Showing posts with label Assassination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Assassination. Show all posts

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Dulles v. Democracy


THE ABSURD TIMES






Remember, remember, the 5th of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot;
I see of no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.


Dulles v. Democracy
by
Czar Donic


We have just about had it for awhile. There are simply too many things our "free-market" system of arms distribution and "Nation Building," sine we can not even rebuild Detroit or Baltimore, refugees, wars, etc. to keep up with. Furthermore, there are other things to think about and, when the spirit moves, we will publish those in another forum, made available the same way or through the same channels.

We once looked back here in order to find out why each President seemed worse than the last. Of course, Carter was a bit of a relief after Nixon and Obama at least speaks English after 8 years of Georgie and his Oedipus complex, but the serious decline came with the death of JFK. It led to Viet Nam and then eventually Ronald Reagan. How did it come about?

A new book of the Dulles brothers in action sheds some more light on the monumental event. In order to follow, we need to unravel some history and that is never fun. In addition, the careers of the Dulles brothers are so murky that they may never be untangled. And anyway, who cares now? Right?

Allen Dulles was head of the CIA during Eisenhower and Kennedy. He once said that the CIA did nothing without the approval of the "Highest" levels of the government, which meant his brother, John Foster Dulles. Both were from San Francisco and had a law firm in D.C. And were very close to what emerged as Bechtel. Allen had the elected President of Iran overthrown and replaced by the Shah (who is the only leader in the Mideast, except Israel, to ever have any nuclear weapons program).

You may have had of Senator McCarthy and McCarthyism in the 50s. Well, the fascist McCarthy felt that there were "Communists" in the CIA and subpoenaed documents from them. Dulles not only resisted, had Eisenhower block him, but also broke into McCarthy's Senate office to plant "disinformation". We might say good for him, but we have to realize that it was Dulles, not CBS, that eventually "neutralized" McCarthy.

Jumping ahead a few years, JFK was elected and happy to see Lamumba elected President, the first democratically elected African leader. Dulles neutralized him, but Kennedy didn't know this until later. You might want to remember a scene from Godfather II that took place in Cuba: a meeting with a few mobsters, ATT, big food conglomerates, and so on, with Batista, then President of Cuba. Remember also some of the cleaned up scenes of decadent "entertainment" provided for United States investors and tourists. Then the revolution. All during Eisenhower.

Kennedy takes office and already several plots to assassinate Castro are underway and take place without his specific approval. By the Bay of Pigs, he finds out how deeply the CIA is involved and fires Allen Dulles and several of his operatives. Kennedy is knocked off in Dallas, and LBJ forms a "commission" to investigate, named after Warren, Chief Justice, but run by Dulles, one year after Dulles was fired by JFK. Bechtel makes a ton of money in Viet Nam and other wars (LBJ knew how to survive, if nothing else). Robert Kennedy resigned immediately as he had forced Hoover to report to him, not directly to the president (as it should be).

New we can here from the author:


The Rise of America's Secret Government: The Deadly Legacy of Ex-CIADirector Allen Dulles Pt. 2

Extended web-only interview with David Talbot, author of "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government," about how Dulles' time at the CIA helped shape the current national security state. Talbot discusses Dulles' close ties to The New York Times, the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and more.

TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Our guest is David Talbot. His book is The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. He's the founder and former CEO and editor-in-chief of Salon. Let's start with the title, The Devil's Chessboard. Why did you call it that, David?
DAVID TALBOT: The Devil's Chessboard refers to the fact that the Dulles brothers—John Foster Dulles, who's secretary of state under Eisenhower, and his brother, Allen Dulles, who I focus on, head of the CIA—they loved to play chess with each other. They would go at it for hours, even when Allen Dulles was about to be married. He kept his wife-to-be waiting around while the two brothers went at it. And they tended to look at the world as their chessboard. People were pawns to be manipulated. So I felt that was a—you know, an apt metaphor.
But, Amy, I wanted to go back to what you were talking about—alternative media—before this. I think—I just want to underline what you were saying about how essential it is to have countervoices. They are the lifeblood of democracy. And shows like yours and public radio are just essential. You know, my book is having a hard time getting through the media gatekeepers. They don't want to hear about this, and in part because the CIA, particularly under Allen Dulles, but even today, are masters at manipulating the media. I've been on shows and been bumped. I was scheduled to be on shows at the last minute, strangely. I was supposed to write something for Politico magazine. Someone there called the book a "masterpiece." They wanted the book to be, you know, showcased there. Instead, I was bumped from Politico. And an articlebased on recently leaked CIA documents—conveniently leaked—was written by a former New York Timesreporter, Phil Shenon, and what he did was to basically accuse Fidel Castro of assassinating President Kennedy. This has been a CIA disinformation line for years. So the CIA is still manipulating the media, and it's essential that independent media exists, like this.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the relationship between The New York Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Allen Dulles?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, the Sulzberger family had a long relationship with Dulles. When he was inaugurated as CIA director, one of the Sulzbergers wrote to him, saying, "This is the best news I've heard in years." In another letter, he calls him affectionately "Ally." They were on a first name basis. They belonged to the same clubs. They were masters at—the Dulles brothers, particularly Allen—at manipulating the media. After the Warren Report comes out, the official investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy, one of the top editors at Newsweek writes to Allen Dulles. And I'm getting all this from Allen Dulles's own files; he was very proud of the fact that he could—he had the media in the palm of his hand. But this Newsweek editor writes to him, "Thank you so much for basically directing our coverage of the Warren Report. We couldn't have done it without you." So, you know, this was the kind of cozy relationship that existed between the CIA and the media in those years. CBS, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, they were all in the palm of the CIA's hands. They all lived together in Georgetown. They had cocktail parties together. It was a very cozy set.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, in Guatemala today, there has been a popular uprising. It has been quite astounding. Otto Pérez Molina, OPM, the president, was thrown out, is in jail right now. I wanted to go toAllan Nairn, longtime investigative reporter, who was in Guatemala during this period. And this also goes back to 1954. But Allan Nairn has been covering Guatemala since the 1980s.
ALLAN NAIRN: This is an oligarchy in Guatemala which kills its own unionists, which kills peasants who try to organize the plantations, which works hand in glove with Washington and is now trying to hold onto their power, because, for the first time, it's under threat. I mean, this is a historic moment. It all began in 1954, when the CIA invaded Guatemala, overthrew a democratically elected government and put the army in power. And now, the people have risen.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that's Allan Nairn talking about this most recent uprising. But, David Talbot, can you go back to 1954, where we left off in Part 1 of our conversation, and talk about what actually happened? Who was Allen Dulles, the CIA director, and his brother, John Foster Dulles, the state—the secretary of state, working for?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, of course, their original power goes back to Sullivan & Cromwell, this very powerful Wall Street law firm that John Foster Dulles ran and where Allen Dulles worked. And among their clients was United Fruit. United Fruit, of course, was this colossus, this corporate colossus, that ruled much of Latin America, owned, you know, vast acreage in Guatemala and many other countries. They weren't just a banana company. They were a multinational real estate company. They owned often the utilities. And they owned the local political elites in those countries.
In the early '50s, Jacobo Árbenz, this young military officer, a reform officer, starts to emerge as a potential leader. He runs for president and is elected by his people on a reform campaign. And one of the first things he does, of course, in this country that's basically a medieval country ruled by land barons, is to begin to nationalize some of the land, that's not being even used by United [Fruit], and give it to the people themselves, the farmers, to work. And this provokes a major backlash from United Fruit, from the local political elites, the oligarchs, and from the CIA. Allen Dulles, working for Eisenhower as CIA director, portrays Jacobo Árbenz as a dangerous communist—he wasn't—and prepares to overthrow him in a military coup, which does occur.
What I tell the story of, mostly I focus on, is the tragic aftermath of that coup, because not only for the Árbenz family, which, in some ways, were the Kennedys of Guatemala—glamorous, young couple, Jacobo and María Árbenz, their children, very good-looking, wealthy, but very committed to uplifting the poor in that country. And after the coup, they're sent into a terrible exile. No country will touch them, because CIApressure. The CIA and the State Department pressure every country, from Mexico throughout Latin America, not to take the Árbenz family in. They're finally forced to go behind the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia to seek exile. They're not happy there. They finally end up back in Mexico, but they're under tight supervision. The family is haunted. It's stalked wherever it goes. One of his daughters commits suicide. And Jacobo Árbenz himself ends up dead under mysterious circumstances—scalded to death in a bathtub in a Mexico City hotel. His family today believes that he was assassinated. And given the fact that the CIA had a death list of left-wing figures, journalists, political leaders, after the coup that were to be eliminated, that, you know, is a distinct possibility.
So, these ripples of tragedy, after these coups, go on and on. You know, the CIA and Allen Dulles told Eisenhower after the Guatemala coup, "Oh, it was a clean coup. You know, hardly anyone died." But the fact is, tens of thousands of people died in the killing fields of Guatemala as a result of that coup, and that violence continues today.
AMY GOODMAN: And wasn't it also a precursor to what happened with the Bay of Pigs? Move forward like, what, six years, and explain what happened.
DAVID TALBOT: Right. Well, emboldened by how easy it was to do a regime change in Guatemala, yes, when Fidel Castro comes to power in Cuba, he again antagonizes the same corporate interests that the Dulles brothers represent—oil companies, like the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil, and others, agribusiness firms. So they believe that Fidel has to be eliminated, and they begin plotting, under the Eisenhower administration, with Eisenhower's approval, to kill, to assassinate Fidel Castro. And, in fact, at one point, Fidel Castro, who was beloved in this country after the revolution—he had overthrown a thug, a Mafia-backed thug, Batista, a very corrupt and violent dictatorship. He was seen as the future, and very glamorous, he and Che Guevara and so on. They would come to New York and would be mobbed by people in the streets. When they came to New York for a U.N. meeting in 1960, though, the Eisenhower administration was already pushing back, and no hotel would take them. Finally, a hotel in Midtown did take them, but there was—they asked for so much money as security, they were basically blackmailing Fidel. He was outraged, and he ended up staying in a hotel in Harlem that took him in.
AMY GOODMAN: Hotel Theresa.
DAVID TALBOT: Hotel Theresa. And they stood up to this Washington pressure, the manager of that hotel, who was African-American. He had grown up in Jim Crow South. And he said, "You know, I know what it's like to be denied a roof over your head. This Cuban delegation can stay here." So it was a very—
AMY GOODMAN: Did he meet Malcolm X there?
DAVID TALBOT: He did. It was a very dramatic moment. Malcolm X makes a visit to the Hotel Theresa. He squeezes into his suite, where there's dozens of people crammed. They have a very interesting encounter, Fidel and Malcolm. And it really changed their lives and had a big impact on both of those men for years afterwards. In fact, Malcolm said he was one of the few white men that he learned to respect and appreciate. And, by the way, there was an FBI guy taking notes the whole time in that hotel room, so we know some of what happened there and the dialogue, because of the FBI report on this.
