Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.

Over the past several weeks, House Republicans have been claiming that the FBI during the 2016 election used an operative to spy on the Trump campaign, and they triggered outrage within the FBI by trying to learn his identity. The controversy escalated when President Trump joined the fray on Friday morning. “Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,” Trump tweeted, adding: “It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot” Fake News story. If true – all time biggest political scandal!”

In response, the DOJ and the FBI’s various media spokespeople did not deny the core accusation, but quibbled with the language (the FBI used an “informant,” not a “spy”), and then began using increasingly strident language to warn that exposing his name would jeopardize his life and those of others, and also put American national security at grave risk. On May 8, the Washington Post described the informant as “a top-secret intelligence source” and cited DOJ officials as arguing that disclosure of his name “could risk lives by potentially exposing the source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence to the CIA and FBI.”

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, who spent much of last week working to ensure confirmation of Trump’s choice to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, actually threatened his own colleagues in Congress with criminal prosecution if they tried to obtain the identity of the informant. “Anyone who is entrusted with our nation’s highest secrets should act with the gravity and seriousness of purpose that knowledge deserves,” Warner said.

But now, as a result of some very odd choices by the nation’s largest media outlets, everyone knows the name of the FBI’s informant: Stefan Halper. And Halper’s history is quite troubling, particularly his central role in the scandal in the 1980 election. Equally troubling are the DOJ and FBI’s highly inflammatory and, at best, misleading claims that they made to try to prevent Halper’s identity from being reported.

To begin with, it’s obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor the Trump campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that 1980 Presidential election spying campaign.

It was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter did this scandal emerge. It was leaked by right-wing officials inside the Reagan administration who wanted to undermine officials they regarded as too moderate, including then White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who was a Bush loyalist.

The NYT in 1983 said the Reagan campaign spying operation “involved a number of retired Central Intelligence Agency officials and was highly secretive.” The article, by then-NYT reporter Leslie Gelb, added that its “sources identified Stefan A. Halper, a campaign aide involved in providing 24-hour news updates and policy ideas to the traveling Reagan party, as the person in charge.” Halper, now 73, had also worked with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Alexander Haig as part of the Nixon administration.

When the scandal first broke in 1983, the UPI suggested that Halper’s handler for this operation was Reagan’s Vice Presidential candidate, George H.W. Bush, who had been the CIA Director and worked there with Halper’s father-in-law, former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who worked on Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign before Bush ultimately became Reagan’s Vice President. It quoted a former Reagan campaign official as blaming the leak on “conservatives [who] are trying to manipulate the Jimmy Carter papers controversy to force the ouster of White House Chief of Staff James Baker.”

Halper, through his CIA work, has extensive ties to the Bush family. Few remember that the CIA’s perceived meddling in the 1980 election – its open support for its former Director, George H.W. Bush to become President – was a somewhat serious political controversy. And Halper was in that middle of that, too.

In 1980, the Washington Post published an article reporting on the extremely unusual and quite aggressive involvement of the CIA in the 1980 presidential campaign. “Simply put, no presidential campaign in recent memory — perhaps ever — has attracted as much support from the intelligence community as the campaign of former CIA director Bush,” the article said.

Though there was nothing illegal about ex-CIA officials uniting to put a former CIA Director in the Oval Office, the paper said “there are some rumblings of uneasiness in the intelligence network.” It specifically identified Cline as one of the most prominent CIA official working openly for Bush, noting that he “recommended his son-in-law, Stefan A. Halper, a former Nixon White House aide, be hired as Bush’s director of policy development and research.”

In 2016, top officials from the intelligence community similarly rallied around Hillary Clinton. As The Intercept has previously documented:

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell not only endorsed Clinton in the New York Times but claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” George W. Bush’s CIA and NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, pronounced Trump a “clear and present danger” to U.S. national security and then, less than a week before the election, went to the Washington Post to warn that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin” and said Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

So as it turns out, the informant used by the FBI in 2016 to gather information on the Trump campaign was not some previously unknown, top-secret asset whose exposure as an operative could jeopardize lives. Quite the contrary: his decades of work for the CIA – including his role in an obviously unethical if not criminal spying operation during the 1980 presidential campaign – is quite publicly known.

And now, as a result of some baffling choices by the nation’s largest news organizations as well as their anonymous sources inside the U.S. Government, Stefan Halper’s work for the FBI during the 2016 is also publicly known

Last night, both the Washington Post and New York Times – whose reporters, like pretty much everyone in Washington, knew exactly who the FBI informant is – published articles that, while deferring to the FBI’s demands by not naming him, provided so many details about him that it made it extremely easy to know exactly who it is. The NYT described the FBI informant as “an American academic who teaches in Britain” and who “made contact late that summer with” George Papadopoulos and “also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page.” The Post similarly called him “a retired American professor” who met with Page “at a symposium about the White House race held at a British university.”

In contrast to the picture purposely painted by the DOJ and its allies that this informant was some of sort super-secret, high-level, covert intelligence asset, the NYT described him as what he actually is: “the informant is well known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years.”

Despite how “well known” he is in Washington, and despite publishing so many details about him that anyone with Google would be able to instantly know his name, the Post and the NYT nonetheless bizarrely refused to identity him, with the Post justifying its decision that it “is not reporting his name following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.” The NYT was less melodramatic about it, citing a general policy: the NYT “has learned the source’s identity but typically does not name informants to preserve their safety,” it said.

In other words, both the NYT and the Post chose to provide so many details about the FBI informant that everyone would know exactly who it was, while coyly pretending that they were obeying FBI demands not to name him. How does that make sense? Either these newspapers believe the FBI’s grave warnings that national security and lives would be endangered if it were known who they used as their informant (in which case those papers should not publish any details that would make his exposure likely), or they believe that the FBI (as usual) was just invoking false national security justifications to hide information it unjustly wants to keep from the public (in which case the newspapers should name him).

In any event, publication of those articles by the NYT and Post last night made it completely obvious who the FBI informant was, because the Daily Caller’s investigative reporter Chuck Ross on Thursday had published an article reporting that a long-time CIA operative who is now a professor at Cambridge repeatedly met with Papadopoulos and Page. The article, in its opening paragraph, named the professor, Stefan Halper, and described him as “a University of Cambridge professor with CIA and MI6 contacts.”

Ross’ article, using public information, recounted at length Halper’s long-standing ties to the CIA, including the fact that his father-in-law, Ray Cline, was a top CIA official during the Cold War, and that Halper himself had long worked with both the CIA and its British counterpart, the MI6. As Ross wrote: “at Cambridge, Halper has worked closely with Dearlove, the former chief of MI6. In recent years they have directed the Cambridge Security Initiative, a non-profit intelligence consulting group that lists ‘UK and US government agencies’ among its clients.”

Both the NYT and Washington Post reporters boasted, with seeming pride, about the fact that they did not name the informant even as they published all the details which made it simple to identify him. But NBC News – citing Ross’ report and other public information – decided to name him, while stressing that it has not confirmed that he actually worked as an FBI informant:

The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a paid consultant to an internal Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net Assessment, consulting on Russia and China issues, according to public records.

“The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a paid consultant to an internal Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net Assessment.” https://t.co/8Jdu8XqtbI

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) May 19, 2018

There is nothing inherently untoward, or even unusual, about the FBI using informants in an investigation. One would expect them to do so. But the use of Halper in this case, and the bizarre claims made to conceal his identity, do raise some questions that merit further inquiry.

To begin with, the New York Times reported in December of last year that the FBI investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia began when George Papadopoulos drunkenly boasted to an Australian diplomat about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was the disclosure of this episode by the Australians that “led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” the NYT claimed.

But it now seems clear that Halper’s attempts to gather information for the FBI began before that. “The professor’s interactions with Trump advisers began a few weeks before the opening of the investigation, when Page met the professor at the British symposium,” the Post reported. While it’s not rare for the FBI to gather information before formally opening an investigation, Halper’s earlier snooping does call into question the accuracy of the NYT’s claim that it was the drunken Papadopoulos ramblings that first prompted the FBI’s interest in these possible connections. And it suggests that CIA operatives, apparently working with at least some factions within the FBI, were trying to gather information about the Trump campaign earlier than had been previously reported.

Then there are questions about what appear to be some fairly substantial government payments to Halper throughout 2016. Halper continues to be listed as a “vendor” by websites that track payments by the federal government to private contractors.

Earlier this week, records of payments were found that were made during 2016 to Halper by the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, though it not possible from these records to know the exact work for which these payments were made. The Pentagon office that paid Halper in 2016, according to a 2015 Washington Post story on its new duties, “reports directly to Secretary of Defense and focuses heavily on future threats, has a $10 million budget.”

It is difficult to understand how identifying someone whose connections to the CIA is a matter of such public record, and who has a long and well-known history of working on spying programs involving presidential elections on behalf of the intelligence community, could possibly endanger lives or lead to grave national security harm. It isn’t as though Halper has been some sort of covert, stealth undercover asset for the CIA who just got exposed. Quite the contrary: that he’s a spy embedded in the U.S. intelligence community would be known to anyone with internet access.

Equally strange are the semantic games which journalists are playing in order to claim that this revelation disproves, rather than proves, Trump’s allegation that the FBI “spied” on his campaign. This bizarre exchange between CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and the New York Times’ Trip Gabriel vividly illustrates the strange machinations used by journalists to justify how all of this is being characterized:

Despite what Halper actually is, the FBI and its dutiful mouthpieces have spent weeks using the most desperate language to try to hide Halper’s identity and the work he performed as part of the 2016 election. Here was the deeply emotional reaction to last night’s story from Brookings’ Benjamin Wittes, who has become a social media star by parlaying his status as Jim Comey’s best friend and long-time loyalist to security state agencies into a leading role in pushing the Trump/Russia story:

Wittes’ claim that all of this resulted in the “outing” of some sort of sensitive “intelligence source” is preposterous given how publicly known Halper’s role as a CIA operative has been for decades. But this is the scam that the FBI and people like Mark Warner have been running for two weeks: deceiving people into believing that exposing Halper’s identity would create grave national security harm by revealing some previously unknown intelligence asset.

Wittes also implies that it was Trump and Devin Nunes who are responsible for Halper’s exposure but he almost certainly has no idea of who the sources are for the NYT or the Washington Post. And note that Wittes is too cowardly to blame the institutions that actually made it easy to identify Halper – the New York Times and Washington Post – preferring instead to exploit the opportunity to depict the enemies of his friend Jim Comey as traitors.

Whatever else is true, the CIA operative and FBI informant used to gather information on the Trump campaign in the 2016 campaign has, for weeks, been falsely depicted as a sensitive intelligence asset rather than what he actually is: a long-time CIA operative with extensive links to the Bush family who was responsible for a dirty and likely illegal spying operation in the 1980 presidential election. For that reason, it’s easy to understand why many people in Washington were so desperate to conceal his identity, but that desperation had nothing to do with the lofty and noble concerns for national security they claimed were motivating them.

The post The FBI Informant Who Monitored the Trump Campaign, Stefan Halper, Oversaw a CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential Election appeared first on The Intercept.

Two GOP senators appear unlikely to vote for Haspel: John McCain, whose illness prevents him from attending, and Rand Paul, who has vowed to oppose Haspel (though few things have proven less reliable than Rand Paul’s promises to act on his supposed principles). That means that Democrats have the power to block a torturer and evidence-destroyer from becoming Trump’s CIA director — if they remain united in their opposition.

Will they do so? It is difficult to be optimistic, to put that mildly. The history of Democrats throughout the war on terror is to ensure that just enough members of their caucus join with the GOP majority to ensure passage of even the most extremist pieces of legislation or nominees justified in the name of terrorism or national security.

The ruse Democrats typically use to accomplish these dirty deeds is quite ingenious: The defectors change so that no one member bears the blame for enabling right-wing measures, while the party itself is able to claim that a majority opposed the extremism. In 2010 — as the Bush-era tactic of Democratic defections to the GOP continued under Barack Obama — I referred to this tactic as “Villain Rotation” and described it this way:

The primary tactic in this game is Villain Rotation.  They always have a handful of Democratic Senators announce that they will be the ones to deviate this time from the ostensible party position and impede success, but the designated Villain constantly shifts, so the Party itself can claim it supports these measures while an always-changing handful of their members invariably prevent it.  One minute, it’s Jay Rockefeller as the Prime Villain leading the way in protecting Bush surveillance programs and demanding telecom immunity; the next minute, it’s Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer joining hands and “breaking with their party” to ensure Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General; then it’s Big Bad Joe Lieberman single-handedly blocking Medicare expansion; then it’s Blanche Lincoln and Jim Webb joining with Lindsey Graham to support the de-funding of civilian trials for Terrorists; and now that they can’t blame Lieberman or Ben Nelson any longer on health care (since they don’t need 60 votes), Jay Rockefeller voluntarily returns to the Villain Role, stepping up to put an end to the pretend-movement among Senate Democrats to enact the public option via reconciliation.

If Haspel is confirmed, it will be because a certain number of Democratic senators join with the GOP caucus to support her, while allowing the Democratic Party to claim it tried to stop her by pointing to a majority of futile Democratic votes against her. That’s why the record of the Democratic Party over the last 17 years — providing whatever amount of support is needed for GOP war on terror policies — makes it difficult to believe that Democrats will unite to kill her nomination.

The prospect of united Democratic opposition to Trump’s CIA nominee is further complicated by the vocal support for Haspel coming not only from the CIA itself — which has been running what amounts to a domestic propaganda campaign on her behalf — but also from the most admired Democratic Party intelligence and military officials.

Despite her role in the CIA torture program — or perhaps because of it — Haspel has been showered with praise, and her confirmation urged, by a bipartisan cast of intelligence officials that includes Obama’s two CIA directors (John Brennan and Leon Panetta), Obama’s director of national intelligence (James Clapper), Panetta’s former chief of staff at the CIA and current MSNBC star Jeremy Bash, and a bevy of Bush-era CIA and military officials who have rehabilitated their reputations among liberals in the Trump era (led by Bush’s CIA and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden).

It is not difficult to understand why these Democratic national security officials — despite effectively rebranding themselves as #Resistance icons — are so supportive of Trump’s choice of a torturer to lead the CIA. Part of it is ideological and group loyalty: unlike Trump, Haspel is one them, a member in good standing of the intelligence and military world in which they have spent so much of their lives. Part of what motivates their support is standard tribalistic rank-closing: Yes, she is a torturer, but she’s one of our torturers.

Part of the motive is undoubtedly financial. Many of Haspel’s most vocal supporters from the intelligence community make great profit from doing business with the CIA. Few things would be better for business than earning the gratitude of the agency by publicly agitating for their prized nominee and using their credentials as Good Democrats to creating space for, and applying pressure to, Democratic senators to support her.

Jeremy Bash, for instance, is a founder and managing director of Beacon Global Strategies LLC, a private consulting firm led by Obama’s former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell (who, needless to say, also supports Haspel). Beacon is filled with ex-CIA and intelligence officials from both parties — including Panetta and Bush Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend.

Many of the Beacon executives are the same national security officials who last year worked with Bill Kristol and Mario Rubio’s neocon foreign policy guru, Jamie Fly, to create the Alliance for Securing Democracy and its Hamilton 68 dashboard to advocate for a new, more aggressive foreign policy (among those in both groups are Morell, Fly, Julianne Smith, and Adm. James Stavridis). It’s the living, breathing personification of the Revolving Door sleaze that everyone who doesn’t swim in it despises:

Beacon describes itself as “a strategic advisory firm specializing in International Policy, Defense, Cyber, Intelligence, and Homeland Security” and — to clients — touts its “deep experience informed by their years of service in the White House, State Department, Defense Department, CIA, Justice Department, on Capitol Hill.” In other words, it leverages its connections to the intelligence and military agencies for which they worked to generate profits from corporate clients who do business with those agencies or whose business otherwise depends on their good will.

If your income and profit depended on maintaining close relations with the government agencies which you once helped manage — as is true of so many of D.C.’s Revolving Door beneficiaries — wouldn’t you also leverage your public credentials to bolster whatever agenda they were supporting at any moment? For so long, Washington’s national security policy has been shaped by profit motives, fueled by legalized Revolving Door corruption, dressed up as counterterrorism and national security imperatives.

This is one of the problems with having TV and cable networks fill their rosters with former military and intelligence officials: They are ideologically and, so often, financially motivated to support those agencies’ worldview and agenda under the guise of “news” — in other words, to spout state propaganda. Of course they are going to use their Democratic Party credentials to support the CIA’s campaign elevate this CIA torturer: They have every ideological and business incentive to do so.

The primary argument being mounted on Haspel’s behalf is not that it was wise or just to torture detainees (the only one who seems to be making that argument is the president who nominated her and Dick Cheney’s daughter, now a pro-torture congresswoman occupying her dad’s old seat). Instead, the defense is the one proffered by the defendants — and rejected by the tribunal — at Nuremberg: Haspel was just following orders.

As my colleague Jon Schwarz noted when Haspel was unveiled, some Democratic national security officials are unironically using the exact phrase invoked by the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg to justify, or at least mitigate, Haspel’s conduct:

Samantha Winograd, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council and now is an analyst for CNN, likewise used Nuremberg defense language in an appearance on the network. Haspel, she said, “was implementing the lawful orders of the president. . . . You could argue she should have quit because the program was so abhorrent. But she was following orders.”

