If You're Gonna Do It, Do It Right -- UPDATE

If you're gonna hype it, hype it with the facts.

What % of people attacking Snowden for "fleeing" would be defending him if he were rotting for decades in a US prison incommunicado?
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 9, 2013

As this tweet shows, the spate of apparently uncontrollable lying which seized Mr. Greenwald last week was not a one-off or the result of sleep deprivation.  

Quite the contrary: instead of gently walking back his overwrought falsehoods -- an act of factual correction which once upon a time any reputable publisher would have demand of any reputable journalist -- Mr. Greenwald is sticking to his story that America whistleblowers are automatically tossed incommunicado into supermax hellholes forever.

Except, of course, that under the Obama Administration this has never happened, and in every case involving civilian contractors (like Mr. Snowden) and not active-duty military (who are subject to an entirely different legal system) it has super-duper never happened.

Now to be 100% fair, there do exist some American leakers who are living out at least part of the scenario which Glenn Greenwald repeatedly and publicly insists is the automatic fate of every whistleblower who crosses the nefarious Obama Administration. None of them charged or convicted during the nefarious Obama Administration, but while exceedingly rare, such people do exist (all reference material from Wikipedia):

For example, there's this guy:

Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is an American former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for 22 years from 1979 to 2001. He is serving a life sentence at the United States Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado. Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001 at Foxstone Park near his home in Vienna, Virginia, and was charged with selling American secrets to the USSR and subsequently Russia for more than US$1.4 million in cash and diamonds over a 22-year period. On July 6, 2001, he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of espionage in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He was then sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His activities have been described by the U.S. Department of Justice's Commission for the Review of FBI Security Programs as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history."

And this guy:

Aldrich Hazen Ames (born May 26, 1941) is a former Central Intelligence Agency counterintelligence officer and analyst, who in 1994 was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. So far as is known, Ames compromised the second-largest number of CIA assets—second only to those betrayed by Robert Hanssen.

While spending nine years working in CIA counter-intelligence, he declared an annual income of $60,000 but his credit card spending of up to $30,000 a month funded a lifestyle that included a new Jaguar and a $540,000 house (2012 value: $810,000) paid for in cash.

...

Ames is Federal Bureau of Prisons prisoner #40087-083, serving his sentence in the high-security Allenwood U.S. Penitentiary near Allenwood, Pennsylvania.

The CIA was criticized for not focusing on Ames sooner, given the obvious increase in his standard of living; and there was a "huge uproar" in Congress when CIA director James Woolsey decided that no one in the CIA would be dismissed or demoted at the agency. "Some have clamored for heads to roll in order that we could say that heads have rolled," Woolsey declared. "Sorry, that's not my way." Woolsey was forced to resign.

And this guy:

Harold James Nicholson (born 1950) is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and a twice-convicted spy for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). His recruitment to the SVR appears to have occurred in the wake of a much publicized arrest of senior CIA officer and Moscow mole Aldrich Ames in February 1994, which, in the words of CIA veteran and author Tennent Bagley, had "exposed extraordinary slackness of CIA security procedures."

...

Harold Nicholson was convicted of selling U.S. intelligence to Russia for $300,000 and was sentenced to 23 years 7 months of imprisonment on June 5, 1997. He did not get a life without parole or death sentence as prosecutors said he had cooperated fully with them after his arrest. Prosecutors believed that he had sold the identities of all the U.S. intelligence officers stationed in Russia, as well as the identities of his trainees at the CIA school. He told the court that he had intended for the money he received from the Russians to benefit his children.

However since these are the only American leakers who can reasonably be described as having been tossed into a hole for "decades" (incommunicado or not) I am compelled to wonder; are these the people Mr. Greenwald keeps alluding to?  

If they are, he needs to say so.  Clearly.

If not -- if  Nicholson and Ames and Hanssen are not the leakers Mr. Greenwald is referring to -- then the tale he is spinning about whistle-blowers languishing incommunicado in hellholes for decades is just straight-up lying.

