The very reason why Bill’s work lives on and still has such amazing potency is that, in a world full of ‘banality and mediocrity’, of sophistry, of casuistry and speciousness, of the kind of fakery and shallowness Brand Man and his ilk make their stock in trade, his words retain the mark of genuine authenticity. They are like water in a desert to those of us thirsting for something real in a world of fabrication and deception.
To the likes of [New York Times columnist David] Brooks, Snowden was a disconcerting mystery; Glenn Greenwald, though, got him right away. “He had no power, no prestige, he grew up in a lower-middle-class family, totally obscure, totally ordinary,” Greenwald says. “He didn’t even have a high school diploma. But he was going to change the world – and I knew that.” And, Greenwald also believed, so would he. “In all kinds of ways, my whole life has been in preparation for this moment,” he says.
I would think journalists would want to be very careful about embracing this pernicious theory of “privatizing” journalism given how virtually all of you are not only are paid for the journalism you do, but also have your own journalism funded by all sorts of extremely rich people and other corporate interests.
Though former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has been indicted for leaking secrets about the U.S. government’s intrusive surveillance tactics, he was honored by a group of former U.S. intelligence officials as a courageous whistleblower during a Moscow ceremony, reports ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern who was there.
Washington and its allies, sold to the public by the media as ‘the international community’, are well aware of the stakes. The general population must be subdued and kept in its place. Obama and his officials in the government, and the US intelligence community, need to assert strenuously that Snowden’s exposure of the massive US secret surveillance programme aids and abets ‘the enemy’, and damages international relations.
Edward Snowden, the person who disclosed top-secret documents on the U.S. government’s massive surveillance programs, is reportedly in Hong Kong and seeking asylum from countries that value openness and freedom, conditions seen as slipping away at home by Ray McGovern Before the U.S. government and the mainstream media engage in the customary character assassination of truth-teller Edward Snowden – a fate […]