There is some factual accuracy to this claim: Haspel was not some rogue torturer. It is absolutely true that she was implementing CIA policy as decreed by George Bush, Dick Cheney and the Justice Department. Like most CIA officials involved in torture, not only was Haspel protected from punishment for that, but she was repeatedly promoted. That’s because torturing helpless detainees is regarded by the CIA as a noble and patriotic act.

That’s why it was so predictably disastrous when Barack Obama elevated to the highest national security positions CIA officials such as John Brennan who had supported and advocated for major parts of the CIA’s torture and rendition program, and why it was even worse when Obama devoted himself to shielding all torturers from all forms of criminal and even civil penalty for their war crimes (even in the face of a treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan, requiring all signatory states to prosecute, not immunize, their torturers no matter their excuse for using it).

Indeed, as CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski pointed out today, a central prong of the GOP’s pro-Haspel messaging is “all the support Brennan got for CIA director from Democrats opposing her.” And that is, as he says, a “fair point”: after all, how can Democratic Senators posture now as vehement opponents of empowering torturers when they cheered Obama for naming the torture-and-rendition advocate Brennan as CIA Director, voted for his confirmation, and have now turned Brennan into a beloved #Resistance hero whose every Twitter utterance instantly goes viral?

https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/993854861337878528

While the primary guilt for torture lies with those who did it (namely, top officials of the Bush White House and the CIA which obeyed their criminal orders), Obama’s sustained 8-year campaign to rehabilitate, protect and even empower torturers converted torture from what it should be – a criminal taboo that automatically leads to prosecution – into just another partisan political dispute. As a result, those who advocate it or even did it not only remain in decent company but even get Washington Post columns, MSNBC contracts, and hugs from beloved liberal TV icons.

The outcome of that climate is that one of the people who oversaw some of the worst torture the U.S. has inflicted is about to be elevated to lead the world’s most powerful intelligence agency.

The word “normalize” has become a favorite media cliché in the Trump era, but it applies with full force here: Gina Haspel as CIA Director is what happens when you normalize torturers by barring their prosecution and awarding them with high-level positions in media, politics, and the intelligence community. Torture becomes just another good faith political disagreement, something that at worst “taints” someone’s record – to use the remarkable  minimizing word chosen by the Washington Post’s long-time CIA defender David Ignatius – but should be weighed against their good points:

This is American Exceptionalism in its purest, and ugliest, expression: war criminals which lead African nations or enemies of the U.S. are sent to the Hague to be prosecuted, while American war criminals are rewarded, empowered, and praised. When an American tortures, it’s not a crime but a mere “taint,” and certainly not one that should result in denial of promotions let alone handcuffs and a prison cell.

During the last Israeli election, when pundits thought Benjamin Netanyahu may lose, I recall many Palestinian activists hoping that Netanyahu would win, because it’s clarifying of what Israel is to have Netanyahu as its leader rather than some prettier, more palatable figure who would support the same policies of occupation, aggression, and illegal settlement.

One could certainly look at Gina Haspel that way: she’s the Director the CIA deserves, an accurate reflection of what this agency really is. Having someone who everyone knows is a torturer at the helm of this agency will make it that much harder to sustain the U.S. media propaganda script – led by CIA spokespeople such as NBC’s Ken Dilanian and Ignatius – about the good and noble work this agency does. On some level, it’s healthy for the CIA to finally wear its true identity on its sleeve.

But it’s also clarifying about the charade of Trump and the #Resistance, about the supposed inability of the parties to agree on anything, of the refusal of people from different ideologies to unite. That Trump chose someone with one of the most gruesome torture histories to lead the CIA is certainly revealing about who he is. And if the Democrats cannot unite to stop that, that will be further evidence of what they are. What kind of #Resistance refuses to stop an actual torturer chosen by Donald Trump from being promoted to head the most powerful spy agency in the world?

The post Will Democrats Unite to Block Trump’s Torturer, Gina Haspel, as CIA Chief? If Not, What Do They #Resist? appeared first on The Intercept.

The bipartisan war party is once again giddy with excitement as Trump prepares to become “presidential” again. This week on Intercepted: U.N. inspectors have not even arrived on the ground in Syria to investigate the latest reported use of chemical weapons, but Trump has already threatened Syria, Russia, and Iran that they will pay a “big price” and “nothing is off the table.” Historian Andrew Bacevich and Jeremy make the case against escalating U.S. military action in Syria, even if Assad’s forces were behind the attack. The acclaimed novelist Arundhati Roy talks about her new novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” and offers insights on Kashmir, Narendra Modi, Trump, and more. Roy also dismantles some widely held beliefs about Mahatma Gandhi’s politics. Actor and writer Wallace Shawn (“My Dinner with Andre,” “The Princess Bride”) talks about the U.S. assassination program, imperial wars, and collective responsibility. He and Jeremy also discuss “Evening at the Talk House,” Shawn’s new audio drama premiering next week on Intercepted. And Jimmy the taxi driver gets into Trump’s head in the aftermath of the raid on the office of his personal lawyer Michael Cohen. It’s a sabotage.

President Donald J. Trump: So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, good man, total witch-hunt, I’ve been saying it for a long time.

Jimmy the Cab Driver (MTV): The president of the United States of America, you’re talking about a very powerful man, you know, especially with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, you know?

DJT: And I have this witch-hunt.

J: But these guys, just like their Camp David, and where they go play golf.

DJT: Attack on our country in a true sense. Attack on what we all stand for.

J: Ah, yeah, well excuse me pal, because behind you guys in black, I like, you know —

DJT: They’re not looking at the other side; they’re not looking at the Hillary Clintons.

J: Sneaking this way: ninja warriors!

DJT: This is a pure and simple witch-hunt. Thank you very much.

[“Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

[Musical interlude.]

JS: I’m Jeremy Scahill, coming to you from the offices of The Intercept in New York City and this is Episode 52 of Intercepted.

Reporter: U.S. military action. Is it off the table?

DJT: Nothing’s off the table. Nothing’s off the table.

JS: The bipartisan war party is once again giddy with excitement. Just a year ago, they were celebrating as Donald Trump became “presidential” when he rained down $100 million worth of cruise missiles, 59 of them on a Syrian military installation. Now, they’re at it again, openly goading Trump. Daring him. Encouraging him to — well, they don’t say what exactly in Syria, but they want military action.

And the thing is, just last week Trump was reportedly talking about the U.S. getting out of Syria very soon. Just days later, it seems, that we may be on the brink of another significant escalation in the U.S. bombing of Syria. There may even be a substantial U.S. ground invasion at some point. This is a very serious moment. So what happened?

Well, on April 4th Russian television reported on comments that Vladimir Putin made during a recent visit to Turkey, where Putin said that Russia had intelligence suggesting that anti-Assad forces in Syria were planning to stage what he called provocations involving chemical weapons in Syria.

Vladimir Putin (translated): We have obtained undeniable evidence of planned provocation by the militants with the use of chemical agents.

JS: Soon after those statements by Vladimir Putin were broadcast, on April 6th, a senior Russian military official was quoted by the state news agency TASS, as saying that the Free Syrian Army was planning chemical attacks with the use of chlorine in areas under its control. That Russian official was quoted as saying “the militants plan to photograph and video the alleged effects of chemical weapons and show the clips to the public at large to blame government troops for civilian casualties, as well as to provide excuses for their own actions to disrupt the ceasefire.”

RT: Russia’s defense ministry says rebel groups have been armed with chemical weapons in Syria and are planning to stage false-flag attacks as a pretext for the U.S. to carry out airstrikes.

JS: On Saturday reports began emerging from the Damascus suburb of Douma that a chemical weapons attack had been unleashed on the civilian population. Horrifying images of children and women and men being rushed to the hospital or already dead were posted online, and they soon made their way to global television networks.

Holly Williams (CBS): Survivors struggling to breathe, especially children, and being hosed down as if to remove a substance from their skin. We cannot independently verify any of these videos or confirm whether a chemical attack took place. Survivors, though, reportedly smelled of chlorine, a chemical that can be deadly in enclosed spaces.

JS: Most of the news coverage focused on the civilians, and I believe that’s the right focus, but Douma was also a stronghold of an armed Islamist group that’s backed by Saudi Arabia and trying to overthrow Bashar al Assad. That group is known as Jaysh al Islam. In any case, the Trump Administration swiftly accused Bashar al Assad and the Syrian government of being responsible for the attack.

Newscaster: President Trump on Twitter called Syrian ruler Bashar al Assad an animal and called out Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran for backing him. Mr. Trump warned of a “big price to be paid.”

JS: Now, soon after this news broke Russia claimed that this attack was a realization of the warnings that its military general and Vladimir Putin had issued earlier. The Syrian government denied that it had carried out the chemical attack. Witnesses on the ground said it was Syrian government forces. Russia’s foreign ministry labeled the attack “fake news.” Said it was a false flag, intended to “justify possible military strikes from the outside.” Here’s Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov:

Sergey Lavrov (translated): I’m sure you saw this video where people allegedly targetted by the chemical weapons, while having water poured over them by people with no chemical protection themselves. This looks like the videos from a year ago, from the white helmets, who already proved to be untrustworthy.

JS: Now I take all of these Russian statements with, not a grain of salt, with like a massive mountain of salt. It’s the Russian government, and it lies, and it engages in constant propaganda. But that is Russia’s official position.

The United Nations Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said on Tuesday that it intends to send a team to Syria to investigate this latest incident, and it noted, in a press release, that this preparation “coincided with a request from the Syrian Arab Republic and the Russian Federation to investigate the allegations of chemical weapons use in Douma.” The U.N. said a team is preparing to deploy to Syria shortly.

Now it’s important to note here that in 2016, a U.N. investigative team concluded that Syrian government forces had used chlorine as a chemical weapon in three cases. The U.N. also concluded that the Islamic State fighters used sulfur mustard. In 2017, that same U.N. body placed the blame for the Khan Shaykhun attack on Assad’s forces.

Newscaster: More than 80 civilians died, many of them children. The report says evidence gathered from eyewitnesses, satellite imagery, and mobile phone footage indicate the attack was carried out by Syrian government aircraft.

JS: I don’t know who carried out this most recent attack in Douma. I’ve not seen clear forensic evidence or an independent assessment of what was used and by whom. That’s what the U.N. investigation is supposed to be about. Could this have been Assad’s forces? Yeah. That would be consistent with what the U.N. has concluded in some previous cases. Could Russia have been running a psychological operation when they predicted an attack and then it happens the very next day? Sure. Does Russia have a vested interest in Assad remaining in power? Absolutely.

At the same time, could Trump and his administration be wrong or straight-up lying about Assad’s forces conducting this attack? Sure. Could the CIA and other intel agencies feed Trump dubious intel posing as definitive conclusions? Absolutely. Does Trump desperately want the subject in Washington D.C. to change? Uh, no question.

Reporter: Do you have any response to Stormy Daniels!

JS: I have to admit here that it is very hard to think of a logical reason for Bashar al-Assad to conduct such a chemical attack right now. I’ve looked at various theories and none of them really make sense. At the same time, war is unpredictable and so are dictators and despots. None of this means that Assad’s forces didn’t do this — just that it would seem very bad strategy for Assad to have done this unless the point was to get Trump to escalate the bombing. And there are some theories about Russia wanting to pull the U.S. deeper into a Syria quagmire, but all of this gets into eighth-dimensional chess territory and straight-up hypothesizing or guessing. So, what I want to put forward here is this: Even if Assad or his forces have used chemical weapons, I’m totally against U.S. military action in Syria. This war has been a horrifying series of war crime, after a war crime, after a war crime: by Assad and his forces, by Russia, by the United States, and by some of the so-called rebel groups, including those funded and aided by the United States and its allies.

But here’s my bottom line: The U.S. has no business overthrowing governments. The use of humanitarian justifications for U.S. wars? It’s vapid, bankrupt bullshit. Don’t tell me you’re intervening to stop a genocide in Syria while simultaneously facilitating one in Yemen. Don’t tell me that after you lied about WMDs in Iraq, that now the mission is saving people from Saddam. I could go on for quite a while here. Just look at the U.S. record of destabilizing — well, the entire Middle East — and actually directly contributing to the horrors that now have gone on unabated for years and years in Syria.

Some people may believe that the U.S. should be the global cop, but if so, that’s one dirty cop — dirty to the core. That cop should not be trusted to rescue your cat from a tree. Here’s Trump’s U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley at the U.N. Security Council pushing for war based on this attack.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley: Who does this? Only a monster does this. Only a monster target civilians and then ensures that there are no ambulances to transfer the wounded, no hospitals to save their lives, no doctors or medicine to ease their pain.

JS: I think the use of chemical weapons is an unconscionable atrocity. They should be banned and those who facilitate their use should be held accountable under international law — and I don’t mean the selective U.S. interpretation of international law. At the same time, I wonder why these weapons have been singled out and seem to immediately justify all manner of bombing or military attack or maybe even an invasion. The U.S. uses banned munitions — cluster bombs. The U.S. has used white phosphorous, which is only legal because the United States has intervened to make it so. The U.S has bombed weddings and funerals, and it’s done double-tap drone strikes. It’s bombed hospitals and shot up ambulances and killed first responders. The point here is that many of the things that Nikki Haley cited have also been done in one form or another by the U.S. and its allies, and she says, “only a monster does this.”

President Barack Obama: There’s no doubt that some innocent people have been killed by drone strikes.

Amy Goodman: Five so-called double-tap strikes took place in mid-2012, one of which also struck a mosque.

Brian Williams: From a U.S. drone strike in Yemen that missed its target this week and struck what witnesses described as a wedding party.

Michelle Norris: The Pentagon is defending its use of white phosphorus in the battle for Fallujah last year. If the ignited particles land on a person, they can burn through the flesh, right through to the bone.

Amy Goodman: A suspected U.S. airstrike Saturday on an Afghan hospital in the city of Kunduz that killed 22 people — 12 staff members and 10 patients, including 3 children.

JS: And I’m just talking about the recent past here involving the U.S. — we could go back and talk about the Brits using chemical weapons and the U.S. using napalm or Agent Orange or the U.S. being the only nation to ever use a nuclear bomb. As of this moment, the U.S. and its allies continue to use internationally banned weapons, including cluster bombs. It’s as though there are some victims who become more worthy than others depending on the munition that’s used to kill them indiscriminately, or based on the identity of the particular force that’s using the weapon.

But chemical weapons seem to be this special trigger for war-mongering. Here’s Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal:

Senator Richard Blumenthal: The response has to have some military component so as to disable al Assad’s ability to use these chemical weapons because clearly, the commitments he’s made are unreliable.

JS: I agree that we should hold those who use chemical weapons accountable, and let’s have an independent investigation about this recent incident in Syria. But there is no case to be made for not doing the exact same thing with those who authorize the use of cluster munitions, which shred human beings into ground meat on a massive radius.

Right now, the world has international courts that can hold Bashar al Assad accountable. But those same courts have been completely defanged when it comes to holding U.S., Israeli, British, Saudi leaders, NATO leaders accountable. I believe that Assad is a war criminal, and if the U.S. did not do everything in its power to make sure that international law is never applied to the United States and its friends then it would be much easier to hold people like Assad accountable without it feeding into an unfortunately accurate narrative about the grotesque double standard and utter hypocrisy that’s on display every time the U.S. bombs or invades countries and is never brought to justice.

This drive to war by politicians is not actually about chemical weapons: It’s about American exceptionalism and hollow moral posturing. It’s about the military-industrial complex and its latest toys of war. It’s about the grand bipartisan addiction to the idea that the U.S. military is a hammer that always needs to find a nail. This focus on: Did Assad use chemical weapons or not? It’s an important one, but it should not be used to justify even more militarism particularly by the United States in the Middle East.

Historian Andrew Bacevich Makes the Case Against Escalating Military Action in Syria 

Joining me now to discuss all of this is the military and war historian Andrew Bacevich. He’s a professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University, and he’s the author of many important books, most recently “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.” Andrew, welcome to Intercepted.

Andrew Bacevich: Thank you.

JS: So, let’s just begin with the big picture. I want to set aside the discussion of Bashar al Assad and his human rights record and whether he’s a war criminal, et cetera, and just talk first about this notion that’s being pushed by both Democrats and now Trump and the Republicans, that the right response to a chemical weapons attack, if that is what happened here, is somehow the solution to the brutality in Syria. How do you see this current push to escalating military action in Syria?

AB: Well, it wasn’t the solution the last time we did this, about a year ago, when Trump ordered an attack on a Syrian airbase, and I don’t know why the outcome would be any different today. It seems to me that what we are witnessing, and I say we, those of us are trying to make sense of U.S. actions in the region, what we’re witnessing really amounts to expressions of frustration. We have managed to become bogged down in a war or series of wars that no longer have any plausible purpose, relative to U.S. interests, but nonetheless policymakers are at a loss for how to get out. So some atrocity like this occurs, and reflexively there is this inclination to lash out. But lashing out really becomes an excuse for not having a strategy.

JS: When you look back at the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, when the WMD lies fell apart, then Bush sort of transitioned and said: Well, we had to intervene because Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and it’s good that he’s gone.

