More Lies From Glenn Greenwald - Update: And an Undisclosed Conflict of Interest
Advocate for anarchy Glenn Greenwald is interviewed in Truth-Out today, and yes — he’s still lying about his partner David Miranda being “denied” a lawyer during his detention at Heathrow Airport: Exclusive Glenn Greenwald Interview: ‘I Won’t Be Kept Out of My Country for Doing Journalism!’
Note that the fawning Truth-Out interviewer seems to believe US Miranda warning laws apply in the UK — and Greenwald does nothing to disabuse him of it.
Jonathan Franklin: Your partner, David Miranda, was detained and held at Heathrow airport for 9 hours; all his electronics were taken away, and he was interrogated about your reporting on the NSA. What was the message the US/UK governments were trying to send you by detaining David Miranda?
Glenn Greenwald: That if we continue to report on what the NSA and [the UK surveillance agency] GCHQ are doing, they will continue to target us for all sorts of retribution.
JF: Puts a different meaning to the term “Miranda” warning, eh?
GG: Yeah, it is ironic that he was denied the right to the lawyer; they actually offered one of their lawyers, and he said he didn’t trust their lawyers and wanted his own, and they refused that; so yeah, there is an irony there.
There’s no other way to describe this: it’s a bald-faced lie. Greenwald knows that David Miranda was given a lawyer during his detention, yet he makes absolutely no mention of this fact, and instead states once again that Miranda was “denied the right to a lawyer.”
It’s an outright lie. If you wonder why I seem so critical of Glenn Greenwald, look no further than lies like this one. He knows his story sounds much more dramatic if he obfuscates about this issue, so that’s what he’s doing. He’s playing the left.
The theme of the interview, by the way, is Greenwald’s incredible, wondrous bravery, and how he’s not going to be intimidated by the evil US government. And boy, does he ever think the US is evil. How evil?
JF: How do you think history will remember this whole affair? It is still unfolding but nonetheless, a lot has already gone down. What is Glenn Greenwald’s prediction on the historic legacy of all this?
GG: I think this will be the time the world realizes that the US and its closest allies are trying to build a surveillance system that has as its primary objective the elimination of privacy globally, by which I mean that everyone’s communications electronically will be collected, stored, analyzed and monitored by the US government.
The “primary objective” of the NSA is “the elimination of privacy globally?” Seriously? And the evil US is planning to “collect, store, analyze and monitor” the communications of every single person in the entire world? All 7.1 billion of them?
Good grief. This is tin-foil hat territory, folks, and it’s not the first time he’s made this insanely hyperbolic claim.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the interview Greenwald admits openly that his partner was “muling” documents to and from Greenwald’s collaborator Laura Poitras, another fact that he initially tried to conceal.
By the way, shouldn’t Glenn Greenwald or Truth-Out have disclosed that Greenwald is on the board of an organization raising money for Truth-Out and Wikileaks? (h/t: Gus.)