"All
Americans should be outraged at the idea
that when we’re killing large numbers of
people in Muslim countries around the world
without knowing who they are, that we
somehow are not going to pay a price later?"
By Kevin Gosztola
Editor’s Note
May
08, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Mint
Press"
-
On May
5, I interviewed The Intercept’s Jeremy
Scahill about the new book released this
week, “The Assassination Complex.” It has a
foreword from NSA whistleblower Edward
Snowden and an afterword by The Intercept’s
Glenn Greenwald. The book collects the
organization’s journalistic work based on
the “Drone Papers,” which were provided to
the media organization by a whistleblower,
who disclosed top secret documents on the
government’s expansion of assassination
policy in warfare on, and away from,
declared battlefields.
Scahill spoke with me for a little over 40
minutes. It was part of a series of
web-based book events, which Shadowproof
has planned for this spring. (We plan to
have another series in the summer.)
Below is a transcript of the interview, and
the full interview can be watched by
clicking on the below player. —Kevin
Gosztola:
GOSZTOLA: What is the “assassination
complex”? When we talk about the “assassination
complex,” are we talking about a much larger system
that includes, for example, the explosion of
watchlisting, where people are intimidated and
harassed? Typically, they are predominantly Arab
Americans, and they have this experience when they
try to fly on airplanes. Should we see that as a
byproduct of this “assassination complex”?
SCAHILL: What’s interesting in regard to
that question is one of the things that we published
in this book is the statement by a whistleblower,
who provided us with a copy of the 180-plus page of
watchlisting guidance, which is really the
government’s rule book for watchlisting. And it
basically maps out a system where individuals have
their data and metadata, their names, the people
they are in contact with poured into several
government databases, one of which has more than 1
million people and growing by the day. Everyone who
goes into that system is preemptively categorized as
a known or suspected terrorist.
I, for one,
was on some form of a watchlist when I was doing a
lot of travel to Yemen and Somalia, and I would come
back into the United States, and I would get pulled
aside and they would ask me if I had any weapons
training, if I had been in the military. And then,
when they would ask me who I was visiting in Yemen
and Somalia, I would tell them I am a journalist.
I’m not going to answer you. I’m under no obligation
to do that. But I’m a white guy, and I am a
journalist. I would often see Arabs and other
Muslims in the detention center at JFK airport, Area
B of JFK airport. I would often come in and see a
room packed with people, none of whom were white. I
would be called up to the desk before them, and I
would be released after them.
Once I
decided to stay because I was on a flight from Cairo
back to JFK, and when we were sitting in the waiting
area to board the plane, I was chatting with this
young couple and sort of their kids were running
around. When we landed, I noticed that this entire
family was in Area B of JFK when I was pulled aside,
and I went up to them to try to talk to them. Then
the agents came up and said no talking in here. You
can’t talk to them. And then I was processed before
them. I was out, and I decided as a test case to
wait and see when they came out and they never came
out. So I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe
they were deported, but this was a family with small
children. They were terrified sitting in there.
The reason
I tell that story is because you can end up on a
watchlist because your phone number was discovered
in the phone of someone else they were monitoring or
someone else, who’s phone was in the phone of
someone else they were monitoring. And no matter why
you are in that database, you are designated as a
known or suspected terrorist, a KST. Now, that
information can trickle all the way to foreign
governments and to state and local law enforcement
in the U.S. So, if someone gets pulled over by a
police officer and they run a check on someone, who
happens to be a known or suspected terrorist because
their name is similar to someone else’s or because
their phone number was in the phone of someone that
the U.S. government was monitoring, then they are in
the situation where a local sheriff or a sheriff’s
deputy is seeing someone is a known or suspected
terrorist, which sounds like an extremely
frightening thing.
Once you’re
in that database, you are assigned what’s called a
TPN number, and it’s basically like a terrorist
tracking number. Every single person who has ever
been killed in a drone strike intentionally, meaning
the intended targets, has been assigned a TPN
number. One of the things that has not gotten a lot
of attention that we reported on is that 16-year-old
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, of course the son of Anwar
al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike—This
16-year-old U.S. citizen kid was killed two weeks
after his father while he was sitting, having a meal
with his cousins, and one of the things that our
source was able to provide us with was the fact that
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki had a terror watchlisting
number assigned to him.
