19-11-2015, 06:00 PM
(This post was last modified: 19-11-2015, 07:36 PM by Peter Lemkin.)
Glenn Greenwald on "Submissive" Media's Drumbeat for War and "Despicable" Anti-Muslim Scapegoating
NERMEEN SHAIKH: French authorities say the alleged mastermind behind last week's Paris attacks has been killed. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian national, is said to have died in Wednesday's police raid on an apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. The operation sparked an intense shootout and one other deatha female suicide bomber who detonated an explosive vest. Police say they confirmed Abaaoud's death through forensic tests on his remains. The news comes as Belgian police conduct raids across Brussels in the hunt for Paris attack suspects. Belgium says the raids are targeting people who may be connected to Bilal Hadfi, one of the alleged suicide bombers involved in Friday's attack on France's national stadium.
As the manhunts unfold, the governments of France and Belgium are each pushing a major expansion of state power in the attacks' aftermath. French lawmakers have begun debating President François Hollande's proposal to extend the state of emergency by three months. Hollande is also seeking the authority to allow police raids without a warrant and to strip citizenship from dual passport holders convicted of terrorism.
AMY GOODMAN: And in Belgium, Prime Minister Charles Michel has asked Parliament to approve a sweeping security bill that would double the antiterrorism budget, expand wiretaps, triple the allowed detention time without charge to 72 hours, and grant authorities the power to shut down mosques that preach messages deemed by the government to be hate speech.
Here in the U.S., top officials have seized on the Paris attacks to defend mass surveillance and to dismiss those who challenge it. Speaking at a cybersecurity conference Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey said intelligence and law enforcement officials need to have access to encrypted information on smartphones.
For more, we're joined by Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, co-founder of The Intercept, lead journalist who exposed NSA mass surveillance based on Edward Snowden's leaks.
Let's start, Glennand it's great to have you with us from Brazillet's start with how we know what we know took place in Paris, the media coverage of the horrific attacks of Friday the 13th.
GLENN GREENWALD: [inaudible] that we don't know, including much of which the media has simply tacitly assumed in order to mindlessly propagate what the CIA and other agencies in the U.S. government want people to believe. For instance, one thing we do not know at all is how the people who perpetrated the attack actually communicated with one another. We don't know whether they used the Internet at all, as opposed to simply meeting face to face, given that some of them were siblings and others of them were from the same neighborhoods in Belgium and France. We definitely don't know whether they used encryption. And we really don't even know the extent to which they actually took direction from or received funding or arms from ISIS in Syria.
And so, there's been this whole propaganda campaign to try and demonize encryption, demonize the Silicon Valley companies that have been providing it, such as Apple, Google and Facebook, and, of course, to demonize Edward Snowden and the journalists who work with him for supposedly teaching the terrorists how to use encryption. There are so many reasons why that claim is deceitful and false, and we can talk about those, but one of the most glaring omissions from the entire discussion is that nobody even has any idea whether the terrorists in this attack used encryption at all. And it really just shows you the extent to which propaganda is so easily circulated by the U.S. media in the wake of an attack.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, earlier this week, CIA Director John Brennan invoked the Paris attacks to defend mass surveillance. In apparent reference to disclosures by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Brennan suggested revelations about mass spying have made it harder to find terrorists.
GLENN GREENWALD: We have not heard such blatant, shameless lying from intelligence and military officials since 2002 and 2003, when they propagandized the country into invading Iraq based on utterly false pretenses. It is actually shocking to listen to John Brennan say that. And, in fact, the proof of just what a liar he is, is the fact that yesterday The New York Times editorial page, which is usually very constrained and very establishment-oriented, published an editorial that was remarkable in terms of the rhetoric it used, in which it called what the CIA is doing in terms of exploiting the Paris attacks a "new low" and "disgraceful." And it also pointed out that John Brennan, the head of the CIA and Obama's closest national security aide, is a pathological and an inveterate liar. And it detailed all the ways that he has been lying to the public about numerous issues for many years, and said, how can anyone possibly believe a word that comes out of his mouth?
As far as the specific claim that he just mentioned goes, there are so many reasons, so many obvious, clear, evidence-driven reasons why what he's saying is utterly false. To begin with, think about how many large-scale mass terrorist attacks were successfully perpetrated long before anyone knew the name Edward Snowden. You had the 2002 bombing of the nightclub in Bali, the 2004, 2005 attacks on the trains in Madrid and London, you had the 2008 mass shooting spree in Mumbai, you had the April 2013 attack on the Boston Marathonall of which were successful multi-terrorist plots carried out without the U.S. detecting them, long before anyone knew the name Edward Snowden. So, if you're somebody who wants to blame Edward Snowden or the disclosures for this attack, you have to answer: How did all those other attacks take place without the CIA or the NSA discovering them?
And the answer is very obvious. The answer is this: Terrorists have known for decades that the U.S. government is trying to read their emails and listen to their telephone calls. They didn't need Edward Snowden to tell them that. They've always known that. And they've known how to use sophisticated encryption. We have articles that we found going back to 2001, February of 2001, before the 9/11 attack, where the FBI is saying Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda use extremely sophisticated encryption in order to prevent us from spying on what it is that they're saying and what it is that they're plotting. You can even go back earlier, to the mid-1990s. After the McVeigh attack in Oklahoma City, the Clinton administration said we need to get backdoors into encryption because terrorists are using these to prevent us from knowing what they're saying. So, there's a huge mountain of evidence that shows that long before Edward Snowden came along, terrorists have been using really sophisticated encryption, because they know that the U.S. government is trying to spy on them.
What Edward Snowden taught the world is not that the U.S. government was trying to spy on terroristseverybody, including the terrorists, have always known that. What the Snowden revelations showed the world is that it isn't just the terrorists that they're spying on, but everybody in the world. That's why they're so angry about these terrorist attacks.
And then, the final point I would make about what Brennan said is that the reforms that he is complaining about and trying to imply are what caused them to be blind and not find the Paris attack, these legislative reforms, aside from the fact that they're incredibly mild, two critical points about these reforms that prove that what John Brennan is saying is a complete and total lie. Number one, the reforms that the Congress implemented after Snowden pertained only to domestic metadata collection, and not remotely to their ability to spy on foreign nationals on foreign soil. So there have been zero restrictions, in the wake of the Snowden revelations, on their ability to listen to people in France or Belgium or Syria or anywhere else outside of the United States. Secondly, the reforms that he's talking about haven't even started yet. They're not in effect. The Congress passed the metadata reform bill, but it hasn't yet been implemented. They're still collecting metadata exactly as they were three, four, five, six years ago, before Edward Snowden ever emerged. So nothing has changed in terms of their ability to spy on al-Qaeda or spy on ISIS or spy on anybody else.
What really is happening hereand this, to me, is the absolutely critical pointis that there are all sorts of ways that the U.S. government itself bears responsibility for strengthening ISIS. They have armed and funded groups in Iraq and Syria that ended up in the hands of ISIS. Just today, four whistleblowers from the U.S. Air Force, in The Guardian, said that a major recruiting tool of ISIS is Obama's drone program. Going around the world and killing Muslims drives people into the arms of ISIS. The closest U.S. allies in the worldSaudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates and other Gulf tyrannies, Qatar, toohave been funding ISIS more or less directly. And even the U.S. government itself admits this.
And then, on top of that, you have these agencies, like the CIA and the NSA, that have received tens of billions of dollars every year, and they have only one goal, only one mission. Their mission is to find people plotting terrorist attacks. And in the case of Paris, they profoundly failed at their job, and 129 people ended up dead as a result. So if you're John Brennan or other Obama national security officials or the head of the NSA, of course you want to go around and blame everybody else for your own failures. You want to be able to tell the world, "Don't look at us for having failed in our job to find these terrorist attacks. Blame Edward Snowden, or blame Facebook and Apple, or blame the journalists who reported on this secret mass surveillance programs we implemented." That's what's really going on here.
