Four consequential lies in two minutes.

Sometimes it feels like Glenn Greenwald is doing more credible and consequential reporting as an independent than many of the big mainstream corporate media shops who have a lot of bodies but little credibility and often much less of a nose for what is consequential.

His latest is The Real Disinformation Agents: Watch as NBC News Tells Four Blatant Lies in a Two-Minute Clip in which he destroys the fact base of "reporting" by Joe Scarborough and former Senator Claire McCaskill.  The topic is not Covid-19 but the extradition of Assange from Britain to the US.

Greenwald has been livid about this issue for years.  As he makes perfectly clear, if the US government is successful in its prosecution of Assange in this case on the charges they are bringing, it eviscerates journalism and the free exchange of idea.  Astonishingly, corporate media has been gung-ho supporters of the US government despite the clear danger to their business.  

There are many accusations these days of so-and-so "is lying" when in fact it is that they 1) have a different opinion of how to interpret the facts or 2) they are ignorant of the facts.  

Oftentimes there is real lying but there is always enough wiggle room to escape the full weight of the charge of lying.  

Greenwald takes Scarborough and McCaskill to task for four lies in a two minute exchange.  Greenwald establishes both the facts as well as why it is not credible that Scarborough and McCaskill are ignorant of those facts and therefore why their claims are indeed deliberate lies.  All that is left for a defense is that Scarborough and McCaskill might be careless in their language.  One lie might be careless but four foundational lies in two minutes is deliberate propaganda.

The four lies are:

Assange hacked US military intelligence and stole the records which were ultimately made public.  As Greenwald makes clear, this is clearly untenable.  The government and all who have followed the case have always known that the data was  stolen by private Chelsea Manning and then turned over to Assange.  

That Assange, and Wikileaks, by releasing the records placed American and allies lives in danger.  This is at least conceptually plausible but became untenable in the first few months after the release as the US government backed further and further away from the claim.  No one has ever been identified as having lost their life or been incarcerated owing to the release of the records.  It was pretty clear within a few months of the release that while the embarrassment to the US government of its own records was immense, the actual danger and consequence was de minimus.  As then Defense Secretary Robert Gates (and former CIA Director) himself acknowledged.  "Let me just offer some perspective of someone who has been at this for a long time.  Every other government in the world knows that the United States government leaks like a sieve, and it has for a long time.  Now, I've heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on.  I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought.  The fact is governments deal with the United States because it is in their interests, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets."

That Assange released the records without care or concern and with no effort to avoid dangerous revelations.  As Greenwald documents, Assange and Wikileaks in fact had a global network in place of major news outlets in each of the relevant countries with whom they coordinated to review and prioritize releases and with a particular care regarding revelations which might be dangerous.  As Greenwald notes, this might not be the most consequential lie but it is the most obvious since the global network of news organs was public from the beginning.

That Assange is charged with hacking into US military systems to steal this information and that his defense against extradition is that he would be unsafe in the US legal system.  As Greenwald documents, this is not what the US government is charging Assange with, nor is it the basis for Assange's defense against extradition.  McCaskill has either forgotten the details or is deliberately lying.  

The best defense of Scarborough and McCaskill's false statements is that they are being careless and/or have simply forgotten the facts.  Given their profiles, that they are in the news business, and that they were present during the emergence of the Wikileaks crisis even that defense is pretty hollow.  

Scarborough and McCaskill are serving as propagandists, trumpeting not just misinformation but disinformation.  And virtually certainly doing so knowing that they are propagating lies.

It is a very revealing and thorough debunking of our mainstream news media.