President George W. Bush: The main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction — turns out he didn’t, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction. But I also talked about the human suffering in Iraq, and I also talked the need to advance a freedom agenda. And so my question, my answer to your question, is that imagine a world in which Saddam Hussein was there, stirring up even more trouble in a part of the world that had so much resentment and so much hatred that three — people came and killed 3,000 of our citizens.

JS: You look now and Saddam Hussein’s popularity has never been higher and that war was an utter disaster that, in part, contributed to what we’re seeing now in Syria. How is it that the political classes in this country, the elites, are able to continuously sell this idea that American intervention is actually aimed at bringing stability, when the history, particularly in that region, says that that’s a total lie, not backed up by historical fact?

AB: Well I think one important contributing factor is the inattention of the American people. I concur with your description — your, you know, very abbreviated description of what’s happened since 2003 — but I don’t see the American people being particularly aware of the extent of our failure. They’re not particularly aware of the costs that we have absorbed — costs whether we’re talking about American soldiers killed, injured, trillions of dollars expended. They’re not particularly aware of the costs imposed on supposed beneficiaries of our liberation, the hundreds of thousands of people killed, probably a couple million displaced.

So, given the lack of public attention, policymakers don’t feel any particular pressure to rethink the course that we embarked upon way back in 2002, 2003. I think it’s cheaper and easier for them — I say cheaper, politically — cheaper and easier for them simply to indulge this sort of petulant response to something like this latest ostensible chemical attack.

JS: I wanted to ask you about the conflicting statements of major world powers on this recent, what appears to be a chemical attack in this suburb of Damascus. A couple of weeks ago Russian top brass were warning that al Nusra and Free Syrian Army were plotting chemical attacks in Syria. A lot of people who are sort of onside for this with Russia are saying that this may be a false flag, or this may have been rebels, or this may be some sort of a fabricated scene by human rights groups that are allegedly tied to NATO. How do you see this? Because the one part of the set I sort of am sympathetic to is it really doesn’t make sense strategically for Assad to have done this, if he did — I’m not saying I know, he very well may have. But how do you see this discussion and debate where you have one camp that just immediately says: Aha, this was Assad! And then the other camp saying: Well, look, you know, Russia is denying this; they’re saying it’s a false flag. Who do we even trust in this stuff?

AB: What you’re describing is an argument that is conducted prior to us having ascertained the facts — to rush to judgment, to announce that, yes, we know for certain Assad did this. But it’s also a rush to judgment. To make the obvious case, I don’t know what the facts are. I think I would argue strongly that before the United States takes any further military action, it will likely deepen our involvement in the Syrian civil war that could potentially increase the likelihood of us coming into conflict with other powers that decision-makers ought to ensure that they have the facts. You know, to my way of thinking, let’s hold off, let’s try to find out what actually happened, let’s find out who the actual perpetrators are and then from that point make a decision.

JS: Why is it that the issue of chemical weapons seems to be this sort of line that now the public has been told if it’s crossed, there has to be an immediate swift response. I mean there are weapons systems that the U.S. uses that are not nuclear, chemical, or biological but kill tremendous numbers of people, including cluster munitions and TLAMs and others. What’s your view on sort of the way that that the issue of chemical weapons is discussed? I mean is it right to say, well this is in a totally different category and requires a much greater level of moral outrage than weapons systems used by the U.S., and the Saudis, and the Israelis?

AB: I don’t think so. I mean, the last thing I would want to do would be an apologist for the Assad regime — whoever did use chemical weapons, it was a despicable act. But I noted it was about a week ago there was an article about the number of people killed in Mosul during the campaign to “liberate Mosul.” It described the number of U.S. airstrikes, I think was 25,000 pieces of ordnance dumped on Mosul during the campaign there. And the upshot was that the number of civilians killed in Mosul, certainly not all killed by the United States, but many of them were, is vastly greater than anybody was willing to admit. And that’s a story that got almost zero attention.

So here we are, all excited and up in arms about 40 people being killed — and again, I do not wish to diminish for a second the depravity of that action — but one has to wonder why American killing of civilians on a much larger scale somehow doesn’t have the same sort of political resonance? And it ought to, and if it did, then it seems to me that the discussion over the use of force and its consequences would be much more grounded in genuine pragmatic considerations, and also would be grounded in moral considerations that are largely absent.

JS: You also have the fact that the United States forces in Fallujah and the Israelis do this also, use white phosphorous in some of their operations. That is akin to chemical weapons in terms of its impact on people. But to your broader point, we’re now saying, basically Trump’s being goaded into, you know, some scorched-earth response or just lobbing cruise missiles again. I mean, we don’t know which, but as we’re sort of looking at this we also have the Saudis just utterly exterminating Yemen right now with the continued support of the United States and the British and they’re treated in very different ways. It’s, you know, cable news today is just filled with Democrats and Republicans basically trying to push Trump to do maximum military force, and those same people are totally fine with Yemen being destroyed by the U.S. ally Saudi Arabia and it’s, you know, and the new best friend of the American media, Mohammad bin Salman.

AB: Well, you’re exactly right — we mock president Trump for his short attention span, but the whole country has a short attention span. I mean. I think it’s Gore Vidal who coined that great phrase “United States of Amnesia.” And that’s exactly right. We forget anything that we find inconvenient to forget. You remember when Trump in an interview with a reporter, Trump’s responses was: What do you think, we’re innocent?

DJT: We got a lot of killers. Got a lot of killers. Why? You think our country is so innocent? You think our country is so innocent?

Bill O’Reilly: I don’t know of any government leaders that are killers.

DJT: Well, take a look at what we’ve done, too.

AB: You know, the idiot speaking wisdom suddenly. So, there is this deep-seated tendency, I think perhaps it’s more prominent in the political class than in the larger public, but the larger public is not immune to it, this deep-seated inclination to think that we are somehow innocent. Sure, we make mistakes, but the mistakes we made ought not to be held against us, and therefore when we come to a moment like this new chemical weapons crisis, we approach it as if we are innocent and it is an enduring quality, I think, of the American mentality.

JS: Right, this is sort of the broader point that I’m getting at. The United States, in the 1980s, at the height of Saddam Hussein’s brutality, lifted Iraq off of the list of state sponsors of terrorism so that the United States could sell and transfer massive amounts of weaponry, including components for chemical weapons and attack helicopters to use those chemical weapons in Halabja to Saddam Hussein. And now we’re being asked to believe that the appropriate global police officer to handle such matters, when despots and dictators do this, is the United States.

It’s not that I don’t believe that Bashar al Assad is a war criminal. I absolutely believe he’s a war criminal. I, however, do not believe that the U.S. has the moral authority to sort of step in and say: Oh, we’re going to be the ones to stop all evil here, particularly given the U.S. track record in the region.

AB: You’re exactly right. I mean, it’s just very disturbing.

JS: What do you make of this question of Bashar al Assad, and obviously he has committed war crimes, how should, you know, people who believe in justice and are not taking the side of Assad and they don’t want U.S. intervention. Like, how should we understand what should be done about the situation in Syria, and particularly whether Bashar al Assad remains in power?

AB: Well my view is that the first-order question relates to the well being of the innocents, the real innocents, who are caught in the middle of this thing. So I say: All right, so what can we do? Well, we can go drop some bombs on Syrian forces. Will that alleviate the suffering of the Syrians who are caught in the middle of this mess? Seems to me if we actually cared about them, we would exert ourselves to find some way to remove as many Syrians as possible from the zone of war. Get them out of there! Bring them to the United States of America. This land of liberty. This vast country. Bring them here.

Could we bring them all here? No! What if we saved 200,000 lives, 500,000 lives? Wouldn’t protect everybody, but that would be a real action that would address real suffering. Dropping more bombs does not do that. Of course, as soon as I say that, you’re sitting there shaking your head, saying: What is this guy, off his nut? Because the American people will not tolerate bringing a quarter of a million or a half a million Syrians to our country. And the very fact that they won’t, I think, reveals how phony all of the moralizing that becomes part of this sort of a moment.

When Trump attacks Syria, as he probably will, he will do so without getting the permission of Congress, almost for sure. So we’ll launch 50 cruise missiles, 100 cruise missiles, who knows what the number it will be. It will cost some tens of millions of dollars. The Congress will immediately re-appropriate necessary money to build new missiles to replace those that are expended. We’ll pat ourselves on the back for having confronted evil, and we will have done nothing to benefit the Syrians who are actually suffering as a consequence of this civil war. I mean the entire thing is really kind of Orwellian.

JS: As we wrap up, I want to ask you about the bigger geopolitical picture here, particularly with regard to Russia. Part of what I’m seeing here is that, for the first year of his administration, Trump refused to ever say any anything negative about Putin. He did take some sort of mild actions in response to various things that the Russians did, but lately, and really in the last month, we’ve seen this dramatic escalation in the rhetoric against Russia coming out of the Trump White House, to the point where Trump even entertained the idea that Vladimir Putin would personally be punished for this alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria.

DJT: He may, yeah, he may. And if he does, it’s going to be very tough. Very tough. Everybody is going to pay a price, he will. Everybody will.

JS: And I’m looking at this and thinking, OK, everyone was sort of trying to push Trump on Putin, saying he’s in Putin’s pocket. See? He won’t ever say anything about Russia. And now we have a president openly saying with no evidence that Putin may be held responsible for this, he’s going to pay a serious price. I’m concerned that what we’re seeing right now, and part of it is because pundits and the Democrats have been so fierce in going after Trump about his public stance on Russia, that we are entering a moment now where the commander-in-chief of the United States is openly belligerent against Russia. I can’t remember in my adult life this kind of a situation just in terms of the rhetoric between the American president and Russia. What’s your sense of that?

AB: Well, it’s, you know, it’s so hard to know what to make of president Trump. And I guess I mean it’s so hard to know what to make of the things that he says and the things that he tweets. The record of contradictions and inconsistencies that he has created, I think, is unprecedented.

I myself firmly believe that he does not have a worldview. He is incapable of really thinking in strategic terms. That he reacts impulsively. The impulse might be to launch some tweet at 5 o’clock in the morning. The impulse might be to meet with a handful of his advisers in a 180-degree reversal of what he said the previous day. And that’s part of his great danger, and so as we try to gauge the direction of U.S. policy, whether it’s with regard to Russia, or the war in the Middle East or relations with China, one of the things we have to puzzle out is who are the advisers that seem to shape his thinking?

I mean advisers could be the people on Fox News. Advisers could be people like Bolton, or Pompeo, or Mattis. In order to try to forecast the way things are headed, we need to have a more finely grained understanding of the advisers that count with Trump.

JS: I mean he’s a very malleable hunk of clay, in a lot of ways. I do think that there is a unique danger here, because of this phenomenon that you’re describing, and it’s like we watch this almost, it’s almost like a bipolar situation, where you have, on the one hand, Trump saying, “Oh, we’re going to be out of Syria soon, ISIS is almost defeated,” and then literally days later “Vladimir Putin may be held accountable personally for a chemical weapons attack in Syria.” I mean it’s, it’s like, who the hell is even running that ship?

And then you have the great mustache come in, John Bolton, who is just salivating to go to war with basically every non-white country on the planet. And we have a very incendiary situation. And these guys are also very serious Russia hawks. These guys cut their teeth as Cold Warriors, basically still believe in fighting the evil empire of the Soviet Union. I think that combination of Trump’s weakness and sort of tendency to flip-flop constantly, and then people like Bolton, Pompeo, Gina Haspel, and Mattis, I would include in that, whispering his ear, it’s pretty frightening.

AB: I agree. One of the things that makes this present Syria crisis frightening is I think you could argue this is the first genuine national security crisis that we’ve had since he’s been president. Now it could be that we’re going to have another perfunctory cruise-missile attack and the story will fade. It could be, and this is the real danger, that there will be a larger or more prolonged military effort, and one that could, not necessarily intentionally, in matter of fact, probably unintentionally, could end up bringing us into a conflict or near-conflict situation with Russia and/or Iran, with no doubt the government of Israel pushing from the sidelines. And that’s where our impetuous, ignorant president, surrounded by the hawks that you just described, that’s where you really can begin to see a nightmare scenario moving into the realm of plausibility.

JS: Yeah, and you know Trump was making a big deal and bragging about how he used the MOAB in Afghanistan, the mother of all bombs. I mean it it’s also a plausible scenario that Trump responds to this by hitting Damascus with this kind of massive munition. I mean, it could be that a tremendous number of people get killed in retaliation for this event before the U.N. has even been able to carry out an investigation.

AB: Yeah, and you are describing a scenario that then could easily slip out of control. And we end up with this ignorant president trying then to address a circumstance that he himself would not understand, and where his impulsiveness could really get us in big trouble. So this is a very dangerous moment.

JS: Well, Andrew Bacevich, I want to thank you very much for your analysis, and all of the books you’ve written, and the critical thinking, backed up by history, that you always bring to the table. Thanks so much for being with us.

AB: Thank you.

JS: Andrew Bacevich is a military and war historian. His latest book is “America’s War for the Greater Middle East.” He’s a frequent contributor to TomDispatch.

[Musical interlude.]

Novelist Arundhati Roy Offers Insights on Kashmir, Narendra Modi, Trump, and More

JS: About 20 years ago, the Indian writer Arundhati Roy published her debut novel “The God of Small Things.” It won the ultra-prestigious Man Booker Prize and it propelled her to international fame. But it wasn’t until last year that her second novel came out. That book is called, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” Both of these novels are beautiful, powerful, epic stories.

So what did Arundhati Roy do for those 20 years in between, besides working on her latest novel? She used her very significant global platform to fight for justice in causes and with movements around the world. In India, she has been an advocate for the most vulnerable and dehumanized people. She spent extensive time in Kashmir. She has defended Muslims in India when they’ve been threatened, attacked or massacred. She’s published many, many nonfiction books and collections of her speeches, including such titles as “Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers,” “War Talk,” “Walking With Comrades,” and “The End of Imagination.”

Most recently, she and the actor John Cusack wrote a book on their meeting with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, whom they traveled to see in Moscow with Pentagon Papers-whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. That book is called “Things That Can and Cannot Be Said.” Arundhati Roy is going to be coming to the U.S. in May, and she’ll be speaking in a number of cities. I’m very proud to call her a friend, and she joins me now from New Delhi.

Arundhati, welcome to Intercepted.

Arundhati Roy: Thank you, Jeremy.

JS: And congratulations on your second novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”

AR: Oh, thank you again.

JS: So, I want to begin just by asking you about the dedication. You dedicated this novel to “The Unconsoled” and I’ve seen you in the past say that all of us, in some way, are the unconsoled. But talk about that dedication.

AR: The dedication is to those people who, like the people in the book, don’t fit into the categories that the ruling establishment, as well as, quite often, the radical resistance put people in – particularly the categories in India, because we are a nation of minority, a nation that is divided into this tiny little fretwork of caste, and ethnicity, and language, and each is pitted against. And yet, all serves a pretty ancient hierarchy.

In some ways, this is dedicated to everybody, but to everybody who, in some real ways, doesn’t fit into that very complex grid that we are asked to fit into, and then jump up and down in, and even be radical in. You know?

JS: In the reviews that I read of the book so many of them get wrong the identity of one of your central characters, Anjum. They identify Anjum as a transgender woman. But in fact Anjum, who was born Aftab, was born with both male and female gender organs and, you know, I think it would be really interesting if you could sort of explain that character, the reaction of her mother when she’s born and realizes that her child is not simply a male in gender.

AR: Her mother, Anjum’s mother, Jahanara Begum, when she discovers that about her baby, you know, she goes through a series of reactions. But fundamentally and eventually, the problem for her is that her baby is beyond words in her languages, because Urdu, which is the language that she speaks, genders everything: chairs, carpets, musical instruments, books, of course, men and women but everything has a gender except her baby. And so the question the book asks is: Is it possible to live outside of language?

Anjum, for example as a character, who people like to often ask me: Why did you choose to write about her and describe her as transgender. In fact, you know, she has more than just one identity. She’s also born as a Shia Muslim and lives through a time when this is a more dangerous identity in India than being a hijra, which is the Urdu word for people like here, you know?

And eventually as you read the book, you see, that she gets caught up in the 2002 massacre of Muslims that took place in Gujarat, and she gets caught up because she is a Shia, not because she’s a hijra, witnessing the massacre that took place around her and left alive because the murderous think that to kill a hijra would bring them bad luck.

There’s a Dalit character, whose name used to be Dayachand, who becomes a Muslim because he too witnesses carnage against his own father. So, he has the border of caste and religious conversion running through him.

JS: Well and he takes the name, Saddam Hussein.

AR: He takes the name Saddam Hussein because he has a video in his phone, which he admires, of Saddam Hussein’s execution. And he says, “Even if he was a bastard, I want to be a bastard like him.” You know?

It’s really, I mean it wasn’t something that I planned, but honestly, you know, the sense that we live in a grid here and these characters are all slightly off-grid, and through them, you shine the light on the grid, you know?

JS: Talk about how your real-world experience in Kashmir and the real-world experience of your friends and others in Kashmir made its way into this novel.

AR: I mean “The Ministry” is not a book where, you know, I had a manifesto or that I wanted to write about the battle in Kashmir or about caste or about what is happening in the forests of Bastar, but this is the air we breathe, you know? For me to avoid all this would be like taking some very complicated yoga position, you know, to try and write where you don’t look these things straight in the eye. And for me this has been my life for the last 20 years, you know? These are not just isolated issues that I’m trying to shed light on.