And you've heard almost none of what I just said in most media discussions, because what most journalists are doing is simply mindlessly repeating what government officials tell them to say, without any questioning, without any contrary evidence being presented, exactly like they did in the run-up to the Iraq War.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Glenn Greenwald, I want to ask you about the New York Times editorial. Your piece is headlined, "NYT Editorial Slams 'Disgraceful' CIA Exploitation of Paris Attacks, But Submissive Media Role Is Key." So, could you talk about what you think accounts for the editorial board taking a line that the other media has not mimicked?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, I think one of the things that's motivating it is that The New York Times itself published many, many Snowden documents. And this is a really important point. You have all these people who are saying Edward Snowden is to blame for the Paris attacks, even saying that he has blood on his hands, because of what he revealed to the world. And there's a huge amount of cowardice taking place with the people who are saying that. And the reason is this: Edward Snowden himself did not reveal a single document to the public. Not a single document. He could have. He could have uploaded them to the Internet. He could have made them public in other ways. He didn't. He came to journalists, to leading media outlets around the world, and said, "I'm not the one who should be making decisions about what the public sees. I want youyou, the editors and journalists at the leading newspapers and media outlets in the Westto make the decision about which of these documents should be published." And it is the leading media outlets in the WestThe New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, NBC News, The Huffington Post, Le Monde in Paris, El PaÃs in Spainall of the leading media outlets in the West and beyondThe Hindu in India, Globo here in Brazilthat made the choice to reveal these documents to the world and chose which documents specifically should be revealed.
So, if you have the courage of your convictions and want to say that what caused the Paris attacks is not the failures of the U.S. government or not the drone program or not ISIS, but rather the people we should blame are the ones who made these documents available, if you had the courage of your convictions, you would say the people who are to blame for the Paris attacks and the people who have blood on their hands are the top editors at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, ProPublica, NBC News, Der Spiegel, etc. Nobody is saying that. None of these journalists who are blaming Snowden or none of these think tank experts who are blaming Snowden are saying that, because they're total cowards. They don't want to blame the media outlets for making these documents available to the public, because they're petrified of losing their media access or because of craven careerism. They don't want to criticize the heads of these media organizations, because they're afraid of what impact that might have on their reputations or on their future career prospects. So they try and dump all the blame on Edward Snowden.
The reality is, though, that it is these leading media outlets that published these documents, and so The New York Times editors, who not only work at the paper that published a lot of these documents, but they also have been defending Snowden for the last two years. They were the first establishment outlet to actually call for amnesty to be given, full amnesty to be given to Snowden. So, I think that The New York Times understands how odious and disgusting and dangerous it is for the U.S. government to try and blame journalism and whistleblowers and transparency for their own failures, and try and shift blame away from themselves.
The problem is, is that there are a lot of journalists in the United States who, as we all knowanyone who lived through the Iraq War knows thiswho have used their role in life as being mindless servants to military and intelligence officials in the U.S. government. And their careers, in their view, are advanced when they kneel down and crawl on their hands and knees over to these officials and get whispered into their ear what they're supposed to say, and then they go and print it. So there's are all kinds of journalists, in all sorts of media outletsin Yahoo News, in The Daily Beast, in Politico, over and over, and even in The New York Times and The Washington Postwho are just mindlessly asserting that the reason the Paris attacks happened is because of encryption and Edward Snowden, even know there's all sorts of reasons to understand, as The New York Times pointed out, that this is a disgraceful lie. And they do that because that's their role: They are spokespeople for those in power, rather than watchdogs over them or adversarially scrutinizing them.
In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, media coverage has seen familiar patterns: uncritically repeat government claims, defend expansive state power, and blame the Muslim community for the acts of a few. We discuss media fearmongering, anti-Muslim scapegoating, ISIL's roots, and war profiteering with Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-founder of The Intercept. "Every time there's a terrorist attack, Western leaders exploit that attack to do more wars," Greenwald says. "Which in turn means they transfer huge amounts of taxpayer money to these corporations that sell arms. And so investors are fully aware that the main people who are going to benefit from this escalation as a result of Paris are not the American people or the people of the West and certainly not the people of Syria it is essentially the military-industrial complex."
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Our guest for the hour is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, as we turn to comments made by former CIA Director James Woolsey on Sunday. Speaking to NPR, Woolsey said Edward Snowden "has blood on his hands" following the Paris attacks.
GLENN GREENWALD: First of all, it's absolutely remarkable that James Woolsey, of all people, is the person who has been plucked to be the authoritative figure on the Paris attacks by leading media outlets such as CNN and MSNBC news, when he is by far one of the most extremist and radical neoconservatives ever to be puked up by the intelligence world. He not only was one of the leading advocates of attacking Iraq, he was one of the leading proponents of all of the lies that led to that invasion, and has been calling for war and other sorts of really extremist policies, and disseminating lies to the American people for decades. And so, to hold him out as some sort of authority figure, some kind of like respected elder intelligence statesman, on these attacks is just exactly the sort of thing we've been talking about, which is the state of the American media. Not one person has challenged anything that he said.
I should also note that what this really is about is this really shameless effort on the part of the CIA and other government officials to exploit the emotions that have been generated by watching the carnage in Paris for all sorts of long-standing policies. If you go back to 2013, the very same James Woolsey went on Fox News, and he saidthis was two years before the Paris attacks"Not only do I think Edward Snowden is a traitor, I think he should be hung by the neck until he's dead." That's the mentality of the kinds of people who the media is holding out as our leading experts.
And again, as far as who has blood on their hands, there's zero evidence that the attackers used encryption or anything else that was revealed as a result of Edward Snowden, but there's lots of evidence that the CIA utterly failed in their mission and that the U.S. government has done all sorts of things unwittingly to strengthen ISIS. And so, I think if you want to talk about who has blood on their hands, personally, I would look first to ISIS, the people who actually shot those people in the Paris streets. It's really weird. Usually after a terrorist attack, nobody is allowed to suggest that anybody has blame other than the terrorists themselves. But for some reason, in this case, leading establishment figures and journalists feel free to go around detractingdistracting attention from ISIS and saying, "No, it's not ISIS that has blood on their hands, it's Edward Snowden." For some reason, that's now allowed. So, if that's what we're doing, if that's the game we're playing, I would look to the U.S. government first, because they failed to find the plot despite huge amounts of money and unlimited power to do so, and because they've done all sorts of things to strengthen the group that apparently bears responsibility for this attack.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I'd like to turn to a clip from an Al Jazeera interview in August with the former head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael Flynn. The host, Mehdi Hasan, questions Flynn about how much the U.S. knew about the rise of the so-called Islamic State in Syria.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, that clip is unbelievable. It is literally one of the three most important military officials of the entire war on terror, General Flynn, who was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He's saying that the U.S. government knew that by creating a vacuum in Syria and then flooding that region with arms and money, that it was likely to result in the establishment of a caliphate by Islamic extremists in eastern Syriawhich is, of course, exactly what happened. They knew that that was going to happen, and they proceeded to do it anyway. So when the U.S. government starts trying to point the finger at other people for helping ISIS, they really need to have a mirror put in front of them, because, by their own documents, as that extraordinary clip demonstrates, they bear huge responsibility for that happening, to say nothing of the fact that, as I said, their closest allies in the region actually fund it.
