THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Carlos Latuff Comes through again!

Last weekend we were actually appalled at the lack of information to reach or even be available to the vast majority of American Citizens. There was a great deal of consequence happening around the world, things that we were somehow involved in. Yet, anyone who relied on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, FOX, OR CNN had absolutely NO information on any of it. The following are just a few of things that were not covered. Most Americans knew that there was a lot of water and wind around and that is about it.

To obtain information on the stories below and any one of many other of such consequence, one had to reply on RT or PRESS (Russian and Iranian respectively) TV or perhaps read the Guardian or be very tied down to the keyboard and Twitter. This is the consequence of almost all the media here being owned by just 6 entities.

By now, some of this has flashed by the screen. It seems that Syria is being successful in restoring its democratically elected government despite extensive campaigns against it. There are at least 8 distinct organizations conducting terrorism against the government, at least two of which even our own government has classified as terrorist. Someone actually confirmed what we have been saying about these groups and their lack of understanding of us by saying that “they are so out of touch they think John McCain actually matters here.”

For some time, we have pointed out that our government was basically fascist, but we seemed alone in that. We found it refreshing that Ralph Nader agreed, giving a full definition of fascism (see below).

There were riots in Turkey and Frankfurt, Germany, just to name two. All riots were demonstrations against their governments’ following of our dictates. (see below).

The trial of Bradley Manning for “helping the enemy” started Monday, 3. He is the soldier who is accused of leaking documents to Wikileaks. He has been tortured and held in solitary confinement, often without clothing, for three years with no charges against him. That is, in itself, shameful of our government, but the documents he leaked were actually very low levels of classification. All they really did was provide further concrete examples of things we already knew simply through a simple process of induction.

One more example is our policy of assassination and rallying other countries against us. Our “Dirty Wars.”

I apologize for the length of this, but we do need to be caught up, Nicht Wahr?

MONDAY, JUNE 3, 2013

A Turkish Spring? Over 1,000 Injured as Anti-Government Protests Spread Outside of Istanbul

Turkey is seeing its biggest wave of protests against the ruling government in many years. Tens of thousands of people rallied across the country Sunday for a third consecutive day of mass demonstrations. The unrest erupted last week when thousands of people converged at Istanbul’s Taksim Square, a public space reportedly set for demolition. The protests have grown to include grievances against the government on a range of issues, and protesters have managed to remain despite a heavy police crackdown, including tear gas and rubber bullets. The Turkish government says around 1,000 people have been detained at more than 200 protests nationwide. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has dismissed the uproar as the work of political opponents and "extremists," vowing to proceed with governments plans to remake Taksim Square. "I cannot tell you how empowering this is," says Turkish scholar and activist Nazan Ustundag. "This is a country known for [police] brutality and for the Turkish people’s unquestioned loyalty to the state. So it’s very exciting all these different sections of people [are] standing [up for] the last public space which wasn’t given to private interests."

TRANSCRIPT

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

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Turkey, where protests that began last week in the capital have now brought tens of thousands into the streets in cities across the country. The demonstrations started last Monday when about a hundred activists in Istanbul tried to block the demolition of trees in Gezi Park by setting up Occupy-like encampment. They succeeded by sitting in the trees and blocking bulldozers, until early Thursday morning when police fired tear gas into the park and reportedly set their tents on fire around 5:00 a.m. By Friday, the protests had spread to the much larger Taksim Square nearby, one of the last public gathering spaces in the city. The square was already the focus of protests because of plans to tear it down and replace it with a shopping mall. By Friday, tens of thousands were drawn to Taksim Square by word of mouth and reports on social media, only to be met by a massive show of police force, including tear gas and rubber bullets.

Some say demonstrators were also upset over new laws passed last week that place strict new restrictions on alcohol. Among the most controversial new rules is a ban on sales of alcohol within 110 yards of a mosque or a school. This is one of the protesters.

PROTESTER: I think we feel that intervention in all parts of our lives. This is just the tipping point. I think that’s why.

AMY GOODMAN: Many people were injured as police tried to disperse the week-long protest. One widely shared photo showed an officer in Taksim Square wearing a face mask and directly spraying tear gas or pepper spray into the face of an unarmed young woman. Journalists were also reportedly targeted. Photos posted on Twitter show well-known Turkish investigative reporter Ahmet Şik bleeding after he was hit in the head with a police tear-gas canister. Still, protests continued throughout the weekend. On Saturday, the Turkish interior minister, Muammer Güler, said police had detained almost a thousand people at demonstrations across the country

MUAMMER GÜLER: [translated] There have been 939 detentions in various cities. Some of them have already been released, and some of them are arrested pending trial. During these protests, 26 police officers and 53 civilians were wounded. Nineteen of them are from Istanbul. One of the wounded is in critical condition.

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. ambassador to Turkey released a statement on the protests, saying, quote, "I wish a speedy recovery to all those injured; get well soon. But if you are asking me about U.S. foreign policy, as you know, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and the right to have peaceful protests are fundamentals of a democracy. I am not going to say anything further," he said.

As all of this unfolded, CNN-Turkey was widely criticized for airing a three-part documentary on penguins while CNN International was covering the protests. Few of the television stations in the country covered the protests while they were happening. And on Sunday, the Turkish prime minister, Tayyip Erdoğan, dismissed the unrest.

PRIME MINISTER TAYYIP ERDOĞAN: [translated] Unfortunately, we have been witnessing undesired incidents, attacks and provocations over the past few days. We are once again experiencing the traps that were sent in the past to threaten governments and create chaotic scenes in order to pave the way for interventions against democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Protests in solidarity with those in Turkey were also held around the world over the weekend, from New York to Belgium. The Turkish demonstrations are being compared to the Egyptian uprising that began in Tahrir Square and to the Occupy Movement that begins with—began with the occupation of Zuccotti Park near Wall Street.

For more, we go to Istanbul, where we’re joined by Koray Çalişkan. He is assistant professor of political science at a university in Istanbul. He participated in the protests, is now at his office, where he joins us via Democracy Now! video stream.

Professor, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you describe for us what is happening in the streets of Istanbul, in the capital Ankara and other places?

KORAY ÇALIŞKAN: Yes. Right now, in more than 60 cities of the country, there are more than a hundred demonstrations, bringing together more than three million people. The Taksim Square, the main avenue, this is like the Times Square of New York City, exactly. And imagine that there’s a public park, you know, this park right in front of the public library, and the president wants to build a shopping mall on a public park or cutting a part of Central Park to build a mall and a residential tower. This is what happened, what Prime Minister Erdogan wanted to do in Istanbul. And as you nicely put it, three days ago, 700 people gathered to protest this, and police gassed them. Next day, 7,000 people gathered in the same square, and the police gassed them. And on Saturday, 700,000 people came together, and then the police fled.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the tension that has clearly been mounting well before even these protests began in Istanbul.

KORAY ÇALIŞKAN: The triggering mechanism is—was to demolish that park, Gezi Park. However, this was the tip of the iceberg. The main problem was the increasing authoritarian regime of Islamist Erdogan government. First, we had the September 11th of Turkey. We lost a whole neighborhood of a district of Reyhanli, losing 51 people. And prime minister, instead of changing people’s attention to a different topic, decided to introduce a ban on wine and beer and other spirits in the country. And then, when people protested that, he said, "How come two drunk men can write a law, and what our religion, Islam, says cannot be a law?" And he was alluding to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder, the founding father of modern Turkey. You can be a Kemalist; you can be an anti-Kemalist—it doesn’t matter. There is some democracy in the country. You can raise your opinions. But he is the main hero of our only common story in this country. And when he looked down on Atatürk, it was a red line.

And afterwards, his mayor, from his own party, the mayor of Istanbul, said there won’t be any shopping mall or a residential center in that park. And his minister of culture, former minister of culture, said they are—they were not planning to build a mall on it. He said, "We are going to cut the trees, the park is going to go, and we’re going to bring a mall and a residential center in that city center." Everyone took to the streets. That’s what’s happened.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re speaking to Professor Koray Çalişkan, who is assistant professor of political science at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. We’re also joined by Nazan Üstündağ, who is an activist and scholar. She’s in the streets right now in Istanbul. Nazan, can you describe what has been happening there?

NAZAN ÜSTÜNDAĞ: Well, today or the last couple of days?

AMY GOODMAN: You can go through the whole weekend.

NAZAN ÜSTÜNDAĞ: Well, people have been arriving more and more. And since Thursday, there have been resistance against the police, and the police have been gassing people, and—but more and more people have joined. And now, basically, the whole main square of Taksim is occupied. Police cannot enter. And more and more cities are joining in.

AMY GOODMAN: And describe what people are saying in the streets and what the police response has been.

NAZAN ÜSTÜNDAĞ: Well, it all started with the park, but it has become bigger than the park. Basically, the whole—Istanbul has been under a variety of different renovation projects for a long time now. And people have not—and there have been—actually, AKP is foremost a neoliberal party. More than being Islamist, I would describe AKP as a neoliberal party. And it has applied all its neoliberal policies for a long time, and people have lost their—the spaces they were living in, because of the renovation projects, because of the reconstruction projects. And there hasn’t been a great resistance against it, because the economy was going well, there was the war in Kurdistan, so people were more concerned with the Kurdish problem. But with the park, all this resistance, all this dissatisfaction with the government has come out. It has started as a urban movement, actually, to protect the urban areas that AKP has been transforming without consulting with people. It has been transforming them without consulting with people for a long time now, without opening any democratic channels for people to participate in their—in the making of their urban futures.

So, everybody has a different reason for being here. Women have the—women are here because they have been attacked to their reproductive rights. There have been new laws passed for restricting abortion, which has been a relaxed issue in Turkey until very recently. There are the—there are LGBT people. They are here because last week there was a meeting in the Parliament about LGBT rights, but the government and people in the government have insulted, in various ways, them and their rights. So everybody has a different reason for being here. And because of the peace process that’s going on, I guess people have found, for the first time in 30 years, the space to react against the oppressive policies of—that have been culminating.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to come back to this discussion in a moment. We have to break. We’re speaking with going to take a break. We’re speaking to Nazan Üstündağ, who has been in the streets for the last days, activist and scholar, and Koray Çalişkan, who is an assistant professor of political science at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Back in a moment.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking about the mass protests in the streets, with, it’s believed, at least a thousand people injured and a number dead in the streets of Turkey. I want to go to the Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan’s comments about the protesters in Taksim Square in Istanbul and around the country.

PRIME MINISTER TAYYIP ERDOĞAN: [translated] They have been removing pavestones and breaking the windows of local stores. Is this democracy? They say Tayyip Erdoğan is a dictator. I have nothing to say if they call the person who has committed himself to serving his nation a dictator.

AMY GOODMAN: Prime Minister Erdoğan also condemned the way social media was used to spread the news about the protests. He said, quote, "There is now a menace which is called Twitter. ... The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society." I want to get the response of both of our guests. Nazan Üstündağ is with us, activist and scholar, and Koray Çalişkan, associate professor of political science at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Professor Çalişkan, first of all, it is my understanding that the prime minister of Turkey was one of the first Turkish leaders to sign onto Twitter and retweets quite a lot, if not him, his staff. But the significance of the blackout on news in Turkey, and his comments about social media?

KORAY ÇALIŞKAN: Yes, this is what happened. But we see this in every authoritarian leader in the Middle East. Twitter is a wonderful tool for people to edit their own newspapers and write comments about life and history. And Twitter usage is—has blasted in the next three days. Only in the last four days, my followers increased by 30 percent in the country. Right now, I just came back from the Department of Computer Engineering at Boğaziçi University, and I sat down with one industrial engineer, who works on bit data from Sabanci University, a computer scientist, Ani phon.. We are writing an article for the daily newspaper Radikal, imagining and analyzing this new, interesting relationship between Twitter and social political movements in the country.

The prime minister, Erdoğan, uses Twitter very well. But when people take to the streets against him, he looks down upon Twitter. Prime Minister Erdoğan says that he is also a follower of Atatürk. When it comes to talking about alcohol ban in the country, he says, "How come a drunken man cannot write a law, and our Islam—we don’t listen to our Islam?" So, he is an ultra-pragmatic leader who bends reality according to his own interests.

