Prime Time

THE ABSURD TIMES

 

 

 

 

Illustration: the fight never ends.

 

The maxim is that people get the government they deserve, but isn't the corollary true? Governments get the voters they deserve? When Biden ran against Trump, he was asked how Trump had a good economy. Joe's answer was "Like everything else, he inherited it." Right then, he had made up for all the manipulation corporate America did to eliminate Bernie. Trump eliminated himself. As Joe said during the debate, "Don't even try to get a sane answer from this clown."

 

Unfortunately, Joe inherited a raging pandemic the clown pretended was nothing and later took credit for the vaccine (the technology had been developing for 20 years) while Joe actually got it distributed. The delaying he inherited made it worse, but it is better now. Now we are in the midst of all sorts of coup investigations and prosecutions, some of those sentenced to 3 years in prison broke out in tears – hey, Proud ones, man up! Aren't they the ones with the raging testosterone?

 

Soon we will be dealing with more of the shit, even though we are wading in it increasingly. We really need to find the Bull, indict him, and put him away. Believe me, his family will not make a single sacrifice for him, although they may try to benefit from his fall. As his cousin Mary Trump so accurately points out, "All communication in that family is transactional." Count on it.

 

So what about the mob of idiots (you know, the ones that cry when they are found out) left over? For awhile, other, pardon the expression, Republicans will try to emulate him. They may be smarter and more intelligent, but they lack his marketing instincts.  Perhaps Ted Cruz will wind up leading the charge, much to the surprise of Ron DeSantis (you know, they guy who lost millions of tax dollars to Mickey Mouse or Disney).

 

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Ukraine is also pretty much of a mess so far as knowing what is really going on.  After all, who is the good guy and who is the bad guy? Before you answer suddenly, consider a few things. A kind of madness grips the country once it decides it is at war with another country. I think the process is the same in any country in any time. Reading about behavior in England while it was at war with Prussia confirmed this for me. The enemy is pictured as the very embodiment of evil while "we" are just standing up for all sorts of virtues.

 

It has been a bit strange in this country. Things began to turn with the feckless adventure in Viet Nam, bringing no gain to any other country except perhaps China. As American citizens were gathered up, much like the slaves from Africa as those who actually liked the idea of having their own gun diminished, American youths started to object. The country became a veritable divided looney bin. Things like the "Domino Theory" were invented to justify it, invented by a 99 year old guy who now charged over $1,000/hour just to sit in front of him, but it was pertty much a joke. Finally, we were ridiculed out of that adventure, with only the weapons industry benefiting. Some time after, all other such adventures were opposed.

 

Well, sometime later some guy up in Sweden held a bunch hostage and it turned out, they tended to agree with him. Behaviorism was still the primary Psychological paradigm then, so the term "Stockholm Syndrome" became vogue.  (It also gave mankind water-boarding and Abu Garab.) What it was trying to do is say that anyone against war was psychologically unbalanced. That way, we could have all the wars we wanted and you would be crazy to oppose them. More importantly, it became easier to give money to weapons manufacturers, the real purpose anyway. Additionally, during the Viet Nam era, there was an argument that it was immoral to draft people when they are not able to vote. This resulted in the voting age being lowered. The same happened with consumption of alcohol. Eventually, Nixon eliminated all objection by instituting a lottery and eliminating any exemptions. End of conscription. Realizing how stupid the entire thing was, Jimmie Carter granted an amnesty to anybody who went to Canada or otherwise expatriated themselves.

 

Other wars passed despite overwhelming objection, but the arms factories had to keep being funded. The results were insane, but now we have what seems to be a tidy solution: Ukraine. No Americans are required to be involved (in fact, we prefer it that way) and still we support a thriving arms industry. Meanwhile, the media has a great time of it being patriotic by relaying atrocities committed by Russia (evil folks, they are).  Clearly, regions of Eastern Ukraine are populated by ethnically and linguistically Russian people and we are told they don't like Russia. Well, I've heard a few direct statements from some unidentified Ukrainians that they would rather be with Russia, but that is by no means a reliable measurement. This situation seems to satisfy the media (with the exception of Fox and others of that ilk that people like Shepherd Smith and Mike Wallace escaped). 