But to me, for Indian intellectuals, for Indian writers to have managed to write for so many years without mentioning caste in any real way, without talking about Kashmir, where, every summer, hundreds of people young people are being blinded by pellets, and all of this is so delicately airbrushed out. And we get our delicate fiction and our sophisticated analysis of identity without mentioning caste, without mentioning Kashmir — the upholding of this nation as the land of Gandhi and yoga and nonviolence, when in fact there has not been a single day since August 15, 1947, when India was declared independent that the Indian Army has not been deployed “within its own borders, against its own people.” Whether it’s Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Hyderabad, Punjab, Goa, Bastar, it’s just a nation that is nailed together by military might, and we try to avoid thinking about it.

And when I write fiction, I’m not trying to write subjects; I’m not putting puppets on a page and trying to make them leave out some political manifesto of mine. You know? But I’m creating a universe in which I invite people to walk through.

JS: What is the significance of cemeteries in the book, and particularly this cemetery where Anjum builds the guesthouse.

AR: Anjum, I spoke about, you know, the fact that she survives the massacre in Gujarat which is, again, of course, a true event where in 2002 than a 1,500 Muslims were just massacred on the streets of the metropolises and towns and cities and villages of Gujarat, when Modi, the current prime minister was chief minister. So Anjum returns from Gujarat to Delhi devastated and unable to live the life she lived all these years. And she moves out of the Khwabgah, the place that she shared with this group of hijras, and she moves into a graveyard where she begins — she just lives there like this wild fearless, specter. She is just unmoored in grief. And, of course, a cemetery or a graveyard in India is usually a Muslim graveyard.

As you know, the Hindus, don’t bury their dead — they cremate their dead. So graveyards have also, in this extreme communalization, in which Muslims have been pushed to the bottom of the economic and social chain, you know? They are now denied housing. They’ve been pushed out of the political arena. They are, you know, lynched on the streets now openly and so on. And so graveyards have become a kind of ghetto, you know, where people congregate.

In the last elections in U.P., Modi and the current chief minister made big politics out of the fact that all the graveyards are consuming electricity and water — these Muslims, in other words. Of course people like Modi and so on, they belong to an organization called the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is the real political power today, not the BJP, and it’s an organization that was started in 1925, and its ideologues, [are] open admirers of Hitler and Mussolini, have openly said in the past that the Muslims of India are like the Jews of Germany. And, you know, in the last elections they proved to the world and to themselves and to the people of this country that you don’t need the Muslim vote. You know? So the Muslims are somehow disenfranchised right now. The Dalits have always been disenfranchised, but now the Dalit vote has been courted and there’s a lot of trouble around that because intrinsically they hate the Dalits too, you know, that is the Hindu caste system, you know for them? Whatever name you call them.

JS: But now there are millionaire Dalits.

AR: Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything.

JS: No, no, I know —

AR: If you actually look at the poorest of the poor, the landless, the jobless, they’re all Dalits. And, of course, that is how you neutralize someone. You create a tiny elite and then say, “Look, they’re millionaires.” And even the millionaires, by the way, will not be accepted in society. They will still be Dalits. But it’s a bit like saying, “Oh look, you have Michael Jordan and you have a few millionaire black actors and therefore there’s no racism in America.” You know?

JS: Arundhati, part of the reason that I brought up the fact that there are some millionaire Dalits now is sort of because we have a similar phenomenon. It’s not a direct analog but it’s a similar strand that you’re describing. I mean we had Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States and, you know, the narrative about that in sort of mainstream political circles is, “Aha! We’ve shattered this glass ceiling and now we have a black man as president.” And yet you look at the condition that many black people live in in this country, particularly with police violence and economic apartheid and it’s like: Did it really change anything? You know, you can siphon off certain elites and say this represents a new America, but in reality, the same exact issues are facing the very people from the black communities, Native American communities, undocumented immigrant communities, and on, and on.

AR: Yes, I mean the fact is that it applies to, you know, having a woman prime minister and so on as well. The same story about — does that change anything for women? There is something to be said when something like that happens, but does it change anything on the ground or has it changed anything on the ground is a big question? I would say that nothing at all has ever changed in India on the question of caste, because we are talking about people who used to be forced to walk backward and sweep away their footprints or hang pots around their necks so that the spit wouldn’t pollute the ground.

My heart broke the other day because you read about a young Dalit boy who was beaten to death because he dared to ride a horse in Gujarat. You know, and to me, he was Saddam Hussein on his horse, and his horse led the funeral procession. He was beaten to death by the upper castes, you know? Every day you have this kind of bludgeoning, lynching, beating, and when you have elections, all you hear about is which caste is going to work for whom and so and, and then when it comes to actually talking about the horrors that are visited upon people because of their caste, there’s a silence. It’s very, very complicated — I mean, I’ve written a little book, which was published by Haymarket, called “The Doctor and the Saint” where, it’s really about the debate between Dr. Ambedkar, the great Dalit leader at the time of the independence struggle and Gandhi.

Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar: Now if you read the two papers, you will see how Mr. Gandhi was deceiving the people. In the English paper, he posed himself as an opponent of the caste system and of untouchability. And that he was a Democrat. But if you read a Gujarati magazine, you will see him he was more an orthodox man, he has been supporting the caste system, varna ashrama dharma, and all the orthodox dogmas which have been keeping India down all through the ages.

AR: People completely have no idea about what Gandhi’s attitudes to caste and race were. You know? That falsification of that story is mind-blowing. Most people know the struggle of Indian independence through Richard Attenborough’s film, unfortunately, called “Gandhi.” That film is a piece of fiction, and through the struggle for independence Gandhi’s greatest antagonist was Dr. Ambedkar.

BRA: I met him first in 1929, through the intervention of a friend of mine, [a] common friend who asked Mr. Gandhi to see me. And so, Mr. Gandhi wrote to me saying that he would like to see me. So I went and saw him.

AR: He doesn’t even make an appearance in the film. He doesn’t even show up there. Gandhi insisted that he was the representative of all untouchables, as Dalits were call then, and the great confrontation between Gandhi and Ambedkar happened in 1930, at the Second Roundtable Conference in London, when Ambedkar’s arguing for a separate constituency temporarily for Dalits so that they could develop into a political community.

BRA: We want untouchability to be abolished. We also want that we must be given equal opportunity so that we may rise to the level of the other classes. But the other things, which are far more important, namely that they should have the same status in the country and they should have the opportunity to hold high offices so that not only their dignity will rise, but also they will get what I call strategic positions. From it they could, they could protect their own people; Mr. Gandhi was totally opposed. Totally opposed!

AR: They are scattered. Every village in India has a small settlement of Dalits outside the village. They can never be a full political constituency. Gandhi went on a hunger fast to the death until that was withdrawn — the idea of a separate electorate, you know? But even when you look at what happened in South Africa, all of us are taught that Gandhi went to South Africa, was thrown off a train and this was his first political education, and from then on he started fighting against segregation. This is complete crap.

The first battle Gandhi fought in South Africa was to have a separate entrance to the Durban post office because he believed that Indians, who he said were descendants of the Aryans, should not share the same entrance with blacks, who he consistently refer to as kafirs and savages. He fasted in prison to have separate prisons, separate food and the satyagraha that he started was not for racial equality, it was to allow Indian tradesmen into the Transvaal to trade.

And so the whole story has been completely distorted, which is not to say that Gandhi was not a brilliant politician, you know? I don’t want to take anything away from him. But I do want to say that the amount of deceit and intellectual dishonesty that has gone into the construction of this narrative is shameful.

JS: You know we, in the United States and on this show, we’ve talked a lot about how powerful people and pop culture have sanitized the legacies of people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks to the point where, you know, I think many people who have studied Martin Luther King’s life believe or agree that he would never be invited to his own Martin Luther King Day celebrations today because he was too radical.

Talking about your description of Gandhi, who benefited from the creation of that narrative around Gandhi?

AR: The Indian upper caste elite, obviously. Because in “The Doctor and the Saint,” what I call him is the saint of the status quo. It was time for the British to give way to this upper-caste elite. Even this whole preaching of nonviolence as the only revolutionary thing. What does it mean? I keep saying you know I travel to the forests of central India today. Ten years ago, today, now, all the time. You have tens of thousands of paramilitary forces unleashed in those forests, because MoUs have been signed with mining companies, 1,000 paramilitaries will go to a village, an indigenous peoples village, four days walk from the main road — surround it, burn it, rape the women, steal the cattle and go. And then in the television studios, when these people have reacted militantly, violently with the commandos and guerrilla forces, but in the studios, they’ll start calling them terrorists.

I said, you know, what should those people do, you tell me? Should they go on a hunger strike? They are already starving. Should they boycott foreign goods? They don’t have any goods. They don’t have an audience to do any sort of nonviolent satyagraha. You need a sympathetic audience. You need a superstar.

Honestly, Jeremy, if you go traveling to India through the poorest places of India, you will not find a picture of Mahatma Gandhi in any poor person’s house. You will find a picture Ambedkar. Gandhi will be in the government local collector’s house, or in the government office, or whatever. But you will not find it in a poor person’s house, you know?

JS: As I was preparing to talk to you, I was remembering, you and I met back in 2004 at this time, when the streets of, you were in New York, and the streets were sort of around the clock filled with protesters who had come from, really, around the world on the occasion of the Republican National Convention.

James O’Neill: My name is Inspector James O’Neill. You are obstructing pedestrian traffic. I’m ordering you to leave this sidewalk. If you do so voluntarily, no charges will be placed against you.

JS: And George Bush and Dick Cheney were running for re-election, and you and Amy Goodman and I went into the Republican National Convention, we got you a credential so that you could go past this massive security apparatus. And we stood on the floor of the Republican National Convention just a few feet away from Dick Cheney. And he spoke that night and gave this very belligerent war speech.

Vice President Dick Cheney: Just as surely as the Nazis during World War II, and the Soviets during the Cold War, the enemy we face today is bent on our destruction. As in other times, we are in a war we did not start and have no choice but to win. [Audience cheers and applauds.]

JS: And I remember you talking about being in sort of this stadium filled with killers, and people egging them on and cheering them on.

AR: I actually, you know, don’t know what to say, because it’s like being in a cult, a place where people are kind of chanting, which veered between chilling and corny, so I’m still confused about which one it was, but I’m sure it was actually chilling, cause to be in a place which is where the richest and most powerful people in the world meet, to plot the next war, the next massacre, the next bombing.

JS: Your reflection on where we are now, versus where we were at that moment, when you and Dick Cheney were in the same room.

AR: (Laughs.) Me and Dick Cheney. Obviously, on the face of fate, your president is somebody who is managing to confuse everybody in the establishment, including the Republicans themselves. You know? But ultimately, I still am waiting to see whether it is in fact an empire on the wane or not. Because there is a white nations agenda, isn’t there, in the world? I mean, Europe and America eventually will hold together, you know? And day-to-day, are the biggest merchants of death: We are doing the buying and they are doing the selling of all the weapons. And that is the fundamental strength of the economy now.

So there can’t be peace on earth when, just to keep these economies going, you need to be at war. Since 9/11, how many countries have been destroyed, and all of us keep talking about this fundamental Islam, but when you look at the countries that have been destroyed, none of them were really fundamentalist Islamic states, you know? Those ones are of course your allies.

Like a lot of people like to compare Trump to Modi. But to me Trump is like someone who has grown out of the toxic effluent of a system that went very wrong, you know? But I see that every elite American institution is against Trump — the media is against him, the military is suspicious of him, the economists are suspicious of him, the White House itself is suspicious of him, blundering around there. But nobody knows what to do because you don’t have any system in place to deal with a lunatic in the White House, so — you don’t know what to do.

But in the case of India, you know, Modi is very much the deep state. He is the product of planning from 1925 for this moment when — they’re almost there — when they can change the Indian Constitution, call it a Hindu nation. So you have a situation here which is the opposite: where the army, the corporates, the media the elite, everybody has been supporting him. Everything is just frozen. And continuously, this venom is being dripped into people’s brains about: India should be a Hindu country and Muslims should be ghettoized, Dalits should be disenfranchised in some way. There’s an attack on institutions the history books are being written by complete cretens.

So what’s going to happen to the next generation? They will be unable to think unless they find non-formal ways of going to school and college. You know?

JS: As we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about something that you said years ago that I actually think about often, and it deals with the, I think, moral challenge that we often find ourselves in, people who believe in justice, and that is that, you know, we don’t have an ability or even a moral authority to choose the form of resistance that rises up in response to the crimes of the imperial nations around the world, and it was during the Iraq war, and really as the Iraqi armed resistance started to really take a toll on the U.S. occupation, and you said the following: “You support the resistance but you may not support the vision that they’re fighting for, and I keep saying I’m doomed to fight on the side of people that have no space for me in their social imagination, and I would probably be the first person that was strung up if they won, but the point is that they’re the ones that are resisting on the ground and they have to be supported, because what is happening is unbelievable.”

I recently was thinking about this in the context of what is happening in Syria and Iraq and in Palestine —

AR: In Kashmir —

JS: — where the Israelis just committed another massacre, and in Kashmir and then historically the genocidal campaigns against the Kurds. Are there any forces of resistance that are worth your support right now, in any of these conflicts? I mean, I am against what the United States and Russia and all of these powerful nations are doing in Syria. At the same time, who is the resistance in Syria? And I don’t mean, Arundhati, explain the different factions.

AR: Well, honestly, Jeremy I don’t think that the way to resist this is for me or you to go to Syria and support some faction or the other. You know because the problem is at your home. The problem is to take it down there in the United States, or to take it down here in India. You know I, in many ways, am obviously deeply entrenched here, and deeply grounded here, and here certainly there are many, many, many people and many organizations and many ways in which the resistance that is being raised is wonderful, you know?

What my issues, let’s say when I think about something like Kashmir, is that it’s not my business to think necessarily about what kind of Kashmir is being fought for, but it’s certainly my business as somebody in whose name this violence is perpetrated to stand up and say it as it is: we need to do it in the places where things are being done, it doesn’t help for you to go to Syria. It helps for you to be where you are, and to prevent that from happening in whatever way you can. For me, I need to know the place where I stand and why I stand there.

JS: Hmm. Well, I think that’s a really great note to end on. Arundhati Roy, thank you so much for talking with me.

AR: You’re welcome, Jeremy.

JS: Arundhati Roy is the author of two novels. Her first, “The God of Small Things,” won the Man Booker Prize. Her new novel is called “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” Both of them are beautiful, deep, powerful books that I highly recommend.

If you want to catch Arundhati Roy when she’s here in the U.S., you can find a list of her events by going to roamagency.com/roy. That’s roam, R-O-A-M, as in, roaming the planet: roamagency.com/roy.

[Musical interlude.]

Wallace Shawn on the U.S. Assassination Program, Imperial Wars, Collective Responsibility, and “Evening at the Talk House”

JS: As Donald Trump contemplates an escalation of U.S. military action in Syria, we should note that he has also been ramping up the number of drone strikes across the Middle East since he came to power. The first U.S. drone strike ever reported in southern Libya occurred just last month. It was Obama, the so-called antiwar candidate, the constitutional law scholar, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was calling for us all to get behind these precision drone strikes — his smarter way to wage war, better than boots on the ground and less loss of civilian life.

BO: It is not true that it is been this sort of willy-nilly, you know, let’s bomb a village. That is not how folks have operated. And what I can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that occur in conventional war.

JS: The reality, though, was that in some so-called targeted killing operations, as many as nine out of ten people killed were not the intended target, and they were, as a matter of policy, labeled EKIA, or enemies killed in action. It was basically a macabre mathematical formula that was used by the Obama White House widely to claim that no civilians, or only a limited number of civilians, were being killed. The idea was: Well if we don’t know who they are, let’s first label them an enemy that we killed, unless someone posthumously proves that they were a civilian or an innocent bystander. It’s pretty sick.

Who can be held accountable when drone strikes kill the “wrong person” or they hit innocent women and children, or weddings or funerals? Is it the president? Is it the CIA or the military entities that authorized the strike? Is it the soldier who pressed the button somewhere in a drone operations center? What about the role that ordinary people play in all of this? Aren’t we all complicit in this new, sanitized, robotic mass-killing program?

A new audio drama, “Evening at the Talk House” is going to be premiering next Wednesday here on Intercepted. It’s written by Wallace Shawn. And I don’t want to give away anything or spoil the plot, but let’s just say that it deals with this world of so-called targeted killing, and the moral responsibility that we all should hold.

The play is set in a fictional world that closely parallels our own, but it has some subtle and not-so-subtle differences.

[“Talk House” promo plays.]

JS: Wally Shawn has had a long career in film, television, and stage, both as a writer and as an actor. He’s known for his roles in “The Princess Bride.”

Wallace Shawn (as Vizzini): Inconceivable!

Mandy Patinkin (as Inigo Montoya): You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

JS: “My Dinner with Andre” —

WS (as Wally): I would never give my electric blanket, Andrew. I mean, because New York is cold in the winter. I mean, our apartment is cold!

JS: And Wally Shawn lent his voice to the anxious T-Rex in Toy Story.

WS (as Rex): Woody, look, I can see daylight! We’re going to be okay! Ha ha ha!

