Ukraine: Let’s get real

Ukraine: Let’s get real

          Nowhere on Corporate media is there anything approaching the truth about the situation in Ukraine, but we have the chance to rectify that here.  The way the media presents it, the mob is an oppressed minority searching for freedom.  The opposition leaders are noble and pure.

            Actually, the original leaders were fairly sane compared to the crowd that has control now.  After the interview reprinted below, for a few days it seemed as if some semblance of sanity was going to be restored.  The Russian sent an emissary both the Ukraine and the EU to work out some sort of accommodation and it seemed as if things would settle down.

            But they will not.  First of all, that blonde bimbo with the long braid circled aounr the tope of her head like some queen of modern Ukraine is now loose on the streets.  Even worse, a Neo-Fascist, nationalistic, very right-wing bunch of lunatics are now in charge of the streets.  The normal, by western standards, opposition is in charge of the parliament now and the President has more or less been ousted in a coup, but this will not satisfy the street people.  A week or so ago we explained a great deal of this here so we see no need to repeat ourselves other than to say that the mob is more virulently neo-fascist than even we expected.  We did think they were insane, about half the population is insane, but had little insight into the neo-nazi aspects of this uprising. 

            At any rate, reprinted here are the words of one of the few honest scholars on the subject of Russia and the old Soviet Union:

Display full version

Thursday, February 20, 2014

A New Cold War? Ukraine Violence Escalates, Leaked Tape Suggests U.S. Was Plotting Coup

A short-lived truce has broken down in Ukraine as street battles have erupted between anti-government protesters and police. Last night the country’s embattled president and the opposition leaders demanding his resignation called for a truce and negotiations to try to resolve Ukraine’s political crisis. But hours later, armed protesters attempted to retake Independence Square, sparking another day of deadly violence. At least 50 people have died since Tuesday in the bloodiest period of Ukraine’s 22-year post-Soviet history. While President Obama has vowed to "continue to engage all sides," a recently leaked audio recording between two top U.S. officials reveal the Obama administration has been secretly plotting with the opposition. We speak to Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. His most recent book, "Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War," is out in paperback. His latest Nation article is "Distorting Russia: How the American Media Misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine."

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A short-lived truce has broken down in Ukraine as street battles have erupted between anti-government protesters and police. Last night, the country’s embattled president and the opposition leaders demanding his resignation called for a truce and negotiations to try to resolve Ukraine’s political crisis. But the truce only lasted a few hours. The last three days have been the bloodiest period of Ukraine’s 22-year post-Soviet history. Over 50 people have died, including at least 21 today. The truce ended today when armed protesters attempted to retake Independence Square. Both sides have accused the other of using live ammunition. A Ukrainian paramedic described the chaotic scene.

UKRAINIAN PARAMEDIC: [translated] Some bodies are at the concert hall. Some are at the barricades. Now there are maybe around 15 or 20 dead. It is hard to count, as some are carried away, others are resuscitated. Now, as far as I know, three dead people are at the city hall, and two more dead are at the main post office. There are so many at the concert hall that we didn’t even take them.

AMY GOODMAN: The Ukrainian parliament, Rada, and Cabinet buildings have reportedly been evacuated because of fears they could be stormed by protesters. The street clashes are occurring while the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, is meeting with the foreign ministers from Germany, Poland and France.
The Obama administration stepped up pressure on the Ukrainian government Wednesday by announcing a visa ban on 20 members of the Ukrainian government. The U.S. is also threatening to place sanctions on the Ukrainian government.
The protests began in late November after President Yanukovych reversed his decision to sign a long-awaited trade deal with the European Union, or EU, to forge stronger ties with Russia instead.

To talk more about the latest in Ukraine, we’re joined by Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. His most recent book, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, is now out in paperback. His latest piece in The Nation is called "Distorting Russia: How the American Media Misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine."

So, talk about the latest, Professor Cohen.

STEPHEN COHEN: Where do you want me to begin? I mean, we are watching history being made, but history of the worst kind. That’s what I’m telling my grandchildren: Watch this. What’s happening there, let’s take the big picture, then we can go to the small picture. The big picture is, people are dying in the streets every day. The number 50 is certainly too few. They’re still finding bodies. Ukraine is splitting apart down the middle, because Ukraine is not one country, contrary to what the American media, which speaks about the Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Historically, ethnically, religiously, culturally, politically, economically, it’s two countries. One half wants to stay close to Russia; the other wants to go West. We now have reliable reports that the anti-government forces in the streets—and there are some very nasty people among them—are seizing weapons in western Ukrainian military bases. So we have clearly the possibility of a civil war.

And the longer-term outcome may be—and I want to emphasize this, because nobody in the United States seems to want to pay attention to it—the outcome may be the construction, the emergence of a new Cold War divide between West and East, not this time, as it was for our generation, in faraway Berlin, but right on the borders of Russia, right through the heart of Slavic civilization. And if that happens, if that’s the new Cold War divide, it’s permanent instability and permanent potential for real war for decades to come. That’s what’s at stake.

One last point, also something that nobody in this country wants to talk about: The Western authorities, who bear some responsibility for what’s happened, and who therefore also have blood on their hands, are taking no responsibility. They’re uttering utterly banal statements, which, because of their vacuous nature, are encouraging and rationalizing the people in Ukraine who are throwing Molotov cocktails, now have weapons, are shooting at police. We wouldn’t permit that in any Western capital, no matter how righteous the cause, but it’s being condoned by the European Union and Washington as events unfold.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And when you say the Western countries who bear some responsibility, in what sense do they bear responsibility? I mean, clearly, there’s been an effort by the United States and Europe ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union to pull the former Soviet states into their economic sphere, but is that what you’re talking about?

STEPHEN COHEN: I mean that. I mean that Moscow—look at it through Moscow’s eyes. Since the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the U.S.-led West has been on a steady march toward post-Soviet Russia, began with the expansion of NATO in the 1990s under Clinton. Bush then further expanded NATO all the way to Russia’s borders. Then came the funding of what are euphemistically called NGOs, but they are political action groups, funded by the West, operating inside Russia. Then came the decision to build missile defense installations along Russia’s borders, allegedly against Iran, a country which has neither nuclear weapons nor any missiles to deliver them with. Then comes American military outpost in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, which led to the war of 2008, and now the West is at the gates of Ukraine. So, that’s the picture as Moscow sees it. And it’s rational. It’s reasonable. It’s hard to deny.

But as for the immediate crisis, let’s ask ourselves this: Who precipitated this crisis? The American media says it was Putin and the very bad, though democratically elected, president of Ukraine, Yanukovych. But it was the European Union, backed by Washington, that said in November to the democratically elected president of a profoundly divided country, Ukraine, "You must choose between Europe and Russia." That was an ultimatum to Yanukovych. Remember—wasn’t reported here—at that moment, what did the much-despised Putin say? He said, "Why? Why does Ukraine have to choose? We are prepared to help Ukraine avoid economic collapse, along with you, the West. Let’s make it a tripartite package to Ukraine." And it was rejected in Washington and in Brussels. That precipitated the protests in the streets.

And since then, the dynamic that any of us who have ever witnessed these kinds of struggles in the streets unfolded, as extremists have taken control of the movement from the so-called moderate Ukrainian leaders. I mean, the moderate Ukrainian leaders, with whom the Western foreign ministers are traveling to Kiev to talk, they’ve lost control of the situation. By the way, people ask—excuse me—is it a revolution? Is it a revolution? A much abused word, but one sign of a revolution is the first victims of revolution are the moderates. And then it becomes a struggle between the extreme forces on either side. And that’s what we’re witnessing.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to the Ukrainian opposition leader, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who admitted earlier today the opposition does not have full control of protesters in Independence Square.

ARSENIY YATSENYUK: The only chance to do it is to stop the riot police, to stop the protesters, to impose a DMZ, like demilitarized zone, and to move this conflict from the streets to the Parliament.

REPORTER 1: Parts of the protesters are out of control?

ARSENIY YATSENYUK: No one—I would be very frank, that the government doesn’t control the riot police, and it’s very difficult for the opposition to control Maidan. And there are a number of forces who are uncontrolled. This is the truth.

REPORTER 2: So, Ukraine is in chaos now.

ARSENIY YATSENYUK: Ukraine is in a big mess.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Ukrainian opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Professor Cohen?

STEPHEN COHEN: A moderate.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go—

STEPHEN COHEN: Who wants to be president.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to President Obama. He’s in Mexico for the big Mexico-Canada-U.S. summit talking about Ukraine.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: With regard to Ukraine, along with our European partners, we will continue to engage all sides. And we continue to stress to President Yanukovych and the Ukrainian government that they have the primary responsibility to prevent the kind of terrible violence that we’ve seen, to withdraw riot police, to work with the opposition to restore security and human dignity, and move the country forward. And this includes progress towards a multi-party, technical government that can work with the international community on a support package and adopt reforms necessary for free and fair elections next year. Ukrainians are a proud and resilient people who have overcome extraordinary challenges in their history, and that’s a pride and strength that I hope they draw on now.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s President Obama in Mexico, Professor Cohen.

STEPHEN COHEN: What are you asking me to comment on?

AMY GOODMAN: Your response to his response.

STEPHEN COHEN: To what he just said? Shame. Shame. He is saying that the responsibility for restoring peace is on the Ukrainian government, and it should withdraw its security forces from the streets. But let me ask you, if in Washington people throwing Molotov cocktails are marching on Congress—and these people are headed for the Ukrainian Congress—if these people have barricaded entrance to the White House and are throwing rocks at the White House security guard, would President Obama withdraw his security forces? This is—this is—and do you know what this does? And let’s escape partisanship here. I mean, lives are at stake. This incites, these kinds of statement that Obama made. It rationalizes what the killers in the streets are doing. It gives them Western license, because he’s not saying to the people in the streets, "Stop this, stop shooting policemen, stop attacking government buildings, sit down and talk." And the guy you had on just before, a so-called moderate leader, what did he just tell you? "We have lost control of the situation." That’s what I just told you. He just confirmed that.

