Ruth Marcos makes it sound as if the DoJ did not prosecute Clapper for congressional perjury because the difficulties of perjury prosecution are insurmountable.

That isn't true. While perjury prosecutions are difficult, especially since the government must not only prove that a sworn witness gave willfully false testimony but that the false statement was material to the proceedings, in this instance Clapper's deception went to the heart of the subject matter that was being investigated by the Senate.

Moreover, Marcos ignores the fact that the Obama administration did not so much as reprimand Clapper for lying to Congress.

Ruth Marcus is offended by Greenwald calling her names, like an Obama loyalist, but proudly repeats her characterization of Snowden as "insufferable."

Yet another example, as Greenwald repeatedly reminds us, of the kind of double standard that exists in the mainstream media--one for those inside the halls of power, a completely different one for those critical of the status quo.

I've watched and listened to Snowden on many video clips. I guess I live in a different world than Ruth Marcus. To me Snowden seems like a humble, passionate, very sensible and intelligent young man.

Ruth Marcus is NOT an Obama loyalist. Fact is, any regular reader of Marcus knows that she despises the President. Marcus loathes Obama because he doesn't give due deference to Israel.

Honestly, both Marcus and Greenwald irritate me greatly, but Greenwald was in the right here. It's just that he went about it in an irritating and wrong-headed manner. He simplistically divides the world into Obama-lovers and Snowden fans. It is not that simple.

Fact is, there's a whole cadre of Neo-Cons who revile Obama and the national security whistleblowers.

It's sad to see Greenwald allying himself with Tea Party activists, even though it is for the cause of civil liberties. I doubt that these people worry about reproductive rights for women or voting rights for Blacks, though.

David Lasagna (2):
Your observation can be explained in that people who dare to challenge the power structure are "insufferable" or as others have said that he is an "egotist" who is trying to get everyone's attention.
The typical DC line is PROJECTION. They project the negative thoughts they have on others. The Republicans are best at this, but obviously it is a disease that rubs off easily on a somewhat moderate voice who must defend the power structure and their lofty role in it.
The politicians and their media supporters are insufferable and egotists (that's how they developed their careers to get where they are. There are lots of darkened pots and kettles in DC

Marcus is a tool of oppressors, and an impairment to the rule of law.

Constitutional values such as equal application of laws regardless of who breaks the law is fundamental to a constitutionally driven democratic republic such as ours.

The spread of a lack of accountability, together with an increase in immunity and impunity, is a very bad sign.

Fabucat @3 writes:

"Greenwald...went about it in an irritating and wrong-headed manner. He simplistically divides the world into Obama-lovers and Snowden fans...It's sad to see Greenwald allying himself with Tea Party activists.

WTF are you talking about? While Greenwald blasted Marcus as an Obama loyalist, his reference to "people in Washington" was a reference not to "Obama-lovers" but to the beltway MSM and its penchant to ignore the essence of a two-tiered justice system which imposes harsh criminal penalties on ordinary citizens and whistleblowers while providing our political and financial elites with impunity.

What Greenwald did was speak truth to power. That is neither "irritating" nor "wrong-headed". That anyone could associate this solid, fact-based blast at the current administration's and NSA's duplicity with the deceptive, fact-free rants of the Koch brothers funded and controlled, 'Tea Party' boggles the mind.

Can you not see the fundamental difference between valid criticisms of the current administration and GOP contrived "scandals" like Benghazi?

This sums up my feelings on this whole Snowden affair.

http://digwithin.net/2014/01/01/snowden/

Should we really trust Snowden or Greenwald?

Orangutan--

Don't know who Kevin Ryan is who wrote that blog piece you linked to, but after years of reading and listening to Greenwald, I believe he is an extremely reliable witness. He has repeatedly explained their measured release of the documents. They(Greenwald and Poitras)are attempting to be careful and thoughtful in their release of the documents in working out the best way to tell the clearest most compelling story detailing government wrongdoing. In an era of information overload and rampant attention deficit disorder their strategy seems eminently sensible to me. Sounds like they also want to study everything carefully to make sure they are not compromising legitimate security concerns.