JS: Wally describes himself as a socialist. He’s an activist and he definitely is a prolific playwright and essayist. His latest book, “Night Thoughts,” talks about Trump, extremism, privilege, and capitalism. I really think that this new drama, “Evening at the Talk House” is going to resonate with a lot of people — particularly at this dark moment we find ourselves in.

It’s a play about a group of actors who spend an evening together after ten years apart. They reminisce about old times while the dark reality of their world is slowly revealed. It raises provocative questions about all of our responsibility, when facing an authoritarian government — even if it is a democracy. We’re really excited to be producing this radio drama with Wally Shawn. There are some really great actors in the play, including Wally: Matthew Broderick, Larry Pine, Jill Eikenberry, and Annapurna Sriram, from the show “Billions.” Make sure to look for it next Wednesday, April 18th, on the Intercepted feed.

I’m joined now by Wally Shawn. Wally, welcome to Intercepted.

WS: Great to be here.

JS: We are very, very excited to be sharing the radio drama of your recent play, which is called “Evening at The Talk House.” I think it would be really helpful for you to explain the world that you created with this play, and what people will need to understand before listening to it.

WS: It is a made-up world, if you want to look at it that way, a dream, but a dream that is dreamed by a guy who’s living in our world. And the ingredients for all of our dreams are in our own lives. It takes place in a club where people who work in theatre used to gather, ten years or twenty years in the past, and the club still exists, even though, in this world, theater is basically gone. But somebody has the idea to have a reunion of all the people or several of the people who worked on a particular play ten years earlier.

Matthew Broderick as Robert: When I asked Ted where he thought we should hold our great anniversary celebration, he replied:

John Epperson as Ted: “Why, the Talk House, of course!”

MB as Robert: The Talk House, my god, the Talk House, that almost legendary, wonderfully quiet and gentile club.

WS: And so it’s a play about a reunion, and during the ten years since that play opened, everybody has gone on to a different life. Some people have gone up in the world and become quite successful and powerful in the new regime that apparently is running the country, and other people have declined and are doing much worse than they were ten years before.

JS: What I think is sort of one of the most powerful aspects of this, is it could be any of us having a reunion, any of us getting together with old friends the way you do, and some of them you’ve kept in touch with and others you don’t know what’s been going on in their lives, and without giving away anything vital, you somehow have managed to capture several of the major issues facing our society today in this play, the me-too movement and the harassment of women by more powerful men that they work with or work alongside, targeted killing also, what was going through your mind as you started to write this play and contemplate the issues that are tackled in it?

WS: You know, we Americans are in a way innocent and sweet creatures, but we somehow have the capacity, without being very conscious of it, to become violent killers. I think of myself as a pretty innocent person. All I do is put on little plays, or I act in rather innocent TV shows, but, you know, when I pay my taxes those dollars go directly to the Saudis who are committing massacres in Yemen. I’m paying for it. And I’m benefiting from it in the sense that I live a pleasant life in a country that is defended, let’s say, by a very brutal machine.

So the play reflects this reality that we Americans don’t see violence, and we don’t even see the ugly side of ourselves. We just sort of pay for it.

JS: Some of the policies that you’re referring to there, and some of this kind of culture of being detached from what our tax dollars are used for, the politicians that we may have voted for, what they enable when they get to Washington, you take it to a degree that may seem to the listener to be quite absurd. But in our society, we have automated the act of killing each other around the world — albeit we’re maybe one step removed from it because we’re not actually firing the missiles from the drones or controlling the joystick over them. But in a way, we’re all just as attached to someone who does the actual killing themselves on a moral level.

WS: We’re the beneficiaries of these things. So, the play is about nice people, sort of likable people, but, you know, how likeable can they be as things enable you to see some of the other sides to them. And, of course, the personal lives of the people are reflective of their conformity and their fearfulness and their coldness, basically. And the people who are doing very well in this world, we get to see a little bit about their personal life, and that can be disturbing.

JS: I wanted you to talk about Matthew Broderick’s character, Robert, and, you know, really is the figure that introduces the play to the viewer, or, in this case, the listener. Maybe you could explain who Robert is and what he represents in this society.

WS: Well the play that they’re celebrating was not very well liked.

WS (as Dick): Robert’s plays always took place in a sort of imaginary medieval world with noble knights and fair ladies and all that sort of thing. And eventually, he wrote a play with the rather odd title “Midnight in a Clearing with Moon and Stars.” He was sure it was the best play he had written, but it didn’t do well at all, and that was the last play that Robert wrote.

WS: He wrote the play and it sort of significant that he’s a writer, and what kind of a writer was he? He was celebrating heroic values, I suppose, in his youth.

MB (as Robert): And, sure, part of the pleasure I took from watching those figures was that their very manner, their bearing, so often reflected certain extremely noble, but, at the same time, perennially threatened ideals that I greatly admired then and still do: self-sacrifice, first of all, I suppose; courage, or heroism on a field of battle, if that was the venue; loyalty, the instantaneous repeated decision to choose suffering in preference to dishonor; the power and magnificence of the body when inspired into action.

WS: And heroic values are things that I myself sort of admire. I admire courage when people will risk their lives for what they believe in. But on the other hand, these heroic values are, if given a tiny twist, are fascistic: the love of force, violence, the essence of fascism and manliness, which is a terrifying idea, and he wrote plays celebrating those types of values — which, on the one hand, you could see as agreeable Robin Hood-type of values, or on the other hand you could see them as terrifying, Mussolini-type values.

Well, as he’s become more powerful, his own cowardice I suppose may have come to the fore. He doesn’t want to risk his own position, as, you know, we don’t — as we, if we rise up to a higher level, we have more to lose. People who rise up become addicted to their power and their comforts, so we see in the play, the guy doesn’t want to risk what he has —

JS: And then you have this mysterious character, played by yourself, who is Dick, and clearly everyone sort of is looking down on Dick, they sort of are implying that he’s an alcoholic, and a kind of flop, a guy who was a one-hit in his life. Who is Dick, the character that you both wrote and play?

WS: Well Dick was not invited, and Dick wasn’t in the play. Dick tried out for the play but was rejected. But he’s allowed to hang out in this club.

WS (as Dick): As fate would have it, I myself was rather often to be seen at the Talk House around that time, and indeed, I happened to be there on the very night that the 10th anniversary of Robert’s opening was going to be celebrated. I was having a few drinks there, during the late afternoon, and eventually, I fell asleep in a large armchair.

WS: And a lot of the play is about how a group coheres, and the principle of conformity. I mean it’s a play really about a group more than it is a play about individuals.

Michael Tucker as Bill: I just can’t stand that program of murdering. It gets bigger every year. I mean, I think it’s awful, and I don’t know why —

Larry Pine as Tom: Well, well, to some extent I think they got into all that because they found it attracted an awful lot of voters. I’m — I mean, that’s all very popular in the rural areas.

MT as Bill: Oh, I’m sure it is, but you can’t just snuff out this enormous number of lives because people in the rural areas find it, because they find it somehow —

Claudia Shear as Annette: Well, it isn’t really an enormous number of lies.

MT as Bill: What?

CS as Annette: Well, it isn’t an enormous number of lives.

MT as Bill: It isn’t?

WS: It’s a kind of sociological study, as well as a psychological one and Dick is kind of the outcast and there are very unmistakable signs that he is not popular with the powers that be.

JS: You know, I remember the night after I saw your play in New York, I was going home and I passed all of these storefronts of H&M, and the Gap, and Banana Republic and all of them as I was walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to go to the train, and thinking like, in this world with all these disposable clothes that we now have, where clothes are only intended to last for a year or so, and you keep changing them for new ones, and they’re all made in sweatshops around the world. And I sort of wonder: What would our lives be like if at the place where you’re looking through the rack at the shirts, trying to find your size, if there was just like a little video kiosk that showed footage of the children that make the garments on that, and it’s showing the conditions that they work in or the wages that they’re paid for it, or if we go to the gas station, if we’re shown footage of the various wars that are fought in the name of natural resources.

Do you think it would have an impact at all on our consumerism if we were brought face to face with the impact of our consumption? Because it’s a theme in this play, is like: OK, we all walk around as though we have nothing to do with our nation’s wars or other things. But we really do. And part of the point of this play that I think is so powerful is to strip that away and say, you know, how absurd is it really?

WS: Well this is Marx’s concept of the fetishism of commodities. Well, it’s a huge debate that people have — more optimistic or idealistic people say if people knew what was going on, they’d be outraged and it would stop. Doesn’t seem to be true to me. I mean certainly, the most obvious and almost overused example is Abu Ghraib photos coming out, and basically Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney and those people saying: Well, yes we do torture people. The period of outrage was brief and then it was replaced — incorporated — into the understanding that we had of, you know, what we Americans do.

I mean Obama, rather peculiarly, said: “That’s not who we are.” It apparently was who we were. And most Americans assimilated that, it seems.

And our country is very far-gone. It’s very decadent. It’s gone to a very extreme level, and Trump is an archetype of total selfishness — I mean he openly shows a contempt or complete lack of interest in the suffering of others. I mean, he openly says: We don’t want any Syrian refugees because I think that some of them might be terrorists. So we won’t even take in any of these people, who are living in agony! Who are desperate.

People did vote for someone who openly is not compassionate and — well, he personally, said he thought torture was a good thing and he would eagerly bring it back.

JS: And kill the families of people that they suspect of being terrorists, too.

WS: So, you know, I just think our society is pretty far-gone.

JS: Well, I think that all of these are issues that in one way or another are touched upon in “Evening at the Talk House.” I think it’s going to be really provocative, and I’m really looking forward to what all of our listeners and others think of this experiment you and I are embarking on.

WS: I can’t wait.

JS: Wally Shawn, thank you so much for talking with us.

WS: It was a pleasure.

JS: Wallace Shawn is the writer and star of the new radio drama “Evening at the Talk House.” It was produced by Intercepted.

If you’re a sustaining member of Intercepted, you’re going to be getting a private link today to listen to the play. You can also ask Wally questions in a live video Q&A that I’m doing with him this Thursday, April 12, at 7 PM EST. Info about that Q&A is going to be sent to our sustaining members as well.

If you are not yet a sustaining member, you can become one by going to theintercept.com/join. And, if you’re not in a position to contribute financially, have no fear: Next Wednesday we will be sharing “Evening at the Talk House” with all of our subscribers.

[Musical interlude.]

JS: And that does it for this week’s show. Next week, in the Intercepted feed, is going to be the radio drama in three parts, “Evening at the Talk House.” We will not have a regular Intercepted next week, but we will be back on Wednesday, April 25th.

Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. We’re distributed by Panoply. Our producer is Jack D’Isidoro, and our executive producer is Leital Molad. Laura Flynn is associate producer. Elise Swain is our assistant producer and graphic designer. Emily Kennedy does our transcripts. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

Until next week, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Senator Ted Cruz: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, welcome, thank you for being here. Mr. Zuckerberg, does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?

Mason Ramsey: (Singing) Lord, I don’t know what I’ll do —

Senator Ted Cruz: Let me ask the question again: Does Facebook consider itself to be a neutral public forum? And representatives of your company have given conflicting answers on this.

MR: — and sigh, oh Lord —

Senator Ted Cruz: It is just a simple question.

MR: — well Lord, I thought I would cry —

Senator Ted Cruz: Do you consider yourself a neutral public forum, or are you engaged in political speech, which is your right under the First Amendment?

MR: — daddy, such a beautiful dream. —

Senator Ted Cruz: Mr. Zuckerberg, I will say there are Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook —

MR: — Well I’m nobody’s sugar daddy and I’m lonesome —

Senator Ted Cruz: — Thank you.

Senator John Thune: Thank you Senator Cruz. You want to break now? Or you want to keep going?

The post Intercepted Podcast: A Nation Addicted to War appeared first on The Intercept.

We therefore regard as inherently serious strident warnings from public officials alleging that the FBI and Department of Justice have abused their spying power for political purposes. Social media last night and today have been flooded with inflammatory and quite dramatic claims now being made by congressional Republicans about a four-page memo alleging abuses of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act spying processes during the 2016 election. This memo, which remains secret, was reportedly written under the direction of the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, and has been read by dozens of members of Congress after the committee voted to make the memo available to all members of the House of Representatives to examine in a room specially designated for reviewing classified material.

The rhetoric issuing from GOP members who read the memo is notably extreme. North Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Meadows, chair of the House Freedom Caucus, called the memo “troubling” and “shocking” and said, “Part of me wishes that I didn’t read it because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much.” GOP Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania stated: “You think about, ‘Is this happening in America or is this the KGB?’ That’s how alarming it is.”

This has led to a ferocious outcry on the right to “release the memo” – and presumably thereby prove that the Obama administration conducted unlawful surveillance on the Trump campaign and transition. On Thursday night, Fox News host and stalwart Trump ally Sean Hannity claimed that the memo described “the systematic abuse of power, the weaponizing of those powerful tools of intelligence and the shredding of our Fourth Amendment constitutional rights.”

Given the significance of this issue, it is absolutely true that the memo should be declassified and released to the public — and not just the memo itself. The House Intelligence Committee generally and Nunes specifically have a history of making unreliable and untrue claims (its report about Edward Snowden was full of falsehoods, as Bart Gellman amply documented, and prior claims from Nunes about “unmasking” have been discredited). Thus, mere assertions from Nunes — or anyone else — are largely worthless; Republicans should provide American citizens not merely with the memo they claim reveals pervasive criminality and abuse of power, but also with all of the evidence underlying its conclusions.

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have the power, working together or separately, to immediately declassify all the relevant information. And if indeed the GOP’s explosive claims are accurate – if, as HPSCI member Steve King, R-Iowa, says, this is “worse than Watergate” — they obviously have every incentive to get it into the public’s hands as soon as possible. Indeed, one could argue that they have the duty to do so.

On the other hand, if the GOP’s claims are false or significantly misleading – if they are, with the deepest cynicism imaginable, simply using these crucial issues to whip up their base or discredit the Mueller investigation, or exaggerating or making claims that lack any evidentiary support, or trying to have the best of all worlds by making explosive claims about the memo but never having to prove their truth — then they will either not release the memo or they will release it without any supporting documentation, making it impossible for Americans to judge its accuracy for themselves.

Anyone who is genuinely concerned about the claims being made about eavesdropping abuses should understand why the issue of evidence is so critical. After all, the House, Senate, and FBI investigations into any Trump collusion with Russia have so far proceeded with many startling claims in the media, but to date little hard evidence for the public to judge. Nobody rational should be assuming any claims or assertions from partisan actors about the 2016 election are true without seeing evidence to substantiate those claims.

The good news is there are at least four easy ways for congressional Republicans and/or Trump to definitively prove that all the right’s darkest suspicions about the Obama administration are true. If this memo and the underlying documents prove even a fraction of what GOP politicians and media figures are claiming about them, then what could possibly justify its ongoing concealment? Any or all of these methods should be promptly invoked to ensure that the public sees this evidence:

1. Trump can declassify anything he wants.

All classification by the U.S. government has no basis in laws passed by Congress (with one tiny exception that is irrelevant here). Rather, all classification is based on presidential executive orders, which rely on the president’s constitutional role as commander in chief of the armed forces. According to the Supreme Court, the presidential power “to classify and control access to information bearing on national security … flows primarily from the constitutional investment of power in the president.”

That means presidents can also declassify anything they chose to — for any reason or no reason — as they have done in the past. George W. Bush, under pressure in 2004, declassified the section of the 2001 presidential daily brief headlined “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Barack Obama declassified the Justice Department memos produced during the Bush presidency on the legality of torture.

Thus if the House Intelligence Committee merely releases a version of its memo without the supporting documentation, that won’t be just because they don’t want Americans to see it – it will be because Trump doesn’t want us to see it either. Note that GOP House members are insistent that releasing the memo and the underlying source material would not remotely harm national security:

Releasing this classified info doesn't compromise good sources & methods. It reveals the feds' reliance on bad sources & methods.

— Lee Zeldin (@LeeMZeldin) January 18, 2018

So what possible justification is there for Trump to continue to conceal this alleged evidence of massive criminality from the American people by hiding it behind “classified” designations? Indeed, it is illegal to abuse classified designations to hide evidence of official criminality: so not only can Trump declassify such evidence, one could argue that he must, or at least should.

2. The House (and Senate) intelligence committees can declassify any material they possess.

According to the procedural rules of both houses of Congress, their intelligence committees can declassify material in their possession if the committee votes that such declassification would be in the public interest. It is then declassified after five days unless the president formally objects. If the president does object, the full chamber votes on the question.

It is true that – in a measure of how embarrassingly deferential Congress is to the executive branch – neither the House nor the Senate intelligence committees has ever utilized this power, so it’s impossible to know how this gambit would play out in practice. But if Trump refused to release proof of the Obama administration’s misdeeds, congressional Republicans should have a straightforward way to overrule him.

3. The Constitution protects members of Congress from prosecution for “any speech or debate in either House.”

Members of Congress have legal immunity for acts they commit as part of the legislative process. Article I, Section 6, clause 1 of the Constitution states that “for any speech or debate in either House, [Senators and Representatives] shall not be questioned in any other place.” It is this constitutional shield that protected Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska from legal consequences in 1971 when he read sections of the Pentagon Papers during a meeting of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, and then placed the rest of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.

It’s true that members could face legal consequences for ancillary acts — perhaps if they unlawfully removed the relevant material from the congressional SCIF. But they could go to the House floor and describe both the memo’s revelations and the underlying evidence for it without any fear of legal consequences.

