Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Writing • Culture
Leaked Pentagon Documents
Top secret documents circulating online should be readily available to the public
April 12, 2023
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We've compiled many of the revelatory documents from the recent Pentagon documents leak and have reproduced them below for the public record. We analyzed several of these documents and their ramifications on Monday's episode of System Update. Watch the full episode on Rumble on the player below. full episode.


Note: State Department officials have alleged that this document, which depicts Ukranian and Russian casualities, has been manipulated.
Note: State Department officials have alleged that this document, which depicts Ukranian and Russian casualities, has been manipulated. 

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Watch Tonight's Monologue

Due to a connection issue, our stream was cut short tonight.
You can find the entire episode below.

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00:43:24
Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted
WEEKLY WEIGH-IN: Another Week Another News Cycle

What’s happening in politics that you want to talk about? Are there any burning topics you think Glenn needs to cover? Any thoughts you’d like to share?

This post will be pinned to our profile for the remainder of this week, so comment below anytime with your questions, insights, future topic ideas/guest recommendations, etc. Let’s get a conversation going!

Glenn will respond to a few comments here—and may even address some on our next supporters-only After Show.

Thank you so much for your continued support through another week of SYSTEM UPDATE with Glenn Greenwald!

🏆Dog-of-the-Week:

Dog-of-the-Week goes to… Zeus! Our adorable puppy friend has returned (and grown)! Also happy to see him is Zuma as they share some brotherly love while Glenn gets to some aftershow questions.

Fallout From Terrorist Attack on Moscow

On Friday, March 22 at the Moscow Concert Hall, one of the deadliest attacks on Russia in decades took place: several gunmen killed 137 and wounded more than 100 people.

U.S. officials claim the group is ISIS-K, while Russia suspects it was Western-backed Ukrainians.

What are your thoughts?

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WE WANT TO KNOW: Best EP of March?

During March, SYSTEM UPDATE aired some important episodes, covering Israel-Gaza and its famine/humanitarian issues, SCOTUS decisions, Ukraine, media corruption, and much more!

But we want to hear from you all: What was your favorite episode of March? Any thoughts on what we should cover in April?

Comment below! 👇

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Lee Fang Exposes 60 Minutes’ Disinfo “Expert” as Partisan Hack. PLUS: The Atlantic Targets Pro-Palestine Stanford Students with Nepo Baby Theo Baker
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Good evening. It's Wednesday, March 27. 

Tonight: There is a group of people in the United States who have become convinced that they are qualified to decree what is true and what is false—not in any one particular area of expertise that they have spent a lot of years studying, say, cardiology or archeology or physics, but they believe they are somehow competent to identify truth and falsity in general. And more than just being somehow qualified to identity truth and falsity in general, they believe they are entitled to have their judgments be binding on others, that if they pronounce something to be false or inaccurate, then it should no longer be permitted to be expressed or to be heard.

Such people now call themselves "disinformation experts." This is a completely fraudulent credential. It was invented out of whole cloth following the dual 2016 disasters of Brexit in the UK and Trump's victory over Hillary in the U.S. Seemingly out of nowhere, overnight, there descended upon the United States this creepy new group of self-anointed experts who proclaimed to the world that they were able to identify falsity and deceit where nobody else could. As a result of this unique insight they insist that they and they alone possess, they have demanded the power to dictate the limits of our political debate, and have purported to impose on the largest tech companies in the West the obligation to enforce their pronouncements. 

It should be—and would be—very easy to scoff at such people and dismiss them the way one laughs at people who materialize and proclaim themselves the Messiah and demand that everyone obey and follow them. Yet these people are often financed by the most powerful and politically interventionist billionaires in the West. The country's largest media outlets routinely treat them as the prophets they claim to be. Often, they’re backed by the U.S. intelligence agencies and increasingly, in the West, the force of law is being wielded to bestow upon their judgments an unquestioning shield of truth. 

Over the weekend, the television program “60 Minutes” featured a woman named Kate Starbird, and she was presented as one of our nation's most important and prestigious disinformation experts. “60 Minutes” found it quite scandalous – as did Starbird herself – that X and other platforms have failed in many instances to remove political speech that Starbird believes is false and should be removed. This “60 Minutes” segment really shines a light on how these people think. And since Starbird herself has worked with some of the most menacing state and private-sector institutions attempting to police our political discourse, understanding her is vital to understanding the institutional weapons being unleashed to control political speech online.

