Kiriakou: ‘I Would Do It All Again’ to Expose Torture

Comments

1. william osborne says

   February 10, 2015 at 12:33 pm

   I liked this interview with an articulate person on an important topic. I used to watch DN! regularly, but eventually came to the conclusion that it is too often a pseudo-progressive organization because of its limited critical reporting about the Obama administration. And even when critical, there is a deference toward Obama that I find discomforting because it seems inconsistent with their harsher treatment of others who were largely involved in the same things and to the same extent.

   There is a close continuity between Presidential administrations in the USA that belies a genuine two party system. Since DN! defers to Obama, these continuities are often overlooked. This interview is an example. So much talk about “the Bush era” without genuinely examining that it was the Obama administration that put John Kiriakou in prison. Even though Edward Snowden was discussed, the relevant theme that Obama has cracked down on whistle-blowers more than almost any other administration was left largely untouched.

   When Kiriakou emphatically stressed that the Obama administration had killed far more people with drones than Bush, there was a silence, and Goodman immediately changed the subject and asked him about being a Greek-American. The ellipse could not have been blunter.

   One could name numerous other examples of a deference to Obama that seems unjustified for genuinely progressive reporting. It leaves the USA without a genuinely progressive news outlet in video format.

   I think much of this evolved when DN! fell victim to a syndrome where its main journalists became media stars. It’s pretty much a one-woman show and needs broader editorial depth.