Category Archives: Opinion

There is no arm’s-length solution for Syria

o13-iconFrederic C. Hof writes: Geneva II was an attempt to fill that which nature abhors: a vacuum. Yet the vast emptiness of US policy toward Syria swallowed the effort itself, making it seem tiny, silly, and futile. President Bashar al-Assad’s regime calculated that it could treat the initiative with contempt. Although the opposition delegation in Geneva acted with competence and dignity, it could not alter or avoid facts on the ground; it could not dispel the belief on the part of the regime, Tehran, and Moscow that there is indeed a military solution for the Syrian crisis, a solution that is very much a work in progress.

The supposed absence of a military remedy to Syria’s travails has been the central talking point of a strategy-free approach to the crisis by the West, led—if that is the proper word—by the United States. The regime, Russia, and Iran may well be wrong that the uprising against crime family rule can be beaten by force of arms. Yet the West’s incantation to the contrary is by no means the product of rigorous, dispassionate analysis. Rather the United States and its allies simply have no appetite for trying seriously to affect the military situation inside Syria. The West has offered no meaningful counter to those who supply strategic arms, inject foreign fighters, and facilitate war crimes and crimes against humanity, all in an attempt to win a war outright. Ergo there is no military solution. It is as if the fact that one chooses not to play somehow means that the game itself does not exist.

That one side thinks it can win a battlefield decision gives it a perfectly logical sense of what a diplomatic outcome should entail: the other (losing) side suing for peace. The West, going into Geneva II, aimed to break new ground in the theory and practice of diplomacy: the party prevailing on the battlefield should do the decent thing and yield power. The self-serving doctrine of no military solution for Syria was even projected onto Russia in the hope that Moscow would prevail on its murderous client to stop shooting and graciously step aside. US leaders now voice disappointment in Russia’s Geneva II performance, suggesting a degree of surprise. One might just as usefully express shock over the dietary habits of the hyena.

Rather than speciously proclaiming the impossibility of a military decision in Syria, the administration might instead argue that US interests are not engaged by what happens in Syria; at least not to the extent that a serious effort to affect the military situation would be merited. One could argue that although regime atrocities against civilians easily represent the premier human rights abomination of the twenty-first century, there are similar (albeit smaller scale) abuses around the globe, so on what basis would one intervene in one place and not others? One could maintain that the only sort of military gesture that would really matter in Syria would be the Iraq-like invasion and occupation of the country. One could warn that even a military mission aimed precisely at killing the delivery systems that drop barrel bombs and other explosives on the defenseless would put the United States on a slippery slope to yet another Middle Eastern war.

Indeed, all of these arguments—or excuses for inaction—have already been made, some quite explicitly by President Barack Obama. One of his top aides reportedly even advanced the argument that Syria would be a wonderful place for Iran to have a bloody, drawn-out, Vietnam-like experience: a morality-free proposition offering Syrians a twist on the Will Rogers observation that, “Anything’s funny as long as it’s happening to someone else.” Perversely, however, the hand-wringing and excuse-making—the transformation of “never again” to “well, maybe just this once”—has made a bad situation incalculably worse and is now forcing the administration to reconsider the “no military solution” cop-out and its corollaries. [Continue reading…]

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It’s time to break up the NSA

o13-iconBruce Schneier writes: The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission — protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies — has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era.

Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the military’s cyberwar wing, in the same location and under the same commander, expanded the NSA’s power. The result is an agency that prioritizes intelligence gathering over security, and that’s increasingly putting us all at risk. It’s time we thought about breaking up the National Security Agency.