One of the journalists who has done the best work on all of this is the independent reporter, Lee Fang. He was not only one of the lead journalists working on the Twitter Files that exposed many of these institutional relationships but has reported specifically on Starbird and the organizations that employ her. He'll join us to talk about what makes her and all of this—this whole system—so truly threatening to our core freedoms. 

Then: the term tattletale journalism is a phrase I first used back in 2021 to describe a new and deeply rooted mentality that now dominates much of corporate journalism. Rather than focus journalistic resources on investigating and exposing institutions of authority and individuals that wield actual power—which is always my understanding of what journalism was supposed to be— instead, the nation's largest media corporations often focus on targeting private citizens who have little to no power, and then drag them into the public light for shaming and even reputational destruction, all as punishment for their having, in the eyes of these media figures, bad political opinions. 

Last night, The Atlantic, which is a magazine owned and funded by one of the richest people on the planet, Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs used its vast resources not to target the CIA or Wall Street or the Pentagon, but instead, 22-year-old college students at Stanford who have made what the magazine considers to be intemperate remarks about Israel and their war in Gaza. The editor-in-chief of The Atlantic is Jeffrey Goldberg, who used to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, IDF, as a prison guard overseeing prisons that held Palestinian prisoners. For this article, he commissioned the 19-year-old son of Peter Baker, who is the New York Times Washington bureau chief, as well as Susan Glasser, the long-time writer at Politico and The New Yorker, where she befriended Goldberg, who then hired her college son to write this article attempting to destroy the reputation of several students at Stanford for the crime of criticism of Israel. 

In so many ways, this article reveals the rot at the heart of American corporate journalism and so, with great reluctance, we will wade into it for that reason. 

For now. Welcome to a new episode of System Updates, starting right now. 

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Assange Wins Very Partial Victory in UK Court, w/ Stella Assange. New Film Shows Mass Israeli Extremism, w/ Journalist Jeremy Loffredo
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Podcast: Apple - Spotify 

Rumble App: Apple - Google


Good evening. It's Tuesday, March 26. 

Tonight, the latest in the ongoing effort of the U.S. government—now in its fifth full year—to extradite Julian Assange from the high-security British prison where he's being held to the United States to stand trial on espionage charges. 

Earlier today, the British High Court issued a ruling that is actually a partial victory for Assange, his first in the British judiciary since 2021. The High Court, which was the last court possible to hear his appeal, overturned the U.S. government's victory in the lower court. That court had rejected all of Assange’s arguments for resisting extradition to the United States and accepted all of the government's arguments for why Assange should be extradited immediately. But the court today accepted three of Assange's objections for why extradition might be illegal under both British law and various human rights conventions to which the United Kingdom is bound. 

The ruling tonight does not mean that the U.S. is barred from extraditing Assange, nor, unfortunately, does it mean that the charges will be dropped or that Assange will be released from prison. Instead, the court simply identified several problems with the American extradition request that, perhaps, according to the court and even plausibly according to the court, make it illegal to accept under British and European law, and it gave the United States government until April 16 to try to resolve these problems through all sorts of legal maneuvers. 

It is very possible that the Justice Department will be able to resolve all these problems through a combination of promises and other assurances, though it's not actually entirely clear that they will be able to. Meanwhile, reports of negotiations between the U.S. government, on the one hand, and Assange's lawyers on the other continue to circulate. According to these reports, it would call for Assange to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count in exchange for his release from prison, which would get him out of prison, but might actually set a bad precedent and would prevent his exoneration. We will review today's ruling and all of its implications, and we'll also speak with Julian Assange’s wife, the human rights lawyer Stella Assange. We actually sat down with her just a few minutes ago, shortly before the show began, about her reaction to today's ruling, how Julian himself is doing in his fifth year in prison, what his reaction was to the ruling and what this ruling means for their family and all of us.

Then: that Gaza is now on the brink of mass famine, with many Palestinian children and adults already dying of hunger, the worst way a human being can die beyond dispute, is well documented by multiple aid organizations. What Israel supporters in the West attempt to dispute is not that there's a famine, but that the reason for the famine is that Israel is blocking food and water from entering that territory, exactly what Israel's defense minister at the start of the war vowed that Israel would do, namely blockade Gaza and prevent food and water from entering. 

