Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
The Same Establishment Playbook is Used to Malign the Character of Leakers and Distract Attention From the Substance of the Revelations
System Update Episode #70 dives into the media's treatment of the Discord leaker
April 14, 2023
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Daniel Ellsberg speaks to the press outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles, April 28, 1973. Credit: Wally Fong / Associated Press.

On a virtually daily basis, one can find authorized leaks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN and NBC News: meaning stories dressed up as leaks from anonymous sources that are, in fact, nothing more than messaging assertions that the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon have instructed these subservient media corporations to disseminate. When that happens, the leaker is never found or punished: even when the leaks are designated as the most serious crimes under the U.S. criminal code, such as when The Washington Post's long-time CIA spokesman David Ignatius in early 2017 published the contents of the intercepted phone calls between Trump's incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Most of Russiagate was constructed based on authorized leaks, a generous way of describing official propaganda from the U.S. Security State laundered in the American corporate press.

But when it comes to unauthorized leaks -- which result in the disclosure of secret evidence showing that the U.S. Security State lied, acted corruptly, or broke laws -- that is when the full weight of establishment power comes crashing down on the head of the leaker. They are found and arrested. Their character is destroyed. And now -- in a new and genuinely shocking escalation -- it is the largest media corporations themselves, such as the Times and the Post, that actually do the FBI's work by hunting down the leaker, exposing him, and ensuring his arrest. 

This playback is always used in such cases and is easily recognized. The point is to shift attention from the substance of the embarrassing and incriminating disclosures onto the personal traits of the person who exposed them, so as to make the public forget about what they learned and come to see the leaker as so unlikeable that they want nothing to do with the disclosures themselves. Thus:

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers – showing the US Government was lying to the American public that it believed it could win the war in Vietnam – FBI and CIA agents broke into the office of his psychoanalyst to try to expose his psychosexual secrets to discredit him and distract from the substance of the disclosures.

When Chelsea Manning leaked massive evidence of hidden US war crimes to WikiLeaks, long-time anti-LGBT bigot Joy Ann Reid of MSNBC and others said the overarching motive was mental illness over gender identity.

When it became clear that Julian Assange had created a powerful and formidible instrument for holding the U.S. Security State accountable and exposing their lies and crimes -- WikiLeaks -- corporate outlets began puking up a deluge of personal attacks against him, ones designed to make people conclude he is so repellent that the disclosures he enabled should be ignored because he was just too personally distasteful. The then-editor-in-chief of The New York Times Bill Keller even stooped to demeaning his personal hygiene, publishing this 2011 paragraph that he said he received from one of his reporters:

“He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”

When Edward Snowden furnished to myself and Laura Poitras the previously secret evidence that Obama national security official James Clapper lied to the public when denying that the NSA spied en masse on millions of Americans --  reporting that ended up winning every major journalism prize in the West and that caused an appellate court to rule that Obama's NSA had acted both unconstituitonally and illegally in infringing the privacy rights of millions of Americans -- CNN, NYT. NBC and The New Yorkier's Jeffrey Toobin labeled him a "narcissist" for believing he knew better than everyone else, and numerous outlets dug through his old blog comments to prove he had bad politics as a teenager.

Now, when doing the FBI's work by outing Jack Teixeira, both the Washington Post and CNN are emphasizing transgressive comments he made about race and anti-Semitism in a teenagers' gaming room to distract attention from the lies these docs reveal about, among other things, Biden's role in Ukraine.

On last night's episode of SYSTEM UPDATE, we examined the media's conduct this week with regard to the leaker, and the way in which they proudly did the FBI's job of hunting him down, exposing him and ensuring his arrest. On Monday night, we examined the key revelations from those documents and the strange circumstances surrounding that leak. The key leaked documents we examined can be read at the link below.

A full transcript for last night's episode will be posted later today on Locals (we post transcripts for each night's show on this platform exclusively for our Locals subscribers); the transcript for Monday night's show is below. And you can watch the full SYSTEM UPDATE episode on the video player below.

To support the independent journalism we are doing here and with our live nightly SYSTEM UPDATE program on Rumble, please join our Locals community; that gives you full access to our live interactive after-show on Tuesday and Thursday night, all of our written journalism, and full transcripts for each night's show:

 

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Edan Alexander Release: Is the Trump/Netanyahu Split Becoming More Real? Are Republicans Moving Toward Populist Economics? With Matt Stoller
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 On our program last week, we asked whether there was anything really authentic or meaningful about various reports suggesting a growing rift between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. There was some evidence to substantiate that suspicion, but as we noted last week, far more than that would be required before believing that there has been a split between any Israeli Prime Minister and any American president, let alone one as surrounded and funded by Israeli loyalists, as Donald Trump has been and still is. 

Now, this is still my view: I want to see far more proof before concluding that this divergence or even animosity between the two governments is both real and enduring. But the evidence for this view is now far more ample and concrete than it was when we reviewed it last week. This split extends to several different Middle East regions and a variety of different agenda items for both Washington and Tel Aviv. 

We'll show you all of that evidence and also review the latest in the U.S./Israel relationship, including what that might mean for Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, and beyond. 

Then, we’ll have Matt Stoller, one of the most knowledgeable analysts on the U.S. government's fight against Big Tech's antitrust violations, to discuss President Trump’s executive order reducing the price of medication and other pharmaceutical products for Americans, who have long paid significantly more than anyone else in the world for pharmaceutical products. 

 
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In terms of the U.S. role in the world and its foreign policy, there have been few aspects or components of the U.S. government more significant than its relationship with Israel. You can certainly make a case that the relationship with Israel, that inextricable link with Israel, has brought the U.S. into numerous different wars over the years. 

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Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis: On Global Trade and Tariffs, EU Arming of Israel, Israeli Destruction of Gaza, & More
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Yanis Varoufakis is a prominent Greek Australian economist, politician, and activist. As Greece's Finance Minister in 2015, he gained global recognition during the negotiations surrounding the Greek debt crisis. He led the charge against attempts by the neoliberal globalist institutions – such as the IMF, the European Central Bank and the EU – to force Greece to take out more high-interest loans to pretend to pay back its national debt. He most vociferously fought against attempts to impose massive suffering on the Greek people, the already quite beleaguered Greek people, through mandatory austerity measures, which Brussels was attempting to impose on Greece. 

As is true of most people who try to challenge or defy these sorts of neoliberal power centers, Varoufakis ultimately failed in the sense that he resigned from his government and his position when they began to make concessions that he regarded as "surrender." He did, however, succeed in convincing the Greek population to reject a referendum that would have ratified the EU's demands. Of course, the government ended up ignoring the will of the people as it often does. In the process, he also drew international attention to the way these financial institutions crush the lives of ordinary citizens (a dynamic that continues to drive right-wing populist movements in the EU, the U.S. and throughout the world) and he ended up, whether he wanted to or not, with a massive platform, widely regarded as one of the most informed and most independent analysts of economic and geopolitical debates. 

We certainly regard him as that, and thus we are very glad that he has that platform and has agreed to come on our show tonight. 

Varoufakis is currently a professor at the University of Athens, where his academic work centers on global economic systems, game theory and critiques of neoliberalism. He leads the MeRA25, the European Realistic Disobedience Front, co-founded the DiEM25 movement for democratic reform, and is a bestselling author. His latest book is “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism” (2023), which examines how technology has transformed global economies. 

 

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