Now, was it
because they believed he was a terrorist or was it
because his father was top on a U.S. hit list? We
don’t know the answer to that question, but every
single person, every bit of innocuous information
that gets put into that database results in you
being labeled a known or suspected terrorist.
Basically, what it is is that is the very first step
of a process that can eventually lead to your death
by a drone strike. But the vast majority in there
are not people that are on the kill list. They are
people who posted something on Facebook or Twitter,
know people, have made phone calls abroad, or their
data ends up in someone else’s phone.
So, the
direct answer to your question is, yes, this
explosion of watchlisting is directly related to the
assassination program across the globe.
GOSZTOLA: Currently, there is a focus at
least among I’d say human rights organizations
toward whatever the Obama administration is going to
put out in terms of how they’re going to count
civilian casualties and what they’re going to do to
show a little transparency because they’ve been so
secretive about this. And my question to you is,
based on your drone reporting, these papers, and
what you’ve had come to you from sources, how should
we understand the ways the Obama administration has
been concealing civilian deaths? How might this
coming announcement about civilian casualties
represent an institutionalization of undercounting
civilian deaths?
SCAHILL: First of all, the White House
claimed they were going to put this out over a month
ago, and what they said is we’re going to be—because
you know we’re the Most Transparent Administration
In History™—we’re going to be putting out this
unprecedented level of detail about who we have
killed in drone strikes outside of declared
battlefields.
There are
some initial leaks that are coming out that seem to
indicate that they’re going to claim they killed
somewhere around 60 individuals outside of Iraq and
Afghanistan, which of course is just a shockingly
ridiculous number given the credible and
conservative reporting of the Bureau for
Investigative Journalism. Even if you take some of
the statistics from the New America Foundation,
which is even more conservative, the idea that there
would only be a few dozen people killed is just
ludicrous.
But the
reason why I think the President is going to be able
to say, with a straight face, that the number of
civilians killed has been minimal is not because
he’s some kind of sophisticated liar. It’s because
the military and the CIA have colluded to create a
mathematical formula for determining when civilians
are killed that will almost always result in the
number zero. What I mean by that is what the “Drone
Papers” show us, these classified top secret
documents, is that when any drone strike is
conducted, there is only one “objective” or target.
Each drone strike is aimed at killing one
individual, not five individuals (except in the case
of signature strikes which we can talk about later).
In the case
of Anwar al-Awlaki, for instance, Anwar al-Awlaki
was the target of a drone strike, but that drone
strike also killed Samir Khan, who was a Pakistani
American who had gone over to Yemen and was writing
for Inspire magazine. He was killed in that strike,
but he was not the target of that strike. One
Republican congressman said at the time that he was
twofer, but Samir Khan would have been categorized
as an enemy killed in action (EKIA), even if they
didn’t know his identity. Now, in that case, you
have two outspoken people, who were calling for
global jihad, and there was not a lot of sympathy in
those cases.
But if you
look at this horrifying strike against the wedding
party in Yemen that happened a couple Decembers ago,
where more than a dozen people were killed—First of
all, the person that was allegedly the target wasn’t
there and wasn’t killed but a tremendous amount of
other people were killed. And the immediate
designation of all of those people was EKIA, and the
standard that we reveal in these documents is that
anyone whose identity is unknown is preemptively
labeled an “enemy killed in action” unless they are
clearly visible as women or small children. And the
only way that designation is lifted is if they are
posthumously proven not to have been terrorist or
militants; you know, terms that are really difficult
to define because the United States doesn’t respect
international law.
What this
means is that the President’s advisers can say, oh,
we killed so-and-so in Pakistan, and there were ten
other “enemies killed in action.” Unless the
President says, “Well, do we know that they were
enemies? Who were these people?” The assumption is
just going to be we didn’t kill any civilians.
Regardless
of what you think of the morality of this policy, on
a very technical level, I think all Americans should
be outraged at the idea that when we’re killing
large numbers of people in Muslim countries around
the world without knowing who they are, that we
somehow are not going to pay a price later? That
this is not going to be any blowback? That should a
be a concern of everybody no matter where you fall
on the political spectrum.
