Saturday, May 17, 2014

And in the international Greenwalding circuit

Used for somewhat relevant purposes by YoStatus.
Earlier this week, Greenwald came so close to noticing himself being wrong about something:
Snowden was almost certain this meant that the NSA had identified him as the likely source of the leaks, but I was sceptical. "If they thought you did this, they'd send hordes of FBI agents with a search warrant and probably Swat teams, not a single NSA officer and a human-resources person." I figured this was just an automatic and routine inquiry, triggered when an NSA employee goes absent for a few weeks without explanation.
But the moment passed quickly. It wouldn't be the last time, anyway, that he was unnecessarily terrified of the jack-booted thugs of our police state. There was this, for instance, from October 2013:
Glenn Greenwald would like to go home to the United States, at least for a visit. But the Guardian journalist and blogger is afraid to do so. He still has material and unpublished stories from his contacts with fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden that he believes U.S. authorities would love to get their hands on.  The nine-hour detention and interrogation of Greenwald's Brazilian partner David Miranda by British security services at London's Heathrow airport in August has only compounded his fears.
I remember! I was so struck by the way Wallace Shawn was forced to go to hot, unpleasant Brazil to stage a private performance of his Greenwald play just last January so Greenwald could see it without risking his life. And yet our intrepid journalist managed to show up in April to collect his Polk Award. So now he's afraid to go to England:
There’s only one country that has been consciously excluded from the tour – in fact, only one country in the world that Greenwald says he absolutely will not visit. It is the UK. The wounds left by the detention under the Terrorism Act of his partner, Miranda, at Heathrow airport last August, are still open and deep.... “I don’t trust them not to detain me, interrogate me and even arrest me. Their behaviour has been so extreme and offensive, and the political and media class was so supportive of it, that I feel uncomfortable with the entire atmosphere,” says Greenwald.
Does that mean he's angling for a Hackademy Award from the Press Gazette for his work getting interviewed by Guardian reporters? Only Time (or more likely Spiegel) will tell. Meanwhile Zandar the Great and Terrible informs us that Glenn got that movie deal, with Sony Pictures, or as Glenn affectionately calls them
Liberal Hollywood has produced the ultimate hagiography of the most secretive arm of America's National Security State, while liberal film critics lead the parade of praise and line up to bestow it with every imaginable accolade
 so it's all good.

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