 

 

 

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So, talking about this particular war is pretty much meaningless and will remain so. The real danger to which attention should be paid is a possible civil war here.  We all could have seen the coup attempt on January 6, 2022, staged to keep #45 in power.  There are contenders to his position, people who are more educated and clever, but they do lack his rhetorical flair and marketing skills. There are enough citizens fed up enough with the damage he has already done and that may frustrate the take over, but only locking him up will provide any real safety.  He and his imitators all know better than to believe much of what they say, but that is irrelevant.  Unless this midterm election keeps a non-maga majority in control of both chambers in congress, we face real danger. There are some people in Biden's cabinet who are younger and more palatable, but they all have some short comings that may make them weak in voter appeal. I don't know right now, but the next election is crucial.

 

One bit of trivia: I have recently seen a U.S. government poster with an image of Stalin, making him look almost saintly and with the caption OUR FRIEND AND ALLY.  I can not find it online anywhere despite searches, but it does illustrate how reality and presentation too often differ.

 

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Just a bit of advice for AIPAC. When the brownshirts marched in time, they shouted YOU WILL NOT REPLACE US – JEWS WIL NOT REPLACE US, (repeat). Here is the idea behind CRT. Like many, at first I was quite confused about it, thinking that it probably had something to do with Critical Theory, a very subtle form of mixing culture and political thought, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and so on. Race had something to do with bigotry here. Well, it turned out that CRT had nothing to do with anything so subtle. When it is used by members of the Brownshit, er Brownshirt, faction of the Republican party, it just means anything not supporting white supremacy. Of course, the theory goes, the blacks and brown don't have the brains to organize anything so complicated, so that's where the Jews come in. Instead of trying to get the U.S. to bomb Iran, put your energy into watching things here.

 

 

Our Border?

THE ABSURD TIMES

Sometimes there is a need for more than one illustration.  Here is how Trump's visit to the U.K. will be greeted:

And here is how he is prophesized here:

And now, we consider the immigration problem.

These are very strange times and H. P. Lovecraft could never have imagined anything as strange as what we are facing.

Trump's immigration policy has resulted in some very surrealistic images and perhaps that is the only way to really discuss them.  It is true that judges down at the Texas southern border are supposed to conduct trials of undocumented children, so as young as two or three years old.  I tired to imagine what that scene looked like.

The defendant was a three year old child with no attorney since, as a non-resident, he did not qualify for a legal defense, especially or even a Public Defender.  The judge called the court to order and the prosecutor, an employee of the Federal Government stood up and made his opening remarks as to why bail should be denied and then sat down.  The judge turned to the child and asked, apparently with a straight face, "And what is your response?"  The child said "Agua" and that was it.  Yes, these are strange times.  There is no information on what happened next, although any judge in his or her right mind would would immediately dismiss the case.  That does not mean anything, however, as this happened in Texas during Trump.

Later that same day, someone posted a video of a cop down in Texas pointing a pistol at a group of ten year olds who were were protesting his strangling of a 16 year old, all of them shouting "Agua" or something else at him.  The cop is now on desk duty and that story is over for now.

Yes, it is a strange time for the sane and one wonders how we got here.  Of course, it is the age of Trump and intellectually perverted candidates are on a list of SCOTUS nominees.  One has been "chosen," and he is no Justice Garland, although he is the one who has published the most.  Of course, that is of litter interest to Trump and things that are published are written down and then have to be read, but somehow he has decided on him.

