There has a bit of a pissing contest between Mark Ames and Glenn Greenwald over the connections between the First Media<\/i> news organization, and its subsidiary The Intercept<\/i> magazine which employs Greenwald.<\/p>\n
Part of this is that Greenwald and Ames have been involved in a long running pissing contest, which explains why Ames original article<\/a> mentioned Greenwald prominently, even though his remit is surveillance, and not covert organic operations or the destabilization of disfavored governments by our state security apparatus.<\/p>\n Still, it raises some very valid points, and Greenwald’s response<\/a> addressed none of the underlying facts.<\/p>\n It’s basically, Greenwald telling Ames that he’s ugly and that his mom dresses him funny, and that the publisher doesn’t matter.<\/p>\n This is not true generally, nor which is not true in this case, as Omidyar has a long history of intimate involvement with his media ventures, with The Intercept writer Jeremy Scahill saying that he is intimately involved with their messaging<\/a>:<\/p>\n Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else. This guy has a vision.<\/b><\/span> (emphasis original<\/i>)<\/p>\n So this is not one of the Glennster’s greatest moments.<\/p>\n Of more significance is the fact that Marcy Wheeler (aka Emptywheel) who is<\/b> covering the developments in the Ukraine for The Intercept<\/i>, asked sometime before this article came out about information on intelligence ops masquerading as “civil society. Quoting from Ames’ article: <\/p>\n Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site\u2019s \u201csenior policy analyst,\u201d speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a \u201ccoup\u201d engineered by \u201cdeep\u201d forces on behalf of \u201cPax Americana\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n And now Wheeler is saying that there is no “there” there<\/a>. This is the bit I find most interesting:<\/p>\n B) The Kyiv Post reported that in 2012 (the year after New Citizen received this grant, and therefore presumably the year it got spent), Omidyar Network funded 36% of New Citizen\u2019s budget, Pact, a non-profit funded in part by USAID funded 54% of it, and other funding came from the National Endowment for Democracy.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n USAID is, of course, a US Government agency, and while it is nominally independent, it is largely directed by the State Department, and the National Endowment for Democracy, thought technically a non governmental not-for-profit is funded entirely by a line item in the budget of \u2026\u2026\u2026 wait for it \u2026\u2026\u2026 USAID.<\/p>\n Or as the best-named-blog ever, Cats not War<\/i>, observes<\/a>:<\/p>\n
<\/span> With those two remarks, Scahill obliterates Greenwald\u2019s claims of independence from his boss, publisher and sole quarter-of-a-billion-dollar backer.<\/span>
<\/span> There is no universe, current or imagined, in which Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen or any other venture capitalist would be allowed within a billion miles of Pando\u2019s internal messaging system. And there is no planet within that universe on which Thiel, Andreessen or any of our dozen or so venture backers would be given any privileged line to our reporters (if they have something to say they can send us a letter to the editor, like everyone else). I would hope all of the other \u201cbillionaire-backed\u201d media organizations Greenwald cites in his post would say the same<\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n