AMY GOODMAN: Who was it?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, his name was not revealed, but there was an agent surveilling him. But meanwhile, while Fidel is there, meeting with Khrushchev from the Soviet Union and Nasser from Egypt and the world leaders and embarrassing the Eisenhower administration, because here he's gone to Harlem, and, you know, no one else would take him in, in Midtown Manhattan—meanwhile, the Mafia is meeting with CIA agents at the Plaza Hotel, just blocks away, plotting his assassination. So, a lot of intrigue in 1960 going on in New York. And then, to make it even more interesting, a young JFK, who's campaigning for president, after Fidel has left, shows up at the Hotel Theresa and basically says, "This is revolutionary ground I'm standing on. And we should welcome the winds of change and the revolution, the future. We shouldn't be afraid of it." So, very end—and begins to talk about the mortality rate of black infants in Harlem and many of the issues that are still current.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, look at what President Kennedy, then President Kennedy, did, when it came to Cuba—
DAVID TALBOT: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: —what happened under his reign, from the Bay of Pigs to the endless assassination attempts of Fidel Castro.
DAVID TALBOT: Kennedy did do a flip-flop, to an extent, after that. He came in as president. He was young. He was untested, under a lot of pressure from the national security people in his administration. He inherited the Bay of Pigs operation, the plans for that. He was basically told, "Look, if you pull the plug on this thing, it's so far along now, there will be a major political backlash against you." So he was kind of sandbagged by the CIA. He did go through with it, but he had no intention of widening it into an all-out U.S. military assault on the island, on Cuba. But that's what the CIA had in mind. They knew that this motley crew of Cuban exiles they put together to invade the island wasn't sufficient to unseat Castro. But what they hoped and what they planned was that a young President Kennedy, as this invasion was bogged down on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, would be forced then to send in the Marines and the U.S. Air Force to topple Castro.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, of course, the Cuban missile crisis, the closest we ever came to a nuclear war.
DAVID TALBOT: Well, but Kennedy stood his ground, and he didn't do that. And that was the beginning of his break, at the Bay of Pigs, between the CIA and Cuba—and President Kennedy. And then, yes, that became even more severe with the Cuban missile crisis the following year. Again, the military in this country and the CIA thought that we could take, you know, Castro out. During the Cuban missile crisis, they were prepared to go to a nuclear war to do that. President Kennedy thought people like Curtis LeMay, who was head of the Air Force, General Curtis LeMay, was half-mad. He said, "I don't even see this man in my—you know, in my sight," because he was pushing for a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. And even years later, Curtis LeMay, after years after Kennedy is dead, in an interview that I quote from in the book, bitterly complains that Kennedy didn't take this opportunity to go nuclear over Cuba. So, President Kennedy basically, I think, saved my life—I was 12 years old at the time—saved a lot of our lives, because he did stand his ground. He took a hard line against the national security people and said, "No, we're going to peacefully resolve the Cuban missile crisis."
AMY GOODMAN: And then President Kennedy, on November 22nd, 1963, was assassinated.
DAVID TALBOT: That's right.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to David Talbot, who is author of The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. What did you find when it came to Kennedy's assassination?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, first of all, after Kennedy did fire Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs, Dulles didn't get the memo. He went home to Georgetown and continued to operate from his home as if he were still running the CIA. His top deputies came on a regular basis to meet with him. He—
AMY GOODMAN: You had notes of his wife and his mistress.
DAVID TALBOT: That's right. I found his daybook, who he was meeting with. I read his—the correspondence. I read his mistress's diaries and journals.
AMY GOODMAN: Who was his mistress?
DAVID TALBOT: A woman named Mary Bancroft, a very interesting woman, related to the gentleman who started or was the top editor at The Wall Street Journal. She had aspirations of her own. She became a spy for Allen Dulles in Switzerland during World War II when they started their affair. And curiously, then, when his wife shows up in Switzerland at the end of the war, Clover Dulles, the two women become friends. Clover Dulles figures out what's been going on. She kind of gives it a pass. And the two women then form a tight bond throughout the rest of their lives. And their correspondence is fascinating. They both were patients of Carl Jung, one of the founding fathers of psychiatry in Switzerland.
And they called Allen Dulles "The Shark," these two women, because they both knew the kind of man they were dealing with—full of surface charm and, you know, a very popular party guest on the Washington circuit, but underneath a very cold man, a man who was capable of sending people to their death with the blink of an eye, a man who was capable of putting his own child, Allen Jr., in the hands of an experimental doctor who was working for the CIA in the notorious MKULTRA program, which Naomi Klein and others have written about.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain it very briefly, and what happened to Allen Jr.?
DAVID TALBOT: MKULTRA was—they called it the Manhattan Project of the mind. It was an attempt by the CIA, funding—millions of dollars—funding scientists and doctors around the country, major institutions, to see if we could program people for whatever purpose. It was a mind control program. His son, Allen Jr., came back from the war, Korean War, with a piece of shrapnel in his brain. He was brain-damaged, and the family had difficulty with him. He was trying to find his way. And at one point, Allen Dulles put him in the hands of this scientist here in New York who did unspeakable sort of experiments on him involving insulin overdose therapy, which is a very traumatic therapy—convulsions, sometimes resulting in death. His sister was appalled—Allen Dulles's daughter—when she went to visit him in the hospital. And it was from her that I got this story.
Joan Dulles is a very amazing woman—Joan Talley, as she's known today, a retired Jungian therapist in New Mexico, drives a Prius with an Obama sticker on it. I'm sure her father is spinning in his grave. But she, herself, like many of us, at the age of 90 when I interviewed her, was grappling with this dark legacy in America, that played out within her own family. You know, she's looking back on this now and is appalled, in some way, that she—it was a part of her life. But she's reading the books—and I hope she reads mine—and is coming to some kind of determination about her father.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what MKULTRA was used for.
DAVID TALBOT: Well, MKULTRA, among other things, they were seeing if they could program a Manchurian candidate, assassins who would act in a robotic-like fashion to kill on CIA command. They were also using it as enhanced interrogation, as we call it today. Soviet prisoners who would fall into our hands, they were—
AMY GOODMAN: And the drug is actually?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, many different drugs, psychedelic—LSD was one of the drugs. They subjected—there was a particular place in Canada at the Allan Institute and McGill University in Canada, where one of these doctors, Dr. Ewen Cameron, he operated something called the sleep room, where women, many—mostly women, and patients of his would be put. These were people who were suffering from common neurotic disorders, postpartum depression and so on. And they were put in this sleep room and, through massive doses of various psychedelic drugs, were put into a sleep state, and then tape loops were played over and over again in an attempt to erase their bad patterns of thinking, and often wiping out their memory. They would come out of these experiments not knowing their family, who they were. In one case, a woman was reduced to an infantile state. She couldn't use a toilet. And this was the wife of a Canadian—a member of the Canadian Parliament. So this was all CIA-funded research during the Cold War, and it was, you know, basically the most inhumane sort of methods being used on people.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to David Talbot, and we digressed from the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
DAVID TALBOT: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you learned in writing The Devil's Chessboard.
DAVID TALBOT: Well, as I was saying, after he was fired by Kennedy, Dulles went to his home. He continued—
AMY GOODMAN: And why was he fired?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, he was fired after the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy realized he shouldn't have kept Dulles on from the Eisenhower years. They were philosophically too different. And the Bay of Pigs was the final straw for him. So he was pushed out after that.
And—but Dulles, as I say, continued to sort of set up an anti-Kennedy government in exile in his home in Georgetown. Many of the people he was meeting with, several of the people, including Howard Hunt and others, later became figures of suspicion during the House Select Committee on Assassination hearings in Washington in the 1970s. You know, most Americans don't know that that was the last official statement, the last official report, on the Kennedy assassination, not the Warren Report back in 1964. But the Congress reopened the investigation into John Kennedy's assassination, and they did determine he was killed as the result of a conspiracy.
So a number of the people who came up during this investigation by Congress were figures of interest who were meeting with Allen Dulles. They had no, you know, obvious reason to be meeting with a "retired" CIAofficial. The weekend of Kennedy's assassination, Allen Dulles is not at home watching television like the rest of America. He's at a remote CIA facility, two years after being pushed out of the agency by Kennedy, called The Farm, in northern Virginia, that he used when he was director of the CIA as a kind of an alternate command post. Well, he's there while Kennedy is killed, after Kennedy is killed, when Jack Ruby then kills Lee Harvey Oswald. That whole fateful weekend, he's hunkered down in a CIA command post. So, there are many odd circumstances like this.