Snowden also appears to me to be completely sincere and consistent in his actions and pronouncements.

Citing "The Risks of Trusting the Snowden Story," Orangutan @7 writes:

This sums up my feelings on this whole Snowden affair.

In the linked January 1 article, Kevin Ryan wrote:

But contrary to what is implied by Ryan, this huge discrepancy in numbers did not come from either Snowden or Greenwald. The first linked article which supplied the "in the thousands" number was a Forbes article that was quoting NSA Director Michael Hayden. The second linked article, which estimated the actual number at 1.7 million came from a Washington Post article.

Ryan's hit piece makes it appear as if Snowden and Greenwald had been the source of the discrepancy, when, it truth, the discrepancy flowed from the MSM's official source narrative.

From this false attribution, Ryan goes on to imply that Snowden's and Greenwald's statements to the effect that they carefully evaluated every document before releasing them could not be true if there were some 1.7 million documents.

The use of the word "documents" is misleading, since what Snowden captured was electronic data.

The entire Ryan hit piece amounts to a theater of the absurd. As Ryan, himself, admits, there were only 900 "documents" total that have been released. Those 900 were not released all at once, but, instead, in a series of revelations.

Ryan does not cite, and this writer is unaware of, any instance in which either Snowden or Greenwald have claimed to have vetted each and every document. It should be obvious to anyone who is not bent on an intelligence community campaign to discredit Snowden and Greenwald, that their reference to carefully evaluating before releasing pertains to the decision they made on each occasion as to whether a specific set of data ("document") should be publicly released, and not to the entire set of data that Snowden, in his capacity of a Booz Allen employee, captured.

Finally, this is not a matter of "trusting" either Snowden, Greenwald, or General Michael Hayden, for that matter. Ryan's hit piece, like so many others, entails an effort to slay the messenger in order to divert attention from the unmistakeable message--the content of Snowden's revelations that reveal not only massive NSA violations of our 4th Amendment rights but the fact that the NSA has repeatedly lied about its activities.

@Ernest -

Thank you.

Regardless of what anyone has to say about Snowden or Chelsea Manning, and the way they went about doing what they did, is irrelevant. Thats a conversation we have later. Not to mention Snowden did exactly what the Administration says you must do: go through a "legitimate" news source (another argument for another day). Snowden did everything by he beltway's own playbook and STILL he's vilified. The issue here is calling our government out on their sh*t. Since 9/11 they've had free reign on the world population, including Americans, to detain, question, and spy on anyone they like in the name of "national security" without cause, suspicion or warrant. Franklin's words have never been truer. The founding fathers would be disgusted with the power we've given to our government, the freedoms we've just wrapped and put under the tree for them to rip apart and throw away. A lot of people have died for those rights, we trample on their memory by laying down so easily. By accepting the Administrations narrative.

Anyone calling for the heads of the whistleblowers is unworthy of citizenship in a democracy.

Fabucat said @ 3:

Marcus loathes Obama because he doesn't give due deference to Israel.

I'm not a regular reader of hers. Got URL demonstrating the above?

It's sad to see Greenwald allying himself with Tea Party activists, even though it is for the cause of civil liberties. I doubt that these people worry about reproductive rights for women or voting rights for Blacks, though.

Is that something you held against, say, Dennis Kucinich for his alliance with Ron Paul against the wars (and much more)? Or is Greenwald, for some reason, being held to a different standard? Oh, and where has he "allied himself with Tea Party activists"?

Orangutan said @ 7:

This sums up my feelings on this whole Snowden affair.

http://digwithin.net/2014/01/01/snowden/

Should we really trust Snowden or Greenwald?

First, it looks like Ernest hit some of the central points that I had planned to offer in response, before I was able to get to it. But allow me to be a bit more specific in one or two aspects of the response.

The linked Kevin Ryan piece (whoever he is) asserts that the number of documents taken by Snowden is "said to be nearly two million."