GOSZTOLA: The other thing that I really
appreciate about this work is that, again, we have
more information about the war in Afghanistan and
how the war is being fought. But so often, we write
this off. The Obama administration write it off as
the “good war.” Democrats write it off as the “good
war.” We also don’t talk about it. It doesn’t pop up
in political discussions. We’ll talk about Iraq, but
we don’t talk about Afghanistan at all, as far as
what’s going on. So what were you able to learn from
the source that gave you the “Drone Papers.”
SCAHILL: My colleague, Ryan Devereaux, who
has worked with me since the “Blackwater” days,
reported outthe Afghanistan part of our story
because we realized one person would have to do a
really deep dive into those documents because they
all pertained to a special operations kill/capture
campaign called Operation Haymaker.
What the
documents say in a nutshell is that during this
operation, which spanned the course of the year, but
during one five-month period that the military
reviewed of this operation being conducted by Joint
Special Operations Command, nearly 9 out of 10
people that were killed in mostly drone strike;
there were some other forms of air strikes. Their
identities were not known, and they were classified
as “enemies killed in action,” which means that only
ten percent of the people that were being killed in
Afghanistan, which is a much easier battlefield in
some cases to conduct drone strikes because you have
bases within the country and you can send multiple
assets at the same time—That they were killing a
tremendous amount of unknown people.
The source
for the “Drone Papers,” who had worked on these
high-value targeting campaigns, as the Obama
administration likes to call it, really described a
sickening system, where there was a cavalier
attitude about anyone who was around the cellphone
that they believed to be a terrorist. Because the
overwhelming number of cases, where people are
killed in drone strikes, it’s not that they’re
killing people. It’s that you’re blowing up a phone
that you believe to be held by a person that you are
hunting, and many drone operators and people who
work on these targeting platforms never even know
the actual name of the person that they are
targeting. They’re either given a designation, like
Sandbox 1 or Sandbox 2, and those are describing a
SIM card or the phone that they have. And then they
are given just a number on a screen and so they know
they are tracking this series of numbers, and it’s a
way of dehumanizing the enemy.
The other
part of what Ryan reported on regarding Operation
Haymaker is that you have the most elite forces in
the U.S. military being unleashed in area of
Afghanistan, where there was very little actual al
Qaida or radical Taliban activity, and instead what
ended up happening is the U.S. military’s most elite
forces found themselves pulled into a turf war
between rival factions that are based along tribal
lines, not political lines, including timber
wars—fighting over natural resources. These guys
that are much vaunted and viewed as superheroes.
They killed Osama bin Laden. They’re in the middle
of a battle over trees that are being cut down in
Afghanistan and not killing anyone that is even a
member of al Qaida. I think they say in there they
killed one individual in that whole year-long
campaign, who actually had any links to al Qaida.
***
GOSZTOLA: Another critical development in
the Obama administration is this expansion of
warfare in the continent of Africa, which these
documents address. I’m wondering when you look at
what is in these documents related to the
assassination complex, on one hand, please talk
about Somalia and what’s going on, but also the
destruction of an entire country in Libya—How is the
assassination complex fueling that, especially when
it seems like we’re almost into a new second or
third round of warfare, where recent reports were
that surveillance drones were sent into the country
to survey the spread of militias once again?
SCAHILL: This is sort of the 1-2-3 punch of
the Obama doctrine, where you have—You’re going to
use a lot of drones, weaponized drones but also
surveillance drones. You’re going to have small
numbers of covert operations forces conducting
direct actions, meaning targeting people
unilaterally, not with foreign forces. And then you
have this CIA-military attempt to build up local
militia that can essentially implement the agenda of
their paymasters from the United States, and of
course, that opens the door for huge blowback, as
we’ve seen over and over again throughout U.S.
history.
Hillary
Clinton now is viewed as the presumptive nominee of
the Democratic Party, although Bernie Sanders did
have quite an upset in Indiana the other night. But
let’s just assume for right now that Hillary looks
like she’s going to be the nominee. Hillary is a
legendary hawk. She is about regime change. She has
much more common on a foreign policy level with Dick
Cheney than she does with her average voter or
average supporter. She is part of the bipartisan war
party that really has governed this country for
many, many decades.
She was one
of the central people in the utter destruction of
Libya, one of the people who was a key player in
creating the conditions that led to Ambassador Chris
Stevens being killed. Hillary Clinton, if you look
at the documents that we have in the book about the
kill chain and the bureaucracy of killing, what
you’ll notice about that is at the very beginning of
the process you have foreign governments feeding
intelligence to the United States. Then it goes all
the way up this pyramid, and Hillary Clinton and
other American officials are an intricate part of
signing off on these extrajudicial sentences for
people around the world that are meted out usually
in the form of a drone strike.