I also found out from interviewing the children of another former CIA official that one of the key figures of interest in the Kennedy assassination, a guy named William Harvey, who was head of the CIA-Mafia plot against Castro and hated the Kennedys, thought that they were weak and so on, he was seen leaving his Rome station and flying to Dallas, by his own deputy, on an airplane early in November 1963. This is a remarkable sighting, because to place someone like William Harvey, the head of the CIA's assassination unit, put there by Allen Dulles, in Dallas in November of '63 before the assassination is a very important fact. The CIA, by the way, refuses, even at this late date, to release the travel vouchers for people like William Harvey. Under the JFK Records Act, that was passed back in the 1990s, they are compelled by federal law to release all documents related to the Kennedy assassination, but they're still withholding over 1,100 of these documents, including—and I—
AMY GOODMAN: Fifteen seconds.
DAVID TALBOT: I used the Freedom of Information Act to try and get the travel vouchers for William Harvey. They're still holding onto them.
AMY GOODMAN: How many calls are you getting in the mainstream media to do interviews?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, thank God, I was saying earlier, for alternative media, like this, Amy, because there is resistance to this book. First of all, I call out the mainstream media. I say that New York Times,CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, they were all under his thumb. They did his bidding.
AMY GOODMAN: Whose thumb?
DAVID TALBOT: Allen Dulles's thumb. So, when the Warren Report came out, I was saying that one of the editors, top editors, at Newsweek wrote to him and said, "Thank you so much, Mr. Dulles, for helping shape our coverage of the Warren Report." Well, of course, Allen Dulles was on the Warren Commission. In fact, some people thought it should have been called the Dulles Commission, because he dominated it so much. So, you know, it's way too cozy, the relationship between Washington power and the media. And—
AMY GOODMAN: What was the relationship between Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, they were social friends, not just him, but other members of the Sulzberger family. I found, you know, cozy correspondence between them, congratulating him when he was inaugurated, Dulles, as CIA director. They called him "Ally," one of the Sulzberger families, in one letter. They would get together, you know, every year. Dulles would hold these media sort of drink fests for New Year's. And these were, you know, top reporters, top editors, would get together with the CIA guys and rub elbows and get a little drunk. And, you know, when Allen Dulles didn't want a reporter, because he felt he was being overly aggressive, covering, say, Guatemala—Sydney Gruson, the reporter—in the run-up to the coup there in 1954, he had—he made a call to The New York Times and had him removed. That was because of his relationship with Sulzberger, the publisher. So, that was the kind of pull that Allen Dulles had.
AMY GOODMAN: How did that work?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, they just took him out. They removed Gruson. They transferred him, I think to Mexico, at that point.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you compare Smedley Butler, the general, who was—called himself, what? A racketeer for capitalism, when he was asked to overthrow countries and said no—
DAVID TALBOT: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —to Allen Dulles?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, one's a hero, and one's a villain, to put it pure and simple. Smedley Darlington Butler, who I've also written about—I wrote an illustrated history, for readers of all ages, called Devil Dog. Smedley was an American hero. He was a guy who joined the Marines at 16, didn't know any better, ran off all around the world fighting America's imperial wars from China to throughout Latin America, ended up in France during World War I. And by the time he was a middle-aged man, he had seen the kind of dirty work that was done by America's soldiers in the name of American business interests. And he said he was like Al Capone. He said, "We marines were like Al Capone, except that Al Capone couldn't even measure up to us, the kind of thuggery that we were capable of, that we committed in America's name throughout Latin America, particularly."
AMY GOODMAN: And wasn't it just not through Latin America, like overthrowing Árbenz, but wasn't the Pitcairn family in the United States involved with attempting a coup against FDR and wanted to recruit Smedley Butler to do it?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, that's what—as I write in my book, that it was his great moment of heroism, because he was a hero to soldiers, to the rank and file. He had spoken to the famous Bonus Army March, where World War I veterans were demanding pay for the time they had lost when they were overseas. He spoke before them. It was a very controversial thing he did as a retired officer, retired general from the Marines. And so, because he was so popular with the rank and file, when a number of corporate families like the DuPonts and others became furious at FDR for being a class traitor, as they called him, and pushing through these Wall Street reforms and other things that were infuriating them, they went to—representatives of theirs went to Smedley Butler and said, "Would you lead a march again, like the Bonus Army March on Washington? But this time we want them to be armed, the soldiers to be armed." Essentially, "Will you lead a coup against Franklin Roosevelt?" And instead of going along with this, he went before Congress and outed this plot.
AMY GOODMAN: And who were the families? Who were the—
DAVID TALBOT: Well, DuPonts were one of them. The family that owned Remington, the arms factory, was also involved. A number of these people were clients of the Dulleses. Foster Dulles, by the way, John Foster Dulles, who later became secretary of state, ran the Wall Street firm Sullivan & Cromwell. WhenFDR starts to push through some of these reforms, like the Security Exchange Commission and others, Glass-Steagall, he convenes all his wealthy clients in his office on Wall Street and says, "Just ignore this. We'll resist this. We won't go along with these reforms."
AMY GOODMAN: The Nazis? Very quickly.
DAVID TALBOT: The Nazis, well, they have a very tight relationship, many Nazi businessmen, with the Dulles brothers. And when Allen Dulles was in Switzerland, supposedly working for our side, the OSS, during the war, he was actually using that to meet with a lot of Nazis and to cut separate deals with them. He did indeed finally cut a separate peace deal with the Nazi forces in Italy against FDR's wishes. FDR had a policy of unconditional surrender. Don't—
AMY GOODMAN: This was Operation Paperclip?
DAVID TALBOT: This was Operation Sunrise, was this deal that he made. And then he set up these rat-lines, so-called, where Nazis, leading Nazi war criminals, escaped after the war through the Alps in Switzerland, down into Italy and then overseas to Latin America and even in the United States. One of the key Nazis he saved was Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's former chief of intelligence, who he installed, Dulles, as head of West German intelligence after the war, a man who should have stood trial at Nuremberg.
AMY GOODMAN: Who turned you down?
DAVID TALBOT: You know, well, Politico was one. Politico, you know, one of the leading publications, online publications and a print publication, you know, had—I was supposed to write something for them there. Instead, they went with a piece by, as I say, a former New York Times guy named Phil Shenon, based on leaked CIA documents that basically pin the Kennedy assassination on Fidel Castro. This is absurd. Fidel Castro, when he heard about Kennedy's assassination, crumpled. He knew that Kennedy was trying to open back channels with him to establish peace between Cuba and the United States, years before Obama finally did. In fact, Jean Daniel, who was a French reporter, was with Fidel, at Kennedy's behest, in Havana, basically carrying this olive branch to Fidel from Kennedy, when they got the terrible news from Dallas.
AMY GOODMAN: Who do you think killed John Kennedy?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, I believe what Robert Kennedy believed. Robert Kennedy, as I showed in my book earlier, Brothers, and in this book, looked immediately at the killing team that was put together by the CIAto kill Fidel Castro. That CIA killing team, I think, was responsible for killing President Kennedy, as well. That team that was killing foreign leaders, that was targeting foreign leaders, that Dulles had assembled, including men like William Harvey, Howard Hunt, David Morales—these were all key figures of suspicion by Congress during the House Assassinations Committee investigation in the '70s. That was the team that was brought to Dallas. I now identify those men. A couple of them admitted—Howard Hunt, on his death bed, admitted that he was involved in the Kennedy assassination, and the mainstream media completely overlooked this shocking—
AMY GOODMAN: Howard Hunt, who was Watergate.
DAVID TALBOT: He was the leader of the Watergate break-in and a legendary CIA action officer, and very close to Allen Dulles, revered Allen Dulles. On his death bed, he revealed that he was part of that plot. Again, 60 Minutes looked at it and then walked away. I know a lot about this story. But the media has been, I think, shockingly remiss in not looking into this investigation. It's a taboo subject. But it's clear—I think I present overwhelming evidence that Allen Dulles was complicit in this, in the assassination of the president. And he conveniently ran the investigation into the president's murder, because he strong-armed President Johnson into appointing him to the Warren Commission, where he became the dominant figure.
AMY GOODMAN: David Talbot, author of the new book, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government.
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Monday, February 10, 2014