"Said" by whom? Well...That text links to a Walter Pincus piece which first says "Among the roughly 1.7 million documents he walked away with...according to a senior government official with knowledge of the situation." So does that 1.7 million come from an anonymous government official (who would have an interest in discrediting Snowden/Greenwald)? I'd think so. That apparently didn't bother Ryan in the least, since he didn't bother to mention it.

But later in the very same Pincus piece, he writes: "On July 19, Greenwald told German public broadcaster ARD that Snowden in June in Hong Kong had given him and Poitras about 9,000 to 10,000 top-secret documents."

That, at least, is a sourced number (it's what Greenwald is said to have said). The 1.7 million --- which became "nearly two million" when Ryan, writing with an agenda, described it --- comes from an anonymous government source. But the implication is that an anonymous government source should be "trusted" more than either Snowden or Greenwald. Really? Why?

As Ryan himself exaggerated a questionable, unsourced "1.7 million" up to "nearly two million", he also offered some crazy formula to assert that "less than one tenth of one percent of the documents (only about 900) have actually been released to the public" ... "nearly a year after Snowden started working with Greenwald". Well, the first Snowden doc was released in late June, so six months has also been exaggerated to "nearly a year" by Ryan, it seems. (Though he could be referring to when they started working together, versus when the first documents were released via article in The Guardian and Washington Post.)

Ryan then goes on to repeat an unsourced allegation that "a deal was made in early June, 2013 between the journalists involved in this recent NSA scandal and U.S. government officials, which was then sealed by secrecy and nondisclosure agreements by all parties involved." Independently verifiable evidence for that extraordinary claim? Apparently none. But we should trust Ryan? Really? Why?

Finally, he picks up on the allegations made by Mark Ames and Sibel Edmonds (both folks I generally admire) that the docs have been “privatized” by Paypal founder Pierre Omidyar’s hiring of Greenwald to head up a new media outlet. There are certainly questions about disclosure and conflicts of interest that need to be answered about that new outlet, but describing it as having “privatized” the Snowden leaks has always seemed patently absurd to me, given the number of outlets where the docs have been released across the globe and where they are still being released. (Remember, WaPo itself is said to have access to thousands of them through Barton Gellman, for example.)

The response, says Ryan (picking up from both Ames and Edmonds) must be to “immediately release all of the stolen documents”. While it’s up to Greenwald (and the other journalists who have access to the documents), that call has always been similarly absurd to me. If, in fact, there is sensitive information in those docs which could harm either individuals or (actual) national security, it would be extraordinarily irresponsible for any journalist to simply release the docs, as is, into the wild. Let’s say they include the names of important intelligence assets in foreign countries who would be killed if they were exposed. Should those docs be released anyway? As a journalist --- one who would be delighted to receive such documents to report on them --- my answer would be no, at least not without having such information redacted first. Such docs should be carefully vetted, researched and reported on, before being simply released.

As far as I can tell, that is exactly what Greenwald and dozens of other journalists have been doing since gaining access to those documents.

So, while you know I’m a fan of yours, Orangutan, I can’t join you in praise of Ryan’s inconsistent, inaccurate, unverifiable and, at times, patently irresponsible take on the situation.

As to “trusting” Snowden or Greenwald, while I haven’t come across anything from either of them that would give me reason to not trust them, I make a habit of not trusting anyone. Luckily, given the documents being released, I don’t have to trust either of them. I can read the evidence and the sourced reporting for myself. No “trust” is actually necessary here, as should be the case in any good reporting.

James Corbett: Interview 799 – Questioning the Snowden Story with Kevin Ryan

Today we are joined once again by Kevin Ryan of DigWithin.net to discuss his new article, “The Risks of Trusting the Snowden Story.” We talk about the questions we should all be asking about the Snowden affair and the way it is being reported, and Ryan outlines the reasons that the documents should be released in their entirety.

http://www.corbettreport...n-story-with-kevin-ryan/

Kevin Ryan: http://www.ultruth.com/Kevin_Ryan.htm

http://www.amazon.com/An...e-Suspects/dp/1489507833

I don't or try not to take anything personally, I just like the pursuit of truth and justice. Kevin Ryan is a whistleblower himself who lost his job because of it.

