Eyes Wide Shut (19/06/13)

I posted an article on Internet Security a few days ago which poked fun at Glenn Greenwald (a prolific blogger who writes for for the Guardian) - while making a serious point about people who always seem, to me at least, to be less than even-handed in commenting on world events.

So I was pleased to see Andrew Sullivan - who writes in the The Sunday Times regularly - stepping into this debate and giving his tuppence worth on the subject last weekend.

I remember reading something by Glenn Greenwald in the immediate aftermath of the bombing attack on the Boston Marathon - and Glenn was keen that no one should rush to judgement about this being a 'terrorist event'.

Well, the authorities did no rush to judgement but relatively quickly it became clear that the two young men responsible for all the murder and mayhem - did regard themselves as fighting a holy or 'jihadist' war and that innocent civilians were a legitimate target.

Now that seems like a good definition of a terrorist event to me - and just because the people responsible for this attack claim to be motivated by a particular cause - doesn't make that cause legitimate, inevitable or justified.

Lots of people are critical of America and sometimes that harsh criticism is well-deserved, but there are also great things to admire about America - for example the fact that the civil rights movement changed the country forever in the 1960s. 

Yet the struggle was not fought with bombs and guns, by the cold-blooded murder of fellow Americans, but by the determination of men like Martin Luther King and his supporters (black and white) who had a dream about people living together in peace - unaffected by the colour of their skin.

Even more recently South Africa was liberated from a cruel and racist Apartheid regime - every bit as tyrannical as the Assad regime in Syria - yet the campaign to abolish Apartheid and bring about majority black rule was waged, in the main, by peaceful and non-violent means.

Here's what Andrew Sullivan had to say in the Sunday Times.

Eyes wide shut, the Prism buster has missed the real dangerBy Andrew Sullivan

I've met Glenn Greenwald in the flesh only a few times over the years but it feels - like many virtual relationships - much more intimate than that.

He popped up a few years ago in the blogosphere as a courageous critic of the George Bush-Dick Cheney administration’s scorn for constitutional and legal propriety. He was never formally trained as a journalist — the best bloggers aren’t — but had a background in law. He asked no permission to take on the US government when so many Washington journalists were terrified of losing access and were refusing, even at The New York Times, to call the torture of terrorist suspects by its proper name.

In this cowardly swamp of deferential “reporters”, Greenwald was a merciless exception. He earned a living by reader donations, along with salaries from media companies that began to realise that all the energy had shifted elsewhere. And it had.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Greenwald is that he really helped to shift the debate in Washington — about civil liberties, torture, executive overreach — from a perch in Rio de Janeiro. It’s where he still lives because his partner, David, cannot get a visa to stay in America and the federal government still bars the spouses of gay couples from immigrating. I’ve wondered if this experience of being forced to choose between his spouse and his country affected him.

He’s like a prosecutor, always repressing emotion in favour of argument and argument and argument. His blog entries are not short and eclectic. There’s no art or photography, nothing to leaven the daily summation to the jury. They are long, complicated mountains of evidence and links, thousands of words long. There is almost never any flicker of doubt in them, no chink in the logical armour, no turn of phrase that he cannot explain away or throw back in your face.

So his publication of the inside story of Edward Snowden, a private sector data analyst who exposed the existence of the National Security Agency’s Prism programme — an electronic surveillance operation — is doubtless still pumping adrenaline into him. This time Snowden didn’t just analyse data; he revealed it.

As the story begins to fade, some key parts of it have come under new scrutiny. Did Snowden have the kind of access to personal information he claimed? Was the data gathered by his company Booz Allen Hamilton sent directly to the government or via a virtual “dropbox” to guard against snooping? Wasn’t this programme all but public knowledge for years, anyway, even though it remained an official secret? If it was — if the snooping was exaggerated and if the controls on it were tighter than Snowden implied — what exactly was the scoop?

There may be more to come, of course. But one thing we have yet to find is a single example of the abuse Snowden claims could have been endemic. What we do know is that Snowden has trashed his own country’s policies while seeking refuge in Hong Kong, part of a regime with one of the most aggressive hacking operations on the planet.

You could almost sense the tide turning last week as even the most liberal Americans weighed the sharing of US intelligence with the world against the exposure of what was, in essence, an unnecessary secret.

Greenwald would not be very sensitive to this. Anyone who seems to favour his own country over another is suspect to him. Reason always trumps patriotism, which he would call a form of tribalism.

There lies behind his solid argument for less secrecy and more transparency in the US government a conviction that the concept of terrorism as used by the West is a fiction for maintaining global hegemony. So my horror at the Woolwich attack was dismissed by him as another veil for my alleged desire to kill Muslims with impunity around the world.

Sam Harris, an atheist writer who has studied religious ritual, meditation and Islamic tradition closely, is for Greenwald just an Islamophobe who can feel no empathy for Muslims because he fears the violent fanaticism that has gripped that religion’s most fervent advocates.

My defence of the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US jihadist, was incomprehensible to Greenwald. The man should have been asked to stand trial or been left alone. There is no war, he seems to imply, and insofar as there is, we’ve brought it upon ourselves.

So you can see why he doesn’t actually care much if intelligence agency data gathering is sabotaged by the leaks. All the better, so far as he is concerned. Many more people die of car crashes than terrorist attacks, so why sacrifice so much freedom to try to prevent them?

It doesn’t seem to occur to Greenwald that if another September 11 were to happen, the chances of restoring constitutional balance would be close to minimal; or that the president has a duty to pre-empt terror strikes; or that the main victims of jihadism are Muslims subjected to tyranny or mass murder.

He doesn’t see the case from the government’s point of view and he lives — like a good lawyer — in an abstract world of guilt and innocence. He wants transparency everywhere and his job — as he sees it — is to prove the guilt of the West’s government, whatever the cost to security. Perhaps that’s why he has as yet not responded to the serious criticism levelled at his and Snowden’s story. His job is not to see both sides.

I was with him 100% on torture. I am glad he exists and writes and shames the tepid press corps. But his world view is limited, I think, by staring at that screen for hours on end. You can create your own world there — and miss the real, more complicated one.

I can see how it happens as you spend so much of your life in the world of words and ideas. And it can add great clarity. What it doesn’t add is the kind of wisdom about the world that those in real positions of authority require to function. You can devastate an argument on a screen, but you do not have the responsibility to care about public order.

On his principles, Greenwald is magnificent. In the messy reality of a world where Islamist violence is very real, he can miss what makes people tick. And that may well include Edward Snowden. Let alone the gloating Chinese.