Bill Moyers’ Interview of Glenn Greenwald Delivered an Enviably Cogent Critique of the Obama Administration’s Attack on Freedom and Human Rights — Accurately Delivered and Worth Watching, the Program Includes a Transcript for People Who Read Faster than They Listen

02 May 2013

Citation

Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Greenwald on the High Cost of Government Secrecy, Moyers & Company (26 April 2013) (video and transcript)

Concisely delivered rational argument

I encourage thoughtful people, who are concerned about the militaristic and authoritarian trend of American Government, to watch the above interview. It lasts less than 26 minutes. There is virtually not a word wasted.

The players

Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional lawyer. He is now a columnist for The Guardian and an author. He seeks out the truth about what Big Government is doing behind our backs.

Bill Moyers’ much longer career has been similarly devoted. The gently penetrating quality of Mr. Moyers’ thoughtful questioning of political and cultural trends has not been surpassed by a media figure in my lifetime.

Moyers, implicitly, and Greenwald, explicitly, think that American culture is rapidly coarsening under the corrosive effect of fear and anti-democratic thoughtlessness — frequently manipulated in both those directions by the Obama Administration and its predecessor.

I consider it a sad irony that our first African-American president would be so eagerly dismantling the human rights values that it took America so long to construct.

It is not that President Obama’s “good ole boy” white guy predecessors were not of subtly similar regal mind. It is just that President Obama is so much better — by virtue of his physical appearance and his Machiavellian genius — at being authoritarianism’s Trojan Horse.

The basics of what Mr. Greenwald said — First, Americans fail to see the moral parallels that the Muslim world sees

The interview begins by pointing out that the Tsarnaev brothers’ bombings attack on innocents at the Boston Marathon is morally not that far removed from the United States’ policy killing of collateral innocents abroad.

Greenwald argues that we have killed and maimed — invisibly insofar as the American public is aware — innocent children, women, and men in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. With occasional forays into the Philippines:

We never hear about who those people are.

And by not thinking about them, we forget that they exist.

And that's when somebody attacks the United States, it leads to this bewilderment, like, "Well, what have we ever done to anybody that would make them want to attack us?"

[P]olicies justified in the name of stopping terrorism have actually done more to exacerbate that threat and to render us unsafe than any other single cause.

Because we are scared, we approve government expansion into arenas where it historically has had no business being

Even without taking drone murder, Guantánamo, and warrantless imprisonments into account:

There is a Washington Post series in 2010 called Top Secret America, three-part series by Dana Priest and William Arkin.

And one of the facts that reported was that the National Security Agency, every day, collects and stores 1.7 billion, that's with a B, billion, emails, telephone calls, and other form of electronic communications by and between American citizens.

Greenwald continues that Government is now cloaked in secrecy. Transparency has vanished. We don’t have a clue about what it is doing and why.

Worse,the media have become intrusive Government’s eager helper

No less a personage than Tom Brokaw is illustrative of this alarming trend in media pusillanimity:

TOM BROKAW on NBC News:

Everyone has to understand tonight however that beginning tomorrow morning, early, there are going to be much tougher security considerations all across the country.

However exhausted we may be by them, we're going to have to learn to live with them and get along and go forward and not let them bring us to our knees.

You'll remember last summer how unhappy we were with all the security at the Democratic and Republican convention. Now I don't think that we could raise those complaints after what happened today in Boston.

GLENN GREENWALD:

[I]t's extraordinary that journalists lead the way in encouraging people to accept greater government intrusion into their lives.

The media, journalists, are supposed to be adversarial to the government, not encouraging people to submit to greater government authority.

Greenwald is correct.

I cannot recall ever hearing a prominent news anchor ever making a statement that so profoundly conflicted with what America has been, and should remain, about.

I doubt that Edward R. Murrow ever would have stooped to such anti-liberty nonsense. Nor can I imagine Walter Cronkite, who (on 27 February 1968) prominently countered one of the Johnson Administration’s manipulating lies about the Vietnam War, ever being tempted to cave to autocrats.

The key point — Government secrecy encourages autocracy and Autocracy’s inevitable abuse of power

From the transcript:

But I think the broader point is that it's that false dichotomy, that the more the government learns about us, the safer we'll be.

In part because what history shows is that when governments are able to surveil people in the dark, generally the greatest outcome is that they abuse that power and it becomes tyrannical.

If you talk to anybody who came from Eastern Europe, they'll tell you that the reason we left is because society's become deadened and soulless, when citizens have no privacy.

A society that loses that privacy is a society that becomes truly conformist. And I think that's the real danger.

Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of government power. If people are able to operate in the dark, it is not likely or probable, but inevitable that they will abuse their power. It's just human nature.

And that's been understood for as long as politics has existed. That transparency is really the only guarantee that we have for checking those who exercise power.

Most indicative of our growing autocracy has been the Obama Administration’s unprecedented attack on whistleblowers

Greenwald observed that the Obama Administration has prosecuted twice as many whistleblowers under 1917’s archaic Espionage Act as all previous presidencies combined.

Which, I am compelled to point out, include those that spanned World Wars I and II, the latter including a period when America’s very existence was at least arguably at stake.

While this Purge has been going on, Greenwald points out that Government’s “actual bad actors . . . have been shielded and protected.”

The result? — Coarsening of society

Constitutional lawyer that he is, Mr. Greenwald concludes that the Obama Administration’s oppression of truth-tellers is designed to intimidate the media and the rest of us into silence.

Our liberty continues to fall under onslaughts of cultural militarism and the demonization of foreign “others”:

[W]hen you continuously induce people to support militarism and aggression and violence by demonizing a foreign other, what you really do is you degrade the population.

You transform how it is that they think, the kind of people that they are, the things that they come to expect from life.

You really make it a much more savage and bloodthirsty populace that will then support things that in the absence of that sustained propaganda, they would find horrific.

And that's the way in which this culture becomes coarsened.

The moral? — The only real threat to America is the cowardly rot that we indulge in our own house

Courage is valued because uncontrolled fear destroys honor.

At present, American political culture is a fearful one. Its pusillanimity actively and intentionally subverts the values that once made us reasonably special.

I abhor President Obama’s professional performance because he, of all people, should have known better than to continue down the mistaken road that his immediate predecessor had selected, arguably excusably under the pressure of surprise attack.

The much more cerebral Barack Obama has no similar excuse. Therefore, I conclude that he is an autocrat at heart. And depressingly, that he is neither especially benevolent nor constructively astute.

Despite his tactically (rather than strategically) oriented political genius, our President has become a frequently duplicitous and often self-aggrandizing entity, enthusiastically pissing away America’s once hopefully Liberty-loving future.

His intentions were almost certainly originally good. But his admirable intellect should have been adequate to foresee the anti-democratic damage that his baser and self-serving instincts have assisted in getting us into.

Somewhere along the way, the man abandoned courageous and honorable effort in favor of low-bar expedience. As have Congress, the media, and most of the rest of us.

This is a cultural phenomenon. And laying it exclusively at the President’s door, unfair.

The expedience of cowardice has always been the roadway to not so metaphorical Hell. For societies, as well as individuals.

PeteFree.com

Bill Moyers’ Interview of Glenn Greenwald Delivered an Enviably Cogent Critique of the Obama Administration’s Attack on Freedom and Human Rights — Accurately Delivered and Worth Watching, the Program Includes a Transcript for People Who Read Faster than They Listen