So what Obama needs to say is, "We deplore what the people in the streets are doing when they attack the police, the law enforcement official. And we also don’t like the people who are writing on buildings 'Jews live here,'" because these forces, these quasi-fascist forces—let’s address this issue, because the last time I was on your broadcast, you found some guy somewhere who said there was none of this there. All right. What percent are the quasi-fascists of the opposition? Let’s say they’re 5 percent. I think they’re more, but let’s give them the break, 5 percent. But we know from history that when the moderates lose control of the situation, they don’t know what to do. The country descends in chaos. Five percent of a population that’s tough, resolute, ruthless, armed, well funded, and knows what it wants, can make history. We’ve seen it through Europe. We’ve seen it through Asia. This is reality. And where Washington and Brussels are on this issue, they won’t step up and take the responsibility.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, even in most recent history, whether you look at Libya or whether you look at the situation in Syria, where those presidents warned that there were extremist elements inside a broader popular movement that were eventually going to gain control, this seems like a replay in terms of what’s going on here in the Ukraine of a popular movement, but yet a very, very, as you say, right-wing movement—not only a right-wing movement, but a fascist movement with a history. Ukraine has had a history of a fascist movement going back to the days of Nazi Germany.

STEPHEN COHEN: Let’s go to real heresy. Let’s ask a question: Who has been right about interpreting recent events? Let’s go to the Arab Spring. Obama and Washington said this was about democracy now, this is great. Russia said, "Wait a minute. If you destabilize, even if they’re authoritarian leaders in the Middle East, you’re not going to get Thomas Jefferson in power. You’re going to get jihadists. You’re going to get very radical people in power all through the Middle East." Looking back, who was right or wrong about that narrative? Have a look at Egypt. Have a look at Libya. Who was right? Can Russians ever be right about anything?

Now what are the Russians saying about Ukraine? They’re saying what you just said, that the peaceful protesters, as we keep calling them—I think a lot of them have gone home. There were many. By the way, at the beginning, there were hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, of very decent, liberal, progressive, honorable people in the streets. But they’ve lost control of the situation. That’s the point now. And so, the Russians are saying, "Look, you’re trying to depose Yanukovych, who’s the elected government." Think. If you overthrow—and, by the way, there’s a presidential election in a year. The Russians are saying wait 'til the next election. If you overthrow him—and that's what Washington and Brussels are saying, that he must go—what are you doing to the possibility of democracy not only in Ukraine, but throughout this part of the world? And secondly, who do you think is going to come to power? Please tell us. And we’re silent.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the famous leaked tape right now. The top State Department official has apologized to her European counterparts after she was caught cursing the European Union, the EU, in a leaked audio recording that was posted to YouTube. The recording captured an intercepted phone conversation between the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, and Victoria Nuland, the top U.S. diplomat for Europe. Nuland expresses frustration over Europe’s response to the political crisis in Ukraine, using frank terms.

VICTORIA NULAND: So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and have the U.N. help glue it. And, you know, [bleep] the EU.

AMY GOODMAN: While Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s comment about the EU dominated the news headlines because she used a curse, there were several other very interesting parts of her conversation with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

GEOFFREY PYATT: Let me work on Klitschko, and if you can just keep—I think we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing. Then the other issue is some kind of outreach to Yanukovych, but we can probably regroup on that tomorrow as we see how things start to fall into place.

VICTORIA NULAND: So, on that piece, Geoff, when I wrote the note, Sullivan’s come back to me VFR saying, "You need Biden?" And I said, "Probably tomorrow for an attaboy and to get the deets to stick." So Biden’s willing.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Pyatt, speaking with Victoria Nuland. The significance of what she is saying? She also had gone to Ukraine and was feeding protesters on the front line.

STEPHEN COHEN: Cookies, cookies. Well, here again, the American political media establishment, including the right and the left and the center—because they’re all complicit in this nonsense—focused on the too sensational, they thought, aspect of that leaked conversation. She said, "F— the European Union," and everybody said, "Oh, my god! She said the word." The other thing was, who leaked it? "Oh, it was the Russians. Those dirty Russians leaked this conversation." But the significance is what you just played. What are they doing? The highest-ranking State Department official, who presumably represents the Obama administration, and the American ambassador in Kiev are, to put it in blunt terms, plotting a coup d’état against the elected president of Ukraine.

Now, that said, Amy, Juan, you may say to me—neither of you would, but hypothetically—"That’s a good thing. We don’t like—we don’t care if he was elected democratically. He’s a rat. He’s corrupt." And he is all those things. He is. "Let’s depose him. That’s what the United States should do. Then the United States should stand up and say, ’That’s what we do: We get rid of bad guys. We assassinate them, and we overthrow them.’" But in Washington and in Brussels, they lie: They’re talking about democracy now. They’re not talking about democracy now; they’re talking about a coup now.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, this is more from—

STEPHEN COHEN: And we—excuse me—and we should—we, American citizens, should be allowed to choose which policy we want. But they conceal it from us. And I’m extremely angry that the people in this country who say they deplore this sort of thing have fallen silent.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Let’s listen to little bit more of the leaked conversation between the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, and Victoria Nuland, the top U.S. diplomat for Europe.

VICTORIA NULAND: Good. So, I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think it’s a good idea.

GEOFFREY PYATT: Yeah. I mean, I guess, you think—in terms of him not going into the government, just let him sort of stay out and do his political homework and stuff. I’m just thinking, in terms of sort of the process moving ahead, we want to keep the moderate democrats together. The problem is going to be Tyahnybok and his guys. And, you know, I’m sure that’s part of what Yanukovych is calculating on all of this. I kind of—

VICTORIA NULAND: I think—I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the guy—you know, what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week. You know, I just think Klitsch going in, he’s going to be at that level working for Yatsenyuk. It’s just not going to work.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Victoria Nuland, the top U.S. diplomat for Europe, speaking with Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine. Stephen Cohen, this—this chess game—

STEPHEN COHEN: You don’t need me here. What do you need me for?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —this chess game that they’re conducting here?

STEPHEN COHEN: There it is. There it is.

AMY GOODMAN: But explain the names. Who is Klitsch, Yats?

STEPHEN COHEN: All right. And notice the intimacy with which the Americans deal with the two leading so-called "moderate"—and these are big shots, they both want to be president—Ukrainian opposition. Klitschko is Vitali Klitschko, a six-foot-eight former—he resigned his title two months ago to enter politics—heavyweight champion of the world. His residence has been Ukraine—I mean, Germany. He plays—he pays taxes in Germany. He’s a project of Merkel. He represents German interests. I’m sure he’s also faithful to Ukraine, but he’s got a problem. Yatsenyuk, however—not Yatsenyuk, but the other guy she calls "Yats" is a representative of the Fatherland Party. It’s a big party in Parliament. But Washington likes him a lot. They think he’ll be our man. So you could see what they’re saying. We don’t quite trust Klitschko. Now, if you want to get esoteric, that’s the tug between Washington and Berlin. They’re not happy with Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. They don’t like the role Merkel is playing, generally. They think Germany has gotten too big for its britches. They want to cut Merkel down. So you noticed Klitschko, the boxer, is Merkel’s proxy, or at least she’s backing him. You notice that they say, "He’s not ready for prime time. Let him do his homework."

Now, this guy—I’m bad on Ukrainian names. Tyagnybok, that they say has got to play a role, he’s the leader of the Freedom Party, the Svoboda Party, but a large element of that party, to put it candidly, is quasi-fascist. And they’re prepared to embrace this guy. This is the guy, by the way, that Senator John McCain in November or December went to Kiev and embraced. Either McCain didn’t know who he was, or he didn’t care. The United States is prepared to embrace that guy, too—anything to get rid of Yanukovych, because they think this is about Putin. That’s all they really got on their mind.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, here you have President Obama, again, speaking yesterday in Mexico.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Our approach as the United States is not to see these as some Cold War chessboard in which we’re in competition with Russia. Our goal is to make sure that the people of Ukraine are able to make decisions for themselves about their future, that the people of Syria are able to make decisions without having bombs going off and killing women and children, or chemical weapons, or towns being starved, because a despot wants to cling to power.

AMY GOODMAN: Who benefits from the instability, Professor Cohen, in Ukraine? And what does it mean for Putin? Is he concerned about this?

STEPHEN COHEN: Of course he’s concerned. It’s right on his borders, and it’s all tainting him. I mean, The Washington Post wrote an editorial yesterday. Putin is happy that the violence has broken out in the streets. Everybody understands, even The Washington Post understands, which understands almost nothing about Russia, but they got this, that during the Sochi Olympics, the last thing Putin wants is violence in Ukraine. So why is he happy about it? He deplores it. He’s unhappy. He’s furious at the president of Ukraine. He read him the Riot Act on the phone last night, that why doesn’t he get control of the situation? What is he doing? So Putin is not responsible for this. Can we speak about Obama?

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly.

STEPHEN COHEN: Very quickly. I grew up in the segregated South. I voted for him twice, as historical justice. That’s not leadership. That’s a falsification of what’s happening in Ukraine, and it’s making the situation worse, what he says, is that we deplore the violence and call upon Ukrainian government to withdraw its forces and stop the violence. He needs to talk about what’s happening in the streets.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And is it conceivable, if Ukraine descends into a further civil war, that Russia might intervene?

STEPHEN COHEN: It’s conceivable. It’s conceivable. Here—I mean, Yanukovych—you might say, as an adviser to Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine, "Impose martial law now, because you’ve got bad PR in the West anyway, and you’re not in control of the situation." The problem is, Yanukovych isn’t sure he controls the army.

AMY GOODMAN: He just fired the head of the army yesterday.

