Greenwald Moves On

[Peter Lemkin]

The NSA's Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program

By Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald10 Feb 2014, 12:03 AM EST131

Credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press.
The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.
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."
T
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.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/artic...cret-role/

[Peter Lemkin]

Death By Metadata: Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald Reveal NSA Role in Assassinations Overseas




In the first exposé for their new venture, First Look Media's digital journal The Intercept, investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald reveal the National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes. The NSA identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cellphone tracking technologies, an unreliable tactic that has resulted in the deaths of innocent and unidentified people. The United States has reportedly carried out drone strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cellphone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike. Scahill and Greenwald join us in this exclusive interview to discuss their report and the launch of their media project.


Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a breaking news story about the National Security Agency and its secret role helping the military and CIA carry out assassinations overseas. According to journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, the NSA is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
A former drone operator for JSOC, the military's Joint Special Operations Command, said the NSA identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cellphone tracking technologies, but it's proven to be an unreliable tactic that's resulted in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. The U.S. has reportedly carried out strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cellphone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike. The former drone operator, who was a source in the story, said, quote, "It's really like we're targeting a cell phone. We're not going after peoplewe're going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy," the quote says.
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald have also revealed the NSA has equipped drones and other aircraft with devices known as "virtual base-tower transceivers." These devices create, in effect, a fake cellphone tower that can force a targeted person's device to lock onto the NSA's receiver without their knowledge.
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald's article appears in the new online publication, TheIntercept.org, published by First Look Media, the newly formed media venture started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Glenn and Jeremy co-founded The Intercept with filmmaker Laura Poitras.
Glenn Greenwald Greenwald is the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. He was previously a columnist at The Guardian newspaper. He's joining us via Democracy Now! video stream from his home in Brazil.
Jeremy Scahill is producer and writer of the documentary film Dirty Wars, which has just been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. He's also author of the book by the same name. Jeremy joins us from Los Angeles.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Jeremy, let's begin with you. Lay out the significance of this explosive story.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Amy, we're living in the era of pre-crime, where President Obama is continuing many of the same policies of his predecessor George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. And there's this incredible reliance on technology to kill people who the United States thinksdoesn't necessarily know, but thinksmay one day pose some sort of a threat of committing an act of terrorism or of impacting U.S. interests. And the U.S. wants to shy away from having its own personnel on the ground in countries like Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, eventually Afghanistan, and so what's happened is that there's this incredible reliance on the use of remotely piloted aircraft, i.e. drones.
What we discovered in the course of talking to sources, including this new source that we have who worked with both the Joint Special Operations Command and the National Security Agency, is that the NSA is providing satellite technology and communications intercept technology to the U.S. military special operations forces and the CIA that essentially mimics the activities of a cellphone tower and forces individual SIM cards or handsets of phonesthere's two separate devices. When you have your telephone, your mobile phone, you have a SIM card in it, and that can be tracked, but also the device itself can be tracked. And what they do is they force the SIM card or the handset of individuals that they're tracking onto these cellphone networks, and the people don't know that their phones are being forced onto this cellphone tower that is literally put on the bottom of a drone and acts as a virtual transceiver. And so, when they are able to triangulate where this individual is, they can locate or track them to within about 30 feet or so of their location.
And what we understand is that under the current guidelines issued by the White House, President Obama gives a 60-day authorization to the CIA or the U.S. military to hunt down and kill these individuals who they've tracked with these SIM-card-tracking technologies or handset-tracking technologies, and that they only have to have two sources of intelligence to indicate that this is the individual that they're looking for. Those two sources cannotcan be signals intelligence, which is what I've just been describing, and they can also be what's called IMINT, or imagery intelligence, meaning just a satellite image of an individual that they think to be this suspected terrorist. They do not require an actual human confirmation that the individual SIM card or phone handset that they're tracking is in fact possessed by the person that they believe is a potential terrorist. And so, what we understand is that this is essentially death by metadata, where they think, or they hope, that the phone that they're blowing up is in the possession of a person that they've identified as a potential terrorist. But in the end, they don't actually really know. And that's where the real danger with this program lies.
And the reason that our source came forward to talk about it is because he was a part of this program and was a participant in operations where he knew the identity of one individual that was being targeted, but other people were killed alongside of that person. And he also said that he just felt incredibly uncomfortable with the idea that they're killing people's phones in the effort to kill them and that they don't actually know who the people are that are holding those phones.
AMY GOODMAN: And the source then is in addition to the documents that Edward Snowden released.
JEREMY SCAHILL: That's correct. In fact, when we first started talking with this source, he was describing the architecture of this program, where the NSA is working closely with the CIA and with the Joint Special Operations Command, and then we were able to validate what he was saying through the documents that were previously provided by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden.