The author and social critic Naomi Wolf wrote a couple of articles back in June, in which she suggested some reasons to be cautious of Edward Snowden and his revelations. You can read the articles on her website, here:

"My creeping concern that the NSA leaker is not who he purports to be …":
http://naomiwolf.org/201...t-who-he-purports-to-be/

"Some aspects of Snowden’s presentation that I find worth further inquiry – an update":
http://naomiwolf.org/201...rther-inquiry-an-update/

I haven't made up my mind either way, but I'm keeping an open mind on the issue as it unfolds.

[ED NOTE: Commercial spam deleted. - BF ]

Re Orangutan @13 & 14.

I, like Brad, respect, and often have agreed with, many of the comments you have posted at this site over the years. But, I think, in this instance, you've allowed unsupported "suspicions" to supersede substantive evidence.

None of the links you have provided answer any of the evidence-based objections either Brad or I leveled @9 & 12 with respect to Kevin Ryan's fact-free blast.

While I do recognize that, as a self-described "9/11 Truther," your admiration for Ryan is grounded upon Ryan's public questioning of the official NIST report with respect to the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings --- public questioning that cost Ryan his position as the Site Manager for Environmental Health Laboratories --- you should not overlook the fact that Ryan's background in chemistry does not mean he is qualified to render an psychological assessment as to what motivated both Snowden and Greenwald to do what they did.

While I have the utmost respect for Naomi Wolf, her piece, My creeping concern that the NSA leaker is not who he purports to be, which was written early on, while Snowden was still in Hong Kong, does not offer anything more than petty musings to support her unfounded suspicions, derived from nothing more than Greenwald's initial, secretly recorded interview of Snowden.

Her complaint is that Snowden is too articulate. "He is not struggling for words...Rather he appears to be transmitting whole paragraphs smoothly, without stumbling." She is disturbed that, unlike Julian Assange, Snowden did not have a lawyer present for the Greenwald interview --- a point that ignores that Greenwald is a lawyer.

The context of Wolf's petty critique is a poorly articulated conspiracy speculation --- as opposed to "theory" which must be based on actual evidence --- to the effect that Snowden is an NSA double agent.

That poorly articulated speculation is contained in Wolf's musing:

Yeah, right, Naomi! That's why that "Police State" has gone to such extraordinary lengths to conceal these programs, and why it has reacted so harshly towards every whistleblower (e.g. William Binney, Thomas Drake) who has dared to so much as reveal even minor aspects of its Orwellian surveillance activities).

It is one thing to, as you write @12, "be cautious of Edward Snowden;" quite another to dismiss the verifiable evidence contained in the data he released based upon nothing more than paranoid, fact-free musings.

Orangutan @14--

1. Naomi Wolf wrote those blog pieces soon after Snowden became a public figure. At least some of her questions(like exactly why he chose Hong Kong) have been answered since then.

2. While I generally think it's hard to be too paranoid given the nature of our surveillance state, for me, she, nevertheless, comes off as sounding a little too paranoid. She writes like she's trapped in the movie The President's Analyst and has become so paranoid(from having seen so much shit worthy of paranoia) she just can't believe anything's what it appears to be.

3. Thus she herself comes off sounding a little crazy. On the one hand she's suspicious of Snowden because he knows his stuff and speaks so well. Rather than taking what appears to be an extremely thoughtful young fellow at face value, it causes her concern that he really knows his shit and is articulate about it. To her this command of self and topic seems unusual in a whistleblower and thus cause for concern.

On the other hand she's simultaneously suspicious cuz in her mind HE'S NOT SMART about not having a lawyer at his side every second. This to her seems, again, uncharacteristic of how a real whistleblower(she sites Assange) would behave.