So, it has become time to explore how these people wound up at the border and what gangs they are fleeing.  It turns out that unlike the Chicago Cops of the 60s where they came from local high school gangs, these are American Military trained groups sent to fight communism and any other sort of human concerns.  Like Norriaga, who was trained for us at what was then called the "School of the Americas," they are all products of our own device.  The following interview makes that clear:

Across the United States, thousands of migrant children remain detained alone after the Trump administration forcibly separated them from their parents at the border. Yet, despite the news about the United States' human rights abuses of migrants, asylum seekers keep risking the dangerous journey to the United States. Texas-based human rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury has lived in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas for more than 40 years and has long worked with people fleeing violence in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. She also knows intimately the U.S. roots of this conflict. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, was a Mayan comandante and guerrilla who was disappeared after he was captured by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan army in the 1980s. After a long campaign, she found there was U.S. involvement in the cover-up of her husband's murder and torture. We speak with Jennifer Harbury in Brownsville, Texas, about this history and this U.S. involvement in today's conflicts in Central America.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: I want you to tell that story of Everardo, of Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, your husband, for especially young people who maybe weren't even born at that time. But to understand the roots of the violence today, talk about what happened. Your campaigning for him was, you know, one of the remarkable moments of protest, in your protest and also what you found out.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, as you said earlier, he was a Mayan Indian campesino. He had grown up starving. He was involved in the—what I call the Mayan resistance movement, which was part of the URNG resistance forces during the massacre campaign, etc., etc. He was captured alive. He was one of their highest-ranking officials, and he was captured alive on March the 12th, 1992, by the military. And they realized who he was and how much valuable intelligence he had. So, instead of—instead of killing him outright, which is what they did with 99.9 percent of the prisoners of war, they kept him alive, with the help of physicians, while they tortured him long term, with the goal of breaking him for his information. And I'm pretty sure, from the evidence I have in the CIA files, that he survived two-and-a-half to three years of torture at the hands of the military intelligence people. That team of his torturers, including the former president of Guatemala, they were all intelligence paid officials for the military who were also working for the CIA.

And I set out to search for him as soon as he disappeared, because we weren't convinced he'd been killed in combat. The army faked his death to better take advantage of his intelligence. They didn't want Amnesty—Amnesty to be crying out, or the U.N. interfering, or the Inter-American Commission.

AMY GOODMAN: And didn't you even go to a military base, where they said, "This is the coffin that Everardo was in"?

JENNIFER HARBURY: I went to a military base, where they said he might be buried under the base, along with between 500 to 2,000 other people. I'm pretty sure that's not where he is. But they faked his death. They told us he was in an unmarked grave in Retalhuleu. And at the same time, about a week after he disappeared, they sent a memo to both the White House and the State Department saying, "Oh, the army just captured Bámaca alive. He's a very, very important catch. They're going to fake his death, so they can better take advantage of his information and so that they can torture him." That was six days after he was picked up. I ended up on a long series of hunger strikes, three total, one of them for 32 days in front of the palace down there.

AMY GOODMAN: Back with human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury on her husband's death, in 20 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our conversation with immigration lawyer Jennifer Harbury when I was in Brownsville, Texas, last week, where she represents people seeking political asylum in the U.S. I played for her a clip of the documentary Dirty Secrets: Jennifer, Everardo & the CIA in Guatemala, a film about the murder of her husband, the Mayan guerrilla and comandante Efraín Bámaca Velásquez in the '80s.

JENNIFER HARBURY: I want to save my husband's life. I'm not going to allow him to be tortured for two-and-a-half years in a secret army prison and then shot to death or assassinated as if he was some kind of garbage. I'd rather die. I would literally rather die. And I'm prepared to do so if I have to.

I want people to understand what it means to have someone disappeared in their family. And I want people to understand what that whole system of terror against a civilian population is about.

When you're looking for someone you care about, you know, you don't sleep anymore. You just stop sleeping. You wonder every single minute, you know, "Am I fighting hard enough? Are they shooting him right now? You know, are they burning him right now? Are they pulling his fingernails out right now? You know, maybe I should be trying harder. Maybe I should be fighting harder."

AMY GOODMAN: That's a clip from Dirty Secrets: Jennifer, Everardo & the CIA in Guatemala. This is when you were on hunger strike in Guatemala City outside the U.S. Embassy there?