Amy, the platform that the CIA is using in Yemen and other countries is known as "SHENANIGANS." It's interesting because the NSA uses a lot of sort of Irish terminology, BLARNEY STONE and otherLIMERICK, other operations. This one is called SHENANIGANS. And the platform that's used by the U.S. military is called GILGAMESH, or GMESH, for short. And that's this technology where they're able to not only triangulate the position of SIM cards and cellphones, but the NSA also puts a device on the drones, that are flying in various countries around the world, known as Air Handler, and the Air Handler device is literally just sucking up all of the data around the world. So it's sort of a secondary mission. In other words, in plain terms what I'm saying is that every time a drone goes out in an effort to track someone or to kill someone, the NSA has put a device on that that is not actually under the control of the CIA or the military, it is just sucking up data for the NSA. And as several former NSA people have told us, you know, the NSA just wants all the data. They want to suck it up on an industrial scale. So they're also piggybacking onto these targeted killing operations in an effort to just suck up data throughout the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Yet, I want to turn to President Obama, who was talking about drone strikes during that first major counterterrorism address of his second term. It was May 23rd, 2013.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And before any strike is taken, there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injuredthe highest standard we can set. Yes, the conflict with al-Qaeda, like all armed conflict, invites tragedy. But 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.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, respond.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Amy, first of all, we saw very recently that the U.S. carried out a drone strike that killed many members of a wedding party in Yemen. The question should be asked: How is it that those individuals were selected on that day for that strike? And, you know, what the president is saying is very misleading, according to people who actually work on this program. And in fact, when we asked the White House for comment, we went to the National Security Council spokesperson, Caitlin Hayden, and asked directly, "Is it true that you're ordering strikes where you don't actually have any human intelligence?" And the White House refused to directly answer that. They just said, "Well, we don't select targets based on only one source of intelligence." Well, we knew that already, and we told them that we knew that. The point here is that they don't actually have a requirement to confirm the identity of the individuals that they're targeting, and that's one of the reasons why we're seeing so many innocent people being killed in these strikes. It effectively amounts to pre-crime, where an acceptable level of civilian deaths is any civilians who die in the pursuit of a limited number of so-called bad guys.
AMY GOODMAN: Didn't the spokesperson also say, though, confirming that human intelligence was used
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: tried afterwards, but not beforeafter attack?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, I'm not sure that they're aware of the kind of twisted irony of the statement that they issued to us, because on the one hand they're refusing to acknowledge that they don't actually need to confirm the identity of people who they're trying to target for death; on the other hand they say, "Oh, well, when we kill someone, we do actually confirm whether or not civilians were killed by using human intelligence." So, it basically isthe standard is: We can kill you if we don't know your identity, but once we kill you, we want to figure out who we killed.
AMY GOODMAN: In Yemen, any human intelligence on the ground?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, yes. I mean, the U.S. does have a very limited presence. In fact, my understanding is that there are small teams of U.S. special operations forces, Navy SEALs and others, that are scattered in various remote locations around Yemen. Of course, the U.S. has long had a counterterrorism presence inside of the Yemeni capital, Sana'a. The CIA also has its own personnel.
But I want to underscore something that's a little bit of a nuanced point, and that is that inside of Yemen, the U.S. has largely outsourced its human intelligence to the Saudi government. And the Saudis have been playing their own dirty games, that have their own dirty wars inside of Yemen. And many times the Saudis will feed intelligence to the U.S. that is intended to benefit the regime in Saudi Arabia and not necessarily the stated aims of the U.S. counterterrorism program. They also rely on notoriously corrupt units within the Yemeni military and security forces that receive a tremendous amount of U.S. military and intelligence support and oftentimes will use that U.S. aid to target Yemeni dissidents or to be used in defense of various factions within the Yemeni state.
So, the short answer, Amy, is, yes, there is a very limited U.S. military human intelligence presence on the ground, but most of it, the overwhelming majority, is outsourced to the notoriously sort of corrupt Saudi regime and its operations and operatives and informants inside of Yemen.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We are broadcasting our exclusive first interview with Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald upon the publication just hours ago of their new piece, "The NSA's Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program." The article appears at TheIntercept.org, a new digital magazine launched today by First Look Media. Glenn and Jeremy co-founded The Intercept with filmmaker Laura Poitras. Glenn is with us from his home in Brazil, and we're going to talk about whether he plans to come into the United States. And Jeremy Scahill joins us from Los Angeles. Jeremy's film, Dirty Wars, has been nominated for an Academy Award.
Glenn, can you talk about the legality of publishing this information, the way it's been challenged by the administration? In your piece, you have Caitlin Hayden, spokesperson for the National Security Agency, saying, "the type of operational detail that, in our view, should not be published," she said, referring to the questions that you both were asking her. You are a former constitutional lawyer, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. The position of the U.S. government is that it's illegal to publish any kind of classified information that you are not authorized to receive. It's of course illegal, in their view, for a government employee or contractor to leak it without authorization. But their view, as well, is that it's actually illegal, even if you're a journalist, to publish it. And they believe that's especially the case if the information pertains to what they call signals intelligence. And if you look at the Espionage Act of 1917 and other relevant statutes, it does seem to say that it is illegal in the United States to publish that kind of information.
