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Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
When Will They Ever Learn? The American People and Support for War
By Lawrence S. Wittner
When it comes to war, the American public is remarkably fickle.
The responses of Americans to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars provide telling examples. In 2003, according to opinion polls, 72 percent of Americans thought going to war in Iraq was the right decision. By early 2013, support for that decision had declined to 41 percent. Similarly, in October 2001, when U.S. military action began in Afghanistan, it was backed by 90 percent of the American public. By December 2013, public approval of the Afghanistan war had dropped to only 17 percent.
In fact, this collapse of public support for once-popular wars is a long-term phenomenon. Although World War I preceded public opinion polling, observers reported considerable enthusiasm for U.S. entry into that conflict in April 1917. But, after the war, the enthusiasm melted away. In 1937, when pollsters asked Americans whether the United States should participate in another war like the World War, 95 percent of the respondents said “No.”
And so it went. When President Truman dispatched U.S. troops to Korea in June 1950, 78 percent of Americans polled expressed their approval. By February 1952, according to polls, 50 percent of Americans believed that U.S. entry into the Korean War had been a mistake. The same phenomenon occurred in connection with the Vietnam War. In August 1965, when Americans were asked if the U.S. government had made “a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam,” 61 percent of them said “No.” But by August 1968, support for the war had fallen to 35 percent, and by May 1971 it had dropped to 28 percent.
Of all America’s wars over the past century, only World War II has retained mass public approval. And this was a very unusual war – one involving a devastating military attack upon American soil, fiendish foes determined to conquer and enslave the world, and a clear-cut, total victory.
In almost all cases, though, Americans turned against wars they once supported. How should one explain this pattern of disillusionment?
The major reason appears to be the immense cost of war -- in lives and resources. During the Korean and Vietnam wars, as the body bags and crippled veterans began coming back to the United States in large numbers, public support for the wars dwindled considerably. Although the Afghanistan and Iraq wars produced fewer American casualties, the economic costs have been immense. Two recent scholarly studies have estimated that these two wars will ultimately cost American taxpayers from $4 trillion to $6 trillion. As a result, most of the U.S. government’s spending no longer goes for education, health care, parks, and infrastructure, but to cover the costs of war. It is hardly surprising that many Americans have turned sour on these conflicts.
But if the heavy burden of wars has disillusioned many Americans, why are they so easily suckered into supporting new ones?
A key reason seems to be that that powerful, opinion-molding institutions – the mass communications media, government, political parties, and even education – are controlled, more or less, by what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex.” And, at the outset of a conflict, these institutions are usually capable of getting flags waving, bands playing, and crowds cheering for war.
But it is also true that much of the American public is very gullible and, at least initially, quite ready to rally ‘round the flag. Certainly, many Americans are very nationalistic and resonate to super-patriotic appeals. A mainstay of U.S. political rhetoric is the sacrosanct claim that America is “the greatest nation in the world” – a very useful motivator of U.S. military action against other countries. And this heady brew is topped off with considerable reverence for guns and U.S. soldiers. (“Let’s hear the applause for Our Heroes!”)
Of course, there is also an important American peace constituency, which has formed long-term peace organizations, including Peace Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and other antiwar groups. This peace constituency, often driven by moral and political ideals, provides the key force behind the opposition to U.S. wars in their early stages. But it is counterbalanced by staunch military enthusiasts, ready to applaud wars to the last surviving American. The shifting force in U.S. public opinion is the large number of people who rally ‘round the flag at the beginning of a war and, then, gradually, become fed up with the conflict.
And so a cyclical process ensues. Benjamin Franklin recognized it as early as the eighteenth century, when he penned a short poem for A Pocket Almanack For the Year 1744:
War begets Poverty,
Poverty Peace;
Peace makes Riches flow,
(Fate ne’er doth cease.)
Riches produce Pride,
Pride is War’s Ground;
War begets Poverty &c.
The World goes round.
There would certainly be less disillusionment, as well as a great savings in lives and resources, if more Americans recognized the terrible costs of war before they rushed to embrace it. But a clearer understanding of war and its consequences will probably be necessary to convince Americans to break out of the cycle in which they seem trapped.
Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, What’s Going On at UAardvark? (Solidarity Press). It can be obtained in a paperback version from Troy Book Makers and in a paperback or eBook version from Amazon.com.
New and Forthcoming Books:
Clyde, by David Helwig, Bunim & bannigan, Ltd. 978-1-933480-36-7; $18.95
Betrayed by his oldest friend, a boyhood companion, his gingerly constructed career at stake, Clyde Bryanton, property developer and Ottawa political consultant, unpeels layers and layers of memory, a half century of getting along by going along. Fatherless, his sire a casualty of the Dieppe raid, Clyde is as baffled by the emotions that occasionally sound from his depths as he is by his mentors, the banker and the senator who manipulate money and power in a small Canadian city. A stranger even to his wife, who dubs him ‘Joe the Silent,’ he navigates social, familial , political and commercial obligations with the same cool skills he exhibits on the golf courses that weave in and out of the fabric of his life. The darkest of secrets becomes no more to Clyde than the bunkers and sand traps he avoids with his selections of irons. This latest novel by distinguished Canadian author David Helwig, describes a North America, of eyes on the ground and noses to the grindstone, of business as politics and politics as business, of kindness and malice and nameless fear. CLYDE, is an incisive portrait of the generation that came of age in the 1960s, and of our post post-modern culture of opportunism and rootless communication.
The Endless Arms Race: Despite Great Power Promises, New Nuclear Weapons Are On the Way
By Lawrence S. Wittner
It’s heartening to see that an agreement has been reached to ensure that Iran honors its commitment, made when it signed the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to forgo developing nuclear weapons.
But what about the other key part of the NPT, Article VI, which commits nuclear-armed nations to “cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament,” as well as to “a treaty on general and complete disarmament”? Here we find that, 44 years after the NPT went into force, the United States and other nuclear powers continue to pursue their nuclear weapons buildups, with no end in sight.
On January 8, 2014, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced what Reuters termed “ambitious plans to upgrade [U.S.] nuclear weapons systems by modernizing weapons and building new submarines, missiles and bombers to deliver them.” The Pentagon intends to build a dozen new ballistic missile submarines, a new fleet of long-range nuclear bombers, and new intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in late December that implementing the plans would cost $355 billion over the next decade, while an analysis by the independent Center for Nonproliferation Studies reported that this upgrade of U.S. nuclear forces would cost $1 trillion over the next 30 years. If the higher estimate proves correct, the submarines alone would cost over $29 billion each.
Of course, the United States already has a massive nuclear weapons capability -- approximately 7,700 nuclear weapons, with more than enough explosive power to destroy the world. Together with Russia, it possesses about 95 percent of the more than 17,000 nuclear weapons that comprise the global nuclear arsenal.
Nor is the United States the only nation with grand nuclear ambitions. Although China currently has only about 250 nuclear weapons, including 75 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), it recently flight-tested a hypersonic nuclear missile delivery vehicle capable of penetrating any existing defense system. The weapon, dubbed the Wu-14 by U.S. officials, was detected flying at ten times the speed of sound during a test flight over China during early January 2014. According to Chinese scientists, their government had put an “enormous investment” into the project, with more than a hundred teams from leading research institutes and universities working on it. Professor Wang Yuhui, a researcher on hypersonic flight control at Nanjing University, stated that “many more tests will be carried out” to solve the remaining technical problems. “It’s just the beginning.” Ni Lexiong, a Shanghai-based naval expert, commented approvingly that “missiles will play a dominant role in warfare, and China has a very clear idea of what is important.”
Other nations are engaged in this arms race, as well. Russia, the other dominant nuclear power, seems determined to keep pace with the United States through modernization of its nuclear forces. The development of new, updated Russian ICBMs is proceeding rapidly, while new nuclear submarines are already being produced. Also, the Russian government has started work on a new strategic bomber, known as the PAK DA, which reportedly will become operational in 2025. Both Russia and India are known to be working on their own versions of a hypersonic nuclear missile carrier. But, thus far, these two nuclear nations lag behind the United States and China in its development. Israel is also proceeding with modernization of its nuclear weapons, and apparently played the key role in scuttling the proposed U.N. conference on a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East in 2012.