JENNIFER HARBURY: The very first hunger strike was in front of the Politécnica, close to the U.S. Embassy, but it's their army intelligence building. And it looks like the Wicked Witch of the West castle, with cannons and machine gun turrets. That was seven days. The second one, that appears in this clip, was in front of the National Palace, the government seat, and that was 32 days, water only. And then the very last one was in Washington, because they weren't assisting me. And that lasted 12 days, before the disclosures came out, with Congressman Torricelli, that my husband had indeed been killed by military intelligence officials, who were also working as paid informants of the CIA.

AMY GOODMAN: And link that to what we're seeing today. So, that was the violence of the 1980s, the U.S.-backed death squads in Guatemala. You really helped to expose this through your own personal experience. How does that relate to people coming over the border in the United States?

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, let's take the example of Julio Roberto Alpirez, the colonel, right? He was witnessed torturing my husband in person. He's also known by the CIA to have helped murder Michael DeVine, a U.S. citizen innkeeper in Guatemala. There are also plenty of CIA files that say he excelled in his task of liquidating not only the guerrillas but all of their sympathizers—in other words, villagers—in the Highlands during the worst of the campaign, and that he was somewhat brutal and not well liked by his fellow military.

So, start with that person as an example. He received $44,000 shortly after he, in person, tortured my husband. He injected him with an unknown substance, out of a cylinder of gas, that made his body swell enormously, so badly that one arm and leg were bandaged because they had hemorrhaged, and he was bending over the torture table. Torricelli named him as one of those people. DEA records show that he's also on the DEA corrupt officer list. He's known to be a drug runner, a cartel leader. What did they do when the disclosures were made by Torricelli? The CIA protected him. He's their asset. They sent him and his whole family to Washington, where he lived happily for 10 years in secret, not far from the CIA. When I found out, so that I would go file a Torture Victims Protection Act case on him, the CIA notified him and immediately sent him back to Guatemala so that he could avoid any consequences. And the DEA is not allowed to take him down, because he's a CIA asset and partner for many, many years, and that's forbidden.

So there are many high-level cartel people who engaged in genocide and daily acts of torture, who now are the heads of cartels. The terrifying Zeta gang, for example, was out of Guatemala and formed by military leaders. It's also composed of many collaborators in the military still and by different police people. So these cartels are fantastically armed and trained to carry out village-by-village massacres, let alone bending people to their will. They're terrifying. I mean, some women from the Río Negro massacre, back in 1980, were not long ago found in the city dump with their teeth pulled out and their breasts and hands amputated. And those kinds of mutilations, we remember. Those are those military people. These are not street gangs. These are not kids. These are not people we have no idea who they are. The head of the Salvatrucha gang was just discovered to be a military leader in Guatemala who had been working in the anti-gang unit hand in glove with U.S. military people. They really didn't know?

AMY GOODMAN: So, that takes us to MS-13, to another country—that's El Salvador—who President Trump says he is protecting us from the gang, the MS-13 gangs in Salvador. How does that relate to what you're talking about in Guatemala?

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, of course, the MS-13 had a lot of its roots in the United States, and then those people were deported back to Salvador. There's a whole lot of history where actually that—that happened in the United States, just as these military intelligence people that went back down there. Those people are firmly entrenched. And then the U.S. is not so much going after them as they are the victims of those people, the people running up here—the woman with two small children on her back, barefoot; the 15-year-old who's seven months pregnant from a gang rape; the man, the young man, 20 years old, with 17 bullets through his legs, that could show me the scars.

A 20-year-old who fled north after the second time the gangs told him they would kill him and the people close to him if he didn't join, he's cannon fodder at that age. And he said, "No," again, took his wife and baby, and fled north, called his mom to say, "I'm coming back for the rest of you. I'm coming right now." The day after he left, the gangs had bludgeoned his mother and younger brother to death and had gang-raped his 12-year-old sister, who was in a mental hospital, unable to speak. That young man has been sent back to Salvador.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to the Zetas and their connection to Special Forces, to training. The Zetas—a 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable that was published by WikiLeaks shows at least one Zeta, former infantry lieutenant named Rogelio Lopez, trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, many people, such as Julio Roberto Alpirez, who I keep mentioning because he's such a template, right? Many of them were trained at the School of the Americas, in torture and kidnapping techniques, and they used them. And then, when the war was over, they kept using them in the same way. And if we would release the files on the human rights violations and massacres committed by all of those people, then the war crimes claims that are—that people are valiantly trying to bring in Central America, something could be done. Those people could be put in prison, and then maybe we would have a lessening of the terror that's being used to drive people north in order to more easily run the drug cartels.

