I was going to say that anyone in the US who doesn’t protest what’s been done to Assange has no right whine about Greenwald, but then I remembered it’s the US; nobody cares. At least this journalist is Canadian.
Evidence of the bias against him was offered just this past Sunday, as Greenwald, who is facing serious cyber crime charges in his adopted country, Brazil, had an appearance on CNN’s Reliable Sources canceled at the last moment to allow the show to exclusively cover the ridiculously aggressive behavior of Mike Pompeo to an NPR reporter who had the audacity to ask him if he had supported former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in his role as Secretary of State (he didn’t). This story was undoubtedly newsworthy, but some time on CNN’s equivalent to “Meet the Press” could have been devoted to the case of a Pulitzer prize winning American journalist facing imprisonment for doing his job.
As the reporter told the conservative Washington Examiner after his invitation to appear was rescinded, “I find it disappointing that CNN can’t devote 6 minutes to a major attack on a free press by the world’s fifth largest country that every major media outlet in the world has extensively covered, but being disappointed isn’t the same as being surprised.”
The case being built against Greenwald, by Brazil’s far right government and its demagogic leader, Jair Bolsonaro, deals with leaked documents, mostly comprised of hacked phone messages, provided by a still anonymous source that proved the country’s Justice Minister, Sergio Moro, who was supposedly an impartial judge at the time, worked behind the scenes with prosecutors to help them coordinate their media strategies as part of what was called ‘Operation Car Wash’, an anti-corruption investigation that most famously resulted in the jailing of the country’s former socially democratic president, Lula da Silva, who, along with his Worker’s Party, made significant strides in fighting poverty in the country beginning in 2003.
He’s facing the same kind of BS charges in Brazil that Assange faces in the US. Whatever comes of this, Derek Royden is correct: Greenwald “will be the last journalist to be targeted.” Our next feature showcases the clamping down on an independent financial publication. (Come to think of it, the grabblers aren’t too keen on a guy who writes a novel about their schools either).
