Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet.
ChaosRadioAustin.org and AntiWar.com slash radio.
And before I introduce my next guest, I want to play you this very short audio clip.
The Arrest of Democracy, now host Amy Goodman.
At the Republican National Convention.
Amy, we're going to get you out of here very soon.
Yes, we have people working on it.
Alright, y'all.
Glenn Greenwald is the best blogger in the world in terms of productivity, quality, and quantity.
It really is incredible.
It's salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
And I got to tell you, Glenn, I'm sitting here watching this video.
I've seen it five times and my jaw's just hanging open.
I cannot believe the brute force that they would use on this tiny little woman, Amy Goodman from Democracy Now.
You know, first of all, there was nothing unusual about what happened to her.
The clear intent, both in Denver and St. Paul, but I would say much more so in St. Paul, was to create a climate of intimidation that was really the defining attribute of what I would call a police state without any hyperbole.
I mean, that was clearly the intention, was to put everybody in a state of fear that if they tried to report on or record or observe anything the police were doing or step out of line in any way that they would be smashed.
And so Amy Goodman's arrest was caught on video and it was pretty dramatic, given who she is.
You know, I've been on that show many times.
I've seen Amy Goodman reporting in many different places.
She's an extremely professional reporter.
She's been doing that for decades without really any problem.
I mean, the idea that she would be brutally arrested and have her hands, you know, tied behind her back with plastic handcuffs and put into a cage for hours, having done nothing other than reporting on those protests and inquiring about her two producers who, a couple hours earlier, had also been arrested, is unbelievably disgusting.
But it was really quite illustrative of what St. Paul was like during the Republican Convention.
So what was it that they claimed that she did?
She crossed a line or something?
Well, if you look at what had happened in the video, what essentially happened, and she gave a few interviews where she explained this, was, as I said a couple hours earlier, two of her principal producers, who are also very professional journalists and long-time producers of hers, were basically in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And what the police were doing constantly, and I mean, there were AP journalists who got swept up as a result and independent journalists as well, is if somebody did something in one place, they would literally encircle the entire crowd and essentially group mass arrest everybody who was in that crowd.
They would block them from escaping, they would make them get on the ground, put their hands behind their heads, and then arrest them all without regard to whether any of them or every one of them did anything wrong.
And so two of her producers had been arrested as part of those mass protests.
When she heard that, was at the convention, and she left to go to where they had been arrested to say, these are not people you should be arresting, these were just reporters, journalists with credentials given by the RNC covering the event.
You mistakenly arrested them, and therefore you should release them.
And she went down there and asked to speak to one of the supervisors, one of the supervisors of the police officers, which is the customary thing that you do when a journalist is arrested.
You speak to the supervisor and say, you've accidentally arrested someone who is credentialed and was just reporting, not participating.
And they said, if you don't go away right now, we're going to arrest you.
And when she said, well, I just want to speak to a supervisor, just her asking that, and you see this in the video, is what led them to then arrest her and then charge her with conspiracy to riot.
That was the charge on the basis of which they arrested her simply for inquiring as to why her producers had been arrested and asked them to speak to her supervisor about it.
Now, you're a former constitutional law litigator, right?
Right.
Okay, now, so am I to understand correctly that the phrase, Congress shall pass no law in the First Amendment that forbids them from restricting the rights of the press or the people to peaceably assemble to petition for redress of grievances, that that, in terms of the way it's been applied by the courts, extends to any executive action taken by fiat without the mandate of Congress?
Well, on the one hand, you know, it's certainly true that journalists are no more exempt from the rule of law than anybody else.
I mean, if you commit a crime, the fact that you're a journalist, even if you're in the act of reporting when you commit the crime, doesn't immunize you from arrest or from the rule of law.
But if the intention is to deter or chill First Amendment-protected activity, then it's clearly unconstitutional behavior on the part of the state.
And there's no question that that's what happened here.
I mean, so many of the journalists who were arrested were engaged in nothing but pure journalistic activity, not remotely criminal.
And, you know, over the weekend, even more disturbingly, before the protest even started, they did a whole bunch of preemptive raids on people's homes, including a home where nothing was happening other than a group called Eyewitness was meeting.
And Eyewitness is a group of independent videographers who, during the 2004 Republican Convention in New York, videotaped, went around with video cameras videotaping the police behavior.
