Many other journalists and activists were quick to accept the line that Miranda had been targeted merely by dint of his relationship to Greenwald. Amnesty International released this statement: “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 analyzing the data released by Edward Snowden.”

Not so, according to Oliver Robbins, Britain’s deputy national-security adviser, who told a court two weeks later that Miranda had been in possession of roughly 58,000 “highly classified UK intelligence documents,” a “large proportion” of which are “either secret or top secret.” The “disclosure of the material could put the lives of British intelligence agents or their families at risk,” Robbins wrote, and “the general public could also be endangered if details about intelligence operations or methods fell into the wrong hands.”

Even if Greenwald and the Guardian had no intention of publishing this information, it is almost a certainty that it has already fallen into the wrong hands. Snowden initially fled to Hong Kong (where he publicly divulged details about Washington’s spying on China), before gaining temporary asylum in Russia; it is reasonable to assume that both Moscow and Beijing are in possession of everything he stole while working for Booz Allen Hamilton, the NSA contractor that employed him for all of three months. Writing in the National Interest, John R. Schindler, a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College and a former NSA intelligence analyst, surmised that “it could take many millions, perhaps billions, of dollars to repair the harm done, and some losses may be irreparable at any cost.”

That Miranda was carrying information about the identities and whereabouts of British undercover agents was nowhere to be found in Greenwald’s angry blog posts and interviews, nor in the distressed complaint issued by Amnesty International. Nor was it mentioned in any of the outraged statements by those media critics and journalists who, ever since the Pentagon Papers case, have developed a theory of “press freedom” that only pays lip service to governmental claims of needing to protect national-security secrets. While the Pentagon Papers dispute set an important precedent in solidifying America’s unparalleled tradition of freedom of the press, it has also left an unfortunate legacy in perpetuating a belief that the government always exaggerates the need for secrecy and that journalists who expose government secrets are never wrong to do so.

Upon the revelation that Miranda was trafficking in stolen secrets, the story peddled by Greenwald, his employer, and his partner began to change. Immediately after having been detained, Miranda told the press: “I don’t look at documents. I don’t even know if it was documents that I was carrying.” Miranda’s lawyers now say that “Mr. Miranda does not accept the assertions [UK authorities] have made,” implying that he did have knowledge of what sort of information he was ferrying. Greenwald tried to mitigate the damage by claiming that no information thus far released has harmed American or British national-security interests. That assertion has been contradicted by the British government, which claims it has redeployed personnel due to Greenwald’s disclosures. Hinting at what motivated his disclosures, Greenwald boasted that “the only thing that has been harmed are the political interests and reputations of UK and U.S. officials around the world.”

In 1975, former Central Intelligence Agency officer Philip Agee published his Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which exposed the identities of some 250 American intelligence assets; he would ultimately reveal the names of more than 2,000. Due to his revelations, several American and British agents were killed. Agee worked closely with the Soviet KGB and Cuban security services, and, as a result of his American passport being revoked, he embarked on a long sojourn through the Communist world, finally ending up in Havana, where he died in 2008.

There is a word for men like Agee and Snowden—men who betray their country, their country’s allies, their comrades, and defect to a hostile state. It is an ancient one: traitor. As Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid described Snowden to the Reno Gazette-Journal: “I think Snowden is a traitor, and I think he has hurt our country, and I hope someday he is brought to justice.” Supporters of Snowden and Bradley Manning (the former Army private who released more than a quarter million classified diplomatic cables to the anarchist web collective WikiLeaks and who was recently sentenced to 35 years in prison after being found guilty of violating the Espionage Act) claim that the men are “whistleblowers.” Far from betraying their country, both men’s backers say, they in fact served it by revealing egregious wrongdoing.

That explanation would have some weight if either man had been discriminating in his leaks, or gone through legal channels to divulge the information, instead of sharing it with less-than-salubrious figures such as Julian Assange and Vladimir Putin. “He has taken an oath,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said in June on CBS’s Face the Nation with respect to Snowden. “These oaths mean something. If you can’t keep the oath, get out. And then do something about it in a legal way.” Snowden did not begin working at Booz Allen Hamilton until March 2013. It was a job he took with the explicit goal of pilfering sensitive national-security information.

After he sought asylum in Russia, the image of Snowden in the minds of most Americans shifted from that of whistleblower to unsavory character. But Greenwald, who argued that Snowden had no choice but to seek asylum because of America’s totalitarian judicial system, was not among the majority. Were Snowden to return to the United States, Greenwald told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, he would face “the standard whistleblower treatment that the United States government gives to people, which is to put them in a cage for decades and render them incommunicado.” Greenwald repeated this accusation on ABC’s This Week: “Whistleblowers in the United States are put into prison for decades and basically ‘disappeared.’” Greenwald never bothered to specify which “whistleblowers” have “disappeared” or been rendered “incommunicado,” words that evoke Latin American dictatorships throwing people out of helicopters into the ocean. Only one government employee has received jail time under the Obama administration for revealing classified information, and the punishment has been 30 months.

The word traitor may not apply legally to Greenwald, but his role as the privileged publisher rather than thief of such classified information (indeed, Snowden never communicates on his own, but always through an intermediary such as Greenwald, Poitras, or WikiLeaks) does not absolve him of culpability in harming the national-security interests of the United States. Greenwald and other publicizers of Snowden, Manning, and WikiLeaks are engaged in a sinister enterprise that, while purporting to forward a benign agenda of promoting “transparency,” is singularly aimed at exposing the national-security secrets of the United States and its closest allies, all with a view to embarrassing Western governments by portraying them as authoritarian states that have grievously betrayed their purported ideals. They are not traitors themselves, but they serve as public-relations coordinators of treasonous actors. They are working to make traitorous actions seem valiant. Call it “treason chic.”

Writing of Communist fellow travelers in The New Meaning of Treason (1964), British essayist and novelist Rebecca West observed: “Of the other virtues, patriotism, it is to be remarked, was the first to get its dismissal. It was naive for a man to feel any conviction that his own country was the best, or even as good as any other country; just as it was naive to believe that the soldiers of any foreign army committed atrocities or to doubt that any English soldier or sailor or colonial administrator failed to do so.” Such a description perfectly describes Greenwald and other journalists of his ilk, who endlessly bemoan the (highly exaggerated) wrongdoings of the Western democracies, all while ignoring the crimes of their authoritarian adversaries. If patriotism has become passé, “the last refuge of scoundrels” in our post-national, wired world, then treason has become the sign of the truly independent and “brave” thinker who is beholden to no state.