This nuclear weapons buildup certainly contradicts the official rhetoric. On April 5, 2009, in his first major foreign policy address, President Barack Obama proclaimed “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” That fall, the UN Security Council -- including Russia, China, Britain, France, and the United States, all of them nuclear powers -- unanimously passed Resolution 1887, which reiterated the point that the NPT required the “disarmament of countries currently possessing nuclear weapons.” But rhetoric, it seems, is one thing and action quite another.
Thus, although the Iranian government’s willingness to forgo the development of nuclear weapons is cause for encouragement, the failure of the nuclear nations to fulfill their own NPT obligations is appalling. Given these nations’ enhanced preparations for nuclear war -- a war that would be nothing short of catastrophic -- their evasion of responsibility should be condemned by everyone seeking a safer, saner world.
Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, What’s Going On at UAardvark? (Solidarity Press). It can be obtained in a paperback version from Troy Book Makers and in a paperback or eBook version from Amazon.com.
Monday, January 27, 2014
Herzl Must be Spinning in His Grave
By M.J. Rosenberg
A front page article in today's Ha'aretz struck me with the thought that, no matter what happens with the peace process, it is becoming impossible to expect non-Orthodox (i.e. 90-plus per cent) of young American Jews to identify with today's Israel.
There, on page one, was a photo of a beautiful young couple in their early 20's who are seriously dating. One is Prime Minister Netanyahu's son. The other is a Norwegian girl who happens not to be Jewish. Sweet looking kids. But, in Israel, a scandal.
Consider: more than 50% of American Jews of all ages marry non-Jews. Younger Jews, in their teens and 20's, don't even consider the race, religion or ethnicity of who they are dating. Some old Jews agonize over this. Young Jews, the same young Jews who overwhelmingly accept gay marriage and rejoiced at Obama's election and re-election, don't even think about it.
But in Israel, it's huge news that the prime minister's 23-year old son dates a Protestant.
And then there is this: the denunciation of young Netanyahu's relationship by the head of the Shas party, Israel's second largest party and part of Netanyahu's coalition.
From Ha'aretz:
"Woe is us if it is true," [Shas Chairman Aryeh] Deri said. "If it is true, he [the prime minister] and Sara have a great heartache."
Deri told the interviewer that the criticism was not an attack against the premier, but rather an issue of national concern. "I try not to raise personal criticism, but if, heaven forbid, this is true, it is no longer a personal matter – it is a symbol of the Jewish people."
The Shas leader went on to describe the great efforts being made to prevent assimilation, saying, "I have friends who invest tens of millions, hundreds of millions to fight assimilation throughout the world. If, heaven forbid, this is true, woe is us. I hope it is not true…."
Meanwhile, last night, here in the United States, the Grammy Award for best song went to Same Love, an anthem about marriage equality. Watch the video. It will give you goosebumps. And it will help you understand why American Jewish kids just aren't into an Israel run by religious fanatics and ethnic chauvinists. No wonder, Israel is reaching out to right-wing fundamentalist Christians.
As I say so often, Theodor Herzl is spinning in his grave. This was not his dream.
As for mine, a secular State of Israel with equal rights for all its citizens (Jewish and not) and no role for religion (any religion) in public life. In short, I want an Israeli James Madison!
Copyright © 2014 MJ Rosenberg, All rights reserved.
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JAMES WECHSLER, JOURNALISM’S LIBERAL CRUSADER, Or When the NY POST VWAS A REAL NEWSPAPER!
By Murray Polner
Few today remember the quintessential Cold War liberal newspaperman James Wechsler, the erstwhile voice of the once resolutely liberal (pre-Rupert Murdoch) New York Post. Since his death in 1983, he has fallen into undeserved obscurity because of liberalism’s equally unmerited fate. Not only do politicians dread any identification with the infamous L-word but also because to admit that liberals opposed Stalinism while defending freedom at home is, for many now in power, sheer heresy.
James Arthur Wechsler was born in 1915 and entered Columbia College just shy of the age of 16, graduating in 1935. Shortly after he began working as an assistant editor for The Nation. In 1940 he joined Marshall Field’s ad-less and innovative daily PM, serving as assistant editor ---and until his induction into the army--- as bureau chief of its Washington office. He later quit, charging that the newspaper was too pro-Communist for his taste.