And then, just to take a step further back, The Washington Post six months ago reported what most people who pay attention to this actually know, which is that what we call ISIS is really nothing more than a bunch of ex-Baathist military officials who were disempowered and alienated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent instability that it caused, and then the policies of thethe sectarian policies of Prime Minister Maliki in basically taking away all of the power of those ex-Baathists in favor of Shiite militias and Iran-aligned militias and the like. And so, essentially, what I think everybody at this point understands is that the reason there is such a thing as ISIS is because the U.S. invaded Iraq and caused massive instability, destroyed the entire society, destroyed all of the infrastructure, destroyed all order, and it was in that chaos that ISIS was able to emerge. So, again, if you're looking for blame, beyond ISIS, the U.S. government is a really good place to look.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to
GLENN GREENWALD: As far as why the mediago ahead. Sorry, go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: No, go ahead. Go ahead, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: So, as far as why the media is willing to sort of spread these claims so uncritically, I mean, you know, there are complicated reasons. I mean, one is that the media itself is very nationalistic, and they get wrapped up and caught up in the sort of uber-patriotism and jingoism as much as non-journalists do, and see the world through that lens. Another is that they spend a huge amount of time with these government officials. They are in the same socioeconomic sphere. They talk to them all day and night, because that's where they get their stories from, is the ones that are fed to them by officials. And so they see the world through their lens and also, at the same time, want to serve them and please them in order to continue to get sources. A lot of these people are people who work for large corporations, and large corporations want to keep positive relations with the U.S. government, and so report favorably on them rather than in a way that would anger the government, because that's not in their interest to do.
And then, finally, there's a lot of resentment and bitterness to the Snowden reporting among lots of journalists, because they were excluded from the story, though journalism won a lot of awards that they themselves have never won. And they hate Edward Snowden, and they hate the journalism that he enabled, and so this is sort of their chance to demonize not just him, but the journalism. And so, they're eagerly giving a platform to any U.S. officials who want to say that the person who has blood on their hands is Edward Snowden.
Our guest for the hour is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, speaking to us from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Let's turn to a clip from a CNN interview on Sunday morning with Yasser Louati from the Collective Against Islamophobia in France. CNN anchors John Vause and Isha Sesay spent several minutes grilling their guest on the role of the Muslim community in the Paris attacks.
GLENN GREENWALD: Honestly, that interview is so despicable that it almost leaves me speechless. I think that's probably the 10th or 11th time I've heard it, and it's still actually hard to believe that any human beings, let alone people calling themselves journalists, would say any of the horrific things that they said. I mean, I know Yasser, and, I mean, he's ayou know, he's a civil rights activist in Paris. He's very smart. He's very educated. He's very savvy about the law and about politics. And so, to go on and essentially accuse him of bearing responsibility for terrorist attacks because he's Muslim and the people who did it are Muslim, I mean, is so reprehensible.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, I was thinking, Glenn
GLENN GREENWALD: There's so many lies that those journalists said, tooyeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, I was thinking about, after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City building, if they had brought on white Christian male minister after minister and saying, "He is from your ranks. What do you say?"
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah. Or imagine if theyyou know, if they did a story on the Israeli who went to the gay and lesbian pride parade in Jerusalem a couple months ago and stabbed six people, and then every time they had a Jewish guest on, they said, "Why didn't you Jews, who obviously knew about this, do anything to stop it? And why aren't you, as Jews, condemning this and you bear responsibility?" They would be fired before the interview was over.
They also said that, you know, no Muslims are condemning this, which is a total lie. Every leading Muslim organization in the West issued statements immediately condemning the Paris attacks, like they always do in these cases. I wish they actually wouldn't do it, because it bolsters the idea that they have the obligation. But the reality is that they did. So, I mean, that's just one small part, is the lie that these journalists told.
But, you know, and then the other part is, is to say, "You, as Muslims, obviously knew about this plot and had the responsibility to stop it and yet failed to do so." All of the leading world's intelligence agencies, with tens of billions of dollars and massive surveillance infrastructure, had no idea about this plot, and yet they're telling Yasser Louati that he and every other Muslim in France obviously knew about it and should have stopped it and is guilty for not doing so. It's really despicable, but it's what's in the ether. It's absolutely the really scary climate that has emerged in the wake of Parisan extremely anti-Muslim strain of animosity that we've seen historically in the past, and that is both ugly and really dangerous.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Glenn Greenwald, let's go to one of the reasons that have been cited for the growth of the Islamic Statenot the Muslim community in France. The Guardian reported Wednesday that four former Air Force drone operators have written an open letter to Barack Obama warning that the program of targeted killings by drones has become a major driving force for ISIS and other terrorist groups. They write, quote, "[T]he innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantanamo Bay." Glenn Greenwald, could you respond to that?
GLENN GREENWALD: It's amazing how we just refuse to learn this lesson. I mean, obviously, there are some differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda, but there's many, many more similarities than differences. And one of the things that we should have learned and that a lot of people have learned, including not just, you know, left-wing activists or independent journalists, but even think tanksand even the Rumsfeld Pentagon commissioned a study finding thisthat what fuels and strengthens terrorist organizations is resentment toward the United States as a result of the policies that we engage in, the actions we engage in, in that part of the world. Yemen is probably the best example. If you talk to Yemenis, what they will tell you is, is that there was no al-Qaeda in Yemen, or very little al-Qaeda in Yemen, very weak and veryjust the presence was marginal and negligible, prior to the U.S. escalating its drone campaign in 2009, 2010, and killing huge numbers of civilians, which is what drove Yemenis into the arms of al-Qaeda and strengthened al-Qaeda to become al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
And so, of course, you will always have violent extremists. We have them in the United States, as Amy mentioned earlier, you know, people who are like Timothy McVeigh, anti-government extremists, or Christian extremists who kill abortion doctors, or white supremacists who go into a church in Charleston and shoot up people in a church for no reason other than hatred of their race. So you're always going to have violent extremists. You can't eliminate that. We're always going to have ISIS. You can't eliminate that.
The question then becomes: How do you avoid giving them an infrastructure of support and fueling and strengthening the willingness of people to run into their arms? And so much of what we're doing, from dropping bombs on civilians in virtuallyyou know, in multiple countries in that region, to pouring weapons and money into that region that end up in the hands of ISIS, is absolutely strengthening them. And as these four Air Force whistleblowers said this morning, the Obama drone campaign is a major recruitment tool for ISIS because people in that region constantly seejust like we just saw in Paris, they constantly see images of dead women and children and innocent men at the hands of the United States government. And just like we have anger toward ISIS when we see that and want to do violence to them, the people in that part of the world who see images of our victims want to do that, as well, to us, and running into the arms of ISIS is a natural thing for them to do.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, what about if the media did not see war as an option? So, for example, you have these horrific attacks in Paris. The immediate response is the pummeling of Raqqa. Yes, they say it's the headquarters of the Islamic State. It's got hundreds of thousands of civilians. France pummels it, the U.S. pummels it, Russia pummels it. Where are the questions in the media about the civilian death toll? And then the people, of course, fleeing that hellhole will be stopped from resettling anywhere, as we see from the United States to Europe. So, that question of broadening the discussion to peaceful options. Clearly, war has not worked for well over 14 years now. Taliban controls more of Afghanistan than it did before the U.S. invaded.
GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, Afghanistan is the perfect example, Amy, which is, you know, if you go back and listen to what American political leaders, in both parties, and journalists and pretty much the entire countryI mean, 90 percent of the American population supported the war in Afghanistan. I mean, there were a good number of people who didn't, but overwhelmingly people did. What everybody was saying at that time wasthey were speaking out of rage and anger and hatred and disgust for the Taliban for their involvement, or perceived involvement, or responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. And the idea was, we're going to go to Afghanistan, and we're going to obliterate the Taliban. We're going to basically just bomb them out of existence. And the Bush administration has a completely free hand, cheered on by the media and the overwhelming majority of the American population to do exactly that. And they tried. And yet, as you just said, 13 years later, the Taliban is stronger than ever, because you cannot do that. All you end up doing is turning the people of Afghanistan against you, and therefore driving them into the arms of the Taliban. We just won't learn that lesson.
And the reason we won't learn that lesson is twofold. Number one is, a lot of what is being stoked are really potent instincts in human natureour tribalistic instinct, our desire for vengeance, our desire to otherize people and then destroy them. And so, when you see carnage in ParisI'm sure it's true for you, I know it's true for meall of us have that impulse to say, "The people who did this are monsters, and we want to destroy them." But we, as human beings, have not only impulse, we also have reason. And the purpose of our reason is to control our instincts and impulses. We don't just act by instinct and impulse. If we did, we'd be the lowest-level animals. But the media is trying to stoke that id part of our brain, and so is the government, to just focus on vengeance and focus on the desire to obliterate, even when it's not in our interest to do so.
And then the second reason is, you know, the American media benefits immensely from war. A huge number of people watch CNN and MSNBC when there are wars. They get to go to war zones and dress up as soldiers, you know, with camouflage flaks, and they embed with the American media. It's exciting for them. They win awards as part of their career. They feel nationalistic. They feel like they have purpose. Telling people that they're part of a civilization war and fighting for freedom and democracy, that makes people feel really good, especially journalists. And so, journalists are hungry for war. You could basically see them drooling in that press conference they did with Obama a few days ago where they tried to badger him into sending ground troops into Syria. So, all of these emotions and all of these instincts and all of these really ignominious impulses are combining into this really toxic brew, that we've seen many times in the U.S. over the last severalyou know, since 9/11, but I don't think we have seen it quite as potently since 2002 or 2003. And it's amazing to watch everything just repeat itself.
AMY GOODMAN: Just to clarify on the issue of the Taliban, the Taliban control more of the country now than right after the U.S. invaded, when supposedly the U.S. was going to take charge and force the Taliban out. Nermeen?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yeah, Glenn Greenwald, talking about the increasing militarization of the conflict, you've spoken of the effects of pouring so many weapons into the region. And your recent article"one of your recent articles":https://theintercept.com/2015/11/16/stoc...is-attack/ is headlined "Stock Prices of Weapons Manufacturers Soaring Since Paris Attack." So could you talk about what you found? What arms manufacturers, and where, are increasing their arms sales?
GLENN GREENWALD: It was reallyit was amazing that the Paris attacks happened on Friday night, last Friday night, so the markets obviously weren't open over the weekend. They open first thing in the morning Monday. Instantly, if you had looked at the charts of the stock prices of the leading weapons manufacturers, not only in the United States, but also in France, there was a massive leap the minute the markets opened. It was like buyers were, investors were frothing at the mouth to buy the stock of the leading arms manufacturers, such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheonand then, in France, the leading one is ThalesThales is the French pronunciation, I believe. And in each case, you see this straight-up vertical line, beginning right at the beginning of the day, and then throughout the day the stock prices continued to increase from anywhere to 3 to 5 to 6 percent. And then, the following day, in a lot of cases, it continued, even as the rest of the market was basically flat or up very, very slightly. There was a huge gap between the weapons manufacturers' stock prices and the rest of the market.
And the reason is obvious, which is, every time there's a terrorist attack, Western leaders exploit that attack to do more war, as Amy was just saying, which in turn means they transfer huge amounts of American taxpayer money, and the taxpayer money in France and Great Britain, to these corporations that sell arms. And so, investors are fully aware that the main people who are going to benefit from this escalation as a result of Paris are not the American people or the people of the West, certainly not the people of Syria. It's essentially the military-industrial complex that is going to profit greatly.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the weapons manufacturers. What about the countries? If you canwe can end on Saudi Arabia, and we only have 30 seconds. U.S. just signing of one massive arms deal after another with Saudi Arabia.
GLENN GREENWALD: It's the weirdest part of the war on terror, which is that there's one country basically most identified with the 9/11 attacks and the ideology that drove it, and that happens to be the second-closest ally of the United States in that region, which is Saudi Arabia. They not only were responsible for lots of parts of al-Qaeda, but are funding, in lots of different ways, ISIS, as well. And yet we continue to hug them while waging war on countries that have never had anything to do with attacks on our country.
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/19/g...s_drumbeat
NERMEEN SHAIKH: French authorities say the alleged mastermind behind last week's Paris attacks has been killed. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian national, is said to have died in Wednesday's police raid on an apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. The operation sparked an intense shootout and one other deatha female suicide bomber who detonated an explosive vest. Police say they confirmed Abaaoud's death through forensic tests on his remains. The news comes as Belgian police conduct raids across Brussels in the hunt for Paris attack suspects. Belgium says the raids are targeting people who may be connected to Bilal Hadfi, one of the alleged suicide bombers involved in Friday's attack on France's national stadium.
As the manhunts unfold, the governments of France and Belgium are each pushing a major expansion of state power in the attacks' aftermath. French lawmakers have begun debating President François Hollande's proposal to extend the state of emergency by three months. Hollande is also seeking the authority to allow police raids without a warrant and to strip citizenship from dual passport holders convicted of terrorism.
AMY GOODMAN: And in Belgium, Prime Minister Charles Michel has asked Parliament to approve a sweeping security bill that would double the antiterrorism budget, expand wiretaps, triple the allowed detention time without charge to 72 hours, and grant authorities the power to shut down mosques that preach messages deemed by the government to be hate speech.
Here in the U.S., top officials have seized on the Paris attacks to defend mass surveillance and to dismiss those who challenge it. Speaking at a cybersecurity conference Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey said intelligence and law enforcement officials need to have access to encrypted information on smartphones.
JAMES COMEY: Nearly all the information we need to be effective sits on the private sector's infrastructure, which is a great thing. It's a wonderful thing that the Internet is in private hands in the United State. The expertise resides within the private sector. So if we're going to be good at what we do, we have to cooperate better. In the absence of effective cooperation, we are left in law enforcement like police officers patrolling a street with 50-foot-high walls on either side.
AMY GOODMAN: Comey's comments come despite no apparent evidence that the Paris attackers used encryption. Meanwhile, others have used the Paris attacks to criticize NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In recent days, CIA Director John Brennan has suggested revelations about mass spying have made it harder to find terrorists, while former CIA Director James Woolsey has said Snowden, quote, "has blood on his hands."For more, we're joined by Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, co-founder of The Intercept, lead journalist who exposed NSA mass surveillance based on Edward Snowden's leaks.
Let's start, Glennand it's great to have you with us from Brazillet's start with how we know what we know took place in Paris, the media coverage of the horrific attacks of Friday the 13th.
GLENN GREENWALD: [inaudible] that we don't know, including much of which the media has simply tacitly assumed in order to mindlessly propagate what the CIA and other agencies in the U.S. government want people to believe. For instance, one thing we do not know at all is how the people who perpetrated the attack actually communicated with one another. We don't know whether they used the Internet at all, as opposed to simply meeting face to face, given that some of them were siblings and others of them were from the same neighborhoods in Belgium and France. We definitely don't know whether they used encryption. And we really don't even know the extent to which they actually took direction from or received funding or arms from ISIS in Syria.
