DYLAN: Welcome to Episode 15 of Radio Free Dylan. Whether you live under a rock or not, you are intimately familiar with the fact that the diplomatic cables were released by WikiLeaks a few days ago; they continue to roll out. There are so many pieces to this story; one obviously the reaction to the fact that these documents are being leaked, and should they be or shouldn’t they be? Whether that is good or bad, I suppose, is one portion of the debate. Then there's the interesting dynamic of whether the so-called "fourth state," the media, who theoretically works on behalf of the truth that's why they are free and separate from the state, in least concept, that the media is actually benefiting from this new information and then using it to amplify the quality and intensity and pointedness with which it's able to prosecute our political leaders for everything from the wars to relations and arms deals with Saudi Arabia or for that matter, a so-called most favored nation trading agreement with a country like China who apparently is busy with all sorts of intellectual property theft among other things in this country.

So you have should they or shouldn’t they. You have how does the media deal with this new information and do they use it for the benefit of the American people and truth and a better understanding. And then obviously, the actual policy implications of the newly revealed information whether it's our relationship with the war in Afghanistan, with the wars in Iraq, or for that matter with sort of semi-friend, semi-foe countries like Pakistan or China or known foes theoretically like North Korea or known allies like NATO.

So that's how we'll sort of frame this entire thing. And I can't think of anybody honestly who I admire more, who I think is better qualified to address a lot of this than the man we're about to talk to.

Glenn Greenwald writes for Salon.com. Glenn was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator here in New York before he took up the good life in Rio de Janeiro which we won't talk about, author of “How Would A Patriot Act?” his first book, "A Tragic Legacy," and the most recently, "Great American Hypocrites." All week this week, Glenn has written extensively about the iffy moral standards of the WikiLeaks critics and for that matter coverage by the mainstream media. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out on Salon.

Glenn, let's begin with should they or shouldn’t they be leaking this information? What is even the parameter upon which -- what is the legal basis starting with Bradley Manning going to Julian Assange, the actual release of the information? What is the legal breach that is occurring and what is the precedent for dealing with it?

GLENN: There's no question that if a member of the United States military, and the allegation that it was Bradley Manning, obtained this information and then leaked it to anybody with the intent that it be published that that is a violation of the law. Members of the military and all employees of the United States government are bound by the law to preserve the sanctity of classified information and not to disclose it to anyone not authorized to receive it. So if there was a member of the military, regardless of their rank, who did what Bradley Manning is alleged to have done, there's zero question that that would be illegal. In the same way that when Daniel Ellsberg, the famous leaker, obtained and turned over to the New York Times the famous Pentagon Papers, he to this day acknowledges that he was violating the law and did so with the risk that he would go to prison for the rest of his life which is almost what happened, and he said that he did it knowing that but believed that it was just and necessary. And that's what Bradley Manning and these logs that had been released have said as well, that although he realized that what he was doing was illegal, so severe and egregious was the wrong-doing contained in the documents that he was turning over, that he believed that so many reforms would happen and so much excellent change would occur, that it was worth it to him to take that risk.

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks which are the entities publishing the information are in a much different legal position because for one thing they are not employees of the federal government and not in the United States Military. They are not United States citizens; they’re not on US soil. And secondly, they're really essentially publishers of classified information. They're essentially -- to take the Pentagon Papers case, the analogy would be to the New York Times which didn’t take the Pentagon Papers illegally. That's what Daniel Ellsberg did. They simply received it and then published. That's what WikiLeaks is doing. They're receiving classified information and then publishing it.

There are some very radical and extreme theories that some people have said would allow publishers of classified information to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. There have been no successful prosecutions under that statute for anybody publishing classified information and it would be extremely dangerous to try. The Bush administration talked about prosecuting the New York Times under that statute for revealing that the Bush administration was illegally spying on Americans, but they never did it. So any member of the media who is calling for that to happen is really jeopardizing themselves and what they do.