And that videotaping that they did resulted in the dismissal of several hundred criminal charges that had been filed against protesters who had been arrested by the police in New York because it showed that what the police were claiming they did was false, and that actually it was the police who were being provocative or just mass arresting people without cause.
And so this same group that videotaped and monitored police action in the 2004 convention went to Minneapolis, went to St. Paul this past week with the intention of doing the same to the police videotaping.
And their home where they were meeting and where they were staying was mass raided by the St. Paul police, you know, using machine guns and rifles.
And they handcuffed lawyers who were there, and they put those videographers in handcuffs and raided their house.
And then they targeted them several other times over the course of the week for doing nothing other than videotaping the police in action.
They weren't arrested ever in 2004.
They had no difficulty whatsoever with law enforcement.
Then they were clearly being targeted in order to deter them from monitoring what the police were doing.
I mean, that's as purely unconstitutional as it gets.
Well, and as blatant as it gets, too.
I mean, seriously, think about that scene.
You have a group of people who the last time that the police state went wild at a convention, they got people off the hook because they were standing on the public sidewalk with their video camera and later said, Look, Judge, we have this guy's arrest on tape, and he didn't do what he's accused of.
And so this time they just did a preemptive war against these guys, laid siege to their house.
This is in an American town during the convention where they're nominating a presidential candidate.
At the same time, of course, that they're bombing people all over the world and saying that it's okay because we're a democracy.
Yeah, it was really shocking.
I mean, and I say that as someone who obviously, as a lawyer, has seen a lot of police abuse in the past.
You know, if you look at what the commentary was during the Olympics, there was all kinds of, you know, very melodramatic condemnations on the part of the American political media establishment, of the Chinese government for doing things like denying permits to protesters and even arresting them in order to keep protests from marring the imagery that they wanted to project during the Olympics.
That is exactly what the Denver police and the St. Paul police, both of them, did during the Democratic and Republican conventions, though the St. Paul police were much more brutal and aggressive and overt about it.
And, you know, it was very clear that the intention was not to allow peaceful protest, not to allow free assembly and free reporting on the part of journalists, both prudential and independent, but instead to completely suppress and intimidate any form of dissent whatsoever using the most aggressive and militarized police tactics possible.
I mean, I was, you know, I was astonished by what happened during those weekend raids.
I mean, we were going from one house to the next, being advised of them as they were in progress, interviewing the people whose homes had been raided, and that the amount of police force that was used and the weapons that they were wielding and the tactics that they were employing, combined with the extraordinarily explicit police state presence that they created well before the convention even began on Saturday and Sunday in downtown St. Paul, created this climate that really felt like you were in a country that wasn't America.
Even given a sort of cynical perspective of police tactics in the United States, it was so extreme that it really felt like you were in a different universe.
I mean, it was palpable.
They were clearly looking to provoke the kinds of conflicts that ended up happening over the week.
And yeah, I think it's really important, that chilling effect, the climate of fear, where I guess the average citizen of St. Paul is supposed to see this looking out his window and say, forget that, I'm going to stay in here and watch the game.
If you booked it or read about what happened to those people who were planning protests over the weekend, I mean, literally, they were terrorized in their homes.
We interviewed these group of kids, 18, 20, 21 years old, in what they call hippie houses in Minneapolis.
These sort of group homes from kids who are sort of disaffected and cynical and politically engaged, but they basically sit around and live a sort of stereotypical hippie lifestyle.
We interviewed neighbors of theirs who aren't hippies.
You said that they never cause any problems.
They're great.
They're neighborly, etc.
But they were clearly looking to protest.
They were raided by 25 to 30 machine gun wielding police officers, forced to lay on the ground, all handcuffed.
Their computers and papers were seized, their laptops, their journals were taken away.
The police were, quote unquote, joking about executions and terminators and things like that while they were on the ground, handcuffed.
And they were wearing black SWAT gear.
I mean, this is a militia force, not a police force.
Joking about executions, Clint?
Yeah, there was, in that one house we were in, they all talked about how when they were on the ground, the police were saying things like, you have the terminator ready, and are you ready to call the executioner?
You know, and these were 18 to 19 year old kids who were trying to show some toughness and pretending that they were kind of scoffing at it, but acknowledging at the same time that at the time they were quite frightened by it.
You could see they were shaking and pretty traumatized by the experience.
None of them was arrested.