Such figures are, instead, anti-beholden—to the United States. Examine the way, for instance, that Greenwald selectively views the disclosure of classified information, particularly the identities of undercover agents. It was not long ago that Greenwald and many of the same people now praising Snowden as a “whistleblower” were calling for the heads of those individuals they believed had revealed the name of an undercover CIA officer: Valerie Plame. “In disclosing to reporters the classified information of Plame’s CIA employment, what [former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney “Scooter”] Libby did was wrong and almost certainly illegal,” Greenwald wrote in 2005. Ironically, it was Agee’s exposés—cheered wildly at the time by left-wing critics of American foreign policy, Greenwald’s political progenitors—that led Congress to pass the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. This was the very law invoked to justify a special prosecutor’s investigation into the leaking of Plame’s identity, an investigation Greenwald lustily applauded.

Contrast Greenwald’s contempt for those who leaked the identity of Plame with his reaction to the plight of Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who sparked a diplomatic crisis with Pakistan in 2011 after shooting two men dead in Lahore. Davis claimed the men had tried to attack him, and that he had acted in self-defense. Washington insisted that Davis was a State Department employee and thus protected by diplomatic immunity, a claim it would later have to retract after the Guardian irresponsibly revealed his true identity. Upon learning that the New York Times had initially heeded a U.S. government request not to disclose the details of Davis’s employment for fear of his safety, Greenwald sneered that the paper was “an active enabler of government propaganda.” Greenwald’s blatant inconsistency on the matter of covert identities suggests that he supports the divulgence of America’s clandestine activities when it can be used to slander his country and endanger its personnel, and opposes it only when it fits his own political agenda.

_____________

Another prominent journalist who criticized the American government’s reaction to the Davis episode was Jeremy Scahill, a contributor to the Nation and the radio program “Democracy Now!” Scahill essentially took the side of Pakistan, faulting the United States for deigning to send covert agents there without first informing the Pakistani government, carrying out drone attacks on Pakistani soil (which Davis was presumably aiding through his intelligence work), and for even operating clandestinely in the country at all. “The case highlights the fact that the U.S. is engaged in a covert war in Pakistan—a country it has not declared war against,” he complained to Al Jazeera, thus conflating American attempts to root out terrorists in a country that has been reluctant to do so itself, with waging war “against” the Pakistani state. The U.S. government’s claim that Davis was not a spy, and its attempt to free him from the Pakistani mob, Scahill wrote dismissively, was a “show” with an “ending” that “was carefully choreographed by both governments” (as if American officials should have blown the cover of one of their own spies, in what is perhaps the most anti-American country on earth). In killing Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil without giving Pakistani authorities prior warning, Barack Obama did precisely what he promised to do in a 2008 presidential debate with John McCain. But in the eyes of Scahill, with the use of “drones, cruise missiles, and Special Ops raids, the United States has embarked on a mission to kill its way to victory.”

In the past several years, Scahill has emerged as one of the most outspoken and oft-quoted national-security reporters in the country. Beginning his journalism career as a writer and producer for a variety of hard-left publications and media programs, he has gone on to publish two bestselling books while appearing frequently on popular television and radio programs. The publication of his latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, was accompanied by the release of an expensively produced documentary film by the same name. The book and movie establish Scahill as one of the most vocal left-wing critics of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism strategy.

And yet, despite his newfound mainstream acceptance, Scahill has barely disguised the ideologies that have always underpinned his work: a fundamental hostility toward capitalism, the United States, and its democratic allies. It is these passions that, in turn, spawned a career devoted to undermining America’s foreign policy and intelligence operations.

Born in 1974 in suburban Milwaukee, Scahill dropped out of the University of Wisconsin in 1995 because “I thought my time would be better spent by entering the struggle for justice in this country.” That year, he met Philip Berrigan, the radical former priest who was a member of the pacifist trifecta: the Baltimore 4 (whose members poured their own blood over draft records), the Catonsville 9 (which burned draft cards in homemade napalm), and the Harrisburg 7 (charged with attempting to kidnap then–Secretary of State Henry Kissinger). Scahill moved into Berrigan’s Baltimore commune, Jonah House, dedicated to the principles of “nonviolence, resistance, and community.” In 1996, foreshadowing his later work as a champion of Snowden, Scahill joined an attempted break-in of the NSA, the “brains of the military death machine,” as Berrigan described it. That same year, Scahill was arrested (alongside former Chicago 7 member David Dellinger and the son of Abbie Hoffman) for the attempted occupation of a Chicago federal building in support of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who murdered two FBI agents in 1975. In 1998, Scahill was arrested once again, this time at Andrews Air Force Base, accompanying protesters who poured blood on a B-52.

During that period, Scahill moved into journalism, working as a producer for “Democracy Now!” Though the line of work might have seemed different than “peace” activism, the mission was the same. “I think that being alive in the times that we live in means to be a resister,” he said in 2007. “For me, media is a nonviolent weapon in that struggle.” In 1998, he and host Amy Goodman won a series of journalism prizes for a program alleging that Chevron was responsible for the deaths of two environmental activists who had occupied an oil platform in the Niger Delta. In 2008, an American jury unanimously exonerated Chevron of all charges in the case.

Following a brief stint as a producer on Michael Moore’s short-lived television show, The Awful Truth, Scahill trekked to the Balkans to cover the tail end of Yugoslavia’s bloody break-up for “Democracy Now!” and a variety of socialist magazines and websites. And here he displayed a propensity for siding with whomever the United States opposed, no matter how evil.

In Kosovo, still a province of Serbia, the majority ethnic Albanian population bore the brunt of violent Serb nationalism at the hands of President Slobodan Milosevic. Serb militias regularly carried out massacres of civilians, and by the end of 1998 they had driven some 300,000 Albanians from their homes. When Serbian negotiators refused a demand from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to remove most of their troops from Kosovo and grant the province autonomy, NATO, led by the United States and Great Britain, launched a 78-day bombing campaign.

While Kosovo Albanians no doubt committed offenses against Serbs, particularly after the NATO bombing run left them as victors, what lay at the heart of the Kosovo conflict were the same factors that sparked the Bosnian war years earlier: Serb ethnic chauvinism and territorial expansionism. Yet Scahill saw the situation differently. In addition to frequent condemnations of NATO and Western leaders such as President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and U.S. General Wesley Clark, Scahill’s work during the period was focused almost exclusively on isolated incidents of violence committed by ethnic Albanians—to the exclusion of the vast, methodical ethnic-cleansing campaign carried out by the Serbs, whom he portrayed as the true victims.