So Snowden is both too smart and not smart enough. And the reason for that, she's afraid, is because maybe he's not who he says he is.

For my money the subsequent six months have shown us that Snowden is exactly who he says he is.

4. The really weird thing about Naomi Wolf's piece is that near the end she alludes to having a lot of information about ongoing illegal activities here in the U.S. that she has become privy to but is not going to( she says,can't) share with us. Maybe she's a little confused about Snowden because she's already compromised her own integrity a bit.

Ernie--

It's Naomi Wolf, not Klein.

Thanks, David for catching my careless error. You are quite correct. It is "Wolf" and not "Klein." Both excellent writers but I listed the wrong Naomi. Mea Culpa!

Fortunately, I have the ability to edit my comments, so I've made the much needed correction.

Orangutan -

Glenn responds to the latest round of smears (as forwarded by Kevin Ryan and others) today right here: http://utdocuments.blogs...h-reader-over-first.html

Hopefully his answers are responses to your concerns.

Orangutan -

I also should have noted in my original response above (as Greenwald again does in his latest response, linked above) that his source, Edward Snowden, insisted that all documents not be simply released in full to the public, but rather, vetted and reported on. Staying faithful to promises made to a source is a central tenet of legitimate journalism, and one that those calling for Greenwald to release all documents willy-nilly --- no matter what actual real-world harm that might cause, and no matter whether it is a total violation of a key agreement with his source --- seem to ignore for some bizarre reason.

As Glenn has discussed that point previously, I should have mentioned it in my original response, but had forgotten that until reading his latest response to some of the same charges/smears.

Ruth Marcus proves her bona fides as exactly the sort of power loyalist that Greenwald accuses her of being, with her repeated assertion that Snowden is "insufferable". These ridiculous character attacks (Snowden is insufferable, Greenwald is arrogant, Al Gore is fat…etc.) are desperate attempts by people that have nothing of substance to bolster their inane positions. Globally important and truly profound and dangerous revelations about the NSA have come to light but Ruth Marcus, instead of being concerned about the threat to our way of life, wants us to worry about whether Edward Snowden is a pleasing person to sip a martini with. It is not obvious whether this behavior is conscious on her part or just ingrained, but clearly she is desperate to not see the main point about power corruption and so, like many others, wanders off into thoughts about completely trivial irrelevancies. She makes the point proudly near the end that she still thinks he's insufferable! She's sticking with it! hooray!….But, who cares? Compared to the real issues at hand, Edward Snowden's personality is not important.

Of course, even she, from her seat in the hub of the DC power structure, can't help but see a little bit of the problem here so,
straining to seem reasonable and generous she muses a soft lament about where Mr. Snowden went wrong: if only he had not exposed so much information - then she could forgive him - but alas she is not able to. To bolster this point she uses an old technique: she makes something up that didn't happen! She says Snowden took all this info and just "spilled it out there". Of course Snowden, in reality, did exactly the opposite. (BTW,Ms. Marcus does not reveal which of the NSA crimes he should have withheld information about - which ones it would be fine for the NSA to continue operating in secret)

Secrets for Sale?: The Greenwald/Omidyar/NSA connection

http://youtu.be/4OCs-x8N47A

I don't hear much from Wikileaks Julian Assange anymore either, after his media saturation that was similar to the attention Edward Snowden originally got to kick things off. These corporate sponsored whistleblowers often tell us what we already know and get the most media attention as well.

RIP to Aaron Swartz, Gary Caradori, Gary Webb, Danny Casolaro, Sean Hoare, Mike Connell, Dr. David Kelly, Dr. David Graham, Tracy Lawrence, Matthew Simmons, Col. James E. Sabow, Barry Jennings and countless others.

Long Live Investigative Journalism.

We’ve Known for Some Time that the NSA Is Spying On Congress
http://www.washingtonsbl.../01/spying-congress.html

Greenwald Responds to Critics, Rejects Conspiracism
http://digwithin.net/2014/01/12/greenwald/