None of them was ever charged with a crime, but they were subjected to this extremely brutal assault in their home by the police.
And it was clearly designed to convey the idea that if you're someone who's thinking about protesting or joining a protest during the Republican Convention, that you might want to think twice because that could happen to you.
And I'm sure that that message was heard loudly and was quite effective.
Well now, under what pretext did the judges give permission for these things, or did they even have warrants?
Well, what happened was there were apparently, you know, a group of...
I mean, obviously in order to get search warrants, the police filed affidavits with the court.
And, you know, were claiming essentially that they were looking for what they called terrorists.
I mean, they claimed that there was a group of anarchists who were planning to do things like fire bomb and throw Molotov cocktails and engage in actual violence.
But the number of people that they claimed to have been participating in that was somewhere between 5 and 10 or 10 and 15.
And yet the number of people to whom they subjected, who they subjected to mass raids and arrests, even over the weekend, numbered in the hundreds.
I mean, way, way beyond the small group of people that they claimed were plotting violence.
And as it turns out, several of the people who they ended up arresting, they're now charging with what essentially are crimes of terrorism under the Minnesota version, state version of the Patriot Act.
Really?
Adopted in the Lake of Mount Eleven.
They're being charged with much more than just conspiracy riots.
They're actually being charged with essentially conspiracy to engage in terrorist acts and can face, you know, long prison terms.
Wow, they're not even Muslim.
Not even Muslim, huh?
White kids.
Yeah.
First of all, you know, what's so important to understand is that if you look at the police forces in so many of our cities, as I said earlier, they really do resemble militarized forces, militias.
Right.
They're the troops quartered among us, referred to in the Declaration of Independence.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, they're standing armies essentially occupying our cities.
And a lot of that has happened as a result of the excesses of the drug war, where our police departments have become much more like military units than actual peacekeeping officers.
And in fact, what was so striking to me was that, you know, not just the uniforms they were wearing, which were, you know, designed to terrorize.
I mean, there are these, you know, black masks, SWAT, riot gear uniforms.
They were, you know, repeatedly marching around in formation and chanting what our military chants, you know, double time and things like this.
Just unprovoked.
I mean, they were behaving as though the cities were occupied by a military force.
You know, we have laws preventing, prohibiting the deployment of our armed services in our cities.
And yet that's essentially what we now have with these militarized police forces.
And they were used to militarize the city and to really intimidate anyone who thought about protesting.
And now, you know, this thing about the terrorism charges, though, I mean, this is so important.
In the days of the 9-11 attacks and the anthrax in the mail, we just absolutely had to get this Patriot Act passed.
We had to create all this homeland security on the federal, state, and local levels and do all these things to protect us from the al-Qaeda terrorists.
And yet, should anybody be surprised that this kind of thing, these terrorism laws are now being applied wherever they think they can possibly apply them?
No, of course not.
I mean, whenever you give the government power that's susceptible to abuse, it's going to be abused.
And the definition of terrorism is so imprecise and so vague and susceptible to manipulation that it was only, you know, it's only a matter of time before those powers start being used in all kinds of unintended and excessive ways.
I mean, a lot of the post-9-11 terrorism measures have been used, you know, in greater and greater ways beyond Muslim terrorists or whatever the intent was originally.
But certainly now they're being applied even to political protesters like the ones who were protesting the Republicans in Minnesota in a way that ought to be disturbing to anyone.
Now, in Denver or in St. Paul, did they deploy all these fancy high-tech weapons I keep seeing on the History Channel and stuff, sound beams and all these kinds of things?
Well, I'm not really a weapons expert, but, you know, I know that there was a large variety of weapons used from all kinds of automatic weapons and some automatic rifles to tear gas and pepper spray and concussion grenades and things like that.
So I don't know the whole panoply of weapons, but it was a very, you know, weaponized show of force that was used.
And clearly they, rubber bullets as well.
And so they clearly used a wide variety of weapons to subdue protesters.
You know, I saw a show on A&E or one of those channels back quite a few years ago now about the advent of all these non-lethal weapons.
Rubber bullets is a perfect example.
And how, well, back in the day you had a Kent State type thing, and that really, you know, gets people off their couch all over the place for dead.
But now when the police can use, you know, overwhelming force and yet keep it short of deadly, they can, well, as we've seen, deny the rights of protesters all over the place, but nobody really died.
