12:52 pm
Picking a Fight with Glenn Greenwald
I’ve always respected blogger and attorney Glenn Greenwald. I haven’t always agreed with him, but I thought he was a valuable voice in the blogging community — and an important champion of civil liberties in this country.
I don’t respect him anymore. Yesterday, he mounted a major hatchet job against Morton Halperin, suggesting that his supposed shift on FISA was the product of some sort of misplaced ambition. I think it’s a scurrilous attack, and completely unjustified.
I should state three things up front.
First, I know Mort. I had the opportunity to work with him at the State Department during the Clinton Administration, when I was Chief of Staff to Assistant Secretary Harold Hongju Koh in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) and he was Director of Policy Planning. That said, I neither contacted nor consulted him before writing this post.
Second, I respectfully disagree with Halperin on the FISA bill. I do not think that he should have supported it, nor do I think that Congress should have passed it. So the purpose of my post here is not to defend Halperin’s decision to support the bill, but rather to condemn Greenwald’s ad hominem attack.
Third, as I have acknowledged repeatedly in this blog, I am one of 300-odd “informal foreign policy advisors” to the Obama campaign. I don’t know whether Halperin is as well, but it wouldn’t surprise me. There are more than three hundred of us, after all, and if he is like me, he occasionally fires off memos to key people in the campaign. That’s what informal policy advisors do.
In his post (and in the transcript of his Salon Radio interview with Halperin), Greenwald lays out his brief like a prosecutor who has only circumstantial evidence on which to build a case. At the core of Greenwald’s argument are two events: a June 9, 2008 letter opposing a version of the FISA bill sponsored by Senator Kit Bond (R-MO), which Halperin allegedly signed on behalf of the Open Society Policy Center (OSPC); and Halperin’s July 8 op-ed in The New York Times, in which he came out in favor of a different version of the FISA bill as “our best chance to protect both our national security and our civil liberties.”
But instead of paraphrasing, let me reproduce Greenwald’s core argument:
What made his Op-Ed particularly confounding was that a mere one month earlier — on June 9, 2008 — Halperin had signed a letter on behalf of OSPI, [sic] also signed by numerous other civil liberties and advocacy groups, in which he expressed steadfast opposition to the FISA “compromise” (which was then known as the “Bond compromise,” after GOP Sen. Kit Bond). A copy of that June 9 letter opposing the FISA bill, which Halperin joined on behalf of his group, is here (.pdf).
[snip]
Manifestly, there was only one meaningful change that occurred between Halperin’s June 9 opposition and his July 8 support: namely, it was in that interim — on June 20 — that Barack Obama announced that he would support the FISA bill, and many have speculated (and it is just speculation) that Halperin, who has served in numerous administrations over the past four decades (beginning with the Nixon administration) and is eager for a high-level appointment in the Obama administration, offered to give Obama cover by coming out and supporting the FISA bill even though, only weeks earlier, he had vigorously opposed it. Lending even stronger support to that hypothesis is a document I obtained that Halperin wrote and which Obama’s office circulated to numerous Democratic Senators, dated June 22 (only two days after Obama announced his support for the bill), in which Halperin heaped praise on the FISA bill and urged Democratic Senators to support it (Halperin’s June 22 memo to Senators is here).
[snip]
Halperin clearly decided to repudiate his own opposition to this bill in order to offer himself up to Obama as the public shill supporting the bill, so that Obama defenders could gain cover for themselves by saying things like “even life-long civil libertarian Mort Halperin says this is a good bill.” [Emphasis from original.]
So Greenwald would have us believe that Halperin’s naked political ambition has led him to violate his principles in order to curry favor with the Obama campaign.
Let me start by picking a couple of nits, not for their own sake, but to demonstrate just how sloppy Greenwald’s argument is. First, Halperin was the executive director of the Open Society Policy Center, not President of the Open Society Policy Institute. Second, Halperin’s service began not with the Nixon Administration, but rather the Johnson Administration, in which he served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Now let’s move on to Greenwald’s most important piece of evidence: the June 22 joint letter that Halperin allegedly “signed. . .on behalf of OSPI” was in fact an institutional sign-on letter. If you go to the PDF, you’ll see that organizations signed, not individuals on behalf of organizations. This is an important distinction because when it is an institutional signature, it signifies that the organization, not its head, supports a position.
