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Will the Real Charlie Hebdo Stand up?

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Illustration: double standards

It's pretty clear that there are no qualifications needed to be a "Terrorism Expert".  It does help, however, if you are able to spout fear inducing mantras.  We are hereby declaring ourselves to be "Terrorism Experts" and are available for a high price on any mainstream medium.

Of course, be careful as there is not a great market for experts on "JudeoExtremism," or "RadicalJudaism" these days.  Bibi may come knocking on your door.

A ChristoTerrorist was arrested in Cincinnati.  He said he was Jesus and was going to Poison John Boehner (Speaker of the House) for being the devil and bringing Ebola into the country.   Hold on.  This just in: he is actually a home-grown (love that term?) terrorist inspired by ISIS.  We find this out because the FBI says so.  How do they know?  1) his tweets and 2) he bought a bunch of automatic weapons and made bombs.  But then, his father said he only had $1,200 (kid was "20, going on 16).  Ah, but he got the money from this FBI agent, we find out.  So, now we hear about entrapment. 

Someone asked what smart phones call us?  Does anyone know?

Ever thought of joining a "Sleeper Cell"?  They eventually want you to wake up.  That's a big down side of the whole deal.

No, we haven't printed any cartoons of Mohamed.  For one thing, there are too many jumping on that bandwagon we we already told you how to find all the copies you could ever want.  We have also not denied the Holocaust, although we did point out that at least three times as many Russians died in WWII as Jews in Camps. 

The Circulation of the magazine has gone from 60,000 to 6,000,000.  The newspaper Liberation lent them space to put together the last issue.

What we have right now in this country is a repeat of the Vietnam mantra: "I don't think people should be criticizing the war while ourt men are over there defending their rights, one of which is the right to free speech, which they should not be practicing while...." and on and on.  Also, we "don't have all the facts."  When we got them, in the Pentagon Papers, that was bad.  Right now, Snowden is being blamed again for these attacks as he revealed our manner of gathering intelligence, so called, by "violating our fourth amendment rights, which we should not be protesting when people a dying protecting that right, even though..... " and so on.

Well, here's the deal on being a Terrorism Expert:

Glenn Greenwald on How to Be a Terror "Expert": Ignore Facts, Blame Muslims, Trumpet U.S. Propaganda

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Who are the so-called terrorism experts? In the wake of the Paris attacks, the corporate media has once again flooded its news programs with pundits claiming authority on terrorism, foreign policy and world events. We discuss the growing and questionable field of "terrorism experts" with three guests: Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-founder of The Intercept; Lisa Stampnitzky, social studies lecturer at Harvard University and author of "Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented 'Terrorism'"; and Luc Mathieu, foreign affairs reporter for the French newspaper Libération.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: As we continue to cover the fallout from last week’s attacks in Paris, we turn now to look at the growing field of so-called terrorism experts.

REV. AL SHARPTON: Back with me is NBC News terrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann.

EVAN KOHLMANN: The cleavages that exist in French society between Muslims and non-Muslims are far more severe than they exist here in the United States.

BROOKE BALDWIN: He is Samuel Laurent, live from Paris. He is the author of The Islamic State and al-Qaeda in France.

SAMUEL LAURENT: The landscape of jihadism and terrorism is deeply changing, and it’s proving to be a much harder task than it used to be for the intelligence service, because it’s very, very difficult now to spot and to stop the threats.

SEAN HANNITY: Joining me now, terrorism expert Steve Emerson.

STEVE EMERSON: Throughout Europe, Sean, you have no-go zones. When I was in Brussels a year ago, when I asked the police to take me to the Islamic zone or the Islamic community area, they refused. They say, "We don’t go there." This goes on in Belgium. This goes on in Sweden, in the Netherlands, in France. It goes on in Italy. I mean, it goes on throughout Europe. So, there are no-go zones.

AARON MATÉ: A few of the so-called terrorism experts who have appeared on television over the past week. That last voice was Steven Emerson, who made international headlines this weekend after this appearance on Jeanine Pirro’s show on Fox News.

JEANINE PIRRO: Developing tonight, new reports that terrorist sleeper cells may have been activated in France. This as we’re learning new details about hundreds of no-go zones across France and other countries that are off-limits to non-Muslims. Steve Emerson, founder of the Investigative Project, joins us.

STEVE EMERSON: These no-go zones exist not only in France, but they exist throughout Europe. They’re sort of amorphous. They’re not contiguous, necessarily, but they’re sort of safe havens. And they’re places where the governments, like France, Britain, Sweden, Germany, they don’t exercise any sovereignty. So, you basically have zones where Sharia courts are set up, where Muslim density is very intense, where the police don’t go in, and where it’s basically a separate country almost, a country within a country. And—

JEANINE PIRRO: You know what it sounds like to me, Steve? It sounds like a caliphate within a particular country.

STEVE EMERSON: It certainly does sound like that. ... And in Britain, it’s not just no-go zones; there are actual cities, like Birmingham, that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.

AMY GOODMAN: While Steve Emerson claimed the British city of Birmingham was totally Muslim, it’s in fact a predominantly Christian city. Emerson, who describes himself as, quote, "one of the leading authorities" on Islamic extremist networks, appeared on the BBC Monday and apologized.

STEVE EMERSON: I relied on incorrect research. It was totally irresponsible for me not to have fact-checked the information that I obtained. And it was not done out of any malice, but out of a total irresponsible journalistic practice, which I usually and uniformly don’t practice.

NICK OWEN: Are you aware that our prime minister has called you a complete idiot?

STEVE EMERSON: Yes, I’m aware.

NICK OWEN: What does that make you feel?

STEVE EMERSON: Not great. You know, mistakes are made. What can I tell you?

AMY GOODMAN: While Steve Emerson is making headlines today, many questions have been raised about the entire field of so-called terrorism experts. Another so-called expert, Evan Kohlmann, has been described as "the Doogie Howser of terrorism" for building a career based on essays he wrote on al-Qaeda as an undergrad.

We’re joined now by two guests who have closely analyzed this issue. Joining us from Boston is Lisa Stampnitzky. She’s a lecturer on social studies at Harvard University and author of the book Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism." And from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we’re joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept and author of No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Glenn, let’s begin with you. The terror attacks, the Paris attacks took place last week, and the so-called terror experts are in—very prominent all over the networks. Can you talk about who we are hearing from?

GLENN GREENWALD: The concept of terrorism is a very widely debated concept all over the world, and there are incredibly divergent opinions, even about what terrorism is, about who it is who’s perpetrating it, about how it is that you define it and understand it, and whether or not there’s even a meaningful definition of the term at all. And yet you have all of these so-called terrorism experts employed by leading American television networks—all of them, really—and on whom most establishment newspapers rely, who are called terrorism experts and yet who are incredibly homogenous in their views, because they spout the very homogenized American conception of all of those questions.

It’s an incredibly propagandized term. It’s an incredibly propagandistic set of theories that they have. And that’s really what these media outlets are doing, is they’re masquerading pro-U.S. propaganda, pro-U.S. government propaganda, as expertise, when it’s really anything but. These are incredibly ideological people. They’re very loyal to the view of the U.S. government about very controversial questions. They certainly have the right to express their opinions, but the pretense to expertise is incredibly fraudulent. And that’s why they have not just Steve Emerson, the Fox News strain, but really all of them who are held up as the most prominent terrorism experts in the U.S. have a really shameful history of incredible error and all sorts of just very dubious claims, because they’re really just rank propagandists.