Scahill’s overriding thesis of the Kosovo conflict is that it was the United States that was the guilty party. “Under his rule, the nation of Yugoslavia was destroyed, dismantled, and chopped into ethnically pure para-states,” Scahill wrote—of Clinton, not Milosevic. What really irked Scahill was not the impending mass genocide of ethnic Albanians, but that NATO had acted without a UN Security Council resolution. Kosovo was “Clinton’s Iraq,” Scahill fumed in 2008. “He bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days with no United Nations mandate.”

During the war itself, Scahill reported from Belgrade, the Serb capital, where he reliably provided the Serb narrative that they were the victims of Western, imperialist aggression. The Rambouillet Agreement, which Serbia rejected (thereby triggering the NATO bombing), was akin to “one of Don Corleone’s famous offers.” While he filed dispatch after sympathetic dispatch from an enemy capital in wartime, Scahill did not report from Kosovo until after the conflict had ended and Albanian reprisals against Serbs began. The province, he wrote in 2000, “has become a living hell for Serbs, Roma people (Gypsies), Slavic Muslims, and other minorities….Washington is giving ethnic cleansing a green light.”

It was curious that, of all the events that took place in the Balkans in the 1990s, it was the postwar expulsion of Serbs from Kosovo that Scahill would label “ethnic cleansing.” During the Kosovo war itself, the Serbs launched Operation Horseshoe, in which they drove out almost the entire Albanian population. The expulsion of 1.3 million people amounted to, in the words of future U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, “the single largest European exodus in a half a century.” Serb militias separated women and children from men, thousands of whom were slaughtered and whose bodies were dumped into mass graves or incinerated. The Serbs’ behavior in Kosovo prompted President Clinton to accuse them of “deliberate, systemic efforts at genocide.” Scahill, meanwhile, dismissed war supporters’ “exaggerations” of Serb atrocities. He is far less judicious when it comes to the United States and Israel. American policy in Iraq “from 1990 to the present,” Scahill claimed, constitutes “one of the greatest mass slaughters in history.” In 2010, during a debate on MSNBC, Scahill accused Israel of perpetrating “extermination campaigns” against Palestinians.

Long after the conflict had ended, Scahill continued to display his sympathies for the Serbian aggressors. Milosevic’s death in 2006 meant the loss of “the only man in the unique position of being able to expose and detail the full extent of the U.S. role in the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s….Sadly, with Milosevic will likely die the last hope the victims of these crimes in Yugoslavia had of getting their day (if it could even be called that) in court—a tragic and unjust reality to begin with that speaks volumes about the twisted state of international justice.” Note here that Scahill was expressing sorrow for the victims of American “crimes,” not Milosevic’s.

Scahill’s big break would come in 2007 thanks to the emerging notoriety of Blackwater, the private security contractor hired to protect American diplomats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other dangerous locales. That year, Scahill published Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, a breathless exposé of the company and its alleged misdeeds. The firm was a perfect target for Scahill because it married the two things most hated by the left: capitalism and war. Scahill’s thesis was a barely concealed rehash of the old Marxist dictum that the latter is an inevitable result of the former. Blackwater, he wrote, “operates in a demand-based industry where corporate profits are intimately linked to an escalation of violence.”

Not long after the book was published, a firefight involving Blackwater guards erupted at a square in Baghdad in which 17 Iraqis died. The Iraqi government said the guards fired indiscriminately; Blackwater claimed its men had been ambushed. The event, soon dubbed the Nisour Square Massacre by Blackwater critics, led to congressional hearings, a slew of lawsuits against the company, and Scahill’s propulsion into journalistic stardom. The paperback version of Blackwater, which became a bestseller, was blurbed by film star Scarlett Johansson. “It should be mandatory reading,” she gushed. “It’s very interesting—and scary.”

To Scahill, Blackwater was a “mercenary army,” whose founder, former Navy SEAL Erik Prince, is a “committed ideologue.” The protection of American diplomats in hostile environments overseas was just a cover for Blackwater’s true aim: to serve as a “Christian supremacist fighting force” in a grand plot to “eliminate Muslims and destroy Islam globally.” According to Scahill, “the outsourcing of U.S. military operations in Muslim countries and in secular societies to such neo-crusaders reinforces the greatest fears of many in the Arab world and other opponents of the administration’s wars.” Scahill’s evidence of the company’s “neo-crusader” ethos was, to be charitable, thin; he cited the membership of one former Blackwater executive in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a lay Catholic service organization, to claim that “some Blackwater executives even boast of their membership” in the group.

Throughout his writings on Blackwater, Scahill ascribed powers to the company it did not have. He refers to Blackwater repeatedly as a “private army” and writes as if the firm’s guards participated regularly in combat operations alongside American soldiers. “If foreign governments are not on board,” Scahill writes, “foreign soldiers—many of whose home countries oppose the U.S. wars—can still be enlisted, at a price.” But the prospect of a private army marching off to fight undeclared, illegal wars at the behest of warmongers in Washington is the stuff of fiction. Neither Blackwater, nor any other contractor, has been hired for combat operations—that is, deploying alongside American or allied soldiers to engage the enemy in the theater of war. (From 2004 to 2009, Blackwater was contracted by the CIA to assist in its campaign of targeting terrorists. The assistance was limited to tasks such as providing security for CIA officers and loading Hellfire missiles.) Private contractors have, of course, found themselves involved in combat, but in the course of protecting diplomats and facilities in war zones.

On the whole, Blackwater guards performed heroically, as in 2004 when a team of eight held off a group of gunmen loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr while defending a Coalition Provisional Authority building in Najaf. In 2007, Blackwater guards saved the Polish ambassador to Iraq after a roadside bomb struck his convoy. Scahill failed to note that the company had a 100 percent success record in keeping American diplomats safe, a stunning accomplishment considering the daily death toll in Iraq at the height of its insurgency. “Blackwater is getting a bad rap,” complained Barack Obama, who was protected by Blackwater guards, when he was a senator in 2008.

