Khorazan -- We Knew Dat

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Latuff rendering of Obama at the UN

Khorazan

            We here at the Times were amused to see so many people in the media puzzled by the Khorazan group.  We knew all about it, of course, the whole time and just didn't want to say anything about it.

            We are given to understand that it is an Al-Quaeda group led my a ruthless 33 year old who was with Bin-Laden on the day after the towers were hit, taking joy along with him.  He was one of the master-minds.  And if you do the arithmetic, that means he was 19 when he helped plan the operation.  What were YOU doing when your were 19, hmm?

            Obama spoke at the United nations about the disillusioned individuals who join these groups.  How did they get illusioned in the first place?  

            We had been told that Al-Quaeda had been decimated, but then that only means reduced by a tenth, so they are still around and so the law or bill passed by congress during the Bush administration allows him to bomb away.

            While he was speaking, John Kerry and Samatha Power were sitting next to each other behind him.  It is by no means clear that she whispered "What did Monica Lewinsky have that I don't?" into his ear, but she did whisper something.

            We also know that the Yazidi people are still oppressed and the women being sold into sexual slavery.  That has to stop.  Why aren't we doing anything about it?

            And this has been so effective that a Frenchman was killed in Algeria and a woman was beheaded in Oklahoma.  This 33 year old means business.

            Meanwhile, the President of Iraq warned the reporters that a subway would be bombed in Paris or New York, but nobody else knew about it.  Not even ISIS.    

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ISIS, OBAMA, SYRIA, PUTIN

THE ABSURD TIMES

            Shall we say "Here we go again?" after the 9/11 festivities, or memorials are over.  We can all lament the two of three thousand innocent people who died in the towers that day, but not the same number of innocent people who died in Gaza?  But now we have a "terrorist" threat in Iraq to take care of.

            It may be difficult to grasp, but what happened as a result of 9/11?  Many think that the entire thing was staged to make way for what followed, but it is just as likely that Bush and Cheney gave thanks that it happened.  At the time, Bush was seen reading a story about a goat, or duck, at the time.  When the fact was whispered in his ear, he waited for the longest time, perhaps because he wanted instead to find out what happened to the duck first, then get on an airplane.  Well, it's as good an explanation as anyone else has given, right?

            Because of the deaths in the twin towers, the crash into the Pentagon, and a crash in Pennsylvania, we quite logically invaded Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and occupied both countries for ten years and spent at least three trillion dollars, and sent many soldiers and civilians to their deaths.  To celebrate our success at reforming the world, Obama announced an additional war on the eve of 9/11. 

            There has been a lot of talk about boot on the ground.  We have no boots of the ground in Iraq.  We do have about 2,000 soldiers there, presumably they walk, and they wear boots, but they are not boots on the ground.  We are assured that boots on the ground are off the table.  You should always keep your boots off the table, don't you know.

            This time, we will get involved in Syria.  In Lebanon there was a civil war that went on for 15 years at least and it was only stopped by the intervention and mediation of Syria.  Now the civil war is in Syria.  There is no way that can turn out well with us involved.  It is less likely to result in good results than the NFL investigation into domestic violence cases.

            Actually, the US should be considered the Rodney Dangerfield of International Relations.  We unified Vietnam, and nobody said thank you.  We saved Afghanistan from the Taliban and now things are great there and women have the vote.  We liberated Iraq from the evil Saddam Hussein, and everything is peaceful.  We liberated Libya from Gaddafi, and they recently held a Militian Pool Party in the American Embassy.  Of course, we had left, but still, things are nice there now and they love us.  Last year they even celebrated 9/11 in Benghazi. 

            Now, of course, we have to liberate Syria from Assad.  So, we are going to arm what we called "doctors, lawyers, and radio journalists" and let them fight ISIL.  Yeah, they will be the boots.  Of course, Assad says this will violate international law and Putin agrees with him, but hey, Putin is just jealous and testing nuclear missiles, just in case NATO attacks from Poland.

            Anyway, here are a couple scholars to talk about the subject without all the idiocy of our major networks:

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2014

Obama Vows to Destroy Islamic State, But Expanded Strikes in Syria & Iraq Point to "Endless War"

President Obama has authorized U.S. airstrikes for the first time in Syria and their expansion in Iraq against the militant group Islamic State. In a prime-time address, Obama vowed to hunt down Islamic State militants "wherever they are." Obama also announced he is sending 475 more U.S. military troops to Iraq, bringing the total to 1,600. He also called for congressional support to arm and train the Syrian opposition. We get analysis of Obama’s speech and this latest U.S. military foray into the Middle East with two guests: Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia who has worked on issues involving Iraq since the 1980s and a former adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government; and Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College and author of several books. Prashad’s latest article is "What President Obama Should Not Do About ISIS."