DEATH BY METADATA,,


DEATH BY METADATA




       



          This is really worth checking out.  I haven’t yet been able to get a response from the site, but it is up and running.



          You have to realize that every time you forward a message, that entire message is Metadata.  Every Re-Tweet, for those of you on Twitter, is Metadata.  Every “like”, anywhere, on anything, is Metadata.  Your phone number is Metadata.  In fact, the definition is so broad, even the term “Metadata” is Metadata. 



          If you use a cell phone, the signal is Metadata.  Right now, drones fly overhead, fake being a cell-phone tower, and are able to use your signal to launch some sort of missile or bomb on you.  If it explodes, and you can be reasonably certain that it will, you will be dead and splattered all over the ground.  SPLAT! 



          A more frightening part of this is one of the last sentences where Obama indicated that he really didn’t think he would be so good at killing.  Well, it only shows what you can do if you really set your mind to it.  Power of Positive Thinking, that is. 



          Of course, the Constitution ensures that we can not be executed by our own government without “due process,” but as Eric Holder has pointed out, “due process” does not necessarily mean “adjudication”.  In other words, you don’t have to be tried, just “due”.  The trouble is, none of us know when we are “due”.



          Now this sound like an Orwellian paranoid nightmare, but as you read the interview below, you can see that this day has come.