In order to exaggerate the extent of private military contractors operating in war zones, Scahill has frequently presented erroneous—and inconsistent—data. The contractor corps, he claimed in a 2009 appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, “constitutes more than half of the fighting force in Afghanistan.” In a 2007 Salon article he referred to “the second largest force in Iraq” as the “estimated 126,000 private military ‘contractors.’” In another article published that same year he wrote: “The 145,000 active-duty U.S. forces are nearly matched” in numbers by employees of “companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR.” In Blackwater, he referred to “tens of thousands of mercenaries” in Iraq. About the four Blackwater employees lynched in Fallujah by an Iraqi mob in March 2004, Scahill wrote: “Those men who died at Fallujah were members of Washington’s largest partner in the coalition of the willing in Iraq—bigger than Britain’s total deployment,” which, at the time, was some 9,000 soldiers.

But not according to a Congressional Budget Office report published in 2008. “As of late 2007,” the report read, “about 40 percent of the approximately 6,700 contractor personnel working for [the Department of State] in Iraq were providing security.” In other words, fewer than 3,000 men working for all “private military contractors” were under arms. That is a far cry from the “tens of thousands” or over 100,000 Scahill would regularly claim. In Afghanistan, while it’s true that, at the time of his statement, there were more contractors there than American soldiers, it is preposterous to allege that a significant number or even a majority of them were part of any “fighting force.” As for Blackwater itself, then–House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said in 2007 that “122 Blackwater employees, one-seventh of the company’s current work force in Iraq, have been terminated for improper conduct.” This would mean there were no more than 850 Blackwater employees in Iraq at the time. Indeed, Scahill contradicts himself in his own book, writing that Blackwater has a mere “2,300 private soldiers deployed in nine countries.”

There are legitimate concerns presented by the use of private military contractors, namely relating to oversight of their behavior in war zones (unlike soldiers, they are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice). But Scahill does not concern himself primarily with such questions. Posing as a defender of the prerogatives of the U.S. military in the face of creeping privatization, Scahill seeks to weaken what he sees as a core element of American foreign policy. “Both Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker made clear that without Blackwater and its ilk, the occupation [of Iraq] would not be tenable,” Scahill writes. In other words: no Blackwater, no American presence in Iraq. “It helped keep a draft, which would make the continuation of the war politically untenable, off the table,” he writes. The government just “rented an occupation force” with soldiers who “were used as cheap cannon fodder.” If the government were to punish the “mercenary firms with indictments for war crimes or murder or human rights violations,” it “would make wars like the one in Iraq far more difficult and arguably impossible.” And so Scahill sets out to discredit and disparage Blackwater, evidence be damned.

Not long after Blackwater appeared, the American justice system provided a coda to Scahill’s years-long campaign of hyperbole, innuendo, and fact-free defamation against the company. In 2009, a federal judge threw out the indictment of five Blackwater guards involved in the Nisour Square incident. In 2011, a district judge dismissed Blackwater’s founder, Prince, from a civil lawsuit alleging that he had defrauded the U.S. government. And in February, a three-year federal prosecution of five separate ex-Blackwater officials for a variety of offenses, including weapons violations and making false statements, resulted in charges against three of the men being dismissed and the remaining two pleading guilty to barely related misdemeanors with no jail time.

_____________

With the scalp of Blackwater in hand, Scahill moved on to a bigger, juicier target: the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies. The fruit of this effort is Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. It mounts what is essentially a 700-page rationalization of Islamist terrorism twinned with a fiery condemnation of American foreign policy right down to its title, a deliberate invocation of the Argentinian military junta’s campaign of repression, torture, and murder against political dissidents in the 1970s.

On 9/11, Scahill argues, the Bush administration grasped its chance to upturn the traditional rules of conflict by converting the entire globe into a theater of combat and anyone it didn’t like into an enemy combatant. “The world is a battlefield and we are at war,” Scahill writes. “Therefore the military can go wherever they please and do whatever it is that they want to do, in order to achieve the national-security objectives of whichever administration happens to be in power.”

Scahill is less wild in tone here than in Blackwater, yet he still manages to slip into hyperbole. For instance, writing about Abu Ghraib, he concedes that the facility was a “prison and torture chamber” under the rule of Saddam Hussein but that America made it worse and turned it into a “gulag.” (Scahill has also written that “the U.S. still runs that gulag in Guantanamo, which one could argue represents the area in Cuba where the most heinous human rights abuses have been perpetrated in recent years.”)

He also continues his theme that the United States is involved in a war against Islam, echoing the propaganda of al-Qaeda. Whereas earlier this “crusade” was attributable mainly to the “Christian Supremacist” Knights of Blackwater, now, in Scahill’s telling, it reaches up to the highest ranks of the American military. Despite the concerted efforts of General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, to reduce civilian casualties, Scahill alleges that McChrystal “shared the political view that the United States was indeed in a war against Islam.” His source for this grave allegation is “a retired military officer” who tells Scahill that McChrystal was one of several U.S. military figures constituting a group of “fellow travelers in the great crusade against Islam.” (Another source Scahill cites as an expert on American foreign policy is Gareth Porter, a notorious defender of the Khmer Rouge who alleged that the Cambodian genocide was “a myth fostered primarily by the authors of a Readers’ Digest book.”)

Reading Dirty Wars and listening to Scahill speak reveals that he is essentially opposed to the use of force by the United States or its allies. “I found it quite disgusting to see people chanting, like it was some sort of sporting event, outside of the White House,” he said on “Democracy Now!” following the death of Osama bin Laden. “This is a somber day where we should be remembering all of the victims, the 3,000 people that died in the United States and then the hundreds of thousands that died afterwards as a result of a U.S. response to this that should have been a law enforcement response and instead was to declare war on the world,” he said, thus connecting those murdered on 9/11 with those civilians who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Indeed, Scahill seems to have a problem with even the most benign expressions of American patriotism. “I hate when people chant U-S-A. #FalseNationalistCrap,” he opined on Twitter during the 2010 World Cup.)

For all his anger about American declarations of “war on the world,” Scahill never seems to generate any ire over violence perpetrated by non-Westerners. In a section of the book about terrorism in the horn of Africa, he outright defends the rampant piracy that has resulted in several deadly hostage situations on the high seas. To Scahill, it was not the pirates who were villains, but private business. “International corporations and nation-states had taken advantage of the permanent state of instability in Somalia, treating the Somali coast as their private, for-profit fishery, while others polluted it with illegal waste dumping,” he writes in Dirty Wars. In light of this rapacious, capitalist nightmare, “piracy was at times a response to these actions and some pirates viewed themselves as a sort of Somali coast guard.” (If only Scahill were so charitable to Dick Cheney.) He describes the Islamic Courts Union, Somalia’s short-lived version of the Taliban, as a motley coalition of “liberals, moderates, and extremists” united by a desire to “stabiliz[e] the country through Sharia law.” In the brief period that the group ruled much of Somalia, it shut down movie theater and co-ed events and declared jihad on neighboring Ethiopia.