Broadly speaking, three types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding how to divide up the NSA’s missions. [Continue reading…]

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If climate change is a ‘weapon of mass destruction,’ why promote carbon proliferation?

o13-iconZoë Carpenter writes: On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry delivered a call for climate action that attracted considerable attention because of its forcefulness. Speaking in Jakarta, Indonesia, Kerry rebuked climate deniers, referring to them as “a tiny minority of shoddy scientists…and extreme ideologues.” He described the economic costs and catastrophic implications of inaction. Most strikingly, he suggested that climate change is “the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”

“It doesn’t keep us safe if the United States secures its nuclear arsenal, while other countries fail to prevent theirs from falling into the hands of terrorists,” Kerry said. Similarly, a serious response to climate change requires that all countries break their fossil fuel addiction. “At the end of the day, emissions coming from anywhere in the world threaten the future for people everywhere in the world,” Kerry said.

Kerry’s nuclear analogy is useful for understanding the Obama’s administration’s climate agenda — and its glaring omission. The plan is built on three pillars: curbing domestic carbon pollution (or, securing our own nuclear arsenal), preparing for the impacts of climate change (building fallout shelters) and leading efforts to address climate change internationally (encouraging disarmament.)

All of that nonproliferation work would be undercut if the US sold weapons-grade uranium to the countries it was asking not to build a bomb. In effect, that is what the United States is doing with fossil fuels. [Continue reading…]

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The Iran I saw — in 781 days in Evin Prison

o13-iconJosh Fattal, who along with his friends Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd, was imprisoned in Evin Prison alongside Iranian political prisoners, writes: Nine months into my detention, my interrogators led me blindfolded out of my cell to meet a man they described mysteriously as a “foreign diplomat from this region.” Awaiting Shane, Sarah and me in a prison office was Salem Ismaeli, an Omani businessman and envoy of Sultan Qaboos bin Said. He enveloped us in his flowing robes as he introduced himself, and I still remember how sweetly he smelled of sandalwood. He gave us expensive watches and told us his mission was to get the United States and Iran to talk to each other about our release.

It took more than a year for Salem to deliver us to freedom and the waiting arms of our families on the tarmac in Muscat. The Associated Press has since reported that Oman’s mediation led to direct talks between U.S. and Iranian officials that paved the way for last November’s interim accord to freeze parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from some economic sanctions.

With talks between Iran and six world powers on a permanent accord resuming this week, some voices in Congress and some supporters of Israel continue to warn against engagement with Iran and to press for even tougher sanctions. The Iran that I glimpsed under my blindfold, heard in the supportive whispers on my prison hallway and tasted in the sweet candies provided by my hall mates convinces me this stance is misguided.

It is time to end the mutual hostility for good. A permanent accord that limits Iran’s nuclear capabilities in exchange for a lifting of sanctions would make my relatives in Israel safer. It would make my family in the United States safer. And it would strengthen the hand of the brave Iranians I met in the dark corridors of Evin Prison in their continuing struggle for democracy.

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We must give the land back: America’s brutality toward Native Americans continues today

o13-iconSteven Salaita: I write often about liberating Palestine from Israeli occupation, a habit that evokes passionate response. I have yet to encounter a response that persuades me to abandon the commitment to Palestinian liberation.

I have, however, encountered responses that I consider worthy of close assessment, particularly those that transport questions of colonization to the North American continent. You see, there is a particular defense of Zionism that precedes the existence of Israel by hundreds of years.

Here is a rough sketch of that defense: Allowing a Palestinian right of return or redressing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1947-49 is ludicrous. Look what happened to the Native Americans. Is the United States supposed to return the country to them?

Israeli historian Benny Morris puts it this way: “Even the great American democracy couldn’t come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds.”

This reasoning suggests a finality to the past, an affirmation of tragedy trapped in the immutability of linear time. Its logic is terribly cliché, a peculiar form of common sense always taken up, everywhere, by the beneficiaries of colonial power.

The problems with invoking Native American genocide to rationalize Palestinian dispossession are legion. The most noteworthy problem speaks to the unresolved detritus of American history: Natives aren’t objects of the past; they are living communities whose numbers are growing.

