Matt Taibbi has warned the narrative around the Pentagon leaker is going to get “ugly” fast. It’s due to the gross hypocrisy that surrounds leaks of this nature, especially when they occur during a Democratic presidency. Look no further than the Obama administration on how they treated leakers; it was beyond Nixonian.
There are two realities that the political class must accept: Leaks are going to happen in the digital age. Jake Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, is the latest to do it.
The information he leaked allegedly in a gaming group chat detailed how the US had compromised the Kremlin’s war network and the spy operations against American allies, including leaders in Ukraine. The latter is hardly surprising, but to have detailed briefs on the matter leaked publicly is another situation. The Pentagon didn’t notice the leak for weeks, making the situation more humiliating.
What Taibbi and Greenwald have both highlighted is that the establishment media peddles classified information all the time with impunity. It’s refreshing to see some vestige of progressive media get irate over a ‘two separate’ rules narrative, which Taibbi aptly noted as “leaks for me, but not for thee,” in his Substack post. Greenwald, who reported on the massive information collection operation that Edward Snowden leaked when he was with The Guardian, didn’t hold back when he appeared on a Fox News hit with Jesse Walters last Friday:
"Anybody whoever has picked up the 'New York Times,' 'The Washington Post' or has the misfortune of hearing MSNBC or CNN knows that corporate journalists, every single day, report classified information that has been leaked. They go on TV all the time and they say anonymous sources told us X, Y, and Z," Greenwald said.
"Yet, none of this kind of uproar ever happens because those are authorized leaks," Greenwald continued. "These are things the CIA or the FBI or the Pentagon want the American people to hear. It's a form of propaganda. What's different here is that this was an unauthorized leak. It reveals that the Biden administration has been lying about the extent of their role in Ukraine and a whole variety of other things about this extremely important war."
"Whatever your views on what war are we should want to know about this, but they don't want us to know about it," he said. "So now it's suddenly we have to clamp down harder. We have to keep things more secret. We have to spy on you and take away your rights. And the amazing thing is as you just showed the people demanding this most loudly are people who call themselves journalists. They're the ones down at the Pentagon saying do more to keep everything secret except for the things you tell us to tell the American people."
"You showed Edward Snowden in the package you put together and that was the reporting we did now 10 years ago or so. And what that showed was under Obama in the name of the war on terror, all this immense, mass indiscriminate spying aimed at the American people is being conducted. Courts ultimately ruled it was unconstitutional in the legal. But it never really went anywhere, Jesse. They still have this gigantic spying system in place. Not on Al-Qaeda or China or ISIS, but at the American people. That is the framework of the U.S. security state. They regard American citizens as enemies and they are using this incident now as an excuse to justify even more domestic spying," Greenwald said.
Fair points that will never see the light of day because while the media will kneecap Biden on his age, his lack of access, and whether he can or cannot do the job—they will always defend him in the end.
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