NYT Editorial Slams “Disgraceful” CIA Exploitation
of Paris Attacks, But Submissive Media Role Is Key
By Glenn GreenwaldNovember 17, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Intercept" -A
truly superb New York Times editorial this morning
mercilessly shames the despicable effort by U.S. government
officials to shamelessly exploit the Paris attacks to advance
long-standing agendas. Focused on the public campaign of the CIA to
manipulate post-Paris public emotions to
demonize transparency and privacy and to demand still-greater
surveillance powers for themselves, the NYT editors begin:
It’s a wretched yet predictable ritual after
each new terrorist attack: Certain politicians and government
officials waste no time exploiting the tragedy for their own
ends. The
remarks on Monday by John Brennan, the director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, took that to a new and disgraceful
low.
The editorial, which you should really read in its
entirety, destroys most of the false, exploitative,
blame-shifting claims uttered by U.S. officials about these issues.
Because intelligence agencies knew of the attackers and received
warnings, the NYT editors explain that “the problem in
[stopping the Paris attacks] was not a lack of data, but a failure
to act on information authorities already had.” They point out that
the NSA’s mass surveillance powers to be mildly curbed by
post-Snowden reforms are ineffective and, in any event, have
not yet stopped. And most importantly, they document that
the leader of this lowly campaign, CIA chief John Brennan, has been
proven to be an inveterate liar:
It is hard to believe anything Mr. Brennan
says. Last year, he
bluntly denied that the C.I.A. had illegally hacked into the
computers of Senate staff members conducting an investigation
into the agency’s detention and torture programs when, in fact,
it did. In 2011, when he was President Obama’s top
counterterrorism adviser, he
claimed that American drone strikes had not killed any
civilians, despite
clear evidence that they had. And his boss, James Clapper
Jr., the director of national intelligence, has admitted lying
to the Senate on the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of data. Even
putting this lack of credibility aside, it’s not clear what
extra powers Mr. Brennan is seeking.
Indeed, what more powers could agencies like the
CIA, NSA, MI6 and GCHQ get? They’ve been given everything they’ve
demanded for years, no questions asked. They have virtually no
limits. Of course it’s “not clear what extra powers Mr. Brennan is
seeking.” It’s like trying to buy a Christmas gift for Paris Hilton:
what do you give to an omnipotent, terrorism-exploiting agency that
already has everything it could ever dream of having?
Space constraints likely required the NYT
editors to leave several specific CIA lines of deceit unmentioned.
To begin with, there’s literally zero evidence that the Paris
attackers used encryption. There are
reasons to believe they
may not have (siblings and people who live near each other have
things called “face-to-face communications”).
Even if they had used encryption (which, just by
the way, the
U.S. government funds and the
GOP protected in the 1990s), that would not mean we should
abolish it or give the U.S. government full backdoor access to it –
any more than face-to-face plotting means we should allow the
government to put monitors in everyone’s homes to prevent this type
of “going dark.” Silicon Valley has repeatedly said there’s no way
to build the U.S. government a “backdoor” that couldn’t also be used
by any other state or stateless organization to invade. And that’s
to say nothing of all the lies and false claims that I
documented several days ago embedded in the
Snowden-is-to-blame-for-Paris trash – a low-life propaganda
campaign which is not principally about Snowden but really about
scaring Silicon Valley out of offering encryption lest they be
viewed as ISIS-helpers.
But there’s one vital question the NYT
editors do not address: why do the CIA and other U.S. government
factions believe – accurately – that they can get away with such
blatant misleading and lying? The answer is clear: because,
particularly after a terror attack, large parts of the U.S. media
treat U.S. intelligence and military officials with the reverence
usually reserved for cult leaders, whereby their every utterance is
treated as Gospel, no dissent or contradiction is aired, zero
evidence is required to mindlessly swallow their decrees, anonymity
is often provided to shield them from accountability, and every
official assertion is equated with Truth, no matter how dubious,
speculative, evidence-free, or self-serving.
Like many people, I’ve spent years writing about
the damage done by how subservient and reverent many U.S. media
outlets are toward the government officials they pretend to
scrutinize. But not since 2003 have I witnessed anything as supine
and uncritical as the CIA-worshipping stenography that has been
puked forward this week. Even before the Paris attacks were
concluded, a huge portion of the press corps knelt in front of the
nearest official with medals on their chest or who flashes covert
status, and they’ve stayed in that pitiful position ever since.
The leading cable news networks, when they haven’t
been spewing outright
bigotry and
fear-mongering, have hosted one general and CIA official after
the next to say whatever they want without the slightest challenge.
Print journalists, without the excuse of the pressures of live TV,
have been even worse:
article after
article after
article does literally nothing other than uncritically print the
extremely dubious claims of military and intelligence officials
without including any questioning, contradiction, dissenters, or
evidence that negates those claims.
None of the facts the NYT pointed to this
morning to show Brennan is lying and misleading are esoteric or
obscure. They’re all right out in the public domain. Countless other
people have raised them. But so many journalists steadfastly exclude
all of that from their “reporting.” Especially after a terror
attack, the already sky-high journalistic worship of security
officials skyrockets. Many journalists are in pure
servant-stenography mode, not reporting and definitely not
questioning claims that emanate from the sacred mouths of these
Pentagon and CIA priests. Just look at the reports I cited to see
how extreme this obsequious behavior is. What can excuse “reporting”
like this?
This, of course, is how propaganda is cemented:
not by government officials making dubious, self-serving claims
(they’ll always be motivated to do that), but by people who play the
role of “journalist” on TV and in print acting as their
spokespeople, literally suppressing all the reasons why the
officials’ claims are so questionable if not outright false.
Kudos to the NYT editors for pulling no
punches this morning in making all this deceit manifest. But the
real culprits aren’t the government officials spewing this
manipulative tripe but the journalists who not only let them get
away with it but, so much worse, eagerly help.