AARON MATÉ: And so, Glenn, what allows them to continue perpetuating these myths that you describe? What is the dynamic that allows this expert industry to keep going?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, there are several aspects to it. I mean, one is the United States government obviously has an interest in making people believe that its very particular and self-serving views of terrorism are not subjective or debatable, but are in fact just objective expertise, and so they do all sorts of things to prop these people up. They give them contracts. They pay them lots of money to teach people inside the government about terrorism. Really most disturbingly of all, they continuously call them as, quote-unquote, "experts" at terrorism trials. And all of these experts then dutifully march forth and say whatever the government wants about the Muslim defendants who are on trial, and help the government obtain conviction after conviction, and get a lot of money in the process.

Part of it is just the role that think tanks play in Washington, which is to lend this kind of intellectual artifice to whatever the government’s policy is or whatever the government wants. And so you have a lot of them who work at think tanks, like Brookings Institute, which employs Will McCants, who misled American media outlets into believing for a full day and then telling the world that the Anders Breivik attack in Norway was actually the work of a jihadist group. Even the more respectable ones are people who generally spout the conventional orthodoxies of the American government about terrorism, and therefore it’s very much in the interest of the U.S. government and these media outlets to continue to depict them not as polemicists and highly opinionated, you know, just participants in debates, but as actual academic experts. And that’s where the fraudulent aspect comes in.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring in Professor Lisa Stampnitzky. Again, your book is called Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism." What do you mean by "disciplining terror"? You carried out one of the first empirical studies of these so-called terror experts on television.

LISA STAMPNITZKY: That’s right. So, "disciplining terror" has a dual meaning. On the one hand, it refers to the attempts of states to get control over the problem of terrorism. On the other hand, it refers to the attempt to develop a discipline of terrorism studies. And that problematic field is the story that I’m telling in the book.

AARON MATÉ: What’s your assessment of the merits of this field in terms of its level of expertise and its seriousness?

LISA STAMPNITZKY: I mean, one of the conclusions I draw is that it’s a very peculiar field in terms of fields of expertise, because there is no strict boundary around it, there is no control according to who can be an expert. There’s no credentialing. And so, you have people coming on TV who are just sort of spouting hysteria and not drawing on any real expert knowledge. And even those who are more serious in the field have no ability to regulate who gets called an expert.

AMY GOODMAN: In 2008, self-described "terrorism consultant" Evan Kohlmann was interviewed on the public radio newshour The Takeway. Host John Hockenberry challenged Kohlmann on his level of expertise.

EVAN KOHLMANN: This is a far-ranging international conspiracy that began, you know, as many as two decades ago, involves hundreds of different people spread around, you know, various different places in the world, and it’s also based in a language and a culture that, you know, to be honest with you, very few Americans are familiar with.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Right, and in speaking of that, do you think, now that the movie has been played in open court, and, you know, you’ve achieved a certain amount of notoriety, that it might be time to learn Arabic, maybe go to Afghanistan or Pakistan—

EVAN KOHLMANN: Well, I mean, I—I mean, I—

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: —or familiarize yourself with the culture?

EVAN KOHLMANN: Well, I have a degree in Islam. And, I mean, I do speak some Arabic; I’m not fluent. But, you know, in terms of traveling to Pakistan, trying to do this research right now in Pakistan is extremely difficult. Trying to even get into Pakistan right now to do this is extremely difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Evan Kohlmann, an NBC News analyst. Glenn Greenwald, your comment?

GLENN GREENWALD: And there are so many of them like that. I mean, he’s one of the people called by the U.S. government in these prosecutions, these really dubious prosecutions, of American Muslims for really remote charges of material support for terrorism. And his expertise is basically just that he gets called an expert by the U.S. government. And the more he gets called to testify, the more that expertise builds. That’s really the only foundation for it, is that some people call him an expert because it’s in their interest to do so. There’s another one like him, Matthew Levitt, who was profiled in Harper’s, who has a long history of unbelievably erroneous claims that he makes in service of this agenda. They get paid a lot of money, too. I mean, he goes on—they go on NBC News. They get held up as a terrorism analyst. They get paid for that. They get called as an expert in court. And yet, as that tape said and as Lisa said, there’s really no foundation for the expertise. There’s no Ph.D.s that they have in terrorism studies.

There’s not even agreement about what the word "terrorism" means, which is why the old cliché that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist is, though clichéd, is so resoundingly true. You can have debates about what terrorism is, about who perpetrates it, and yet all of these so-called experts simply assume the answers to those questions, because if they were, for example, to say that the U.S. government is a state sponsor of terrorism by virtue of its support for death squads in El Salvador or the Contras in Nicaragua or any of the other groups across the United States—across the world that the United States continues to support that engages in violence against civilians for political ends, you would immediately have them eliminated. No major network like CNN or MSNBC or NBC would ever call somebody like that a terrorism expert, even though that’s a very plausible claim to make. It’s an extremely ideological and politicized view that gets called expertise. And they don’t even have the basic attributes of what we generally consider that makes somebody an expert.

AARON MATÉ: Glenn, do you personally use the word "terror," or do you avoid it entirely?

GLENN GREENWALD: I generally avoid it. I mean, you could probably find instances in my writing where I’ve invoked the term, usually just ironically or to refer to the fact that somebody else is using it. But I do think that until we have an understanding of what the term means, it really is a term that ought to be avoided.

There is some amazingly great scholarly research by Rémi Brulin, who was at the Sorbonne and then NYU, where he traces, essentially, the history of this term in political discourse. And what he has described, in a very scholarly way, is that the term "terrorism" really entered and became prevalent in the discourse of international affairs in the late '60s and the early ’70s, when the Israelis sought to use the term to universalize their disputes with their neighbors, so they could say, "We're not fighting the Palestinians and we’re not bombing Lebanon over just some land disputes. We’re fighting this concept that is of great—a grave menace to the world, called 'terrorism.' And it’s not only our fight, it’s your fight in the United States, and it’s your fight in Europe, and it’s your fight around the world."

And there are all these conferences in the late '60s and early ’70s and into the 1980s even, where Israelis and Americans and neocons are attempting to come up with a definition of the term "terrorism" that includes the violence that they want to delegitimize, meaning the violence by their adversaries, while legitimizing—excluding the violence they want to legitimize, namely our violence, the violence of Israel, the violence of our allies. And it was virtually impossible to come up with a definition, and that's why there really is no agreed-upon definition. The term is incredibly malleable, because it’s typically just meant as a term that says any violence we don’t like is something we’re going to call terrorism. And at this point it really just means violence engaged in by Muslims against the West. That’s really the definition of the term "terrorism," the functional definition. It has no fixed definition.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, I remember at the beginning, at the Oklahoma City bombing attack, when two names of Arab men were floated. It turned out they were New York taxi drivers who had gone to Oklahoma City to renew their licenses. But those names were put out by the media, and then there was the question: Was this a terrorist attack? When it turned out it was Timothy McVeigh—Timothy McVeigh, who worked with other people, had all the—you know, all the definition of a terrorist attack—then it wasn’t. "Oh, no, it was Timothy McVeigh, and he did this, a white Christian man." No longer did we refer to it as a terrorist attack.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, that happens all the time. First of all, it was Steve Emerson, the very same Steve Emerson who just said that Birmingham was an all-Muslim city that no non-Muslims can enter, who was working at the time—either at the time for CNN or just afterwards, who went on, on the air, and was the most influential comment shaping what you just described. And he said the attempt here was to kill as many people as possible, which is a Middle East attribute, and therefore we should assume or highly speculate that this is likely an attack perpetrated by someone from the Middle East, someone who is Muslim. That’s how that narrative actually started. Steve Emerson’s career didn’t suffer at all from that.