TRANSCRIPT

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

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In a prime-time televised address last night, President Barack Obama announced he had authorized U.S. airstrikes for the first time in Syria and their expansion in Iraq against the Islamic State, which has seized broad stretches of Iraq and Syria. He vowed to hunt down militants from the Islamic State, quote, "wherever they are." Obama also announced he is sending 475 more U.S. military troops to Iraq, bringing the total to 1,600. He also called for congressional support to arm and train the Syrian opposition. Obama’s speech came on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: So tonight, with a new Iraqi government in place and following consultations with allies abroad and Congress at home, I can announce that America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat. Our objective is clear: We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL through comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.

First, we will conduct a systematic campaign of airstrikes against these terrorists. Working with the Iraqi government, we will expand our efforts beyond protecting our own people and humanitarian missions, so that we’re hitting ISIL targets as Iraqi forces go on offense. Moreover, I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

Second, we will increase our support to forces fighting these terrorists on the ground. In June, I deployed several hundred American servicemembers to Iraq to assess how we can best support Iraqi security forces. Now that those teams have completed their work, and Iraq has formed a government, we will send an additional 475 servicemembers to Iraq. As I’ve said before, these American forces will not have a combat mission. We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq. But they are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment. We’ll also support Iraq’s efforts to stand up National Guard units to help Sunni communities secure their own freedom from ISIL’s control.

Across the border in Syria, we have ramped up our military assistance to the Syrian opposition. Tonight I call on Congress again to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters. In the fight against ISIL, we cannot rely on an Assad regime that terrorizes its own people, a regime that will never regain the legitimacy it has lost. Instead, we must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like ISIL, while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria’s crisis once and for all.

Third, we will continue to draw on our substantial counterterrorism capabilities to prevent ISIL attacks. Working with our partners, we will redouble our efforts to cut off its funding, improve our intelligence, strengthen our defenses, counter its warped ideology, and stem the flow of foreign fighters into and out of the Middle East. And in two weeks, I will chair a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to further mobilize the international community around this effort.

Fourth, we will continue to provide humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who have been displaced by this terrorist organization. This includes Sunni and Shia Muslims who are at grave risk, as well as tens of thousands of Christians and other religious minorities. We cannot allow these communities to be driven from their ancient homelands.

So this is our strategy. And in each of these four parts of our strategy, America will be joined by a broad coalition of partners.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about President Obama’s speech, we’re joined by two guests. Peter Galbraith is former U.S. ambassador to Croatia. He’s worked on issues involving Iraq since the 1980s and is a former adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government. He testified before a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, currently a senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. His books include The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. He joins us from Washington, D.C.

In Chicopee, Massachusetts, we’re joined by Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College, author of several books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter and, most recently, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Vijay Prashad is also a columnist for Frontline, where he’s been writing extensively about the Islamic State, his latest piece headlined "What President Obama Should Not Do About ISIS."

Ambassador Galbraith, let’s begin with you. Your response to President Obama’s speech last night?

PETER GALBRAITH: He outlined a strategy, and I think the strategy has a good prospect of accomplishing the goal of degrading ISIS. But I don’t think it’s capable of destroying ISIS. So let’s look at the parts of it. Airstrikes are effective when there are forces on the ground. And that really is the dilemma. Inside Iraq and Syria, there are three main forces that you could be supporting. There’s the Kurdistan Peshmerga, which suffered setbacks in August, but the units remained intact. With air support, they’ve been able to retake territory. But they are not going to go significantly beyond Kurdistan, and they’ve more or less retaken that territory. In the rest of Iraq, there’s the Iraqi army, which has largely disappeared since the beginning of the year. We spent billions building it up, and the end result was that the weapons we provided ended up in ISIS’s hands. I don’t see how you reconstitute that. The president’s talking about supporting local forces, and that, in theory, could be effective in the Sunni areas, but it’s going to be hard to get them set up, given that ISIS is there, and also that they would have to work with a government that Sunnis absolutely don’t trust. They don’t see a big difference between al-Abadi and his predecessor, Maliki. So, and in Syria, the problem with supporting the Syrian opposition is that we don’t really have a good feel for who all these people are, and they really have no prospect of defeating Assad, and we don’t really know if we can rely on them to fight ISIS, with the exception of, again, in the Kurdish north, the YPG, the Syrian Kurdish military. They have been fighting ISIS for well more than a year and at least have been holding their own.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Vijay Prashad, I wanted to ask you your reaction to the president’s speech and his new policy, and also this whole idea of asking Congress to finance the retraining once again, a creation of a new Iraqi army, after the last one that the United States spent billions on training has basically disintegrated.

VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, I found the speech interesting, because the details on Iraq were definitely much more significant than the details on Syria. It was very light on Syria, for a good reason. At least in Iraq, as Ambassador Galbraith said, there is the possibility of providing close air support to the Kurdish Peshmerga from Iraqi Kurdistan. There’s a possibility of providing close air support through whatever remains of the Iraqi army. After all, they did take back the town of Amerli. But in Syria, there is no real easy group to which the United States can give close air support.

You know, the YPG—that is to say, the Kurdish force in the northeast of Syria—is backed by the Kurdish Workers’ Party from Turkey. The United States sees them as a terrorist organization. So I doubt very much that they will overtly have any coordination with the YPG and the PKK. They’ve already said they will not coordinate with the Syrian government. That’s the second force that could be mobilized to attack the ISIS fighters, particularly as ISIS is moving beyond Raqqa toward the homeland of the Kurdish government. The third major force is the other Islamist opposition. And it’s important to point out here that just a few days ago there was an enormous bomb attack on one of the most, you know, fierce fighting units among the other Islamists, and that was Ahrar al-Sham’s, which lost basically its entire leadership. The Free Syrian Army is basically a shell of what it had been. It’s more in name only.

So the idea that the United States is now going to outsource the training of a moderate Syrian opposition fighting force to Saudi Arabia has created, I think, a lot of worry in the region, a lot of concern, because Saudi Arabia’s own cutout in the Syrian war has been Jaysh al-Islam, which is not known for its moderation in any way. So the United States, if it wants to provide close air support to take on the Islamic State inside Syria, has no effective partner. So, in that sense, Mr. Obama’s speech yesterday was very confusing and was much more rhetoric than actual strategy.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, then come back to this debate. We’re joined by Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College, also by Ambassador Peter Galbraith. Stay with us.

[break]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We continue to look at President Obama’s speech last night authorizing airstrikes in Syria and expanding attacks in Iraq against the Islamic State.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil. This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partners’ forces on the ground. This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years. And it is consistent with the approach I outlined earlier this year: to use force against anyone who threatens America’s core interests, but to mobilize partners wherever possible to address broader challenges to international order.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the speech, again, we’re joined by two guests, Ambassador Peter Galbraith, former adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government, and Trinity College professor Vijay Prashad. Vijay Prashad, do you think the U.S. should be bombing at all?

VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, you know, there’s a big difference between bombing from the sky to, you know, destroy the advance of something like the Islamic State, and to give close air support. And I think that this is the confusion, is what exactly is the United States prepared to do? Is it prepared to wipe out the city of Raqqa? Or does it want to give close air support to people on the ground who are fighting directly and engaging with the group, the Islamic State? In Syria, as far as I can see in, unless there is a serious political discussion between all the parties, there is no way that you can reconstitute a significant enough fighting force that will be able to take on the Islamic State. It seems that the United States wants to have it both ways: on the one side, take on the Islamic State, and on the other side, continue with promoting chaos inside Syria. You cannot promote chaos and take on the Islamic State. You have to pick one particular strategy, and Mr. Obama actually has chosen both. Bombing is not a panacea, unless there’s a real strategy of how you’re going to defeat the Islamic State on the ground.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ambassador Galbraith, what about this issue of the president saying that he believes he has the authorization to be able to carry out these actions and says he would welcome a vote by Congress but doesn’t feel he needs it? I’d like to ask you about that specifically in relationship to Syria itself.

PETER GALBRAITH: I spent 14 years working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, from '79 to ’93, and repeatedly the issue of the War Powers Act came up. It was enacted to prevent another Vietnam, but the kind of conflicts that we've had since then have been much smaller scale. The Congress is not serious about having a role in making decisions about these kinds of interventions. And presidents, when they really want to do it, are not interested in getting congressional support. So I think this is really an academic debate that is not of much interest to the American people, not to the foreign policy community. Frankly, it’s a sideshow.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you agree with that, Professor Prashad?

VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, you know, I don’t have the kind of experience in Washington, D.C., but I do think that a lot of what happens in American foreign policy making, or has happened in the last few years, is much more for domestic consumption than it is actually about the problems around the world. If you just take the examples that Mr. Obama said yesterday of successes, you know, he mentioned Yemen and Somalia. Well, that’s news to the people of Somalia and Yemen that the American strategy has been a success. Indeed, Yemen, principally because it’s out of the American news, appears to be a quiet place, but it’s definitely not a quiet place for the people of Yemen. In fact, the problems in Yemen have since compounded. And even in Somalia, where the leader of al-Shabab was assassinated recently, there was a bomb blast. And, you know, I don’t know, they counted about 20 people dead. So it’s not clear that—when foreign policy decision making is made in the public domain in the United States, it’s not clear that that’s directly in the interests of people overseas or whether it’s for domestic consumption. And it seems to me this is much more for domestic consumption than it is for the actual pragmatic problems for people in that region.

AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Prashad [sic], the issue of Saudi Arabia, I believe—rather, Ambassador Galbraith, Saudi Arabia, I think Secretary of State Kerry is there today. Saudi Arabia as a funder of the Islamic State and the U.S. role as an ally with Saudi Arabia, do you think it is putting the proper pressure it should, whether we’re talking about Saudi Arabia, whether we’re talking about Qatar, whether we’re talking about Jordan?

PETER GALBRAITH: Well, the first point is that these countries don’t see the situation as we do. As far as they’re concerned, the top threat is Iran, and then probably the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Islamic State would be in third place. So, to the extent that the Islamic State is useful in fighting the Iranian-backed regime in Iraq and in Syria, they are much more ambivalent. And that raises a question about a strategy of having the Saudis involved in training the so-called moderate Islamic opposition. And there’s always a question about whether the Saudis are moderate in this matter.

But the other problem in Syria, which I think people don’t focus on, is some 35 percent of the Syrian population is not Sunni Arab. That is to say, they are Alawites, Christian, Druze, other religious minorities and Kurds. And the striking thing about this opposition is that it doesn’t include significant support from any of those communities. The Alawites fear, with very good reason, that if the opposition were to prevail, even the moderates, that they would face genocide. So even if they don’t like Assad, he’s an Alawite, and at least he’s there and capable of preventing genocide.

Now, the one thing that I think was—one of the things that I think was good in the president’s speech, which hasn’t been remarked on, is he made a distinction between trying to eliminate ISIS and having a political settlement in Syria. And I think there’s no prospect that the Syrian war can be resolved militarily. I think it’s going to be very difficult to do it politically. But at least there’s a recognition in his speech that as far as the Assad regime goes, we’re not looking at a military defeat, we’re looking at a political settlement. And I think that’s right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Vijay Prashad, what would you see as the solution to the continuing crisis in Iraq and Syria? And how does the United States counter this view in the Arab and Muslim world that it’s going from one country to another seeking to impose its solutions on the local domestic conflicts?

VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, Juan, I’ll put it in two different ways. I was actually struck by President Obama’s use of words like "Shia" and "Sunni," very loosely used, and I don’t think this is helpful. I think the most important direction is to create a rapprochement, for the United States to work towards creating a de-escalation and rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Unless the United States is able to bring these two countries or at least help bring these two countries to the table, there is going to be continued chaos in the region. And in fact, there has been an opportunity to bring them together, and that was the ill-starred Syria contact group which was formed by Egypt in 2012, which had the most important countries in the region sit around the table, and that was Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Egypt. I think something like that needs to be reconstituted. I utterly agree with Ambassador Galbraith that from the standpoint of Riyadh, they still see Iran as the principal threat. And if this continues to happen, well, God help the Middle East, because the most important thing is to de-escalate the tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia. It is what is principally going to be an impediment to any—let’s not say "peace," but any de-escalation of the immense violence that has inflicted Syria and Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Prashad, the same question to you about the role of Saudi Arabia in all of this?

VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, I mean, it’s a curious business. Again, like Ambassador Galbraith, I agree. It’s a serious question whether Saudi Arabia has moderate goals in the region. I mean, the fact is that their cutout in Syria, which is Jaysh al-Islam, was not at all considered a moderate group. I mean, people have worried about the people that Saudi officially has been financing. Forget the private financing from Saudi, Qatari and Kuwaiti sheikhs; the official organization itself is not moderate. So how does that give people confidence that the new force that will be constituted, you know, after the Islamic Front, the Southern Front, and this will be the third attempt—how are we confident that this is going to be moderate? I think, you know, this is really hoping against hope for some kind of development which there is no evidence to indicate can happen—in other words, the making of a moderate military force through the good auspices of Saudi Arabia.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ambassador Galbraith, I’d like to ask you about Iraq specifically. You’ve argued in some of your writings that the national project of Iraq is essentially a failed project and that, especially in terms of the Kurds, greater independence would probably be a better route. How do you see what is going to be happening in Iraq, even assuming the United States is able to prevail against the Islamic State with the support of the local Iraqi and Syrian militias or fighters?