Jeremy Alfredo is an independent journalist who went to the West Bank and met with and then traveled to the Gaza border with numerous Israeli activists and settlers in the West Bank. He interviewed them about why it is that they have spent weeks organizing physical blockades of trucks bringing food and water into Gaza. 

Here in the West, we constantly hear that Palestinians are full of hatred and violence toward Israelis and that they are taught to think this way from birth, that they're indoctrinated with an ideology of violence and hatred. And yet, if one looks at the Israeli government, it is very clear that this same mentality dominates many of their policies. And we will hear directly from Alfredo and hear directly from the Israelis, with whom he spent a great deal of time. And they will explain in their own words why they are trying hard to cause mass famine and mass starvation, not just for Hamas, but for all Gazans. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. 

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A Trifecta of Media Corruption: Ronna McDaniel/NBC, Kara Swisher/Big Tech, & Andrew Huberman/New York Mag
Video Transcript

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Good evening. It's Monday, March 25. 

Tonight: there's quite an uproar taking place at both NBC News and MSNBC. Apparently, they are convinced that they are some sort of real news network and, as a result, many of their on-screen personalities are expressing serious rage in offense over the hiring by NBC of former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who is better known as the niece of Mitt Romney. According to these giants of journalism people such as Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough, the mere presence of someone on their airwaves who was even linked to Donald Trump, who happens to be the person leading all polls to be elected as president of the United States in 2024, would sully this network's reputation for objective and high-minded news. Worse, they say, it would infuriate their liberal viewers who are very unaccustomed to hearing any dissent from the Democratic Party and would feel deeply uncomfortable if they were exposed to any views that made them feel like they weren't being agreed with. 

This is the same august news outlet that is the one that currently employs former Bush-Cheney spokeswoman Nicolle Wallace, former CIA Director John Brennan, Joy Reid— Reid – who has a 7 pm show every night on MSNBC, even though got caught fabricating an elaborate lie about a time-traveling hacker who authored the bigoted blog posts under her name – and as many former agents and operatives of the U.S. Security State as one might found at a Proud Boy rally or a civil war somewhere. 

This reaction to hiring a quite banal RNC chair, somebody who actually is so kind of conventional that she's hated by the MAGA world, reveals a great deal about how employees of the largest media outlets see their actual function. For that reason, we think it's worth taking a look at. 

Then: Ben Carter Swisher has become a very wealthy woman, posturing as the mean and no-nonsense watchdog over Silicon Valley. She has a new book, topping the New York Times bestseller list that purports to expose the secret abuses and corruption of the leaders of this tech culture. And yet, at the very same time that she brands herself as the scores of Silicon Valley powerbrokers, the leading cheerleaders for Kara Swisher generally, and for her new book, in particular, are and always have been the very leaders of the industry she claims to subject to such harsh and unrelenting and critical journalistic scrutiny. If you're a journalist who purports to adversarially report on a leading power center, whether it be Silicon Valley, the military-industrial complex, Congress, or Wall Street, and the leading power brokers of those sectors love and support and praise and help market you, that is a very good sign that what you're doing is subservient propaganda that advances their interests, not independent journalism that undermines it. That is certainly the case for Kara Swisher, who provides a very vivid window into the role that celebrity journalists like her play as they are promoted by the very people they claim to expose. 

And then, finally, the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has become a major force in independent media, someone who has managed to find a very large and devoted audience without relying on large media corporations at all. He has a podcast that is listened to by millions of people and an audience that he built by himself over time. There is nothing—and I mean nothing—that corporate media hates more than that. Somebody who succeeds without having to rely on their rotted structure. And so this week, they set out to destroy him, as they do to everyone who finds success without relying on their corporate structure. As one of the countless failing liberal digital outlets, New York Magazine has a cover story this week with his face on it that purports to expose dirty and shameful secrets about Huberman's dating life. Yet having read it, there is not a single fact that was even worth reporting or that was even of journalistic value, let alone that one's brings shame or disrepute to him. So often these people demand that the public cry and express sympathy as their journalistic industry dies around them, and they are laid off by the dozens. And yet so often they engage in behavior that makes their failures so well deserved, and feelings of sympathy as we watch them lose their jobs almost impossible as their industry deservedly sinks, and they drown along with it. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.

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