In Libya,
in Syria, in Iraq, you now have this world as a
battlefield mentality underway and JSOC is being let
off the leash again. But I think the dog is now so
far away from the yard that you can’t even call it
back. We don’t even discuss foreign policy except
through a narrow lens in this election year right
now. There’s too many sneezes of Donald Trump to
cover, which of his former interns was Ted Cruz
sleeping with, and is John Kasich’s heart still
beating. That’s what’s on news all day long. But
there are hardcore issues. There is not a single
person running for president from either major party
that is against the assassination policy, that is
against the compilation of a kill list.
Bernie
Sanders, when asked by Chris Hayes recently at a
Democratic town hall meeting, said as it’s being
implemented under Obama, he supports the kill list,
and Chris Hayes used the phrase the kill list and
Bernie co-signed it. The other thing is Bernie
hammers away at Hillary Clinton for her regime
change politics, and I think he should, and she
deserves to be held completely accountable. She is a
total hawkish empire politician. But Bernie Sanders’
foreign policy is not that much better. It’s just
that he hasn’t been in a position of authority the
way that Hillary Clinton has as secretary of state.
Now, set
aside climate change and other issues. Just looking
at military policy. Bernie Sanders signed on to the
Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which was a product of
the neoconservative Project for a New American
Century. William Kristol, Donald Rumsfeld, Eliot
Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz—these guys in 1998 wrote a
letter to President Clinton that said you need to
take Iraq seriously. Make it a major priority of
U.S. national defense policy, and we should make
regime change the law of the land. That then was
translate into a bill that Bernie Sanders supported
it and then signed into law. That was laying the
ground work for a point of no return in terms of
invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
Bernie Sanders was about regime change at the very,
very beginning before Hillary Clinton even was in
the Senate.
Bernie
Sanders then went on to support the most brutal
regime of economic sanctions in modern history
against Iraq, and I spent a lot of time on the
ground in Iraq during that period, where the U.S.
policy was to try to starve and sort of target the
healthcare system of ordinary Iraqis to try to
encourage them to rise up against Saddam Hussein,
and it only benefited Saddam Hussein.
So, while
Bernie Sanders has said some amazing things about
various aspects of the crooked criminal nature of
various U.S. foreign policies—the coups in Guatemala
and Iran. It’s all amazing to hear a major
politician say that in the United States, but he
gets away with sort of the hypocrisy of just
hammering away on Hillary Clinton’s regime change
stuff when he was on the wrong side of decision
making in history when he was a lawmaker when the
Iraq stuff was just starting. So, I mean, I think
the fact that Bernie Sanders has come out in favor
of drones, has basically said that he supports the
maintenance of a kill list, and believes that these
kind of targeted assassination operations make sense
means we really don’t have an alternative in terms
of the major political candidates on this issue.
GOSZTOLA: Just to follow up on the
political question, and then we’ll get back to the
book. An important political question is this issue
of people who read our work on a daily basis, people
who sympathize with what we do and are out doing
organizing, but do give candidates like Bernie
Sanders and Hillary Clinton when it comes to drone
warfare, when it comes to regime change policies.
And I think now it’s even more stark because I think
what you say is very significant, the fact that this
election’s going to become about Hillary Clinton
playing the woman card or it’s going to become about
the misogynistic sleazy attacks of Donald Trump, and
the worst thing that people will say is that Donald
Trump is going to become president and he’s going to
have this assassination complex at his fingertips to
wield around the world, but the fact of the matter
is that there is a real thing that has to be
confronted, which is the extent to which the left
has made it possible to be available post-election.
SCAHILL: You cannot understate the
significance of the role that President Obama has
played over both terms of his administration in
seeking to legitimize assassination as a central
component of American policy. In the early days
after 9/11, Richard Clarke, who was the
counterterrorism czar under President Clinton and
then carried over with the Bush people, was called
to a secret hearing that’s since been declassified,
a joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence
committees. The aim of the hearing was the
Republicans were trying to blame Bill Clinton for
9/11. They were reviewing counterterrorism policy
and why Bill Clinton didn’t kill Osama bin Laden.