From 1934-37, Wechsler was a member of the Young Communist League and a leader of the leftist and essentially pro-Communist American Students Union until he quit the YCL at the ripe old age of 22. Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, he wrote an article for The Nation condemning the Stalinist regime. For this “sin,” the Daily Worker repeatedly damned him. And again, in 1948, he challenged the Communist Party by backing Harry Truman for the presidency when he opposed Henry Wallace’s campaign, insisting that the Communists had captured the Progressive Party.
Internationally, he was the personification of a Cold War liberal, a journalist and an activist. His views often coincided with that of George Kennan and Walter Lippmann and especially Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (who he brought on as a Post columnist) who defined Cold War liberalism this way: “liberalism and communism had nothing in common, either as to ends or means.” Wechsler backed NATO and the Korean War (which triggered the massive rearmament of the U.S., which he ultimately criticized) but furiously dissented from what other Cold War liberals like Hubert Humphrey and some in the Americans for Democratic Action (of which in 1947 he was one of the founders and a longtime member) favored in 1950, namely, detention camps for “subversives.”
With Wechsler as editor, the Post not only championed domestic liberalism but also frequently pricked readers’ consciences. Ted Poston, one of its black reporters, was sent south to cover the emerging civil rights story. It exposed Richard Nixon’s slush fund, which resulted in his humiliating “Checkers” speech to the nation. It featured sparkling liberal columnists like Murray Kempton, Marquis Childs, Pete Hamil, Max Lerner, William Shannon, and Samuel Grafton, one of country’s few columnists who regularly dared criticize the U.S. for not doing enough to rescue European Jews from the Nazis. Women reporters were assigned to major stories and its education and sports sections were among the best in the nation.
The Post published critical articles about J. Edgar Hoover, denouncing his unaccountability in a democratic society and for causing terrible harm to many innocent people. He defended Max Lowenthal, an early Hoover critic, who dared publish the first book excoriating the FBI director. Not surprisingly, Wechsler was hounded and monitored by the FBI He was relentlessly pursued by the FBI and even placed on its “custodial detention” list between 1942 and 1945. A notation by J. Edgar Hoover’s on a FBI memo described Wechsler and his wife, Nancy, as “radicals and leftists of the most dangerous type.” His FBI file numbers 530 pages!
In response, he created a sardonic “sacred cow” prize and awarded it to the FBI’s director. “Who else,” asked Joseph Rauh, the veteran liberal and arch-civil libertarian lawyer who had defended both Wechsler and Lillian Hellman before congressional anti-Red committees, “would have had the courage, the wit, the ability to ridicule J. Edgar Hoover at the height of his power?” Very few indeed.
Wechsler needed Rauh’s legal expertise after the Post published a series damning Joe McCarthy. He was hauled before the Senator’s senate committee in a nasty spectacle in which Wechsler confronted his inquisitors as an unfriendly witness. Still, in a controversial move even criticized by McCarthy’s opponents, he “named names,” after afterwards unconvincingly rationalizing his behavior for doing so, (he claimed he agonized over his decision. In his book, “The Age of Suspicion,” he wrote, “I did not believe my answers would tend to incriminate or degrade me but I was quite certain that silence would.” But McCarthy and his admirers were never persuaded of Wechsler’s “loyalty” and insisted he still retained Communist sympathies. In 1954 he was thrown off a popular TV show, “Starring the Editors,” for being a “controversial personality.”
He was a perennial debater, taking on the likes of conservative William Buckley and Beatnik Jack Kerouac and Yippie Jerry Rubin, among many others, and in time, became less of a cold warrior than a dove. He questioned an American foreign policy consensus that— until the invasion of Iraq-- would eventually be shattered by Vietnam, with 58,000 American body bags, tens of thousands more grievously wounded in body and mind, not to mention 3,400,000 dead Southeast Asians.