It’s rarely a good idea to ask rhetorical questions that have literal answers. Yes, the United States absolutely should return stolen land to the Indians. That’s precisely what its treaty obligations require it to do. [Continue reading…]

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Why it’s a good time to be a dictator like Kim Jong-un

o13-iconJonathan Freedland writes: In the early 1990s, when I was in my infancy as a reporter, the dominant international story was the war in the Balkans. Several of my peers made their names covering that war and were deeply affected by it. What motivated at least a few of them was not the desire simply to be on the front page or lead the evening news, but a passionate urge to let the world know what was happening. Several believed that, if only the world could see what they could see in Bosnia, then it would act.

Perhaps the authors of the latest UN report into human rights in North Korea felt a similar motivation. They can be satisfied that, thanks to their 372-page study, no one now can claim to be ignorant of the horrors committed in that place. They are laid out in stomach-turning detail: the torture, the deliberate starvation, the executions committed in a network of secret prison camps. The individual cases break the heart: the seven-year-old girl beaten to death over a few extra grains of food; the boy whose finger was chopped off for accidentally dropping a sewing machine in the factory where he was forced to work; and, most shocking of all, the mother forced to drown her just-born baby in a bowl of water.

The report’s lead author, like those old journalistic colleagues of mine, clearly hopes that now that the evidence is laid out, action will follow. “Now the international community does know,” says retired Australian judge Michael Kirby. “There will be no excusing a failure of action because we didn’t know. It’s too long now. The suffering and the tears of the people of North Korea demand action.”

But how confident can Kirby be that action will follow? Any UN plan – even a referral of North Korea to the International Criminal Court – would hit the immediate obstacle of a Chinese veto in the security council. (China, after all, is implicated in North Korea’s horrors: when people somehow manage to escape across the border, China’s policy is to hand them straight back.)

It’s a similar story in Syria. Less than a month has passed since a report laid out comprehensive evidence of the suffering of detainees at the hands of the Assad regime. That report, like the latest one on North Korea, detailed murder through starvation, beatings and torture – complete with photographs of emaciated bodies. Then, as now, the authors noted chilling echoes of the Nazi crimes of the 1940s. Yet did that report spark a worldwide demand for action, with demonstrations outside parliaments and presidential palaces? It did not. Perhaps mindful that any call for UN action would be blocked by a Russian veto, the chief response was a global shrug. [Continue reading…]

A global shrug, or more specifically a Western shrug?

The intervention in the Balkans had perhaps more to do with the fact that the atrocities were taking place inside Europe, than it was a product of the “responsibility to protect”. There was an enormous reluctance to intervene but the tipping point came when Europe appeared to be witnessing what it had pledged it would never witness again: scenes reminiscent of the Holocaust. And even at such a juncture, Europe wasn’t willing to act without the U.S. taking the lead.

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John Kerry’s Mideast peace deal is a disaster

o13-iconGideon Levy writes: If United States Secretary of State John Kerry fails in his efforts, it will be a disaster; if he succeeds, it will be an even greater disaster. Failure is liable to herald what New York Times analyst Thomas Friedman has called “the Brussels intifada,” a third intifada that won’t involve bombings and violence but sanctions and international boycotts of Israel. Failure will push the Palestinians back to the United Nations, where even the U.S. may remove its automatic and blind veto umbrella that has always protected Israel there. In the end, failure is also liable to reignite the fire of rebellion in the territories.

But success would be even more ominous. Kerry is not an honest broker, because the U.S. cannot be one − not even the U.S. of President Barack Obama, as disappointing as that is. The absolute ally of one side can never be a fair intermediary, not in business and not in diplomacy. An ally that cannot exploit the dependence of its protectorate to advance a fair agreement can’t achieve anything that will resolve the ultimate problems.

Instead, the name of the game now is exploiting the weakness of the Palestinian Authority. With the Arab world fighting its own regimes and the Western world tired of this endless conflict, the Palestinians are left alone to their fate. America is trying to bring them to their knees and subdue them. If it succeeds, it will be a disaster. [Continue reading…]

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Going ‘green’ is more than shopping at Whole Foods and driving a Prius

o13-iconMarc Bamuthi Joseph writes: As environmentalism goes mainstream, corporations are marketing the word “green” as a panacea for the world’s climate crisis. Today the word describes a set of prescribed, mostly consumerist actions: buy local, organic and fresh; go vegan; eat in season; skip the elevator, take the stairs. “Green” has come to mean shopping at Whole Foods and possessing a Prius. Meanwhile, leading corporate polluters like BP and ExxonMobil place commercials on CNN advertising their “green” practices.

