayed.

Limited hangout artists are instant media darlings

The most obvious characteristic of the limited hangout operative is that he or she immediately becomes the darling of the controlled corporate media. In the case of Daniel Ellsberg, his doctored set of Pentagon papers were published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and eventually by a consortium totaling seventeen corporate newspapers. These press organs successfully argued the case for publication all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where they prevailed against the Nixon administration.

Needless to say, surviving critics of the Warren Commission, and more recent veterans of the 9/11 truth movement, and know very well that this is emphatically not the treatment reserved for messengers whose revelations are genuinely unwelcome to the Wall Street centered US ruling class. These latter are more likely to be slandered, vilified and dragged through the mud, or, even more likely, passed over in complete silence and blacked out. In extreme cases, they can be kidnapped, renditioned or liquidated.

Cass Sunstein present at the creation of Wikileaks

As for Assange and Wikileaks, the autumn 2010 document dump was farmed out in advance to five of the most prestigious press organs in the world, including the New York Times, the London Guardian, El Pais of Madrid, Der Spiegel of Hamburg, and Le Monde of Paris. This was the Assange media cartel, made up of papers previously specialized in discrediting 9/11 critics and doubters. But even before the document dumps had begun, Wikileaks had received a preemptive endorsement from none other than the notorious totalitarian Cass Sunstein, later an official of the Obama White House, and today married to Samantha Power, the author of the military coup that overthrew Mubarak and currently Obama’s pick for US ambassador to the United Nations. Sunstein is infamous for his thesis that government agencies should conduct covert operations using pseudo-independent agents of influence for the “cognitive infiltration of extremist groups” - meaning of those who reject in the establishment view of history and reality. Sunstein’s article entitled “Brave New WikiWorld” was published in the Washington Post of February 24, 2007, and touted the capabilities of Wikileaks for the destabilization of China. Perhaps the point of Ed Snowden’s presence in Hong Kong is to begin re-targeting these capabilities back towards the original anti-Chinese plan.

Snowden has already become a media celebrity of the first magnitude. His career was launched by the US left liberal Glenn Greenwald, now writing for the London Guardian, which expresses the viewpoints of the left wing of the British intelligence community. Thus, the current scandal is very much Made in England, and may benefit from inputs from the British GCHQ of Cheltenham, the Siamese twin of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. During the days of his media debut, it was not uncommon to see a controlled press organ like CNN dedicating one third of every broadcast hour of air time to the birth, life, and miracles of Ed Snowden.


Another suspicious and tell-tale endorsement for Snowden comes from the former State Department public diplomacy asset Norman Solomon. Interviewed on RT, Solomon warmly embraced the Snowden Project and assured his viewers that the NSA material dished up by the Hong Kong defector used reliable and authentic. Solomon was notorious ten years ago as a determined enemy of 9/11 truth, acting as a border guard in favor of the Bush administration/neocon theory of terrorism.

Limited hangouts contain little that is new

Another important feature of the limited hangout operation if that the revelations often contain nothing new, but rather repackage old wine in new bottles. In the case of Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, very little was revealed which was not already well known to a reader of Le Monde or the dispatches of Agence France Presse. Only those whose understanding of world affairs had been filtered through the Associated Press, CBS News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post found any of Ellsberg’s material a surprise.

Of course, there was method in Ellsberg’s madness. The Pentagon papers allegedly derived from an internal review of the decision-making processes leading to the Vietnam War, conducted after 1967-68 under the supervision of Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb. Ellsberg, then a young RAND Corporation analyst and militant warmonger, was associated with this work. Upon examination, we find that the Pentagon papers tend to cover up such CIA crimes as the mass murder mandated under Operation Phoenix, and the massive CIA drug running associated with the proprietary airline Air America. Rather, when atrocities are in question, the US Army generally receives the blame. Politicians in general, and President John F. Kennedy in particular, are portrayed in a sinister light - one might say demonized. No insights whatever into the Kennedy assassination are offered. This was a smelly concoction, and it was not altogether excluded that the radicalized elements of the Vietnam era might have carried the day in denouncing the entire package as a rather obvious fabrication. But a clique around Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn loudly intervened to praise the quality of the exposé and to lionize Ellsberg personally as a new culture hero for the Silent Generation. From that moment on, the careers of Chomsky and Zinn soared. Pentagon papers skeptics, like the satirical comedian Mort Sahl, a supporter of the Jim Garrison investigation in New Orleans and a critic of the Warren Commission, faced the marginalization of their careers.

Notice also that the careers of Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb positively thrived after they entrusted the Pentagon papers to Ellsberg, who revealed them. Ellsberg was put on trial in 1973, but all charges were dismissed after several months because of prosecutorial misconduct. Assange lived like a lord for many months in the palatial country house of an admirer in the East of England, and is now holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He spent about 10 days in jail in December 2010.