The problem for that view is that there's a superseding law called the Constitution, the First Amendment to which guarantees that there shall be a free press and that Congress and no other part of the government has the right to interfere with it. And one of the reasons why the government has been so reluctant about prosecuting journalists for publishing classified information, at least up until now, is because they're afraid that courts will say that application of this statute, or the statutes that I've described, to journalists is unconstitutional in violation of the First Amendment, and they want to keep that weapon to be able to threaten or bully or intimidate journalists out of doing the kind of reporting that they're doing.
So, every media lawyer will tell you that before you publish top-secret information, it's a good practice, for legal protection, to ask the government if they want to tell you anything they think you should know about the implications of publishing this material. They always say, "If you publish it, it will harm national security." But if you're a minimally decent journalist, that isn't good enough. You need specific information about what innocent people will really be harmed if you publish. They virtually never provide any such information. They didn't in this case. And so, it was veryit was an easy call to make, as journalists, to tell the American people about the methods that their government are using that result in the death of innocent people in ways that are easily preventable.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, you have been publishing many pieces all over the world since you first broke the story of Edward Snowden with the documents that he has released, downloading 1.7 million documents. What makes this story, "The NSA's Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program," different?
GLENN GREENWALD: Most of the stories that we published thus far have been about the way in which the NSA collects signals intelligence, tries to intercept the electronic communications of hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people around the world, hundreds of millions inside the United States. And that's what the U.S. government has told the American people is the role of the NSA, is to listen in on the communications of people who are threatening the United States in some manner.
This story has very little to do with those prior stories, in the casein the sense that this is not a case of the NSA trying to collect people's communications to find who is plotting with whom or what kinds of plots they're engaged in. This is the NSA using a form of signals intelligence to, first, determine who should be targeted for assassination based on an analysis of their metadatahas this person called what we think are bad people enough times for us to decide that they should dieand then, secondly, trying to help the CIA and JSOC find those individuals who have been put on a list of, basically, assassination, but not by finding where they are, but by finding where their telephone isa very obviously unreliable way of trying to kill people that is certain to result in the death of innocent people. And obviously, the source who came forward has said that that's exactly what has happened. So it's really an incredibly expanded role that we're revealing that the NSA engages in, far beyond what traditionally the American people are told about why this agency exists.
AMY GOODMAN: In addition, Jeremy, to the JSOC operator's account, you quote, in this first piece for TheIntercept.org, Brandon Bryant. Talk about the significance of his experience and who he is.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. First, just something to follow up on what Glenn says. You know, the teams from the NSA that are involved with this program are called geo cell, geolocation cells, and their motto is: "We track 'em, you whack 'em," meaning that the NSA will find these individuals, and then the military or the CIA will actually conduct or carry out these hits.
And as to the other question that we were talking about, about the relevance for people in the United States, you know, what we've seen, particularly since 9/11, but really throughout U.S. history, is that the kind of technology and the kind of operations, the sorts of tactics that the U.S. uses on citizens of other nations around the world in its military operations or intelligence operations, end up coming home to the United States, as well. And we believe that what we're doing here is public service journalism and that the American people have a right to know what kind of technology their government is developing that could potentially be used on them. But also, when innocent people are killed in these operations, it impacts American national security, as well, and ultimately undermines our safety, because we're creating more new enemies than we are killing terrorists at this point in what's been called, you know, the so-called "war on terror."
Brandon Bryant is a very important figure right now in this discussion. He spent years as what he called a "stick monkey" for the U.S. Air Force. He was a drone sensor operator and was part of theof over a thousandhis unit was part of over 1,500 kill operations around the world when he worked on the drone program. He also was working with the Joint Special Operations Command in the operation to target an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who of coursewe've talked about many times on this showwas an imam in Washington, D.C., who ended up becoming famous for his sermons denouncing U.S. around the world and calling for jihad against the United States, armed jihad against the United States. He was killed in September of 2011. And Brandon Bryant had worked on that operation until the spring of 2011, when the CIA took over and took the lead in that.
In fact, one of the documents that Glenn and I cite in our pieceand you can see an excerpt of it embedded in our storyreveals that the NSA actually played a role in the killing of Anwar Awlaki, and also it is revealed in this document that it was a joint operation by the U.S. military and the CIA. That is a new revelation on this case and could have an impact on the legal case that the family of Anwar Awlaki and another American citizen, Samir Khan, have filed against the Obama administration, because this actually shows the U.S. government acknowledging that the NSA, the CIA and the U.S. military were all involved in that operation.
And for Brandon Bryant, this former drone sensor operator, it was the killing of Anwar Awlaki, and then, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who was also an American citizen, that spurred him to speak out. And he, in fact, says, and we quote this in our piece, that he feels that he became an enemy of the American people by participating in those operations, because he denied due process to an American that should have had a right to a trial before being sentenced to death by drone.
AMY GOODMAN: You're saying Brandon Bryant said that, that he himself became an
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yes, Brandon Bryant said that. In fact, I mean, I don't have it in front of me, but you can read his own words in that piece, where he essentially says, you know, "I swore an oath to the Constitution, to uphold it and its values, and then I violated that by participating in the effort to kill this American citizen, who, albeit a very bad guy, deserved his day in court, rather than to just be sentenced to death by fiat from a president assuming emperor-like powers."
AMY GOODMAN: We interviewed Brandon Bryant on Democracy Now! in October. He described his first strike, which took place in Afghanistan in 2007 while he was sitting in a trailer at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

