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Breaking News: The NSA Is Spying on Foreign Countries

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petesh3/18/2014 11:43:17 am PDT

re: #57 HappyWarrior
Greenwald denies that he supported the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that he was an apathetic, passive consumer of news, despite having written that:

I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country.

It gets better, in the same rebuttal (full paragraph included just to be clear):

It is true that, like 90% of Americans, I did support the war in Afghanistan and, living in New York, believed the rhetoric about the threat of Islamic extremism: those were obvious mistakes. It’s also true that one can legitimately criticize me for not having actively opposed the Iraq War at a time when many people were doing so. Martin Luther King, in his 1967 speech explaining why his activism against the Vietnam War was indispensable to his civil rights work, acknowledged that he had been too slow to pay attention to or oppose the war and that he thus felt obligated to work with particular vigor against it once he realized the need (“Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam”).

So, being an apathetic 36-year-old attorney trying to make a living in New York is just like being a full-time civil rights activist for a decade, at a time when this was so dangerous that many people got killed. How could we have failed to notice the similarity?