But, you know, if you watch how these attacks are discussed, every time there’s an attack where the assailant or the perpetrator is unknown, the media will say it’s unknown whether or not terrorism is involved. And what they really mean by that is: It’s unknown whether or not the perpetrator is Muslim. And as soon as they discover that the perpetrator is a Christian or is American, a white American, they’ll say, "We now have confirmation that this is not a terrorist attack." It’s something else—someone who’s mentally unstable, some extremist, something like that. It really is a term that functionally now means nothing other than Muslims who engage in violence against the West.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, we have a perfect example right now in Colorado Springs. There was a bomb that was affixed that blew up outside the NAACP. The media is not saying right now, as the man is looked for, there is a search for a terrorist going on right now on our own soil in Colorado.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I remember there was an individual named Joseph Stack who flew an airplane into a government building in Texas, into the side of theIRS, actually. And for the first several hours of the reporting, it was said that the suspicion is that this is a terrorist attack, because it was on a government facility. And then when it was discovered that he was actually a right-wing, anti-tax, anti-government American, they said, actually, this isn’t a terrorist attack, this is just kind of this crazy person who did this for political ends.

You know, I was in Canada about two months ago when those two attacks happened, first one in Quebec and then the other one at the Parliament in Ottawa. And the first one, in the outskirts of Quebec, was somebody—two people who had waited two hours in a car to see a soldier, a Canadian soldier, and then targeted him and ran him over. And that was instantly branded a terrorist attack, even though they purposefully avoided targeting civilians and targeted a soldier of a country that is at war. It really is a term that is so muddled and confused in terms of how it’s used, and it is used for very specific agendas and very ideological purposes.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. We are talking to Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept. We’re also speaking with Lisa Stampnitzky. She is a lecturer at Harvard University, author of Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism." Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. Our guests are Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, Lisa Stampnitzky of Harvard University, who wrote the bookDisciplining Terror. And we’re joined from Paris by Luc Mathieu, the foreign affairs reporter for the French newspaper Libération, who has written critically of so-called terrorism expert Samuel Laurent. He appeared on CNN last week with host Brooke Baldwin. This is Samuel Laurent.

BROOKE BALDWIN: He is Samuel Laurent, live from Paris. He is the author of The Islamic State and al-Qaeda in France. Samuel, nice to see you, sir. Here’s my question. You know, Fareed was making the point about how this totally seems to be changing the game, the face of terror. These are, you know, seemingly local, perhaps French natives from perhaps a much larger organization. When you watch the video, very trained. What’s your read on this?

SAMUEL LAURENT: Mm-hmm. Well, basically, what you have to understand is that the situation has changed a lot from the time of al-Qaeda. Basically, Qaeda was operating cells. They were breeding them, and they were targeting a specific objective. Nowadays with the Islamic State, what has changed is that the caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is supposed to be the leader of the believers, so therefore he issues some orders at wide. And basically, some of his orders in October and November has been to kill the French, by any possible means. That was his words.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Samuel Laurent, often seen on CNN. Luc Mathieu, you’re with the French newspaper Libération. You have written about who Samuel Laurent is. Can you talk about him?

LUC MATHIEU: Well, it’s difficult to talk about him, because he is not a journalist. He is not an analyst. He is not a former diplomat. He is not a former member of an intelligence community. I mean, he’s describing himself as an international consultant, which doesn’t mean any—which doesn’t mean nothing. So, he wrote like three books, and one was culturally interesting, which was Al-Qaeda in France. So I investigate on that book, and basically nothing is holding together. I mean, facts are not matching. Places he’s supposed to go are not matching. So, there are a lot of mistakes and a lot of approximations and a lot of nonsense in his books.

AARON MATÉ: Lisa Stampnitzky, I want to ask you, what do you think the experts are missing? What issues should they be looking at that these so-called experts are not?

LISA STAMPNITZKY: I mean, I think one of the key difficulties is, A, as Glenn mentioned, that there is no settled definition of what terrorism is, and that insofar as there is a common understanding of what terrorism is, it tends to be that it’s violence that we don’t like. And one of the most interesting things that I show in my book is that that wasn’t always the case. I look at debates on terrorism from the 1970s until 2001. And if you look at when people were first starting to talk about terrorism in the early 1970s, they were talking about it in a very different way.

So, Glenn mentioned this cliché: One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. And that seems almost obvious today, that these are opposed, that you can’t be a terrorist and a freedom fighter. But if you look at the way that people were talking about terrorism or political violence of this sort in the late '60s and early 1970s, this wasn't considered to be in opposition. There wasn’t this assumption that acts of terror as a tactic were necessarily something that was done by people who we think are evil. There was not this moral overlay over it. And this has come to be understood as so basic to understanding of terrorism now that it really clouds any attempt to understand the issue.

AMY GOODMAN: And let me go back to Luc in Paris—first of all, our condolences—and what you’re writing about right now in Libération, what you feel these terrorism experts do not bring us that we should understand about what’s happening in France.

LUC MATHIEU: It’s perhaps too early to say and to be sure of it. We have to look back at al-Qaeda history, because it comes from al-Qaeda in Yemen. We have to look deeply into Islamic State, because one of the three assailants said he was from Islamic State. So, it’s a lot—it’s very messy right now in France, because a lot of people are trying to know exactly where those guys come from, where they went, what they wanted to do exactly. So it’s a bit early to say. I think we are missing. We are missing that. We are still searching a lot.

AARON MATÉ: I want to go back to Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, a former prosecutor. This is from her show on Saturday.

JEANINE PIRRO: We need to kill them. We need to kill them, the radical Muslim terrorists hell-bent on killing us. You’re in danger. I’m in danger. We’re at war, and this is not going to stop. After this week’s brutal terror attacks in France, hopefully everybody now gets it. And there’s only one group that can stop this war: the Muslims themselves. Our job is to arm those Muslims to the teeth, give them everything they need to take out these Islamic fanatics. Let them do the job. Let them have at it. And as they do, we need to simply look the other way.

AARON MATÉ: That’s Jeanine Pirro of Fox News, a former prosecutor in Westchester, also a former judge. Glenn Greenwald, it’s easy to make fun of Fox News, but your response to this? And how does—how do attitudes like these play out in the corporate media, generally?

GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, you know, if you listen to her, Jeanine Pirro, that clip you just played, I mean, she’s obviously psychotic. I mean, that’s just like bloodthirsty fascism in its purest, you know, expression. But I don’t really think that the substance of what she’s saying, to the extent one can attribute substance to those comments, is really all that rare or even controversial in the U.S. I mean, we have been a country that has declared ourselves at war with some formulation of Islam, radical Muslims, whatever you want to call it, something that John Kerry actually just affirmed a few days ago, that the French president and others have embraced, as well, over the last week.

And I think this is one of the most pernicious aspects of these so-called terrorism experts and terrorism expertise, which is, if you are an American citizen or if you’re a French citizen or if you’re a British citizen, you have a greater chance of being killed by slipping in the bathtub tonight and hitting your head on the ceramic tile, or being struck by lightning—literally—than you do dying in a terrorist attack. And yet these terrorism experts have it in their interest to constantly hype and exaggerate the threat and fearmonger over it, because that’s how they become relevant. They become relevant in terms of their work. They become relevant in terms of their government contracts and in terms of the money that they make. And it really has infected large parts of Western thinking to view terrorism as a much, much greater threat than just rationally and statistically it really is. And I think that’s—a big part of that is at the feet of these so-called terrorism experts.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank Luc Mathieu, speaking to us from Paris, fromLibération. I also want to thank Lisa Stampnitzky, who wrote Disciplining Terror, speaking to us from Boston, Harvard lecturer.

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Hypocrisy in Paris -- Squared

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Hypocrisy IN ACTION

 

Illustration: RADICALJUDAISM

            Right after we all became so outraged at the actions against Charlie Hebo, we were treated to a solidarity march, covered wall-to-wall by news channels. 

            Perhaps the most disgusting aspect of it is to be seen in the first row, and several following, with the Leaders, arm in arm, demonstrating their commitment for freedom of the press while they are some of the worst offenders.  Fortunately, we don't have to type up all that as Amy Goodman had Jeremy Scahill on for the entire hour.  We even found it informative, especially the parts about what Al-Awlaki was really like, the onetime friend and buddy of U.S. Interests. 

MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 2015

"Circus of Hypocrisy": Jeremy Scahill on How World Leaders at Paris March Oppose Press Freedom

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An estimated 3.7 million people rallied across France on Sunday in response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings and ensuing attacks that left 17 people dead. More than a million people marched in Paris, making it the largest demonstration in French history. More than 40 world leaders traveled to Paris to help lead the march. "What we saw on display on the one hand was very heartening, to see so many people come into the streets," says Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept. "But on the other hand, this is a sort of circus of hypocrisy when it comes to all of those world leaders who were marching at the front of it. Every single one of those heads of state or representatives of governments there have waged their own wars against journalists."

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: An estimated 3.7 million people rallied across France Sunday in response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings and ensuing attacks that left 17 people dead. On Sunday, more than 40 world leaders traveled to Paris for the demonstration. At the Place de la République, demonstrators wearing Charlie Hebdo headbands waved French flags, and some sang "La Marseillaise," the national anthem. Several mounted the Statue of the Republic, a symbol of the French Revolution, and hoisted up an inflated pencil to honor the killed Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. Here are some of the voices from the streets of France on Sunday.

DEMONSTRATORS: [singing] ...dans les campagnes
mugir ces féroces soldats?
Aux armes, citoyens.

DEMONSTRATOR 1: [translated] We are free people in France, where everyone can live with one another. And it is important to voice and show it.

DEMONSTRATOR 2: [translated] Beyond Charlie, it is about freedom of speech, secularism, all the values that make up France that have been rattled. But the fact of gathering together, to see all these people, gives back a lot of hope.

DEMONSTRATOR 3: [translated] I sympathize with the people who have lost their loved ones. I would like to tell French people not to get confused, that at no time, in not a single book related to religion, whether it be the Qur’an, the Bible or the Torah, is it asked to kill one’s fellow man or woman.

DEMONSTRATOR 4: [translated] Everybody is concerned, not only in France. It’s all the people. The entire planet Earth is concerned. That means we’re united. All countries are free, but we are here to prove that France is a welcoming country and that we are really free to express our joy whenever we want.

AMY GOODMAN: Voices from Sunday’s demonstration in France, one of the largest protests in the nation’s history. Again, 3.7 million people marched across France.

The march took place two days after the gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo, Chérif and Said Kouachi, were killed by police after a siege at a printing works plant following a three-day manhunt. Minutes after the print shop assault, police broke a second siege at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris. Four hostages died there along with the gunman, Amedy Coulibaly. France has announced it will deploy 10,000 soldiers on home soil and post almost 5,000 extra police officers to protect Jewish sites. On Friday, Chérif Kouachi said he received financing by the Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. He made the assertion to BFMTV before his death.

CHÉRIF KOUACHI: [translated] I’ll tell you only that we were defenders of the Prophet Muhammad and that I was sent, me, Chérif Kouachi, by al-Qaeda of Yemen. I went over there, and it was Anwar al-Awlaki who financed me. Rest in peace.

AMY GOODMAN: Reuters is reporting both brothers who carried out the attack against Charlie Hebdo traveled to Yemen in 2011 and had weapons training in the deserts of Marib, an al-Qaeda stronghold. Meanwhile, a source within al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has provided The Intercept with a full statement claiming responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack. The statement reads in part, quote, "The leadership of #AQAP directed the operation, and they have chosen their target carefully as a revenge for the honor of Prophet ...The target was in France in particular because of its obvious role in the war on Islam and oppressed nations," unquote. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula members have taken to social media and discussion boards to praise the attacks.

Well, for more, we’re joined by the article’s author, Jeremy Scahill. He is co-founder of the TheIntercept.org, where his new article is "Al Qaeda Source: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Directed Paris Attack." His latest book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, it’s now out in paperback. His film Dirty Wars was nominated for an Academy Award. He’s also author of the best-selling book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Jeremy, welcome back to Democracy Now!

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about this latest news out of France.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, you know, what we saw yesterday on display, on the one hand, was very heartening, to see so many people come into the streets. And, you know, one of the core issues of press freedom, if this is a moment where the whole world is saying we have to have a free press, and that no matter how controversial or hateful some of the speech is or may be interpreted in some communities, that we judge a free press by how we treat the journalists or the stories that we don’t like or that we’re offended by.

But on the other hand, this is sort of a circus of hypocrisy when it comes to all of those world leaders who were marching at the front of it. I mean, every single one of those heads of state or representatives of governments there have waged their own wars against journalists. You know, David Cameron ordered The Guardian to smash with a hammer the hard drives that stored the files of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Blasphemy is considered a crime in Ireland. You had multiple African and Arab leaders whose own countries right now have scores of journalists in prison. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel has targeted for killing numerous journalists who have reported on the Palestinian side, have kidnapped, abducted, jailed journalists. You know, there’s this controversy right now: Why didn’t President Obama go, or why didn’t Joe Biden go? You know, Eric Holder was there already and was representing the United States.

I think that we should remember—and I was saying this on Twitter over the weekend—that Yemen should have sent the Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye as their representative. He, of course, was in prison for years on the direct orders of President Obama for having reported on secret U.S. strikes in Yemen that killed scores of civilians. Or Sudan should have sent Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was held for six years without charge in Guantánamo and repeatedly interrogated by U.S. operatives who were intent on proving that Al Jazeera had some sort of a link to al-Qaeda. So, you know, while there is much to take heart in, in terms of this huge outpouring of support for freedom of the press, hypocrisy was on full display in the streets of Paris when it came to the world leaders.

AMY GOODMAN: Reporters Without Borders issued a statement saying it, quote, "condemns [the] presence of 'predators' in [the] Paris march," and, quote, "is appalled by the presence of leaders from countries where journalists and bloggers are systematically persecuted such as Egypt ... Russia ... Turkey ... and United Arab Emirates." A Gabonese journalist covering the march expressed similar reservations about his president, Ali Bongo Ondimba, participating in the event.

GABONESE JOURNALIST: [translated] He banned demonstrations in his own country and is coming to a demonstration in France. That’s intolerable for us. It’s a complete hypocrisy. We’re here not only to show our outrage for what happened to Charlie Hebdo, but also to show our outrage over the fact that dictators like Ali Bongo Ondimba are present here in Paris, in a country that supports human rights, at an assembly that is in fact dedicated to freedom of expression, freedom of the press.

AMY GOODMAN: That, a Gabonese journalist covering the march, expressing reservations about his president participating in the march, Jeremy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, and then you have—you know, you have General Sisi, the dictator of Egypt, who apparently is showing his solidarity for press freedom by continuing to preside over the imprisonment of multiple Al Jazeera journalists whose only crime was doing actual journalism and scores of other Egyptian journalists that never get mentioned in the news media.

Another thing that I think is really absent from a lot of the coverage of the aftermath of this horrific massacre is that France also is a surveillance state. And France has a very Islamophobic position toward their immigrant community, but also toward second- and third-generation Arabs or people from other Muslim countries who have settled inside of France. And there’s going to be an intense—intensification of an already overreaching surveillance system inside of France.

You know, some months ago I was on the show talking about the U.S. watchlisting system, and one of the things that we heard when we were doing this report on how you end up on the no-fly list or on the watchlist was that people within the U.S. counterterrorism community, who are actually trying to prevent acts of terrorism from happening, say that they’re flooded in information and that if everyone is on the watchlist, effectively no one is on the watchlist when it comes to actually looking at who might be engaged in these kinds of terror plots.

A similar phenomenon is happening in Paris, France. You know, people talk about an intelligence failure, an intelligence breakdown. When you are putting people on these lists for monitoring or surveillance based on flimsy or circumstantial evidence, what that means is that you overload your own bureaucracy. So, on the one hand, you have a surveillance state that unfairly targets Muslims and immigrants, in both the United States and in France, and on the other hand, you have a system that is intended to stop acts of terrorism or to monitor people that are plotting acts of terrorism that has become its own hindrance, its own biggest obstacle to actually figuring out the reality of these plots.

And let’s remember, while horrifying and reprehensible, these incidents represent a relatively minor threat to Western society. You know, in terms of the actual threats facing our society, this doesn’t even rank in the top five. And so, you know, to have this kind of a reaction is not only a waste of a tremendous amount of money, but it is going to encourage, I think, future acts of terrorism.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, it is a horrific moment where people actually see it before them.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yes, right. But, you know, it’s, again, the—let’s remember that the United States bombed Al Jazeera in Afghanistan very early on after 9/11, then bombed the Sheraton Hotel in Basra, Iraq, where Al Jazeera journalists were the only journalists. Then they killed one of the most famous Al Jazeera correspondents in Baghdad in April of 2003, when Victoria Clarke, George Bush’s Pentagon spokesperson at the time, basically said if you’re an unembedded journalist, you’re with the terrorists, and if you die, it’s not our fault. They shelled the Palestine Hotel, killing a Reuters cameraman and the Spanish cameraman José Couso. So, yes, we should be condemning any and all attacks, especially when they’re killing journalists, no matter who the perpetrators are, but let’s not act as though the West’s hands are clean and that any one of those world leaders marching yesterday, that their hands are clean on these matters.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Jeremy Scahill, founder of The Intercept. When we come back, we’re going to talk about the article that he’s written, "Al Qaeda Source: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Directed Paris Attack." His latest book,Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. This is This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 2015

Jeremy Scahill on Paris Attacks, the al-Qaeda Link & the Secret U.S. War in Yemen

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The gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo staff, Chérif and Said Kouachi, were killed by French police on Friday following a three-day manhunt. Shortly before his death, Chérif Kouachi told a French television station he received financing from the late Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen in 2011. Both brothers reportedly traveled to Yemen that same year and had weapons training in the deserts of Marib, an al-Qaeda stronghold. Meanwhile, a video released over the weekend shows Amedy Coulibaly — the gunman who killed four hostages at a kosher supermarket in Paris — pledging allegiance to the Islamic State. In a statement to The Intercept, a source within al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack, saying: "The leadership of #AQAP directed the operation, and they have chosen their target carefully as a revenge for the honor of Prophet … the target was in France in particular because of its obvious role in the war on Islam and oppressed nations." We speak to the reporter who broke this story, The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, about al-Awlaki’s background and the Paris shooters’ claims of militant ties.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, a massive march across France, close to four million people, took place. That march took place two days after the gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine, Chérif and Said Kouachi, were killed by police after a siege at a printing works following a three-day manhunt. Minutes after the print shop assault, police broke a second siege at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris. Four hostages had already died there, and the police killed the gunman, Amedy Coulibaly. France has announced it’s deployed 10,000 soldiers on home soil and posting almost 5,000 extra police officers to protect Jewish sites, some 700 Jewish schools.

On Friday, Chérif Kouachi said he received financing by the Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. He had made the assertion on a television station before his death. Reuters is reporting both brothers who carried out the attack against Charlie Hebdotraveled to Yemen in 2011 and had weapons training in the deserts of Marib, an al-Qaeda stronghold. Meanwhile, a source within al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, orAQAP, has provided the website The Intercept with a full statement claiming responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack. Jeremy Scahill was the source of information in this country about that.

Jeremy, talk about what we know about these attacks.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, first of all, there is a built-in motivation for a lot of different groups to try to take responsibility for these kinds of attacks, because there is a turf war going on between ISIS, the Islamic State; AQAP, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; old-school central al-Qaeda, which is a very different organization now than it was under bin Laden now that Ayman al-Zawahiri is in charge of it. France has been actually fighting its own war in Mali and elsewhere in Africa, using drone strikes and attacks and supporting the United States battling against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. So, we have to take everything that all of these groups say about this, you know, with a great deal of skepticism.

But what is clear to me, both from the reporting that we’ve seen at other news outlets and also from my own sources, is that AQAP, at a minimum, had these brothers in a camp, a training camp in Yemen, provided them with training, discussed with them, I understand from sources inside of Yemen, the idea that they should be attacking media outlets that have published the image of the Prophet Muhammad, particularly those that have published the image of the Prophet Muhammad in a demeaning or what they consider to be a disgraceful manner.

You know, the context of this, Amy, is that in June of 2010, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released its first issue of a glossy, very fancy, designed magazine in the English language called Inspire. And in that magazine, they had an image that was centered around the idea of a cartoon crusade. And they called on Muslims in the West to avenge the reputation and the sanctity of the Prophet Muhammad by going and killing cartoonists who were participating in a "Draw Muhammad Day"—and the show South Park on Comedy Central did a whole issue about this, where they mocked the Prophet Muhammad—and they actually published a list of cartoonists, some of the cartoonists, that had drawn the Prophet Muhammad in this manner, including a woman in Seattle, Washington, named Molly Norris. And she had to go underground and change her name and received federal protection from the FBI. And I think, to this day, she still is underground, believing that she remains on this hit list. So this was something that was a major campaign initiated by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And my understanding is that these two brothers were doing this in concert, to some degree, with AQAP.

Now, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula officials have told me that "We directed this attack." That’s very—

AMY GOODMAN: How did they get in touch with you?

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, I don’t want to discuss—as the CIA says, I don’t want to discuss sources and methods. But I will say this about the source. I’ve spent a lot of time in Yemen, including in areas controlled by al-Qaeda, and I would never just print something that I received from a random person whose identity I couldn’t verify. Also, this isn’t a source that just popped out of thin air for this story. This is—this source of this information is someone that in the past has given me information about what al-Qaeda was going to say or the fact that al-Qaeda was holding particular hostages before it was made public, as a way of validating that they in fact are—do have access to the highest levels of debate and discussion within the leadership of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

But I should say, just by way of context, well-placed sources within AQAP saying this is not an official statement from the leadership of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And before we go sort of all in and say, "Yeah, this is—this definitely was AQAP that directed this plot or financed this plot"—the normal way that AQAP would validate this would be to release statements and audio or video recordings through their official media channels. They have their own online television station. They have their own way of releasing things on discussion boards. Over the past year, they’ve started to shift more to Twitter in terms of announcing—making pronouncements or announcing actions that they’ve taken, hostages that they’ve taken, assaults or raids inside of Yemen that they’ve conducted.

So, what I’m going to be looking for in the coming weeks is if there’s a martyr video that was filmed in Yemen by either of these brothers, or if AQAP is able to produce photographs of them at a training camp. That’s what happened when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the airplane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. After that happened, AQAP eventually took responsibility, and then they began to release media showing, "Hey, this guy was with us in Yemen," and they actually released a martyr video where he, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, this young Nigerian man, explained what he was going to do and why he was going to do it. So, until that happens, I think that what we have here is a very reliable source, in terms of accuracy within AQAP, saying this, and now the U.S. is saying that they believe that—that their working assumption is that AQAP was involved.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, that, the underwear—the so-called underwear bomber, it’s just coming out now, actually shared a room in Beirut, Lebanon, with Coulibaly, the kosher supermarket shooter.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, my understanding is that both Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and at least one of these brothers spent time at Iman University in Sana’a, in Yemen. And that’s a university founded by a cleric named Zindani, who is a very, very famous radical Yemeni preacher. He denies that he has any ties to terrorism, but his message is definitely in sync, more or less, with groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And John Walker Lyndh, for instance, studied at that university. It definitely is a place where people go and then somehow find themselves going to training camps inside of Yemen. The idea that they would have been there at the same time, if in fact everything we understand to be true about these brothers is true, would not be surprising at all.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you were in Yemen. You were investigating the drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, as well as his son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was 16 years old, born in Denver. Talk about these connections that they’re talking about right now, the actual meeting that Awlaki had with one of the brothers.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Allegedly, yeah. Well, and first of all, just to give context on who is Anwar al-Awlaki, you know, The New York Times had a front-page piece on this over the weekend. The Washington Post had a big piece on it. CNN is now running this big profile of Anwar al-Awlaki. And a lot of what is being said about Anwar al-Awlaki in the media is sort of what Stephen Colbert called "truthiness," you know, where like it’s sort of true, they’re kind of getting it right, but there are tremendous factual inaccuracies that actually are very relevant to understanding any potential role played by Anwar al-Awlaki here.

First of all, Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen who was born in the United States. His father was a very well-respected—is, still alive—very well-respected Yemeni diplomat and scholar, who got his master’s degree in the United States and had intended to live in the U.S. And then the family went back—

AMY GOODMAN: He was a Fulbright scholar.

JEREMY SCAHILL: He was a Fulbright scholar. And he also—he had multiple master’s degrees in the United States, and remains a very dignified, respected member of Yemeni society. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Anwar al-Awlaki’s father.

JEREMY SCAHILL: This is his father, Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki. And so, the family is here for some years. Then Nasser al-Awlaki goes back to Yemen, because he was a water specialist, an engineer, and tried to help deal with the crisis of water shortage in Yemen, which is perhaps the greatest threat facing Yemeni society right now, not terrorism, but its lack of actual potable water. So the family moved back there. Anwar al-Awlaki was young. He goes to school there at a bilingual school with the elite of the elite in Yemen. In fact, he went to school with the future head of Yemen’s intelligence agency, who would be one of the main collaborators with the United States in trying to hunt down and kill Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone strike.

Awlaki then returns to the United States, goes to university in Colorado, was not a particularly religious guy, becomes sort of radicalized by the Gulf War in 1991, when George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion and bombing of Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein’s incursion into Kuwait. And al-Awlaki starts to become involved with antiwar activities, ends up going to a local mosque on an invitation to speak there and becomes interested in the idea of actually becoming a religious scholar and studying to be an imam. And so his life takes a dramatic shift, and he ends up becoming an imam.

He and his family—at this point, he gets married. He’s in San Diego. Two of the 9/11 hijackers were people that had been at his mosque. The 9/11 Commission determined that Awlaki didn’t have any sort of conversations with them beyond clerical conversations that like a priest would have with a parishioner somewhere in the Catholic Church, but nonetheless that’s something that keeps being brought up, that Awlaki had connections to the 9/11 attackers. If we want to talk about that and say that that’s evidence of something, we should also mention that at a time when 9/11 attackers were going to mosques where Awlaki was the imam, Awlaki was also invited by the Pentagon, shortly after 9/11, to give a lecture at a luncheon at the Pentagon. And he in fact went to the Pentagon, at the invitation of a senior Pentagon official, and gave a lecture about the state of Islam in the world today.

Awlaki was clearly angered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He defended the right of the United States to go into Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda and denounced al-Qaeda as fake Muslims. This was all in the aftermath of 9/11. He was on NPR. He was profiled in The Washington Post. He was considered a legitimate part of the commentariat in the United States post-9/11, as a person who was brought on TV shows to make sense of the position of Muslims in the world post-9/11. And part of the reason he was invited on these media outlets is because he was condemning al-Qaeda. He was condemning the invasion of—or, excuse me, he was condemning the use of Afghanistan as a base to plot the 9/11 attacks.

Then Iraq gets invaded. Then Abu Ghraib happens. Then we start to learn about CIAtorture sites around the world. We start to see Muslim prisoners in orange jumpsuits with hoods being brought. Then there’s desecration of the Qur’an that happens. And you could see Awlaki becoming radicalized by these policies. And he goes back to Yemen, and basically didn’t know what he was doing with his life. He got involved with some real estate and other things. Then he starts—he basically starts using YouTube and the Internet as his online mosque. He already was known around the world for sermons he had recorded on CDs.

And part of the reason he became so popular in the Western world is because not only was he fluent in both English and Arabic, but he spoke in the language of the street. He would make pop cultural references. He would sort of mimic the way that Malcolm X spoke, in terms of his riffs and other things. He would make references to international football teams and matches, and make comparisons with—you know, when you’re trying to spread the religion, you don’t wait to show up like the post office, you want to go at it like FedEx. And he would sort of—you know, he was a guy who, I think, has an appeal to particularly younger Western Muslims.

And, you know, I listened to many, many, many, many days’ worth of Anwar al-Awlaki’s preaching. And up until the invasion of Iraq, there was very little that you could look at and say, "Oh, here’s a guy who is going to be very anti-American." In fact, Awlaki supported the war in Yugoslavia. He was on the same side as the United States in Bosnia. And, in fact, you know, Awlaki was calling for Muslims in the United States to fight the jihad against the Catholic forces of Croatia and the Orthodox Christian forces of Serbia, and he was on the same side as the United States. The U.S. was raising funds to arm Bosnian Muslims to fight in that war. They were on the—the U.S. was on the same side as Anwar al-Awlaki and Osama bin Laden in the war in Yugoslavia in terms of the position that they staked out on Bosnia.

Once Awlaki starts, though, preaching against the U.S. wars and saying that Muslims have a right to fight the jihad against the United States, he became a public enemy, similar to what the U.S. did with Saddam Hussein. When he’s our guy doing our kind of repression, we want him. But if he crosses that line and affects U.S. or international oil interests, he’s now tantamount to Hitler. That’s similar to what happened with Awlaki. The U.S. then has Awlaki put in prison inside of Yemen for 18 months, where he was held in solitary confinement for 17 of those months. He was interrogated by the FBI while in that prison. And then, when he was released, he was a totally changed man.

AMY GOODMAN: Where was he held?

JEREMY SCAHILL: He was held in a political prison inside of Yemen, in Sana’a, Yemen. And, in fact, I reported in my book that when the Yemeni government wanted to release Awlaki, that John Negroponte, who at the time was a senior counterterrorism official under the Bush administration—and, of course, one of the butchers of Central America during the 1980s—John Negroponte had a secret meeting with Bandar Bush, the Saudi diplomat very close to the Bush family, where he—and the Yemeni ambassador, where John Negroponte said, "Our position is that we want Awlaki kept in prison until all of these young Western Muslims forget about him." This is a U.S. citizen who was being held in a prison in a human rights-violating country on very flimsy charges that he had intervened in a tribal dispute, and a senior official intervenes to say, "We want our citizen kept in your prison without any trial for five years, until people forget about him."

When Awlaki eventually was released, he was a totally changed man and began increasingly to cross the line from praising people fighting against the United States, in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, to actively calling on people to come and, as he put it, fight on the fronts of jihad in Yemen or elsewhere or in your own country. And this is where he really became considered to be a significant threat by the United States, that his words—not his actions, but his words—were going to inspire lone-wolf acts of terrorism inside of the United States.

And when he really rose to international prominence was in November of 2009, when Army Major Nidal Hasan, who was a U.S. military psychiatrist that had petitioned to try to have some of his patients prosecuted for war crimes after they described to him what they had done in Afghanistan and elsewhere, he—Hasan had written—

AMY GOODMAN: This is at Fort Hood.

JEREMY SCAHILL: This is at Fort Hood, Texas. Nidal Hasan had written to Anwar al-Awlaki a number of times, praising Awlaki, offering to give Awlaki like a human rights prize of $5,000. Awlaki writes back to him and says, "Give it to the orphans and widows." Awlaki basically was treating Hasan like kind of a disturbed character. But if you read media accounts today about Anwar al-Awlaki, they say he directed the Fort Hood attack. The declassified emails, that the U.S. government has declassified, between Anwar al-Awlaki and Nidal Hasan do not show that at all. In fact, they show Nidal Hasan as sort of an unstable stalker who’s trying to get Awlaki to like him, and Awlaki is sort of dismissing him.

Now, was Nidal Hasan inspired by Anwar al-Awlaki’s preaching and teaching to do what he did at Fort Hood? Absolutely, no question whatsoever. Anwar al-Awlaki was clearly saying—and Awlaki, in the aftermath, praised it and said, "What Nidal Hasan did was right, but I didn’t tell him to do it." And Awlaki was not a guy who wouldn’t claim responsibility for things that he actually did. He admitted that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was one of his students. Now, that could mean something very serious. It could mean that he was a student, and he said, "Hey, to do something like AQAPwants you to do, to try to blow up this airplane, is acceptable under Islam, because they’re attacking us, and under these codes of the Sharia, it’s fine to do."

But to say someone directed a plot, in the case of the underwear bomber or in the case of Fort Hood, that’s just not proven. And if we want to say that we live in a society based on the rule of law, if there’s all this evidence that Awlaki was operational within al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, why did the United States never charge him with a crime? If I were a prosecutor, I would have tried to indict Anwar al-Awlaki for directly threatening the life of this American cartoonist in Seattle. Why was he never indicted? We indicted Osama bin Laden. We indicted John Walker Lindh. Why would they not indict Awlaki? If all of this evidence that The New York Times and The Washington Post and CNN now today claim that the U.S. has had for a long time, why was there never an indictment on Anwar al-Awlaki? What did the president of the United States serve as judge, jury and executioner of an American citizen? Why did the United States advocate for a human rights-abusing government to have one of their citizens placed in prison for indefinite detention, when he hadn’t yet been charged with a crime by the United States?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, what’s the answer?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I think that the U.S., on the one hand, was afraid of Awlaki’s words. They didn’t want to give him a platform in a trial. I think they also wanted to continue to be able to monitor him to see who he was working with and who he was meeting with. And I ultimately think that they—that the calculus was, if we were to capture this American citizen, this is not the same as putting Osama bin Laden on trial, this is not the same as putting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial. This is an American citizen who speaks very articulate, fluent English and would probably have an incredible defense team. So I think part of it was that they never wanted him to see a day in court.

Now, I found Awlaki’s words and his involvement with a number of people who went on to commit acts of terrorism or mass violence reprehensible. That’s not the point here. The point is, if you’re going to make these allegations, you better be able to prove it. So, if Awlaki did in fact meet with either or both of the Paris shooters, that’s a relevant part of the story, but what I know from my reporting on the ground about the underwear bomber is that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a deranged young man, and AQAP wanted to make sure that he followed through on his plot. And my understanding is that they brought Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to Anwar al-Awlaki to essentially either groom him or to act as a sort of Islamic therapist who was sort of trying to get his mental health back up so that AQAP could do what they wanted to do with him. That’s my understanding of the role Awlaki played with AQAP, is that he was a guy who would help facilitate these people going to AQAP, but not that Awlaki was picking the targets or running the show.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break. When we come back, we’re going to talk more about Chérif and Said Kouachi, about Amedy Coulibaly. Now, the French government and governments around the world are looking for Hayat Boumeddiene, the woman who they say was related to Amedy Coulibaly, not clear exactly what her role has been. They say she left France, went through Turkey, possibly is in Syria. And the person who has fallen off the map is the 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad. The day of the attack on the satirical magazine, on Charlie Hebdo, they said that he was driving the car. But he turned himself in and said, "I was in class," and many of his classmates tweeted this same fact. We haven’t heard about him again. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. The winter 2014 issue of Inspire, the English-language magazine of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, features an image of a Muslim man praying next to a pressure cooker, above an image of a French passport. The image is accompanied by text that reads, quote, "If you have the knowledge and inspiration all that’s left is to take action." Last spring, Inspire magazine published a "wanted" poster showing the name and photograph of Charlie Hebdo editor Stéphane Charbonnier, who was killed in last week’s attack.

Our guest for the hour is Jeremy Scahill, who is co-founder of The Intercept, where his most recent article is "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Directed Paris Attack," according to an al-Qaeda source. His latest book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. His film, nominated for an Academy Award, by the same title, Dirty Wars.

OK, Jeremy, if you can talk about, first of all, that latest Inspire magazine and what we know about the relationship between these attackers in France, who killed 17 people, and their relationship with AQAP? And also, where does ISIS fit into this?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right, well, let’s take that on first about ISIS. You know, the man who did the siege at the kosher market released this martyr video that he recorded after the Charlie Hebdo offices were attacked by the two brothers. And it was like a hastily put together thing, where he put a picture of an Islamic flag on the wall behind him, and he did some exercises in front of it, and then he pledged his allegiance to Baghdadi, you know, and the caliphate trying to be established by the Islamic State. I wouldn’t read too deeply into his role with the Islamic State. It’s possible that there was, that he had gone and had some participation with members of the Islamic State. It’s also more likely that he was inspired by this and was trying to basically project an image that he was part of a bigger effort around the world to avenge the honor of the Prophet Muhammad and that, you know, this was sort of his last stand and that he was going to be a martyr. But, you know, the—

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go—

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: —to the French media outlets, you know, broadcasting extracts of this video, reportedly to be Amedy Coulibaly. He said he had synchronized the attacks in Paris with the Kouachi brothers and that he was in allegiance with the Islamic State.

AMEDY COULIBALY: [translated] You attack the caliphate. You attack the Islamic State. We are attacking you. One cannot attack and get nothing in return. So you’re playing the victim as if you don’t understand what was happening for some deaths, while you and your coalition, you heading it, you regularly bombard over there. You have sent forces. You are killing civilians. You are killing fighters. You are killing.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Amedy Coulibaly, apparently, and not clear even who he made this video with, if he make it with someone else, which brings in this—the woman who they originally said was in the kosher supermarket with him, and perhaps had killed the French policewoman the day before. But it turns out they now say she had left like January 1st or January 2nd. They say she might be his girlfriend, his common-law wife, and may have made her way through Turkey to Syria.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, and, I mean, I’m—I think we all need to be very careful in speculating about—you know, in the immediate aftermath of things like this, they go and they sweep up all sorts of people, and they make allegations that these individuals may be tied to it. And we heard—I mean, if you watch in the minutes after this happened, you start to hear that there are other attacks that may be underway and that there is going to be multiple cells that are going to be attacking Paris tonight and that they’re looking at this network of people around them. I mean, that’s what happens in the aftermath of shootings like this. They scramble to try to find anyone connected to the individuals that they know were involved, you know, and in this case you had three people that they definitely knew were involved with tremendous acts of violence and mass murder. And, you know, a lot of people get swept up in that net.

So, what her potential role in this is, we don’t know. I mean, they’re putting a lot of scary images of her on television, showing her with a crossbow pointed at a camera and showing images of her with some of the suspects in this case. I don’t think we know enough yet. I mean, my understanding is that the—

AMY GOODMAN: And she’s totally covered there; you don’t even know if it’s her.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, it could be anyone. And the—but that the intelligence that they have about her whereabouts is largely from signals intelligence and tracking the position of a phone that she apparently, until a few days ago, still had on her.

AMY GOODMAN: And Turkey saying that she had come through.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, Turkey, and they’re saying that maybe she’s already in Syria. But again, all that is speculation. And, you know, the scaremongering machine is in full effect. It’s not to say that there aren’t scary people on the run or that there aren’t potentially dangerous people on the run. But if you watch, as I know you do, like if you watched big corporate media coverage over the weekend, it’s Fear, Inc., you know, and they’re just revving up the fear engine again. This is a serious incident. People need to be brought to justice for this. Anyone involved with it does. But, like, the fear is counterproductive. France deploying 10,000 soldiers on the streets of its city, I mean, this is—the state will always look for a reason to overreact and to sweep up civil liberties. That’s what we saw in this country after 9/11. We’ve never been able to roll it back. That’s exactly what’s happening in France right now.

AMY GOODMAN: How do they prepare for future attacks?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, the discussion you would hear on big corporate television about that is going to be about how do we defend our society, how do we integrate these networks, how do we do surveillance on these people. You know, this is probably going to be an unpopular thing to say, but I’ll say it because I believe it: The only way I think we’re ever going to effectively be able to confront this kind of terrorism is to take away the justification or the motivation of people who are not already sort of committed radical individuals who believe that what they’re doing is justified and they’re not afraid to die.

You know, the Taliban fighters always say, you know, "We love death as much as you love life." But a lot of these people who do these attacks, something happened in their life somewhere—similar to what happens with school shootings here, you know, what happened at Columbine. I liken a lot of these guys to people who go through some kind of period where they’re lost in life, and then they’re falling. Who catches you when you fall? A lot of times in a society that’s been decimated, a religion that’s been humiliated, people are looking for some kind of greater meaning, and there are a lot of people willing to take advantage of them.

But in a broader sense, what we’ve done since 9/11, and actually going back well before 9/11, with the unquestioning support for Israel, with the drone bombing campaigns, with the invasions and occupations of countries, with the torture of prisoners around the world, we have projected a message that we are at war with a religion. When Rupert Murdoch, the most powerful media figure in the world, goes on Twitter and uses the word "Moslem," but says that basically all Muslims are to blame for this until they stop it, that’s not lost on people around the world. And Bush used the word "crusade" in the early stages of the post-9/11 aftermath. So, I’m not saying that any of this is justified as a result of U.S. policy. But if we really want to confront this, we have to understand our own role in legitimizing it.

AMY GOODMAN: It was interesting to see Hollande in the middle of the line of world leaders, and on one side of him, just a few leaders down, is Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and on the other side, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. Well, Netanyahu, one of the biggest war criminals in the world for his—what he’s doing in Palestine. I mean, it’s shocking that someone like him is accepted as like someone who has any business being in a march about defense, freedoms or human rights.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about the connection between ISIS and AQAP. Is there competition? Are they joining together? And to get out there, as we get to the end of this hour, even Boko Haram, I wanted to ask if you see any possible—even if they don’t start out linked—I mean, what hasn’t even been covered in the last week, the possibility that Boko Haram in Nigeria, where we have both reported, killed possibly 2,000 people.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. I mean, these are heinous, heinous criminals, Boko Haram. But also, you know, just not to get inside baseball about Nigerian politics, but how is it that the Nigerian state—Nigeria has the most powerful military in Africa, is deployed around Africa in so-called humanitarian missions. How is it that the Nigerian military is not able to confront Boko Haram in any effective way? I’m not alleging there’s a conspiracy here, but I guarantee you that very powerful individuals in Nigeria are allowing this to happen or looking the other way, similar to what happens with the Saudi royals with acts of terrorism around the world, where, on the one hand, they say, "Oh, we’re with America, and we denounce this," on the other hand, their cousin is one of the major funders of it.

You know, to answer your question—and we only have a little bit of time left—aboutISIS, AQAP, Boko Haram, al-Shabab and others, those groups are all united in a very generic sense of perceiving that there is a world war against Islam and that they’re going to fight all of the nonbelievers, and that they’re not just going to defend themselves, but they’re also going to actively promote and project their interpretation of Islam on the world. On a micro level, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are fighting a turf war, and AQAP is aligned with other al-Qaeda-affiliated organizations throughout East Africa, North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and a few other spots around the world. They’re battling for funds from the diaspora. They’re battling for supremacy. It’s not an active military battle right now. It’s largely a propaganda battle waged on Twitter and social media and through official pronouncements.

But at the end of the day, as the AQAP source told me, "It doesn’t matter to us who did the shooting at the kosher market or if he was working with another group; what matters to us is that he did it, and that he was a Muslim, and that he declared that he was avenging the Prophet Muhammad. And that’s more important to us than who directed this." That, I think, is probably a widely shared sentiment across a number of these groups, many of which have issued statements praising it, but stopping short of saying, "Hey, we did this."

AMY GOODMAN: Will there be an intensification of the drone strikes in Yemen now?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yes. I mean, there already has been in recent weeks. And let’s remember, too, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, if they are behind this—

AMY GOODMAN: We have one minute.

JEREMY SCAHILL: —this would be their deadliest external attack that they’ve been able to orchestrate or sort of plot or be involved with, you know, since Obama started bombing Yemen and since the creation of the group. And they’ve had a number of failed attempts. The vast majority of people who have died at the hands of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are Yemenis and are other Muslims. But we don’t talk about that. The day the French shooting happened, AQAP attacked a police academy and killed 30 people in Sana’a. It wasn’t even a blip on the radar of media coverage. You know, and so, when we look at the future of what Obama is going to do there, if they go after them, they’ll go after them for this. They won’t go after them for killing other Yemenis or troops that are actually being funded by the United States inside of Yemen. It’s only when they scare us in our own languages or in our own societies, and the response is often disproportionate and ends up killing a lot of innocent people.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think ISIS and AQAP are coming together?

JEREMY SCAHILL: No, I don’t. I don’t think they are, but I think they’re both happy that this happened.

AMY GOODMAN: And who do you think these three brothers—the two brothers and Coulibaly thought they were working for?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, we have their own words. They said that they were doing it on behalf of al-Qaeda in Yemen. They claim that they were financed by Anwar al-Awlaki, who was close to al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is telling me that they played a role in this, al-Qaeda in Yemen. I think until there’s an official statement, we won’t know. But for now, I think we should take seriously what they’re saying, but also in the context that a lot of people have an agenda to say, "Hey, we were behind this," and those brothers had an agenda to say, "We are operating as part of a bigger network," because it helps in propaganda.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of the The Intercept. His recent article, we’ll link to at democracynow.org. His latest book, Dirty Wars.

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