STEPHEN COHEN: Yeah, we don’t know what it means, but it indicates he’s not too sure about the army. But, by the way, you asked, would Russia intervene? Would NATO intervene? NATO is all over the place. NATO was in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Ask yourself that: Would NATO send troops in? Is that, yes, you think they would?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I—

STEPHEN COHEN: We don’t know.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We don’t know, yeah.

STEPHEN COHEN: And we’re not going to be told, just like we’re not being told what’s going on in these private conversations about deposing the president of Ukraine. If they depose—

AMY GOODMAN: Unless they’re leaked again.

STEPHEN COHEN: Yeah, and if the Russians leak them, it doesn’t count. Is that right?

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. can hardly protest, given the whole scandal with the NSA recording conversations.

STEPHEN COHEN: Yeah, well, you know what they said. They said—they said, when this got leaked, that this is a low point in statecraft. After Snowden? After Snowden? I mean, what did Tennessee Williams used to say? Mendacity? Mendacity? The mendacity of it all? Don’t they trust us, our government, to tell us a little bit of the truth at last?

AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Cohen, I want to thank you for being with us. We’re going to move onto Venezuela. Stephen Cohen is professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. His most recent book, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, it’s just out in paperback. His latest piece in The Nation is "Distorting Russia: How the American Media Misrepresent [Putin], Sochi and Ukraine." This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Edwin Starr singing "War." This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We have just hit 18. We have just come of age. Yes, Democracy Now! is 18 years old this week, and people are sending in from all over the world pictures of themselves holding up signs, "We need Democracy Now! because..." And we urge you to do the same thing. You can just go to democracynow.org/because, and you can send us your image. Also people also sending in videos. We’ll play some of them in a bit. Yes, this is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now that we’re 18, we are of legal age.

---

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.

Why the Focus on Whistle Blowers -- Marx's Advice

    Capitalism has learned from Marx who said that an idea, once adopted by the masses, becomes a force.
    The survival of Capitalism was not all that certain during a few periods in our history, including the period leading up to and including the Great Depression, and the aftermath of the House on Un-American Activities Committee led in its vile witch hunt by McCarthy.  After that, life expanded; eventually cane Kennedy and a sense of idealism that led to protest against the War in Vietnam and the indentured servitude called either the draft or public service.  Many leading figures were killed until the draft was eliminated by Nixon, not from a sense of freedom, but rather to eliminate one of the chief motivators behind the idealism, the “make love, not war” mantra, communal living (there is that “communism again,” and an general anti-authoritarian movement.
    Capitalism realized the importance of Marx’s message and embarked on a massive Public Relations campaign.  It groomed a mediocre actor named Ronal Reagan to eventually become President, adopt an unassuming “guy-next-door” personage, a nice guy, to systematically dismantle any sort of program that helped less fortunate people, the masses, and do it with their support.  When R. D. Laing, for example, had campaigned against mental institutions, Ronnie seized the opportunity and tossed the mentally disabled on the streets and diverted the money into weapons.  His administration decided nicotine was as addictive as heroin, but immediately eliminated addiction as a “disability.”
    Every since then, the steady erosion of the “New Deal” has continued.  When it seemed that the country wanted a change, the billionaires invented the “tea-party,” morons who gleefully accepted attacks on any government program.
      Now, after Bradley Manning released the videos of what we were actually doing in Iraq, the helicopter shot, and the events at Abu Garab, and the truth about “WMDs’ were released, immediately the focus turned not on the misdeeds themselves, but on those who exposed them.  Ellsberg stated quite rightly that the “political situation was much different back then,” or he would have spent his life in prison.
    Well, that is what is going on new with all the attacks on Assange, Snowden, Greenwald, and the rest.  The focus of the media is on THEM, but what they revealed and whether it is acceptable behavior from a “democratic government.”
    Here is another example:

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2014
Julian Assange on Being Placed on NSA "Manhunting" List & Secret Targeting of WikiLeaks Supporters
Top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden have revealed new details about how the United States and Britain targeted the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks after it published leaked documents about the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. According to a new article by The Intercept, Britain’s top spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, secretly monitored visitors to a WikiLeaks website by collecting their IP addresses in real time, as well as the search terms used to reach the site. One document from 2010 shows that the National Security Agency added WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to a "manhunting" target list, together with suspected members of al-Qaeda. We speak to Assange live from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has sought political asylum since 2012. Also joining us is his lawyer Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden have revealed new details about how the United States and Britain targeted the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks after it published leaked documents about the Afghan War. According to a new article co-written by Glenn Greenwald published this morning by The Intercept, Britain’s top spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, secretly monitored visitors to a WikiLeaks site by collecting their IP addresses in real time as well as the search terms used to reach the site. One document from 2010 shows that the National Security Agency added WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to a, quote, "manhunting" target list, together with suspected members of al-Qaeda.
AMY GOODMAN: Another document reveals the NSA considered designating WikiLeaks as a "malicious foreign actor." According to The Intercept, "Such a designation would have allowed the group to be targeted with extensive electronic surveillance—without the need to exclude U.S. persons from the surveillance searches." In addition, the leaked documents reveal the United States urged its foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group’s publication of the Afghanistan War Logs.
Joining us now from London is Wikileaks founder and editor Julian Assange, talking to us by the phone from the Ecuadorean embassy where he has political asylum since August 2012. Here in New York, we’re joined by Michael Ratner, the attorney for Julian Assange, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
When you read this, Julian — welcome back to Democracy Now! — what were your thoughts on being put on this "manhunting"—their words—"manhunting" list together with al-Qaeda?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Good morning, Amy.
Well, my first thought was, well, finally, we have some proof that we can present to the public for what we have long suspected for a variety of reasons. And it is strange to see your name in that context with people who are suspected of serious criminal acts of terrorism. Clearly, that is a massive overstep.
We’ve heard a lot in the propaganda pushed on this issue by Clapper and others in the U.S. national security complex that, of course, this pervasive surveillance is justified by the need to stop U.S.—stop terrorist attacks being conducted on the United States and its allies. But we’ve seen example after example come out over the last few months showing the National Security Agency and its partners, GCHQ, engaged in economic espionage.
And here we have an example where the type of espionage being engaged in is spying on a publisher—WikiLeaks, the publishing organization, and a publisher—me, personally. And the other material that came out in relation to GCHQ was from 2012, and that shows that GCHQ was spying on our service and our readers, so not just the publisher as an organization, not just the publisher as a person, but also the readers of a publisher. And that’s clearly, I believe, not something that the United States population agrees with, let alone other people.
AMY GOODMAN: Were you surprised by anything that came out in these latest documents?
JULIAN ASSANGE: I was surprised about how someone is added to the foreign malicious actor list. So, the National Security Agency went through a process to try and—at quite a high level, at the office of the legal director, to designate us as a foreign—foreign malicious actor, which means that our U.S. personnel can be spied on, or our U.S. supporters or associates. The, quote, "human network" that supports WikiLeaks in the United States can be targeted without going through any of the checks that the National Security Agency might normally engage in.
And if you read the detail of that writing, you can see that it’s quite a lackadaisical, cavalier approach to going into that very serious step of deciding to spy on a publisher and all its U.S. personnel. And we must assume that news agencies like Reuters or the Deutsche Presse Agency that have foreign correspondents in the United States, who are American citizens or American citizens working overseas, could be similarly affected.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Julian Assange, the Intercept article quotes from thedocument you’re referencing. It was from July 2011 and showed how two NSA officers considered designating WikiLeaks a, quote, "malicious foreign actor." I want to read from the exchange between the NSA agency’s general counsel and an arm of its Threat Operations Center. Quote, "Can we treat a foreign server who stores, or potentially disseminates leaked or stolen US data on it’s [sic] server as a 'malicious foreign actor' for the purpose of targeting with no defeats? Examples: WikiLeaks, thepiratebay.org, etc." The response was, quote, "Let us get back to you." Julian Assange, your response, and what the documents reveal about the process that the NSA or GCHQgo through to designate someone a malicious foreign actor?
JULIAN ASSANGE: What they mean here by "no defeats," it’s sort of no protections for any form of interception of content of U.S. citizens communicating with that organization or through that foreign server. And the particular document that this came out in was actually not a document that was formally looking at this issue in relation to us; rather, it was a extraction from that consideration that happened sometime in the past and then was put into one of their, if you like, sort of frequently asked questions internally in the National Security Agency. So we’re quite lucky to have found this reference.
We were used as an example of how could you in fact target these servers, even when they were used by people in the United States. And the answer is, yes, that can be done. And we don’t know what the answer was in our particular case, but given that the general example is yes, then we must assume that it was. And I think, really, now General Alexander needs to come clean and say, in fact, was that permitted in the case of WikiLeaks, and did the National Security Agency proceed in spying on our U.S. personnel or our lawyers, for example, like Michael Ratner, who’s based in New York.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian, we have Michael here, but I did want to ask—you’ve been in the embassy, haven’t had natural daylight, sunlight, for 608 days. How are you? And does the information that has come out of this change in any way what your thoughts are about your future?
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I just find it helpful that—in preparing the asylum application, of course, we looked into many details like this that were quite technical, a big puzzle of many pieces, which some organization, like a foreign office or the Ecuadorean Department of Foreign Affairs, has the time to assess, but of course it’s harder for the public to understand, that documents like this show very readily sort of the scale of the U.S. response to our publications and why it’s, unfortunately, necessary for me to apply and receive asylum and for some of our other personnel, like Sarah Harrison, who’s a British citizen, to be in legally advised exile in Germany.
AMY GOODMAN: And will the information about whether there is a sealed indictment, which this seems to indicate there isn’t—do you have any further information about that, an indictment against you in the United States?
AMY GOODMAN: The district attorney of Virginia gave the last information on that issue and formally stated publicly that the investigation continues.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Julian Assange, we want to thank you for being with us, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. Will this change anything you do inside the embassy, when you see how—further information about your being monitored and people even going to the website—what is it—GCHQ, the equivalent of the NSA in Britain, collecting the IP addresses in real time of people who even access the WikiLeaks site?
JULIAN ASSANGE: The WikiLeaks security model has always been predicated under the basis that we are dealing with very powerful organizations that do not obey the rule of law, whether those are powerful criminal organizations, whether those are corrupt governments in Africa, or whether they’re spy agencies allied with the West or Russia or China. And so, it doesn’t—we’ve always been prepared to defend against that sort of scrutiny. The U.K. government has publicly admitted that they’ve spent six million pounds in the last year surveilling the embassy through police forces alone. We see from these documents that we must assume that GCHQ is also monitoring the situation. That’s part of—I suppose, part of the sad state of the rule of law in the West, where these organizations behave that way. I think the days are clearly numbered that they can get away with it without being exposed. But I’ll leave you to Michael Ratner now.
AMY GOODMAN: Thanks so much, Julian. Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. When we come back, we are joined by Michael Ratner, legal adviser to Julian Assange. We’ll also be joined from London, not in exile in the Ecuadorean embassy, but in a studio in London, by Jesselyn Radack, the legal adviser to Edward Snowden who was stopped at Heathrow Airport on Sunday, asked, "Who is Edward Snowden? Where is Bradley Manning?" and other such questions. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden have revealed new details about how the United States and Britain targeted the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks after it published leaked documents about the Afghan War. According to a new article written by Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher published this morning by The Intercept, Britain’s top spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, secretly monitored visitors to a WikiLeaks site by collecting their IP addresses in real time as well as the search terms used to reach the site.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden details a "manhunting timeline" that shows how the U.S. tried to pressure other nations to prosecute Julian Assange. One read, quote, "The United States on 10 August urged other nations with forces in Afghanistan, including Australia, United Kingdom, and Germany, to consider filing criminal charges against Julian Assange."
Joining us now is Michael Ratner. He is the president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is the legal adviser to Julian Assange.
So, talk about this last point, Michael, first what you’re most surprised by in this piece that just came out at The Intercept, and particularly the U.S. pushing other countries to prosecute Julian.
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, what I was really shocked by was the extent the U.S. and U.K. have gone through to try and get and destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and their network of supporters. I mean, it’s astounding. And it’s been going on for years. And it also, as Julian pointed out, tells us why he is in the Ecuadorean embassy and why Ecuador has given him asylum. He has every reason to heavily fear what would happen to him in this country, in the United States, if he were to be ever taken here. So I think, for me, that’s a very, very critical point, justifies every reason why Ecuador gave him asylum.
And the document you’re addressing, Amy, what they call the manhunt timeline, which is extraordinary because it groups him among, you know, a whole bunch of people who the U.S. considers terrorists, it also, interestingly, groups them—groups them among Palestinians, which is pretty interesting in itself. But to have Julian on that list as a manhunt timeline, and it says prosecute him wherever you can get him, is pretty extraordinary. It doesn’t say you necessarily need a good reason to prosecute him; it just says, basically, prosecute him. And what it’s reminiscent, to me, is of the program that took place in this country in the '60s and the ’70s, COINTELPRO, counterintelligence procedures, when the FBI said, "We have to basically destroy the black civil rights movement, the New Left and others, and prosecute them, get them however you can, get rid of them." And so, the manhunt timeline, even its name is chilling. But that's what it is. It’s an effort to try and get WikiLeaks and their personnel, wherever they are in the world.
And, of course, we’ve seen some of that. You’ve had people on this show. When people cross borders who are associates with WikiLeaks, they get stopped. They get surveilled all the time. We’ve seen—we’ve seen efforts to take—to basically destroy WikiLeaks by stealing their laptops on a trip that went from Sweden to Germany. We’ve seen efforts across the board, in country after country. Germany, they surveil conferences when WikiLeaks people speak there, everywhere. So, actually, this program is not just an abstraction. This program has been implemented. And the manhunt timeline, I think, is incredibly significant, considering that the manhunt is an effort to locate, find and destroy—in some cases, kill—kill people.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Michael Ratner, what do you think the appropriate response should be to something like that? Is there any legal action that Assange’s legal team can take in response to this?
MICHAEL RATNER: Julian Assange, in his statement to the article, said that he felt that the U.S. ought to appoint a special prosecutor, not just to investigate what’s happening to WikiLeaks and a publisher and journalist, but across the board what’s happening to publishers and journalists in this entire country right now and around the world, where the U.S. is trying to basically say publishing is a crime. And that’s what they’re saying. That’s what the Obama administration is saying. And Julian is strongly suggesting, and I support, the idea of a special prosecutor to look into this.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Is that aspect of it unprecedented, though? I mean, you drew comparisons between COINTELPRO and manhunt timeline, but the fact that publishing, people who work in journalism, are being monitored in this way by intelligence agencies here, has that occurred before?
MICHAEL RATNER: On this level, I don’t think it’s occurred, on this extreme level. You had the manhunt program. You also had what they call—what do they call it? The ANTICRISIS GIRL program. And that’s the dragnet—I don’t know how it got that name.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain, ANTICRISIS GIRL program.
MICHAEL RATNER: What does—what is that about? I mean, I don’t know. Except what it is, is whenever I search for WikiLeaks on my computer, or when I go visit the WikiLeaks site, in real time, the GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, can take in my IP address, take in what I’m searching for in real time. Now, they gave an—they did a number of slides showing how they could do this. We don’t know how extensively they’ve implemented that program, but that means that every one of us who have ever gone to a WikiLeaks site to look for a document could technically be surveilled and our IP address taken in.
AMY GOODMAN: And also the hacktivist group Anonymous and Pirate Bay. Explain.
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, Anonymous, they actually did designate as what they call a malicious foreign actor. And a malicious foreign actor, which is what they were deciding whether to designate WikiLeaks as or not—and we don’t know what the final decision was, whether WikiLeaks was designated as a malicious foreign actor, but Anonymous apparently was. And what it means is any restrictions on government surveillance of anything—my conversations, my email—are completely lifted, whether you’re an American or whatever. Any of my communications to anywhere in the world to that website, to Anonymous, going on chat rooms with Anonymous, going on tweets with Anonymous, those can be taken in and surveilled. It’s an incredibly broad power. We don’t know, as I said, if it was used against WikiLeaks. It was certainly discussed, and they asked to use it against WikiLeaks. We will know, I hope, soon, if and when a lawsuit is ever filed around these issues.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what do the documents reveal about what the U.S. officials said they were doing and what in fact they were doing? Because not only was their surveillance of U.S. citizens problematic, but also of foreign citizens.
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, I’m sorry, I’m not following the question exactly, Nermeen.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I mean, in other words, Michael Ratner, the U.S. officials have claimed that they only surveil foreign—foreign citizens who are, in some sense, either potentially guilty of or likely to be involved in terrorist activities. But if you’re monitoring every visitor to a website, whether it’s WikiLeaks or Pirate Bay or—I mean, that’s obviously not the case.
MICHAEL RATNER: You know, this is just obfuscation and lies by our officials, which has been consistent. Obviously, if there’s a WikiLeaks website overseas, what they’re really saying is everybody who visits that website, American or otherwise, we can surveil. So it’s complete—it’s complete B.S. This is just untrue. We are all being surveilled.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael, we want you to stay with us as we bring in another guest from London. Nermeen?