It should come as no surprise, then, that “green” lifestyles don’t resonate with low-income communities; being “green” involves a set of behaviors that are financially or culturally inaccessible to millions of Americans. This presents a major problem for the environmental movement. If it is going to be successful, environmentalism simply cannot afford to be demographically segregated or isolated from the pathos of economic disparity.

The environmental movement needs to do a better job of connecting issues of race, class, poverty and sustainability; in short, it has to become a broader social movement. And people of color need visibility in the movement. By that, I don’t mean Barack Obama presiding over environmental policy from the White House or Lisa Jackson heading the Environmental Protection Agency during Obama’s first term. I mean the recognition that sustainable survival practices in poor communities are just as significant as solar panels and LED lights. Ultimately this is where the citizenry of the planet can and must come together in order to move forward. [Continue reading…]

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Did the NSA really help spy on U.S. lawyers?

o13-iconOrin Kerr writes: The front page of the Sunday New York Times features a new Snowden-based story that looks, at first blush, like a really big deal. Authored by James Risen and Laura Poitras, the story opens with considerable drama by suggesting that the NSA is spying on U.S. lawyers:

The list of those caught up in the global surveillance net cast by the National Security Agency and its overseas partners, from social media users to foreign heads of state, now includes another entry: American lawyers.

A top-secret document, obtained by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, shows that an American law firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States. The disclosure offers a rare glimpse of a specific instance in which Americans were ensnared by the eavesdroppers, and is of particular interest because lawyers in the United States with clients overseas have expressed growing concern that their confidential communications could be compromised by such surveillance.

Sounds like the NSA helped spy on U.S. lawyers, right? Well, not so fast. If you unpack the story and ignore the opening spin, the story ends up delivering considerably less than it promises.
[…]
As I understand it, the Times story is based on a short entry in an NSA internal bulletin celebrating the liaison office’s accomplishment. It reports that the liaison helped clear up a legal issue, and that it all ended well, as the Australians ended up giving useful intel to the U.S. But because it’s just an internal bulletin, it doesn’t tell us what we want to know: What advice was provided, and whether the intel was related to the legal issue. Without that information, it’s hard to know if there’s a significant story here. [Continue reading…]

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Cecily McMillan’s Occupy trial is a huge test of U.S. civil liberties. Will they survive?

o13-iconChase Madar writes: The US constitution’s Bill of Rights is envied by much of the English-speaking world, even by people otherwise not enthralled by The American Way Of Life. Its fundamental liberties – freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom from warrantless search – are a mighty bulwark against overweening state power, to be sure.

But what are these rights actually worth in the United States these days?

Ask Cecily McMillan, a 25-year-old student and activist who was arrested two years ago during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan. Seized by police, she was beaten black and blue on her ribs and arms until she went into a seizure. When she felt her right breast grabbed from behind, McMillan instinctively threw an elbow, catching a cop under the eye, and that is why she is being prosecuted for assaulting a police officer, a class D felony with a possible seven-year prison term. Her trial began this week.

McMillan is one of over 700 protestors arrested in the course of Occupy Wall Street’s mass mobilization, which began with hopes of radical change and ended in an orgy of police misconduct. According to a scrupulously detailed report (pdf) issued by the NYU School of Law and Fordham Law School, the NYPD routinely wielded excessive force with batons, pepper spray, scooters and horses to crush the nascent movement. And then there were the arrests, often arbitrary, gratuitous and illegal, with most charges later dismissed. McMillan’s is the last Occupy case to be tried, and how the court rules will provide a clear window into whether public assembly stays a basic right or becomes a criminal activity. [Continue reading…]

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New York Times op-ed ‘The Dustbowl Returns’ never mentions climate change

o13-iconJoe Romm writes: In yet another example of how the New York Times is mis-covering the story of the century, it published an entire op-ed on the return of the Dust Bowl with no mention whatsoever of climate change.