AMY GOODMAN: CNN International’s Ivan Watson was filing a report on live television when he started to cough after police used pepper spray in Istanbul’s Taksim Park. I want to go to an excerpt from Ivan’s report.

IVAN WATSON: You can see the riot police here in the central Taksim Square squaring off against demonstrators who are starting to set up burning barricades. They’re hurling rocks and bottles. It’s very overwhelming. And this is the commercial heart of Turkey’s largest city. This started as a protest movement against plans to bulldoze that park over there and replace it with a shopping mall.

AMY GOODMAN: At the end of that report, CNN’s Ivan Watson said it was hard to breathe without wearing a gas mask in the area near Taksim Square and Gezi Park. I’m wondering, Nazan, if you can talk about the police use of tear gas at the protests in Istanbul and Ankara and in other related demonstrations?

NAZAN ÜSTÜNDAĞ: We call this the gas state of the state, because it has been going on here for a very, very long time. This is not the first time that the police have been gassing us. As you might recall, in October there was a really large hunger strike in Turkey, 10,000—in the end, it culminated to 10,000 people. They were protesting also the government, because it had finished a peace process, which had started a couple of—three years ago. So—and during that time, this time it was the Kurds who were on—who had taken over the streets, and thousands and thousands of people were on the streets for weeks. And that was also a mass gassing of people. So, in Istanbul, people had witnessed that. And there are—I think there is a subconscious contamination, because we have seen, as Turks, how the Kurds have taken over the streets and how they have claimed actually their rights by taking the streets. And it was a legend—it was legendary how they bended one of the most authoritarian police force in the world to their wishes. I think we were subconsciously contaminated by it.

And I cannot believe that we can stand now this amazing tear gas, which prevents you from breathing and from talking and from doing anything. But I see people—I mean, I have seen, not now, but I have seen people standing in the midst of this gas without moving, and actually police had to, in the end, move. [inaudible] empowering. I cannot tell you how empowering this is, because this is a country which is—which has been known for its brutality of its police force and for actually Turkish people’s unquestioned—unquestioned loyalty to the state, to its own police forces and to its army. So it’s very exciting to see all these different sections of people standing against this gas, against this police force, and just to—and how it was actually initiated, just protect a park and achieve in that park the last resort, the last public space, where—which wasn’t given to private interests. And from that, now, in Beşiktaş, for people who know Istanbul, in all the neighborhoods, people are now trying to open up spaces, stateless spaces, where they collaborate and where they show solidarity with each other, where they share bandages, where they share lemons to protect each other from gas. So it’s very exciting to be here at this moment.

AMY GOODMAN: The mayor of Istanbul, Kadir Topbaş, said on Friday that the concerns about the demolition of Gezi Park and Taksim Square were not accurate. He said, quote, "It is simply the mandatory removal and transfer of trees in the area in order to enlarge the pedestrian walk. ... The work that will be done is not on the scale of a shopping mall, and what we see here is the exploitation of our nature-loving citizens with misinformation. ... Sadly there are those who exploit people over this, and who expect political gains from this." Professor, I would like to go to your response, Professor Çalişkan.

KORAY ÇALIŞKAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you—do you know the number of dead at this point? Doctors are saying more than a thousand wounded.

KORAY ÇALIŞKAN: More than a thousand wounded. I have may friends, at least 10, who are wounded. Unfortunately, we lost one person, and five people are in critical condition because of the tear gas that they had on their heads. The police is aiming at the head with their tear-gas bullets, and they maim people. They shot people on the head, on their bodies.

The mayor—what the mayor said is not right. This is a clear sign of looking down upon people’s intelligence. He is just telling that 700,000 Turks are so easily manipulated that 700,000 people can just follow a number of tweets, and they find themselves in Taksim Square. This is not the case. Turkish people know that they tried to—due to all the tweets of this park, by changing a corner of it. And the work started without any news about the nature of the work. If you start any construction project, Amy—it’s very much like New York City or Washington, D.C. A major construction project, even a minor one at a city center, should have a sign on it—the contractor, the permit, everything, all right? Even the budget should be written on the construction project, OK? There was nothing in Taksim Square. They started killing the trees, cutting them, and razing and taking the soil and moving it with bulldozers. And people said, "No." The mayor should not look down upon people’s intelligence on the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Nazan Üstündağ, where do you see this going? Can you talk about communicating with people in other cities, like in the capital Ankara, and also, in terms of the police, the targeting of the tear-gas canisters, aiming for heads, the reports we’re hearing over the weekend?

NAZAN ÜSTÜNDAĞ: Mm-hmm. Well, I really don’t—things like this, you know, are unpredictable. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Four demands have been pronounced. One of them is the banning of the tear gas, actually. The other is the release of people who have been arrested, and then, of course, the stopping of the mall project at Gezi Park. And there was one more that I can’t remember right now. So, there are four demands. And until these four demands are met, we are not going to leave this place. But this—I’m not sure that the police—at some point, the police will try to enter, and so the whole thing can start again. Actually, at night, there are other districts where people demonstrate, and when they demonstrate, the police arrive there. And there been—yesterday, actually, one person died because he was—I mean, he was actually run by a car during the demonstrations, during the fight against the police. So, the police did not kill him, but it was during the demonstration. So, we don’t really know how long—whether these demands will be met.

But the good news—and I would like to share this now to you, as well—there have been—unions are calling for a general strike, so the whole thing will take another form once the strike starts. And this will bring in new demands, once the workers join in. So, we are trying to—what we are expecting, I can—I think I can say this, for all of us who are here, to hear, once in this 10 years, the truth coming out through the lips of the president, saying something truthful, saying, you know, he has done something wrong, saying that people are protesting against him, saying that he has been pressuring the media to not to speak, not to give any news, saying that he has been—he hasn’t been doing the constitution that we have all been expecting for the last 10 years, saying that these renovation projects are oppressive, totalitarian projects, saying at least one of these, saying once in his lifetime something truthful. That’s all we are expecting.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about the president responding to this. The prime minister, Erdoğan himself, has just left, is that right? He was speaking to reporters before he began a four-day trip to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

NAZAN ÜSTÜNDAĞ: Right, yeah. I mean, I meant the prime minister. Sorry for saying "the president." I meant the prime minister. Yes, he has left. And that’s exactly what he has done during the hunger strikes, too. He has—that’s what he does. He just leaves the country and hopes for the best. And then, when he comes back and the best has not happened, so then he makes a concession, but pretending as if he doesn’t make the concession. But I don’t think this time concession will be enough.

AMY GOODMAN: And the number you estimate, Nazan, of dead in the protests?

NAZAN ÜSTÜNDAĞ: There hasn’t—I mean, I can’t—I can only tell you what the association of doctors is saying, and they are saying there hasn’t—there has been only one death due to police violence, and that has happened in Ankara. There are very, very badly wounded people, some of them in coma, but there has been only one dead until now. Thousands of people are injured. And a lot of people have lost their eyes because of the—I don’t know how you call it in English, these bullets that are not real, but—

AMY GOODMAN: Rubber bullets.

NAZAN ÜSTÜNDAĞ: Yeah, when they come to your eye, your eye gets—comes out. And a lot of people—as far as I know, 12 people have lost their eye.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Nazan Üstündağ, on the streets, activist and scholar, and Koray Çalişkan, assistant professor of political science at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, speaking to us about the mass protests that have been taking place throughout Turkey now, begun in Istanbul, with about, it’s believed, a thousand people injured.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’re going to Fort Meade, Maryland, to talk about the trial of Bradley Manning. Stay with us.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Bradley Manning Trial: After 3 Years, Army Whistleblower Begins Court-Martial Shrouded in Secrecy

More than three years after he was arrested, Army whistleblower Bradley Manning goes on trial today accused of being behind the biggest leak of classified information in U.S. history. Manning faces life in prison for disclosing a trove of U.S. cables and government documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. On Saturday, hundreds of Manning supporters rallied outside the barracks at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the trial will be held. We’re joined by two guests: Firedoglake reporter Kevin Gosztola, who is at Ft. Meade covering the trial, and attorney Chase Madar, author of "The Passion of Bradley Manning."

TRANSCRIPT

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

AMY GOODMAN: Today marks the first day of the military trial of Private Bradley Manning, accused of disclosing a trove of U.S. cables and government documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history. Bradley Manning is 25 years old. He has already pled guilty to misusing classified material he felt, quote, "should become public," but has denied the top charge of aiding the enemy. For much of the last three years since his arrest, Bradley Manning has been kept in harsh military detention, including many months in solitary confinement, prompting the U.N.’s top torture expert to criticize the U.S. for "cruel and degrading" treatment. He could face life in prison, possibly the death penalty.

On Saturday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the barracks in Fort Meade, Maryland, where the trial will be held, to show their support for Manning. Protesters included Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Bradley was an extraordinary American who went on record and acted on his awareness that it was wrong for us to be killing foreigners. He was not doing it only for American citizens, although—I’ll come back to that in a moment—I think he saved American lives, but he was concerned that the people of the world should be informed of the way, as he put it, the First World, or the West, he said, treats the Third World. And, of course, these Europeans are not in the Third World, but they do have an interest in the fact that America has been asking for—acting for a long time, and above all, in the last decade, as if the lives of foreigners meant nothing.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Ellsberg, speaking Saturday at a protest in support of Bradley Manning outside Fort Meade.

Last month, a military judge ruled that some testimony in Manning’s trial will be kept from the public. Colonel Denise Lind granted the government’s request to call 24 witnesses behind closed doors. The Obama administration has argued for the secretive testimony by citing the need to protect classified information.

The trial begins today, is expected to run to the end of August. A leaked audio recording emerged earlier this year of the statement Manning delivered at his pretrial hearing at Fort Meade in February. Manning acknowledged he gave the classified documents to WikiLeaks and explained what he wanted people to learn from his revelation. It is not an easy, clear recording, so listen carefully.

BRADLEY MANNING: I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure-cooker environment of what we call "asymmetric warfare."

AMY GOODMAN: The audio isn’t clear because it was leaked, but Bradley Manning explained that he wanted the American people to know, quote, "that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure-cooker environment of what we call," he said, "'asymmetric warfare.'"

Well, to talk about this trial, we’re joined by two guests. We’re going to begin at Fort Meade at the trial site by Kevin Gosztola. Kevin has been blogging about the trial. He’s a civil liberties blogger at Firedoglake and co-author of the ebook Truth and Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning. He’s a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights that challenges government secrecy in Manning’s court-martial, as, by the way, is Democracy Now!

Kevin, welcome back to Democracy Now! Explain today, this morning, what exactly is happening at the trial. It was very unclear what would happen for the journalists, for how this trial will be covered.

KEVIN GOSZTOLA: Well, I expect that we’ll have some sort of opening arguments that will have any sort of housekeeping issues that have to be dealt with before they can really proceed with the trial. And what I can tell you about the media, having just come in, is that there happens to be an overwhelming amount of media. I don’t think that the military were prepared to handle as many cars as were coming, even though they—you know, they granted 70 requests, and the number was that there were about 350 or so requests that were put in to the military for credentials. And you’ve had people turned away and denied access. Importantly, for this issue of the media, you’ve got the story of this court—this crowd-funded court reporter or stenographer that Freedom of the Press Foundation funded, happens to actually be going in, is going to be using the credentials of the Bradley Manning Support Network in order to be covering the proceedings today.

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to say, Kevin, you’re reporting to us from your car right outside the proceedings. Explain what is at stake today and what you expect will happen in this first day of the trial.

KEVIN GOSZTOLA: Well, there’s a lot that I’m going to find out here when I get off of this segment with you, because I have not received the morning briefing. The military did not advertise what exactly the first day is going to be about. But what I can tell you from my experience covering this since December 2011, because this has been one of the longest court-martials that I’ve ever—seems fairly long, and in the first day, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. They’ll establish the business. And what we know is that there’s probably going to be some kind of an entering of the charges. Manning probably will be read his rights. I think that the first day could be pretty standard, and maybe the word would be "perfunctory."