BRANDON BRYANT: We got confirmation to fire on these guys. And the way that they reacted really made me doubt their involvement, because the guys over there, the locals over there, have to protect themselves from the Taliban just as much as armeduswe do, as U.S. military personnel. And so, I think that they were probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the way thatI've been accused of using poetic imagery to describe it, but I watched this guy bleed out, the guy in the back, and his right leg above the knee was severed in the strike. And hishe bled out through his femoral artery. And it

AMY GOODMAN: You saw that on your computer screen?

BRANDON BRYANT: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: It's that detailed?

BRANDON BRYANT: Yeah, it's pixelated, but, I mean, you couldyou could see that it was a human being, and you could see thatwhat he was doing, and you could see the crater from the dronefrom the Hellfire missile, and you could see probably the body pieces that were around this guy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the other two that were in this strike?

BRANDON BRYANT: They were completely destroyed.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Blown apart.

BRANDON BRYANT: Blown apart.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you watched this guy bleed out for how long?

BRANDON BRYANT: You know, it's the femoral artery, so he could have bled out really fast. It was cold outside, you know, wintertime. It seemed like forever to me, but weas the Predator drone can stay in the air for like 18 to 32 hours, and so they just had us watch and do battle damage assessment to make sure thatto see if anyone would come and pick up the body parts or anyone really cared who these people were. And we watched long enough that the body cooled on the ground, and they called us off target.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Brandon Bryant, the former drone sensor operator with the U.S. Air Force who is quoted in this first article by Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald for their new publication, TheIntercept.org. And, Jeremy, just to follow up, that's the description of what happened in Afghanistan. And the quote you're referring to, on the killing of Awlaki, this quite remarkable quote of Brandon Bryant, saying, "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. And because I violated that constitutional right, I became an enemy of the American people."
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. And, you know, I mean, one thing that I know Glenn has experienced and I certainly have experienced in recent months is that since Edward Snowden made this decision that he was going to forever alter his life by going to Hong Kong and meeting with Glenn and Laura and taking the position that he's taken, he's inspiring other people within these apparatuses to speak out. And I think, you know, courage is indeed contagious. And I think we're going to hear more and more people from within the national security apparatus saying, you know, "I believe I'm a part of something that is violating our own Constitution and is violating my own morals and ethics." And I think we're going to see more and more people speaking out. And that's why on our site, at TheIntercept.org, we've created a secure drop center where people can give us tips anonymously, and we will protect their identities, and we encourage people to come forward and to speak about their experiences within thewhat's called the national security apparatus.
AMY GOODMAN: The former JSOC drone
GLENN GREENWALD: Amy, let me add just one thing?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, sure, just as far as that incredibly moving clip that we just listened to, I just wanted to make two quick points about the significance of what we published this morning. You know, there's a lot of debates about journalism and how it should best be practiced, but I think everybody ought to agree that journalism is supposed to be about informing the public of the truth, and especially debunking official lies. And a big part of our story and why we wrote it and published it was because you have President Obama running around saying that we only kill or target people when there's a near certainty there won't be civilian deaths, and, of course, we know that to be completely false, because the methods that we reported on have almost aI wouldn't say a near certainty, but a very high likelihood of killing the wrong people, killing innocent people.
But the other thing about it is, back in July, the NSA, in order to propagandize the public, went to The Washington Post to boast about the role they play in the killing program and talked about some of these methods. And The Washington Post just uncritically published what it was they were told. It was just a propaganda piece talking about all the great things the NSA does in helping the CIA and JSOC target people, not a word of the unreliability of these methods or the NSA's role in targeting and killing innocent people. And so, part of what we did was to come forward as an antidote to that false propaganda from the president and from The Washington Post and correct the record and make it complete. And that is a big part of what we see as the purpose of our new media outlet, not just to protect and encourage sources, as Jeremy said, to know that they can come forward and have their material reported on aggressivelythat's a huge part of what we're doingbut it's also to provide a corrective to the type of, quote-unquote, "journalism" that The Washington Post practiced here, where they just mindlessly repeated what government officials told them, with no investigation, no critical analyses, and therefore just misleading the public about what it is that is taking place.

[David Guyatt]

At the risk of sounding as though I, too, am having a bad hair day (a la Sibel Edmonds), it has been known for a long time that drone assassinations are based on mobile phone signal acquisition and a missile fired at that signal. The Israeli's have done this, for one thing.

So while the article is interesting and in the right direction, as the "first" article of their new venture it leaves me slightly underwhelmed, and wondering if they have more important news to reveal or whether this is the extent of their intended groundbreaking?

I'm now off to buy a comb....

[Peter Lemkin]

At the risk of sounding as though I, too, am having a bad hair day (a la Sibel Edmonds), it has been known for a long time that drone assassinations are based on mobile phone signal acquisition and a missile fired at that signal. The Israeli's have done this, for one thing.

So while the article is interesting and in the right direction, as the "first" article of their new venture it leaves me slightly underwhelmed, and wondering if they have more important news to reveal or whether this is the extent of their intended groundbreaking?

I'm now off to buy a comb....

You and I might have know it...but it is 'news' to the great number of persons...and they added details and some documents to better prove the contention. I concede, however, it is not groundbreaking, but it does present the material in a way that makes it usable in Court [the family of Al Awlaki and son are currently suing the USG. You and Sibel can have your bad hair days......I share many of Sibil's worries about this venture, as well.

[Magda Hassan]

Glenn Greenwald's great betrayal

17 February 2014

I'm a huge fan of Glenn Greenwald's work, and I very much hope his new media venture, the Intercept, is a success not just for his sake but for all of us who want to see the media landscape open up for independent journalists.
That said, I found his responses to Michael Albert in an interview on the problems of journalism utterly disillusioning. Questioned about the ideological constraints on journalists posed by the nature of the media's commercial, corporate interests, he comes across as smug and complacent. To be honest, he sounds like the Margaret Thatcher of new media.
Let's start with the best bit. Greenwald agrees with Albert that there are institutional and structural pressures on journalists. Here's what he says:

These kinds of biases [in media organisations] are cultural and generalized, not absolute. The Guardian has published Noam Chomsky many times [sic]. So has Salon. The nature of theories of media bias isn't that it's impossible to ever inject certain ideas into them. That's just not the case. Exceptions happen. But to the extent that you're suggesting that most journalists would find it uncomfortable and even damaging to their career to write critically of their employers, of course that's true. That's true everywhere, not just in journalism.

Unfortunately, that's the high point. It goes rapidly downhill from there.