It stands in sharp contrast to the coverage of the connection between climate change and extreme weather other leading news outlets and science journals. Consider the BBC’s Sunday article on the epic deluges hitting the UK, “Met Office: Evidence ‘suggests climate change link to storms’.” Consider the journal Nature, which back in 2011 asked me to write an article on the link between climate change and “Dust-bowlification”…

As James Hansen told me two weeks ago, “Increasingly intense droughts in California, all of the Southwest, and even into the Midwest have everything to do with human-made climate change.” [Continue reading…]

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The Old Testament’s made-up camels are a problem for Zionism

o13-iconAndrew Brown writes: There are 21 references to camels in the first books of the Bible, and now we know they are all made up.

Some of them are quite startlingly verisimilitudinous, such as the story of Abraham’s servant finding a wife for Isaac in Genesis 24: “Then the servant left, taking with him 10 of his master’s camels loaded with all kinds of good things from his master. He set out for Aram Naharaim and made his way to the town of Nahor. He made the camels kneel down near the well outside the town; it was towards evening, the time the women go out to draw water.”

But these camels are made up, all 10 of them. Two Israeli archaeozoologists have sifted through a site just north of modern Eilat looking for camel bones, which can be dated by radio carbon.

None of the domesticated camel bones they found date from earlier than around 930BC – about 1,500 years after the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis are supposed to have taken place. Whoever put the camels into the story of Abraham and Isaac might as well have improved the story of Little Red Riding Hood by having her ride up to Granny’s in an SUV. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt: Reprisals for revolutionaries

o13-iconDavid Wolman writes: During his first two weeks in Cairo’s notorious Tora Prison, Ahmed Maher was able to smuggle out a few letters that he had scribbled on toilet paper. Maher is the soft-spoken 33-year-old civil engineer who co-founded the April 6 Youth Movement and was a crucial behind-the-scenes operator during the 2011 protests that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak three years ago today. Maher has now been in prison for 72 days. His family is having difficulty getting information about his wellbeing, although he has occasionally dictated letters to visitors, including this one, published last week by the Washington Post, and this one, sent to me yesterday.

In one of his earlier messages, Maher wrote of conditions in the jail, joking that his food, at least, would stay well-preserved. “I don’t think there is a refrigerator anywhere colder than this cell.” For the most part, however, his letters have been scathing indictments of Egypt’s military and warned of catastrophic social unrest if the “police state” continues its campaign to dismantle the groups that came together for the 2011 Revolution.

That dismantling has gone largely unnoticed by the West. Outside of Egypt, news about the country suggests a binary struggle. On one side: the Muslim Brotherhood, angered over the ouster of President Mohammad Morsi and pushing back against oppression, real or perceived. On the other side: The military-led government of Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who appears poised to run for president. [Continue reading…]

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Orwell was hailed a hero for fighting in Spain. Today he’d be guilty of terrorism

o13-iconGeorge Monbiot writes: If George Orwell and Laurie Lee were to return [to Britain] from the Spanish civil war today, they would be arrested under section five of the Terrorism Act 2006. If convicted of fighting abroad with a “political, ideological, religious or racial motive” – a charge they would find hard to contest – they would face a maximum sentence of life in prison. That they were fighting to defend an elected government against a fascist rebellion would have no bearing on the case. They would go down as terrorists.

As it happens, the British government did threaten people leaving the country to join the International Brigades, by reviving the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870. In 1937 it warned that anyone volunteering to fight in Spain would be “liable on conviction to imprisonment up to two years”. This was consistent with its policy of non-intervention, which even Winston Churchill, initially a supporter, came to see as “an elaborate system of official humbug”. Britain, whose diplomatic service and military command were riddled with fascist sympathisers, helped to block munitions and support for the Republican government, while ignoring Italian and German deployments on Franco’s side.