I wouldn’t split this hair, except that Greenwald uses it as supposedly devastating proof that Halperin opposed FISA before he supported it. But the fact that OSPC supported a position is not in any way, shape, or form evidence that Halperin supported the position. I have yet to work for an organization with which I agreed all of the time. Sometimes you set aside your personal opinions and act according to what the institution decides is its best course of action.
That means that Greenwald has no real evidence to prove his core allegation: that Halperin changed his opinion between June 9 and July 8.
Perhaps the best example of the weakness of Greenwald’s case is the transcript of his interview with Halperin. Greenwald approaches it not as a conversation or debate, but as a prosecutor dealing with a hostile witness. He repeatedly tries to get Halperin to confess to the sin of ambition. Not surprisingly, Halperin refuses to engage, and the interview falls apart. Greenwald then cites Halperin’s refusal to debate the minutiae as further evidence of his alleged careerism. It’s a circular argument, and not even a good one at that.
But Greenwald isn’t content with abusing the facts; he also thinks it’s necessary to make ad hominem attacks. He states that Halperin has “served in numerous administrations. . .beginning with the Nixon administration,” as if Halperin is some sort of secret Republican who once served for that paragon of secrecy and deceit. I could easily defend Halperin from this, but it’s better to let him do it himself. This is the section of his NYT op-ed that discusses his service in the Nixon Administration:
When I was on the staff of the National Security Council, my home phone was tapped by the Nixon administration — without a warrant — beginning in 1969. The wiretap stayed on for 21 months. The reason? My boss, Henry Kissinger, and the director of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover, believed that I might have leaked information to this newspaper. Even after I left government, and went to work on Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign, the F.B.I. continued to listen in and made periodic reports to the president.
I was No. 8 on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” — a strange assemblage of 20 people who had incurred the White House’s wrath because they had disagreed with administration policy. As the presidential counsel John Dean explained it in 1971, the list was part of a plan to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” My guess is that I earned this dubious distinction because of my opposition to the Vietnam War, though no one ever said for sure.
Greenwald never mentions any of this. He doesn’t say that the information Halperin allegedly leaked to the NYT was the Pentagon Papers the Nixon Administration’s secret bombing of Cambodia. He doesn’t acknowledge that Halperin refused to let Nixon, Kissinger, and Hoover intimidate him; in fact, he sued Nixon and won the case. He doesn’t note that Halperin was on Nixon’s enemies list. Those are no small things. Instead, Greenwald merely says that Halperin worked in the Nixon Administration, which in the insular world of progressive blogs, will be read as an indictment.
Greenwald goes on to claim that Halperin, “eager for a high-level appointment in the Obama administration, offered to give Obama cover by coming out and supporting the FISA bill even though, only weeks earlier, he had vigorously opposed it [emphasis in original].” Greenwald acknowledges that this is “just speculation,” and offers no evidence to back his allegation. In other words, he is, by his own admission, using scuttlebutt and gossip rather than facts.
Greenwald does produce a memo Halperin wrote on June 22 (two days after Obama came out in support of the bill) to “interested parties” expressing his opinion that the bill was the best possible compromise available. To be clear, Halperin does express his support for the bill. But he also says the following:
In my view the service providers who assisted the government in violation of FISA should not be granted immunity. The original FISA legislation clearly provided that the companies were only to cooperate pursuant to the provisions of the law. The service providers should have had no reasonable doubt that the requests from the administration to provide support outside of the statute was both illegal and unconstitutional. The current court cases should be allowed to proceed unhindered by the Congress.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Greenwald chooses not to highlight it.
If that weren’t enough, Greenwald later added a postscript to his piece:
Several people have emailed to complain — correctly — that I was remiss in failing to note that Mort Halperin is the father of the incomparably execrable Mark Halperin, formerly of ABC News and now of Time. My apologies for the oversight. If there is any system more nepotistic and incestuous than our Beltway political and media institutions, I don’t know what it is.
So Greenwald would have us believe that the father should be held accountable for the supposed sins of the son, and vice versa, and that Mark Halperin’s success is based entirely on his “famous” father. I don’t know Mark Halperin. I have no idea how he got his first job in Washington. But I’m guessing that his subsequent success just might be based on his own achievements and not because of his dad.
So in sum, Greenwald uses what at best could be called a mix of circumstantial evidence and gossip to condemn someone who has long championed the very causes that Greenwald professes to support. He does so because Halperin happens to differ with him on a single issue. If Greenwald was in court, his case wouldn’t stand. But he’s not in court. He’s online. And somehow he has come to regard that as a free ticket to impugn a good man’s character.
Next time, he should try sticking to the facts.
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