 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.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2014
Attorney for Edward Snowden Interrogated at U.K. Airport, Placed on "Inhibited Persons List"
Four journalists who revealed the National Security Agency’s vast web of spying have been awarded the 2013 George Polk Awards in Journalism. Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post were among the winners announced on Sunday. Even as the journalists who broke the stories based on Edward Snowden’s leaks were awarded one of journalism’s highest honors, a lawyer who represents Snowden was recently detained while going through customs at London’s Heathrow Airport. Jesselyn Radack joins us today to tell her story. Radack says she was subjected to "very hostile questioning" about Snowden and her trips to Russia. Radack also learned she might be on an "inhibited persons list," a designation reportedly used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to require further vetting of certain passengers. Radack is just one of a growing number of people who are being stopped, harassed and interrogated for their work around Snowden, WikiLeaks and National Security Agency documents. Radack is the director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower support organization.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Four journalists who revealed the National Security Agency’s vast web of spying have been awarded the 2013 George Polk Awards in Journalism. Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post were among the winners announced on Sunday. Even as the journalists who broke the stories based on Snowden’s leaks were awarded one of journalism’s highest honors, a lawyer who represents Snowden was detained while going through customs at London’s Heathrow Airport. Jesselyn Radack toldFiredoglake she was subjected to, quote, "very hostile questioning" about Snowden and her trips to Russia. Radack also learned she might be on an inhibited persons list, a designation reportedly used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to require further vetting of certain passengers. After the Polk Awards were announced, Glenn Greenwald tweeted, quote, "In the UK government, this is known as the George Polk Award for Excellence in Terrorism."
Jesselyn Radack is just one of a growing number of people who are being stopped, harassed and interrogated for their work around Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks and National Security Agency documents. In this clip, we hear from journalist Laura Poitras, computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, and then journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda, who have all been stopped and interrogated in airports.
LAURA POITRAS: I’ve actually lost count of how many times I’ve been detained at the border, but it’s, I think, around 40 times. And on this particular trip, lately they’ve been actually sending someone from the Department of Homeland Security to question me in the departing city, so I was questioned in London about what I was doing. I told them I was a journalist and that, you know, my work is protected, and I wasn’t going to discuss it.
JACOB APPELBAUM: I was targeted by the U.S. government and essentially, until the last four times that I’ve flown, I was detained basically every time. Sometimes men would meet me at the jetway, similarly, with guns.
DAVID MIRANDA: [translated] I stayed in a room with three different agents that were entering and exiting. They spoke to me, asking me questions about my whole life. They took my computer, my video game, cellphone, everything.
AMY GOODMAN: That was journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda; before him, computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and journalist Laura Poitras. You can go to our website to see our interview with Jacob Appelbaum andLaura Poitras at democracynow.org. But all of them have been interrogated at airports, as has most recently Jesselyn Radack, the attorney representing Edward Snowden, joining us from London. She is a former ethics adviser to the U.S. Department of Justice under George W. Bush, currently director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower organization.
Jesselyn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Describe what happened at Heathrow on Sunday.
JESSELYN RADACK: I was trying to enter through customs, which at Heathrow is called the Border Force, and I was directed to a very specific station rather than the regular line. And after the first question, which is, "Why are you here?" which is a normal question, things just got more bizarre as we went along. I said that I was here to see friends. They wanted me to be more specific. I said, "In the Sam Adams Association," the group that awarded Edward Snowden the award last year—I didn’t add that part. And then they asked for the names of the people in the group. And so I gave names of people who are publicly known to be members. And then they asked where we were meeting, and I said at the Ecuadorean embassy. And they asked, "With Julian Assange?" And I said, "Yes." But then, at that point, I was asked why I had been to Russia twice in the past three months. And I said, "Because I have a client there." And they asked, "Who?" And I said, "Edward Snowden." And then, this was the most bizarre thing: They said, "Who is Edward Snowden?" And I just said matter-of-factly, "He is a whistleblower and an asylee." They next asked, "Who is Bradley Manning?" And I said, "A whistleblower. And then they asked, "Where is Bradley Manning?" And I said, "In jail." And he said, "So, he’s a criminal." And I said that he’s a political prisoner. And then they said, "But you represent Snowden." And I said, "Yes, I’m a human rights attorney, and I’m one of his legal advisers."
But I found that entire line of questioning very jarring and very unnerving. I didn’t know what kind of answer I was supposed to give. I mean, obviously, it’s like asking, "Who is President Obama?" They’re asking about some of the most famous people on the planet. Obviously, I have an attorney-client relationship to protect. I’m not going to get into meetings that I’ve had with clients. And only some of my clients are public, Edward Snowden being one of them, so that’s why I could answer that question. But I walked away from the interview just shaking. During the interview, I was fine. I maintained my composure. But I walked away just shaking and just upset. I just cried. It was very intimidating and very, very, again, unnerving to be asked that line of questions as an attorney. And I don’t think journalists or attorneys should be harassed or intimidated at the border, and it’s very disturbing to me that this has occurred in the U.S. and the U.K., and I’ve heard that this happened to someone recently in Germany, though I don’t know the details of that. But certainly, as an attorney, having gone to 14 different countries in the past year, I have never endured a line of questioning like that. You get the usual, "Hi. Why are you here? Who are you seeing? Where are you staying?" But not, "Who do you—who is Edward Snowden? Where is Edward Snowden? Where is Bradley Manning? Do you represent Bradley Manning?" which I wouldn’t even be allowed to answer, obviously, because that would be attorney-client privileged information. I, in fact, do not represent him, but it would have put me in a really difficult situation of actually making a false statement if I did represent him and had to answer a question like that.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Jesselyn, could you talk about the significance of the inhibited persons list? How did you first learn about it, and are you in fact on it?
JESSELYN RADACK: As hard—as a graduate or an alumnus of the no-fly list, you’re never officially told, "You are on this list." It’s implied, and you hear it. This apparently is some list maintained in Great Britain, but originating from the Department of Homeland Security. And I wish I could tell you more about it, but that’s just what I was able to learn from speaking with other people who have had difficulty getting out of the U.K. My difficulty was getting in. I’m hoping I don’t have any difficulty getting out. But an inhibited persons list, to me, is another kind of watch list, just like how ridiculous it was that I spent a number of years on the no-fly list, when I obviously posed no direct threat. To Snowden, I’m an attorney doing my job, and being a human rights lawyer does not pose any kind of immigration violation or safety threat to entering the United Kingdom, so I’m not sure why I was subjected to that interrogation other than to try to intimidate me from doing my job.

 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.

Guy Fawkes Forever, NSA, Ellsberg, Big Brother

We are using the Guy Fawkes Mask as our illustration and will continue to do so when this is the topic.  It is one long repetition.  Any program can find someone stupid and opinionated enough to argue that the NSA is a good thing, that nothing wrong is going on, and life is just a bowl of, well pick your fruit.

Perhaps the most meaningful part of this is Daniel Ellsberg’s last statement “This is ridiculous.” 

It was back in 1998 that Enemy of the State came out.  Back then, it was labeled as “Science Fiction” by those who wanted to protect the NSA.  Well, Snowden and many others before have since debunked that myth.  The movie should be up for an Emmy this year.

In the movie, Gene Hackman talks about all the things that the government can and does do, and ends with “and that was 20 years ago,” putting all this back in 1978, during Carter.  Well, think about it.  I remember photos coming to the earth in the early 80s from a computer ranted as a 16k type.  Well, imagine how much we have developed when we are regularly taking about terabytes, not kilobytes. 

Anybody remember AM radios with tubes in them?  Ok, how about transistors?  Semi-conductors so advanced that it no longer made sense to try to repair a radio?  Chips?  It makes no sense to try to keep up with it.  You are not going to fix it.  Right now, everything is stored.  The 4^th Amendment is so 18^th Century, don’t you think?

Well, the mask adopted by Anonymous is 17^th Century.  Best of luck to them.  Me?  I’m going back to the 16^th. 

Later now.  Comcast, I thought, was the absolute worst.  Then I heard that time Warner was.  Now Comcast has bought time-Warner, meaning 2/3 of the market.  Time for net-neutrality, anyone?

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014

Debate: Was Snowden Justified? Former NSA Counsel Stewart Baker vs. Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg

Former National Security Agency lawyer Stewart Baker and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg join us for a debate on Edward Snowden’s disclosure of the NSA’s massive spying apparatus in the United States and across the globe. Snowden’s leaks to The Guardian and other media outlets have generated a series of exposés on NSA surveillance activities — from its collection of American’s phone records, text messages and email, to its monitoring of the internal communications of individual heads of state. Partly as a consequence of the government’s response to Snowden’s leaks, the United States plunged 13 spots in an annual survey of press freedom by the independent organization, Reporters Without Borders. Snowden now lives in Russia and faces possible espionage charges if he returns to the United States. Baker, a former NSA general counsel and assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, is a partner at the law firm Steptoe & Johnson and author of "Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism." Ellsberg is a former Pentagon and RAND Corporation analyst and perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, prompting Henry Kissinger to call him "the most dangerous man in America."

TRANSCRIPT

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

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Today, we host a debate on former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and his disclosure of the massive spying apparatus theNSA operates in the United States and across the globe. Snowden’s leaks to The Guardian and other media outlets have generated a series of exposés on NSAsurveillance activities, from its collection of Americans’ phone records, text messages and email, to its monitoring of the internal communications of individual heads of state. The latest revelations based on the leaks were reported by journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald with First Look Media. They show how the NSA has secretly assisted in U.S. military and CIA assassinations overseas by using metadata analysis and cellphone-tracking technologies—the unreliable tactic that has resulted in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the NSA has defended its activities as essential in the fight against terrorism. In January, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper attacked Snowden while speaking before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and called for him to return all stolen documents to the NSA after causing what he called major harm to U.S. security. Clapper also suggested the journalists who have published Snowden’s leaks are his accomplices.

JAMES CLAPPER: Snowden claims that he’s won and that his mission is accomplished. If that is so, I call on him and his accomplices to facilitate the return of the remaining stolen documents that have not yet been exposed, to prevent even more damage to U.S. security. But what I do want to speak to, as the nation’s senior intelligence officer, is the profound damage that his disclosures have caused and continue to cause. As a consequence, the nation is less safe, and its people less secure. What Snowden has stolen and exposed has gone way, way beyond his professed concerns with so-called domestic surveillance programs.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Meanwhile, Snowden has repeatedly maintained he’s no longer in possession of any of the documents he took from the NSA—

AMY GOODMAN: —having passed them on to journalists to report at their discretion. The editors of The New York Times recently urged clemency for Snowden, writing, quote, "Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service," the Times wrote.

Partly as a consequence of the government’s response to Snowden’s leaks, the United States plunged 13 spots in an annual survey of press freedom by the independent organization, Reporters Without Borders. Snowden now lives in Russia and faces espionage charges if he returns to the United States. In his first television interview with German channel ARD late last month, Snowden talked about how perceptions of the leaks among U.S. government officials have changed.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: What we saw initially in response to the revelations was sort of a circling of the wagons of government around the National Security Agency. Instead of circling around the public and protecting their rights, the political class circled around the security state and protected their rights. What’s interesting is, though that was the initial response, since then, we’ve seen a softening. We’ve seen the president acknowledge that when he first said, "We’ve drawn the right balance. There are no abuses," we’ve seen him and his officials admit that there have been abuses. There have been thousands of violations of the National Security Agency and other agencies’ authorities every single year.

AMY GOODMAN: Edward Snowden, speaking to German television last month.

Well, to discuss the significance and implications of Snowden’s leaks, we’re hosting a debate. In Washington, D.C., we’re joined by Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the National Security Agency and assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, a partner at the law firm Steptoe & Johnson. Baker is the author of Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism.

And here in New York, Daniel Ellsberg, former Pentagon and RAND Corporation analyst, perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, prompting Henry Kissinger to call him "the most dangerous man in America." The papers were published in several newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, and later published as a book. They were only officially declassified and released in 2011.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Stewart Baker, I’m sorry you’re snowed in at home, but why don’t we begin with you. Can you talk about what Edward Snowden did and if you think he is a traitor?

STEWART BAKER: What Edward Snowden did was quite deliberately change jobs to gather as much, perhaps millions of documents, from as many places as he could around the National Security Agency, but involving other agencies, as well. He stored them on a computer and handed them out to—who exactly, we don’t know, but certainly to journalists, and with controls that probably make it likely that sophisticated intelligence agencies have been able to get access to them, and allowed them to be disclosed at the journalists’ discretion, more or less with some guidance from Snowden.