Assange first won credibility for Wikileaks with some chum in the form of a shocking film showing a massacre perpetrated by US forces in Iraq with the aid of drones. The massacre itself and the number of victims were already well known, so Assange was adding only the graphic emotional impact of witnessing the atrocity firsthand.


Limited hangouts reveal nothing about big issues like JFK, 9/11

Over the past century, there are certain large-scale covert operations which cast a long historical shadow, determining to some extent the framework in which subsequent events occur. These include the Sarajevo assassinations of 1914, the assassination of Rasputin in late 1916, Mussolini’s 1922 march on Rome, Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, the assassination of French Foreign Minister Barthou in 1934, the assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, in 1963 Kennedy assassination, and 9/11. A common feature of the limited hangout operations is that they offer almost no insights into these landmark events.

In the Pentagon Papers, the Kennedy assassination is virtually a nonexistent event about which we learn nothing. As already noted, the principal supporters of Ellsberg were figures like Chomsky, whose hostility to JFK and profound disinterest in critiques of the Warren Commission were well-known. As for Assange, he rejects any further clarification of 9/11. In July 2010, Assange told Matthew Bell of the Belfast Telegraph: “I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.” This is on top of Cass Sunstein’s demand for active covert measures to suppress and disrupt inquiries into operations like 9/11. Snowden’s key backers Glenn Greenwald and Norman Solomon have both compiled impressive records of evasion on 9/11 truth, with Greenwald specializing in the blowback theory.

The Damascus road conversions of limited hangout figures

Daniel Ellsberg started his career as a nuclear strategist of the Dr. Strangelove type working for the RAND Corporation. He worked in the Pentagon as an aide to US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He then went to Vietnam, where he served as a State Department civilian assistant to CIA General Edward Lansdale. In 1967, he was back at RAND to begin the preparation of what would come to be known as the Pentagon papers. Ellsberg has claimed that his Damascus Road conversion from warmonger to peace angel occurred when he heard a speech from a prison-bound draft resister at Haverford College in August 1969. After a mental breakdown, Ellsberg began taking his classified documents to the office of Senator Edward Kennedy and ultimately to the New York Times. Persons who believe this fantastic story may be suffering from terminal gullibility.

In the case of Assange, it is harder to identify such a moment of conversion. Assange spent his childhood in the coils of MK Ultra, a complex of Anglo-American covert operations designed to investigate and implement mind control through the use of psychopharmaca and other means. Assange was a denizen of the Ann Hamilton-Byrne cult, in which little children that were subjected to aversive therapy involving LSD and other heavy-duty drugs. Assange spent his formative years as a wandering nomad with his mother incognito because of her involvement in a custody dispute. The deracinated Assange lived in 50 different towns and attended 37 different schools. By the age of 16, the young nihilist was active as a computer hacker using the screen name “Mendax,” meaning quite simply “The Liar.” (Assange’s clone Snowden uses the more marketable codename of “Verax,” the truth teller.) Some of Assange’s first targets were Nortel and US Air Force offices in the Pentagon. Assange’s chief mentor became John Young of Cryptome, who in 2007 denounced Wikileaks as a CIA front.

Snowden’s story, as widely reported, goes like this: he dropped out of high school and also dropped out of a community college, but reportedly was nevertheless later able to command a salary of between $120,000 and $200,000 per year; he claims this is because he is a computer wizard. He enlisted in the US Army in May 2004, and allegedly hoped to join the special forces and contribute to the fight for freedom in Iraq. He then worked as a low-level security guard for the National Security Agency, and then went on to computer security at the CIA, including a posting under diplomatic cover in Switzerland. He moved on to work as a private contractor for the NSA at a US military base in Japan. His last official job was for the NSA at the Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations Center in Hawaii. In May 2013, he is alleged to have been granted medical leave from the NSA in Hawaii to get treatment for epilepsy. He fled to Hong Kong, and made his revelations with the help of Greenwald and a documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. Snowden voted for the nominally anti-war, ultra-austerity “libertarian” presidential candidate Ron Paul, and gave several hundred dollars to Paul’s campaign.

Snowden, like Ellsberg, thus started off as a warmonger but later became more concerned with the excesses of the Leviathan state. Like Assange, he was psychologically predisposed to the world of computers and cybernetics. The Damascus Road shift from militarist to civil libertarian remains unexplained and highly suspicious.

