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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Glenn
Published Letters: 2
FireDogLake's reporting is a window into the future, as you so rightly note. I've been a journalist — reporter, editor and columnist — since 1964 and though my e-media skills are limited, I can at least recognize this new paradigm that's before us. My son, a blogger, is heading in the right direction. Blogs are the future of news dissemination; most news gathering organizations are beginning to realize it, as The Times article shows — it's patronizing tone aside. The work of Hamshire, Smith et al, as well as your work, Glenn, and the efforts of Atrios, Digby, Kos and others, are showing old foggies like me — who remember paste-pots and 'copy boys' in the news room — what this wonderful and important profession will become. Today's mass media has abdicated, as we all know. The new media will rush in to, as Churchill said be "the guardian of every right that free men prize."
Glenn Rutherford
I once interviewed a retired B-52 driver who said that, at the depth of the cold war, Strategic Air Command pilots took comfort in knowing that if they ever received the "go-codes" they could be certain of one thing — their country had been horribly damaged by an attack. "Because we knew," he said, "that the United States would never start a war. We knew we always had the moral high ground."
Mr. Greenwald's excellent post today — and his consistently good work over the past few years — have revealed time and time again that this country, under its current leadership, has abandoned its moral standing in the world. We start wars now. We torture people. We suspend the rule of law. We do all the terrible things we once accused the Soviet Union of doing years ago when it would snatch people off the streets and hold them in gulags without contact with the outside world.
We have, on many fronts, become bad guys. Good guys don't do what Mr. Greenwald's article chronicles. Good guys don't do what Gen. Anthony Taguba documented in his report on the Abu Graib prison, which was reported in this week's New Yorker magazine by Sy Hersh.
We have to become the good guys again. And with the likes of Glenn Greenwald, Hersh and others shining light on this darkness, perhaps we will.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