He wrote regularly what he saw as demonstrations of conscience during the Vietnam era: the ex-POW fighting for amnesty for draft resisters; the sacrifice of our troops in Vietnam; and the revelations of the Pentagon Papers. “The old men quibble, the young men die,” he said in 1968. “No one beyond the reach of the draft can or should tell the students how to meet the crisis.” The killings at Kent State in May 1970 horrified him and, in his fashion, he wrote about it through the grieving eyes of the father of one of the young women killed by the Ohio National Guard. He was aghast at the accession to power of the murderous American-backed Pinochet regime in Chile as well as the fascist-minded leaders in Argentina during the late seventies. In the spring of 1983 he turned his critical attention toward the Reagan administration’s military intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua, his last public battle before he died of lung cancer in September 1983.
If he were alive today, I believe he would be very critical of the Bush administration’s imperial dreams and endless wars. I would hope too that he would be working hard to reformulate liberalism into a “new liberalism,” concentrating on America’s role as a stabilizing, less militarized and less quick to send in the troops and bombers. At home he would be drawn toward class and racial justice, balancing private and public interests with fairness, criticizing the enormous gap between the very rich and everyone else and always refusing to ignore the victims of our fiercely competitive, greed-driven society.
His legacy to publishers, editors and reporters who would follow him was simple: “It was said long ago that the function of a newspaper is to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ Too many newspapers have forgotten the word or grown so fat and comfortable themselves that they view the phrase as inflammatory. We like it and we propose to remember it, not because we regard success as subversive but because success too often means the complacent loss of conscience.”
Murray Polner wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and
co-authored Disarmed & Dangerous: The Radical Lives & Times of Daniel & Philip Berrigan. He is a book review editor for the History News Network.org and a columnist for the New YorkTimesexaminer.
Let Us Now Praise Edward Snowden
By Murray Polner
Nowadays it’s Edward Snowden, Snowden, Snowden, and Snowden everywhere, at least in spyworld, euphemistically dubbed our “Intelligence Community,” which in spite of its longtime claims of success, once famously misread the collapse of the Soviet Union and the coming of the Arab Spring. Now add another: Eric Schmitt’s recent Times front page article, anonymously sourced, read “CIA Noted Its Suspicions Over Snowden. Red Flags Overlooked 4 Years Before Leaks.” Schmitt’s comprehensive piece about the CIA’s failure to spot and report Snowden’s alleged problems also carried coverage of the four American whistleblowers (ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Jesselyn Radack formerly of the Justice Department, Coleen Rowley who once was an FBI agent and former NSAA official Thomas Drake) who on October 9th awarded Snowden in Moscow what they called the Sam Adams award which, in McGovern’s words, was for his “decision to divulge secrets about the NSA’s electronic surveillance of Americans and people round the globe.”
Still, the issue goes well beyond Snowden’s contributions, which raised the question: How much freedom shall American journalists be allowed [ my italics] by their government to publish stories critics say may cause great harm to “national security.”
Some words of warning of what reporters now face and what may lie ahead has just been provided by a surprising new report issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists.(http://cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks-surveillance-post-911.php). Written by Leonard Downie Jr.,(assisted by Sara Rafsky) who once ran the Washington Post, DC’s preeminent establishment newspaper, it quotes among others, David Sanger, the Times’ chief Washington correspondent, who charged that the Obama White House is “the most closed control-freak administration I’ve ever covered” an accusation backed, he continued, by “a memo [that] went out from the chief of staff a year ago to White House employees and the intelligence agencies that told people to freeze and retain any e-mail, and presumably phone logs, of communications with me.” Consequently, long-term sources were afraid to talk with him. “They tell me, ‘David, I love you, but don’t e-mail me. Let’s don’t chat until this blows over.” His colleague Scott Shane also told Downie, that “seemingly innocuous e-mails not containing classified information can be construed as a crime.” They’re echoed by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest. “People think they’re looking at reporters’ records. I’m writing fewer things in e-mail. I’m even afraid to tell officials what I want to talk about because it’s all going into one giant computer.”
While not Chinese, Russian or Saudi Arabian media censors, Obama’s continual use of the 1917 Espionage Act and its Insider Threat Program, which demands federal workers report colleagues’ suspicious behavior, led Michael Hayden, who ran the NSA and CIA for the second Bush, to tell Downie that the ITP “is designed to chill any conversation whatsoever.”