I use my own experience as an example, but there are lots of other people who could report similarly. When I worked at Salon and at the Guardian, there were owners, funders, etc. They all had their own interests. But I negotiated into my contract to be able to write whatever I wanted and to publish directly onto the internet without anyone even looking at what I write much less having the ability to edit or change it except in the most extreme circumstances. And I think that one of the things we are seeing is that there are now journalists who are able to use the resources of institutions and enjoy certain benefits of the institution like readers and traffic, yet very much keep those institutions at arm's length so the dynamics that you described don't end up limiting or interfering in the kind of journalism they do and I guess it is up to the individual journalists to figure out ways to make that happen.

I find this more than hard to stomach. I worked for many years at the Guardian, and unless things have changed dramatically in the last decade Greenwald is talking complete nonsense in suggesting that the arrangement he secured with the newspaper is commonplace, or even possible for the overwhelming majority of journalists.
The word that I used in the past about the deal that Greenwald struck with the Guardian was "unique". Now, I'm prepared to be persuaded that things have changed enough in recent times that there are other journalists with such absolute independence written into their contracts, but I would want some evidence. And if there are a few a tiny elite at the Guardian like, maybe, George Monbiot, Polly Toynbee, Simon Jenkins the point would be that almost all of them are safely within the consensus of the Guardian. Most are veteran journalists who have proved that they are never likely to stray from a broad consensus the Guardian is comfortable accommodating.
The point about Greenwald what made his appointment so exciting to so many of us was our understanding that he did not fit into that safe consensus. The Guardian's decision to give him real independence was a very risky undertaking from its perspective. It was a sign of quite how desperately they needed him, as a way to bolster their credentials among a radical US readership (not least because a strong US presence might finally make their online advertising strategy profitable).
In short, Greenwald was able to dictate his terms. That is simply not possible for 99% of other journalists, least of all radical journalists. For Greenwald to suggest otherwise is, in my view, a betrayal of their struggle. In fact, it is the equivalent of blaming the victim. The inability of most radical journalists to get a high-paid, high-profile job at the Guardian or the Huffpo is, Greenwald implies, not related to structural problems in the industry; it's simply that they haven't, like him or Jeremy Scahill, worked hard enough at "figuring out ways to make that happen".
Or as Greenwald puts it at another point,

I agree that you do get a little ostracized [if you are radical] but again, you have to not succumb to it and instead fight for independence. So you are right that there are real institutional pressures, but I think there are ways to insulate yourself from them so you can do the kind of journalism that you want without regard for what anyone, including those in your media outlet, think about it.

Albert, to his credit, isn't falling for this. In the end, Greenwald's answers inadvertently prove the point that Albert is trying to make about structural constraints in the media. Greenwald is now a very well-paid senior journalist in the new media empire of Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder and multi-billionaire. Greenwald's self-made, entrepreneurial journalism philosophy sounds very much in line with what one would expect Omidyar to believe about the industry.
Albert asks a very important and penetrating question:

So, have you ever written a piece for the Guardian that reveals aspects of their structure, their decision making, their division of labor, their pay scales and internal culture, and shows the implications for the people involved and for journalism, and, if someone did that, what do you think would be the response? Has anyone at the Guardian ever written such a piece even about another corporation, for that matter, much less the Guardian itself? Can they even think those thoughts?

Here's Greenwald's answer:

Again, a lot of this depends on one's individual situation. Before coming to the Guardian I never wrote much about the internal decision-making processes of media outlets because the only work I had done with media outlets previously was at Salon, where I had total editorial independence and worked alone. The same was true at the Guardian, until I began reporting on the NSA documents. But I have zero doubt that had I been so inclined and thought I had worthwhile things to say about it I could have easily written about the internal processes of newspapers, including the Guardian, without being interfered with.

If someone had said something like this to Greenwald about any subject other than the media, I think he would have rightly torn their argument to shreds. Is Greenwald saying he cannot write about something unless he has direct experience of it? So did he ever work for the security services or the NSA? And does he really want to argue that he has "nothing worthwhile" to say ever about the role of corporations in controlling the media, the single most important prism through which we interpret the world and the events around us.
I can only hope enough readers and colleagues call Greenwald out over this interview that he is forced to do a reality check. Yes, Glenn, we hold you to a higher standard than almost anyone else. But that's because you're only any use as long as you stay honest. Lose that and you lose us.
www.newleftproject.org/adversarial_journalism_in_a_corporate
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2014-0...ign=buffer

[Lauren Johnson]

Post modern investigative journalism at its best.

[Magda Hassan]

Post modern investigative journalism at its best.

::laughingdog::

[Magda Hassan]

Looks good.

Matt Taibbi to Lead First Look's Next Digital Magazine

Former Rolling Stone journalist and best-selling author will build a team to report on financial and political corruption


February 19, 2014 08:44 PM Eastern Standard Time
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--First Look Media, the news organization created by Pierre Omidyar, today announced that acclaimed journalist and New York Times best-selling author Matt Taibbi will launch First Look's second digital magazine. Taibbi will help assemble a top-notch team of journalists and bring his trademark combination of reporting, analysis, humor and outrage to the ongoing financial crisis and to the political machinery that makes it possible. The magazine will launch later this year.

"Matt is one of the most influential journalists of our time"

Taibbi comes to First Look from Rolling Stone, where he served as a contributing editor for the past 10 years. During his tenure, he built a large and devoted following that has grown to rely on his in-depth and irreverent reporting on Wall Street and Washington. Whether busting Goldman Sachs for market manipulation or revealing the hidden roots of the student loan crisis, Taibbi has exposed and explained the most complicated financial scandals of the day with a fresh and compelling approach to journalism that has enraged and inspired millions of readers.
"Matt is one of the most influential journalists of our time," said Eric Bates, executive editor of First Look Media. "His incisive explorations of the financial crisis and Wall Street's undue influence over our political system have played a key role in helping to inform the public and transform the national debate. He is a journalist who can explain what a credit default swap is and why it's important and, make you bust out laughing while he's doing it. I look forward to having him on our team and helping him launch a dynamic new site unlike any other."
While at Rolling Stone, Taibbi won a National Magazine Award for his reporting on the 2008 presidential election, and was a finalist for his coverage of Occupy Wall Street. The author of two New York Times bestsellers, he earlier worked as reporter for the Moscow Times, an English-language expatriate newspaper, and co-founded The eXile, a bi-weekly newspaper based in Moscow. The paper became infamous for its satirical wit, as well as for hard-nosed reporting of corruption in both the Russian government and the American aid community. The paper was the only publication to correctly predict the 1998 Russian financial crisis.
"This is an incredible opportunity and a wonderful creative challenge," said Taibbi. "I'm looking forward to helping build a team that produces hard-hitting coverage of politics and the economy, but delivers it in a way that's fun, funny, and accessible. It's a new golden age for reporting and it's a real privilege to be part of this effort to create something innovative and lasting."
Taibbi will be based in New York City. The name and launch date of his digital magazine will be announced in the coming months. First Look Media's first online publication, The Intercept, led by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill, launched on February 10.
About First Look Media
First Look Media seeks to reimagine journalism for the digital age, combining the promise of technological innovation with the power of fearless reporting. Founded by Pierre Omidyar, the organization will pursue original, independent journalism that is deeply reported and researched, thoroughly fact checked, and beautifully told. We are driven above all by a belief that democracy depends on a citizenry that is not just highly informed, but deeply engaged. In all our work, we are committed to strict standards of accuracy and honesty, a willingness to report our own errors and inconsistencies, and a deep respect for the transformative power of true stories. To learn more, visit www.firstlook.org.

Contacts

For First Look Media
Gina Lindblad, 206-770-7082
gina.lindblad@firstlook.org

[Lauren Johnson]

Matt Taibbi made his reputation in his vicious, profanity laced attacks on Thomas Friedman. After he signed on with the Rolling Stone, they made him cut out the potty keyboard. I can't find his first few. They seem to have "vanished." But his essay Flathead is still a classic. Here is a snippet:

I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world's manganese supply. Who knew what it meant but one had to assume the worst.


"It's going to be called The Flattening," he whispered. Then he stood there, eyebrows raised, staring at me, waiting to see the effect of the news when it landed. I said nothing.


It turned out Alex had bad information; the book that ultimately came out would be called The World Is Flat. It didn't matter. Either version suggested the same horrifying possibility. Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s.


So I tried not to think about it. But when I heard the book was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:


I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.


Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one....

And this blog post, may be the best one minus the profanity. No Kidding. The Most Incoherent Tom Friedman Column Ever.

I realize this is not a statement anyone can make lightly, but: this morning's column by Thomas Friedman, "Syria is Iraq," is the single most incoherent thing he has ever written. It's… well, breathtaking is the only word. Others, like Glenn Greenwald, have already pointed out the column's most obvious contradictions. But for those who missed it, here are two passages that were written, not as a joke, by the same human being in the same opinion column. Start with passage #1:

And, for me, the lesson of Iraq is quite simple: You can't go from Saddam to Switzerland without getting stuck in Hobbes a war of all against all unless you have a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts to manage the transition. In Iraq, that was America.

Got that? Here's the second passage:

Because of both U.S. incompetence and the nature of Iraq, this U.S. intervention triggered a civil war in which all the parties in Iraq Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds tested the new balance of power, inflicting enormous casualties on each other and leading, tragically, to ethnic cleansing that rearranged the country into more homogeneous blocks of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

This pair of passages can be summed up in a Friedman-syllogism:
1. Syria will not become Switzerland unless it has the kind of help America gave to Iraq.

2. When America helped Iraq, it triggered a terrifying four-sided civil war that left the country reeling in blood-soaked, genocidal chaos and hopelessly partitioned along ethnic and religious lines very much like Switzerland, where a diverse collection of ethnic groups speaking different languages live peacefully under democratic rule.

3. Therefore, when your wife needs help giving birth, she should hire a midwife who stands outside the door and carries an automatic weapon.

This column today is so crazy I have to think Friedman is kidding. The line about how everyone on the ground in Iraq trusts America is especially awesome. Of course! True, you can't even open a Humvee door there to dump a pebble out of your shoe without getting your face shot off, but still, they trust us!

And yet the best thing of all is the rhetorical flourish at the end a rare triple-figurative dismount, which he sticks with Nadia Comăneci-esque confidence:

Without an external midwife or a Syrian Mandela, the fires of conflict could burn for a long time.

God bless this man. There's never been another like him!

Editor's note: Thanks to Justin Elliott at TwitLonger, who notes that this is at least the ninth time that Friedman has written a column calling for an Arab Mandela -- and at least the third time he has used the winning Arab-Mandela/midwife imagery combination.

A midwife? The US is a fucking midwife? A midwife that everybody trusts? :: ::headexplode::

[Magda Hassan]

Pierre Omidyar co-funded Ukraine revolution groups with US government, documents show

By Mark Ames
On February 28, 2014

Just hours after last weekend's ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, one of Pierre Omidyar's newest hires at national security blog "The Intercept," was already digging for the truth.
Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site's "senior policy analyst," speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a "coup" engineered by "deep" forces on behalf of "Pax Americana":

"There's quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is."