If the memo really proves what they claim, it would seem to be their patriotic duty would compel them do this. Ordinary citizens — like Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning — have risked prison in order to expose what they believed were serious official crimes; these members of Congress can do this without any of those consequences. So what justifies their failure to do this?

4. Republicans can leak everything to the news media.

If for some reason Trump and the congressional leadership refuse to use any of the above options to vindicate themselves, a brave member of Congress could turn whistleblower and transmit the classified proof of the GOP’s claims about the memo to the news media.

Many outlets now have secure methods of sending sensitive material to them, such as Secure Drop. Those for The Intercept can be found here. (All leaking entails risks, as we describe in our manual for whistleblowers.)

So that’s that. All Americans, particularly conservatives, should ask every Republican making spectacular assertions about this memo when they will be using the above ways to conclusively demonstrate that everything they’ve said is based in rock-solid fact.

If they do not, Republicans will conclusively demonstrate something else. They will prove conclusively that all of this is about them shamelessly making claims they do not actually believe, fraudulently posturing as caring about one of the most vital, fundamental issues facing the United States: how the U.S. government uses the vast surveillance powers with which it has been vested.

Top photo: The official seal of the FBI is seen on an iPhone’s camera screen outside the J. Edgar Hoover headquarters in Washington, on Feb. 23, 2016.

The post Republicans Have Four Easy Ways to #ReleaseTheMemo — and the Evidence for It. Not Doing So Will Prove Them to Be Shameless Frauds. appeared first on The Intercept.

Whatever else there is to say about Trump, it is simply a fact that the 2016 election saw elite circles in the U.S., with very few exceptions, lining up with remarkable fervor behind his Democratic opponent. Top CIA officials openly declared war on Trump in the nation’s op-ed pages and one of their operatives (now an MSNBC favorite) was tasked with stopping him in Utah, while Time magazine reported, just a week before the election, that “the banking industry has supported Clinton with buckets of cash. … What bankers most like about Clinton is that she is not Donald Trump.”

Some of Trump’s advocated assaults on D.C. orthodoxy aligned with long-standing views of at least some left-wing factions (e.g., his professed opposition to regime change war in Syria, Iraq/Libya-style interventions, global free trade deals, entitlement cuts, greater conflict with Russia, and self-destructive pro-Israel fanaticism), while other Trump positions were horrifying to anyone with a plausible claim to leftism, or basic decency (reaffirming torture, expanding GITMO, killing terrorists’ families, launching Islamophobic crusades, fixation on increasing hostility with Tehran, further unleashing federal and local police forces). Ironically, Trump’s principal policy deviation around which elites have now coalesced in opposition — a desire for better relations with Moscow — was the same one that Obama, to their great bipartisan dismay, also adopted (as evidenced by Obama’s refusal to more aggressively confront the Kremlin-backed Syrian government or arm anti-Russian factions in Ukraine).

It is true that Trump, being Trump, was wildly inconsistent in virtually all of these pronouncements, often contradicting or abandoning them weeks after he made them. And, as many of us pointed out at the time, it was foolish to assume that the campaign vows of any politician, let alone an adept con man like Trump, would be a reliable barometer for what he would do once in office. And, as expected, he has betrayed many of these promises within months of being inaugurated, while the very Wall Street interests he railed against have found a very welcoming embrace in the Oval Office.

Nonetheless, Trump, as a matter of rhetoric, repeatedly affirmed policy positions that were directly contrary to long-standing bipartisan orthodoxy, and his policy and personal instability only compounded elites’ fears that he could not be relied upon to safeguard their lucrative, power-vesting agenda. In so many ways — due to his campaign positions, his outsider status, his unstable personality, his witting and unwitting unmasking of the truth of U.S. hegemony, the embarrassment he causes in Western capitals, his reckless unpredictability — Trump posed a threat to their power centers.

It is often claimed that this trans-partisan, elite coalition assembled against Trump because they are simply American patriots horrified by the threat he poses to America’s noble traditions and institutions. I guess if you want to believe that the CIA, the GOP consulting class, and assorted D.C. imperialists, along with Bush-era neocons like Bill Kristol and David Frum, woke up one day and developed some sort of earnest, patriotic conscience about democracy, ethics, constitutional limits, and basic decency, you’re free to believe that. It makes for a nice, moving story: a film from the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” genre. But at the very least, Trump’s campaign assaults on their most sacred pieties was, and remains, a major factor in their seething contempt for him.

From the start of Trump’s presidency, it was clear that the permanent national security power structure in Washington was deeply hostile to his presidency and would do what it could to undermine it. Shortly before Trump was inaugurated, I wrote an article noting that many of the most damaging anti-Trump leaks were emanating from anonymous CIA and other Deep State operatives who despised Trump because the policies he vowed to enact — the ones American voters ratified — were so contrary to their agenda and belief system. Indeed, they were even anonymously boasting that they were withholding secrets from Trump’s briefings because they decided the elected president should not have access to them.

After Trump openly questioned the reliability of the CIA in light of its Iraq War failures, Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow’s show to warn Trump — explicitly — that he would be destroyed if he continued to oppose the intelligence community:

Chuck Schumer on Trump's tweet hitting intel community: "He's being really dumb to do this." https://t.co/MOcU8ruOPK

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 4, 2017

Although it is now common to assert — as a form of in-the-know mockery — that the notion of a “Deep State” in the U.S. was invented by Trump supporters only in the last year, the reality is that the U.S. Deep State has been reported on and openly discussed in numerous circles long before Trump. In 2010, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Dana Priest, along with Bill Arkin, published a three-part series that the paper titled “Top Secret America: A hidden world, growing beyond control.”

In 2014, mainstream national security journalists Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady published a book titled “Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry,” which documented — in its own words — that “there is a hidden country within the United States,” one “formed from the astonishing number of secrets held by the government and the growing ranks of secret-keepers given charge over them.”

Other journalists such as Peter Dale Scott and Mike Lofgren have long written about the U.S. Deep State completely independent of Trump. The belief that the “Deep State” was invented by Trump supporters as some recent conspiratorial concoction is based in pure ignorance about national security discourse, or a jingoistic desire to believe that the U.S. (unlike primitive, inferior countries) is immune from such malevolent forces, or both.

Indeed, mainstream liberals in good standing, such as the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, have repeatedly and explicitly speculated about (and, in Heer’s case, warned of) the possibility of Deep State subversion of the White House:

The terrifying thing here is the only people able to stand up to Trump so far are the denizens of the Deep State. Also the Chinese gov't.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 14, 2017

The American Deep State is in open conflict with an incoming president who is twitchy, thin-skinned & paranoid. What could go wrong?

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) January 11, 2017

For me, the most terrifying thing about this political moment is the intervention of the Deep State (against both Clinton & Trump) https://t.co/qBnyH47W6z

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) January 12, 2017

Call it what you will — the National Security Elite, the Deep State, the Blob. It's very pig-headed & knows how to sabotage change.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) April 17, 2017

To qualify earlier tweet, there's a lot Deep State can do short of a coup: leaking and investigation. That's all to the good.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) May 12, 2017

That the U.S. has a shadowy, secretive world of intelligence and military operatives who exercise great power outside of elections and democratic accountability is not some exotic, alt-right conspiracy theory; it’s utterly elemental to understanding anything about how Washington works. It’s hard to believe that anyone on this side of a sixth grade civics class would seek to deny that.

The last several weeks have ushered in more open acknowledgment of — and cheerleading for — a subversion of Trump’s agenda by unelected military and intelligence officials. Media accounts have been almost unanimous in heralding the arrival of retired Marine Gen. John Kelly as White House chief of staff (pictured, top photo), widely depicted as a sign that normalcy is returning to the executive branch. “John Kelly Quickly Moves to Impose Military Discipline on White House,” the New York Times headline announced.

The current storyline is that Kelly has aligned with Trump’s national security adviser, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, to bring seriousness and order to the White House. In particular, these two military men are systematically weakening and eliminating many of the White House officials who are true adherents to the domestic and foreign policy worldview on which Trump’s campaign was based. These two military officials (along with yet another retired general, Defense Secretary James Mattis) have long been hailed by anti-Trump factions as the Serious, Responsible Adults in the Trump administration, primarily because they support militaristic policies — such as the war in Afghanistan and intervention in Syria — that are far more in line with official Washington’s bipartisan posture.

As the Atlantic’s Rosie Gray reports, McMaster has successfully fired several national security officials aligned with Steve Bannon and the nationalistic, purportedly non-interventionist foreign policy and anti-Muslim worldview Trump advocated throughout the election. As Gray notes, this has provoked anger among Trump supporters who view the assertion of power by these generals as an undemocratic attack against the policies for which the electorate voted. Gray writes: “McMaster’s show of force has set off alarm bells among Bannon allies in the pro-Trump media sphere, who favored Flynn and regard the national security adviser as a globalist interloper.”

In a bizarre yet illuminating reflection of rapidly shifting political alliances, Democratic Party think tanks and other groups have rallied behind McMaster as some sort of besieged, stalwart hero whose survival is critical to the Republic, notwithstanding the fact that, by all accounts, he is fighting to ensure the continuation of the U.S. war in Afghanistan and escalate it in Syria. As usually happens these days, these Democrats are in lockstep with their new neocon partners, led by Bill Kristol, who far prefer the unelected agenda of McMaster and Kelly to the one that Trump used to get elected:

The success or failure of the Bannon/alt-right/Russian assault on McMaster will be a key moment for the Trump Administration–& the country.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) August 4, 2017

It is certainly valid to point out that these generals didn’t use tanks or any other show of force to barge into the White House; they were invited there by Trump, who appointed them to these positions. And they only have the power that he agrees that they should exercise.

But there’s no denying that Trump is deluged by exactly the kinds of punishments that Schumer warned Trump would be imposed on him if he continued to defy the intelligence community. Many of Trump’s most devoted haters are, notably, GOP consultants; one of the most tenacious of that group, Rick Wilson, celebrated today in the Daily Beast that the threat of prosecution and the tidal waves of harmful leaks have forced Trump into submission. The combination of the “Goldman Boys” and the generals has taken over, Wilson crows, and is destroying the Bannon-led agenda on which Trump campaigned.

Whatever else is true, there is now simply no question that there is open warfare between adherents to the worldview Trump advocated in order to win, and the permanent national security power faction in Washington that — sometimes for good, and sometimes for evil — despises that agenda. The New Republic’s Brian Beutler described the situation perfectly on Friday:

Where the generals haven’t been empowered to run the show, they have asserted themselves nonetheless. “In the earliest weeks of Trump’s presidency,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday, Mattis and Kelly agreed “that one of them should remain in the United States at all times to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House.”

It would be sensationalizing things to call this a soft coup, but it is impossible to deny that real presidential powers have been diluted or usurped. Elected officials have decided that leaving the functioning of the government to unelected military officers is politically preferable to invoking constitutional remedies that would require them to vote.

Beutler is a full-scale, devoted enemy of Trump’s political agenda, and is clearly glad that something is impeding it. But he also recognizes the serious, enduring dangers to democracy from relying on military officials and intelligence operatives to serve as some sort of backstop, or supreme guardians, of political values and norms.

It’s particularly ironic that many of the same people who have spent the year ridiculing the notion that the U.S. has any kind of Deep State are now trumpeting the need for the U.S. military to save the Republic from the elected government, given that this, roughly speaking, is the defining attribute of all Deep States, at least as they depict themselves.

There have been some solitary Democratic Party voices expressing concern about these developments. Here, for instance, is what Barbara Lee had to say as most of her fellow Democrats were cheering the arrival of Gen. Kelly in the West Wing:

By putting Gen John Kelly in charge, Pres Trump is militarizing the White House & putting our executive branch in the hands of an extremist.

— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 28, 2017

But hers was clearly the minority view: The military triumvirate of Kelly, Mattis, and McMaster has been cast as the noble defender of American democracy, pitted against those who were actually elected to lead the government.

No matter how much of a threat one regards Trump as being, there really are other major threats to U.S. democracy and important political values. It’s hard, for instance, to imagine any group that has done more harm, and ushered in more evil, than the Bush-era neocons with whom Democrats are now openly aligning. And who has brought more death, and suffering, and tyranny to the world over the last six decades than the U.S. national security state?

In terms of some of the popular terms that are often thrown around these days — such as “authoritarianism” and “democratic norms” and “U.S. traditions” — it’s hard to imagine many things that would pose a greater threat to all of that than empowering the national security state (what, before Trump, has long been called the Deep State) to exert precisely the power that is supposed to be reserved exclusively for elected officials. In sum, Trump opponents should be careful of what they wish for, as it might come true.

The post What’s Worse: Trump’s Campaign Agenda or Empowering Generals and CIA Operatives to Subvert It? appeared first on The Intercept.

President Donald Trump nominated Gina Haspel as the new director of the CIA, announcing the news on Twitter. Mike Pompeo, the previous director, was nominated to run the State Department to replace the ousted Rex Tillerson.

* * * * *

In May 2013, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller reported that the head of the CIA’s clandestine service was being shifted out of that position as a result of “a management shake-up” by then-Director John Brennan. As Miller documented, this official — whom the paper did not name because she was a covert agent at the time — was centrally involved in the worst abuses of the CIA’s Bush-era torture regime.

As Miller put it, she was “directly involved in its controversial interrogation program” and had an “extensive role” in torturing detainees. Even more troubling, she “had run a secret prison in Thailand” — part of the CIA’s network of “black sites” — “where two detainees were subjected to waterboarding and other harsh techniques.” The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture also detailed the central role she played in the particularly gruesome torture of detainee Abu Zubaydah.

Beyond all that, she played a vital role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed the torture of detainees both at the black site she ran and other secret agency locations. The concealment of those interrogation tapes, which violated multiple court orders as well as the demands of the 9/11 commission and the advice of White House lawyers, was condemned as “obstruction” by commission chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Keane. A special prosecutor and grand jury investigated those actions but ultimately chose not to prosecute.

The name of that CIA official whose torture activities the Post described is Gina Haspel. Today, as BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold noted, CIA Director Mike Pompeo announced that Haspel was selected by Trump to be deputy director of the CIA.

This should not come as much of a surprise given that Pompeo himself has said he is open to resurrecting Bush-era torture techniques (indeed, Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, was forced to withdraw from the running in late 2008 because of his support for some of those tactics only to be confirmed in 2013). That’s part of why it was so controversial that 14 Democrats — including their Senate leader Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Tim Kaine — voted to confirm Pompeo.

That Haspel was the actual subject of the 2013 Post story was an open secret. As Leopold said after I named her on Twitter as the subject of that story: “All of us who covered CIA knew. She was undercover and agency asked us not to print her name.” Gina Haspel is now slated to become the second-most powerful official at the CIA despite — or because of — the central, aggressive, sustained role she played in many of the most grotesque and shameful abuses of the war on terror.

Top photo: An interrogation room at Camp Delta in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for detainees from the U.S. war in Afghanistan, April 7, 2004.

The post Gina Haspel, Trump’s Pick for CIA Director, Ran a Black Site for Torture appeared first on The Intercept.

Two weeks after the killing of Awlaki, a separate CIA drone strike in Yemen killed his 16-year-old American-born son, Abdulrahman, along with the boy’s 17-year-old cousin and several other innocent Yemenis. The U.S. eventually claimed that the boy was not their target but merely “collateral damage.” Abdulrahman’s grief-stricken grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, urged the Washington Post “to visit a Facebook memorial page for Abdulrahman,” which explained: “Look at his pictures, his friends, and his hobbies. His Facebook page shows a typical kid.”

The U.S. assault on Yemeni civilians not only continued but radically escalated over the next five years through the end of the Obama presidency, as the U.S. and the U.K. armed, supported, and provide crucial assistance to their close ally Saudi Arabia as it devastated Yemen through a criminally reckless bombing campaign. Yemen now faces mass starvation, seemingly exacerbated, deliberately, by the U.S.-U.K.-supported air attacks. Because of the West’s direct responsibility for these atrocities, they have received vanishingly little attention in the responsible countries.

In a hideous symbol of the bipartisan continuity of U.S. barbarism, Nasser al-Awlaki just lost another one of his young grandchildren to U.S. violence. On Sunday, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, using armed Reaper drones for cover, carried out a commando raid on what it said was a compound harboring officials of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A statement issued by President Trump lamented the death of an American service member and several others who were wounded, but made no mention of any civilian deaths. U.S. military officials initially denied any civilian deaths, and (therefore) the CNN report on the raid said nothing about any civilians being killed.

But reports from Yemen quickly surfaced that 30 people were killed, including 10 women and children. Among the dead: the 8-year-old granddaughter of Nasser al-Awlaki, Nawar, who was also the daughter of Anwar Awlaki.

This is the 8-year-old girl killed in US raid in Yemen, Arabic media reports https://t.co/nPlWh6LqE3
US killed her teen American brother too pic.twitter.com/QP0TsgdIfq

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 29, 2017

As noted by my colleague Jeremy Scahill — who extensively interviewed the grandparents in Yemen for his book and film on Obama’s “Dirty Wars” —  the girl “was shot in the neck and killed,” bleeding to death over the course of two hours. “Why kill children?” the grandfather asked. “This is the new (U.S.) administration — it’s very sad, a big crime.”