AMY GOODMAN: Where are the Zetas based?

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, they were up here for quite a while, near Reynosa. They came originally out of Guatemala and southern Mexico. They were up here and owned the riverfront here for quite a while. They were pushed out a few years ago by the Golfo cartel. But in Reynosa now, they captured the—the army had captured the highest-level person, and they've captured or killed several lower-level ones. So that's fractured, and the Zetas are coming back. And they're all fighting each other, and they're fighting the Mexican Army and the Mexican marines. So there's nonstop shootouts.

Anyone that's deported to Reynosa, they're lucky if they can get off the bridge without being immediately grabbed, because they know they'll have someone up north. People struggling north, you know, with their babies and stuff, they're lucky if they don't get trafficked and grabbed. It's completely unsafe in Reynosa.

And the Zetas are clearly trying to come back, because a group of people recently paid off the correct cartel, what's left of the Golfo, got to mid-river and were shot to death, with no explanation. And that's almost for sure the Zetas coming back, saying, "Oh, you paid the wrong guys."

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Jennifer Harbury, the well-known human rights activist and attorney. And she is also well known now all over the country for having gotten the news organization ProPublica the tape of children, babies, infants, toddlers, children of tender age, crying out for their parents, saying, "Mama," "Papi." Let's go to that clip.

CHILD: [crying] Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá!

AMY GOODMAN: So, Jennifer Harbury, you're the person who got this audiotape out. Describe how this happened.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, the true hero, of course, is the whistleblower. And he was present in the building nearby to these children, who had just been separated from their parents recently and who were just crying desperately and in fear, the way you just heard. That whistleblower brought the tape to me, and we discussed the legal issues and stuff. And the whistleblower authorized me to get it through to the press, which is what we did.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know—can you tell us what detention center it's from?

JENNIFER HARBURY: I'd best not.

AMY GOODMAN: And how old the children were?

JENNIFER HARBURY: The children that you hear weeping would have been possibly as young as 3, up to 6 or 7. And in the background, not weeping, are some older children that are still minors.

AMY GOODMAN: And one child who keeps on repeating the phone number of her aunt.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Remarkable.

AMY GOODMAN: Has she been reunited with her family?

JENNIFER HARBURY: I don't think she has yet. I may be wrong on that, but I believe she's still trying to get reunited with her family.

AMY GOODMAN: Even though her mother has called up and said that "This is my daughter," and her aunt has confirmed that that is her number?

JENNIFER HARBURY: Even with that. And—

AMY GOODMAN: So a judge in San Diego has just ruled that these children must be reunited with their parents—under 5 in 14 days, all children in 30 days. So, what's going to happen? Is this possible?

JENNIFER HARBURY: It's possible, if they really want to put the time and attention into it that they must. The problem, of course, is that so many people within ICE and Border Patrol feel that these refugees are just kind of trash and should not be coming to our country in the first place, that things can't be that bad back home, even though you can read that they have the highest murder rates in the world. So, I'm not sure how much—how hard they're going to try. There can be spelling mistakes in a name. And, of course, in most of Central America, instead of saying June the 10th, 1984, they're going to say 10th June, 1984, so that can be transposed sometimes, making it harder to find the person. But if they want to find the parents, of course they can. And if they want to release them immediately, of course they can. They always used to.

AMY GOODMAN: So, as we sit here, a major protest about to take place right behind us at the federal courthouse, a courthouse you know well, right here in Brownsville.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: What message do you have for people across the country?