To personalize the cost of America’s “dirty wars,” Scahill chose a curious subject: Anwar al-Awlaki. The firebrand Islamic preacher, who was born in New Mexico, gained notoriety as the first American citizen since the Civil War to be declared a wartime enemy and deliberately killed without trial by the United States government (via drone attack). Over the course of just a few years, Awlaki inspired a dozen terrorist plots. Some (such as the 2009 Christmas Day “underwear bomber”) failed, while others (such as the killing of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood by Nidal Malik Hasan) were monstrously successful. Through the saga of Awlaki and his targeted killing in Yemen, Scahill hopes, we can appreciate not only the wantonness of America’s “dirty wars” abroad, but the “blowback” effect they produce at home.

From the outset, Scahill seeks to humanize the man who declared jihad against his homeland. “In many ways, Awlaki’s story was a classic tale of people from a faraway land seeking a better life in America,” he writes at the outset of Dirty Wars. Awlaki, we learn, was merely a pious Muslim driven to justifiable rage by America’s wicked foreign policy and its post-9/11 backlash against domestic Muslim communities. To be sure, it was not just Scahill who believed that Awlaki was a moderate Muslim who later transformed into something else. In the late 1990s, he had emerged as one of the most prominent imams in the United States, leading a prayer service for congressional staffers and speaking at the Pentagon. But, according to Scahill, “between the global crackdown that followed 9/11 and the U.S. government’s campaign to hunt him down, something in Awlaki shifted, and he was no longer torn between allegiance to the country of his birth and his religion.”

Yet the alleged “shift,” if it can even be labeled as such, is not so easy to decipher. The good reputation Awlaki had earned among credulous non-Muslims was more a testament to their inability to recognize duplicity than it was of his genuine moderation. According to an in-depth New York Times profile, in which two dozen of his former friends and associates were interviewed, Awlaki was awakened to jihad upon visiting Afghanistan at around the time the Soviet-backed government there fell to Islamist forces; in other words, at least a decade before 9/11. Upon returning to the United States, he would “quote Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian scholar who provided theological justification for the Afghan jihad and was later known as a mentor to Osama bin Laden,” the Times reported. Several years later, ensconced at the Denver Islamic Society, he encouraged a Saudi student to travel to Chechnya and join the jihad against Russia.

Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Awlaki ministered to three of the hijackers, developing a “close relationship” with two of them, according to the 9/11 Commission Report. And although the FBI ultimately decided not to pursue a full-scale investigation of Awlaki after the attacks, the decision was controversial within the agency, with one detective telling the 9/11 Commission that he believed Awlaki “was at the center of the 9/11 story.” Days after the attacks, Awlaki publicly disputed Muslim involvement, writing that the FBI merely blamed passengers with Muslim names. In a sermon the following week, Awlaki read a condolence note from Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has endorsed the practice of female genital mutilation and capital punishment for homosexuals, has referred to suicide bombings as “heroic martyrdom operations,” and has called for Islam to “conquer” America and Europe. Scahill, who never lacks for colorful adjectives when describing people like Erik Prince (“Christian Supremacist”) or Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (“key leaders of a militant movement”), referred to Qaradawi merely as “the famous, controversial Egyptian theologian.”

But even as the mainstream media was continuing to court him as a “moderate” Islamic voice, Awlaki was showing clear signs of further radicalization. A week after 9/11, he said that the attacks were not “an attack on American freedom, on the American way of life,” but “an attack on U.S. foreign policy.” In words that can be read, at best, as a morally equivocating call for pacifism as a response to 9/11, Awlaki declared: “The fact that the U.S. has administered the death and homicide of over one million civilians in Iraq, the fact that the U.S. is supporting the deaths and killing of thousands of Palestinians doesn’t justify the killing of one U.S. civilian in New York City or Washington D.C. And the deaths of 6,000 civilians in New York and Washington D.C., does not justify the death of one civilian in Afghanistan.” (After his killing, Scahill told NPR’s Terry Gross that Awlaki “actually was saying things that many secular anti-war activists were saying about the sameness of violence.”)

According to Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, “a close analysis of the corpus of Awlaki’s sermons and articles shows a surprising level of consistency throughout,” and “the only significant change has been in the prescriptions for solving the perceived problems faced by the ummah (global Muslim community).” That is, Awlaki was always a radical, but would only explicitly embrace violence against Westerners after 9/11, when he was living in Yemen.

In the wake of 9/11, Awlaki fueled claims that Muslims across America were falling victim to a violent nationwide “backlash,” a slanderous picture of the remarkably restrained American response that Scahill accepts at face value. Soon, Awlaki was spouting the sort of anti-corporate hyperbole popularized by Canadian author (and Scahill’s Nation colleague) Naomi Klein. “Either accept McDonald’s, otherwise McDonnell Douglas will send their F-15s above your head,” Awlaki said in a 2003 London sermon. In one particularly popular Internet diatribe, Awlaki implored his listeners, “Whenever you see the word terrorist, replace it with the word mujahid. Whenever you see the word terrorism, replace it with the word jihad.” In 2005, six months after listening to this sermon on a laptop computer, a group of 18 Muslim men were arrested in Canada’s largest post-9/11 terrorism investigation after attempting to blow up downtown Toronto and various military installations.

According to Scahill, Awlaki never said or did anything that ought to have alarmed the U.S. government, and whatever might have alarmed them was their own fault. “You could make a reasonable case that Anwar Awlaki was a product of U.S. policy,” he told the Kremlin-funded propaganda cable station RT. Citing a 2008 Awlaki blog post, in which the cleric furiously issues a “challenge” for the U.S. to “come up with one such lecture where I encourage ‘terrorist attacks,’” Scahill opines, “But, in the eyes of the U.S. government, Awlaki’s calls for jihad amounted to encouraging such attacks,” as if “calls for jihad” amount to anything but “encouraging” violence.