The New York Times yesterday reported that military officials had been planning and debating the raid for months under the Obama administration, but Obama officials decided to leave the choice to Trump. The new president personally authorized the attack last week. They claim that the “main target” of the raid “was computer materials inside the house that could contain clues about future terrorist plots.” The paper cited a Yemeni official saying that “at least eight women and seven children, ages 3 to 13, had been killed in the raid,” and that the attack also “severely damaged a school, a health facility and a mosque.”

As my colleague Matthew Cole reported in great detail just weeks ago, Navy SEAL Team 6, for all its public glory, has a long history of “‘revenge ops,’ unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities.” And Trump notoriously vowed during the campaign to target not only terrorists but also their families. All of that demands aggressive, independent inquiries into this operation.

Perhaps most tragic of all is that — just as was true in Iraq — al Qaeda had very little presence in Yemen before the Obama administration began bombing and droning it and killing civilians, thus driving people into the arms of the militant group. As the late, young Yemeni writer Ibrahim Mothana told Congress in 2013:

Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants. … Unfortunately, liberal voices in the United States are largely ignoring, if not condoning, civilian deaths and extrajudicial killings in Yemen.

During George W. Bush’s presidency, the rage would have been tremendous. But today there is little outcry, even though what is happening is in many ways an escalation of Mr. Bush’s policies. …

Defenders of human rights must speak out. America’s counterterrorism policy here is not only making Yemen less safe by strengthening support for AQAP [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] but it could also ultimately endanger the United States and the entire world.

This is why it is crucial that — as urgent and valid protests erupt against Trump’s abuses — we not permit recent history to be whitewashed, or long-standing U.S. savagery to be deceitfully depicted as new Trumpian aberrations, or the war on terror framework engendering these new assaults to be forgotten. Some current abuses are unique to Trump, but — as I detailed on Saturday — some are the decades-old byproduct of a mindset and system of war and executive powers that all need uprooting. Obscuring these facts, or allowing those responsible to posture as opponents of all this, is not just misleading but counterproductive: Much of this resides on an odious continuum and did not just appear out of nowhere.

Congress voted on border wall in 2006, Hillary, Schumer, Feinstein voted Yes https://t.co/70y1dwH1J7 Bernie voted no https://t.co/QWcWWQZ602

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 30, 2017

It’s genuinely inspiring to see pervasive rage over the banning of visa holders and refugees from countries like Yemen. But it’s also infuriating that the U.S. continues to massacre Yemeni civilians, both directly and through its tyrannical Saudi partners. That does not become less infuriating — Yemeni civilians are not less dead — because these policies and the war theories in which they are rooted began before the inauguration of Donald Trump. It’s not just Trump but this mentality and framework that need vehement opposition.

Top photo: A Yemeni man walks past cars destroyed during fighting with militants in the city of Zinjibar, Yemen, June 14, 2012.

The post Obama Killed a 16-Year-Old American in Yemen. Trump Just Killed His 8-Year-Old Sister. appeared first on The Intercept.

These unnamed sources told the Post that “the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.” The anonymous officials also claim that “intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails” from both the DNC and John Podesta’s email account. Critically, none of the actual evidence for these claims is disclosed; indeed, the CIA’s “secret assessment” itself remains concealed.

A second leak from last night, this one given to the New York Times, cites other anonymous officials as asserting that “the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.” But that NYT story says that “it is also far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials — and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.”

Deep down in its article, the Post notes — rather critically — that “there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.” Most importantly, the Post adds that “intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks.” But the purpose of both anonymous leaks is to finger the Russian government for these hacks, acting with the motive to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Needless to say, Democrats — still eager to make sense of their election loss and to find causes for it other than themselves — immediately declared these anonymous claims about what the CIA believes to be true, and, with a somewhat sweet, religious-type faith, treated these anonymous assertions as proof of what they wanted to believe all along: that Vladimir Putin was rooting for Donald Trump to win and Hillary Clinton to lose and used nefarious means to ensure that outcome. That Democrats are now venerating unverified, anonymous CIA leaks as sacred is par for the course for them this year, but it’s also a good indication of how confused and lost U.S. political culture has become in the wake of Trump’s victory.

Given the obvious significance of this story — it is certain to shape how people understand the 2016 election and probably foreign policy debates for months if not years to come — it is critical to keep in mind some basic facts about what is known and, more importantly, what is not known:

(1) Nobody has ever opposed investigations to determine if Russia hacked these emails, nor has anyone ever denied the possibility that Russia did that. The source of contention has been quite simple: No accusations should be accepted until there is actual convincing evidence to substantiate those accusations.

There is still no such evidence for any of these claims. What we have instead are assertions, disseminated by anonymous people, completely unaccompanied by any evidence, let alone proof. As a result, none of the purported evidence — still — can be publicly seen, reviewed, or discussed. Anonymous claims leaked to newspapers about what the CIA believes do not constitute proof, and certainly do not constitute reliable evidence that substitutes for actual evidence that can be reviewed. Have we really not learned this lesson yet?

A reminder to take every claim made by unnamed US officials about intelligence conclusions with healthy skepticism.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 10, 2016

(2) The reasons no rational person should blindly believe anonymous claims of this sort — even if it is pleasing to believe such claims — should be obvious by now.

To begin with, CIA officials are professional, systematic liars; they lie constantly, by design, and with great skill, and have for many decades, as have intelligence officials in other agencies.

Many of those incidents demonstrate, as hurtful as it is to accept, that these agencies even lie when there’s a Democrat overseeing the executive branch. Even in those cases when they are not deliberately lying, they are often gravely mistaken. Intelligence is not a science, and attributing hacks to specific sources is a particularly difficult task, almost impossible to carry out with precision and certainty.

Beyond that, what makes claims from anonymous sources so especially dubious is that their motives cannot be assessed. Who are the people summarizing these claims to the Washington Post? What motives do they have for skewing the assertions one way or the other? Who are the people inside the intelligence community who fully ratify these assertions and who are the ones who dissent? It’s impossible to answer any of these questions because everyone is masked by the shield of anonymity, which is why reports of this sort demand high levels of skepticism, not blind belief.

Most important of all, the more serious the claim is — and accusing a nuclear-armed power of directly and deliberately interfering in the U.S. election in order to help the winning candidate is about as serious as a claim can get — the more important it is to demand evidence before believing it. Wars have started over far less serious claims than this one. People like Lindsey Graham are already beating their chest, demanding that the U.S. do everything in its power to punish Russia and “Putin personally.”

Nobody should need an explainer about why it’s dangerous in the extreme to accept such inflammatory accusations on faith or, worse, based on the anonymous assurances of intelligence officials, in lieu of seeing the actual evidence.

(3) An important part of this story, quite clearly, is inter-agency feuding between, at the very least, the CIA and the FBI.

Recall that the top echelon of the CIA was firmly behind Clinton and vehemently against Trump, while at least some powerful factions within the FBI had the opposite position.

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell not only endorsed Clinton in the New York Times but claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” George W. Bush’s CIA and NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, pronounced Trump a “clear and present danger” to U.S. national security and then, less than a week before the election, went to the Washington Post to warn that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin” and said Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

Meanwhile, key factions in the FBI were furious that Hillary Clinton was not criminally charged for her handling of classified information; pressured FBI Director James Comey into writing a letter that was pretty clearly harmful to Clinton about further investigating the case; and seemed to be improperly communicating with close Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. And while we are now being treated to anonymous leaks about how the CIA believes Putin helped Trump, recall that the FBI, just weeks ago, was shoveling anonymous claims to the New York Times that had the opposite goal:

One can choose to believe whatever anonymous claims from these agencies with a long history of lying and error one wants to believe, based on whatever agenda one has. Or one can wait to review the actual evidence before forming beliefs about what really happened. It should take little effort to realize that the latter option is the only rational path.

(4) Even just within the leaks of the last 24 hours, there are multiple grounds of confusion, contradictions, and uncertainty.

The always-observant Marcy Wheeler last night documented many of those; anyone interested in this story should read her analysis as soon as possible. I want to highlight just a few of these vital contradictions and questions.

To start with, the timing of these leaks is so striking. Even as Democrats have spent months issuing one hysterical claim after the next about Russian interference, the White House, and Obama specifically, have been very muted about all of this. Perhaps that’s because he did not want to appear partisan or be inflammatory, but perhaps it’s because he does not believe there is sufficient proof to accuse the Russian government; after all, if he really believed the Russians did even half of what Democrats claim, wouldn’t he (as some Democrats have argued) be duty-bound to take aggressive action in retaliation?

It was announced yesterday afternoon that Obama had ordered a full review of hacking allegations: a perfectly sensible step that makes clear that an investigation is needed, and evidence disclosed, before any definitive conclusions can be reached. It was right on the heels of that announcement that this CIA leak emerged: short-cutting the actual, deliberative investigative process Obama had ordered in order to lead the public to believe that all the answers were already known and, before the investigation even starts, that Russia was guilty of all charges.

More important is what the Post buries in its story: namely, what are the so-called “minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment”? How “minor” are they? And what do these conclusions really mean if, as the Post’s sources admit, the CIA is not even able to link the hack to the actual Russian government, but only to people outside the government (from the Post: “Those actors, according to the official, were ‘one step’ removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees”)?

This is why it’s such a shoddy and unreliable practice to conduct critical debates through conflicting anonymous leaks. Newspapers like the Post have the obvious incentive to hype the flashy, flamboyant claims while downplaying and burying the caveats and conflicting evidence. None of these questions can be asked, let alone answered, because the people who are making these claims are hidden and the evidence is concealed.

(5) Contrary to the declarations of self-vindication by supremely smug Democrats, none of this even relates to, let alone negates, the concerns over their election-year McCarthyite behavior and tactics.

Contrary to the blatant straw man many Democrats are railing against, nobody ever said it was McCarthyite to want to investigate claims of Russian hacking. To the contrary, critics of Clinton supporters have been arguing for exactly that: that these accusations should not be believed in the absence of meaningful inquiry and evidence, which has thus far been lacking.

What critics have said is McCarthyite — and, as one of those critics, I fully stand by this — is the lowly tactic of accusing anyone questioning these accusations, or criticizing the Clinton campaign, of being Kremlin stooges or Putin agents. Back in August, after Democrats decided to smear Jill Stein as a Putin stooge, here’s how I defined the McCarthyite atmosphere that Democrats have deliberately cultivated this year:

So that’s the Democratic Party’s approach to the 2016 election. Those who question, criticize or are perceived to impede Hillary Clinton’s smooth, entitled path to the White House are vilified as stooges, sympathizers and/or agents of Russia: Trump, WikiLeaks, Sanders, The Intercept, Jill Stein. Other than loyal Clinton supporters, is there anyone left who is not covertly controlled by or in service to The Ruskies?

Concerns over Democrats’ McCarthyism never had anything to do with a desire for an investigation into the source of the DNC and Podesta hacking; everyone favored such investigations. Indeed, accusations that Democrats were behaving in a McCarthyite manner were predicated — and still are — on their disgusting smearing as Kremlin agents anyone who wanted evidence and proof before believing these inflammatory accusations about Russia.

To see the true face of this neo-McCarthyism, watch this amazing interview from this week with Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, one of the party’s leading Russia hawks (he’s quoted in the Post article attacking Obama for not retaliating against Putin). When Schiff is repeatedly asked by the interviewer, Tucker Carlson, for evidence to support his allegation that Putin ordered the hacking of Podesta’s emails, Schiff provides none.

What he does instead is accuse Carlson of being a Kremlin stooge and finally tells him he should put his program on RT. That — which has become very typical Democratic rhetoric — is the vile face of neo-McCarthyism that Democrats have adopted this year, and nothing in this CIA leak remotely vindicates or justifies it:

Needless to say, questions about who hacked the DNC and Podesta email accounts are serious and important ones. The answers have widespread implications on many levels. That’s all the more reason these debates should be based on publicly disclosed evidence, not competing, unverifiable anonymous leaks from professional liars inside government agencies, cheered by drooling, lost partisans anxious to embrace whatever claims make them feel good, all conducted without the slightest regard for rational faculties or evidentiary requirements.

The post Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence appeared first on The Intercept.

The fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Committee’s Torture Report – which Dan Froomkin covered here – has now zeroed in on the White House.

Did the White House order the CIA to withdraw 920 documents from a server made available to Committee staffers, as Senator Dianne Feinstein says the agency claimed in 2010? Were those documents – perhaps thousands of them – pulled in deference to a White House claim of executive privilege, as Senator Mark Udall and then CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston suggested last fall? And is the White House continuing to withhold 9,000 pages of documents without invoking privilege, as McClatchy reported yesterday?

We can be sure about one thing: The Obama White House has covered up the Bush presidency’s role in the torture program for years. Specifically, from 2009 to 2012, the administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep a single short phrase, describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program, secret.

Some time before October 29, 2009, then National Security Advisor Jim Jones filed an ex parte classified declaration with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in response to a FOIA request by the ACLU seeking documents related to the torture program. In it, Jones argued that the CIA should not be forced to disclose the “source of the CIA’s authority,” as referenced in the title of a document providing “Guidelines for Interrogations” and signed by then CIA Director George Tenet. That document was cited in two Justice Department memos at issue in the FOIA. Jones claimed that “source of authority” constituted an intelligence method that needed to be protected.

The Obama Administration successfully appealed a judge’s ruling to release the redacted part of this title describing under what authorities torture was conducted. Document obtained by ACLU under FOIA.

As other documents and reporting have made clear, the source of authority was a September 17, 2001 Presidential declaration authorizing not just detention and interrogation, but a range of other counterterrorism activities, including targeted killings.

Both former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo have made clear that the torture program began as a covert operation. “A few days after the [9/11] attacks, President Bush signed a top-secret directive to CIA authorizing an unprecedented array of covert actions against Al Qaeda and its leadership.” Rizzo explained in 2011. One of those actions, Rizzo went on, was “the capture, incommunicado detention and aggressive interrogation of senior Al Qaeda operatives.”

As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, noted  in 2009 – shortly after Hayden revealed that torture started as a covert operation – this means there should be a paper trail implicating President Bush in the torture program. “[T]here should be a Presidential ‘finding’ authorizing the program,” he said, “and [] such a finding should have been provided to Congressional overseers.”

The National Security Act dictates that every covert operation must be supported by a written declaration finding that the action is necessary and important to the national security. The Congressional Intelligence committees – or at least the Chair and Ranking Member – should receive notice of the finding.

But there is evidence that those Congressional overseers were never told that the finding the president signed on September 17, 2001 authorized torture. For example, a letter from then ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, to the CIA’s General Counsel following her first briefing on torture asked: “Have enhanced techniques been authorized and approved by the President?” The CIA’s response at the time was simply that “policy as well as legal matters have been addressed within the Executive Branch.”

Nevertheless, the finding does exist. The CIA even disclosed its existence in response to the ACLU FOIA, describing it as “a 14-page memorandum dated 17 September 2001 from President Bush to the Director of the CIA pertaining to the CIA’s authorization to detain terrorists.” In an order in the ACLU suit, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein confirmed that the declaration was “intertwined with” the administration’s effort to keep the language in the Tenet document hidden. When the administration succeeded in keeping that short phrase secret, all effort to release the declaration also ended.

Enduring confusion about this particular finding surely exists because of its flexible nature. As Bob Woodward described in Bush at War, CIA Director Tenet asked President Bush to sign “a broad intelligence order permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation.” As Jane Mayer described in The Dark Side, such an order not only gave the CIA flexibility, it also protected the President. “To give the President deniability, and to keep him from getting his hands dirty, the finding called for the President to delegate blanket authority to Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how.”

When George Tenet signed written guidelines for the CIA’s torture program in 2003, however, he appeared to have deliberately deprived the President of that deniability by including the source of CIA’s authorization – presumably naming the President – in a document interrogators would see. You can’t blame the CIA Director, after all; Tenet signed the Guidelines just as CIA’s Inspector General and DOJ started to review the legality of the torture tactics used against detainees like Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was threatened with a drill and a gun in violation of DOJ’s ban on mock executions.

Protecting the President?

The White House’s fight to keep the short phrase describing Bush’s authorization of the torture program hidden speaks to its apparent ambivalence over the torture program. Even after President Obama released the DOJ memos authorizing torture – along with a damning CIA Inspector General Report and a wide range of documents revealing bureaucratic discussions within the CIA about torture – the White House still fought the release of the phrase that would have made it clear that the CIA conducted this torture at the order of the president. And it did so with a classified declaration from Jones that would have remained secret had Judge Hellerstein not insisted it be made public.

As Aftergood noted, such White House intervention in a FOIA suit is rare. “The number of times that a national security advisor has filed a declaration in a FOIA lawsuit is vanishingly small,” he said. “It almost never happens.” But as ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer noted of the finding, “It was the original authority for the CIA’s secret prisons and for the agency’s rendition and torture program, and apparently it was the authority for the targeted killing program as well.  It was the urtext.  It’s remarkable that after all this time it’s still secret.”

President Obama’s willingness to go to such lengths to hide this short phrase may explain the White House’s curious treatment of potentially privileged documents with the Senate now – describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program and its seemingly contradictory stance supporting publishing the Torture Report while thwarting its completion by withholding privileged documents. After all, the documents in question, like the reference to the presidential finding, may deprive the President of plausible deniability.