DYLAN: If you were to look at the rhetoric around WikiLeaks specifically, particularly from Peter King and some of the other political leaders who are basically saying, “Listen, you need to reclassify WikiLeaks as a terrorist organization as you would al-Qaeda because then your capacity to pursue them -- you have a whole new set of parameters for that.” Obviously, if you're a terrorist, the president can kill you for no reason apparently as you've written about extensively which are surely a component, and then you have the ability to pursue those who've donated money. WikiLeaks functions by accepting donations where basically someone who has donated money to WikiLeaks could be prosecuted as funding a terrorist organization. Is that all political rhetoric? Is that possible? Would there be basis for that? Where does that go?

GLENN: One of the problems with the whole concept of "terrorist organizations” is that we have taken the word "terrorism" and completely distorted it beyond any recognition. It means whatever anybody who is using the term wants it to mean. That basically means a person that we think is bad. I mean the idea that somebody who has never shot a gun, who has never thrown a bomb, who has never participated in blowing up anything or bringing down airplanes or doing any of the things that have traditionally been associated with terrorism, who has done nothing but what newspapers do which is publish classified information can somehow be called a "terrorist" demonstrates how completely manipulated and impoverished a meaning that word is.

The problem though as you just suggested is that we have created a system of law and justice, using the very loose sense of those terms, that basically provides that the minute the president decides that somebody is a "terrorist," whatever he might mean by that, essentially anything goes. There are no rules any longer. There are no limitations or constraints on what he can do. He's not even obligated in any way to prove to anybody that his accusation is correct. And so what I said to my first answer which is that Julian Assange would be very difficult to prosecute him or WikiLeaks under the law might sound like that's a really good thing for him, but it actually could prove to be more dangerous because what the United States government has demonstrated is that it’s not bound by law.

So the mere fact that we can't prove that he committed a crime or charge him with a crime in a court of law isn’t any restraint at all on our willingness to lock people up or even kill them. I mean we're holding still 200 people in Guantanamo Bay who have never been charged with a crime and thousands more in detention centers around the world because we simply believe that the minute we decide that someone should be in a cage, they're going to go in a cage without charges and without due process and they're going to stay there for as long as they want. And if that doesn’t work, then we'll simply drone attack them or assassinate them or do anything else.

And you know, one of the interesting things, Dylan, is relating to your question, and this I remember; I found it so striking at the time and I really do now. Before WikiLeaks was on anybody's radars, before they even did their first big time release which was the video of the Apache helicopter back in Baghdad on the journalists, I wrote about them and actually told my readers that I thought they were playing a vital role in bringing about transparency and encouraged them, my readers that is, to donate money to them on the grounds that they needed money to operate and to expand. And I had so many people email me and made comments to the post I was writing expressing fear about whether or not their doing that would eventually subject them to some form of legal jeopardy by having it retroactively decide that they’ve aided and abetted terrorism. You think about that, American citizens afraid to donate money to a political organization that has never been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted, petrified that at some point they're going to be accused of aiding and abetting terrorism because the government decides they don’t like this organization. That's the kind of climate of fear that we've created in the United States mostly through fear mongering and through the use of these concepts relating to terrorism.

DYLAN: It's a -- fairly devastating stuff. If not for the historical moral progression over time on this planet, I'd be more pessimistic, Glenn. But considering how bad it was a few thousand years ago even as crazy as this government is and is completely screwed up as all this is and not that it won't get much worse, but my goodness, it is stunning to behold and at the very least we do have some other information, weapons, and other variables over time that I hope will benefit us.

I want to talk about the next chapter in this, if you will, where you focused a lot of your attention this week which is once you get beyond Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, who's a terrorist and who's not, and the government's decision to use the willy-nilly sort of the threat of classifying an institution as a terrorist organization as a way to basically become lawless and work from murder to imprisonment. The US media and its ability to absorb a treasure trove of information like that contained in these cables or in some of these previous leaks, but we'll stick with the most recent. What is your view of how the American media basically benefits from and handles this information and uses this information on behalf of their audiences, and their responsibility to question authority, in this case the government?