During this
secret hearing, Richard Clarke said there was a
consensus within the Clinton administration that
they did not want to give the impression of running
an Israeli-style assassination ring around the
world. And so, the Clinton administration put in
talmudic regulations before you could actually pull
the trigger in an operation that was going to kill
someone like Osama bin Laden. You then fast-forward
to the Obama era, and we’re hitting people left and
right all over the globe with a very streamlined,
almost scientific process for determining who lives
and who dies on any given day.
The
popularity of drone strikes, when it peaked in the
seventies at one point [referring to poll numbers],
and it didn’t decline much at all in the question of
targeting a U.S. citizen in drone strike—I think can
overwhelmingly be attributed to the fact that Obama
was viewed as a transformative figure. He has
tremendous support among the liberal base across the
country. He is a constitutional lawyer by training.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize, and people sort of
check their conscience at the door when their guy is
in power.
Over the
past two days, I’ve been called both a “Bernie Bro”
and a “Hillary Bot,” and what seems to not get
across to these dingbats is I’m not a politician,
and I’m not a partisan. Journalists, our job is to
provide people with critical information. I am not
in Bernie’s camp. I am not in Hillary’s camp. I am
not in Trump’s camp. Real journalists will be the
same journalists when there is a Democrat or
Republican in the White House, and they’re not going
to pull punches or withhold facts just because
someone they may like more than the other
person—That’s not journalism.
Do I think
that Bernie has a tremendous number of great ideas?
Of course, I do, but I’m not Bernie’s political
advisor. I’m a journalist, and I think that Bernie
should be whacked with criticism for the hypocrisy
of going after Hillary Clinton when he also has been
a part of that machine. Hillary is low-hanging fruit
to go after because she is so hawkish. It’s almost
like a parody of the one-party foreign policy system
in this country that Hillary is running. Jeb Bush
would not be much different than Hillary Clinton on
any one of these issues. In fact, he may be a little
less hawkish than Hillary Clinton on some of these
issues. So, all of these people should be put under
the microscope of scrutiny and not because of any of
this personal crap that people are talking about. We
should have an audit of who they are in public, and
so often the focus is on who they are screwing in
private.
GOSZTOLA: To the book, the issue of
secrecy, but let’s tie to what we just discussed
here. One of the more absurd things that has been
said in the last year by people who are whispering
to media and are close to Hillary Clinton is that
because her emails have information in them about
the drone program, they’ve claimed that this
information is “innocuous,” even though you are
doing really hard work. There are people whose lives
are on the line, whose livelihoods are at risk.
There’s the ACLU, who is fighting in court to get
this information released. Just talk about the
secrecy element here.
SCAHILL: First of all, Hillary Clinton
attempted to say, oh, Colin Powell did this when he
was secretary of state and Madeleine Albright did
this as well. I mean, Colin Powell still has an AOL
address. This is not a fair comparison. Hillary
Clinton and her husband setup a private server in a
bathroom at their house. This was not just something
of convenience. They went to great lengths to
circumvent a system that would allow her emails to
be subjected to the Freedom of Information Act, and
I think one of the big major drudge sirens that
should be going off about the Clinton thing is
Clinton Global Foundation’s role in agitating for
Hillary to be using that private email.
The thing
is, Hillary is playing with words because what
Hillary is saying is no one sent me classified
information or documents on this email. That may or
may not be true. I’ve heard there were some actual
classified documents sent, but we’ll wait and see
what comes out. But what we do know is she is
playing with the term classified because when Huma
Abedin or any of these other advisors or
particularly when other officials at the State
Department would send Hillary Clinton information
about what was happening in a variety of countries
around the world, those emails were not classified.
But the information in them, when put through the
appropriate classification procedure, would
certainly have been classified.
This is not
a nothing burger. Bernie Sanders said we don’t give
a damn about your emails. We should give a damn
about her emails, if for no other reason than the
violent double standard. People like David Petraeus
and Hillary Clinton and John Brennan have all been
involved in leaking information or mishandling
classified information and almost nothing happens to
any of them. And then you’ve got Chelsea Manning
doing 30 years in a military prison.