Furthermore, those documents may undermine one of the conclusions of the Torture Report. According to Senator Ron Wyden, the Senate Torture Report found that “the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House.” Perhaps the documents reportedly withheld by the White House undermine this conclusion, and instead show that the CIA operated with the full consent and knowledge of at least some people within the White House.

Finally, the White House’s sensitivity about documents involved in the torture program may stem from the structure of the finding. As John Rizzo made clear, the finding authorizes not just torturing, but killing, senior al Qaeda figures. Bob Woodward even reported that that CIA would carry out that killing using Predator drones, a program CIA still conducts. And in fact, when the Second Circuit ultimately ruled to let the White House to keep the authorization phrase secret, it did so because the phrase also relates to “a highly classified, active intelligence activity” and “pertains to intelligence activities unrelated to the discontinued [torture] program.” Given what we know about the September 17, 2001 finding, that may well refer to President Obama’s still active drone program.

In any case, the White House’s seemingly contradictory statements about the Torture Report might best be understood by its past treatment of CIA documents. By releasing the DOJ memos and other materials, the White House provided what seemed to be unprecedented transparency about what the CIA had done. But all the while it was secretly hiding language describing what the White House has done.

The post The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency’s Role in Torture for Years appeared first on The Intercept.

According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.

The drone operator, who agreed to discuss the top-secret programs on the condition of anonymity, was a member of JSOC’s High Value Targeting task force, which is charged with identifying, capturing or killing terrorist suspects in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

His account is bolstered by top-secret NSA documents previously provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It is also supported by a former drone sensor operator with the U.S. Air Force, Brandon Bryant, who has become an outspoken critic of the lethal operations in which he was directly involved in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.

In one tactic, the NSA “geolocates” the SIM card or handset of a suspected terrorist’s mobile phone, enabling the CIA and U.S. military to conduct night raids and drone strikes to kill or capture the individual in possession of the device.

The former JSOC drone operator is adamant that the technology has been responsible for taking out terrorists and networks of people facilitating improvised explosive device attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But he also states that innocent people have “absolutely” been killed as a result of the NSA’s increasing reliance on the surveillance tactic.

One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members.

Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s how they confuse us.”

As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike. According to the former drone operator, the geolocation cells at the NSA that run the tracking program – known as Geo Cell –sometimes facilitate strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike.

“Once the bomb lands or a night raid happens, you know that phone is there,” he says. “But we don’t know who’s behind it, who’s holding it. It’s of course assumed that the phone belongs to a human being who is nefarious and considered an ‘unlawful enemy combatant.’ This is where it gets very shady.”

The former drone operator also says that he personally participated in drone strikes where the identity of the target was known, but other unknown people nearby were also killed.

“They might have been terrorists,” he says. “Or they could have been family members who have nothing to do with the target’s activities.”

What’s more, he adds, the NSA often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a SIM card, rather than the actual content of the calls. Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata.

“People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” he says. “It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people – we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”

The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that its operations kill terrorists with the utmost precision.

In his speech at the National Defense University last May, President Obama declared that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set.” He added that, “by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life.”

But the increased reliance on phone tracking and other fallible surveillance tactics suggests that the opposite is true. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which uses a conservative methodology to track drone strikes, estimates that at least 273 civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia have been killed by unmanned aerial assaults under the Obama administration. A recent study conducted by a U.S. military adviser found that, during a single year in Afghanistan – where the majority of drone strikes have taken place – unmanned vehicles were 10 times more likely than conventional aircraft to cause civilian casualties.

The NSA declined to respond to questions for this article. Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, also refused to discuss “the type of operational detail that, in our view, should not be published.”

In describing the administration’s policy on targeted killings, Hayden would not say whether strikes are ever ordered without the use of human intelligence. She emphasized that “our assessments are not based on a single piece of information. We gather and scrutinize information from a variety of sources and methods before we draw conclusions.”

Hayden felt free, however, to note the role that human intelligence plays after a deadly strike occurs. “After any use of targeted lethal force, when there are indications that civilian deaths may have occurred, intelligence analysts draw on a large body of information – including human intelligence, signals intelligence, media reports, and surveillance footage – to help us make informed determinations about whether civilians were in fact killed or injured.”

The government does not appear to apply the same standard of care in selecting whom to target for assassination. The former JSOC drone operator estimates that the overwhelming majority of high-value target operations he worked on in Afghanistan relied on signals intelligence, known as SIGINT, based on the NSA’s phone-tracking technology.

“Everything they turned into a kinetic strike or a night raid was almost 90 percent that,” he says. “You could tell, because you’d go back to the mission reports and it will say ‘this mission was triggered by SIGINT,’ which means it was triggered by a geolocation cell.”

In July, the Washington Post relied exclusively on former senior U.S. intelligence officials and anonymous sources to herald the NSA’s claims about its effectiveness at geolocating terror suspects.

Within the NSA, the paper reported, “A motto quickly caught on at Geo Cell: ‘We Track ’Em, You Whack ’Em.'”

But the Post article included virtually no skepticism about the NSA’s claims, and no discussion at all about how the unreliability of the agency’s targeting methods results in the killing of innocents.

In fact, as the former JSOC drone operator recounts, tracking people by metadata and then killing them by SIM card is inherently flawed. The NSA “will develop a pattern,” he says, “where they understand that this is what this person’s voice sounds like, this is who his friends are, this is who his commander is, this is who his subordinates are. And they put them into a matrix. But it’s not always correct. There’s a lot of human error in that.”

The JSOC operator’s account is supported by another insider who was directly involved in the drone program. Brandon Bryant spent six years as a “stick monkey” – a drone sensor operator who controls the “eyes” of the U.S. military’s unmanned aerial vehicles. By the time he left the Air Force in 2011, Bryant’s squadron, which included a small crew of veteran drone operators, had been credited with killing 1,626 “enemies” in action.

Bryant says he has come forward because he is tormented by the loss of civilian life he believes that he and his squadron may have caused. Today he is committed to informing the public about lethal flaws in the U.S. drone program.

Bryant describes the program as highly compartmentalized: Drone operators taking shots at targets on the ground have little idea where the intelligence is coming from.

“I don’t know who we worked with,” Bryant says. “We were never privy to that sort of information. If the NSA did work with us, like, I have no clue.”

During the course of his career, Bryant says, many targets of U.S. drone strikes evolved their tactics, particularly in the handling of cell phones. “They’ve gotten really smart now and they don’t make the same mistakes as they used to,” he says. “They’d get rid of the SIM card and they’d get a new phone, or they’d put the SIM card in the new phone.”

As the former JSOC drone operator describes – and as classified documents obtained from Snowden confirm – the NSA doesn’t just locate the cell phones of terror suspects by intercepting communications from cell phone towers and Internet service providers. The agency also equips drones and other aircraft with devices known as “virtual base-tower transceivers” – creating, in effect, a fake cell phone tower that can force a targeted person’s device to lock onto the NSA’s receiver without their knowledge.

That, in turn, allows the military to track the cell phone to within 30 feet of its actual location, feeding the real-time data to teams of drone operators who conduct missile strikes or facilitate night raids.

The NSA geolocation system used by JSOC is known by the code name GILGAMESH. Under the program, a specially constructed device is attached to the drone. As the drone circles, the device locates the SIM card or handset that the military believes is used by the target.

Relying on this method, says the former JSOC drone operator, means that the “wrong people” could be killed due to metadata errors, particularly in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. “We don’t have people on the ground – we don’t have the same forces, informants, or information coming in from those areas – as we do where we have a strong foothold, like we do in Afghanistan. I would say that it’s even more likely that mistakes are made in places such as Yemen or Somalia, and especially Pakistan.”

As of May 2013, according to the former drone operator, President Obama had cleared 16 people in Yemen and five in Somalia for targeting in strikes. Before a strike is green-lit, he says, there must be at least two sources of intelligence. The problem is that both of those sources often involve NSA-supplied data, rather than human intelligence (HUMINT).

As the former drone operator explains, the process of tracking and ultimately killing a targeted person is known within the military as F3: Find, Fix, Finish. “Since there’s almost zero HUMINT operations in Yemen – at least involving JSOC – every one of their strikes relies on signals and imagery for confirmation: signals being the cell phone lock, which is the ‘find’ and imagery being the ‘unblinking eye’ which is the ‘fix.’” The “finish” is the strike itself.

“JSOC acknowledges that it would be completely helpless without the NSA conducting mass surveillance on an industrial level,” the former drone operator says. “That is what creates those baseball cards you hear about,” featuring potential targets for drone strikes or raids.

President Obama signs authorizations for “hits” that remain valid for 60 days. If a target cannot be located within that period, it must be reviewed and renewed. According to the former drone operator, it can take 18 months or longer to move from intelligence gathering to getting approval to actually carrying out a strike in Yemen. “What that tells me,” he says, “is that commanders, once given the authorization needed to strike, are more likely to strike when they see an opportunity – even if there’s a high chance of civilians being killed, too – because in their mind they might never get the chance to strike that target again.”

While drones are not the only method used to kill targets, they have become so prolific that they are now a standard part of U.S. military culture. Remotely piloted Reaper and Predator vehicles are often given nicknames. Among those used in Afghanistan, says the former JSOC drone operator, were “Lightning” and “Sky Raider.”

The latter drone, he adds, was also referred to as “Sky Raper,” for a simple reason – “because it killed a lot of people.” When operators were assigned to “Sky Raper,” he adds, it meant that “somebody was going to die. It was always set to the most high-priority missions.”

In addition to the GILGAMESH system used by JSOC, the CIA uses a similar NSA platform known as SHENANIGANS. The operation – previously undisclosed – utilizes a pod on aircraft that vacuums up massive amounts of data from any wireless routers, computers, smart phones or other electronic devices that are within range.

One top-secret NSA document provided by Snowden is written by a SHENANIGANS operator who documents his March 2012 deployment to Oman, where the CIA has established a drone base. The operator describes how, from almost four miles in the air, he searched for communications devices believed to be used by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in neighboring Yemen.The mission was code named VICTORYDANCE.

“The VICTORYDANCE mission was a great experience,” the operator writes. “It was truly a joint interagency effort between CIA and NSA. Flights and targets were coordinated with both CIAers and NSAers. The mission lasted 6 months, during which 43 flights were flown.”

VICTORYDANCE, he adds, “mapped the Wi-Fi fingerprint of nearly every major town in Yemen.”

The NSA has played an increasingly central role in drone killings over the past five years. In one top-secret NSA document from 2010, the head of the agency’s Strategic Planning and Policy Division of the Counterterrorism Mission Management Center recounts the history of the NSA’s involvement in Yemen. Shortly before President Obama took office, the document reveals, the agency began to “shift analytic resources to focus on Yemen.”

In 2008, the NSA had only three analysts dedicated to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. By the fall of 2009, it had 45 analysts, and the agency was producing “high quality” signal intelligence for the CIA and JSOC.

In December 2009, utilizing the NSA’s metadata collection programs, the Obama administration dramatically escalated U.S. drone and cruise missile strikes in Yemen.

The first strike in the country known to be authorized by Obama targeted an alleged Al Qaeda camp in the southern village of al-Majala.

The strike, which included the use of cluster bombs, resulted in the deaths of 14 women and 21 children. It is not clear whether the strike was based on metadata collection; the White House has never publicly explained the strike or the source of the faulty intelligence that led to the civilian fatalities.

Another top-secret NSA document confirms that the agency “played a key supporting role” in the drone strike in September 2011 that killed U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, as well as another American, Samir Khan. According to the 2013 Congressional Budget Justification, “The CIA tracked [Awlaki] for three weeks before a joint operation with the U.S. military killed” the two Americans in Yemen, along with two other people.

When Brandon Bryant left his Air Force squadron in April 2011, the unit was aiding JSOC in its hunt for the American-born cleric. The CIA took the lead in the hunt for Awlaki after JSOC tried and failed to kill him in the spring of 2011.

According to Bryant, the NSA’s expanded role in Yemen has only added to what he sees as the risk of fatal errors already evident in CIA operations. “They’re very non-discriminate with how they do things, as far as you can see their actions over in Pakistan and the devastation that they’ve had there,” Bryant says about the CIA. “It feels like they tried to bring those same tactics they used over in Pakistan down to Yemen. It’s a repeat of tactical thinking, instead of intelligent thinking.”

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hose within the system understand that the government’s targeting tactics are fundamentally flawed. According to the former JSOC drone operator, instructors who oversee GILGAMESH training emphasize: “‘This isn’t a science. This is an art.’ It’s kind of a way of saying that it’s not perfect.”

Yet the tracking “pods” mounted on the bottom of drones have facilitated thousands of “capture or kill” operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan since September 11. One top-secret NSA document provided by Snowden notes that by 2009, “for the first time in the history of the U.S. Air Force, more pilots were trained to fly drones … than conventional fighter aircraft,” leading to a “‘tipping point’ in U.S. military combat behavior in resorting to air strikes in areas of undeclared wars,” such as Yemen and Pakistan.

The document continues: “Did you ever think you would see the day when the U.S. would be conducting combat operations in a country equipped with nuclear weapons without a boot on the ground or a pilot in the air?”

Even NSA operatives seem to recognize how profoundly the agency’s tracking technology deviates from standard operating methods of war.

One NSA document from 2005 poses this question: “What resembles ‘LITTLE BOY’ (one of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II) and as LITTLE BOY did, represents the dawn of a new era (at least in SIGINT and precision geolocation)?”

Its reply: “If you answered a pod mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that is currently flying in support of the Global War on Terrorism, you would be correct.”

Another document boasts that geolocation technology has “cued and compressed numerous ‘kill chains’ (i.e. all of the steps taken to find, track, target, and engage the enemy), resulting in untold numbers of enemy killed and captured in Afghanistan as well as the saving of U.S. and Coalition lives.”

The former JSOC drone operator, however, remains highly disturbed by the unreliability of such methods. Like other whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, he says that his efforts to alert his superiors to the problems were brushed off. “The system continues to work because, like most things in the military, the people who use it trust it unconditionally,” he says.

When he would raise objections about intelligence that was “rushed” or “inaccurate” or “outright wrong,” he adds, “the most common response I would get was ‘JSOC wouldn’t spend millions and millions of dollars, and man hours, to go after someone if they weren’t certain that they were the right person.’ There is a saying at the NSA: ‘SIGINT never lies.’ It may be true that SIGINT never lies, but it’s subject to human error.”

The government’s assassination program is actually constructed, he adds, to avoid self-correction. “They make rushed decisions and are often wrong in their assessments. They jump to conclusions and there is no going back to correct mistakes.” Because there is an ever-increasing demand for more targets to be added to the kill list, he says, the mentality is “just keep feeding the beast.”

For Bryant, the killing of Awlaki – followed two weeks later by the killing of his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al Awlaki, also an American citizen – motivated him to speak out. Last October, Bryant appeared before a panel of experts at the United Nations – including the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, Ben Emmerson, who is currently conducting an investigation into civilians killed by drone strikes.

Dressed in hiking boots and brown cargo pants, Bryant called for “independent investigations” into the Obama administration’s drone program. “At the end of our pledge of allegiance, we say ‘with liberty and justice for all,'” he told the panel. “I believe that should be applied to not only American citizens, but everyone that we interact with as well, to put them on an equal level and to treat them with respect.”

Unlike those who oversee the drone program, Bryant also took personal responsibility for his actions in the killing of Awlaki. “I was a drone operator for six years, active duty for six years in the U.S. Air Force, and I was party to the violations of constitutional rights of an American citizen who should have been tried under a jury,” he said. “And because I violated that constitutional right, I became an enemy of the American people.”

Bryant later told The Intercept, “I had to get out because we were told that the president wanted Awlaki dead. And I wanted him dead. I was told that he was a traitor to our country…. I didn’t really understand that our Constitution covers people, American citizens, who have betrayed our country. They still deserve a trial.”

The killing of Awlaki and his son still haunt Bryant. The younger Awlaki, Abdulrahman, had run away from home to try to find his dad, whom he had not seen in three years. But his father was killed before Abdulrahman could locate him. Abdulrahman was then killed in a separate strike two weeks later as he ate dinner with his teenage cousin and some friends. The White House has never explained the strike.

“I don’t think there’s any day that goes by when I don’t think about those two, to be honest,” Bryant says. “The kid doesn’t seem like someone who would be a suicide bomber or want to die or something like that. He honestly seems like a kid who missed his dad and went there to go see his dad.”

Last May, President Obama acknowledged that “the necessary secrecy” involved in lethal strikes “can end up shielding our government from the public scrutiny that a troop deployment invites. It can also lead a president and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism.”

But that, says the former JSOC operator, is precisely what has happened. Given how much the government now relies on drone strikes – and given how many of those strikes are now dependent on metadata rather than human intelligence – the operator warns that political officials may view the geolocation program as more dependable than it really is.

“I don’t know whether or not President Obama would be comfortable approving the drone strikes if he knew the potential for mistakes that are there,” he says. “All he knows is what he’s told.”

Whether or not Obama is fully aware of the errors built into the program of targeted assassination, he and his top advisors have repeatedly made clear that the president himself directly oversees the drone operation and takes full responsibility for it. Obama once reportedly told his aides that it “turns out I’m really good at killing people.”

The president added, “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”

Ryan Devereaux contributed to this article.

The post The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program appeared first on The Intercept.