The Administration cooked up a scenario to silence him?

Really? He’s continuing to bleed ink at The Guardian and will go on every media outlet willing to suffer his presence (and there’s more than a few willing to do so).

They haven’t silenced him one bit.

But that’s not the important part here.

He really thinks that the latest alerts that have been attributed to NSA intercepts of al Qaeda chatter is trumped up? On what factual basis does he arrive at that conclusion? Nothing more than a feeling that it hits back at his shoddy reporting on the whole NSA-Snowden mess.

Thing is, Greenwald ignores a few other major developments around the world that might actually play a role in the alerts.

There’s two huge reasons - the breakout of hundreds of terrorists, including senior al Qaeda from a prison in Iraq and a similar breakout of a prison in Pakistan. Combined, those are huge events that give renewed strength to al Qaeda and Taliban efforts as direct manpower and for future recruitment efforts. They threaten to push the Middle East and South Asia into even more chaos as local authorities are ill equipped to handle the strain - Egypt and Tunisia are looking at ongoing internal strife, Syria’s civil war, etc., and al Qaeda can read the news like everyone else and determine they aren’t paying as much attention to counterterrorism as they should be - enabling them to take advantage of them in carrying out attacks against diplomatic facilities. Interpol instituted a worldwide alert after those two prison breaks.

Heck, the Indian consulate in Pakistan was just hit this past Sunday (during the time frame when the US alerts were active for diplomatic facilities worldwide with particular interest in North Africa and Middle East).

Guess Greenwald doesn’t read his own paper much, or figures that since it wasn’t the US consulate that it doesn’t count. The chatter picked up by US facilities was apparently so loud and ominous that other countries instituted alerts of their own.