GLENN: That's by far been the most extraordinary aspect of this whole episode, in my opinion, which is I understand that people in government believe that their duty is to safeguard their secrets. I don’t agree with that. I think they're abusing their power, but I understand that perspective. But for everybody else, citizens and especially journalists, people who call themselves journalists, those who are criticizing WikiLeaks or condemning them or accusing them of doing something awful, what they're essentially saying is, what it really boils down to is “I want to be kept in the dark about all of these things that my government is doing. I am angry that I have been informed about what the government is doing in my name. I demand that in the future I remain ignorant and that my government do all these things behind the wall of secrecy.” That to me is extraordinary. It's --

DYLAN: But that's not so shocking. I mean honestly for me that's not so shocking. I recognize why it's so damning and so destructive, but you're dealing with a major psychological issue here, Glenn. You're dealing with the collapse, the cognitive dissonance of this image that is painted to sell things primarily inside the media, inside the government being decimated, being chopped like a sushi chef before your very eyes. And quite honestly, that level of cognitive dissonance, the gap between the imagery and the reality is so wide, it creates so much pain I think for people. I'm not excusing it, but don’t you think --

GLENN: I understand.

DYLAN: You say you can understand the government. Can't you understand the psychological insanity of somebody who's living in a fantasy and doesn’t want to deal with reality?

GLENN: Here's what -- I understand that citizens, ordinary citizens who don’t think about politics for a living and who aren’t completely plugged in, are content to allow the government to do things without them knowing both because they've been subjected to a continuous stream of fear mongering and thus believes that the government needs to do things in the dark in order for them to be safe, and that, as you just suggested, there is just a bliss to ignorance; that they would rather cling to their image and their fantasy about what the United States is and what the government is doing, rather than have their faces rubbed in the lawlessness, corruption and violence that the United States government carries out throughout the world. That I completely understand.

For me what is the remarkable part, are journalists. And I say this not because I have some idealized sense of what they are, who they are, or what they do. I do not. Nonetheless, I just have to believe that at some point along the way the reason people became journalists, at least “a” reason that people entered the field of journalism is because they had some commitment to the values of accountability and transparency and holding powerful factions accountable and being somewhat adversarial to them. I understand that there's probably lots of other motives that go into it and none are exact here, but on some level people would go into that field and want to call themselves journalists have to have that disposition constitutionally, and they have to tell themselves that what their profession is about is shedding light on what the world's powerful factions are doing.

So for people like that to watch some of the most extraordinary and sweeping episodes of disclosure that shed unprecedented light on what this people are doing in the dark and to react the way that most of them are reacting which is with anger and horror and to defend the very people in power they're supposed to be scrutinizing and starting an adversarial attack again; for them to react that way, I do find somewhat baffling even though I understand all the reasons why they do it because on some level I just think that basic -- there should be a minimal amount of dignity that should in their brain somewhere tell them “You can't possibly be an enemy of disclosure and condemn these leaks the way government officials are because your role is supposed to be completely different.” And there just doesn’t seem to be any sense at all even just for appearances sake that they ought to pretend to believe in those things. It's just so blatant and that I do find, I guess, somewhat surprising and just striking in terms of how unabashed it is.

DYLAN: To what do you attribute it?

GLENN: I think there are several things. First of all, I think that there is cultural and sociological change in the way that the media relates to the government. I think several decades ago -- and I don't want to idealize this. There wasn’t as pure as I'm about to say, but it's certainly true on the whole. The kind of iconic journalist was somebody who is rumpled and the lower middle class with the working class background who was kind of cantankerous and hostile to people in power and wanting to uncover them and expose them. That was just the personality type. And they tended to work for purely journalistic endeavors, newspapers that were owned by people -- in newspapers who have that true journalistic spirit.

Now, what you have is an extraordinarily professionalized media which are owned by large corporations, as you know, so the people who work in the mainstream media are really, first and foremost, employees of large corporations on which the media division is but one part. And so they have a corporate mindset which tends to be people who thrive in corporations, I believe, tend to be people who are predisposed to a power to think about what their environment demands of them to be pleasing and sort of servile which is the exact opposite of what adversarial media figure should be.

