Greenwald: Snowden fled 'because US is filled w/ Jeffrey Toobins'...

Brad Friedman Byon 8/3/2013, 7:05am PT

Earlier this week we detailed The Guardian investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald's dismantling of CNN/New York's Jeffrey Toobin in regard to the Bradley Manning verdict, and Toobin's vigorous defense of the U.S. surveillance state, long and cruel sentences for patriot whistleblowers and his support of the elitist establishment media who often publish "approved" administration leaks of Top Secret material to great aplomb from folks like Toobin.

Greenwald was back with Toobin on CNN Wednesday night, this time to talk about NSA leaker Edward Snowden. And this time, they were joined by New York Times investigative journalist James Risen, who is being forced to testify concerning his reporting on an alleged U.S. cyberattack against the Iran nuclear program.

It didn't go well for Toobin...

"It's certainly true that there has been public discussion about this and that's a good thing," says Toobin about the positive results from Snowden's disclosures, before adding: "I still think Edward Snowden is a criminal and should not have done what he did, but I do think this discussion we're having is a good thing."

"Well, we wouldn't be having this discussion if it wasn't for him," Risen jumped in to respond. "That's the thing I don't understand about the climate in Washington these days, is that people want to have debates on television and elsewhere, but then you want to throw the people who started the debates in jail."

After Toobin then assails Snowden for fleeing the U.S. --- which even legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said Snowden was right to do, given what our government has become in the decades since his own landmark Pentagon Papers leak of thousands of pages of classified documents in 1971 --- Greenwald "drops an elbow" on Toobin, as our friend Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks describes it in the video below.

"The reason he had to go to Russia and China," Greenwald argues, "is because the United States is filled with Jeffrey Toobins who want to take people who come forward and bring transparency to the government, and throw them into a cage for decades and disappear them from our public discourse!"

I'm happy to associate myself with the commentary on all of this by Uygur as seen in the video below...

There is much more in the actual video of the 7/31/2013 conversation on CNN's Piers Morgan Live, as cited in Uygur's video above. That video follows below...

[Hat-tip to too-infrequent BRAD BLOG contributor D.R. Tucker.]