The result of that has been a massive disclosure of classified intelligence gathering that has hurt our ability to catch terrorists, to keep an eye on Iranian and North Korean and Chinese and Russian operations, and has done great diplomatic damage, as well. I think that, frankly, the way that those disclosures have occurred, it’s hard to view that as anything other than the intended result of his gathering that information and disclosing as he—disclosing it as he did. He certainly disclosed some information that sparked a debate in the United States. He did that in June, but he has continued to disclose documents for months thereafter, which have no obvious policy value in terms of a debate or a concern that the United States public should have, but which have done enormous damage. And so, at a minimum, I think he is someone who has violated U.S. law, done great damage, and should go to jail for it.

AMY GOODMAN: Traitor?

STEWART BAKER: It remains to be seen. There have been people who have made the case, and in some cases fairly persuasively, that his leaks, and especially the most recent leaks, serve the interests of the country where he is located, and that either wittingly or because he was sort of tricked into it, he may have been serving Russia’s interest. That would make him a traitor, but I think that’s an unproven case.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But what about his argument that given the extensive nature of the surveillance that was being conducted without the knowledge of the American people, that he had a moral responsibility to speak out and to at least spark this debate?

STEWART BAKER: Well, you can’t—obviously, you cannot do intelligence gathering in the sunlight. You can’t tell the American people everything you’re doing in their name, because the process of telling them also tells your targets, and it tells Hezbollah, it tells al-Qaeda, it tells the North Koreans and the Iranians and the Russians and the Chinese exactly what you’re doing. And you can’t do that and continue to gather the intelligence. So there has to be a limit on what the public debates here.

There also has to be a limit on what the several million people who have clearances feel they’re free to disclose because they’ve decided that there’s a problem with the program. At the end of the day, all that Snowden says he did is he kind of made some oblique remarks to his superiors, saying, "Gee, do you think this would really look good in The Washington Post if it were known?" And then he decided to release a million or two million or three million documents. There are whistleblower protections in U.S. law more than in any other countries’ law, but they provide a procedure: You need to go to the authorities, you need to go to Congress, you need to go to an inspector general, and raise your concerns there. He did none of that. And his view that this was illegal has turned out to be highly questionable.

All that said, yes, he has spurred a debate on that one program, and he could have spurred that debate on that one program with one document, the document that he released first. Everything he has done since then has simply caused damage. And the number of debates that have been spurred, and certainly the number of serious proposals for changing the current intelligence law, is close to zero.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the National Security Agency. Dan Ellsberg, your assessment of Edward Snowden’s actions, and do you think he is a traitor or a patriot?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I feel confident, as you in the clip showed earlier, that he’s no more a traitor than I am, and I’m not. The notion that he joined NSA with the intention to, earlier on, or the CIA, when he took the oath of service to the country earlier, that he did that with the intent to either harm the interests of the United States or to release any information or to harm NSA or to deprive it of secrecy, I think there’s no evidence for that whatever, and I believe it’s entirely false. He came to believe, as I did, having made those oaths initially and the promises of nondisclosure, which were not oaths, but they are contractual agreements not to do that, which he later violated, as I did—he made those in good faith, by everything known to me, and came to realize, I think, eventually, as he said, that a nondisclosure agreement in this case and the secrecy conflicted with his oath, so help me God, to defend and support the Constitution of the United States, and it was a supervening—a superseding authority there that it was his responsibility really to inform the public, because, as he said, he could see that no one else would do it.

He saw the head of the NSA, but also the director of the national intelligence, you quoted here, Clapper, lie to Congress. And actually, I think what he’s mostly revealed, in particular, is not that Mr. Clapper was violating his oath in the sense of trying to deceive Congress; Clapper knew that the false statements he was making, that they were not collecting data on millions—any data on millions of Americans, were false, but he knew that Congress knew they were false, the people he was talking to, the dozen, even the man who had asked the question, Senator Wyden. What we saw, what Snowden saw and what we all saw, was that we couldn’t rely on the so-called Oversight Committee of Congress to reveal, even when they knew that they were being lied to, and that’s because they were bound by secrecy, NSA secrecy and their own rule. The secrecy system here, in other words, has totally corrupted the checks and balances on which our democracy depends.

And I think the—I am grateful to Snowden for having given us a constitutional crisis, a crisis instead of a silent coup, as after 9/11 an executive coup, or a creeping usurpation of authority. He has confronted us. He has revealed documents now that prove that the oversight process, both in the judiciary, in the FISC, the secret court, and the secret committees in Congress who keep their secrets from them, even when two of them, Wyden and Udall, felt that these were outrageous, were shocking, were probably unconstitutional, and yet did not feel that they could inform even their fellow colleagues or their staff of this. What Snowden has revealed, in other words, is a broken system of our Constitution, and he’s given us the opportunity to get it back, to retrieve our civil liberties, but more than that, to retrieve the separation of powers here on which our democracy depends.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Daniel Ellsberg, what about Mr. Stewart’s—Mr. Baker’s remarks that he could have just released one document or two documents, that would have been sufficient to spur the kind of debate that we have now?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: He talked about revealing on one program. But I like the way you put it, because what I was confronted with, with the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago, when I put out 4,000 pages to the newspapers and 3,000 other pages, top secret, to the Senate Foreign Intelligence—Foreign Relations Committee—there was no Intelligence Committee at that time—which I didn’t give to the newspapers at that time, when I saw the effects of that, it gave me a moral that I’ve been saying for 40 years. And I’ve been asking people: First, don’t do what I did. Don’t wait 'til the bombs are falling, if you know that we're being lied into a war. Don’t wait ’til thousands more have died, before you tell your truth to Congress and to the public.

But I would also say, by now, don’t tell it only to Congress. I gave it to Congress a year and a half before it came out. Senator Fulbright failed to bring the hearings that he promised me, on the grounds that he himself would be deprived of secret information from the Defense Department thereafter. So he waited for me to do it. If I didn’t do it, it wasn’t going to happen.

But the other thing I’ve been saying for years is, I want someone to put out enough documentation to make the case irrefutable. If you bring out one memo, 10 memos, you will hear, as we have heard when the first memos came out, "Oh, that was rescinded the next day. Oh, that just reflected one agency, one opinion." No, the Pentagon Papers showed—but, unfortunately, they were only history. I didn’t have current documents. If I had, I would have put those out instead of the history. But what they did show was that this was a pattern of decision making that went over four different presidents and was being repeated today. That took hundreds and thousands—thousands—of pages to reveal, and many of those pages didn’t reveal anything of great significance. I wanted it to be very clear I hadn’t censored them, I hadn’t taken out the one good reason for that war. Said, "Here’s the whole history. See if you could find a good reason for it."

What Snowden did, which I admire very much, is to put out enough material to show an entire pattern of behavior, and not just on one program, on a number of programs, with the implication there are many more and that Congress needs to look into this, but not in the way the intelligence committees have done. They’ve been thoroughly co-opted and corrupted by this process. There has to be a new congressional investigation, with new people on it, and that has to be pressed by the public. It will not happen by Congress alone.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Dan Ellsberg and Stewart Baker. Dan Ellsberg, perhaps most famous whistleblower in the United States, released the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Stewart Baker is former general counsel for the National Security Agency. We’ll continue this debate in a moment.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: "The Paper Soldier" by the famous Russian poet, novelist, singer-songwriter, Bulat Okudzhava. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org,The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We’re hosting a debate on Edward Snowden, spying and the national security state.

In Washington, D.C., snowed in at home, we’re joined by Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the National Security Agency and assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security. His tenure spanned from Clinton to Bush. He’s a partner at the law firm Steptoe & Johnson. Baker is the author of Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism.

Here in New York, Dan Ellsberg, former Pentagon and RAND Corporation analyst, who became the country’s most famous whistleblower by leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. This was thousands and thousands of pages that exposed the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, helping to end the Vietnam War.

Stewart Baker, do you think that Dan Ellsberg was a traitor?

STEWART BAKER: No, but I think he is shockingly misrepresenting the facts and stating a proposition that has no place in a democracy. Mr. Ellsberg said—I had pointed out that Snowden changed jobs specifically to steal more documents. Dan Ellsberg says that’s false. I don’t know where he gets this. Snowden himself says he changed jobs from a contractor for Dell to a contractor at Booz Allen so that he could get more documents. And for Ellsberg to come on this program and simply look into the camera and say that’s false, calling me a liar, when the record is clear, suggests that he is either not paying attention or he doesn’t really care what the facts are.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let him respond to that point, and then you can make your next one.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: OK, listen, I’ve—let me give the benefit of the doubt to Mr. Baker that he really isn’t listening to what I’m saying, when it comes to misrepresenting facts here. Of course, it’s the case that Snowden has said openly that he went to Booz Allen in order to get documents, that he—

STEWART BAKER: Well, then why did you call that false? I heard you say that’s a false—

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Pardon me. Oh—

STEWART BAKER: You accused me of lying to this program, when—

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Listen, stop talking so much, and listen for a minute.

STEWART BAKER: —when you now admit that the facts are as I said.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: As I said, when he first worked as a consultant for years toNSA, and when he went—and when he joined the CIA earlier, it was with no intention of disclosing documents, and that the turning point came for him much later, after deciding that he had to sacrifice or risk—

STEWART BAKER: But wait, just a second. Just a second.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Listen, will you—

STEWART BAKER: I heard you say that, and I accept that that’s a storyline that is not implausible. It may be true, or it may be something that he’s made up to—

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I’m agreeing with you that he joined Booz Allen—

STEWART BAKER: But I want to go back to—you started that discussion by saying what Mr. Baker says is false.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Look—

STEWART BAKER: And then you told this different story. But why are you accusing me of lying, when in fact what I said was true, not false.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Actually, I haven’t yet accused you of lying, Mr. Baker.

STEWART BAKER: You—what? Well, you said my statement was false.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: No, I said that he did not join CIA or NSA or be a consultant for NSA with the intention of putting out documents. He later—

STEWART BAKER: I heard you say "false." You said it was false.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Will you—will you lay off for a minute here and let me finish my sentence?