AMY GOODMAN: Among the protesters outside Fort Meade, Maryland, on Saturday was Sarah Shourd. She was jailed for 14 months in Iran after she and two other Americans, Shane Bauer and now her husband—who is now her husband, and Josh Fattal, were detained by Iranian border forces on July 31st, 2009, for allegedly hiking across the Iraqi border into Iran, which they don’t believe is the case. She spoke to Al Jazeera from the protest.

SARAH SHOURD: My name is Sarah Shourd. I’m an author and an advocate against the use of solitary confinement. And I was held as a political hostage by the Iranian government for 410 days in solitary confinement, along with my now-husband Shane Bauer and my friend Josh Fattal.

Bradley Manning doesn’t deserve to be in prison. And I know what it’s like to sit in a prison cell and know that you don’t deserve to be there. Bradley Manning was held for nine months in extreme conditions of solitary confinement, very similar to my own conditions in Iranian prison. We were both under lockdown 23 hours a day, with—under sensory deprivation. There’s really no way to describe the depth of loneliness. You really just have to get through one day at the time, and every day is a monumental task.

*But the fact that people are coming out for Bradley Manning—and I’m sure he knows about it, word will get to him—I’m sure will give him the strength that he needs and help remind him that a lot of people really appreciate what he did for our country and for the world. It’s a level of bravery and heroism that really takes—takes me aback.

PROTESTERS: Free Bradley Manning! Free Bradley Manning! Free Bradley Manning!

SARAH SHOURD: Bradley Manning is a modern-day hero. And the Obama administration is on the wrong side of history when it comes to the persecution of Bradley Manning.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined right now by Chase Madar. He is the author ofThe Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the WikiLeaks Whistleblower. And he’s blogging about the Manning trial for The Nation magazine. He’ll be covering the court-martial from the courtroom next week. He is with us right now, also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, along with Democracy Now!, Firedoglake and others, brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights that challenges government secrecy in Manning’s court-martial. Chase, the significance of what is happening today?

CHASE MADAR: Well, the court-martial of Bradley Manning is really the last ugly chapter of our sordid and ugly Iraq War. A war that we rushed into catastrophically, in no small part because of extreme government secrecy, is now ending in the trial of a truth teller behind a veil of extreme government secrecy. Now, none of the CIAtorturers, much less Bush and Cheney, were put on trial, but Washington has finally found a scapegoat in a young Army private who leaked these important documents. Now, to put things in perspective, this is the biggest security breach in U.S. history, but it’s also less than 1 percent of what Washington classifies in a given year. It has not put us on the brink of total transparency. It has not caused diplomatic Armageddon. And there is no concrete evidence whatsoever that any civilian or soldier has been harmed by the leaks. On the other hand, we have a very clear understanding of what the Iraq War was really all about and what our Afghan War is still all about. And the leaks have sparked important debates and even reforms, and in the case of Tunisia, did help spark an uprising that overthrew a hated dictator there. What’s not to like?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, last week, Democracy Now! spoke to WikiLeaks founderJulian Assange. He spoke to us from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he’s been holed up for 11 months to avoid extradition to Sweden. He fears that, from there, he would then be extradited to the United States, where he fears a grand jury has secretly indicted him for publishing the diplomatic cables leaked by Bradley Manning. Assange talked about the implications of Bradley Manning’s trial.

JULIAN ASSANGE: He’s also facing a quite decent chance of life imprisonment. And the life imprisonment charge comes from a very new ambit claim of the Pentagon, that is—and the Department of Justice, that is, communicating with a journalist is communicating to the public, is communicating to al-Qaeda. And there’s no allegation that Bradley Manning intended to communicate to al-Qaeda. The only allegation is that he indirectly did so as a result of communicating with journalists, who communicated to the public. If that precedent is allowed to be erected, it will do two things. Firstly, it means it’s a potential death penalty for any person in the military speaking to a journalist about a sensitive matter. Secondly, it also embroils the journalist and the publication in that chain of communicating, they would say, to the enemy, and therefore making them susceptible, as well, to the Espionage Act, which also has capital offenses. And that is part of the U.S.—that latter part is part of the U.S. attack on WikiLeaks, including myself.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Julian Assange speaking to Democracy Now! last week from the Ecuadorean embassy. Ecuador has granted him political asylum, but the British government threatens to arrest him if he steps foot outside the embassy to try to go to Ecuador.

Meanwhile, a New York Times op-ed suggested when government secrets are leaked, responsibility lies with the whistleblower alone, not the media that publicized their leaks. Max Frankel, The New York Times Washington bureau chief during the Pentagon Papers leak, said, quote, "When the government moved to prosecute Ellsberg, we felt no obligation to assist him. He was committing an act of civil disobedience and presumably knew that required accepting the punishment. We were privately pleased that the prosecution overreached and failed, but we did not consider ourselves his partner in any way." Chase Madar, your response?

CHASE MADAR: Well, this is just a shocking betrayal of an important source. Both Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning have supplied the world’s greatest newspapers and magazines with cover stories and headlines that number in the thousands. And it’s just shameful the way The New York Times, in particular, has turned on Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks and has made an actual point of sliming both of them with the insinuations that Bradley Manning did what he did because he’s weird or because he’s crazy or gay, or gay and crazy. Enough of this. This is an important act that has enlightened the public, and we have paid a very heavy price in blood and money, and inflicted horrible destruction around the world, because we did not know what our government is doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Gosztola, in the car outside the Fort Meade courtroom, describe for us what that courtroom is like and who can actually go into the courtroom where Bradley Manning is being tried and what you’re allowed to bring with you in terms of taking notes, reporting out. I mean, the audio we just played of Bradley Manning was not authorized, of course. It was forbidden. But someone actually recorded his voice. Talk about where the reporters will be and how you’ll convey information through this trial.

KEVIN GOSZTOLA: Well, first I’ll say quickly that the military’s view of freedom of the press is such that they have told us the media center is a privilege, not a right. And they have also said if there is a leak again, everyone will feel the pain, and they want us to police ourselves and be informing on our fellow journalists, which I take—I don’t like this at all, and I completely oppose.

But I should say that, going into it, there are going to be 70 seats inside of a media center. People will watch a feed from the courtroom. They will have 10 media that will be allowed to go into the court proceeding and see whatever is going on, you know, how the public gallery is responding, how the prosecutors and the judge are interacting. Inside the media center, you can use your laptop, you can use your computer, but inside of the courtroom, you have to only limit yourself to pen, pencil, paper, which makes it hard, especially if what you’re doing is online. And that’s part of the challenge. Part of the Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit is just the fact that the judge continues to not make court records available so that we can, the day of, do the most extensive reporting that we should be doing on Bradley Manning’s court-martial.

AMY GOODMAN: Chase Madar, if you’d like to wrap up with why you not only are covering this but chose to write a book on this, and what you think are the significant facts, as this trial begins, for people who don’t know that much about Bradley Manning to understand.

CHASE MADAR: People need to understand that the idea that government should be as open and transparent as realistically possible, this is not some crazy new idea that was schemed up by a bunch of computer hackers at Julian Assange’s kitchen table a few years ago. It’s a very old idea. It’s a very good idea. And it was James Madison, the primary author of our Constitution, who wrote over 200 years ago that a popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prelude to a tragedy or a farce, or perhaps both. The last 10 years of U.S. foreign policy have been a tragic farce. If we’re going to snap out of it and stop making poorly informed decisions that wind up in catastrophe, we need to know what our government is doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Chase Madar, I want to thank you very much for being with us,The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the WikiLeaks Whistleblower, is our guest. Kevin Gosztola, speaking to us directly from the trial, from Firedoglake.

TUESDAY, JUNE 4, 2013

American Fascism: Ralph Nader Decries How Big Business Has Taken Control of the U.S. Government

Describing the United States as an "advanced Third World country," longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader calls for a new mass movement to challenge the power corporations have in Washington. "It is not too extreme to call our system of government now 'American fascism.' It’s the control of government by big business, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt defined in 1938 as fascism," Nader says. "We have the lowest minimum wage in the Western world. We have the greatest amount of consumer debt. We have the highest child poverty, the highest adult poverty, huge underemployment, a crumbling public works — but huge multi-billionaires and hugely profitable corporations. I say to the American people: What’s your breaking point? When are you going to stop making excuses for yourself? When are you going to stop exaggerating these powers when you know you have the power in this country if you organize it?" Nader has just published a new book, "Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns."

Watch Part 2 of Today’s Ralph Nader Interview

TRANSCRIPT

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

AARON MATÉ: For the rest of the hour, we’re joined by Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, corporate critic, attorney, author, activist and former presidential candidate. For well over four decades, Ralph has helped us drive safer cars, eat healthier food, breathe better air, drink cleaner water and work in safer environments. His devotion to political reform and citizens’ activism has fueled a number of critical policy victories and the creation of generations of watchdogs and activists to carry them forward.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader came to prominence in the early '60s, when he began to take on powerful corporations and work with local activists on their campaigns, putting himself on the map in 1965 with his book Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. In this interview from that same year, Nader pointed out the safety flaws of General Motors' Chevrolet Corvair.

RALPH NADER: What aggravates the problem is that the rear wheels of the Corvair begin to tuck under. And as they tuck under—the angle of tuck under is called "camber." And as they tuck under, it can go from three or four degrees camber to 11 degrees camber almost in an instant. And when that happens, nobody can control the Corvair. Interestingly—

CBC INTERVIEWER: Well, then, surely they did the right thing. They found out there was something was wrong with the car, and they fixed it.

RALPH NADER: Yes. The question is: Why did it take them four years to find out? This is my point. Either it’s sheer callousness or indifference, or they don’t bother to find out how their cars behave.

AARON MATÉ: Ralph Nader’s exposé led to the first of a number of federal laws bearing his imprint: the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. As he moved on to public and environmental health, Nader would help spur landmark bills, including the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, and the creation of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Environment Protection Agency. Meanwhile, Nader also helped found a number of nonprofit organizations dedicated to the common good, including the Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG, and Public Citizen.

AMY GOODMAN: In recent years, Ralph Nader’s name has become synonymous with challenging the nation’s two-party political system. He ran for president in 1996 and 2000 as a candidate on the Green Party ticket, again in 2004 and 2008 as an independent.

Ralph Nader is just out with a new book—it’s his columns—called Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns. It’s an anthology collecting Nader’s weekly opinion pieces. Throughout, Nader tackles the major political issues of our time while offering practical solutions rooted in collective organizing.

Ralph Nader joins us for the first time in our studios, the greenest TV, radio, Internet studios in the country.

Welcome, Ralph.

RALPH NADER: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. So, the title, Told You So?

RALPH NADER: Yes. I’ve been impressed by how all the warmongers and the false predictors get promoted, and they get on op-ed pages, and they get jobs after they have failed in the U.S. government. We know Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and Wolfowitz and Cheney and all these people. And we don’t—we don’t recognize people who have predicted accurately, who have spotted problems arising, as we should. And so I decided to say—excuse me—I decided to say, "Told you so," as we told Nixon about the rise of corporate crime. We warned about the Iraq War and the consequences. We made sure that the consequences of repealing Glass-Steagall were going to lead to huge speculation and serious problems on Wall Street for trillions of dollars of workers’ money. And again and again and again. And there’s something wrong with a society that marginalizes, in so many ways, the people who were right, the people who predicted right, who cautioned, who sent up the warning signals to the American people; and the people who got us into Iraq and warmongering and militarism and corporatism, they’re the ones who get applauded, those are the ones who get $100,000 speeches, like Bush is getting, $150,000. So, I decided—

AMY GOODMAN: Where did he get that?

RALPH NADER: I decided to throw down the gauntlet and say, "Told you so."

AARON MATÉ: Ralph, can you compare our capacity for taking on corporate crime, one of your big issues, from when you first started out to today? Have we developed any improved regulatory framework to tackle the crimes of corporations?