Also, there -- it is just true that the way our media works now. It is that they are dependent upon people in power doling out favors, access, exclusives, leaks. And so if you make people in power angry at you, then you have a career disadvantage. If you please them, you get treats. And so that develops this identity with the people in power and a sort of the closeness to them that is to identify with --

DYLAN: I'm one of them because I hang out with them or because they care of me or we go to their house.

GLENN: Right, because I talk to them all day. These are the people I respect and like and know and want to be with all the time.

DYLAN: We'll go to Rahm Emanuel's and play squirt gun.

GLENN: Precisely. In Washington there is a hierarchy. The White House is basically like a royal court, and the king is at the center of that, and all the king's most trusted aides are the gatekeepers. And whoever gets admitted into the royal court is grateful and servile. I mean this is just the dynamic of imperial capital throughout all of history. And the people in the media who are admitted into that realm are grateful to the people who have admitted them, and they become -- they essentially do their bidding.

The other aspect of it is is that a lot of the members of the media are people who have substantial wealth, and who earn a lot of money doing what they do. They have status. They have some degree of celebrity, and rather than being on the outside of power they become central cogs of this insular D.C. culture so that in no way are they in any way different than political leaders. They're essentially part of the same club. They just perform slightly different roles, and their first allegiance is to that club. And anybody who truly is adversarial to people in political power, like Julian Assange who doesn’t care what kinds of animosity he provokes, doesn’t care about subverting the system, gets to be the enemy. They’re media figures who are doing the opposite of what they're supposed to be doing. They're devoted to preserving and protecting that political system. That's where all their status, their benefits, their money, their access, all of it, it's where it derives from, and they defend it as vigorously as the political figures.

DYLAN: And at the end of the day as people become more and more aware of that, and you keep talking about the media and political figures, and I think that's dead on because if you look again at the polling in credibility and trust in politicians, it's very similar to the polling in trust in media figures all of whom are largely seen as corrupt but hypocritical and self-preserving at the expense of, not only their obligation to their job, but any obligation they would have to either their true inner selves or, God help us, the country. We have begun the process of truly degrading the reputations of the political class. Whatever you think about the Tea Party, the Tea Party at the very least knows that the politicians aren’t working for them. Now, the Tea Party might not be working for you either, but they do know that.

At what point does the degradation of those who choose to accept the treats and hang out in the royal court so they can be rich, famous, movie stars playing journalists of some kind, at what point -- and do you not think that at some point we reached that point where that degradation naturally begins as people come to realize who among the journalists are really part of the royal court and shills, not just which networks but which individuals, and as such, this sort of bought construction really starts to dissolve or is that too optimistic on my part?

GLENN: I think that what you're seeing is pretty much what you've described which is a gradual but very clear and inarguable trend towards all of the leading institutions in the United States losing esteem and power in the eyes of the citizenry. There's an incredible disconnect between virtually every leading institution that was once respected and listened to and have authority and the rest of the country. And you're right. I mean you see this in different ways, I mean the Tea Party is a manifestation of anger towards and dissatisfaction with the ruling elite. That's the language they use to express it. There are people on the left who are just as angry and angry at the same people, albeit for different reasons and with different goals. But if you look at what's happening in general and -- you know, it's not a very, in one sense, optimistic thing to think about because it's what happens when countries break down. It's when the institutions lose their ability to command respect over the citizenry because they've lost the foundation of that respect. But on the other hand, I can't see any other way that these intrinsically corrupt institutions can be weakened and then removed except by allowing that fracturing process to happen. I don’t think it would have to be apocalyptical, but it's going to be disruptive and I think that ultimately will be a good thing.

DYLAN: I agree with that and not -- I look at the success that you have had as a muckraker effectively for some time now. You have a meaningful audience. You have a meaningful voice, and you're not the only person. I look quite honestly at the success that I have been able to experience ever since leaving CNBC in the face of the atrocious corruption of the US government and financial system that was sort of happening before my eyes.