And so, there's been this whole propaganda campaign to try and demonize encryption, demonize the Silicon Valley companies that have been providing it, such as Apple, Google and Facebook, and, of course, to demonize Edward Snowden and the journalists who work with him for supposedly teaching the terrorists how to use encryption. There are so many reasons why that claim is deceitful and false, and we can talk about those, but one of the most glaring omissions from the entire discussion is that nobody even has any idea whether the terrorists in this attack used encryption at all. And it really just shows you the extent to which propaganda is so easily circulated by the U.S. media in the wake of an attack.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, earlier this week, CIA Director John Brennan invoked the Paris attacks to defend mass surveillance. In apparent reference to disclosures by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Brennan suggested revelations about mass spying have made it harder to find terrorists.
JOHN BRENNAN: In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of handwringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability, collectively, internationally, to find these terrorists much more challenging.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was CIA Director John Brennan. Glenn Greenwald, could you respond to what he said and also to how the media has covered Brennan's comments?GLENN GREENWALD: We have not heard such blatant, shameless lying from intelligence and military officials since 2002 and 2003, when they propagandized the country into invading Iraq based on utterly false pretenses. It is actually shocking to listen to John Brennan say that. And, in fact, the proof of just what a liar he is, is the fact that yesterday The New York Times editorial page, which is usually very constrained and very establishment-oriented, published an editorial that was remarkable in terms of the rhetoric it used, in which it called what the CIA is doing in terms of exploiting the Paris attacks a "new low" and "disgraceful." And it also pointed out that John Brennan, the head of the CIA and Obama's closest national security aide, is a pathological and an inveterate liar. And it detailed all the ways that he has been lying to the public about numerous issues for many years, and said, how can anyone possibly believe a word that comes out of his mouth?
As far as the specific claim that he just mentioned goes, there are so many reasons, so many obvious, clear, evidence-driven reasons why what he's saying is utterly false. To begin with, think about how many large-scale mass terrorist attacks were successfully perpetrated long before anyone knew the name Edward Snowden. You had the 2002 bombing of the nightclub in Bali, the 2004, 2005 attacks on the trains in Madrid and London, you had the 2008 mass shooting spree in Mumbai, you had the April 2013 attack on the Boston Marathonall of which were successful multi-terrorist plots carried out without the U.S. detecting them, long before anyone knew the name Edward Snowden. So, if you're somebody who wants to blame Edward Snowden or the disclosures for this attack, you have to answer: How did all those other attacks take place without the CIA or the NSA discovering them?
And the answer is very obvious. The answer is this: Terrorists have known for decades that the U.S. government is trying to read their emails and listen to their telephone calls. They didn't need Edward Snowden to tell them that. They've always known that. And they've known how to use sophisticated encryption. We have articles that we found going back to 2001, February of 2001, before the 9/11 attack, where the FBI is saying Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda use extremely sophisticated encryption in order to prevent us from spying on what it is that they're saying and what it is that they're plotting. You can even go back earlier, to the mid-1990s. After the McVeigh attack in Oklahoma City, the Clinton administration said we need to get backdoors into encryption because terrorists are using these to prevent us from knowing what they're saying. So, there's a huge mountain of evidence that shows that long before Edward Snowden came along, terrorists have been using really sophisticated encryption, because they know that the U.S. government is trying to spy on them.
What Edward Snowden taught the world is not that the U.S. government was trying to spy on terroristseverybody, including the terrorists, have always known that. What the Snowden revelations showed the world is that it isn't just the terrorists that they're spying on, but everybody in the world. That's why they're so angry about these terrorist attacks.
And then, the final point I would make about what Brennan said is that the reforms that he is complaining about and trying to imply are what caused them to be blind and not find the Paris attack, these legislative reforms, aside from the fact that they're incredibly mild, two critical points about these reforms that prove that what John Brennan is saying is a complete and total lie. Number one, the reforms that the Congress implemented after Snowden pertained only to domestic metadata collection, and not remotely to their ability to spy on foreign nationals on foreign soil. So there have been zero restrictions, in the wake of the Snowden revelations, on their ability to listen to people in France or Belgium or Syria or anywhere else outside of the United States. Secondly, the reforms that he's talking about haven't even started yet. They're not in effect. The Congress passed the metadata reform bill, but it hasn't yet been implemented. They're still collecting metadata exactly as they were three, four, five, six years ago, before Edward Snowden ever emerged. So nothing has changed in terms of their ability to spy on al-Qaeda or spy on ISIS or spy on anybody else.
What really is happening hereand this, to me, is the absolutely critical pointis that there are all sorts of ways that the U.S. government itself bears responsibility for strengthening ISIS. They have armed and funded groups in Iraq and Syria that ended up in the hands of ISIS. Just today, four whistleblowers from the U.S. Air Force, in The Guardian, said that a major recruiting tool of ISIS is Obama's drone program. Going around the world and killing Muslims drives people into the arms of ISIS. The closest U.S. allies in the worldSaudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates and other Gulf tyrannies, Qatar, toohave been funding ISIS more or less directly. And even the U.S. government itself admits this.
And then, on top of that, you have these agencies, like the CIA and the NSA, that have received tens of billions of dollars every year, and they have only one goal, only one mission. Their mission is to find people plotting terrorist attacks. And in the case of Paris, they profoundly failed at their job, and 129 people ended up dead as a result. So if you're John Brennan or other Obama national security officials or the head of the NSA, of course you want to go around and blame everybody else for your own failures. You want to be able to tell the world, "Don't look at us for having failed in our job to find these terrorist attacks. Blame Edward Snowden, or blame Facebook and Apple, or blame the journalists who reported on this secret mass surveillance programs we implemented." That's what's really going on here.
And you've heard almost none of what I just said in most media discussions, because what most journalists are doing is simply mindlessly repeating what government officials tell them to say, without any questioning, without any contrary evidence being presented, exactly like they did in the run-up to the Iraq War.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Glenn Greenwald, I want to ask you about the New York Times editorial. Your piece is headlined, "NYT Editorial Slams 'Disgraceful' CIA Exploitation of Paris Attacks, But Submissive Media Role Is Key." So, could you talk about what you think accounts for the editorial board taking a line that the other media has not mimicked?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, I think one of the things that's motivating it is that The New York Times itself published many, many Snowden documents. And this is a really important point. You have all these people who are saying Edward Snowden is to blame for the Paris attacks, even saying that he has blood on his hands, because of what he revealed to the world. And there's a huge amount of cowardice taking place with the people who are saying that. And the reason is this: Edward Snowden himself did not reveal a single document to the public. Not a single document. He could have. He could have uploaded them to the Internet. He could have made them public in other ways. He didn't. He came to journalists, to leading media outlets around the world, and said, "I'm not the one who should be making decisions about what the public sees. I want youyou, the editors and journalists at the leading newspapers and media outlets in the Westto make the decision about which of these documents should be published." And it is the leading media outlets in the WestThe New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, NBC News, The Huffington Post, Le Monde in Paris, El PaÃs in Spainall of the leading media outlets in the West and beyondThe Hindu in India, Globo here in Brazilthat made the choice to reveal these documents to the world and chose which documents specifically should be revealed.
So, if you have the courage of your convictions and want to say that what caused the Paris attacks is not the failures of the U.S. government or not the drone program or not ISIS, but rather the people we should blame are the ones who made these documents available, if you had the courage of your convictions, you would say the people who are to blame for the Paris attacks and the people who have blood on their hands are the top editors at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, ProPublica, NBC News, Der Spiegel, etc. Nobody is saying that. None of these journalists who are blaming Snowden or none of these think tank experts who are blaming Snowden are saying that, because they're total cowards. They don't want to blame the media outlets for making these documents available to the public, because they're petrified of losing their media access or because of craven careerism. They don't want to criticize the heads of these media organizations, because they're afraid of what impact that might have on their reputations or on their future career prospects. So they try and dump all the blame on Edward Snowden.