JENNIFER HARBURY: I think first we have to wake up and understand the basic flaw in the administration's argument that they're protecting us from cartels and terrorists and so forth. The people we are punishing are moms, kids, fathers, young teenagers that don't want to be trafficked, young men that are saying, "No, I won't work with the cartels." They're running for their lives. If the cartels wanted to send people to cross the river, as I said earlier, they can—they can buy the airport. They have bought several police units in Texas already. They can buy real—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, a whole elite piece of our—of the police force here, not long ago, was found out to have been working with the cartels. That was very—

AMY GOODMAN: Here in Brownsville.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Not in Brownsville, up towards McAllen, in Hidalgo County. And it's inevitable, with that kind of money. They have no need to send a desperate person who speaks no English, in raggedy clothing, to try to swim the river. They don't need that. They just buy the passports. They buy the visas that are legitimate. And they can do whatever they want. So, we need to understand the difference.

Once we understand the difference, I think it becomes very clear what we have to do: protect the refugees. Protect them. Don't leave them on the bridge to go into heat stroke. Don't leave them to miscarry a child after you've been gang-raped. I mean, what are we thinking that we would declare war and bring down total abuse on people that have just run for their lives?

AMY GOODMAN: In the countries they're mainly running from—Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala—

JENNIFER HARBURY: And much of Mexico.

AMY GOODMAN: And Mexico.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Much of Mexico, and also parts of Africa—not the cartels there, but genocide and anti-gay stuff.

AMY GOODMAN: In places like Honduras, where the U.S.—back to when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, the U.S. supported a coup in Honduras. And then, even the Organization of American States saying the last election was not legitimate, the U.S. continues to support that government. How does that link, what's happening there, to the violence there?

JENNIFER HARBURY: We keep supporting our military allies. It was President Otto Pérez Molina in Guatemala, was one of the intelligence leaders responsible for my husband's three years of torture. And they knew that when he was running for office, and the State Department still covered for him, saying he was a reformist, for example. But what we're doing is we're—through our intelligence agencies, we're still giving massive support and protection to keep these military units in place and in total power over each of these countries, so that they'll do what we want with their countries. And in return, we cast a blind eye. Well, they set up these hideous drug-running cartels that are chasing these people up here and which eventually are going to land right here. And there already are signs of that in Texas. And if we haven't done our part to put those people in prison by releasing our files and halting military support for them, through elections and otherwise, then we're going to get what we deserve.

AMY GOODMAN: Human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury. I spoke to her on the border in Brownsville, Texas, last week. This is Democracy Now!I'm Amy Goodman.

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SURVEILLANCE

SURVEILLANCE STATE CAN BE FUNNY

I must say that Luke Harding is able to look at this and laugh a bit, although he also seems to see absurdity as something amusing, not threatening.

Now imagine your own reaction.  You have a computer, brand new, never been hooked up to the Internet.  You are writing a manuscript about the Snowden papers.  You are sitting there, pausing for a second, and by itself, the cursor starts to backspace, deleting characters as it goes.  You are unable to even act to stop it before an entire paragraph or two has been deleted.  Isn’t that a bit freaky?

I mean, it’s enough to speed up the auto save function on your word processor.  I’m going to change that right now and then upload this interview:

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2014

"The Paragraph Began to Self-Delete": Did NSA Hack Computer of Snowden Biographer & Edit Book Draft?

Is the National Security Agency breaking into computers and tampering with unpublished manuscripts? Award-winning Guardian journalist Luke Harding says paragraphs of his writing mysteriously disappeared when he was working on his latest book, "The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man." "I wrote that Snowden’s revelations had damaged U.S. tech companies and their bottom line. Something odd happened," wrote Harding in The Guardian. "The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish." Harding joins us to talk about the computer monitoring and other times he believes he was being tracked.

TRANSCRIPT

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

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the latest on the growing surveillance state.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: [Recently, we learned that our governments], working in concert, have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance, watching everything we do. Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the book—microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us—are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem, because privacy matters.

AMY GOODMAN: Those are the words of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, speaking in December.