Snowden is also remarkable for the precision of his timing. His first revelations, open secrets though they were, came on June 5, precisely today when the rebel fortress of Qusayr was liberated by the Syrian army and Hezbollah. At this point, the British and French governments were screaming at Obama that it was high time to attack Syria. The appearance of Snowden’s somewhat faded material in the London Guardian was the trigger for a firestorm of criticism against the Obama regime by the feckless US left liberals, who were thus unwittingly greasing the skids for a US slide into a general war in the Middle East. More recently, Snowden came forward with allegations that the US and the British had eavesdropped on participants in the meeting of the G-20 nations held in Britain four years ago. This obviously put Obama on the defensive just as Cameron and Hollande were twisting his arm to start the Syrian adventure. By attacking the British GCHQ at Cheltenham, Britain’s equivalent to the NSA, perhaps Snowden was also seeking to obfuscate the obvious British sponsorship of his revelations.

Stories about Anglo Americans spying on high profile guests are as old as the hills, and have included a British frogman who attempted an underwater investigation of the Soviet cruiser that brought party leader N. S. Khrushchev for a visit in the 1950s. Snowden has also accused the NSA of hacking targets in China -- again, surely no surprise to experienced observers, but guaranteed to increase Sino-American tensions. As time passes, Snowden may emerge as more and more of a provocateur between Washington and Beijing.

Limited hangouts prepare large covert operations

Although, as we have seen, limited hangouts rarely illuminate the landmark covert operations which attempt to define an age, limited hangouts themselves do represent the preparation for future covert operations.

In the case of the Pentagon papers, this and other leaks during the Indo-Pakistani Tilt crisis were cited by Henry Kissinger in his demand that President Richard Nixon take countermeasures to restore the integrity of state secrets. Nixon foolishly authorized the creation of a White House anti-leak operation known as the Plumbers. The intelligence community made sure that the Plumbers operation was staffed by their own provocateurs, people who never were loyal to Nixon but rather took their orders from Langley. Here we find the already infamous CIA agent Howard Hunt, the CIA communications expert James McCord, and the FBI operative G. Gordon Liddy. These provocateurs took special pains to get arrested during an otherwise pointless break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the summer of 1972. Nixon could easily have disavowed the Plumbers and thrown this gaggle of agent provocateurs to the wolves, but he instead launched a cover up. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, equipped with a top secret security clearance from the Office of Naval Intelligence, then began publicizing the story. The rest is history, and the lasting heritage has been a permanent weakening of the office of the presidency and the strengthening of the worst oligarchical tendencies.

Assange’s Wikileaks document dump triggered numerous destabilizations and coups d’état across the globe. Not one US, British, or Israeli covert operation or politician was seriously damaged by this material. The list of those impacted instead bears a striking resemblance to the CIA enemies’ list: the largest group of targets were Arab leaders slated for immediate ouster in the wave of “Arab Spring.” Here we find Ben Ali of Tunisia, Qaddafi of Libya, Mubarak of Egypt, Saleh of Yemen, and Assad of Syria. The US wanted to replace Maliki with Allawi as prime minister of Iraq, so the former was targeted, as was the increasingly independent Karzai of Afghanistan. Perennial targets of the CIA included Rodriguez Kirchner of Argentina, Berlusconi of Italy, and Putin of Russia. Berlusconi soon fell victim to a coup organized through the European Central Bank, while his friend Putin was able to stave off a feeble attempt at color revolution in early 2012. Mildly satiric jabs at figures like Merkel of Germany and Sarkozy of France were included primarily as camouflage.

Assange thus had a hand in preparing one of the largest destabilization campaigns mounted by Anglo-American intelligence since 1968, or perhaps even 1848.

If the Snowden operation can help coerce the vacillating and reluctant Obama to attack Syria, our new autistic hero may claim credit for starting a general war in the Middle East, and perhaps even more. If Snowden can further poison relations between United States and China, the world historical significance of his provocations will be doubly assured. But none of this can occur unless he finds vast legions of eager dupes ready to fall for his act. We hope he won’t.

WT/HN

fruhmenschen » Wed Dec 11, 2013 11:39 pm wrote:I would hope someone will create a thread about the FBI

Former whistleblowers: open letter to intelligence employees after Snowden
Blowing the whistle on powerful factions is not a fun thing to do, but it is the last avenue for truth, balanced debate and democracy

Thomas Drake, Daniel Ellsberg, Katharine Gun, Peter Kofod, Ray McGovern, Jesselyn Radack, Coleen Rowley
theguardian.com, Wednesday 11 December 2013 09.45 EST

Edward Snowden's revelations have changed the debate on civil liberties. Photograph: Ho/AFP/Getty Images
At least since the aftermath of September 2001, western governments and intelligence agencies have been hard at work expanding the scope of their own power, while eroding privacy, civil liberties and public control of policy. What used to be viewed as paranoid, Orwellian, tin-foil hat fantasies turned out post-Snowden, to be not even the whole story.