But the act was unworkable, and never used – unlike the Crown Prosecution Service’s far graver threat to British citizens fighting in Syria. In January 16 people were arrested on terror charges after returning from Syria. Seven others are already awaiting trial. Sue Hemming, the CPS head of counter-terrorism, explained last week that “potentially it’s an offence to go out and get involved in a conflict, however loathsome you think the people on the other side are … We will apply the law robustly”.

People fighting against forces that run a system of industrialised torture and murder and are systematically destroying entire communities could be banged up for life for their pains. Is this any fairer than imprisoning Orwell would have been? [Continue reading…]

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Has AIPAC lost its mojo?

o13-iconMehdi Hasan asks: Is a lobby group famed for its ability to move bills, spike nominations and keep legislators in line now in danger of looking weak and ineffectual? Consider the evidence of the past year. Exhibit A: Chuck Hagel. In January 2013, the independent-minded Republican senator from Nebraska was tapped by Obama to become his second-term defence secretary. Pro-Israel activists quickly uncovered a long list of anti-Israel remarks made by Hagel, including his warning in a 2010 speech to a university audience that Israel risked “becoming an apartheid state”.

In previous years, Aipac would have led the charge against Hagel, but this time it stayed silent. “Aipac does not take positions on presidential nominations,” its spokesman Marshall Wittman insisted. Hagel was (narrowly) confirmed by the Senate the following month.

Exhibit B: Syria. In September 2013, Aipac despatched 250 officials and activists to Capitol Hill to persuade members of Congress to pass resolutions authorising US air strikes on Syria. “Aipac to go all out on Syria” was the Politico headline; the Huffington Post went with “Inside Aipac’s Syria blitz”. And yet, although it held 300-plus meetings with politicians, the resolutions didn’t pass; the air strikes didn’t happen.

Exhibit C: Iran. Despite President Obama pushing for a diplomatic solution to the row over Tehran’s nuclear programme, Aipac is keener on a more confrontational approach. Between December 2013 and last month, a bipartisan bill proposing tough new sanctions on Iran, and calling on the US to back any future Israeli air strikes on the Islamic Republic, went from having 27 co-sponsors in the Senate to 59 – and threatened to derail Obama’s negotiations with Tehran. [Continue reading…]

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One day, it will be an Alawite who finally kills Assad

o13-iconAboud Dandachi writes: The regime’s supporters want someone to execute the war efficiently and win it decisively, something Bashar has utterly failed to do despite massive foreign backing from Hizbollah, Iran and Russia.

As the war grinds on, there is an increasing sense of anger towards a man many see as being out of his depths. Whereas Winston Churchill would be out and about visiting parts of the UK hit by Germany bombing raids, Bashar’s continued isolation and seclusion from the other world is as much about protecting him from his own Alawites as it is from attempts on his life by the opposition.

Of course the Geneva talks failed! Waleed Muallem and Buthaina Shaaban et al would have been lynched by the regime’s own supporters among the delegation if they had uttered so much as a compromising word, let alone discussed any deal to transition to shared power. One does not share power with “takfiris”. In the absence of a clear and decisive military victory by one side over the other, the only way to end the war in Syria would have been a political settlement. Both are outcomes Bashar Assad cannot possibly deliver on. Trapped by his own rhetoric, he is doomed to continue pursuing a course of action which has no hope of ending in a triumph for the regime.

As Alawites continue to die in their thousands, expended by a president who regards them as expendable as rounds of ammunition or liters of tank fuel, as increasingly barbaric barrel bombings and starvation tactics fail to bring the rest of the country under heel once again, Assad’s position will become increasingly untenable among his own constituency. [Continue reading…]

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How much will Glenn Greenwald shape the future of First Look Media?

o13-iconLloyd Grove writes: [S]ince last fall the pugnacious Greenwald — constantly making television appearance by satellite from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he lives with his domestic partner, David Miranda — has seemed to be the camera-ready face of First Look Media. [Editorial strategist Eric] Bates, however, said that’s all wrong.