RALPH NADER: No, the corporate criminals have overrun the government. The Justice Department now has expanded Bush’s practice of deferred prosecution. So, Attorney General Holder and President Obama now are basically saying to corporate crooks, "You don’t have to admit. You don’t have to deny culpability. We’ll defer prosecution. Just pay a fine that’s a fraction of the cost of doing business." So the drug companies may pay individually when they’re caught, $500 million, a billion dollars, but they’ve gained numerous billions of dollars. Nobody goes to jail. No corporate charters are pulled. It’s basically above the law.

AARON MATÉ: Ralph, in the past few months, fast-food workers across the country have walked off the job in a bid for a higher minimum wage. They’re seeking $15 an hour and the right to unionize without harassment. The one-day strikes have hit seven cities: Seattle, Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago and New York City. This is organizer Jennifer Epps-Addison of the group Citizens Action of Wisconsin.

JENNIFER EPPS-ADDISON: Fast food, in retail, it’s one of the fastest-growing industries. It’s one of the most profitable, with $200 billion in profits. And yet, these are the lowest-paid workers in our economy. They’re standing up and saying, "Our families can’t survive on $7.25 an hour."

AARON MATÉ: Ralph, this is a big issue of yours, seeking a higher minimum wage. Your thoughts on this fast-food strike?

RALPH NADER: Yeah, it’s a good start. And we’ve got to show the American people it’s easier than they think to turn the country around in many ways. And let’s start with the lowest bar of all. Thirty million workers in this country are making less today than that workers made in 1968, inflation-adjusted. These are the workers who clean up after us, grow our food, serve us in the stores, take care of our ailing grandparents. Just let that figure sink in. These are the workers that are most underemployed, underinsured. They work in often the most dangerous situations. They don’t have unions. And the question is: Is our society so inert, is our society so surrendering of any kind of civic sovereignty, that we cannot get a minimum wage equal to 1968? That’s supported, by the way, by 70 percent of the people, including Rick Santorum, and until last year, Mitt Romney. That’s how basic it is. So, we have a president saying in 2008, when he was campaigning, he wants $9.50 by 2011, and now he’s down to $9.00 by 2016. The Democrats are sitting on inadequate bills in the House and Senate and not really pushing the Republicans.

So, here’s what we’re trying to do. August is the big recess, where the members of Congress go back home. So we want people to get 300 to 400 signatures on a summons by the people back home, summoning the congresspeople and the senators to exclusive town meetings in each district. And those of you who are watching or listening to this program and want to show how to turn this around—it’s a great economic stimulus, by the way, to give people who desperately need the necessities of life more money—if you want to take 30 million people up to $10.50 an hour, which catches up barely with 1968, even though the worker productivity has doubled, by the way, since then, just go to timeforaraise.org. Remember, this is—if we cannot do this, it’s doubtful we can change anything in this country. Timeforaraise.org. You’ll get a "whereas ... whereas ... whereas ..." very well done summons that you can go around and get people to sign—it will be the easiest petition you’ll probably ever get to sign—to the congressperson or the senator, saying, "In August, and in a municipal building or wherever, we want you to show up, and we’re going to let you know what we want you to do." That’s why I called it a summons instead of a petition.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to President Obama in February in his State of the Union address calling on Congress to raise the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour from $7.25 and to automatically adjust it with inflation.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour. We should be able to get that done. This single step would raise the incomes of millions of working families. It could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank, rent or eviction, scraping by or finally getting ahead. For businesses across the country, it would mean customers with more money in their pockets. And a whole lot of folks out there would probably need less help from government. In fact, working folks shouldn’t have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up, while CEO pay has never been higher. So here’s an idea that Governor Romney and I actually agreed on last year: Let’s tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, so that it finally becomes a wage you can live on.

AMY GOODMAN: So that’s President Obama in February in his State of the Union address.

RALPH NADER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Isn’t that what you’re calling for?

RALPH NADER: Yeah, has there—has there been a bigger con man in the White House than Barack Obama? He hasn’t lifted a finger since he made those statements. And when he made the statements in the 2008 campaign, he said nothing for four years on raising the minimum wage. He made no pressure on Congress. He hasn’t even unleashed people in his own White House on this issue.

AMY GOODMAN: What can he do?

RALPH NADER: What can he do? He can barnstorm it. That’s what the bully pulpit is about. He can go up to Congress. He can get George Miller and Senator Harkin, who have introduced weak minimum wage increase bills, to have dynamic hearings where he puts a face on all these people who can’t even make as much as the workers made in 1968. Look at the difference here. There are a million Wal-Mart workers who are making less today than Wal-Mart workers made in 1968, inflation-adjusted, while the boss of Wal-Mart is making $11,000 an hour, you know, plus benefits. Two-thirds of all low-income workers are hired by these big companies, like McDonald’s and Burger King and Wal-Mart, and that the bosses are making anywhere from $10 million to $20 million a year.

Now, what does that do to the normative juices of the American people? I mean, where’s the indignation here? I mean, why do they take it? They don’t have to take it. They can hit the streets. They can march. They can turn this around. How come they hit the streets in these Third World countries? I mean, isn’t it important for their livelihood? They can’t even get the necessities of life for their children. The cruelty is unbelievable here. We are an advanced Third World country. We have great military equipment and science and technology. Half of the people in this country are poor. They can’t even pay their bills. They’re deep in debt. And so, people sitting around are saying, "Oh, the powers that be, you know, we can’t do anything." What do you mean they can’t do anything? They can do everything. They’re the sovereign. We don’t have "We the corporation" at the beginning of the Constitution; we have "We the people." So, timeforaraise.org. Let’s get it done in August. Let’s move. You’ll get a nice summons. You go around. You get your friends and neighbors. Bring that member back home in a town hall or wherever for an exclusive meeting on the minimum wage.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, then come back to Ralph Nader. His new book is called Told You So. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Ralph Nader. Let’s go to a comment of the AppleCEO, Tim Cook, in response to a Senate report that accused his company of a massive tax-dodging scheme that saved it tens of billions of dollars. The report describes a massive web of affiliates spanning several continents that were used to hide the company’s profits, even in countries where Apple had no employees. Overall, Apple avoided paying U.S. taxes on $44 billion over a three-year period. This is Apple CEOTim Cook speaking before the Senate hearing last month.

TIM COOK: Apple has become the largest corporate income taxpayer in America. Last year, our U.S. federal cash effective tax rate was 30.5 percent, and we paid nearly $6 billion in cash to the U.S. Treasury. That’s more than $16 million each day, and we expect to pay even more this year.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Apple CEO Tim Cook. Ralph Nader, your response?

RALPH NADER: It’s very simple. Apple has parked a huge percentage of its profits in tax havens abroad. So they can say the ones that they haven’t parked, in this country, pay a higher tax rate, basically. Apple is one of many giant U.S. corporations who benefited from subsidies by the government, research and development, grew to profit on the backs of American workers, and is now operating overseas, very unpatriotically, like other U.S. corporations, to be tax escapees. But they expect the government to give them the latest developments in science and technology, which have infiltrated themselves into Apple products. They expect all the public services that taxpayers pay for in this country. But they want to go to the Bahamas and Ireland and other tax havens and pile it up. In the meantime, they’re not investing these huge profits—Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Apple—they’re not investing in this country. So you have this amazing situation where you have a recession, you have very high unemployment, you have high underemployment, and you’ve got huge capital reserves piling up, not being taxed to be put back into building our public works and repairing America and creating jobs. And you’ve got, you know, a rump Congress just basically curtsying to all this.

So we’ve got a real problem here. It’s not too extreme to call our system of government now "American fascism." It’s the control of government by big business, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt defined in 1938 as fascism. And they control the government and turn the government to their favor—subsidies, handouts, giveaways, deferred prosecutions, non-prosecutions—and against the American people. And minimum wage is just one. You have full Medicare for all, which a majority of doctors and the American people want, with free choice of doctor and hospital. That’s the only—we’re the only Western country that doesn’t have it. Eight hundred Americans a week die because they cannot afford diagnosis and treatment for their ailments. That’s 800 Americans a week, 45,000 a year. Who says so? A study, peer-reviewed, out of Harvard Medical School. So, we have the lowest minimum wage in the Western world. We have the greatest amount of consumer debt. We have the highest child poverty, the highest adult poverty, huge underemployment, a crumbling public works—but huge multi-billionaires and hugely profitable corporations.

I say to the American people: What’s your breaking point? When are you going to stop making excuses for yourself? When are you going to stop exaggerating these powers when you know you have the power in this country if you organize it? That’s why I want people to timeforaraise.org, get the summons, fill out the names, and get the congresspeople and the senators back in August.

AARON MATÉ: Ralph, what do you think the U.S. government should do—President Obama, the Federal Reserve—to take on high unemployment?

RALPH NADER: Public works is obviously the best. I mean, we have trillions of dollars, according the American Society of Civil Engineers. It’s not just bridges and highways. It’s sewage and water systems. It’s public buildings. It’s dams. It’s ports. It’s community clinics. It’s libraries. The country is running down. And when I say big corporations are running the U.S.A. into the ground, that’s part of the dismal picture. Now, that creates jobs that are good-paying, they’re decentralized in every community, and you can’t export them to China. So that’s what the government should do.

But, of course, if President Obama cannot defeat the worst, cruelest, most vicious, ignorant Republican Party in history and take over the Congress—instead, he loses it in 2010 in the House, and he loses it in 2012 in the House, and he’s going to lose it again in 2014, because he doesn’t know how to take the Republican votes that are so cruel and vicious, that have actually passed the House of Representatives and have been documented by the House Democratic Caucus, and hurl it against them in the coming election. So what’s he going to do the rest of his term, if he’s being run by Boehner and Cantor and McConnell, the Republican minority?

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, you wrote an open letter to President Obamaasking him to explain his—to explain by what authority he’s empowered to imprison prisoners indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay and kill people abroad with drone warfare.

RALPH NADER: Yeah, it’s really quite clear. President Obama is a recidivist violator, systematically, day after day, of Constitution, of our statutes and of our international treaties. We still have torture. We still have indefinite imprisonment. We still have war crimes all over part of Asia and Africa, violating all kinds of laws. These wars have never been declared by Congress. We have indefinite imprisonment. They use the word "detainee." Don’t you like that word, "detainee"? You know, you’re in Guantánamo for nine years; you’re still a detainee instead of a prisoner. And the press uses their language, too.

So, we sent him a letter, with Bruce Fein, who now has started a group called the National Commission on the Misuse of Intelligence to Justify War—lies, in other words, cover-ups. These are the people who should be on trial, not Bradley Manning. The people who lied in official Washington—Bush and Cheney and Wolfowitz—who lied and caused the death of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of American injuries, those are the people who should be on trial. So, this letter goes right to the core. Every time Obama tries to say he’s doing this and that, he should give the constitutional, statutory or treaty authority. And the press has not been holding his feet to the fire, or his representatives. They should always ask, "By what authority are you doing this, Mr. President? And by what evidence? By what authority, and by what evidence?"

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, in the last 10 seconds we have, Frank Lautenberg, the longtime senator from New Jersey, just died. Your thoughts?

RALPH NADER: He has a marvelous record. You pointed out his record in environment and consumer. It’s going to be a real loss to the Senate.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, I want to thank you for being with us. His new book, Told You So . He’ll be speaking at Barnes & Noble Wednesday night here in New York at Union Square. And I’ll be interviewing you at the 92nd Street Y Thursday night at 8:15. Hope to see people there.

As U.S. Deploys Patriot Missiles and F-16s to Jordan, Could Syrian Conflict Engulf the Middle East?

Pro-government Syrian forces have seized control of the key border town of Qusayr, which had been controlled by rebel fighters for the past year. This comes as the United Nations accuses both sides of the Syrian conflict of reaching "new levels of brutality." Since fighting broke out over two years ago in Syria, more than 80,000 people have been killed, and another 1.6 million Syrian refugees have fled. We’re joined by longtime foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn of The Independent, who recently returned from Syria where he reported on how the conflict is spreading across the Middle East. Cockburn warns that pending global peace talks will have no effect without a ceasefire on the ground. "The best you could really hope for at this stage is a ceasefire, get the level of violence down, and then later you might have talks of sharing power," Cockburn says. "But you are not going to have that at the moment."