          Somewhere in there, Glenn Greenwald mentions visiting the United States because he has the right as an American Citizen.  The Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who looks to us as if he could not install Itunes on his own computer, and who has said that Snowden must have had Russian help in order to copy all the stuff that he did, believes that everyone is a Traitor, especially Glenn Greenwald.  I doubt if Eric Holder is going to bother arguing with him. 



          Anyway, here is a transcript of the entire interview.  Try not to get too freaked out because Obama is only targeting cell-phones, not people.  Any people that die, well, that’s collateral damage.  Obama said so, and Obama is an honorable man.



          And he would never target an American citizen INSIDE the United States.  Obama said so, and Obama is an honorable man.



          And he would only target evil cell phones overseas.  Obama said so, and Obama is an honorable man:

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2014

Death By Metadata: Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald RevealNSA Role in Assassinations Overseas

In the first exposé for their new venture, First Look Media’s digital journal The Intercept, investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald reveal the National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes. The NSA identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cellphone tracking technologies, an unreliable tactic that has resulted in the deaths of innocent and unidentified people. The United States has reportedly carried out drone strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cellphone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike. Scahill and Greenwald join us in this exclusive interview to discuss their report and the launch of their media project.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a breaking news story about the National Security Agency and its secret role helping the military and CIA carry out assassinations overseas. According to journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, the NSA is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
A former drone operator for JSOC, the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, said the NSA identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cellphone tracking technologies, but it’s proven to be an unreliable tactic that’s resulted in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. The U.S. has reportedly carried out strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cellphone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike. The former drone operator, who was a source in the story, said, quote, "It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people—we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy," the quote says.
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald have also revealed the NSA has equipped drones and other aircraft with devices known as "virtual base-tower transceivers." These devices create, in effect, a fake cellphone tower that can force a targeted person’s device to lock onto the NSA’s receiver without their knowledge.
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald’s article appears in the new online publication,TheIntercept.org, published by First Look Media, the newly formed media venture started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Glenn and Jeremy co-founded The Interceptwith filmmaker Laura Poitras.
Glenn Greenwald Greenwald is the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. He was previously a columnist at The Guardian newspaper. He’s joining us via Democracy Now! video stream from his home in Brazil.
Jeremy Scahill is producer and writer of the documentary film Dirty Wars, which has just been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. He’s also author of the book by the same name. Jeremy joins us from Los Angeles.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Jeremy, let’s begin with you. Lay out the significance of this explosive story.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Amy, we’re living in the era of pre-crime, where President Obama is continuing many of the same policies of his predecessor George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. And there’s this incredible reliance on technology to kill people who the United States thinks—doesn’t necessarily know, but thinks—may one day pose some sort of a threat of committing an act of terrorism or of impacting U.S. interests. And the U.S. wants to shy away from having its own personnel on the ground in countries like Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, eventually Afghanistan, and so what’s happened is that there’s this incredible reliance on the use of remotely piloted aircraft, i.e. drones.
What we discovered in the course of talking to sources, including this new source that we have who worked with both the Joint Special Operations Command and the National Security Agency, is that the NSA is providing satellite technology and communications intercept technology to the U.S. military special operations forces and the CIA that essentially mimics the activities of a cellphone tower and forces individual SIM cards or handsets of phones—there’s two separate devices. When you have your telephone, your mobile phone, you have a SIM card in it, and that can be tracked, but also the device itself can be tracked. And what they do is they force theSIM card or the handset of individuals that they’re tracking onto these cellphone networks, and the people don’t know that their phones are being forced onto this cellphone tower that is literally put on the bottom of a drone and acts as a virtual transceiver. And so, when they are able to triangulate where this individual is, they can locate or track them to within about 30 feet or so of their location.
And what we understand is that under the current guidelines issued by the White House, President Obama gives a 60-day authorization to the CIA or the U.S. military to hunt down and kill these individuals who they’ve tracked with these SIM-card-tracking technologies or handset-tracking technologies, and that they only have to have two sources of intelligence to indicate that this is the individual that they’re looking for. Those two sources cannot—can be signals intelligence, which is what I’ve just been describing, and they can also be what’s called IMINT, or imagery intelligence, meaning just a satellite image of an individual that they think to be this suspected terrorist. They do not require an actual human confirmation that the individual SIM card or phone handset that they’re tracking is in fact possessed by the person that they believe is a potential terrorist. And so, what we understand is that this is essentially death by metadata, where they think, or they hope, that the phone that they’re blowing up is in the possession of a person that they’ve identified as a potential terrorist. But in the end, they don’t actually really know. And that’s where the real danger with this program lies.
And the reason that our source came forward to talk about it is because he was a part of this program and was a participant in operations where he knew the identity of one individual that was being targeted, but other people were killed alongside of that person. And he also said that he just felt incredibly uncomfortable with the idea that they’re killing people’s phones in the effort to kill them and that they don’t actually know who the people are that are holding those phones.
AMY GOODMAN: And the source then is in addition to the documents that Edward Snowden released.
JEREMY SCAHILL: That’s correct. In fact, when we first started talking with this source, he was describing the architecture of this program, where the NSA is working closely with the CIA and with the Joint Special Operations Command, and then we were able to validate what he was saying through the documents that were previously provided by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden.
Amy, the platform that the CIA is using in Yemen and other countries is known as "SHENANIGANS." It’s interesting because the NSA uses a lot of sort of Irish terminology, BLARNEY STONE and other—LIMERICK, other operations. This one is called SHENANIGANS. And the platform that’s used by the U.S. military is calledGILGAMESH, or GMESH, for short. And that’s this technology where they’re able to not only triangulate the position of SIM cards and cellphones, but the NSA also puts a device on the drones, that are flying in various countries around the world, known as Air Handler, and the Air Handler device is literally just sucking up all of the data around the world. So it’s sort of a secondary mission. In other words, in plain terms what I’m saying is that every time a drone goes out in an effort to track someone or to kill someone, the NSA has put a device on that that is not actually under the control of the CIA or the military, it is just sucking up data for the NSA. And as several formerNSA people have told us, you know, the NSA just wants all the data. They want to suck it up on an industrial scale. So they’re also piggybacking onto these targeted killing operations in an effort to just suck up data throughout the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Yet, I want to turn to President Obama, who was talking about drone strikes during that first major counterterrorism address of his second term. It was May 23rd, 2013.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And before any strike is taken, there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set. Yes, the conflict with al-Qaeda, like all armed conflict, invites tragedy. But by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, respond.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Amy, first of all, we saw very recently that the U.S. carried out a drone strike that killed many members of a wedding party in Yemen. The question should be asked: How is it that those individuals were selected on that day for that strike? And, you know, what the president is saying is very misleading, according to people who actually work on this program. And in fact, when we asked the White House for comment, we went to the National Security Council spokesperson, Caitlin Hayden, and asked directly, "Is it true that you’re ordering strikes where you don’t actually have any human intelligence?" And the White House refused to directly answer that. They just said, "Well, we don’t select targets based on only one source of intelligence." Well, we knew that already, and we told them that we knew that. The point here is that they don’t actually have a requirement to confirm the identity of the individuals that they’re targeting, and that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing so many innocent people being killed in these strikes. It effectively amounts to pre-crime, where an acceptable level of civilian deaths is any civilians who die in the pursuit of a limited number of so-called bad guys.
AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t the spokesperson also say, though, confirming that human intelligence was used—
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —tried afterwards, but not before—after attack?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, I’m not sure that they’re aware of the kind of twisted irony of the statement that they issued to us, because on the one hand they’re refusing to acknowledge that they don’t actually need to confirm the identity of people who they’re trying to target for death; on the other hand they say, "Oh, well, when we kill someone, we do actually confirm whether or not civilians were killed by using human intelligence." So, it basically is—the standard is: We can kill you if we don’t know your identity, but once we kill you, we want to figure out who we killed.
AMY GOODMAN: In Yemen, any human intelligence on the ground?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, yes. I mean, the U.S. does have a very limited presence. In fact, my understanding is that there are small teams of U.S. special operations forces, Navy SEALs and others, that are scattered in various remote locations around Yemen. Of course, the U.S. has long had a counterterrorism presence inside of the Yemeni capital, Sana’a. The CIA also has its own personnel.
But I want to underscore something that’s a little bit of a nuanced point, and that is that inside of Yemen, the U.S. has largely outsourced its human intelligence to the Saudi government. And the Saudis have been playing their own dirty games, that have their own dirty wars inside of Yemen. And many times the Saudis will feed intelligence to the U.S. that is intended to benefit the regime in Saudi Arabia and not necessarily the stated aims of the U.S. counterterrorism program. They also rely on notoriously corrupt units within the Yemeni military and security forces that receive a tremendous amount of U.S. military and intelligence support and oftentimes will use that U.S. aid to target Yemeni dissidents or to be used in defense of various factions within the Yemeni state.
So, the short answer, Amy, is, yes, there is a very limited U.S. military human intelligence presence on the ground, but most of it, the overwhelming majority, is outsourced to the notoriously sort of corrupt Saudi regime and its operations and operatives and informants inside of Yemen.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, and when we come back after a minute, we’ll continue with Jeremy Scahill, as well as Glenn Greenwald. They have just co-authored their first piece for their new online publication called The Intercept. We will link to it at democracynow.org. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We are broadcasting our exclusive first interview with Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald upon the publication just hours ago of their new piece, "The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program." The article appears atTheIntercept.org, a new digital magazine launched today by First Look Media. Glenn and Jeremy co-founded The Intercept with filmmaker Laura Poitras. Glenn is with us from his home in Brazil, and we’re going to talk about whether he plans to come into the United States. And Jeremy Scahill joins us from Los Angeles. Jeremy’s film, Dirty Wars, has been nominated for an Academy Award.
Glenn, can you talk about the legality of publishing this information, the way it’s been challenged by the administration? In your piece, you have Caitlin Hayden, spokesperson for the National Security Agency, saying, "the type of operational detail that, in our view, should not be published," she said, referring to the questions that you both were asking her. You are a former constitutional lawyer, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. The position of the U.S. government is that it’s illegal to publish any kind of classified information that you are not authorized to receive. It’s of course illegal, in their view, for a government employee or contractor to leak it without authorization. But their view, as well, is that it’s actually illegal, even if you’re a journalist, to publish it. And they believe that’s especially the case if the information pertains to what they call signals intelligence. And if you look at the Espionage Act of 1917 and other relevant statutes, it does seem to say that it is illegal in the United States to publish that kind of information.