If Awlaki’s sermons were not yet explicit enough to warrant the accusation that he was “encouraging” terrorism, he would soon discard any subtlety with the release in 2010 of Inspire, al-Qaeda’s English-language magazine, which he co-founded and co-edited. Its premier issue included a “hit list” of artists who had caricatured the prophet Muhammad and an accompanying piece by Awlaki urging Muslims to assassinate them. Scahill brushes the magazine aside, saying that it “played into the U.S. propaganda campaign aimed at presenting AQAP as a grave threat.” His nonchalance about the effect of such propaganda tools on young, disillusioned Muslim minds could not have been more unfortunately timed; the May issue of Inspire devoted nearly all its 40 pages to the “BBB,” or “Blessed Boston bombings,” carried out by two young men who were “inspired by INSPIRE,” as the magazine bragged. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who along with his brother Tamerlan killed three people with a bomb attack at this year’s Boston Marathon, has told investigators that he and his sibling discovered how to build their pressure-cooker bombs from the magazine and were motivated to launch their deadly attack after listening to Awlaki’s sermons.

To be sure, hateful sermons—even those that encourage violence—are not the same thing as violence itself. “There was no hard evidence presented that Awlaki had done anything that was not protected speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or that would not require a major court battle to prove it was unconstitutional,” Scahill writes, employing a strange defense for a man who openly rejected the American Constitution and justice system. Elsewhere in his defense of Awlaki, Scahill claims that “words are not actions.”

Definitive proof of Awlaki’s “operational,” as opposed to simply “inspirational,” role in terrorism came in two court filings released in February. In 2009, a Nigerian graduate student named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to detonate explosive materials sewn into his undergarments while on an Amsterdam jet bound for Detroit. Abdulmutallab, who eventually plead guilty, told investigators that after absorbing Awlaki’s sermons for years, he traveled to Yemen in 2009 to find the preacher and spent three days at Awlaki’s home discussing jihad. Awlaki then sent the young Nigerian to an al-Qaeda bomb-maker, gave his blessing to an attack, and specifically told his disciple to detonate the bomb over U.S. soil, thus ensuring the highest number of possible casualties (unlike a failed 2006 attempt in which the plotters had planned to explode American-bound planes leaving from Britain over the Atlantic Ocean). Directed by Awlaki, Abdulmutallab trained for two weeks at an al-Qaeda camp in Yemen.

And what is Scahill’s analysis of this damning indictment from the attempted underwear bomber himself? He does not even mention it. Granted, this confession did not emerge publicly until 2012, months after Awlaki had been killed. But it appeared over a year before Scahill’s book was released. Instead, Scahill denies the Obama administration’s earlier, fuzzier claims of Awlaki’s involvement in the Christmas Day plot by quoting unnamed “tribal sources” in Yemen who told him that “Awlaki was not involved in the plot.” And Scahill accepts, at face value, Awlaki’s own denial of issuing any “fatwa,” though the cleric stated, after the attempt failed, “I support what Umar Farouk has done.”

Scahill’s main source for his narrative on Awlaki is the late cleric’s father, Nasser, an American-educated agricultural expert. In the acknowledgements to Dirty Wars, Scahill writes of how he stands “in awe” of the Awlaki family’s “quest for justice.” Scahill publishes a 2010 letter the elder Awlaki wrote to Obama, in which he characterized his son’s post-9/11 radicalization as “learning and preaching his religion and nothing else.” The senior Awlaki then pleaded with the president. “I would like to inform you Mr. President Obama that my son is innocent, has nothing to do with violence, and he is only a scholar of Islam.” That Scahill, the supposedly dogged investigative journalist, would convey this fable about Awlaki verbatim without any critical reflection whatsoever reveals where his sympathies lay.

Scahill’s criticism of the blowback allegedly caused by drones would be more credible if he expressed support for some other method of combatting America’s enemies. But unlike some critics, who argue against drones because they believe them to be inefficient and instead favor other methods, Scahill’s opposition is foundational. In his eyes, the U.S. lacks all legitimacy for using force, because the death of one civilian is too much. “Those whose loved ones were killed in drone strikes or cruise missile attacks or night raids will have a legitimate score to settle,” he writes, essentially arguing that relatives of civilians who die unintentionally as a result of U.S. counterterrorism actions ought to wage terrorist attacks in turn.

One of Scahill’s prime targets in Dirty Wars is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, the military’s most elite fighting force responsible for, among other accomplishments, the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Initially a hostage rescue team formed in the wake of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, JSOC transformed over the past three decades into a top-secret counterterrorism force heavily favored by President Obama, who has been averse to large-scale military deployments. JSOC often operates in areas where the United States has not declared war (such as Pakistan or Yemen) and has become a vital element in the American war on terror. Whereas most Americans probably view JSOC with admiration, Scahill sees something nefarious. It is a “global killing machine,” Obama’s embrace of which indicates that he has “doubled down on the Bush-era policy of targeted assassination as a staple of U.S. foreign policy.” As with drone strikes, Scahill’s criticism of JSOC rests on its very existence; he proposes no alternative to dealing with armed radicals who seek to sow destruction against the United States and its allies.

_____________

Scahill was bidding  to be the most important voice on the far left until Greenwald zoomed past him this summer with the Snowden leaks. Like Scahill, Greenwald ascended rapidly from the precincts of the far left to mainstream acceptance. In the past six years, he has written four books, three of which have been New York Times bestsellers. And also like Scahill, he brings a pugnacious personality and Manichaean worldview to his work. Greenwald grew up near Fort Lauderdale, and his homosexuality appears to have played some role in fomenting his anti-American attitudes. “When you grow up gay, you are not part of the system, it forces you to evaluate: ‘Is it me, or is the system bad?’” he told the New York Times earlier this year. It is understandable how Greenwald, who, until the Supreme Court decided the case of Windsor v. United States earlier this year, would have been unable to bring Miranda to live with him in his native land, might have resented his country for it. Yet America has the capacity to change, as it has in quite a remarkably short period of time on the issue of homosexuality. Moreover, however disagreeable Greenwald might have found his country’s attitudes toward his sexual orientation, it can hardly justify his advocacy on behalf of some of the world’s most repulsive homophobes.

Briefly a litigator for the high-powered firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz before hanging out his own shingle, Greenwald stopped practicing law to take up political writing in 2005. Greenwald claims to have been radicalized by the Bush administration, which he believed had plunged the country into an unprecedented moral darkness. “Over the past five years, a creeping extremism has taken hold of our federal government, and it is threatening to radically alter our system of government and who we are as a nation,” he wrote in the preface to his 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act?

