Monday, August 19, 2013

CBS's Bob Schieffer and former FBI agent John Miller continue their Snowden spook-spin on a lickspittle network

AKSARBENT thinks CBS's coverage of NSA disclosures has been contemptibly and obviously biased (especially its incessant reliance on Washington spook mouthpiece and FBI apologist John Miller). Here's what The Nation thought of Miller's coverage of the various FBI accounts of why it killed Boston Bomber acquaintance Ibragim Todashev in an interrogation room:
     Read the details of that version and you almost have to laugh. One of the cops texted the FBI agent to tell him the suspect was getting agitated? And it was when the FBI guy was reading the text that all the action started? And the “samurai sword” that became a “pole” that became a “broomstick” had now become the metal part of a broom, perhaps to make it sound more like the original “knife.”
     John Miller of CBS, the longtime reporter who later became an FBI hack, recounts the latest here, as usual bending over backwards to accept the official story. You’ll see that like many others he makes no mention of how the agency could claim this was a knife attack for a week before the broomstick appeared. That’s some kind of tough reporting.
     Today, friend-of-the-NSA Bob Schieffer, who made a fool of himself a week ago on the issue of domestic spying, asked puffball questions of John Miller on the CBS Evening News, which they used as a platform to try to con viewers into seeing Glenn Greenwald as some sort of petulant fag intent on exacting revenge on Britain's spy agency, GCHQ, for inconveniencing his Brazilian boyfriend at the airport.

Some journalists were outraged by what happened at Heathrow.
Here's what Rachel Maddow said yesterday:



Here's what the Brazilian government and Amnesty International had to say:
     The government of Brazil issued a statement in which it expressed its "grave concern" over the detention of one of its citizens and the use of anti-terror legislation.
     It said: "This measure is without justification since it involves an individual against whom there are no charges that can legitimate the use of that legislation. The Brazilian government expects that incidents such as the one that happened to the Brazilian citizen today are not repeated."
     Widney Brown, Amnesty International's senior director of international law and policy, said: "It is utterly improbable that David Michael Miranda, a Brazilian national transiting through London, was detained at random, given the role his partner has played in revealing the truth about the unlawful nature of NSA surveillance.
     "David's detention was unlawful and inexcusable. He was detained under a law that violates any principle of fairness and his detention shows how the law can be abused for petty, vindictive reasons.
"There is simply no basis for believing that David Michael Miranda presents any threat whatsoever to the UK government. The only possible intent behind this detention was to harass him and his partner, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, for his role in analysing the data released by Edward Snowden."

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