TRANSCRIPT

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show in Syria. Pro-government forces have seized control of the key border town of Qusayr, which had been controlled by rebel fighters for the past year. Qusayr, which lies on a cross-border supply route with neighboring Lebanon, had been the site of a fierce battle over the past two weeks as fighters from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah joined forces aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Since fighting broke out over two years ago in Syria, more than 80,000 people have been killed, and another 1.6 million Syrian refugees have fled. Earlier this week, the United Nations accused both sides of the Syrian conflict of reaching, quote, "new levels of brutality." U.N. panel chair Paulo Pinheiro accused government forces of murder, torture, rape, forcible displacement and other acts, many of them carried out systematically against civilians. But he said anti-Assad rebels were guilty of similar atrocities.

PAULO PINHEIRO: Anti-government armored groups have also committed war crimes, including murder, sentencing and execution without due process, torture, hostage taking and pillage. They continue to endanger the civilian population by positioning military objectives in civilian areas. And as we said in the past, there is a disparity between the violations or the crimes committed by the government forces and those committed by the rebels. But this is a disparity in intensity. It’s not a disparity in the very nature of the crimes and violations. They are the same.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In its report, the United Nations said they had, quote, "reasonable grounds" to believe that limited amounts of chemical weapons had been used in Syria. The U.N. investigators said they had received allegations that Syrian government forces and rebels had both used the banned weapons. But the U.N. report lacked details.

Meanwhile, France said tests on chemical samples taken from Syria prove the deadly nerve agent sarin gas has been used several times during the conflict. But France did not give any details of where or by whom the poison gas had been used. This is Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.

LAURENT FABIUS: [translated] A line has been crossed, unquestionably. There is the United Nations approach. Apart from that, we are discussing with our partners—the United States, the English, etc.—what eventual reaction will have to be given. All the options are on the table.

AMY GOODMAN: In response to France’s claim, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters, "We need more information" about claims of such use.

The Syrian conflict has fueled sectarian tensions across the Middle East. In the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, six people were killed in clashes Monday. In Iraq, more than 500 people were killed in May, while more than 700 died in April, marking the bloodiest month there in nearly five years.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has announced that Patriot missiles and F-16 fighter jets deployed to Jordan for a military exercise may be kept there due to the violence in Syria.

Our next guest recently returned from Syria, has reported on how the conflict is spreading in the Middle East. Patrick Cockburn is a longtime foreign correspondent with The Independent of London.

Patrick, welcome back to Democracy Now! Describe what is happening in Syria and what you’re saying is the reverberations of this throughout the Middle East.

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, the war gets more and more intense. The fighting gets heavier. But I think we also have a stalemate. The government has been quite successfully advancing, has just taken the town of Qusayr, as you mentioned, and has also moved south towards the Jordanian border.

But the impression I get is that there was an exaggerated idea in the last two years that Assad was going to go down. When I’m in Beirut, you had people—last year, earlier this year, people were speaking as if, you know, his days were numbered. But as soon as I get to Damascus, this isn’t so obvious at all. You know, I could drive from Damascus up to Homs, which is the third-biggest city in Syria, about a hundred miles away, without any guards. There wasn’t any shooting on the road. So I think that there was always an exaggerated idea that Assad was about to go down.

The other big change in the Syrian conflict is the way it’s very visibly spreading. It spread to—it spread to Lebanon. The Hezbollah has been taking part in the latest fighting. Anti-government forces have been moving, showing positions in Lebanon. And in Iraq, you know, we’re practically back to the days of the civil war. I mean, you mentioned that, according to some figures, 500 Iraqis died last month in May; according to the U.N., it was a thousand. I’m not quite sure why the disparity is there. But you can sense in Baghdad, where I was also quite recently, that people are very tense. They feel that they’re very close to a sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia, and the number of being killed has reached the level that it was last seen in 2008, five years ago.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Patrick Cockburn, you say that there’s a military stalemate in Syria. Could you explain how much of the country remains under the control of Bashar al-Assad and how much is under the control of opposition forces?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Right. I mean, what surprised me over the last sort of year is that you’d hear foreign leaders say Assad is about to go down, or, alternatively, his departure should be a precondition of any talks, while at the same time Assad controls and has controlled all but one—I think there are 16 provincial capitals in Syria, and he held 15 of them. So they hold most of the population centers and hold a lot of the main roads. So, the opposition tends to hold areas in the country, particularly in the north and in the east, in the northeast. They’ve been losing ground in the center and in the south. I don’t think that the government, Assad’s forces, are going to win a complete victory, but I think that they are rather more than holding their own. They’re advancing. Overall, there’s a stalemate. I don’t think—I think the opposition will hold onto the areas it controls in the north. These are Sunni Muslim areas. I don’t think it will lose out entirely. It can resupply across the Turkish border. But it’s certainly on the back foot at the moment. Probably the key thing to look at will be to see what happens in Aleppo, which is the second-biggest city in Syria.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of Qusayr on the Lebanese border and the shifting of hands back to pro-government forces?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Yeah. I think people speak about it as being a sort of supply center. This is true. It’s close to Homs, which is big city and was sort of mostly under government control, not entirely. And supplies and reinforcements were moving through Qusayr, so it was a military loss. On the other hand, it’s not the very main supply line of the rebels. That mainly comes through Turkey. Most of the Turkish border is no longer controlled by the government. Those are the main supply lines. Most of the ammunition and weapons are coming through there.

But there’s another very important thing about Qusayr, that it’s—is a visible government victory. For two years, we had sort of—it looked as though the government was losing ground, maybe slowly losing ground, and there was a feeling of inevitability for a lot of the time that Assad would eventually go. That isn’t there anymore. And one of the reasons it isn’t there is that the war has spread, that it’s not just—you know, at the beginning, you could describe this war as being maybe primarily a popular uprising against a dictatorial government, but now so many other conflicts have fed in, including the whole Shia-Sunni dispute in the Middle East. The Shia in Iraq and Lebanon feel threatened, so they’re pitching in—that’s not surprising—and as Hezbollah has decided to make a full commitment to what it sees as its side in the Syrian civil war. So that’s a big change.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Patrick Cockburn, you’ve written recently about the splits within the Syrian opposition forces and their criticism of the leadership outside of Syria. Could you explain who comprises the opposition forces and what’s happening with them?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Sure, yeah. I mean, even by the standards of Iraq, the opposition forces are not just split, but are chaotic. I mean, there’s a division between—the military units in Syria are mostly sort of independent brigades, maybe sometimes under a hundred people, sometimes over a thousand, different brigades, but nobody really controlling them. They have different sort of paymasters and suppliers outside. You have the Free Syrian Army, but that sounds a bit more united than in fact it is. And then you have the al-Qaeda-type organizations, which—the al-Nusra Front, which is better organized, better disciplined, fights harder, but obviously is regarded with aversion by the U.S. and various other people on the outside.

But then you have the Syrian National Coalition, you have the outside political forces, who, you know, are almost recognized by—certainly by the U.K. and France, as the next government of Syria. But they’re completely disunited. They’ve generally depended for money on Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The head of the National Coalition recently—al-Khatib recently resigned, saying it was all run by foreign powers, and he had no influence.

So, you know, it’s deeply divided. Will they go to negotiate in Geneva? They don’t—they aren’t sure. They think they probably won’t. Who will go? They’re not sure. So, even by the standards of sort of divided oppositions in the world, this one is extraordinarily chaotic.

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Cockburn, I wanted to ask you about the role of the United States in the conflict. This is Secretary of State John Kerry speaking Monday.

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: What is happening in Syria is happening because one man, who has been in power with his family for, you know, years now, more than 40 years, will not consent to an appropriate process by which the people of Syria can protect minorities, be inclusive, and have the people of Syria decide their future. He has decided to protect himself and his regime’s interests by reaching out across state lines and actually soliciting the help of Iran on the ground with fighters, as well as Hezbollah, a terrorist organization. A designated terrorist organization has now crossed over from Lebanon into Syria and is actively engaged in the fighting.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Patrick Cockburn, to Secretary of State John Kerry and also the fact that the U.S. is deploying Patriot anti-aircraft missiles and F-16 fighter jets to Syria’s neighbor Jordan this month, Jordan saying the planes will be used for an exercise, but others are speculating other things.

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, I think, you know, it’s pretty distressing. You know, what John Kerry says is, I’m afraid, sort of, you know, demonstrably untrue. All you have to do is ask yourself, if Assad went tomorrow, would the fighting stop? And you bet it wouldn’t, because it’s a civil war. It’s not just Assad, but it’s, you know, a whole group of people. I mean, somebody said to me in Damascus not so long ago, you know, that 15 percent of the population support the government, 15 percent the rebels, and 70 percent just want the war to end. But to see this purely a personal thing about does Assad go or stay, I think, is very oversimplified. I can’t believe that Kerry believes that.

As for foreign intervention, you know, the Syria—the Tunisian government admitted recently that, I think, 800 of its Tunisians were fighting on the rebel side, and Tunisian security said it was about 2,000. You know, Islamic fundamentalists have been pouring in from all over the world, just like they once did in Afghanistan or more recently in Iraq. So that really isn’t true. I think that—I don’t know how far this oversimplification is believed in by the State Department or the White House, but, you know, what is needed in Syria, and I think which is unfortunate, is that, you know, you—this prevents real negotiations taking place. If you have negotiations which say Assad—it’s a precondition that Assad will go, well, that’s absurd, because he controls most of the country. If you say the Iranians can’t turn up or have any role, but hold on a minute—you know, the Iranians are major players there. You’re basically saying—if you have these preconditions, you’re basically saying no realistic negotiations.

So, what I think should happen, and what all this avoids is, you know, these—basically, look, you have a civil war. Both sides hate each other so much. There have been so many atrocities at this stage that they’re not going to agree on the future distribution of power or power sharing or the future of Syria. The best you can really hope for at this stage is a ceasefire, get the level of violence down, and then that might be later you could have talks about sharing power. But you’re not going to happen to have—to have that happen at the moment. I think you should have a ceasefire, and you should have the U.N. monitoring it. You had a U.N. force doing this last year. It didn’t work perfectly, but it was a lot better than what we had subsequently. You’ll need mediation, local ceasefires. Just get the level of violence down, and then you might have talks. But before we do that, I don’t think these talks are going to lead anywhere.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Patrick Cockburn, I want to turn to recent reports about the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria. On Tuesday, France said tests on chemical samples taken from Syria prove the deadly nerve agent sarin gas has been used several times during the civil conflict. The White House responded by saying it needs more evidence on Syria that chemical weapons have been used. This is White House spokesperson Jay Carney.

PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: We have worked very closely with the French, as well as other allies, as well as the Syrian opposition, to build on the information that we had developed about the likely use of chemical weapons in Syria. And we continue to work with the French and the British and others and the Syrian opposition to do that. I would note that the French report that you’re citing says that more work needs to be done to establish who is responsible for the use and the amount that was used and more details about the circumstances around it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Patrick Cockburn, that was White House spokesperson Jay Carney. Could you explain the significance of the alleged use of chemical weapons in this conflict?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, clearly, the rebels feel that if they can prove that it was used by the government, this might lead to foreign intervention. So, really, all witnesses to this are very partial, whether they’re Syrian government or opposition, or indeed their backers. The U.N. produced a report yesterday saying that poison—evidence that poison gas had been used. They had interviewed 430 people outside the country. But no information as to who used it, how it was delivered, or what chemical weapons were actually used. I mean, so that really shows us a vacuum of information. The French are now saying this, that it was used. But the French are very partial, in favor of the rebels. They don’t—French intelligence doesn’t have a great track record in Syria or indeed during the lead-up to the Iraq War. So, I think it’s still pretty dubious.