So there's no real sympathy created in the minds of the people at home watching on TV.
I mean, assuming they see any of it on TV anyway.
And so it basically, as they use somewhat softer methods of coercion, they can use much more coercion than back in the day when it was, you know, either a 38 or a punch in the face.
Right.
Well, you know, that's one of the problems with, for example, the pervasive use of tasers, is that it encourages the police essentially to use what is by any measure violent and brutality, simply in order to subdue people or to compel compliance with orders, because it doesn't really leave any permanent marks.
It's subject to deniability.
And yet it's extraordinarily painful.
It's essentially torture to send jolts of electricity through someone's body and get the police to use it in an extremely wide variety of circumstances.
Now, I personally witnessed, you know, police just pepper spraying crowds of people, you know, which causes people to lose their eyesight temporarily, to choke, to be incapable of breathing, to experience severe pain in their lungs, not in order to subdue anyone who was attacking them, but simply in order to kind of subdue the crowd, turn them more passive and scared and make them disperse, not people who were engaging in any violence themselves, but people who happened to be nearby as well.
Tear gas was used in the same way, from what I understand, concussion grenades, though I didn't see any, were deployed with great frequency as well.
So I think you're absolutely right that the ability now to use what is essentially state violence in nonlethal ways, or what are usually nonlethal ways, has really intensified the willingness of the police to use violence to achieve their ends.
All right, now I want to know who is orchestrating this thing.
I saw pictures on your blog of an FBI jacket.
I guess that means that this thing was really run out of D.C.
What about Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff and those guys?
Well, yeah, my sense at first was that that was almost certainly the case, that this was being coordinated by the federal government.
The more I looked around, the more I was able to confirm that that was in fact the case.
What essentially happened was, what was odd to a lot of people at first, was that these raids in Minneapolis were being conducted by the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office, which is based in St. Paul.
Minneapolis is actually not Ramsey County, it's Hennepin County.
And the sheriff in St. Paul is someone named Bob Fletcher, who's known as being kind of a hardcore right-wing, pseudo-law-and-order type of sheriff who has been accused of police brutality and excesses in the past.
And no one understood why Ramsey County was leading these raids, including in Minneapolis, which is outside its jurisdiction.
And we actually talked to some of the Minneapolis police officers who were posted at some of these raids, who seemed irritated that they were there and that this was happening in their jurisdiction.
And the reason why that ended up happening, those cross-jurisdiction raids, is because there was a joint federal-state-local task force created by Homeland Security under the guise of combating terrorism that was led by the FBI, which essentially was designed to coordinate police activity during the convention and to protect the convention from protesters.
And all of this was fueled with Homeland Security money and coordinated by the FBI, which participated in many of these raids.
And as a result, it was clearly done at the seat of federal power in Washington that they used the local police force as sort of the face for what it was that they were doing.
So at the end of the day, there's no question that this emanated from federal activity.
I saw lots of—I didn't even know such a thing existed— but I saw lots of Homeland Security police cars, you know, just police cars that had federal Homeland Security tags on them.
I mean, Homeland Security itself is now its own stand-alone police force.
And they were clearly coordinating much of what took place.
Well, they can't call it the National Police Force, because people might remember, wait a minute, wasn't there something about the American tradition that had always opposed the creation of a national police force?
Oh, I know, we'll translate some German and we'll call it Homeland and give everybody a warm feeling in their heart as we enslave them.
Right, well, again, I mean, a lot of the precursor to this is grounded in the drug war.
I mean, the DEA, for example, is basically a standing national police force, armed to the teeth and empowered with all sorts of standard police powers.
And they're more than a police force.
I mean, they're essentially a militia, and they're militarized greatly.
And so local police agencies have adopted the same tactics.
And now that you have so much of this taking place in the guise of anti-terrorism, it's being militarized even further.
And so you have literally our federal government-controlled militias within our cities, which are longstanding statutes, like Posse Comitatus and other laws, have long been designed to prohibit.
And they've essentially circumvented those prohibitions under the guise of law enforcement.
And it's really quite alarming.
Man, I'm really sorry about this, Glenn.
I really hate to wish this on you for even a moment.
But it occurs to me that you'd be really great in the House of Representatives.
You ever thought about running for Congress?
No, I have not, and I will not.
I think you could do it.
You should feel free, and I'll happily support your candidacy.
But I don't think I'll ever have one myself.