Which is a big problem; big enough to potentially dwarf Dan Rather's screw-up over using allegedly falsified data to report on a true story which triggered a series of events that effectively ended his career and, much more to the point, destroyed the story he was trying to report:

...
By all rights, Rather, who turns 81 this year, should be enjoying a few victory laps at the close of a remarkable career. And he would be, except for one report that he will never forget, because no one will ever let him: the botched 60 Minutes segment in 2004 on George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service. The report, which lasted fifteen minutes, forever damaged Rather’s reputation and ended his network TV career after forty years. Its claims were potentially explosive—that Bush had received preferential treatment to enter the National Guard in 1968 in order to avoid the Vietnam draft and that he had then shirked his duty without repercussion. As evidence, Rather produced six documents that described the alleged political pressure Bush’s commanding officer was under to “sugarcoat” possibly embarrassing moments in Bush’s record, specifically his failure to show up for a flight physical and his loss of flight status. In a presidential campaign that had become a referendum on who had the credibility to take control of the quagmire in Iraq, Rather’s report could have seriously damaged Bush’s reelection effort. But he went at the king—and he missed. 

Almost as soon as the broadcast aired, a swarm of right-wing blogs assailed Rather’s documents, claiming their typeface and spacing was inconsistent with any known typewriter of the early seventies. Within days CBS was reeling as Bush allies accused Rather and his longtime producer, Mary Mapes, of using forgeries to tip a presidential election in favor of the Democrats. Twelve days after the story aired, CBS backed down, forced Rather to apologize, and established a special panel to investigate what went wrong. Forty-three days later, Bush was reelected, beating Senator John Kerry by a two-point margin in the pivotal swing state of Ohio. By the time Mapes and three other producers were ousted by CBS, the Bush National Guard story was dead and buried, with Rather’s reputation as the tombstone.

Of course, Mr. Greenwald's hyperbole and his fairy tales would fall well within the parameters of the perfectly acceptable tools of activism were he merely acting as Mr. Snowden's very-aggressive defense attorney.  Hell, every activists I have ever known (including me), in addition to using logic, cajoling, pleading and threatening, always has an Apocalyptic Scenario on tap should that turn out to be what the situation calls for.  In the Apocalyptic Scenario, all intermediate opinions are burned to the ground and the world is reduced to two-and-only-two alternatives: your position -- a blasted hellscape fit only for zombies and cannibals where the survivors envy the dead -- or my position, which you much accept entirely and immediately!

Which Will You Choose!?!

Using this Manichean sledgehammer to pound out your paragraphs just fine for the advocate, but Mr. Greenwald has instead chosen to position himself as an activist/journalist.  And while the currency of activism is passion and tireless commitment to The Cause (Please help me stop childhood hunger!) the currency of journalism is credibility (You can trust that I am telling you the truth and giving you the whole story.)

I want to be perfectly clear that there nothing wrong with doing both but if you choose to marry the two -- as Mr, Greenwald has -- you are obliged to bear the burdens of both.  And that means, when it comes to the facts of the story, you had damn well better be as pure as Caesar's wife.

Which is why, whether or not his followers can stand to acknowledge it, Mr. Greenwald's on-the-record lies are such a disaster.

Because when a journalist lies, they blow the story.

But when an activist/journalist lies, they sabotage their cause.

UPDATE:

If Mr. Greenwald wants to tell whoppers about his Grandma's haunted root cellar or spout off wild tales about the Cubs winning the World Series or take on the entire rap community and declare that
Kendrick Lamar's lyrics were not genuinely "nuclear" but merely HE, fine.

Go with God and be well.

But the fact is, he didn't choose to do any of those things.

Instead, he went on national teevee in his role as principal reporter in the NSA surveillance story and lied about a critical aspect of his own own story.

Twice.

Before he lied on national teevee, he lied about this critical aspect of his own story on Twitter.

After he lied on national teevee, he lied about this critical aspect of his own story on Twitter again.

You are free to dress this fact up any way you like, but for a person who is shepherding such a genuinely important and consequential story -- arguably the most visible story in the world at the moment -- this was a colossally reckless thing to do.

But it gets so much worse.

This could have been fixed with a retraction and a correction.  But retractions and corrections are not  in Mr. Greenwald's natural.  Grabbing the nearest "Fascism!" hammer and bashing the crap out of anyone who disagrees with him to the smallest degree is Mr. Greenwald's nature and "Supermax! Hellhole For life! Incommunicado!" is such a perfectly Greenwaldian cudgel with which to pound the hell out of his critics that he simply cannot put it down.

And while seeing their leader swinging that big, bone club down on the heretical skulls of the nonbelievers may delight his horde, 

 

outside the Greenwald Bubble people will  inevitably ask, "If Mr. Greenwald cannot stop lying about this critical part of his story what other critical parts of this story is he lying about?"