“I think the way the news of the founding of it got leaked led to that misperception, because every time you saw the initial headlines for months, it was a ‘Glenn Greenwald-led organization funded by Pierre Omidyar,’ as if Pierre was simply writing the checks,” Bates told me. “And I think we’ve done a better job of making it clear that’s just not the case… Our ambitions and aspirations are much broader.” Indeed, Bates described the $250 million being spent by the press-shy Omidyar — whose personal fortune is estimated at $9 billion — as an “initial” investment.

But the question is: how much top-flight talent can they recruit if Greenwald remains the organization’s apparent front man?

Greenwald and Scahill, especially, have positioned themselves as fearless warriors against “modern establishment journalism” as practiced by mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times and NBC News (on which Greenwald engaged in a memorable brawl over Snowden with Meet The Press host David Gregory).

At last summer’s 2013 Socialism Conference in Chicago, Scahill spoke of “lapdog stenographers posing as journalists,” prompting cheers from the audience, and Greenwald inveighed against “the corruption of American journalism,” “actors who play the role of journalists on TV,” and even former Times executive editor Bill Keller, who “defines good journalism by how much you please the people in power you’re covering.”

That would have come as news to Keller. who in a December 2005 showdown at the Oval Office defied President Bush and his demand that the Times not publish an exposé of the NSA’s warrantless electronic eavesdropping program targeting people inside the United States. The story — by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau — earned Keller the Bush White House sobriquet of “traitor” and was a worthy predecessor to Greenwald’s NSA/Snowden scoops last June in The Guardian, for which Greenwald and Poitras are on the short list for a prestigious George Polk Award.

Some mainstream journalists who would otherwise be logical recruits to work on national security issues with Greenwald & Co. — such as the Times’s Risen, who didn’t respond to my voicemail message, or The New Yorker’s Amy Davison and The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman, who declined to comment for this story — haven’t signed on with First Look, at least not so far. Perhaps they’re loath to identify themselves with a worldview that leaves so little room for nuance. [Continue reading…]

Let’s suspend the question about the definition of “top-flight talent.” What will be much more significant is whether Greenwald’s presence has the effect of producing a lack of editorial diversity.

In its mission statement, The Intercept says: “The editorial independence of our journalists will be guaranteed.” Take it as given that this means independence from the usual suspects — big government, the national security state, and the corporate media — but how much independence will these journalists have from each other?

There don’t need to be any editorial litmus tests applied in the hiring process to still end up with the same result: group think, or a tendency moving in that direction, that is simply the effect of like attracting like.

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Why does America send so many stupid, unqualified hacks overseas?

o13-iconJames Bruno writes: When hotel magnate George Tsunis, Obama’s nominee for Oslo, met with the Senate last month, he made clear that he didn’t know that Norway was a constitutional monarchy and wrongly stated that one of the ruling coalition political parties was a hate-spewing “fringe element.” Another of the president’s picks, Colleen Bell, who is headed to Budapest, could not answer questions about the United States’ strategic interests in Hungary. But could the president really expect that she’d be an expert on the region? Her previous gig was as a producer for the TV soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. She stumbled through responses to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) like, well, a soap opera star, expounding on world peace. When the whole awkward exchange concluded, the senator grinned. “I have no more questions for this incredibly highly qualified group of nominees,” McCain said sarcastically.

For the purposes of comparison, Norway’s ambassador to the Washington is a 31-year Foreign Ministry veteran. Hungary’s ambassador is an economist who worked at the International Monetary Fund for 27 years.

The resumé imbalance, of course, owes to a simple fact: The United States is the only industrialized country to award diplomatic posts as political spoils, often to wealthy campaign contributors in an outmoded system that rivals the patronage practices of banana republics, dictatorships and two-bit monarchies. [Continue reading…]

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