Yeah, well, that's the whole thing, man.
The best lack-all conviction.
No, so let's see.
The media thing.
Here's the thing.
One of the clips of Amy Goodman, she says, well, other reporters asked her, well, you know, how'd you get arrested?
What happened to you?
And she said, well, I was out here covering the police state.
You were safe inside.
And how, of course, the fact that not just Amy Goodman, but as you mentioned, AP photographers and all kinds of different people, mainstream credentialed journalists were being arrested.
That kept the media, which wasn't really interested anyway, and gave them extra reason to not even cover this brutality.
And I've got to admit, I cannot watch television.
During presidential campaigns, I just can't do it.
But I'm reading these things on your blog, but as far as I know, the American people don't even know that any of this stuff happened during these conventions.
Well, I mean, look, we were walking around.
I was with Jane Hampshire, and she was doing a lot of the videoing.
And we were walking around.
We had spent the weekend going, as I said, to each house as these raids were taking place.
And then spent Monday and Tuesday walking around St. Paul during the protests themselves.
And it was extremely unpleasant.
There was a sense that the police were acting in a very indiscriminate manner, using brutality and violence and engaging in mass arrests.
And so one was hesitant to head right into where the action was because you felt like you could be tear gassed or shot with a rubber bullet or arrested.
And we knew that that was likely to happen, and we kept having to sort of push ourselves in order to go uncover it because it would be much easier to just go and sit in some office somewhere and kind of remain safe and free from all of it.
And so I have no doubt that that impulse prevented numerous journalists from going anywhere near that scene.
And, you know, whatever your view of those protests were and the police actions were, there's no question that it was extremely newsworthy.
And yet it was barely covered.
You know, that first day, the end of the first day, which is when most of the brutality took place and many of the arrests occurred, including when Amy Goodman was arrested on Monday, we went to a news conference given by the mayor of St. Paul, the police chief.
And there were maybe, I'd say, 15, 20 people there at the press conference, at least half of whom were independent journalists, you know, students videotaping for various websites in Minnesota.
The few credentialed journalists, standard journalists, were people who worked at the local news stations, the ABC, NBC, CBS affiliates.
And they would do things like ask very kind of unchallenging, gullible questions like, well, what's the property damage that you estimate took place from these protesters?
You know, things designed to fuel the police narrative, very uncritical, unchallenging and questioning.
And the level of interest in what took place was extremely small in the standard media.
And I agree, given the extremity of what happened, the number of people who know that this took place is probably very small, very limited, because the media essentially stayed away.
Wow.
What a shame.
I've got to wonder what goes on at these newsrooms where any reporter who comes in applying for a job but who exhibits any courage whatsoever is denied.
Is that it?
You just have to be a tool to even get in the door?
Well, it was interesting.
I mean, you could tell that there was an obvious relationship between these establishment reporters and the mayor and the police chief.
And the rapport was very obvious.
They knew one another.
They liked each other.
And, you know, reporters think that in order to do their job effectively, they need to maintain good relationships with those in power.
That's how they get their access, their scoops, their information.
And so there's an instinct that develops in the journalistic culture that is designed to curry favor with people in political power rather than challenge or question or displease them.
And every time I'm around, any kind of interaction between establishment journalists and political officials, that is far and away the overriding attribute, that the journalists are eager to maintain amicable relationships with the people in political power.
Well, and I think this is the solution to the riddle that you're talking about on your blog in your most recent couple of blog entries here about the debate, the accusations by the right that the media, quote-unquote, you know, as a whole, is biased toward the liberals.
And, of course, you know, liberals always seem to think that the media is biased toward the conservatives.
But it's always been the case, as far as I could tell, since I've never been left or right and lucky enough to have escaped that my whole life, it seems to me like the media is simply biased toward the state, no matter who has power.
They're not conservative or liberal.
They're not liberal at all.
They don't even know what that means.
What they're interested in is, as you said, policing their...
I think that's true.
I think that, however, that, you know, by and large, political power in the United States over the past couple of decades, and even going back further, has been largely right-wing power.
And the reason for that is because Republicans typically win presidential elections.
And political power is vested overwhelmingly in the executive branch these days.
And even, you know, Congress throughout the 90s and most of this decade has been controlled by Republicans as well.
And even when Democrats tend to have power, they're hardly members of the left in any meaningful sense.