It may be that Obama has been facing demands from Congress and intelligence agencies to stop national security leaks but if so, he has certainly given into their pressure. The result is what Downie’s report described as a “fearful atmosphere” among Washington-based reporters, including Times people. Yet the report and its implications have been ignored in the paper’s editorials, Op Eds, or Sunday Review essays. Even the Wall Street Journal gave it a good play, posting the AP dispatch “Report: Obama brings chilling effect on journalism.”
The question of press freedom also cropped up in The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson’s perceptive article “When Journalists Are Called Traitors.” In it, she recalled the 1962 Der Spiegel scandal when Konrad Adenauer and his Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss falsely charged the magazine with endangering German national security, using the words traitors and treason, once among the older Germany’s kindest words for its opponents, even Jewish kids. The publisher was jailed for a hundred and three days and several others were imprisoned as well. Police were stationed in Spiegel's offices before charges were dropped and Strauss let go. Davidson’s lesson: “the strands connecting the Spiegel and Snowden affairs are many and instructive—and are a reminder, above all, of why press freedom is worth fighting for.”
Relating it to the storm around Snowden, and praising the CPJ report, Davidson asked if it was a journalists’ job to publish pieces that the government considered secret and potentially damaging. How dare they place their judgments above government priorities and secrets? Documents are secret for state reasons, critics say, and have to be obeyed. Her response: “The professional secret- keepers are phenomenally bad at distinguishing between the threat of terror and t\heir terror at being threatened—or worse, as with Strauss, at being humiliated. They need the press not just to shake them up but also to keep them from being destabilized by their own weaknesses and vanities.”
Not to be outdone, our ever loyal British allies in war and peace (except for Syria), are very upset about Snowden’s leaks. Its conservative officials have been sneering at the leakers and the Guardian. The new M15 chief Andrew Parker defended its Tempora program (similar to the NSA’s Prism, divulged by Snowden) without saying anything specific about the sort of data collected. He called Snowden’s tapes, which had appeared in the Guardian, a “gift” to terrorists. Soon after, the conservative Daily Mail snarled that the Guardian was “The Paper That Helps Britain’s Enemies.” Not to be outdone, and more ominously because Britain has no Bill of Rights, PM David Cameron accused the Guardian of harming national security, even suggesting, however vaguely, that the paper’s editor be called before Parliament.
About the same time Times editor Jill Abramson was interviewed by British TV interviewer Jeremy Paxman who asked why her newspaper had turned down a British request that it give them documents based on Snowden’s information. Abramson, a very experienced journalist, remembered the uproar about the Pentagon Papers and read him some history: “When the New York Times published the Pentagon papers back in the 1970s, the same claims were made, that publishing did grave harm to national security, and yet a couple of years after we published them, the same officials who said that admitted that actually there had not been any real harm to national security.” Perhaps now the paper will talk about and analyze Downie’s report.
Sooner or later, and the sooner the better, the question how to cover honestly and fearlessly critical matters of national security needs to be resolved. Any resolution will need to keep the First Amendment in mind since . accountability is essential. That’s still a part of democracy, right? Failure to do so, the CPJ report concludes:
With so much government information digitally accessible in so many places
to so many people, there are likely to be more Mannings and Snowdens among
those who grew up in a digital world with blurred boundaries between public and
private, shared and secret information. That makes access by the press to a
range of government sources of information and guidance more important than ever.
Downie then turned to Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, for steps the Obama administration might take to fulfill the president’s campaign pledge of transparency, Downie summarized her suggestions: “fewer secrets, improve the FOIA process, be open and honest about government surveillance and build better bridges with the press, rather than trying to control or shut it out.”
There’s not much time because Pierre Omidyar, the eBay’s billionaire founder, will soon provide some of his fortune to a new venture starring the iconoclast Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, the film documentarian, conduit between Snowden and Greenwald, and the subject of Peter Maass’ sympathetic feature in the Times magazine last summer, and Jeremy Scahill, the bane of private military contractors and mercenaries, to develop an online publication “to support independent journalists” according to NYU’s Jay Rosen who spoke to Omidyar.
Fair warning.
____________________
Murray Polner writes the Keeping Score column for the NYTimesExpress.com.
Published October 19. 2013
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