What's really remarkable is that we've been warned for years that these things were going on: wholesale surveillance of entire populations, militarization of the internet, the end of privacy. All is done in the name of "national security", which has more or less become a chant to fence off debate and make sure governments aren't held to account – that they can't be held to account – because everything is being done in the dark. Secret laws, secret interpretations of secret laws by secret courts and no effective parliamentary oversight whatsoever.

By and large the media have paid scant attention to this, even as more and more courageous, principled whistleblowers stepped forward. The unprecedented persecution of truth-tellers, initiated by the Bush administration and severely accelerated by the Obama administration, has been mostly ignored, while record numbers of well-meaning people are charged with serious felonies simply for letting their fellow citizens know what's going on.

It's one of the bitter ironies of our time that while John Kiriakou (ex-CIA) is in prison for blowing the whistle on US torture, the torturers and their enablers walk free.

Likewise WikiLeaks-source Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning was charged with – amongst other serious crimes – aiding the enemy (read: the public). Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison while the people who planned the illegal and disastrous war on Iraq in 2003 are still treated as dignitaries.

Numerous ex-NSA officials have come forward in the past decade, disclosing massive fraud, vast illegalities and abuse of power in said agency, including Thomas Drake, William Binney and Kirk Wiebe. The response was 100% persecution and 0% accountability by both the NSA and the rest of government. Blowing the whistle on powerful factions is not a fun thing to do, but despite the poor track record of western media, whistleblowing remains the last avenue for truth, balanced debate and upholding democracy – that fragile construct which Winston Churchill is quoted as calling "the worst form of government, except all the others".

Since the summer of 2013, the public has witnessed a shift in debate over these matters. The reason is that one courageous person: Edward Snowden. He not only blew the whistle on the litany of government abuses but made sure to supply an avalanche of supporting documents to a few trustworthy journalists. The echoes of his actions are still heard around the world – and there are still many revelations to come.

For every Daniel Ellsberg, Drake, Binney, Katharine Gun, Manning or Snowden, there are thousands of civil servants who go by their daily job of spying on everybody and feeding cooked or even made-up information to the public and parliament, destroying everything we as a society pretend to care about.
Some of them may feel favourable towards what they're doing, but many of them are able to hear their inner Jiminy Cricket over the voices of their leaders and crooked politicians – and of the people whose intimate communication they're tapping.

Hidden away in offices of various government departments, intelligence agencies, police forces and armed forces are dozens and dozens of people who are very much upset by what our societies are turning into: at the very least, turnkey tyrannies.

One of them is you.

You're thinking:

● Undermining democracy and eroding civil liberties isn't put explicitly in your job contract.
● You grew up in a democratic society and want to keep it that way
● You were taught to respect ordinary people's right to live a life in privacy
● You don't really want a system of institutionalized strategic surveillance that would make the dreaded Stasi green with envy – do you?

Still, why bother? What can one person do? Well, Edward Snowden just showed you what one person can do. He stands out as a whistleblower both because of the severity of the crimes and misconduct that he is divulging to the public – and the sheer amount of evidence he has presented us with so far – more is coming. But Snowden shouldn't have to stand alone, and his revelations shouldn't be the only ones.

You can be part of the solution; provide trustworthy journalists – either from old media (like this newspaper) or from new media (such as WikiLeaks) with documents that prove what illegal, immoral, wasteful activites are going on where you work.

There IS strength in numbers. You won't be the first – nor the last – to follow your conscience and let us know what's being done in our names. Truth is coming – it can't be stopped. Crooked politicians will be held accountable. It's in your hands to be on the right side of history and accelerate the process.

Courage is contagious.

Signed by:

Peter Kofod, ex-Human Shield in Iraq (Denmark)
Thomas Drake, whistleblower, former senior executive of the NSA (US)
Daniel Ellsberg, whistleblower, former US military analyst (US)
Katharine Gun, whistleblower, former GCHQ (UK)
Jesselyn Radack, whistleblower, former Department of Justice (US)
Ray McGovern, former senior CIA analyst (US)
Coleen Rowley, whistleblower, former FBI agent (US)

Please do not get me wrong here. I have no questions but answers when it comes to the checkbook opportunist in question. I have known about him for years, long before this NSA episode.

Beligerant Savant wrote,
How difficult would it have been to distribute those ~50,000 documents to a much wider net? Why only to a select few 'journalists'? And given the time since the initial release/broadcast and the lack of additional intel, it seems very odd that Snowden has kept relatively quiet about the lack of additional revelations.