The reality is, though, that it is these leading media outlets that published these documents, and so The New York Times editors, who not only work at the paper that published a lot of these documents, but they also have been defending Snowden for the last two years. They were the first establishment outlet to actually call for amnesty to be given, full amnesty to be given to Snowden. So, I think that The New York Times understands how odious and disgusting and dangerous it is for the U.S. government to try and blame journalism and whistleblowers and transparency for their own failures, and try and shift blame away from themselves.
The problem is, is that there are a lot of journalists in the United States who, as we all knowanyone who lived through the Iraq War knows thiswho have used their role in life as being mindless servants to military and intelligence officials in the U.S. government. And their careers, in their view, are advanced when they kneel down and crawl on their hands and knees over to these officials and get whispered into their ear what they're supposed to say, and then they go and print it. So there's are all kinds of journalists, in all sorts of media outletsin Yahoo News, in The Daily Beast, in Politico, over and over, and even in The New York Times and The Washington Postwho are just mindlessly asserting that the reason the Paris attacks happened is because of encryption and Edward Snowden, even know there's all sorts of reasons to understand, as The New York Times pointed out, that this is a disgraceful lie. And they do that because that's their role: They are spokespeople for those in power, rather than watchdogs over them or adversarially scrutinizing them.
In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, media coverage has seen familiar patterns: uncritically repeat government claims, defend expansive state power, and blame the Muslim community for the acts of a few. We discuss media fearmongering, anti-Muslim scapegoating, ISIL's roots, and war profiteering with Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-founder of The Intercept. "Every time there's a terrorist attack, Western leaders exploit that attack to do more wars," Greenwald says. "Which in turn means they transfer huge amounts of taxpayer money to these corporations that sell arms. And so investors are fully aware that the main people who are going to benefit from this escalation as a result of Paris are not the American people or the people of the West and certainly not the people of Syria it is essentially the military-industrial complex."
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Our guest for the hour is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, as we turn to comments made by former CIA Director James Woolsey on Sunday. Speaking to NPR, Woolsey said Edward Snowden "has blood on his hands" following the Paris attacks.
JAMES WOOLSEY: I am no fan of the changes that were made after Snowden's leaks of classified information. I don't think they have improved our ability to collect and use intelligence, and I think they've seriously reduced our abilities. I think Snowden has blood on his hands from these killings in France.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to the former director of central intelligence, Glenn Greenwald, James Woolsey?GLENN GREENWALD: First of all, it's absolutely remarkable that James Woolsey, of all people, is the person who has been plucked to be the authoritative figure on the Paris attacks by leading media outlets such as CNN and MSNBC news, when he is by far one of the most extremist and radical neoconservatives ever to be puked up by the intelligence world. He not only was one of the leading advocates of attacking Iraq, he was one of the leading proponents of all of the lies that led to that invasion, and has been calling for war and other sorts of really extremist policies, and disseminating lies to the American people for decades. And so, to hold him out as some sort of authority figure, some kind of like respected elder intelligence statesman, on these attacks is just exactly the sort of thing we've been talking about, which is the state of the American media. Not one person has challenged anything that he said.
I should also note that what this really is about is this really shameless effort on the part of the CIA and other government officials to exploit the emotions that have been generated by watching the carnage in Paris for all sorts of long-standing policies. If you go back to 2013, the very same James Woolsey went on Fox News, and he saidthis was two years before the Paris attacks"Not only do I think Edward Snowden is a traitor, I think he should be hung by the neck until he's dead." That's the mentality of the kinds of people who the media is holding out as our leading experts.
And again, as far as who has blood on their hands, there's zero evidence that the attackers used encryption or anything else that was revealed as a result of Edward Snowden, but there's lots of evidence that the CIA utterly failed in their mission and that the U.S. government has done all sorts of things unwittingly to strengthen ISIS. And so, I think if you want to talk about who has blood on their hands, personally, I would look first to ISIS, the people who actually shot those people in the Paris streets. It's really weird. Usually after a terrorist attack, nobody is allowed to suggest that anybody has blame other than the terrorists themselves. But for some reason, in this case, leading establishment figures and journalists feel free to go around detractingdistracting attention from ISIS and saying, "No, it's not ISIS that has blood on their hands, it's Edward Snowden." For some reason, that's now allowed. So, if that's what we're doing, if that's the game we're playing, I would look to the U.S. government first, because they failed to find the plot despite huge amounts of money and unlimited power to do so, and because they've done all sorts of things to strengthen the group that apparently bears responsibility for this attack.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I'd like to turn to a clip from an Al Jazeera interview in August with the former head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael Flynn. The host, Mehdi Hasan, questions Flynn about how much the U.S. knew about the rise of the so-called Islamic State in Syria.
MEHDI HASAN: Many people would argue that the U.S. actually saw the rise of ISIL coming and turned a blind eye, or even encouraged it as a counterpoint to Assad. In a secret analysis by the agency you ran, the Defense Intelligence Agency in August 2012 saidand I quote"there is a possibility of establishing a declared"
MICHAEL FLYNN: Not so secret.
MEHDI HASAN: "or undeclared Salafist"it's not secret anymore. It was released under FOI. The quote is: "there is a possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in Eastern Syria ... and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime." The U.S. saw the ISIL caliphate coming and did nothing.
MICHAEL FLYNN: Yeah, I think that what wewhere we missed the pointI mean, where we totally blew it, I think, was in the very beginning. I mean, we're talking four years now into this effort in Syria. Most people won't even rememberit's only been a couple yearsthe Free Syrian Army, that movement. I mean, where are they today? Al-Nusra, where are they today, and what havehow much have they changed? When you don't get in and help somebody, they're going to find other means to achieve their goals. And I think right now what we have allowed is
MEHDI HASAN: Hold on, you were helping them in 2012, while these groups
MICHAEL FLYNN: Yeah, we've allowed thiswe've allowed this extremistyou know, these extremist militants to come in
MEHDI HASAN: But why did you allow them to do that, General?
MICHAEL FLYNN: Those arethose are
MEHDI HASAN: You were in post. You were the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
MICHAEL FLYNN: Yeah, right, right. Well, those arethose are policy
MEHDI HASAN: I took the liberty
MICHAEL FLYNN: Those are policy issues.
MEHDI HASAN: I took the liberty of printing out that document.
MICHAEL FLYNN: Yeah, yeah.
MEHDI HASAN: This is a memo I quoted from. Did you see this document in 2012? Would this come across your table [inaudible]?
MICHAEL FLYNN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I paid very close attention to all the [inaudible]
MEHDI HASAN: OK, so when you saw this, did you not pick up a phone and say, "What on Earth are we doing supporting these Syrian rebels?"
MICHAEL FLYNN: Sure. I mean, thatthat kind of information is presented, and
MEHDI HASAN: And what did you do about it?
MICHAEL FLYNN: those becomethose becomeI argued about it.
MEHDI HASAN: In 2012, your agency was saying, quote, "the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria."
MICHAEL FLYNN: Mm-hmm.
MEHDI HASAN: In 2012, the U.S. was helping coordinate arms transfers to those same groups. Why did you not stop that, if you're worried about the rise of, quote-unquote, "Islamic extremism"?