The problem for that view is that there’s a superseding law called the Constitution, the First Amendment to which guarantees that there shall be a free press and that Congress and no other part of the government has the right to interfere with it. And one of the reasons why the government has been so reluctant about prosecuting journalists for publishing classified information, at least up until now, is because they’re afraid that courts will say that application of this statute, or the statutes that I’ve described, to journalists is unconstitutional in violation of the First Amendment, and they want to keep that weapon to be able to threaten or bully or intimidate journalists out of doing the kind of reporting that they’re doing.
So, every media lawyer will tell you that before you publish top-secret information, it’s a good practice, for legal protection, to ask the government if they want to tell you anything they think you should know about the implications of publishing this material. They always say, "If you publish it, it will harm national security." But if you’re a minimally decent journalist, that isn’t good enough. You need specific information about what innocent people will really be harmed if you publish. They virtually never provide any such information. They didn’t in this case. And so, it was very—it was an easy call to make, as journalists, to tell the American people about the methods that their government are using that result in the death of innocent people in ways that are easily preventable.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, you have been publishing many pieces all over the world since you first broke the story of Edward Snowden with the documents that he has released, downloading 1.7 million documents. What makes this story, "The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program," different?
GLENN GREENWALD: Most of the stories that we published thus far have been about the way in which the NSA collects signals intelligence, tries to intercept the electronic communications of hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people around the world, hundreds of millions inside the United States. And that’s what the U.S. government has told the American people is the role of the NSA, is to listen in on the communications of people who are threatening the United States in some manner.
This story has very little to do with those prior stories, in the case—in the sense that this is not a case of the NSA trying to collect people’s communications to find who is plotting with whom or what kinds of plots they’re engaged in. This is the NSA using a form of signals intelligence to, first, determine who should be targeted for assassination based on an analysis of their metadata—has this person called what we think are bad people enough times for us to decide that they should die—and then, secondly, trying to help the CIA and JSOC find those individuals who have been put on a list of, basically, assassination, but not by finding where they are, but by finding where their telephone is—a very obviously unreliable way of trying to kill people that is certain to result in the death of innocent people. And obviously, the source who came forward has said that that’s exactly what has happened. So it’s really an incredibly expanded role that we’re revealing that the NSA engages in, far beyond what traditionally the American people are told about why this agency exists.
AMY GOODMAN: In addition, Jeremy, to the JSOC operator’s account, you quote, in this first piece for TheIntercept.org, Brandon Bryant. Talk about the significance of his experience and who he is.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. First, just something to follow up on what Glenn says. You know, the teams from the NSA that are involved with this program are called geo cell, geolocation cells, and their motto is: "We track ’em, you whack ’em," meaning that the NSA will find these individuals, and then the military or the CIA will actually conduct or carry out these hits.
And as to the other question that we were talking about, about the relevance for people in the United States, you know, what we’ve seen, particularly since 9/11, but really throughout U.S. history, is that the kind of technology and the kind of operations, the sorts of tactics that the U.S. uses on citizens of other nations around the world in its military operations or intelligence operations, end up coming home to the United States, as well. And we believe that what we’re doing here is public service journalism and that the American people have a right to know what kind of technology their government is developing that could potentially be used on them. But also, when innocent people are killed in these operations, it impacts American national security, as well, and ultimately undermines our safety, because we’re creating more new enemies than we are killing terrorists at this point in what’s been called, you know, the so-called "war on terror."
Brandon Bryant is a very important figure right now in this discussion. He spent years as what he called a "stick monkey" for the U.S. Air Force. He was a drone sensor operator and was part of the—of over a thousand—his unit was part of over 1,500 kill operations around the world when he worked on the drone program. He also was working with the Joint Special Operations Command in the operation to target an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who of course—we’ve talked about many times on this show—was an imam in Washington, D.C., who ended up becoming famous for his sermons denouncing U.S. around the world and calling for jihad against the United States, armed jihad against the United States. He was killed in September of 2011. And Brandon Bryant had worked on that operation until the spring of 2011, when theCIA took over and took the lead in that.
In fact, one of the documents that Glenn and I cite in our piece—and you can see an excerpt of it embedded in our story—reveals that the NSA actually played a role in the killing of Anwar Awlaki, and also it is revealed in this document that it was a joint operation by the U.S. military and the CIA. That is a new revelation on this case and could have an impact on the legal case that the family of Anwar Awlaki and another American citizen, Samir Khan, have filed against the Obama administration, because this actually shows the U.S. government acknowledging that the NSA, the CIA and the U.S. military were all involved in that operation.
And for Brandon Bryant, this former drone sensor operator, it was the killing of Anwar Awlaki, and then, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who was also an American citizen, that spurred him to speak out. And he, in fact, says, and we quote this in our piece, that he feels that he became an enemy of the American people by participating in those operations, because he denied due process to an American that should have had a right to a trial before being sentenced to death by drone.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re saying Brandon Bryant said that, that he himself became an—
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yes, Brandon Bryant said that. In fact, I mean, I don’t have it in front of me, but you can read his own words in that piece, where he essentially says, you know, "I swore an oath to the Constitution, to uphold it and its values, and then I violated that by participating in the effort to kill this American citizen, who, albeit a very bad guy, deserved his day in court, rather than to just be sentenced to death by fiat from a president assuming emperor-like powers."
AMY GOODMAN: We interviewed Brandon Bryant on Democracy Now! in October. He described his first strike, which took place in Afghanistan in 2007 while he was sitting in a trailer at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
BRANDON BRYANT: We got confirmation to fire on these guys. And the way that they reacted really made me doubt their involvement, because the guys over there, the locals over there, have to protect themselves from the Taliban just as much as armed—us—we do, as U.S. military personnel. And so, I think that they were probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the way that—I’ve been accused of using poetic imagery to describe it, but I watched this guy bleed out, the guy in the back, and his right leg above the knee was severed in the strike. And his—he bled out through his femoral artery. And it—
AMY GOODMAN: You saw that on your computer screen?
BRANDON BRYANT: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s that detailed?
BRANDON BRYANT: Yeah, it’s pixelated, but, I mean, you could—you could see that it was a human being, and you could see that—what he was doing, and you could see the crater from the drone—from the Hellfire missile, and you could see probably the body pieces that were around this guy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the other two that were in this strike?
BRANDON BRYANT: They were completely destroyed.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Blown apart.
BRANDON BRYANT: Blown apart.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you watched this guy bleed out for how long?
BRANDON BRYANT: You know, it’s the femoral artery, so he could have bled out really fast. It was cold outside, you know, wintertime. It seemed like forever to me, but we—as the Predator drone can stay in the air for like 18 to 32 hours, and so they just had us watch and do battle damage assessment to make sure that—to see if anyone would come and pick up the body parts or anyone really cared who these people were. And we watched long enough that the body cooled on the ground, and they called us off target.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Brandon Bryant, the former drone sensor operator with the U.S. Air Force who is quoted in this first article by Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald for their new publication, TheIntercept.org. And, Jeremy, just to follow up, that’s the description of what happened in Afghanistan. And the quote you’re referring to, on the killing of Awlaki, this quite remarkable quote of Brandon Bryant, saying, "I was a drone operator for six years, active duty for six years in the U.S. Air Force, [and I was] party to the violations of constitutional rights of an American citizen who should have been tried under a jury. And because I violated that constitutional right, I became an enemy of the American people."
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. And, you know, I mean, one thing that I know Glenn has experienced and I certainly have experienced in recent months is that since Edward Snowden made this decision that he was going to forever alter his life by going to Hong Kong and meeting with Glenn and Laura and taking the position that he’s taken, he’s inspiring other people within these apparatuses to speak out. And I think, you know, courage is indeed contagious. And I think we’re going to hear more and more people from within the national security apparatus saying, you know, "I believe I’m a part of something that is violating our own Constitution and is violating my own morals and ethics." And I think we’re going to see more and more people speaking out. And that’s why on our site, at TheIntercept.org, we’ve created a secure drop center where people can give us tips anonymously, and we will protect their identities, and we encourage people to come forward and to speak about their experiences within the—what’s called the national security apparatus.
AMY GOODMAN: The former JSOC drone—
GLENN GREENWALD: Amy, let me add just one thing?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, sure, just as far as that incredibly moving clip that we just listened to, I just wanted to make two quick points about the significance of what we published this morning. You know, there’s a lot of debates about journalism and how it should best be practiced, but I think everybody ought to agree that journalism is supposed to be about informing the public of the truth, and especially debunking official lies. And a big part of our story and why we wrote it and published it was because you have President Obama running around saying that we only kill or target people when there’s a near certainty there won’t be civilian deaths, and, of course, we know that to be completely false, because the methods that we reported on have almost a—I wouldn’t say a near certainty, but a very high likelihood of killing the wrong people, killing innocent people.
But the other thing about it is, back in July, the NSA, in order to propagandize the public, went to The Washington Post to boast about the role they play in the killing program and talked about some of these methods. And The Washington Post just uncritically published what it was they were told. It was just a propaganda piece talking about all the great things the NSA does in helping the CIA and JSOC target people, not a word of the unreliability of these methods or the NSA’s role in targeting and killing innocent people. And so, part of what we did was to come forward as an antidote to that false propaganda from the president and from The Washington Postand correct the record and make it complete. And that is a big part of what we see as the purpose of our new media outlet, not just to protect and encourage sources, as Jeremy said, to know that they can come forward and have their material reported on aggressively—that’s a huge part of what we’re doing—but it’s also to provide a corrective to the type of, quote-unquote, "journalism" that The Washington Postpracticed here, where they just mindlessly repeated what government officials told them, with no investigation, no critical analyses, and therefore just misleading the public about what it is that is taking place.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, and when we come back, I want to ask you about The Intercept and First Look Media, what your plans are—you’ve both, together with Laura Poitras, just launched The Intercept—and also talk about the second piecethat has been launched on The Intercept, this series of photographs, the new photos of the NSA and other top intelligence agencies revealed for the first time. We’re speaking with Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald in their first broadcast TV interview together upon the launch of TheIntercept.org at First Look Media. Theirpiece is "The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program," and we’ll link to it at democracynow.org. Stay with us.