We turn now to the remarkable story of British journalist Luke Harding, who says he became the target of surveillance himself while reporting on Edward Snowden. Harding recently published The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man. On Friday, he revealed that while he was writing the book on his computer, paragraphs of the book would begin to self-delete. He repeatedly saw the cursor move rapidly from the left, gobbling text. And that wasn’t the only time he felt he was being monitored. Luke Harding joins us now via Democracy Now! video stream from The Guardian newsroom in London.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Luke. Tell us what happened.

LUKE HARDING: Well, before I do that, I think you have to understand the context, which is that the first few months of last year after Snowden’s leaks, both the U.S. and the British governments were scrambling to find out what he’d taken, how much he’d taken, why he’d taken it, and were really kind of clueless. And so, I think in that context it’s hardly surprising that the small number of journalists who were working on this material, including me, would have been targeted.

What happened was that I was writing my book. I was about halfway through. I had been to see Glenn Greenwald in Rio, in Brazil, to interview him, which was a kind of curious experience because Gleen is clearly very heavily surveilled by, I think, all sorts of people. Back at my home in the English countryside, I was writing kind of rather disparagingly, rather critically, about the NSA and its—the damage these revelations had done to Silicon Valley. And I was sitting back, working offline, I have to say, and, as you say, the text began rapidly deleting. And I thought, "Oh, my goodness! What is going on here?" This happened four or five times over a period of a month, to the point where I was actually, almost kind of jokingly, leaving little notes every morning to this kind of mysterious reader. And then, at one point, one of my colleagues mentioned this in a newspaper interview in Germany, and it suddenly stopped. So, I wrote this piece not because this was an especially sinister experience, but merely to kind of lay out the facts in what was another curious episode in an already quite surreal tale.

AMY GOODMAN: Luke, you describe in your most recent piece about an American who approached you when you were in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil.

LUKE HARDING: Well, that’s right. I mean, again, I said this—you know, I mean, it was quite funny, in a way. Essentially, what happened was that I met Glenn at a hotel by the seafront, and we had to shift locations several times because it was clear that there were various people who were trying to eavesdrop on our conversation, and we ended up in the business suite where we could actually physically lock the door behind ourselves. Subsequently, at my hotel, the Marriott, the next day, I was kind of accosted in the lobby by someone who looked as if they were straight out of CIAcentral casting, with a kind of military haircut and neatly ironed khaki shorts. And basically, he wanted to become my friend. He wanted to take me sightseeing. And it was a curious incident. I mean, you know, I say in my piece that he may have been a tourist, because of course there’s an innocent explanation for all of these things. But having talked to Glenn, one of the things he taught me was that the CIA in Rio especially was very aggressive. Glenn’s own computer had been stolen from the home where he shared with David Miranda just a few weeks previously. And it’s clear that there was a lot of U.S. intelligence activity going on there.

AMY GOODMAN: Remind us, Luke Harding, about the day the GCHQ came to call on The Guardian.

LUKE HARDING: Yeah, it was really, I think, one of the bizarrest episodes in the history of journalism. Essentially, the British government was extremely unhappy about our ongoing publication, from June the 5th onwards, of Snowden’s files, of the prison revelations, of Verizon and so on. And we came under increasing pressure, private pressure, backdoor pressure, from David Cameron, the British prime minister, who sent his most senior official, a guy called Sir Jeremy Heywood, to come and see us and basically say, "We can do this nicely, or we can go to law." In other words, he wanted this material back, and if we didn’t give it back, we were going to be injuncted. In other words, police would seize our computers and kind of shut down our reporting operation. And we explained that this was pointless, because Glenn had this stuff in Brazil; Laura Poitras, the filmmaker, had Snowden material in Berlin; The Washington Post similarly.

But the British government wasn’t listening, and this culminated in a hot Saturday morning last summer with three of my colleagues being forced to smash up our computers in the underground car park, four floors down from where I’m talking to you, watched by two spies from the British spy agency, GCHQ, who took photos on their iPhones to record the event, brought along a special machine called a degausser, which looks like a microwave oven. So we had to post the pieces of our bashed-up MacBooks into this degausser, which demagnetized them. And then these spies, who are based in the English countryside in a small provincial town called Cheltenham, they don’t get to London very often, the big city, and they left carrying bags of shopping, presents for their families. It really was a bizarre thing and, I think, for anyone who cares about press freedom, a pretty chilling thing, too.