STEWART BAKER: I’m sorry, you’re making up facts now. You know—

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah.

STEWART BAKER: I ask, can you play back what he said? I heard him say that the statement was false.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Let me say right away the statement is correct, as I’ve known and have never meant to deny, that he joined NS—that he joined Booz Allen in order to get documents he couldn’t have gotten otherwise, with the intent of putting them out. It was something, by the way, that I didn’t do. In a way, I regret it, but I didn’t go back to Washington to get more documents with the intention of putting them out. I went with the documents that I had authorized to have at the moment. Anyway, I agree with your point. I have not accused you of lying. But now let’s move to the question of just how much you know about the damage that you’ve asserted several times that he caused. I don’t—

STEWART BAKER: Before we do that, I’d like to address your other point.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Are you going to allow me to finish a sentence or not?

STEWART BAKER: You’ve had plenty of time to explain that you didn’t mean to say that the statement was false, even though you said it, that you meant something else. But your broader theory, if I understand it right, is this doc—all these documents should have been released because they allow for a broader story, and that you can’t give it to Congress because they feel that there are certain programs they have to protect—

DANIEL ELLSBERG: OK, let’s address that point. Let me address that point.

STEWART BAKER: —in order to maintain the confidentiality of our intelligence methods.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah, let me—will you—

STEWART BAKER: You can’t give it to—

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Oh, well.

STEWART BAKER: You can’t go higher in the chain, because they might decide to protect national security rather than blow the whistle. And so, every single person who works in the government or who has the ability to break into the government’s system gets to make the decision for themselves how many confidential, classified and various important programs should be disclosed to the people that we are targeting.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Let me go right to the point you’re raising.

STEWART BAKER: That’s a—

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s let—let’s let Dan Ellsberg—

STEWART BAKER: That is basically saying, "I don’t have any faith in our democracy"—

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s let Dan Ellsberg respond to that, Stewart Baker.

STEWART BAKER: —which, I suppose, is consistent with your statement—would you let me finish?

AMY GOODMAN: No, let’s let Dan Ellsberg respond.

STEWART BAKER: That’s consistent with your statement—no, [inaudible].

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Let you finish? Let you finish your filibuster? I’m sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: We have a good amount of time here to have an extended discussion, so you will have time.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah, yeah. OK, let me address the very important point of what else he could have done or should have done to reveal this. He learned, as I understand it, as he said—and I’ve been in touch with him—he learned from the example not only from me, and from Chelsea Manning, by the way, but from the experience of four or five NSA senior officials—Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis, Tom Drake and Bill Binney—who, between them, have 30 years’ average—30 years, some of them have 28, and some have 32—experience with NSA at the highest levels.

Each of them, separately and together, did exactly what you and, I think, the president has suggested they should have done: They went to their superiors in great detail when they thought the program, after 9/11—after you were out of NSA, by the way, after—so, I’m giving you credit there—after 9/11, was unconstitutional and was dangerous, was unnecessary, and should be—should be modified or changed or dropped. They got no response from that, and their recommendations were simply ignored. They went to the IG, the inspector general. I believe some of them went to the inspector general, as well, of the Defense Department. They went to staff of the congressional offices, on a classified basis, to Diane Roark specifically, to complain about these, and offered to testify, by the way.

The result of their doing that was not only no change to programs that they knew were more protective of civil liberties and more effective at catching terrorists and could well have prevented 9/11, rather than the programs that were in effect. The effect of their doing that was to be suspected, wrongly, of having leaked all this information to The New York Times for the revelations for which it got the Pulitzer Prize. They hadn’t. I would say they should have considered that. Anyway, what—they had not done that. Instead, they followed all these channels. The result of that was early morning raids by the FBI on each of them, in this suspicion that they might have been the leakers of this important information. And, in fact, one of them, Bill Binney, a diabetic with an amputated leg, first learned of the suspicion here when there was a knock on his shower door, where he was seated taking a shower, and opened the door to find an FBI agent pointing a gun at his head, and followed by eight hours of interrogation, and the removal, in all four cases, of all their computers, all their thumb drives, some of which they’ve never gotten back—no charges ever pressed against them. Tom Drake, one of the four here, as a result, was subject to a spurious, punitive prosecution with no valid basis, which led essentially to an apology from the judge in the end after he had been bankrupted.

Looking at that experience very specifically, Snowden knew that it would be foolish and hopeless for him to try to call attention to this within the channels. He did, I think, exactly right, and others should follow the same, not just when they disagree with policy or object to it, as the president has suggested, but when they feel that it’s unconstitutional, criminal—as, by the way, the years of NSA warrantless spying from 2001 to 2006 with no legal basis were criminal and unconstitutional—and leaked essentially by no one with documents. What Snowden has done is to provide the documents that prove, at last, what was done in the past was clearly illegal, and that that put in question the whole oversight procedure and the good faith of NSA in binding itself to the Constitution. So, I think that he did what he should have done, as all four of those NSA people, who did not do it, have said now, "He did it right. Our approach was hopeless."

STEWART BAKER: So, I have served in government off and on a long time and at pretty senior levels, and the number of times that I have not persuaded the rest of the government to do things that I think it should do, even things I think it’s morally or legally compelled to do, are pretty substantial. This is the way government works. This is the way democracies work. Individual government employees do not get to say, "I think this is wrong, and therefore it must stop." You can raise it, and there are plenty of circumstances and plenty of stories of people who have raised issues that have been investigated and have led to changes.

I don’t know the specifics of the cases that you’re talking about. Maybe they were mistreated as a result of the suspicions aroused by what they did internally. But the fact that not every one of their complaints was validated is not surprising. No one in government gets what they want, not even the president. And to say, "Well, I didn’t get what I want, so I’m going to wreck this operation by disclosing it," is a remarkable and fundamentally anti-democratic view. It’s—the president has called it "narcissistic," and I think that’s not wrong.

There comes a point at which you say, "I have done what I can to raise this, and I have been assured that in fact this is not illegal." And the things that he was complaining about had been through court, had been through Congress. We can argue about whether they are legal or not now, or whether they should be legal. I think it’s fair to say that they were blessed by the courts at the time. The things that he disclosed, that were news as opposed to the things that were history—

DANIEL ELLSBERG: OK, Mr. Baker—

STEWART BAKER: —were not unlawful at the time. It’s pretty clear the Congress and the courts had approved those things. They may become changed, they may, as a result of this debate, but that’s very different from saying, "I am doing something illegal, and my conscience requires me to disclose it."

DANIEL ELLSBERG: OK, let me—you’ve raised—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Let me just ask Mr. Baker—

DANIEL ELLSBERG: You’ve raised important questions, sir. Let me address both of them. First of all, when it comes to being named—called names—narcissistic, megalomaniac and traitor, which is a much more serious name—I’ve had that experience, from the president and the vice president. They were mistaken. But those names are what every whistleblower gets, essentially, whatever the conditions. And if you’re not willing to be called names, I think you can’t carry out your responsibilities to the Constitution.

Now, getting to that, if you’re telling me that there have been times when you dutifully, with your agreement on secrecy, accepted, without exposing to anyone else, policies that, as I heard you, were immoral—and I think you may have said illegal, but let’s just say illegal—I respectfully say you were mistaken, you were, in your judgment. You were acting as nearly all bureaucrats and officials do in that face: They protect their jobs, their careers, their clearances, and indeed their promise, and they don’t think—to keep secrets, and they don’t think twice about what their responsibility might be beyond their responsibility to their agency or to the president.

If you say you’re not familiar with those four NSA names I had, my first thought would be you haven’t followed this very closely. The second thought would be that they haven’t testified before Congress, because despite their extreme expertise in this field, no Congress committee has wanted to hear from them under oath, which they’re urging—which I urge the public to urge committees to bring these people and tell them under oath. If they are mistaken, let them be—let that be exposed. But the fact is that they found that this was unconstitutional. And I think they now feel they didn’t do all that they should have. And if you were in a similar position, then I have to say to you that, like most people in that position, you didn’t do everything you could, just as I didn’t, just as I didn’t when I first had the documents in my hands.

STEWART BAKER: That’s right. I didn’t do everything I could, because some of the things I could do would be profoundly damaging to the United States. And I said I have done what I can—

DANIEL ELLSBERG: OK.

STEWART BAKER: —inside the system to raise this issue, and it is going to be resolved. It’s been resolved by people who have made calls that are different from mine, who are closer to the facts, who have more facts. Sometimes you have to make that decision because the alternative is to say no secret is safe as long as one person in government does not [inaudible]—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Let me—let me step in.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I would never single you out—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dan, one second.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Go ahead. Go ahead.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Let me step in. Mr. Baker—

STEWART BAKER: —they are going to disclose it because it makes them feel better. That’s what happened here.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Mr. Baker—

STEWART BAKER: And, in fact, what he disclosed is far more than just one secret. He disclosed massive amounts of stuff that have sparked no debates at all here, but nonetheless continue to do great damage to the United States. How can that possibly have been the right outcome?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Mr. Baker, one question for you. As a former NSA general counsel, I mean, you say that you did raise some concerns during your tenure.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah, what were they?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What you have seen since—

STEWART BAKER: Well, or, look, I’m not—I’m not—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Wait, wait, let me finish my question, please.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Fat chance.

STEWART BAKER: I’m not suggesting I—I realize that—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, let me ask you this: What you have seen revealed since then—

STEWART BAKER: Hang on, hang on. I keep hearing—you’re misinterpreting my—excuse me, you’re misinterpreting what I said. I was not saying that back when I was NSA general counsel, I saw things that I thought were illegal and raised them and—inside, but did not go outside. There are many calls—and I’ve been in government many times—many calls that are made by people above you in government where you wonder if they’re doing the right thing, and you have to recognize that you don’t always have all the facts that they have. And I’ve done it since I’ve been out of government, where I’ve learned of things that I thought were wrong.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: OK, but, Mr. Baker—Mr. Baker, my question—

STEWART BAKER: But I did not—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Let me ask my question to you.