While Greenwald repudiates any political classification other than that of a committed civil libertarian, he has repeatedly spoken at international socialist conferences, including one this year where he joined Scahill for an “urgent discussion about the attack on civil liberties, U.S. imperialism, and how we can fight back,” in the words of the organizers. “As someone who speaks at all sorts of political gatherings every year, I can say with certainty that no event assembles more passionate activism, genuine expertise, and provocative insights than the Socialism Conference,” Greenwald has said. “This will be my third straight year attending, and what keeps me coming back is how invigorating and inspiring it is to be in the midst of such diverse and impressive activists.”

In 2005, Greenwald started a blog, Unclaimed Territory, which was originally focused on the Valerie Plame case. He soon branched out into covering a variety of topics related to civil liberties and foreign policy, in a manner highly critical of the Bush administration and its defenders in the media, to put it gently. His vituperative writing style (“odious,” to designate someone or something he doesn’t agree with, and “smear,” to describe any criticism, no matter how mild, of something he does agree with, being two of his choice words) mixed with the detailed obsessiveness of a trained litigator, proved popular with a steadily growing number of readers in the left-wing blogosphere. He quickly rose to become one of the country’s most widely read bloggers, repeatedly earning himself a place on lists of the most influential or popular pundits in the United States. In 2007, his blog was picked up by the website Salon, and in 2012, Greenwald catapulted into international stardom when he was hired by the Guardian as a full-time blogger and reporter.

Like Scahill, Greenwald subscribes to a modernized version of the old trope attributing all that is wrong in the world to the behavior of the United States. They maintain that anything unfortunate to befall America is a result of its own behavior, or, in the parlance of left- and right-wing isolationists, blowback. Greenwald never comes out explicitly in favor of terrorist attacks. His defenses of jihad are always couched in language that seeks to justify terrorism as a logical and understandable response to Western imperialism. “As strange as it is, they actually seem to dislike it when foreign militaries bomb, invade, and occupy their countries and kill hundreds of thousands of Muslim children,” Greenwald sarcastically wrote of Muslim terrorism suspects in 2010.

“Terrorism,” Greenwald has written, is “a term of propaganda, a means of justifying one’s own state violence.” Greenwald acknowledges no distinction between the strict rules of engagement followed by Western militaries and the deliberate murder of civilians perpetrated by Islamists. “Anti-American Terrorists,” he writes (sarcastic capitalization being a Greenwaldian trademark meant to impugn his intellectual adversaries as fearmongering, self-important cretins), are motivated by “severe anger over the violence and interference the U.S. brings to their part of the world.” Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who was arrested in 2010 for attempting to set off a car bomb in Times Square, had told investigators he wanted to take revenge on America in response to the drone strikes it had launched in his native country’s ungoverned tribal areas. While we in America might view the blowing up of a car bomb in Times Square to be an utterly inappropriate response to such a policy, Greenwald reminded his readers that “a desire to exact vengeance for foreign killings on your soil is hardly a unique attribute of Pashtun culture.” On the contrary, “It’s fairly universal,” Greenwald wrote. “See, for instance, the furious American response to the one-day attack on 9/11—still going strong even after 9 years.” And so the American response to the murder of nearly 3,000 of its citizens (a mere “one-day attack”) is akin to blowing up a Nissan Pathfinder in the country’s busiest commercial plaza.

In addition to justifying the horrific violence regularly perpetrated by Islamists (most often against their fellow Muslims) as perfectly understandable reactions to American behavior, Greenwald portrays attempted terrorists as luckless victims of entrapment by the American government. The series of terrorist attacks thwarted in the United States in the dozen years since 9/11, Greenwald argues, were largely orchestrated by law-enforcement authorities to scare the American people and thereby mentally bludgeon them into supporting tougher and tougher counterterrorism measures and invasions into their privacy. In November 2010, officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Portland police arrested 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somali-American student, on charges of attempting to detonate a car bomb at a Christmas tree lighting, an attack that would have killed scores of people. Undercover agents approached Mohamud, pretending to be members of an international terrorist organization, and provided him with the fake bomb. “The FBI successfully thwarts its own terrorist plot,” sneered Greenwald on his blog.

Entrapment, of which Greenwald accused the government, hinges on intent. And in each and every one of the post-9/11 terrorism cases, the accused individual demonstrated a clear willingness and desire to kill innocent people; in not one of these cases has a court found a defendant not guilty by reason of entrapment. Throughout the Portland investigation, for instance, according to the government’s affidavit, undercover agents repeatedly told Mohamud that the attack would lead to the death and injury of many people and offered him opportunities to back out of the plan. At every point, Mohamud acknowledged his willingness to kill people and resisted attempts to dissuade his participation. While defending Mohamud as a hapless kid targeted by unscrupulous government officials, Greenwald made time to once again play lawyer for the terrorist’s defense. Citing a video Mohamud made before the attempted attack in which he announced, “Did you think that you could invade a Muslim land, and we would not invade you,” Greenwald wrote that “accused Terrorists” repeatedly explain that “they are attempting to carry out plots in retaliation for past and ongoing American violence against Muslim civilians and deter such future acts” (emphasis in original).

Though Greenwald had already gained a loyal following in the United States, his joining the Guardian—the closest thing to a Bible for the global left—elevated him to new heights. And it was less than a year into working for the London-based paper that he would break what would become the biggest story of 2013: revelations about the extent of spying programs conducted by the National Security Agency. In his original story about the Prism program, Greenwald alleged that the NSA is able “to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders” and that it can “directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies’ servers.” In reality, however, the NSA does not have anything approaching such wide and uninhibited access to the data compiled by Internet companies. Rather, as the Guardian later acknowledged, the agency obtains the information it needs via “drop boxes”—secure computer servers—established by the companies themselves. There, companies can safely deposit legally requested information. The drop boxes are simply a method of complying with subpoenas, which, like any American citizen or business concern, Internet companies are legally obliged to do. This reality is a far cry from the government having access to any and every bit of data compiled by Internet companies.