PETER GALBRAITH: Well, Iraq had broke apart a long time ago. Kurdistan in the north is, in all regards, an independent state with its own parliament, army. We’re now supplying it directly. We speak of it, you know, as if it were also an independent state. And there’s no way that it’s going to go back to be just a region of Iraq. The president of Kurdistan said he’s going to have a referendum on independence. I think that’s probably been put off for a while. But the operative thing is "put off for a while."

And with regard to Sunnis and Shiites, the problem is that the Sunnis ran Iraq for its first 90 years and their policy was to keep the Kurds in and the Shiites down. Since 2003, the Shiites, who are the majority, have been in charge. It has been a—the last three prime ministers have come Dawa, a Shiite religious party. They seek to define Iraq as a Shiite state with close ties with Iran. That’s unacceptable to the Sunnis. And there’s no way that Sunnis are going to turn against ISIS and work with a government that they see doesn’t really include them, and indeed is hostile to them.

And the president made a lot in his speech of this national unity government. That was the basis for the strategy. But there isn’t one. The Kurds, of the 30 Cabinet ministries, they got three. They haven’t actually even named their people. By their strength in Parliament, they should have had twice as many. They didn’t want to join the government. They did so—and they’ve said this very clearly—only because of very intense U.S. pressure, and because of the deadline of President Obama’s speech. The Sunnis, the members of the government, if any of them live in the Sunni areas of Iraq, they can’t go home. So they aren’t really representing the people who are there. And also, none of those tensions have been solved. Abadi is really—although he speaks better, maybe isn’t as dour and paranoid as his predecessor, he comes from exactly the same party, exactly the same approach, that of a centralized state that is not going to be accommodating to either the Kurds or the Sunnis. So, this national government is not real, and that’s a fundamental problem with the strategy.

AMY GOODMAN: Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday the rapid rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria can be attributed to the failure of President Obama to assert American influence in the region.

DICK CHENEY: ISIS does not recognize a border between Syria and Iraq, so neither should we. We should immediately hit them in their sanctuaries, staging areas, command centers and lines of communication, wherever we find them. We should provide significantly increased numbers of military trainers, special operations forces and intelligence architecture and air power to aid the Iraqi military and the Kurdish Peshmerga in their counteroffensive againstISIS. We work to defeat ISIS and prevent the establishment of a terrorist safe haven in the heart of the Middle East. We must move globally to get back on offense in the war on terror.

AMY GOODMAN: Aside from criticizing the Obama administration, is what President Obama is doing that different from what Dick Cheney wants, Vijay Prashad?

VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, not really, except, of course, firstly, it’s a hubris matter to take Dick Cheney seriously, who after all was one of the architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which, you know, basically broke the state up completely and provided the opportunity for Iraqi society, which had never really had any kind of al-Qaeda group, to incubate al-Qaeda. So, it’s an odd thing for him to now give advice. But on the other hand, what he’s saying is similar to what Mr. Obama is saying. He’s being more specific. I don’t know what intelligence he is reading, but it’s amazing to hear somebody talk about the Islamic State having command and control centers, supply routes. I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about. This is not a group that’s functioning in the way that he imagines. This is a very different kind of insurgency, much more fragmented. And I’m not sure that it’s going to be so easy to find targets from up on high without people on the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Ambassador Galbraith, the subtitle of your book isWar Without End. Are we now looking at a war without end?

PETER GALBRAITH: Yes. I think President Obama’s strategy may be able to degrade the Islamic State, but there isn’t the prospect of putting together a unified Iraqi government that is going to win over the Sunnis and make them partners in an effort to eradicate ISIS in the Sunni areas of the country. So, this is likely to continue for many years. And in Syria, you know, I thought Syria, in its demography, has a lot of similarities to Lebanon. And that civil war went on for 15 years, and it ended when Syria intervened. But there isn’t a Syria to intervene in Syria, so this war also could go on for decades. It’s a real tragedy for the peoples of that part of the world, and it’s going to be a challenge for U.S. and world foreign policy. We’ve had a lot of talk about pivoting from Europe to Asia, but inevitably we’re going to be focused on this part of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Galbraith, I want to thank you for being with us, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, worked on issues involving Iraq since the '80s, former adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government, now with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, among his books, Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies and The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. And thank you to Professor Vijay Prashad of Trinity College, author of a number of books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter and, most recently, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, what would Dr. King do? Stay with us.

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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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