STEWART BAKER: Once I had raised them, I could not stop—I could not just—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Mr. Baker, let me ask my question to you.

STEWART BAKER: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: From what you have seen since the Snowden disclosures, and what you know of of the operations of the NSA when you were there, is there anything that has been disclosed that raises questions to you about whether your government was—our government was properly conducting surveillance, its surveillance responsibilities?

STEWART BAKER: At bottom, no. I think that the agency has an incredible commitment to following the law, a commitment they’ve had since the ’70s, the last set of reforms that were adopted. And they may have done things that, in retrospect, some courts would say were not proper, but they have almost always done those things with careful legal analysis and with the approval, where appropriate, of the courts. And so, you know, people can disagree about whether the courts got it right or wrong, but I think NSA has acted in a fundamentally law-abiding way. And the institution that I knew, and that I still see, is committed to that, because they recognize that the powers they have are extraordinary and need to be used in democratically legitimate ways. They have worked very hard to do that. And Snowden just has blown those things without any regard for their efforts to stay within the law and their commitment to the law.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and come back to this discussion. Our guests are Stewart Baker, former NSA general counsel, and Dan Ellsberg, former Pentagon and RAND Corporation analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He leaked those papers to, first, The New York Times. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Before we continue our debate on what Edward Snowden did and what should happen to him, I just have some breaking news on a person we’ve been covering over the last week. Karim Khan, a Pakistani drone activist and journalist, who had been missing since being abducted from his home February 5th, has been released. Khan had been set to travel to Europe to speak against the U.S. drone wars. His brother and son were killed by a drone in 2009. The legal charity Reprieve says he was released earlier today, two days after the Lahore High Court ordered Pakistani forces to produce him from custody by next week. You can go to our website at democracynow.org to see our coverage of Mr. Khan from this week’s broadcast.

But now we continue our debate between Stewart Baker, former NSA general counsel—he was appointed to the NSA by President George H.W. Bush, and then served, appointed by President George W. Bush, to the Department of Homeland Security. We’re also joined by Daniel Ellsberg, former Pentagon and RAND Corporation analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Dan Ellsberg, Stewart Baker says he was not, in response to Juan’s question, surprised by what was exposed by Edward Snowden, and I also want to make just one point on the issue of Snowden continuing to release information. According to Edward Snowden, he gave the documents—we believe it’s about 1.7 million documents—to the journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. He says when he went to Russia, he didn’t have the documents, and he is not the one who is continuing to release them. But the journalists who have access to them are, one by one, writing stories in various papers, delving into what is in these documents. Dan Ellsberg?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: OK, a couple of things here, Amy. First of all, the 1.7 million figure, which obviously is far more than he could possibly have looked at, let alone read, is a government statement. They don’t know what he released to the journalists. Neither Mr. Baker nor I actually know. But I am informed—well, first, Snowden has said that it’s wrong by at least an order of magnitude tenfold, which is another—

AMY GOODMAN: Which way?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Which way, yes, very good. That he released less than 10 percent of what they’re talking about, and that everything he did release to the journalists was something that he had looked at and formed a judgment that they ought to have it. But he didn’t want them to rely on his judgment alone. He could have put them all on the web by himself, very much, or sequentially. On the contrary, he said over and over, "I am not releasing a single document," which he has not. He said every document should have the judgment of a staff of trained journalists, to use their judgment on that.

Second, in every case of every story that has appeared so far—and apparently Mr. Baker believes that there has been great damage from those already, for which the journalists would be also responsible—every story has been checked with NSA by both The Guardian and by The Washington Post. In every case, they have made objections. Not all of the objections have been followed by the newspapers. But in almost every case that they’ve printed, they have followed objections as to sources and methods that would actually damage the United States or our interests. As Snowden has said, he had access—he had knowledge of the clandestine whereabouts of NSA listening posts all over the world, had neither copied those nor given them to journalists, which he could have, because that would harm our intelligence apparatus, which he believes in and which I believe in. Of course there must be intelligence, and of course there must be secrecy about it. So he has made that judgment. I understand that Glenn Greenwald, for example, has demanded an agreement from every newspaper source to which he’s given documents that they check their stories withNSA for sensitive material. Now, when Mr. Clapper—oh, I’m sorry, when Mr.—

AMY GOODMAN: Baker, Stewart Baker.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Baker, thank you. When Mr. Baker says that there—over and over, that there has been great damage here, I ask him: How does he know that? Based on what? Now, possibly he still is reading classified material as a consultant or someone, and maybe not. If not, he has—I wonder what his basis is. My guess is, he’s accepting at face value the statements of Mr. Clapper or of others. Why would you do that? There’s no basis for that.

I have two questions. I have two questions for Mr. Baker, actually, which are both susceptible of yes-or-no questions. They’re very short, and I hope he will not filibuster. One—let me say one thing about background to give him credit, if I may. He was general counsel at NSA in the ’90s, before 9/11, when, according to Kirk Wiebe and others, the NSA was observing what they called the First Commandment—thou shall not spy on Americans, thou shall not listen to Americans or collect their material without an individualized court order with probable cause—and that they observed that. Wiebe has said that for some 20 years of their 70 years in existence, they were within the law and the Constitution—not earlier, under Johnson or Nixon, and not later. So the two questions are—but he may have—Mr. Baker may have an idealized picture of how this system works from having experienced it before 9/11.

Here’s the two questions. One, if he had been general counsel to Mr. Clapper, when he faced Congress and told them—was asked—was asked, "Are we collecting any data at all on millions of Americans?" would he have encouraged Mr. Clapper to give, as a counsel, the answer that he did give, "No," which Clapper later explained, after Snowden’s disclosure, was, quote, "the least untruthful" answer he could have given, or would he have advised him otherwise, perhaps to go into closed session or something?

And the second is, if he had been general counsel of the NSA in 2001 to 2006, during which there was no legal basis for criminal, unconstitutional, warrantless [inaudible], what would his judgment have been? And if it had been not to do that, and had been overridden, would he have simply accepted that, like his colleagues, or might he have considered telling someone other than the intelligence committees?

AMY GOODMAN: Stewart Baker, those are two questions for you. Why don’t you begin with the first?

STEWART BAKER: So, I don’t want to be accused of filibustering, but some of these answers do require a little bit more context. I think everyone would agree that Clapper’s answer to that question was not the right thing to say. That said, it was a question designed quite specifically to result in the compromise of the 215 program. That is to say, there was nobody asking the question, nobody answering the question, who didn’t already know the answer to that question. What they could not do is tell al-Qaeda or the American people about it without telling al-Qaeda. What he should have said is something that dodged the question. But it was cleverly designed by Senator Wyden so that, having asked the question, "Are you collecting information on millions of Americans?" to say, "I can only answer that in classified session," answers the question, as well. So, it was—

DANIEL ELLSBERG: So what would he have advised—what would you have advised?

STEWART BAKER: —designed to put him in a position where he could neither answer or refuse to answer without exposing the program. So he came up with a compromise that was trying to, I think, interpret the notion of collection as, "Are you spying on Americans?" which he felt he could comfortably say we are not, except where we have court orders or where we’ve inadvertently collected the information. That was—I think when you read the transcript, it’s hard to see that as a responsive answer, and he didn’t even gracefully do that. But I think it’s fair to point out that this was not some campaign of lying. This was a campaign of exposure by Senator Wyden and a maladroit effort to avoid that question. So that’s point one.

Point two, the question of the 2006 warrantless wiretapping, I certainly agree with Mr. Ellsberg that it’s very hard to square that with the statute, with FISA. The direction was given and the legal conclusion was reached that the president had the authority to order that, notwithstanding FISA, and there have been—there’s a long-standing view that the president does have authority to do this without the involvement of the courts. In fact, it was the majority view at least until 1978. But I think the passage of the FISA Act made that much harder to do.

That said, the FISA court at that point had utterly disgraced itself. It had forced a bunch of what it turns out are illegal requirements in the name of civil liberties on theFBI and the intelligence community that helped in a very significant way to make it difficult to respond to the news that there were hijackers or there were terrorists in the United States before 9/11. Had it not been for the FISA court’s wrong and extralegal policies, it’s quite possible that the hijackers would have been caught.

And after 9/11, after it became clear that this was part of the problem, the FISA court insisted on those illegal policies and forced the government to take its first appeal ever to the FISA review court. That suggested that the FISA court was not actually interested in protecting Americans, but had a goal that no one else in government shared, which was to maintain this wall between intelligence and law enforcement.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: That’s absolutely mistaken.

STEWART BAKER: But I kind of understand why they did it, but I have to say that as a lawyer, it’s hard to justify.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Mr. Baker, we just have about a minute left. You had the first word; we’ll have Dan Ellsberg respond.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: OK, I haven’t called Mr. Baker a liar. I certainly don’t regard him as anything other than patriotic. And I don’t think it’s his intent to deceive, but what he’s just said has given example that actually demonstrates the opposite of what he just said. He’s referring to the case of Khalid al-Mihdhar. I would assume—I would like to assume that he knew, but on the other hand, perhaps—

AMY GOODMAN: You have 30 seconds.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: —he was just ignorant of the fact that the fact that al-Mihdhar was known in this country—the hijacker who went into the Pentagon—was known by pre-NSA, pre-9/11 intelligence methods to the CIA. Their choice, deliberate not to give it to the FBI, had nothing to do with firewalls. I can’t believe you don’t know that, I’m sorry, Mr. Baker. And the fact is, it was not a fault of FISA. You’re joining me here in criticizing the FISA court. That’s ridiculous.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, because we are out of time. Stewart Baker, former NSA general counsel, as well as worked at the Department of Homeland Security, and Dan Ellsberg, perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower, leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, exposing the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

---

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.

-->