I was
saying last night at an event in New York, just
watch the “Collateral Murder” video. Try to tell me
that exposing that operation was not a tremendous
act of heroism on the part of Chelsea Manning, and
that’s true of all sorts of documents that were
published then by WikiLeaks. Yet, she is repaid for
what I think was an act of patriotism because she
was speaking out against these crimes being
committed by U.S. people—She’s doing 35 years.
Edward Snowden is in exile in Moscow. Tom Drake had
his public life ruined. He was smeared and dragged
through the mud. Bill Binney had his house raided
while he was taking a shower. All of these people,
who were whistleblowers, have been targeted in an
attempt to destroy them or imprison them. And this
administration is waging an all-out war against
whistleblowers, and by virtue of that, against an
independent press.
Then, you
have Hillary Clinton, who is the embodiment of the
establishment, running around, cackling and laughing
off questions about her mishandling of classified
information and conspiring with her husband and his
organization to setup a private server in her
bathroom with the express point of circumventing the
laws governing communications of a sitting secretary
of state. That is a huge scandal, but instead, we
have the Espionage Act being applied to people who
try to speak out about unconstitutional activity.
GOSZTOLA: I want to talk about these
whistleblowers. I’ll put it in this context just
because I was very moved by your
tribute to Father Daniel Berrigan over on
“Democracy Now!” and I’ve been reading about him.
When I think about the way that people who are part
of the liberal establishment turn these people into
sort of radical pariahs that we’re not supposed to
follow, it’s very disturbing.
It happens
a lot to these whistleblowers, like Edward Snowden
and Chelsea Manning. You get a lot of—I guess some
people might call this hippie-punching. But you have
this happening, and it’s rather disturbing. This is
a moral issue. These are people who are taking moral
stands regardless of what the outcome may be.
They’re told that they’re not going to be able to
change anything, but it doesn’t matter because when
you think about it, something just has to be done to
confront the system regardless of whether the
political system can be changed.
SCAHILL: Right. Chris Hayes, the other
night on his show—I think he was the only person in
corporate media to do any kind of a meaningful
tribute on his show. You know, he and his brother,
Philip Berrigan, were radical Catholic priests, who
conducted the most high-profile faith-based action
of the Vietnam War era, and one of the most
high-profile actions against the Vietnam War period
when they went into the customs house in
Catonsville, Maryland, with seven others and in full
view of the clerks stole out of the cabinets draft
files that were being used to send young people to
the war in Vietnam. Of course, poor people of color
were disproportionately sent to that war. And then
they burned them in the parking lot with homemade
napalm.
Daniel
Berrigan read a statement on behalf of the group,
part of which read, our apologies, good friends, for
the fracture of good order, for the burning of paper
instead of children. Devastating, chilling,
beautiful commentary on the hypocrisy of American
society knowing they would be arrested and put in
prison for using homemade napalm against pieces of
paper while the people that were dropping napalm on
villages in Vietnam were being hailed internally as
heroes. The country’s position on that, of course,
evolved, and eventually, it was viewed as the
criminal war that it was by many, many people.
But when
Chris Hayes played a clip the other night of Daniel
Berrigan, it was from 1981. It was Chris Wallace,
who is now the host of “Fox News Sunday.” The most
legitimate connection he has to actual journalism is
that his father was Mike Wallace, the legendary “60
Minutes” journalist, but in 1981, he’s interviewing
Daniel Berrigan and he says to him, basically,
you’re a nobody now. Year ago, you were a big deal,
and people paid attention to what you were doing.
Wallace doesn’t mention that one year before that
interview, Daniel Berrigan had organized an action
as part of the Plowshares Eight, where they snuck
into the General Electric plant in King of Prussia,
Pennsylvania, and hammered on Mark-12A nuclear
warhead cones, and then sparked a global movement
that did that. But Daniel Berrigan responds to Chris
Wallace by essentially saying who we are and why we
do what we do is not tethered to the other end of a
television cord. It was a brilliant response.
Should we
be concerned with wanting to be effective? Of
course, we should, but if you’re obsessed with
efficacy at the expense of doing what’s right, then
I think that’s the problem that a lot of people face
in our society. And it’s part of the problem with
just being attached to our computers all the time.
The real work is done away from our electronic
devices or our electronic devices are with us when
we’re out doing something. The greatest thing about
Dan Berrigan I think is that he showed up. He was
always there, and he was fond of saying don’t just
say something. Stand there. I think there’s a lot of
wisdom that younger folks, who are concerned about
these issues can learn by studying the people who
came before them and not just look at the last thing
that was tweeted.
GOSZTOLA: We have these sources that are
coming forward and are willing to share information,
even though they may have to flee the United States
and no longer live with their families anymore, even
though it may make it impossible for them to get a
job ever again. But also, in a different part of
this, you’ve got the activists, who some of them are
taking action. When I listen to Daniel Berrigan, I
thought of them too because we have organizations
like CODEPINK or we have smaller community
organizations in upstate New York that will go to
these air force bases that are actually taking
risks. Some are even put on these lists, where
they’re not even allowed to be near the base anymore
because they’re allegedly going to pose a risk to a
colonel, who they don’t know. They’ve never ever
seen.
You also
have people traveling. I know Daniel Berrigan talked
about being in Vietnam when the U.S. bombs were
dropping, and I thought about CODEPINK has gone to
Pakistan to visit people and see the destruction
there. I just wondered about connecting that part,
the fact that there really are people out there
challenging this.
SCAHILL: During the Vietnam War, one of the
things that became very common—in addition to the
raids of draft boards that took place in cities
around the country, where activists would go in and
destroy in some way or another the draft files.
Individual people would publicly burn their draft
cards, and they would go to jail. There were several
cases of young people, who had done this, and they
felt they were part of a community that had done
this. When they ended up going to jail, they were
dropped by everybody, and left in solitary in jail
and came out very shattered and destroyed people.
Everyone will cheer on someone doing the big action,
but then when they have to pay up personally, and
they end up going to jail, who is going to continue
to support those people when they do it?
That’s why
I think the lives of Daniel and Philip are so
interesting because they had a commitment to trying
to spend a solid percentage of their life behind
bars. Not just with their comrades who were arrested
with them in resistance, but with people who were
convicted of everyday crimes or of violent crimes,
because those people are also a part of our society.
I think
that it’s been disgraceful the way that the New York
Times has handled Chelsea Manning’s case. They
splashed those files and stories about the WikiLeaks
files on the front page for a sustained period of
time, and they had to be shamed by you and Alexa
O’Brien and others, independent, low-funded
journalists were doing the daily coverage of that
trial, and the New York Times had to be shamed into
covering it. Plus, the CNN producer was sleeping all
the time, according to Alexa’s tweets. I love
following how the one corporate journalist there
can’t even stay awake during the proceedings. But
that’s a commentary on why we need independent
media, and also why we need to support
whistleblowers and amplify their voices. When the
government comes for them, speaking out and being
there is so essential. You can’t just drop people
like litter on the ground when you have used the
information given to you at risk to publish news
stories. You have to be there for your sources.
GOSZTOLA: As we wrap, any final thoughts?
Anything from the book that you want to share before
we conclude?
SCAHILL: My pleasure, Kevin. Thank you
again for the work that you and your team are doing.
I really look forward to seeing what Shadowproof is
going to become, and the story’s that you are going
to be breaking.
Our book
was a huge collective effort. There are a lot of
people, as you know, who are a part of great
reporting that don’t get the byline. They research
for you. They help you with logistical stuff. They
lay your website out. They do all these things, and
so many people worked on it. What we tried to do is
create—It’s only like 280-pages long, but we tried
to create a living document that people could use as
a reference to understand the watchlisting process,
and what we understand from inside, from
whistleblowers, about how the assassination complex
works, especially since we know President Obama is
going to try historically revise what actually
happened over the past two administrations.
The other
thing I would say is when whistleblowers come under
the sights of the sniper scope of the American
state, that people be there for them, and that they
stand up and not drop them. Chelsea Manning still
needs people’s voice and support. It’s one thing to
be there when the act of resistance is ongoing, and
it’s in the media. It’s when the cameras go away,
and the sentence is handed down that you really see
who is with you and who is not.
GOSZTOLA: Thank you, Jeremy. I expect
throughout this general election we’re going to see
Hillary Clinton trying to prove to us that she’s a
smarter warrior-in-chief than Donald Trump we’ll
ever be. So, we’ll need your clarity on these issues
of the drone war and assassination complex.
SCAHILL: It’s great: choosing between a
fascist and a politician of the empire. It’s just a
wonderful collection that we have in this country.
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