You know, a lot of the stuff that comes all from people on the ground, when you talk to them, they can be pretty convinced that chemical weapons have been used against them. But when you talk to them, they—you know, they don’t know what the effect of chemical weapons. You have people talking about, you know, sarin gas being used and people gasping and so forth, but if you ingest sarin gas, you’re generally—you know, you’re dead. The people don’t—sometimes if it’s tear gas, people think it’s chemical weapons, you know, which—and people obviously get completely terrified. But a lot of this evidence that’s coming out is very partial, very dubious. Some of the samples—you know, some of the samples that were taken from Syria, a Syrian, sympathizing with the rebels, meant to take it to Turkey to the U.S. officials there. He took 13 days. Nobody told him what he was carrying. It was in the boot of his car for five days. So, this is very uncertain stuff.

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Cockburn, as we wrap up—

PATRICK COCKBURN: And interviewing lots of refugees abroad doesn’t really prove anything.

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick, as we wrap up, the press coverage of what’s happening in Syria?

PATRICK COCKBURN: I think pretty bad, actually. I mean, I’ve been covering the Middle East a long time, and it’s really the worst I’ve seen of any conflict there. Why is that? Well, you know, people might say the Syrian government isn’t sympathetic to letting people into Damascus, therefore it creates a vacuum of information, which is filled by rumor or filled by opposition sources. That’s certainly one source of it.

I think that the media has been very sort of credulous of taking YouTube evidence as being definitive, while this is mostly taken by political activists. Nothing wrong with that, but there’s a—on television and elsewhere, there’s understating of how partial a lot of this evidence is, the YouTube evidence is, that they’re producing. You know, you often have health warnings saying we can’t—we’re not—verify that this is true, but the fact that television is running it at all shows that they believe it is true. So, I think that’s given a sort of a false impression of what’s happening. You know, this is a genuine civil war. It may have started as a popular uprising, but I think that all that’s been very partial. It’s also given the impression that the Assad government is about to collapse, which really was never true. I think this is beginning to be recognized now.

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick—

PATRICK COCKBURN: I mean, more recently, I think people are a bit more skeptical. You know, video of rebels—a rebel commander, you know, cutting open the body of a government soldier and eating his heart, or children cutting off the head of somebody—have shown, you know, that there is a case to be made on both sides. But that’s quite recent. But before that, I’m rather amazed the way the foreign media has relied on secondary sources, and secondary sources that are very partial.

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Cockburn, I want to thank you very much for being with us, foreign correspondent for The Independent, speaking to us from London, recently back from Syria. We’ll link to his article at The Independent.

PATRICK COCKBURN: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Thanks so much. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, a debate on DNA. Stay with us.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2013

The World Is a Battlefield: Jeremy Scahill on "Dirty Wars" and Obama’s Expanding Drone Attacks

As the Senate holds its first-ever public hearing on drones and targeted killings, we turn the second part of our interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield." Scahill charts the expanding covert wars operated by the CIA and JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, in countries from Somalia to Pakistan. "I called it 'Dirty Wars' because, particularly in this administration, in the Obama administration, I think a lot of people are being led to believe that there is such a thing as a clean war," Scahill says. He goes on to discuss secret operations in Africa, the targeting of U.S. citizens in Yemen and the key role WikiLeaks played in researching the book. He also reveals imprisoned whistleblower Bradley Manning once tipped him off to a story about the private security company Blackwater. Scahill is the national security correspondent for The Nation magazine and longtime Democracy Now! correspondent. For the past several years, Scahill has been working on the "Dirty Wars" film and book project, which was published on Tuesday. The film, directed by Rick Rowley, will be released in theaters in June. Click here to watch Part 1 of this interview.

TRANSCRIPT

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: "License to Kill," the Bob Dylan song performed by the late Richie Havens. He died Monday at the age of 72. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh.

We turn now to Jeremy Scahill, the national security correspondent for The Nationmagazine and longtime Democracy Now! correspondent. For the past several years, Jeremy has been working on a book and film project called Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. The book came out on Tuesday. The film, which is directed by Rick Rowley, will be released in theaters in June. The book follows Jeremy to Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and beyond as he chases down the hidden truth behind America’s expanding covert wars operated by the CIA and JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command. We turn now to part two of Amy Goodman’s interview with Jeremy. She began by asking him about the title of his book.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I called it Dirty Wars because, you know, particularly in this administration, in the Obama administration, I think a lot of people are being led to believe that there’s—there is a such thing as a clean war and that the drone and what’s called targeted killing—I mean, I use that term myself, but it’s actually not—if you think about it, it’s actually not a very appropriate term for what’s going on, because it’s—as we know, these strikes are anything but targeted, in many cases, and we don’t know the—we don’t even know the identities of many of the people that we’re killing in intentional strikes. So, I called it Dirty Wars because there is no such thing as a clean war, and drone warfare is not clean, but also as a sort of allusion to how we’ve returned to the kind of 1980s way of waging war, where the U.S. was involved in all these dirty wars in Central and Latin America, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and beyond. And we’re using—you know, we’re in a world right now where the U.S. is using proxies, that effectively are death squads, in Somalia to hunt down people that the U.S. has determined are enemies. We’re using mercenaries. President Obama continues to use mercenary forces in various wars, declared and undeclared, around the world. You also have the aiding of dictatorships and other, you know, right-wing governments around the world and propping them up. It’s very similar to what Reagan and company were doing in Central America.

And you have an increasingly paramilitarized CIA. You know, the CIAserved a major paramilitary function for many decades at the beginning, from the 1950s through the 1970s. And then, because of the scandals of assassinations and the Church Committee hearings and the House Committee on Political Assassinations, you had a generation of CIApeople that came up sort of feeling like, "Wow, covert action—we should be careful about getting into this business." After 9/11, the CIA has been on a constant sort of curve back to paramilitarization. So you have theCIA functioning as a paramilitary organization, and JSOC has become very, very powerful.

And so, to me, the concept of The World Is a Battlefield actually is not something I thought up; it’s a doctrine, actually, a military doctrine called "Operational Preparation of the Battlespace," which views the world as a battlefield. And what it says is that if there are countries where you predict, where the military predicts that conflicts are likely or that war is a possibility, you can forward deploy troops to those countries to prepare the battlefield. And under both Bush and Obama, the world has been declared the battlefield. You know, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that was passed after 9/11 is technically the law that President Obama and his administration point to when they say they have a right to drone strike in Yemen, because these people are connected to the 9/11 attacks. But in reality, one of the enduring legacies of the Obama presidency is going to be that he solidified this Cheneyesque view of the U.S. government, which says that when it comes to foreign policy, that the executive branch is effectively a dictatorship and that Congress only has a minimal role to play in oversight. I mean, Cheney didn’t want Congress to have any role in it. Obama’s administration plays this game with Congress: Certain people can go into the padded room and look at this one document, but, oh, not this other document, and you’re not allowed to bring in a utensil to write with, and you can’t ever tell anyone what you said. That’s congressional oversight on our assassination program. But they have doubled down on this all-powerful executive branch perspective. And that’s why we see this stuff expanding.

AMY GOODMAN: What about this kill list and the elevation of John Brennan, who worked with President Obama in the Oval Office? And how much do you understand about what does take place around defining who will die—

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —and who will live?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean, you know, we now know that there’s these things that are called Terror Tuesdays, where they look at rosters of potential targets and present them to the president. And the president, my understanding, is very, very involved with plucking names off and deciding who stays on. And, you know, you have a working group that is—that’s essentially focused around the clock on figuring out who to kill next around the world. And what’s—what I think is really both disturbing and interesting is that there are multiple—I know that there are at least three separate sets of kill lists. There’s the kill list that the CIA has, and then there’s the Joint Special Operations Command, and then there’s another National Security Council list that contains certain high-value individuals that the U.S. wants taken out. And so, in a country like Yemen, you have both the CIA and JSOCconducting operations. In Pakistan, that’s been true for a very long time. In Somalia, JSOC has conducted operations on the ground, the CIA has done drone strikes, and JSOC has also come in by helicopter and launched missiles at people.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, JSOC is extolled because of the killing of Osama bin Laden. It was, what, SEAL Team 6. And where did they getSEAL Team 6, that name?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right, and Disney tried to trademark the nameSEAL Team 6 after the killing of Osama bin Laden, and then they lost that battle.

I mean, really, the story of JSOC is in many ways the story of Admiral William McRaven, who I think is one of most powerful military figures in—certainly in modern U.S. history. But McRaven was an original member of SEAL Team 6, which, you know, now is known as the Naval Warfare Development Group, DEVGRU, for short, D-E-V-G-R-U. He was an original member of SEAL Team 6, and at the time there were, I think, only two SEAL teams, but they decided to call it SEAL Team 6 as sort of to throw the Russians off, so that—it was Cold War politics. They wanted the Soviet Union to believe that there were more teams of these elite SEALs than there were. And, you know, SEAL Team 6 is probably the most elite unit that’s ever been trained and brought up in the U.S. military. And for much of its lifetime, since it was created in the early 1980s, SEAL Team 6 has operated discreetly in missions, like the one that killed Osama bin Laden, that never make it into the newspaper, very active in Central and Latin America, in Africa and elsewhere.

And so, McRaven was an original member of SEAL Team 6 and would have been one of the people forward deploying to Afghanistan very early on after 9/11, except that a few weeeks before the September 11th attacks, McRaven had injured his back in a parachuting accident and couldn’t deploy to Afghanistan. So instead, McRaven was tapped by General Wayne Downing—this is very early on after 9/11—to come in and advise the National Security Council, which is basically the president and the secretary of defense and then there’s staffers on the National Security Council, but to be at the center of developing the policy for how the U.S. would hunt down those responsible for 9/11. So, McRaven, because of this back injury, is right there in the front row in the White House and helped to shape the policy that he would later implement as the commander of JSOC.

So he’s there in the NSC, very close. He sees how the political wheels spin inside the White House and has a sort of upfront education to how the White House works, then goes back into the field—McRaven does—and is the guy that led the hunt and eventual capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And he also, along with General Stanley McChrystal—he was McChrystal’s deputy at JSOC at the time, for much of the Iraq War—they ran a Murder Inc. operation in Iraq, where they were—they were hunting down the deck of cards, but they were also—they were using intelligence gained from one raid to lead them to the next raid, and they also were running a secret prison in Baghdad called CampNAMA, which stood for "Nasty A— Military Area." I’m not sure that I can say that word on the air, but—and it was effectively a secret prison where high-value detainees were brought. Saddam Hussein was held there originally when he was brought, and McRaven, the night Saddam was arrested, had a cigar with one of the intelligence chiefs of JSOCoutside of Saddam’s cell in what was an old Saddam torture chamber that JSOC then turned into its own torture chamber. And they would bring high-value detainees there. And I get into great description about this in my book from people that were working at the prison at the time and other interrogators that had been there.

And that became the sort of model for—that took hold and spread around. You know, you had torture happening at Guantánamo. You had torture happening at Abu Ghraib. You had this sort of spread of these torture tactics. But a lot of it was because JSOC implemented torture techniques at Camp NAMA in Iraq that were developed from something called the SERE training, which is Survival—it’s a survival program that all special operators go through. And it’s effectively—they are tortured themselves. They’re waterboarded. The guys have had their ribs broken and other limbs broken. Sometimes you’re abducted. The curriculum was developed based on studying the torture techniques of communist China, the North Vietnamese, going all the way back to the Civil War. They have all this institutional knowledge in the U.S. military of torture techniques of the enemy. And they train U.S. soldiers to prepare to endure those torture techniques if—

AMY GOODMAN: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, right. Right, that’s the SERE, S-E-R-E, program. So, this is this training program where it’s to prepare U.S. soldiers for it. What they did is they reverse-engineered it, and they said, "We’re going to start using the tactics that we’ve taught you to endure against our enemy." So, in effect, they became the lawless enemy. And they would use these—that’s where waterboarding came from. They would use these techniques on detainees. And that just—that spread. And so, the standard operating procedures, the SOPs that were used at Camp NAMA, were also used then at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. And there were dissidents within the interrogator community who would try to stand up to this, and then they would have their lives threatened, or they would be blackballed. You know, and no one was allowed to access these prisons.

