The story that Hastings was working on at the time of his death centered around CIA Director John Brennan, the chief architect of President Obama’s foreign drone program. It related specifically to Brennan’s role as the administration’s point man tracking investigative journalists and their sources in Washington.
Glenn Greenwald’s video message for the Frontline Club Awards 2013.
I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance; I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner, by obediently X-ing a little box.
Billy Connolly said: “Don’t vote, it encourages them,” and, “The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever being one.”
What indicates to me that Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald and Russell Brand, whatever their personal or political differences, are part of an important social and ethical trend is the huge irritation they cause to the media class who have spent decades making very good livings being paid by the media corporations to limit our intellectual horizons.
American power is diminishing, as it has been in fact since its peak in 1945, but it’s still incomparable. And it’s dangerous. Obama’s remarkable global terror campaign and the limited, pathetic reaction to it in the West is one shocking example. And it is a campaign of international terrorism – by far the most extreme in the world.
“What will your revolution look like,” growled Paxo from behind said beard.
“I’ll tell you what it won’t be like,” said Brand in a moment of clarity, “a huge disparity between rich and poor, where 300 Americans have the same amount of wealth as the 85 million poorest Americans, where there is an exploited and underserved underclass that are being continually ignored and where welfare is slashed while Cameron and Osborne go to court to defend the rights of bankers to continue to receive their bonuses. This has to be addressed.”
Britain is to launch a parliamentary inquiry into the Guardian newspaper’s leaks by Edward Snowden as part of a broad counter-terrorism inquiry. The probe was announced hours after PM David Cameron called the leaks “dangerous” for national security.
Addressing the UK parliament Wednesday, Cameron accused the newspaper of damaging national security by publishing sensitive data provided by the former NSA contractor.
Modern thought control is dependent on subliminal communication. Messages influencing key perceptions are delivered unseen, unnoticed, with minimal public awareness of what is happening or why.
For example, journalists tell us that Hugo Chavez was ‘divisive’, that Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are ‘narcissistic’, that George Galloway is ‘controversial’. But beneath their literal meaning, these adjectives communicate a hidden message: that these individuals are acceptable targets for negative media judgement; they are fair game.
The BBC has an outstanding record of misrepresenting the facts about Iran’s nuclear activities. The most egregious example of this was the ‘File on 4’ programme ‘Iran’s Nuclear Standoff’ broadcast on Radio 4 on 28 May 2013. This programme performed the remarkable trick of purporting to examine the latest intelligence on Iran’s nuclear activities, while uttering not a word about the publicly available assessments of US intelligence on the matter.
One of my favorite language shifts over the years has been the move to “corrections facilities” from “jails” and “prisons.” What makes this verbal change so noteworthy and Orwellian is that jails and prisons have moved steadily away from any focus on rehabilitation to just getting prisoners out of circulation—that is, away from anything like “corrections.” It is reminiscent of the shift from Department of War to Department of Defense back in the late 1940s, coinciding with the shift in that Department’s real mission from defense to offense and expansion (i.e., “containment”).
“A state’s appetite for collecting intelligence expands in direct relationship to the failure of its media to hold it tenaciously to account.” And the emphasis is on “tenaciously”.
The hype of public relations – Edward Bernays’ euphemism for propaganda – is now regarded as truth. The medium has become the message. Prime Minister David Cameron, himself a former PR huckster for a media asset-stripper, saw the hyped ‘The Fifth Estate’, and declared: “Benedict Cumberbatch – brilliant, fantastic piece of acting. The twitchiness and everything of Julian Assange is brilliantly portrayed.” Neither he nor Cumberbatch, nor the makers of this fiction have ever met Assange. Based on a dodgy, axe-grinding book, the DreamWorks juggernaut is a perfidious, unethical exploitation of a man fighting for his freedom, if not his life.