These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking.
Wheeler is partly correct. Pando has confirmed that the American government in the form of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) played a major role in funding opposition groups prior to the revolution. Moreover, a large percentage of the rest of the funding to those same groups came from a US billionaire who has previously worked closely with US government agencies to further his own business interests. This was by no means a US-backed "coup," but clear evidence shows that US investment was a force multiplier for many of the groups involved in overthrowing Yanukovych.
But that's not the shocking part.
What's shocking is the name of the billionaire who co-invested with the US government (or as Wheeler put it: the "dark deep force" acting on behalf of "Pax Americana").
Step out of the shadows…. Wheeler's boss, Pierre Omidyar.
Yes, in the annals of independent media, this might be the strangest twist ever: According to financial disclosures and reports seen by Pando, the founder and publisher of Glenn Greenwald's government-bashing blog,"The Intercept," co-invested with the US government to help fund regime change in Ukraine.
[Update: Wheeler has responded on Twitter to say that her Tweets were taken out of context, but would not give specifics. Adam Colligan, with whom Wheeler was debating, commented on Pando that "while Wheeler did raise the issue of external interference in relation to a discussion about a coup, it was not really at all in the manner that you have portrayed." Further "[Pax Americana] appeared after the conversation had shifted from the idea of whether a coup had been staged by the Ukrainian Parliament to a question about the larger powers' willingness to weaken underlying economic conditions in a state." Neither Wheeler or Colligan has commented on the main subject of the story: Pierre Omidyar's co-investment in Ukrainian opposition groups with the US government.]

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When the revolution came to Ukraine, neo-fascists played a front-center role in overthrowing the country's president. But the real political power rests with Ukraine's pro-western neoliberals. Political figures like Oleh Rybachuk, long a favorite of the State Department, DC neocons, EU, and NATOand the right-hand man to Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko.
Last December, the Financial Times wrote that Rybachuk's "New Citizen" NGO campaign "played a big role in getting the protest up and running."
New Citizen, along with the rest of Rybachuk's interlocking network of western-backed NGOs and campaigns "Center UA" (also spelled "Centre UA"), "Chesno," and "Stop Censorship" to name a few grew their power by targeting pro-Yanukovych politicians with a well-coordinated anti-corruption campaign that built its strength in Ukraine's regions, before massing in Kiev last autumn.
The efforts of the NGOs were so successful that the Ukraine government was accused of employing dirty tricks to shut them down. In early February, the groups were the subject of a massive money laundering investigation by the economics division of Ukraine's Interior Ministry in what many denounced as a politically motivated move.
Fortunately the groups had the strength which is to say, money to survive those attacks and continue pushing for regime change in Ukraine. The source of that money?
According to the Kyiv Post, Pierrie Omidyar's Omidyar Network (part of the Omidyar Group which owns First Look Media and the Intercept) provided 36% of "Center UA"'s $500,000 budget in 2012 nearly $200,000. USAID provided 54% of "Center UA"'s budget for 2012. Other funders included the US government-backed National Endowment for Democracy.
In 2011, Omidyar Network gave $335,000 to "New Citizen," one of the anti-Yanukovych "projects" managed through the Rybachuk-chaired NGO "Center UA." At the time, Omidyar Network boasted that its investment in "New Citizen" would help "shape public policy" in Ukraine:

"Using technology and media, New Citizen coordinates the efforts of concerned members of society, reinforcing their ability to shape public policy.
"… With support from Omidyar Network, New Citizen will strengthen its advocacy efforts in order to drive greater transparency and engage citizens on issues of importance to them."

In March 2012, Rybachuk the operator behind the 2004 Orange Revolution scenes, the Anatoly Chubais of Ukraine boasted that he was preparing a new Orange Revolution:

"People are not afraid. We now have 150 NGOs in all the major cities in our clean up Parliament campaign' to elect and find better parliamentarians….The Orange Revolution was a miracle, a massive peaceful protest that worked. We want to do that again and we think we will."

Detailed financial records reviewed by Pando (and embedded below) also show Omidyar Network covered costs for the expansion of Rybachuk's anti-Yanukovych campaign, "Chesno" ("Honestly"), into regional cities including Poltava, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Ternopil, Sumy, and elsewhere, mostly in the Ukrainian-speaking west and center.

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To understand what it means for Omidyar to fund Oleh Rybachuk, some brief history is necessary. Rybachuk's background follows a familiar pattern in post-Soviet opportunism: From well-connected KGB intelligence ties, to post-Soviet neoliberal networker.
In the Soviet era, Rybachuk studied in a military languages program half of whose graduates went on to work for the KGB. Rybachuk's murky overseas posting in India in the late Soviet era further strengthens many suspicions about his Soviet intelligence ties; whatever the case, by Rybachuk's own account, his close ties to top intelligence figures in the Ukrainian SBU served him well during the Orange Revolution of 2004, when the SBU passed along secret information about vote fraud and assassination plots.
In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Rybachuk moved to the newly-formed Ukraine Central Bank, heading the foreign relations department under Central Bank chief and future Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko. In his central bank post, Rybachuk established close friendly ties with western government and financial aid institutions, as well as proto-Omidyar figures like George Soros, who funded many of the NGOs involved in "color revolutions" including small donations to the same Ukraine NGOs that Omidyar backed. (Like Omidyar Network does today, Soros' charity armsOpen Society and Renaissance Foundationpublicly preached transparency and good government in places like Russia during the Yeltsin years, while Soros' financial arm speculated on Russian debt and participated in scandal-plagued auctions of state assets.)
In early 2005, Orange Revolution leader Yushchenko became Ukraine's president, and he appointed Rybachuk deputy prime minister in charge of integrating Ukraine into the EU, NATO, and other western institutions. Rybachuk also pushed for the mass-privatization of Ukraine's remaining state holdings.
Over the next several years, Rybachuk was shifted around President Yushchenko's embattled administration, torn by internal divisions. In 2010, Yushchenko lost the presidency to recently-overthrown Viktor Yanukovych, and a year later, Rybachuk was on Omidyar's and USAID's payroll, preparing for the next Orange Revolution. As Rybachuk told the Financial Times two years ago:

"We want to do [the Orange Revolution] again and we think we will."

Some of Omidyar's funds were specifically earmarked for covering the costs of setting up Rybachuk's "clean up parliament" NGOs in Ukraine's regional centers. Shortly after the Euromaidan demonstrations erupted last November, Ukraine's Interior Ministry opened up a money laundering investigation into Rybachuk's NGOs, dragging Omidyar's name into the high-stakes political struggle.
According to a Kyiv Post article on February 10 titled, "Rybachuk: Democracy-promoting nongovernmental organization faces ridiculous' investigation":

"Police are investigating Center UA, a public-sector watchdog funded by Western donors, on suspicion of money laundering, the group said. The group's leader, Oleh Rybachuk, said it appears that authorities, with the probe, are trying to warn other nongovernmental organizations that seek to promote democracy, transparency, free speech and human rights in Ukraine.
"According to Center UA, the Kyiv economic crimes unit of the Interior Ministry started the investigation on Dec. 11. Recently, however, investigators stepped up their efforts, questioning some 200 witnesses.
"… Center UA received more than $500,000 in 2012, according to its annual report for that year, 54 percent of which came from Pact Inc., a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Nearly 36 percent came from Omidyar Network, a foundation established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife. Other donors include the International Renaissance Foundation, whose key funder is billionaire George Soros, and National Endowment for Democracy, funded largely by the U.S. Congress."

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What all this adds up to is a journalistic conflict-of-interest of the worst kind: Omidyar working hand-in-glove with US foreign policy agencies to interfere in foreign governments, co-financing regime change with well-known arms of the American empire while at the same time hiring a growing team of soi-disant "independent journalists" which vows to investigate the behavior of the US government at home and overseas, and boasts of its uniquely "adversarial" relationship towards these government institutions.
As First Look staffer Jeremy Scahill told the Daily Beast…

We had a long discussion about this internally; about what our position would be if the White House asked us to not publish something…. With us, because we want to be adversarial, they won't know what bat phone to call. They know who to call at The Times, they know who to call at The Post. With us, who are they going to call? Pierre? Glenn?

Of the many problems that poses, none is more serious than the fact that Omidyar now has the only two people with exclusive access to the complete Snowden NSA cache, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Somehow, the same billionaire who co-financed the "coup" in Ukraine with USAID, also has exclusive access to the NSA secretsand very few in the independent media dare voice a skeptical word about it.
In the larger sense, this is a problem of 21st century American inequality, of life in a billionaire-dominated era. It is a problem we all have to contend withPandoDaily's 18-plus investors include a gaggle of Silicon Valley billionaires like Marc Andreessen (who serves on the board of eBay, chaired by Pierre Omidyar) and Peter Thiel (whose politics I've investigated, and described as repugnant.)
But what is more immediately alarming is what makes Omidyar different. Unlike other billionaires, Omidyar has garnered nothing but uncritical, fawning press coverage, particularly from those he has hired. By acquiring a "dream team" of what remains of independent media Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Wheeler, my former partner Matt Taibbi not to mention press "critics" like Jay Rosen he buys both silence and fawning press.
Both are incredibly useful: Silence, an absence of journalistic curiosity about Omidyar's activities overseas and at home, has been purchased for the price of whatever his current all-star indie cast currently costs him. As an added bonus, that same investment buys silence from exponentially larger numbers of desperately underpaid independent journalists hoping to someday be on his payroll, and the underfunded media watchdogs that survive on Omidyar Network grants.
And it also buys laughable fluff from the likes of Scahill who also boasted to the Daily Beast of his boss' close involvement in the day to day running of First Look.

"[Omidyar] strikes me as always sort of political, but I think that the NSA story and the expanding wars put politics for him into a much more prominent place in his existence. This is not a side project that he is doing. Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else. And he is not micromanaging. This guy has a vision. And his vision is to confront what he sees as an assault on the privacy of Americans."

Now Wheeler has her answer that, yes, the revolutionary groups were part-funded by Uncle Sam, but also by her boss one assumes awkward follow up questions will be asked on that First Look internal messaging system.
Whether Wheeler, Scahill and their colleagues go on to share their concerns publicly will speak volumes about First Look's much-trumpeted independence, both from Omidyar's other business interests and from Omidyar's co-investors in Ukraine: the US government.
Editor's note: Pando contacted Omidyar Networks for comment prior to publication but had not received a response by press time. We will update this post if they do respond.

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Chesno document showing total funding from USAID and Omidyar Network to "Centre UA":

Chesno document showing numerous Omidyar fundings for activities in regional cities:

09 09 2013 Chesno 2012 Finance Campain Final