In his coverage of the NSA programs, Greenwald’s status as an unapologetic polemicist has collided with what ought to have been the news judgment of the Guardian. In his writing and frequent television appearances, he has vastly exaggerated, and at times outright lied about, the programs. For instance, in describing the Prism program on CNN, Greenwald detailed an Orwellian world in which the American government has “only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States but around the world. That is not hyperbole. That is their objective.” On MSNBC, he said that “the objective of this is to enable the NSA to monitor every single conversation and every single form of human behavior.” According to Greenwald, the problem with the NSA’s programs is not that they represent an overzealous approach to combating terrorism, for in his view the NSA actually has no interest in combating terrorism. No, the “only one goal” of the NSA is to spy on innocent American citizens. Here Greenwald did what he always does, which is to impute sinister motives to actors—in this case, the shadowy and amorphous American national-security state—he cannot substantiate with evidence. In publishing wildly sensational stories about the NSA, Greenwald is himself guilty of the very type of fearmongering that he accuses the government of perpetrating against American citizens. And it appears to be working. A July poll conducted by Pew found that 63 percent of Americans believe the government is “gathering information about the content of communications,” and a full 27 percent of Americans believe that the government has “listened to or read their phone calls and emails.”

While actively supporting (in words and materially) the work of American traitors, Greenwald simultaneously accuses American friends of Israel of putting the interests of the Jewish state before their own. “Not even our Constitution’s First Amendment has been a match for the endless exploitation of American policy, law, and resources [by the Israel lobby] to target and punish Israel’s enemies,” he wrote in 2009. Pro-Israel activists and writers, he alleged, exercise a “suffocating control over American debates and American policy.” If one does not “pledge your loyalty to our policies toward Israel and to Israel,” he once wrote, you will “be demonized and have your career ended,” an odd remark coming from a man whose career has gone from strength to strength the more outrageous his attacks on Israel have become.

Greenwald is not just content to slander Israel’s American supporters; he is a full-throated supporter of those who seek its destruction. Following the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident—in which Israeli commandos raided a Turkish flotilla, attempting to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip—Greenwald published a series of strongly worded posts condemning the Jewish State and praising those who took part in the flotilla. “It hardly seemed possible, for Israel—after its brutal devastation of Gaza and its ongoing blockade—to engage in more heinous and repugnant crimes,” he wrote, with characteristically overwrought language. Greenwald, who trades on his history as a corporate litigator to pose as an expert in international law, asserted that the Israeli blockade of Hamas is “illegal,” despite a ruling by the United Nations to the contrary. He alleged, moreover, that “the initial act of aggression was the Israeli seizing of a ship in international waters which was doing nothing hostile,” choosing here to ignore the stated, pro-Hamas sympathies of those behind the flotilla. Nor did Greenwald ever bother to retract his assertions after a United Nations inspection into the incident found that the Israeli commandos who boarded the main Turkish ship were met with “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers.”

The most telling aspect of Greenwald’s writings about the flotilla incident, which applies to his oeuvre on Israel more generally, is that he hardly ever mentions Hamas, never mind its racism or genocidal intentions. Grappling with the nature of Hamas would complicate Greenwald’s black-and-white portrayal of the Middle East, so he ignores it completely. And then he went a step further. Noting that the Mavi Marmara incident occurred on Memorial Day, “when the meaning of ‘heroism’ is often discussed,” Greenwald wanted his readers to know that the members of the Mavi Marmara were “pure, unadulterated heroes.”

Greenwald’s temperament is never reasonable, and his writing style borders on the outlandish in its vituperation and tendency to characterize anyone who disagrees with him, even on the slightest point, as evil. He can sometimes veer off into unintentional self-parody, like the time he wrote an entire post endorsing the repeal of “Godwin’s Law,” the assertion made by journalist Mike Godwin that, “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Devised in 1990, “Godwin’s Law,” seems to have been presciently created just for Greenwald. In 2010, after ridiculing the notion that there had been any positive outcome from the invasion of Iraq, Greenwald received a public invitation from the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan to visit the region. Greenwald scoffed at the offer, writing, “It’s difficult to find an invasion in history that wasn’t supported by at least some faction of the invaded population and where that same self-justifying script wasn’t used.” He then went on to compare the war in Iraq to the Nazi “invasion” of Austria and the Sudetenland, with the Kurds, in this sickening comparison, akin to Nazi sympathizers.

In his capacity as a legally minded pontificator of the far left, Greenwald might be called the Leonard Boudin of the interactive age. Boudin was the go-to lawyer for America’s most prominent Communists, left-wing radicals, and terrorists, not to mention the post-revolutionary Cuban government of Fidel Castro. Like Boudin, Greenwald can always be relied upon to provide a defense for those who wish to do America and its allies harm. Greenwald has ranked his perverse sense of “anti-imperialism” ahead of any and all other considerations, including what many would expect to be his own self-interest. After all, how else could a gay Jew become the world’s most verbose Western apologist for homophobic, anti-Semitic fanatics and murderers?

_____________

In their critiques of the Obama administration, Greenwald and Scahill are right about one important thing, which is the general continuity in counterterrorism policies between the Bush and Obama administrations and the blatant hypocrisy of the latter in claiming it would restore the reputation of an America “tarnished” by the actions of the former. Unlike many on the left, who vigorously defend Obama policies they would surely condemn as war crimes if a Republican were pursuing them, Greenwald and Scahill are at least intellectually consistent in their broad renunciation of American foreign policy. The Obama administration had propagated “the fantasy of a clean war,” Scahill writes, the implication being that all wars are inherently “dirty,” and thus America should disarm and withdraw from the world.

While this righteous condemnation of American liberal hypocrisy is a welcome tonic, one must remember that it originates from a deep and abiding belief that America plays a fundamentally evil role in the world. It is a view that Greenwald and Scahill have repeatedly expressed. “So I say that we call for an end to the death penalty in this country, and we call for an end to the collective death penalty being meted out on the rest of the world by this criminal government,” Scahill pronounced at the Socialism 2007 conference. Raising a similar alarm about the foundational corruption of the American political system, Greenwald declares that “the worst and most tyrannical government actions in Washington are equally supported on a fully bipartisan basis.”

“All men should have a drop of treason in their veins,” Rebecca West wrote in 1964. By this she meant that no citizen should accept everything his political leaders say without question; he should be ready to acknowledge that his government, like anything created by man, is capable of error. This sentiment has been popularized in the less eloquent and more simplistic maxim “dissent is patriotic.” The American practitioners of Treason Chic like to see themselves as dissenters, which they are in the sense that they diverge from the mainstream. But in so doing, they have taken the principle to an unholy extreme. Striking a pose as concerned patriots, far more than a drop of treason courses through their veins.