And to this day, the U.S. military is operating what they call filtration sites, because they’re not categorizing them as prisoners. They’re categorizing them as people who have intelligence that could lead to saving of lives. So they hold them incommunicado and say, "Oh, no, no, they’re not prisoners. These are people that we’re interrogating." And they do it sometimes for months. Under President Obama, people have been held on Navy brigs in ships in the Indian Ocean for months at a time incommunicado while they’re being interrogated. So, you know, these stories, you know, some of them have been out in the press, but we haven’t even been able—started to come to terms with all that has taken place in sort of the world that’s been created over these two administrations, Bush and Obama.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, you did original reporting. You discovered a secret prison, U.S. prison, in Somalia.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, it wasn’t a U.S. prison. It was—when I flew into Aden Adde Airport in Mogadishu in the summer of 2011, when we landed, Rick Rowley and I, we saw this large—I don’t know how to describe it other than it looked like a forward operating base that you would see in Afghanistan, but it had this sort of pink paint on it, and Somalis call it the "pink house." And we discovered that it was a new counterterrorism center that the CIA and military intelligence were running in Somalia, and they were training and preparing a Somali task force to go down and hunt members of the radical group Al Shabab, which pledged its allegiance to al-Qaeda. And they were paying the Somalis $200 in cash each month to work on this task force.

And so, as I started to investigate that, I met people who were working with the CIA that were Somalis, and they described for me a prison that’s in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Service, which is funded and backed by the United States. And in this basement, high-value prisoners are held in a bedbug-infested hellhole, and they are interrogated at times by CIA interrogators and French and other foreign interrogators. And I also met journalists that were put into that prison and saw the U.S. interrogators there, and they were put in that prison for filming things that the U.S.-backed Somali government didn’t want filmed. And so, when we—when I did that reporting, and I called a—you know, we’re not allowed to say who we call—I called a U.S. official, I guess I have to say, and the first thing he said to me is, "Yeah, that sounds right," and, you know, that we’re doing that. And eventually they released a statement to me saying, you know, it makes perfect sense that we would partner with them, and admitted that they were doing interrogations there, but said it was very limited and that they sit in on debriefings with Somali agents.

But I wrote about the case of one man who was snatched in Nairobi, Kenya, from his home, taken to Wilson Airport in Nairobi, and then flown to Somalia, where he was then held in that prison. And he was a guy that was believed to be the right-hand man of one of the leaders of al-Qaeda in East Africa. But the U.S. told the Kenyans, "Go pick him up." This is under Obama. "Go pick this guy up." They go pick him up. They render him to this prison, where then U.S. agents interrogate him.

So, how far have we come? Well, under Bush, they were running secret prisons in Poland and Thailand and elsewhere, these so-called black sites, where they were torturing people. Under President Obama, you have the U.S. directing another government to snatch the person, so it’s not U.S. agents that are doing it, but you say, "We want you to go and take them," and put them in this prison in a third country, where they don’t live, and then they’re going to be put into this hellish prison, the conditions of which constitute, I think, torture, when you don’t give anyone access to sunlight ever and you have them in a bedbug-infested, you know, filthy circumstances. And then U.S. agents can go in and interrogate them. How huge of a difference are those two things? Because, you know, we tend to think that—or I think the collective wisdom is that President Obama rolled back all of these Bush-era policies with his initial executive orders. In reality, there’s been cosmetic changes to a lot of this. And there’s—

AMY GOODMAN: And he said he wanted to close secret prisons.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, he—in fact, there was an order to close the secret prisons. And I believe it was in April of 2009, Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, said that we’re out of the business of secret prisons. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but what I do know is true is that we’re using other people’s secret prisons, other countries’ secret prisons, to do the same kind of dirty deeds that liberals were so rightly outraged about when President Bush was doing it around the world. So, you know, I think that because—because it’s a popular Democratic president, I think people have been convinced that things have really radically shifted, and in reality, they haven’t. And I think a lot of the Bush people stand in awe of what President Obama has been able to do, because they know that they probably wouldn’t have been able to get it done themselves. So, you know, there are ways in which Obama pushed the Cheney agenda far beyond what a President McCain or a President Romney would have been able to do, because he had his base of supporters.

AMY GOODMAN: And to those who say you have to fight lawless terrorists without using the constraints of law?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, then we’re a different nation. I mean, if that’s true, then we have to—we have to step back. I mean, if the majority of Americans believe that, which I don’t believe they do, then we’re a different nation. Then we should go back and write a new constitution, and we should have a totally different concept of what it means to have a justice system or have a judiciary that’s supposed to give access to due process, where you’re allowed to face your accusers.

I mean, one of the things that was most fascinating to me in researching this book was to read about the Clinton era. I cut my teeth in journalism, as you know, Amy, because I started working for you, in the '90s when Clinton was president. And I went back, and I read some of the memos that have been declassified, when the Clinton people were first looking at this question of assassination. And Richard Clarke, you know, who was a counterterrorism adviser in many administrations, Democratic or Republican, said that it was almost like a Talmudic sort of system with how detailed they were in if this, then this, then this, you know, in order to justify an assassination, that you had to have like—know what kind of lock was on the door in the house that you wanted the SEALs to go in and raid to take the person down. The Clinton people look like pacifists, basically, compared to what's happening under this administration, where on Tuesday you get together and decide who’s going to live or die around the world.

But, you know, so this has evolved so radically from one Democratic president, Clinton, to the next, in President Obama. I mean, President Obama looks like a ferocious hawk compared to Clinton or Jimmy Carter or any of these other presidents, which makes it so hilariously ironic the sort of line that a lot of these right-wingers have about Obama, that he’s like a Kenyan Mau Mau socialist or whatever. You know, President Obama is a very hawkish, hard-hitting president when it comes to counterterrorism policies, when it comes to assassination, when it comes to the U.S. reserving the right to bomb countries that it’s not at war with, and, most importantly, when it comes to convincing the American people that these things are all lawful and right and are smarter than the Bush-era big wars.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. We’ll air more of Amy Goodman’s interview with him in a minute.

[break]

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Music from the Somali musician K’naan. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh. We return now to Amy Goodman’s interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of the newly released book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.

AMY GOODMAN: What about JSOC and the covert wars on the African continent?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean, this is a—this is an interesting story that’s only starting to come out into light right now. I mean, JSOC, for some years, has been involved in Mali in fighting against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and you have actions going on in Mali and Mauritania and, you know, very small-scale, discreet presence, working alongside French special operations forces. And, you know, the U.S. has been looking at doing drone strikes also in Africa.

But JSOC has a base in Kenya, and in fact that was where the operation to take down the pirates in April of 2009 took place, when the Somali pirates had taken the Maersk Alabama, which was a defense contractor ship, which seldom gets mentioned, that part of it. And the SEAL Team 6 was deployed from, you know, Kenya, and they went, and they sniper-shot the Somalis, and they rescued the captain. And that was one of the first times that Obama really understood the full power of JSOC, like the kind of force that he had, and, you know, had McRaven into the White House after that, and they had this whole sort of solidification of their relationship.

But a lot of the activity in Africa for the first part of the Obama administration centered in East Africa. And under President Obama, a number of leading al-Qaeda figures were assassinated. You had Saleh Ali Nabhan, was killed in September of 2009. President Obama authorizedJSOC to actually go into Somalia in helicopters, and they went in, and they gunned him down, and then they landed. And they took Nabhan’s body—and I tell this whole story in the book. They took Nabhan’s body, and they flew it out to the sea, and they buried him at sea. We know that that’s the story about what happened with Osama bin Laden’s body.

They did that—actually, Obama and company did that in September of '09 with the head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. He was then succeeded by a fascinating guy whose story would take too long to tell, but it's in the book, Fazul Mohammed, who was this sort of brilliant con artist/master of disguise, who was one of the main plotters of the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, then goes on to become the head of al-Qaeda in Somalia and had a serious battle going on between him and the local Somali jihadists. And when I was in East Africa in 2011, he was killed at a checkpoint in Somalia by a random militia. This was a guy who was a leading al-Qaeda figure, who had eluded—or had evaded CIA andJSOC capture or killing for his entire adult life, from 1998 to the present, and is killed at a random checkpoint.

And it was interesting because it was a huge sort of benefit—I mean, the U.S. was very happy about it. Hillary Clinton made this big statement about how amazing it was. But the U.S. didn’t even kill him. He was killed by—I met the guys who killed him. Rick and I—Rick Rowley and I went and met these guys at a—and had lunch with them and talked to the guys that killed him. And they were just militia guys. And they had stolen all of this leading al-Qaeda figure’s computer equipment and took it back to their village. And so, when the Somali intelligence service realized that this, you know, very important guy, who was traveling on a South African passport under the name Daniel Robinson—and he’s actually from Comoros, the Comoros—they realized that they’ve killed Fazul, this internationally wanted terrorist going back to the Clinton administration. And they said, "Well, where’s all of his stuff in his car?" And they’re like, "Well, the militia guys looted it." So then they had to go back and not tell the guys, "Hey, you know, you have this intelligence stuff." They had to go and say, "We’re looking for computers," and they go into their village, and they paid them, you know, thousands of dollars just to buy back the computers and the memory sticks and the cellphones.

And then they downloaded all of this information that showed the communications between Fazul and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the successor to Osama bin Laden, the number two man in al-Qaeda. And in the book, I talk about what these documents said. And none of these, you know, have really been published. But Fazul was advocating that the Al Shabab stop trying to take control of Somalia and engage in targeted assassinations and to give the appearance of total instability around the country. And they’re all subscribers to this document that is one of the sort of main manifestos of al-Qaeda called "The Management of Savagery." And the actual author of it is unknown, but it’s basically the al-Qaeda manual. And Fazul wanted to implement "The Management of Savagery" in Somalia.

And you’ve seen, Al Shabab has been weakened. They’ve been pushed out of Mogadishu. But they’re able to strike at the heart of the government in Mogadishu, blowing up buildings, attacking courtrooms, killing dozens of people at times. And, you know, it’s—to me, Somalia is, in a way, a window into the future of warfare, because you have mercenaries, drone strikes, special ops, U.S. on the ground working with proxies, but trying to not have a major U.S. footprint, and then you have an enemy that’s engaged in asymmetric warfare. And so, the United States has—is increasingly engaged in this kind of warfare where it’s going to be not large-scale military deployments; it’s going to be bin Laden raid-type operations that you’ll never hear about, in countries that most people probably can’t point out on a map.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, you wrote Blackwater before you wroteDirty Wars. Jeremy Scahill is the author of the international bestseller,Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. You focused on Erik Prince and, overall, the whole issue of the rise of mercenary armies. Can you talk about how that informs what you’re reporting on today? For example, Blackwater in—in Africa, but larger than that, these private contractors in Africa?

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, studying the Blackwater, you know, history and then doing reporting on Blackwater was really my gateway into looking at the world of Joint Special Operations Command and CIAparamilitaries, because a lot of the guys that worked for Blackwater in their earlier life were doing the similar things for the U.S. government or were Navy SEALs or Army Rangers or Delta Force guys. And I actually met several people that, as a result of my reporting on Blackwater, that are from the actual U.S. military and had served and despise Blackwater and feel like they’ve cheapened the image of the American soldier by turning it into a for-profit entity and by taking—cashing in on all of the training they received in the U.S. military. So, actually, some people that really helped to inform me and are in this book—and some of them I can’t name—because I’ve gotten to know them, are people that have serious political disagreements with me but really cannot stand mercenaries and, for that reason, decided to reach out to me or to agree to talk to me.

AMY GOODMAN: Blackwater called now Academi?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, they’ve gone through many name changes. They were Blackwater, then Academi—or then Xe, then Academi. And who knows what it will be? The, you know, Fluffy Bunny Brigade next week. They’re constantly rebranding.

AMY GOODMAN: And where is Erik Prince today?