MICHAEL FLYNN: Yeah, I mean, I hate to say it's my job, but thatmy job was to ensure that the accuracy of our intelligence that was being presented was as good as it could be. And I will tell you, it goes before 2012I mean, when we were in Iraq, and we still had decisions to be made before there was a decision to pull out of Iraq in 2011. I mean, it was very clear what we were going to face.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was the former head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael Flynn, being interviewed by Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera. So, Glenn Greenwald, could you respond to that interview? And also explainyou've said repeatedly that the U.S. media tends to simply echo what U.S. government and military officials say. Explain what you think accounts for that.GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, that clip is unbelievable. It is literally one of the three most important military officials of the entire war on terror, General Flynn, who was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He's saying that the U.S. government knew that by creating a vacuum in Syria and then flooding that region with arms and money, that it was likely to result in the establishment of a caliphate by Islamic extremists in eastern Syriawhich is, of course, exactly what happened. They knew that that was going to happen, and they proceeded to do it anyway. So when the U.S. government starts trying to point the finger at other people for helping ISIS, they really need to have a mirror put in front of them, because, by their own documents, as that extraordinary clip demonstrates, they bear huge responsibility for that happening, to say nothing of the fact that, as I said, their closest allies in the region actually fund it.
And then, just to take a step further back, The Washington Post six months ago reported what most people who pay attention to this actually know, which is that what we call ISIS is really nothing more than a bunch of ex-Baathist military officials who were disempowered and alienated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent instability that it caused, and then the policies of thethe sectarian policies of Prime Minister Maliki in basically taking away all of the power of those ex-Baathists in favor of Shiite militias and Iran-aligned militias and the like. And so, essentially, what I think everybody at this point understands is that the reason there is such a thing as ISIS is because the U.S. invaded Iraq and caused massive instability, destroyed the entire society, destroyed all of the infrastructure, destroyed all order, and it was in that chaos that ISIS was able to emerge. So, again, if you're looking for blame, beyond ISIS, the U.S. government is a really good place to look.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to
GLENN GREENWALD: As far as why the mediago ahead. Sorry, go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: No, go ahead. Go ahead, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: So, as far as why the media is willing to sort of spread these claims so uncritically, I mean, you know, there are complicated reasons. I mean, one is that the media itself is very nationalistic, and they get wrapped up and caught up in the sort of uber-patriotism and jingoism as much as non-journalists do, and see the world through that lens. Another is that they spend a huge amount of time with these government officials. They are in the same socioeconomic sphere. They talk to them all day and night, because that's where they get their stories from, is the ones that are fed to them by officials. And so they see the world through their lens and also, at the same time, want to serve them and please them in order to continue to get sources. A lot of these people are people who work for large corporations, and large corporations want to keep positive relations with the U.S. government, and so report favorably on them rather than in a way that would anger the government, because that's not in their interest to do.
And then, finally, there's a lot of resentment and bitterness to the Snowden reporting among lots of journalists, because they were excluded from the story, though journalism won a lot of awards that they themselves have never won. And they hate Edward Snowden, and they hate the journalism that he enabled, and so this is sort of their chance to demonize not just him, but the journalism. And so, they're eagerly giving a platform to any U.S. officials who want to say that the person who has blood on their hands is Edward Snowden.
Our guest for the hour is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, speaking to us from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Let's turn to a clip from a CNN interview on Sunday morning with Yasser Louati from the Collective Against Islamophobia in France. CNN anchors John Vause and Isha Sesay spent several minutes grilling their guest on the role of the Muslim community in the Paris attacks.
JOHN VAUSE: It seems to me that this was a pretty big plan. Surely, someone beyond the seven guys who have been killed over the last 48 hours would have to have known something, and that was probably within the Muslim community, but yet no one said anything.
YASSER LOUATI: Sir, the Muslim community has nothing to do with these guys. Nothing. We cannot justify ourselves for the actions of someone who just, you know, claims to be Muslim. Our secret services knew about these guys. And again, just like during the January attacks, it turned out they were all, you know, on a blacklist somewhere, somehow, on a desk. So, right now we can't take responsibility for anything. Right now, what these terrorists are
JOHN VAUSE: Why not? What is the responsibility within the Muslim
YASSER LOUATI: blaming this for is belonging to the French nation. And
JOHN VAUSE: Sure. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt you, Yasser, but what is the responsibility
YASSER LOUATI: How can we be responsible if they are blaming our country
JOHN VAUSE: within the Muslim community to identify what is happening within their own ranks when it comes to people who are obviously training and preparing to carry out mass murder?
YASSER LOUATI: No, no, no, no, no. No, no, sir. No, no, no. They were not from our ranks. If they were trained, they were trained abroad. And what these terrorists are blaming our country for is for its failed foreign policy.
AMY GOODMAN: When the interview concluded with Louati, the anchors, John Vause and Isha Sesay, had this discussion.JOHN VAUSE: You know, I'm yet to hear, you know, the condemnation from the Muslim community on this. But we'll wait and see.
ISHA SESAY: I mean, you know, again, the point he's making is, it's not our fault. But the fact of the matter is, when these things happen, the finger of blame is pointed at the Muslim community. And so, you have to be preemptive. It's coming from the community. You've got toyou've got to take a stand and
JOHN VAUSE: The word "responsibility" comes to mind.
ISHA SESAY: Yeah, it just comes to mind. You can't shirk that.
AMY GOODMAN: That was CNN. Glenn Greenwald, you're a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Can you talk about what they said and how they treated this Muslim civil rights activist in Paris?GLENN GREENWALD: Honestly, that interview is so despicable that it almost leaves me speechless. I think that's probably the 10th or 11th time I've heard it, and it's still actually hard to believe that any human beings, let alone people calling themselves journalists, would say any of the horrific things that they said. I mean, I know Yasser, and, I mean, he's ayou know, he's a civil rights activist in Paris. He's very smart. He's very educated. He's very savvy about the law and about politics. And so, to go on and essentially accuse him of bearing responsibility for terrorist attacks because he's Muslim and the people who did it are Muslim, I mean, is so reprehensible.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, I was thinking, Glenn
GLENN GREENWALD: There's so many lies that those journalists said, tooyeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, I was thinking about, after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City building, if they had brought on white Christian male minister after minister and saying, "He is from your ranks. What do you say?"
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah. Or imagine if theyyou know, if they did a story on the Israeli who went to the gay and lesbian pride parade in Jerusalem a couple months ago and stabbed six people, and then every time they had a Jewish guest on, they said, "Why didn't you Jews, who obviously knew about this, do anything to stop it? And why aren't you, as Jews, condemning this and you bear responsibility?" They would be fired before the interview was over.
They also said that, you know, no Muslims are condemning this, which is a total lie. Every leading Muslim organization in the West issued statements immediately condemning the Paris attacks, like they always do in these cases. I wish they actually wouldn't do it, because it bolsters the idea that they have the obligation. But the reality is that they did. So, I mean, that's just one small part, is the lie that these journalists told.
But, you know, and then the other part is, is to say, "You, as Muslims, obviously knew about this plot and had the responsibility to stop it and yet failed to do so." All of the leading world's intelligence agencies, with tens of billions of dollars and massive surveillance infrastructure, had no idea about this plot, and yet they're telling Yasser Louati that he and every other Muslim in France obviously knew about it and should have stopped it and is guilty for not doing so. It's really despicable, but it's what's in the ether. It's absolutely the really scary climate that has emerged in the wake of Parisan extremely anti-Muslim strain of animosity that we've seen historically in the past, and that is both ugly and really dangerous.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Glenn Greenwald, let's go to one of the reasons that have been cited for the growth of the Islamic Statenot the Muslim community in France. The Guardian reported Wednesday that four former Air Force drone operators have written an open letter to Barack Obama warning that the program of targeted killings by drones has become a major driving force for ISIS and other terrorist groups. They write, quote, "[T]he innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantanamo Bay." Glenn Greenwald, could you respond to that?