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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2014

Defying Threats to Journalism, Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald Launch New Venture, The Intercept

Investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald join us for their first interview upon launching The Intercept, their new digital magazine published by First Look Media, the newly formed media venture started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Greenwald is the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden’s disclosures on the National Security Agency. He was previously a columnist at The Guardian newspaper. Scahill is producer and writer of the documentary film "Dirty Wars," which is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. "We are really about a journalistic ethos — which is not doing things like helping the U.S. continue its targeting of U.S. citizens for death, but by being adversarial to the government," Greenwald says. "Telling the public what it ought to know, and targeting the most powerful corporate factions with accountability journalism." Greenwald and Scahill founded TheIntercept.org with filmmaker Laura Poitras.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about The Intercept. Glenn, talk about the launching of this new website today, together with Jeremy and Laura, what you’re doing with The Intercept, what your plans are.
GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. So, you know, it was only, I think, four months ago or so that we first had conversations with Pierrre Omidyar, who is the publisher of the site through First Look Media, about working together. Jeremy, Laura and I were off in one corner planning our own media site, and he was off in another planning his, and we realized that we could work together effectively. And we ended up getting launched in a very short period of time, relatively speaking, when you’re talking about launching a new media outlet, in part because we feel a serious obligation to get up and running so that we can report on the stories like the one that we reported on today and all of the rest of the stories that come out of the archive of documents that our source Edward Snowden provided to us, as well as other sources that we’re now developing.
And so, we intended to start with a fairly limited function, although one that’s profoundly important, which is to give us a place where we can aggressively report on these NSA documents. There are many, many, many more big stories left to report. And we’re thrilled that we get to work with each other and an amazing team of journalists that we recruited. And then we’re going to start slowly and inexorably expanding the range of topics that we cover. We’re really about a journalistic ethos, which is not doing things like helping the United states government continue its targeting of U.S. citizens for death, like AP just did by withholding information allowing it to continue, but by being adversarial to the government and telling the public what it ought to know, and targeting the most powerful corporate and political factions with accountability journalism. And we’re thrilled that we get to work together, that we have a new media outlet that is devoted to these principles, that we have the resources to protect our sources and enable the journalists that work with us to do the kind of journalism that we think is so sorely lacking.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Amy, can I add to that?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, Jeremy.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. You know, what we’ve seen also in—over the past month is a very serious escalation in the threats coming from the Obama administration and coming from Capitol Hill against journalists. There is this attempt on the part of the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to imply that the journalists who are reporting on the Snowden documents are accomplices to a crime. My understanding, from a confidential source in the intelligence community, is that Clapper, two weeks before he publicly used that term of accomplice, that he also said that in a top-secret classified briefing within the intelligence community, sort of floating it. You know, Mike Rogers also has just been on a rampage against journalists, also against Snowden, making totally unfounded allegations about Snowden being somehow a Russian agent or cooperating with Russian agents. And so, the timing of this site and why we felt it was so urgent to start reporting on these stories right now is to push back against this climate of fear and to say that we, as independent journalists, are not going to back down in the face of government threats, that in fact this is when it is most important to stand up for a truly free and independent press, is when those in power start to try to, you know, push their fists down upon you.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jeremy, I want to play a recent exchange between House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers and FBI Director James Comey. This is Congressman Rogers.
REP. MIKE ROGERS: There have been discussions about selling of access to this material to both newspaper outlets and other places. Mr. Comey, to the best of your knowledge, is fencing stolen material—is that a crime?
JAMES COMEY: Yes, it is.
REP. MIKE ROGERS: And would be selling the access of classified material that is stolen from the United States government—would that be a crime?
JAMES COMEY: It would be. It’s an issue that can be complicated if it involves a newsgathering, a news promulgation function, but in general, fencing or selling stolen property is a crime.
REP. MIKE ROGERS: So if I’m a newspaper reporter for fill-in-the-blank and I sell stolen material, is that legal because I’m a newspaper reporter?
JAMES COMEY: Right, if you’re a newspaper reporter and you’re hocking stolen jewelry, it’s still a crime.
REP. MIKE ROGERS: And if I’m hocking stolen classified material that I’m not legally in the possession of for personal gain and profit, is that not a crime?
JAMES COMEY: I think that’s a harder question, because it involves a newsgathering function, could have First Amendment implications. That’s something that probably would be better answered by the Department of Justice.
AMY GOODMAN: House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers questioningFBI Director James Comey. Glenn Greenwald, you were not named specifically during the hearing, but Politico reports Rogers called you a thief after the hearing ended. He reportedly said, quote, "For personal gain, he’s now selling his access to information, that’s how they’re terming it. ... A thief selling stolen material is a thief," said the head of the House Intelligence Committee. Your response?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, Mike Rogers is a liar. He is outright lying when he says that I or any other journalist working on this case have sold documents or fenced documents. The one thing that’s missing from his accusations is any evidence, because none exists. And I defy him to present any. But that’s what Mike Rogers does. It’s who he is. He just lies and smears people, with no evidence.
But I think the more important point than the fact that Mike Rogers is a pathological liar is the fact that this is part of a broader campaign on the part of the Obama administration, as Jeremy said, to try and either threaten journalists that they will be criminalized or outright criminalize them by prosecuting us for the journalism that we’re doing. It comes in the context of this coordinated campaign to call us accomplices by President Obama’s top national security official. Keith Alexander, two months ago in a speech, raised this idea of selling documents. When we did our first report in Canada with the CBC, the right-wing Harper government attacked us as having sold documents to the CBC. And so, what you’re really seeing is the Obama administration has been worse on press freedoms than any president since President Nixon, as James Goodale, the former New York Times general counsel, has said, and is actually approaching Nixon and getting worse, he said.
And I think this most recent escalation is showing that they’re not content to just go after the newsgathering process and also their source—our sources, but also to start threatening us with criminality, with prosecution. And if they think it’s going to deter us in any way, they’re sorely mistaken. But it is a very serious thing when the top level of the U.S. government starts accusing you of criminality for the journalism that you’re engaged in.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, you’re speaking to us from your home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. You’re an American citizen. You haven’t come back to the United States since the release of the documents by—information, articles based on the documents of Edward Snowden. Do you plan to come here? Are you concerned about being arrested?
GLENN GREENWALD: I do. I do plan to come there. Neither Laura Poitras nor I have returned. She’s in Berlin. And we’ve been advised by numerous people that it wouldn’t be a good idea to, that the risk of something happening is certainly more than trivial. And so, the U.S. government is also refusing to give us any indication about their intentions, despite being asked many times by our lawyers. They obviously want to keep us in a state of uncertainty. And this recent escalation of rhetoric and accusations obviously makes that concern more acute. At the same time, just on principle, as an American citizen, I refuse to be kept out of my own country for the crime of doing journalism. And so I absolutely will come back. I’m going to pick the time to do it when I feel I understand the risks and am as protected as I can be. But under no circumstances will I allow this intimidation campaign to succeed either in deterring me from doing the journalism I do or returning to the country of which I’m a citizen.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, if you can comment quickly on the other piece that has launched at TheIntercept.org today, the new photos of the NSA and other top intelligence agencies revealed for the first time, by Trevor Paglen, who did the photography.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean, Trevor Paglen is an amazing journalist in his own right, who has documented a sort of secret world using images for a long time. He has had another project where he was looking at patches of all sorts of covert signals intelligence units. And these photos really are provided as a stunning public service, and they are the freshest images that we have of this architecture of secret organizations, and, in some cases, the only images really available to the public. And so, we’re really excited that Trevor worked with us on that and that we can publish them on TheIntercept.org.
AMY GOODMAN: The final quote—and we are showing those images, but you can go to democracynow.org, as well—of your piece, that has just launched today, of President Obama, Jeremy?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. You know, President Obama is sort of—he’s become the drone president.
AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds.
JEREMY SCAHILL: And he told his aides at one point that he had become remarkably effective at killing people, and said, you know, he didn’t—he didn’t see that one coming. Well, it’s true. He has become good at killing people. It’s just, who are the people that they’re actually killing?
AMY GOODMAN: The exact quote, President Obama quoted by _The Huffington Post, saying, "Turns out I’m really good at killing people." The president added, "Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine." Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, congratulations on the launch of TheIntercept.org at First Look, co-authors of the new piece, "The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program." We’ll link to it at democracynow.org.


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