JEREMY SCAHILL: I actually think—I heard a rumor that Erik Prince is supposed to be coming to the Tribeca Film Festival because of a movie about Somali piracy, the anti-piracy force that he has been involved with operating. But I don’t—you know, I don’t know. I mean, you know, he’s not under any indictment that we know of, although the top five people under him all were indicted on conspiracy charges and weapons charges and got—

AMY GOODMAN: And he did leave the country.

JEREMY SCAHILL: —and got house arrests. And Erik Prince left the country in—I think it was 2010. He left the United States. In fact, I’ll tell you a story that I’ve never—I’ve never told publicly before. The way I found out about Erik Prince—you know, he was the head of Blackwater. His company was being investigated by multiple entities for all sorts of reasons, and they had conducted the Nisoor Square massacre in Baghdad in September of 2007, where they gunned down more than a dozen Iraqis, including a nine-year-old boy. And so, there was all this pressure. There were congressional hearings, and there was a firestorm about Blackwater being involved with the assassination program, running parts of the assassination program. And so Erik Prince decides to leave the United States and goes to Abu Dhabi.

Well, I found out about that before I even—before it was ever public, because I got an email from a young man, from a guy, who said, you know, "I’ve read your book, and I’ve seen you on TV, and I really respect your work, and I have a personal connection to someone who is—because of what he does, has information about the Prince family." And I can’t say more than that about it, but just—so this person says to me, "I have information about that, and I think the two of you should be in touch." And through that contact, I learned that Erik Prince was preparing to leave the United States.

And the person that wrote me that email was Bradley Manning, who is of course now being prosecuted for allegedly leaking all of the diplomatic cables and the "Collateral Murder" to WikiLeaks. Bradley Manning was the person that sent me that email. It wasn’t based on any classified information. He wasn’t sending me a document. It was a personal friend of his that had some attachment to—had some knowledge, because of what he does, of the Prince family’s movements. And it was because of Bradley Manning that I found out about that. And then The New York Times had, you know, followed up on the story after I wrote it in The Nation some weeks later and confirmed that Erik Prince had in fact left the United States. So, win-win.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about Erik Prince in Africa?

JEREMY SCAHILL: And Erik Prince in Africa, he—so, when he left the United States, he—well, first of all, he had—even when he was at Blackwater, he had bought this ship that he called "The McArthur," and he envisioned it as this sort of counter-piracy vessel that could be used to protect shipping companies as they moved in and out of—you know, around the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. And that didn’t end up materializing and didn’t end up going operational. But then Prince got involved with this company called Saracen, which was a mercenary force that was working in various parts of Somalia. And Prince’s latest venture also is targeting Africa, includes, my understanding from his own—from reporting that happened in the Chinese press, is that he he has some wealthy Chinese investors that have—that are working with him on a project. And, you know, they’re looking at counter-piracy. They’re looking at counterterrorism.

You know, Africa is a major story, going forward, in everything that we’re discussing right now. You’re going to—I predict that you’re going to see a real uptick in covert operations in Africa, which is also why—part of why, when I write about it, it’s "dirty wars." I mean, look at what happened in Africa, you know, with the anti-colonialist struggles and the CIA’s involvement with killing people like Patrice Lumumba and the dirty business that went on in South Africa and the Rhodesian mercenaries. I mean, there’s a real history of the CIA and the U.S. military in Africa that I think is important to study as we look into the future of what the U.S. program is in Africa. AFRICOM, which was created in 2007, is a combatant command now. It’s its own area of operations based in Djibouti, which is this tiny African nation, you know, right next to Somalia. And drone strikes are launched out of Djibouti. Special operations teams are in Djibouti. The CIA is in Djibouti. And they took over an old French base called Camp Lemonnier. And that’s where a lot of the covert actions on the African continent are based out of now.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, you mentioned Bradley Manning. And in your extensive footnotes, you do cite WikiLeaks documents. The significance in your covering dirty wars, covert wars, JSOC, of the information that’s come out from WikiLeaks?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Impossible to even like quantify how significant WikiLeaks has been to our understanding of overt and covert U.S. actions. I mean, when I was preparing initially to go to Somalia, we went through and researched on the WikiLeaks cables and found various warlords identified in the cables as being on the U.S. payroll or that the U.S. was working with, and then we went and tracked them down and found them. And, you know, you see that in our film. Two of those warlords were people that we discovered through the WikiLeaks cables.

And also, on the Somalia cables that were released, you know, there is a recognition that the U.S. was using these warlords to hunt down people and that it had caused great problems within the State Department, that they—you had internal debates going on where the CIA and the special operations forces were doing things that U.S. diplomats didn’t want them to be doing and that were counter to what the intelligence available to the U.S. government at the time indicated the threats were and the level of the threat.

But just in terms of our understanding of how the covert apparatus works, I mean, WikiLeaks was indispensable. And I think it’s—we’re going to look back decades from now and realize that because of the release of those documents, there was a huge shift in how we understand some of the more hidden aspects of U.S. policy.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, as we begin to wrap up, what most surprised you in your investigation of these covert wars, and particularly looking at JSOC? And what do you want people to understand from your book?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean, I think that we have rolled back the clock, in some ways, to an era where you have multiple covert paramilitary forces that are operating in secret away from—largely away from journalists or congressional oversight, and they’re engaged in actions that are going to cause blowback. This is going to boomerang back around to us. You can’t launch these so-called signature strikes, killing people in pre-crime, you know, in countries around the world, and think that we’re not going to create a whole new generation of enemies that have an actual grievance against us—not that want to kill us for our McDonald’s or our freedom, but have an actual score to settle. I mean, a lot of the al-Qaeda leadership—you know, Obama likes to talk about how he—you know, "Ask the top 20 leaders of al-Qaeda that I’ve taken down, you know, if I have resolve," was something that he said during the campaign. And fair enough, they’ve—you know, they killed Osama bin Laden. They’ve killed heads of al-Qaeda in East Africa twice. They’ve killed the number three man in al-Qaeda, you know, probably a dozen times. All that’s very true. But, to me, they’re—out of the ashes of all of this could rise a force that is much more difficult to deal with, and that is disparate groups of people that have actual scores to settle with the United States. And I think we’re going to see more asymmetric war on our own—in our own country. And I think some of it is going to be inspired by what we’ve done over these past 10, 12 years.

And I’m—I mean, as a New Yorker, too, I mean, I think that you can’t be paralyzed by the fear of an explosion happening. I mean, we’ve all of course watched, you know, with great horror what happened at the Boston Marathon. And, you know, I haven’t said anything about it, because I don’t think—I think it’s not right to comment on motivations of people until you actually know. And I think that there was a lot of racism in the response that happened after Boston, and I think there was a real rush to judgment, and I think there’s still a rush to judgment that’s going on. We need to understand all of the facts. But separate from that, I think we’re living in a world where we are not going to be immune to the payback for some of the things that we’ve done. And unless—unless we, as a society, completely re-imagine what an actual national security policy would look like, one that recognizes the dignity of other people around the world or the rights of people to practice their religion or determine their form of government, unless we’re willing to re-imagine how we approach the world, we’re doomed to have a repeat of a 9/11-type attack or something that’s smaller-scale but constant.

You asked me about what surprised me. The depth and texture of so many of the characters that populate the landscape of this story over the past 10 years—I mean, from Admiral McRaven and General McChrystal to Mohamed Qanyare, a warlord in Somalia, to Emile Nakhleh, who was one of the people running the CIA’s political Islam division, who’s a character in my book—you know, the way that their lives intersect at various points is incredible. And, you know, the story of the Awlaki family is the one that I think I was invested in most, because I felt like it was a—we only know about the last three years of Anwar al-Awlaki’s life, and it was a watershed moment. The two-week period when the U.S. killed three U.S. citizens, to me, we crossed a—you know, we sort of crossed a line there, and you can’t turn back on it. And I think it was important to understand who was this guy whose death was so important that the Obama administration was willing to cross such a serious line to end his life. Who was that man, and why was he so significant that he needed to be taken out?

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Robert Gibbs. In October, the former White House press secretary and then Obama campaign adviser, Robert Gibbs, was asked about the U.S. killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the U.S. teenage son of Anwar al-Awlaki. In response, Gibbs blamed the elder Awlaki for his son’s assassination by U.S. drones. He was questioned by reporter Sierra Adamson.

SIERRA ADAMSON: Do you think that the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, who was an American citizen, is justifiable?

ROBERT GIBBS: I’m not going to get into Anwar al-Awlaki’s son. I know that Anwar al-Awlaki renounced his citizenship—

SIERRA ADAMSON: His son was still an American citizen.

ROBERT GIBBS: —did great harm to people in this country and was a regional al-Qaeda commander hoping to inflict harm and destruction on people that share his religion and others in this country. And—

SIERRA ADAMSON: That’s an American citizen that’s being targeted without due process of law, without trial.

ROBERT GIBBS: And again—

SIERRA ADAMSON: And he’s underage. He’s a minor.

ROBERT GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father. If they’re truly concerned about the well-being of their children, I don’t think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.

AMY GOODMAN: He "should have a far more responsible father." Those are the words of Robert Gibbs as a surrogate for President Obama when he was running for president in October. Jeremy Scahill?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, he should be—he should be ashamed of himself for what he said. I mean, first of all, Awlaki had left his son in the care of his grandparents, who were—did not share his worldviews at all. He actually had—didn’t have his family on the run with him. He did exactly what Gibbs said he should have done. He was responsible. He left him with his grandparents, who are prominent, upstanding citizens who had great affection for the United States, actually. They were raising that kid, and their dream was for him to go to the United States and go to college in the United States. And to say that a child can pay for the sins of their parents is this old tragedy of history. It’s the worst, most despicable justification that you could ever put forward for killing a child, to say that it’s because of who their parent was. And, I mean, I—to me, and I am not going to stop working on this until we get an answer from this administration—the fact that they will not come out and say why that young man was killed should be viewed with a collective sense of shame in our country, because it shows just how far this has gone. And there are very legitimate questions that are being—that need to be raised about this, and too few people are raising them, particularly in Congress.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield . Please visit democracynow.org to hear part one of Amy Goodman’s interview with Jeremy.

On Saturday, Amy will be moderating a discussion with Jeremy and Noam Chomsky at Harvard University at 2:00 p.m.

-->

The Absurd Times

Thursday, June 06, 2013

Turkey, Syria, Ralph Nader, Dirty Wars

A Turkish Spring? Over 1,000 Injured as Anti-Government Protests Spread Outside of Istanbul

TRANSCRIPT

Bradley Manning Trial: After 3 Years, Army Whistleblower Begins Court-Martial Shrouded in Secrecy

TRANSCRIPT

American Fascism: Ralph Nader Decries How Big Business Has Taken Control of the U.S. Government

TRANSCRIPT

As U.S. Deploys Patriot Missiles and F-16s to Jordan, Could Syrian Conflict Engulf the Middle East?

TRANSCRIPT

The World Is a Battlefield: Jeremy Scahill on "Dirty Wars" and Obama’s Expanding Drone Attacks

TRANSCRIPT

Twitter

Translate

Labels

Popular Posts

fb

The Absurd Times

https://open.substack.com/pub/absurdtimes1c2/p/free-sign-up?r=q3o1q&am

Thursday, June 06, 2013

Turkey, Syria, Ralph Nader, Dirty Wars

A Turkish Spring? Over 1,000 Injured as Anti-Government Protests Spread Outside of Istanbul

TRANSCRIPT

Bradley Manning Trial: After 3 Years, Army Whistleblower Begins Court-Martial Shrouded in Secrecy

TRANSCRIPT

American Fascism: Ralph Nader Decries How Big Business Has Taken Control of the U.S. Government

TRANSCRIPT

As U.S. Deploys Patriot Missiles and F-16s to Jordan, Could Syrian Conflict Engulf the Middle East?

TRANSCRIPT

The World Is a Battlefield: Jeremy Scahill on "Dirty Wars" and Obama’s Expanding Drone Attacks

TRANSCRIPT

Twitter

Translate

Labels

Popular Posts

fb