AMY GOODMAN: While you were doing the work, while The Guardian was, and Glenn Greenwald was working for The Guardian, putting out the original pieces based on what Edward Snowden released from the National Security Agency, you write about how you were a part of this small team holed up in a room at The Guardian. Describe the security you had, and even your computers not being linked to the Internet.

LUKE HARDING: Yeah, it’s actually one floor up from here, so the computer smashing happened three floors down. The secret bunker is upstairs. And we knew that this was a serious—you know, the material that Snowden had entrusted to us, that this was a very serious undertaking. And we had a clear mission from him, which was to not publish anything which would damage legitimate intelligence operations, but to reveal mass surveillance, which we now all know about. And so, there were seven or eight of us, never any more than that, working in the room. We had security guards, around the clock, 24 hours, making sure that nobody who shouldn’t have been there was there. We left all electronics out. And we had four laptops and a PC, which had never been connected to the Internet, which were brand new, air-gapped at all times. We papered over the windows so nobody could see in from outside. And we—actually, to be honest, we were also kind of working against the clock. There was a sense that we needed to get as many stories out as we could, and in a responsible way, because we didn’t know when the British government would fall on us. And one other quite nice detail, cleaners were banned. Nobody was inside that room. So, very quickly, you know, I write in my book, it sort of resembled a kind of student dormitory with pizza wrappers, dirty coffee cups. So it was a pretty insalubrious working environment.

AMY GOODMAN: Has the GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, the equivalent of the NSA, and the NSA changed their practices in any way in this eight months since all of this information has begun to come out?

LUKE HARDING: Well, you would think the answer to that question, Amy, would be yes, but in reality the answer is no. And I find it very depressing. I mean, it’s been fascinating. You know, I’ve been to the U.S. several times researching the book, and there’s clearly a very lively debate, a polarized debate, going on. But what’s happening politically is very interesting. In Britain, for certainly the first four or five months, the entire political establishment was asleep, and it’s only really woken up, I’d say, in the last few months. And the message from David Cameron, the prime minister, has been, really, "Move along, nothing to see here." But I think, inevitably, one of the things you know when you look at these documents is that GCHQ and the NSA work so closely together. This becomes very clear. They’re practically one entity. So I think the reforms or "reforms" that Obama announced in January, on January 17th, will inevitably affect the work of GCHQ, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think of President Obama’s so-called "reforms"?

LUKE HARDING: Well, I mean, I think reform is rather a grand word. It seems to me they’re more face-saving tweaks, actually. I mean, the big takeaway is that theNSA will no longer listen to Angela Merkel’s cellphone or that of other "friendly" leaders. But I’ve just been in Europe doing various literary events there, and people are scratching their heads wondering whether their prime ministers, you know, are sufficiently friendly to—whether that means they will be bugged or not. They simply don’t know. And on the big thing, which is of course the collection of American metadata, telephony data, you know, tell me if I’m wrong, but that’s carrying on. OK, it may be administered by some new entity, but those programs, which Ed Snowden very bravely exposed, are still continuing.

AMY GOODMAN: And we just have 30 seconds. Google, Microsoft, have they changed their ways of operating at all as a result of all that has come out, and the other big companies?

LUKE HARDING: Well, I mean, I haven’t—I haven’t noticed major changes. I have noticed absolute panic and a really massive kind of PR campaign to try and assure everybody, from us—senior Google executives recently visited The Guardian—to the whole world, that they are not kind of complicit in this spying, and have been coerced into collaborating. But I still think there are some kind of big questions about how deep their involvement in all of this is.

AMY GOODMAN: Luke Harding, I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning foreign correspondent with The Guardian. His new book, just out, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man. He also recently wrote a piece in The Guardian called "Writing The Snowden Files: 'The Paragraph Began to Self-Delete.'"

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