You know, they tend to be sort of establishment-promoting, status quo-perpetuating Democrats who support the surveillance state and imperial policies and war.
And so whether, you know, you want to say that the media is biased toward conservatives or whether they're simply...their function is simply to curry favor with the state, I think that distinction ultimately is less important than it seems because political power largely exists to promote what is known as a right-wing agenda, which is, you know, large federal power, police power, wars and empire, and a growing surveillance state.
And the right has dominated our national elections, and so that's where the media's allegiance lies.
And whether that's ideological bias or whether it's just a bias in favor of power, ultimately it doesn't matter because those two things end up being essentially the same.
Sure.
Yeah, you know, you point out on your blog that Phil Donahue had the anti-war show and got canned even though he had the very best ratings on MSNBC.
And the same thing happened to Jesse Ventura.
I guess he did two shows or something and then they realized he was going to be anti-war and he was coming in and had really good ratings.
Oh, I guess he was supposed to be in a market system, it would seem like.
Go ahead and use your best guys.
And yet, I don't know exactly what reasons.
I can make some up.
I don't really know exactly.
I can speculate.
They've decided that there's either more money or more influence or whatever it is to be had in getting rid of these top earners rather than promoting them.
Well, I mean, you know, these media corporations that media outlets such as MSNBC promote some kind of left-wing or anti-war agenda.
MSNBC is owned by General Electric which makes extraordinary profits through the expansion of the military industrial state and the surveillance state and through war policies.
And so the idea that General Electric is out there promoting left-wing policies or anti-war positions is idiotic on its face.
And, you know, you're absolutely right.
I interviewed the executive director and the executive producer of that show, Jeff Cohen, who talked about how from the very first day they were told that for every anti-war guest that they put on they were required to put on two pro-war guests.
You could never have a war opponent alone but you could have war supporters on the loan.
And even though the Donahue Show was the best-rated program on MSNBC it was canceled shortly before the war began and memos that were released to MSNBC executives demonstrated that the cancellation was due to the fact that they didn't want to be perceived to be the left-wing network in part because their corporation relies upon good relationship with the federal government and incurring favor with the Bush administration and on pro-war policies.
That's what General Electric's interests lie.
You know, today I quoted Sumner Redstone who is the CEO of Viacom which owns CPS.
And what he said was, you know, he had good feelings for John Kerry and that's what he's known for.
He himself has been a Democrat in the past and has supported liberal policies but that his concern is Viacom and that his corporation's interests are best served by Republicans in power and so that's where his allegiance lies.
And so the idea that, you know, these large corporations that control our media outlets are out there promoting some radical pacifist agenda or undermining the interests of the government on which they rely is just absolutely ludicrous.
And you know, maybe that CBS News has ties with the military industrial complex in ways that I don't know about but I know that Dan Rather told Bill Moyers on his special Buying the War, Dan Rather said, look, nobody has to send you a memo to remind you that you work for this gigantic multinational corporation that is regulated from top to bottom, front to back, by the government and that if you cross them it can cost, you know, unmeasurable amounts of money and it would be, you know, an act of disloyalty to the rest of the people who work for the same company as you to perhaps put that company in jeopardy by doing something that would severely cross the state.
Yeah, I mean, anybody who works for a company develops and succeeds, develops the ability to know what their bosses want without having to be told.
You know how to please the people on whom your livelihood depends.
All large cultures create their own mores.
You can see who thrives and succeeds in your culture and who doesn't.
And if you look at who is promoted and who becomes the face of these networks, people like Brian Williams or Charlie Gibson or Katie Couric, people like that, they tend to be people who are very uncontroversial and inoffensive and very accommodating to those in power.
That's what these networks want and you're absolutely right.
Your corporate corporation, which is your parent company, relies upon good relationships with the government on all sorts of ways.
You know that angering and infuriating the government with your reporting is not something that your corporate bosses want.
You don't need a memo telling you not to do that.
You know that that's something that if you do, you'll be undermining your corporate interests and therefore your career.
So the climate in these media companies very much is one that avoids angering and infuriating the government.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate all the work you do on your blog and coming on this show to share your insight with us.
My pleasure.
It's always great to be here, Scott.
All right, folks.
That's Glenn Greenwald.
He is the author of A Tragic Legacy, How Would a Patriot Act, Great American Hypocrites.
His blog is salon.com