GLENN GREENWALD: It's amazing how we just refuse to learn this lesson. I mean, obviously, there are some differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda, but there's many, many more similarities than differences. And one of the things that we should have learned and that a lot of people have learned, including not just, you know, left-wing activists or independent journalists, but even think tanksand even the Rumsfeld Pentagon commissioned a study finding thisthat what fuels and strengthens terrorist organizations is resentment toward the United States as a result of the policies that we engage in, the actions we engage in, in that part of the world. Yemen is probably the best example. If you talk to Yemenis, what they will tell you is, is that there was no al-Qaeda in Yemen, or very little al-Qaeda in Yemen, very weak and veryjust the presence was marginal and negligible, prior to the U.S. escalating its drone campaign in 2009, 2010, and killing huge numbers of civilians, which is what drove Yemenis into the arms of al-Qaeda and strengthened al-Qaeda to become al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
And so, of course, you will always have violent extremists. We have them in the United States, as Amy mentioned earlier, you know, people who are like Timothy McVeigh, anti-government extremists, or Christian extremists who kill abortion doctors, or white supremacists who go into a church in Charleston and shoot up people in a church for no reason other than hatred of their race. So you're always going to have violent extremists. You can't eliminate that. We're always going to have ISIS. You can't eliminate that.
The question then becomes: How do you avoid giving them an infrastructure of support and fueling and strengthening the willingness of people to run into their arms? And so much of what we're doing, from dropping bombs on civilians in virtuallyyou know, in multiple countries in that region, to pouring weapons and money into that region that end up in the hands of ISIS, is absolutely strengthening them. And as these four Air Force whistleblowers said this morning, the Obama drone campaign is a major recruitment tool for ISIS because people in that region constantly seejust like we just saw in Paris, they constantly see images of dead women and children and innocent men at the hands of the United States government. And just like we have anger toward ISIS when we see that and want to do violence to them, the people in that part of the world who see images of our victims want to do that, as well, to us, and running into the arms of ISIS is a natural thing for them to do.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, what about if the media did not see war as an option? So, for example, you have these horrific attacks in Paris. The immediate response is the pummeling of Raqqa. Yes, they say it's the headquarters of the Islamic State. It's got hundreds of thousands of civilians. France pummels it, the U.S. pummels it, Russia pummels it. Where are the questions in the media about the civilian death toll? And then the people, of course, fleeing that hellhole will be stopped from resettling anywhere, as we see from the United States to Europe. So, that question of broadening the discussion to peaceful options. Clearly, war has not worked for well over 14 years now. Taliban controls more of Afghanistan than it did before the U.S. invaded.
GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, Afghanistan is the perfect example, Amy, which is, you know, if you go back and listen to what American political leaders, in both parties, and journalists and pretty much the entire countryI mean, 90 percent of the American population supported the war in Afghanistan. I mean, there were a good number of people who didn't, but overwhelmingly people did. What everybody was saying at that time wasthey were speaking out of rage and anger and hatred and disgust for the Taliban for their involvement, or perceived involvement, or responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. And the idea was, we're going to go to Afghanistan, and we're going to obliterate the Taliban. We're going to basically just bomb them out of existence. And the Bush administration has a completely free hand, cheered on by the media and the overwhelming majority of the American population to do exactly that. And they tried. And yet, as you just said, 13 years later, the Taliban is stronger than ever, because you cannot do that. All you end up doing is turning the people of Afghanistan against you, and therefore driving them into the arms of the Taliban. We just won't learn that lesson.
And the reason we won't learn that lesson is twofold. Number one is, a lot of what is being stoked are really potent instincts in human natureour tribalistic instinct, our desire for vengeance, our desire to otherize people and then destroy them. And so, when you see carnage in ParisI'm sure it's true for you, I know it's true for meall of us have that impulse to say, "The people who did this are monsters, and we want to destroy them." But we, as human beings, have not only impulse, we also have reason. And the purpose of our reason is to control our instincts and impulses. We don't just act by instinct and impulse. If we did, we'd be the lowest-level animals. But the media is trying to stoke that id part of our brain, and so is the government, to just focus on vengeance and focus on the desire to obliterate, even when it's not in our interest to do so.
And then the second reason is, you know, the American media benefits immensely from war. A huge number of people watch CNN and MSNBC when there are wars. They get to go to war zones and dress up as soldiers, you know, with camouflage flaks, and they embed with the American media. It's exciting for them. They win awards as part of their career. They feel nationalistic. They feel like they have purpose. Telling people that they're part of a civilization war and fighting for freedom and democracy, that makes people feel really good, especially journalists. And so, journalists are hungry for war. You could basically see them drooling in that press conference they did with Obama a few days ago where they tried to badger him into sending ground troops into Syria. So, all of these emotions and all of these instincts and all of these really ignominious impulses are combining into this really toxic brew, that we've seen many times in the U.S. over the last severalyou know, since 9/11, but I don't think we have seen it quite as potently since 2002 or 2003. And it's amazing to watch everything just repeat itself.
AMY GOODMAN: Just to clarify on the issue of the Taliban, the Taliban control more of the country now than right after the U.S. invaded, when supposedly the U.S. was going to take charge and force the Taliban out. Nermeen?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yeah, Glenn Greenwald, talking about the increasing militarization of the conflict, you've spoken of the effects of pouring so many weapons into the region. And your recent article"one of your recent articles":https://theintercept.com/2015/11/16/stoc...is-attack/ is headlined "Stock Prices of Weapons Manufacturers Soaring Since Paris Attack." So could you talk about what you found? What arms manufacturers, and where, are increasing their arms sales?
GLENN GREENWALD: It was reallyit was amazing that the Paris attacks happened on Friday night, last Friday night, so the markets obviously weren't open over the weekend. They open first thing in the morning Monday. Instantly, if you had looked at the charts of the stock prices of the leading weapons manufacturers, not only in the United States, but also in France, there was a massive leap the minute the markets opened. It was like buyers were, investors were frothing at the mouth to buy the stock of the leading arms manufacturers, such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheonand then, in France, the leading one is ThalesThales is the French pronunciation, I believe. And in each case, you see this straight-up vertical line, beginning right at the beginning of the day, and then throughout the day the stock prices continued to increase from anywhere to 3 to 5 to 6 percent. And then, the following day, in a lot of cases, it continued, even as the rest of the market was basically flat or up very, very slightly. There was a huge gap between the weapons manufacturers' stock prices and the rest of the market.
And the reason is obvious, which is, every time there's a terrorist attack, Western leaders exploit that attack to do more war, as Amy was just saying, which in turn means they transfer huge amounts of American taxpayer money, and the taxpayer money in France and Great Britain, to these corporations that sell arms. And so, investors are fully aware that the main people who are going to benefit from this escalation as a result of Paris are not the American people or the people of the West, certainly not the people of Syria. It's essentially the military-industrial complex that is going to profit greatly.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the weapons manufacturers. What about the countries? If you canwe can end on Saudi Arabia, and we only have 30 seconds. U.S. just signing of one massive arms deal after another with Saudi Arabia.
GLENN GREENWALD: It's the weirdest part of the war on terror, which is that there's one country basically most identified with the 9/11 attacks and the ideology that drove it, and that happens to be the second-closest ally of the United States in that region, which is Saudi Arabia. They not only were responsible for lots of parts of al-Qaeda, but are funding, in lots of different ways, ISIS, as well. And yet we continue to hug them while waging war on countries that have never had anything to do with attacks on our country.
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/19/g...s_drumbeat
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass