09/14/13 – Marcy Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, September 15th, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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Alright, our guest today is the great Marcy Wheeler, otherwise known as Empty Wheel.
In the blogosphere, her website is emptywheel.net.
And she is good on just about everything.
And so today we'll be talking about the thankfully aborted, at least so far, war against Syria.
And also developing national security agency news.
Welcome back to the show, Marcy.
How are you doing?
I'm doing alright.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you back on the show here.
And of course, the biggest news of the week is the so-called Russian deal.
The seemingly off-the-cuff proposal by the Secretary of State that the Syrians could avoid airstrikes if only they would give up their chemical weapons.
Of course, this happened right at the same time it was becoming apparent that neither the Senate nor the House would pass an authorization for war.
So it was a nice out for the President.
Maybe we can talk a little bit about that.
But most importantly, let's talk about the deal itself.
And your latest piece here about expansive commander-in-chief claims backing up the deal.
Even as much as they have backed down.
Yeah, the Russians really threw us a lifesaver.
Because Obama was faced with the choice of either going to war without any backing from Congress.
So illegally according to U.S. law.
And without any backing, not just from the U.N., but from any other international body.
So it would be illegal internationally as well.
To do something which they admitted sort of both could spiral out of control and could end up helping the side of the rebels that have ties to al-Qaeda.
So that's where we were looking.
And now we walked into negotiations saying there'd have to be an automatic trigger if Syria didn't end up disarming its chemical weapons stocks.
Then the U.N. would have pre-agreed to war.
And that's not what came out this morning.
What was it that came out this morning?
Well, this morning, so Assad has agreed to give up his chemical weapons.
He's got to almost immediately tell the U.N. what he has.
And both the Russians and the United States agree on what was used, although that isn't being said publicly.
The U.N. will have its inspector's report come out Monday, and they're going to say the chemical weapons were used.
No one still has tied it to Assad ordering the attack, but we can come back to that.
But the important thing is that, well, if Assad fails to disarm, it will come back to the U.N. Security Council under Chapter 7, which would allow for a vote to authorize military punishment.
Nobody expects the Russians to support that.
So in other words, and the AP reported explicitly, the U.S. doesn't believe Russia would approve a strike in retaliation for Assad not holding up his side of the bargain.
But the United States has made it clear to the Russians that they believe that the commander-in-chief, meaning Obama, has the authority to go if national interest supports it.
So in other words, Obama's still saying, I might go in unilaterally in a way that would be illegal.
Maybe Obama could get more support from Congress in that circumstance.
I think he can get more support.
I don't think he can get by the House.
The numbers coming out from the Senate were that he couldn't even get 40 in the Senate when Lavrov kind of pounced on Kerry's comment and set up this deal.
Well, and that's part of the international conversation is he can sort of just leave out any question of Congress and just say, well, with or without the U.N. Security Council and leave the question of the Constitution to the side.
And that's the only enforcement mechanism.
And, I mean, to me what's really interesting and what's important, I mean, through the whole debate about the war, Kerry and Obama and everybody else were saying this is not about regime change.
Even while explicitly and on the record they were saying we have a covert program that is about regime change.
So, you know, the idea was we were going to go bomb the poop out of Assad.
That wasn't meant to be regime change.
But, you know, clearly it was going to weaken Assad and would make it easier for the rebels that were backing to achieve regime change.
And now one of, you know, whatever else this did, what it did do is it kind of committed us to disarming chemical weapons.
And, you know, it sort of puts the U.S. in an odd situation because even while that's happening, you know, there are press reports that make it clear we're continuing to arm the rebels that we like.
And so that sets up Russia having leverage down the road to prevent us from overturning Assad.
Right.
I mean, even the administration's numbers of 1,500, which didn't prove out on numbers of casualties from this chemical weapons strike, still dwarfed the numbers of people who've been killed in the Civil War.
And while cooperating with Russia might make it easier for us in Russia to craft some kind of end to the Civil War, in the immediate future, there's no sign of hope for the millions of refugees or for the, you know, Assad is still.
In fact, to some degree, this gives him an even bigger green light to continue to bomb his own people.
And it gives a green light to the rebels to continue to bomb back.
So it's not going to end the Civil War.
It's not going to do much for the Syrian people.
Well, and it seems perfectly plausible that the Kremlin can tell Assad what time to get up in the morning if they want to.
But how do the Saudis or the Americans control the jihadists that they've set loose on the other side?
Right.
I mean, you know, more importantly, how do we control the Saudis?
We're relying on the Saudis largely to prevent the civil, the rebel side of the Civil War from spiraling out of control.
And I don't trust Bandar bin Sultan.
Do you?
No, of course not.
But, you know, even if they could get him to go along by some kind of leverage, how does he get the jihadists that he sent there to obey him now that he sent them there?
You know what I mean?
It's not like they're government soldiers.
Right.
And I agree.
I think that Russia has quite a bit of leverage over Assad.
I mean, to some degree has, as you said, has pretty unlimited leverage over Assad.
And we don't have leverage over anybody, you know, or we don't have real leverage over anybody.
And, you know, certainly some of our partners, particularly Qatar, are saying, well, if you don't fund the good rebels, then we're going to continue to encourage the bad ones.
So we're still kind of stuck.
And who are these good and bad rebels?
Marcy, tell me.
Nobody knows.
Mother Jones had this great piece about what process we're using to ensure that only the good rebels keep the arms that we're giving them.
And it basically is the kind of paper receipt system that allowed nine billion dollars in cash in Iraq to walk away and allowed more billions in Afghanistan to walk away.
I mean, there's no we can't do this with money.
So there's no we can't ensure that money goes to the right people and stays with the right people.
That's been proven.
And in Libya, it also was proven that we can't we can't be sure to arm rebels and have the rebels give them back when they're done.
So you can bet that whatever weapons we do give are going to get into the hands of people who we'd prefer didn't have them.
Well, in this whole talk about moderates, I mean, what in the world is a moderate rebel in this circumstance anyway?
One of the claims Kerry made before Congress was that, oh, the rebels are by and large secularists, which doesn't sound, you know, most credible reports at least don't make that claim.
But he said that, oh, our allies in the region are going to ensure that the secularists are the ones who remain in power.
And of course, our allies in the region are led by a guy whose title is the custodian of the two holy mosques.
So I don't know why we're going to trust the Saudis to tell us who are the secularists and not because they're not exactly secularists themselves.
Well, and look, the reason that the Baathist fascist government of Syria is a secularist one is because it's a coalition of ethnic and religious minorities.
But nobody there's an atheist if that's what he's talking about.
And if the Baathist government falls and is replaced by a Sunni majority one, then they'll have a Sunni government.
Right.
I mean, come on.
And we'll go back to where we were with Egypt, except that it'll be on a more volatile side of Israel.
And now the FSA, there was this report.
There's been a couple of reports like this in regards to the chemical weapons attacks, supposedly, but also just who the rebels are and what they're up to, where I believe it was an Italian reporter was released and said that the FSA, that is the Americans friends among the rebels, they treated him like an animal and that when he was finally turned over to the Jabhat al-Nusra suicide bombers who have declared their sworn loyalty to Ayman al-Zawahiri, those guys actually had a little bit of a code of honor in the way that they treated him as a prisoner as compared to the completely corrupt CIA trained death squad types.
So, you know, it's just like the Farouk brigades.
They were being promoted for a while.
Well, these guys want to have elections.
Yeah, but then it was the guy from the Farouk brigade that was the cannibal eating the man's heart on video.
Right.
And that Mother Jones piece makes it clear that he's considered a moderate, the heart eater, or as Putin likes to call them, the liver eaters.
So it's not I mean, that's the thing is we don't have any control over what we have.
You know, we didn't unleash the civil war by any shade, but the Saudis and the Qataris certainly wanted to, you know, after Mubarak fell, they came up with an approach that said, fine, we'll use this, quote unquote, popular uprising to get rid of the people we want to.
And we'll, you know, make sure that we reinstall the people we like, which is what we've seen recently in Egypt.
And but but they don't you know, as you said, they don't have full control over what's going on.
And no matter how many nice reports we we can find to to claim to the contrary, we simply don't have that control.
And that's that's you know, I still don't see how we avoid going in with boots on the ground sometime in the next several years.
I don't because short of Assad's regime staying in power.
And I'm not saying I want that, but short of that kind of brutal dictatorship.
I don't see how given the Sunni extremists that are involved, how we don't have the kind of instability we're seeing in Iraq increasingly.
I mean, you know, when when the White House issued its first AUMF, they basically issued one that would allow it to go into other countries, including Lebanon, but even Iran.
And I made the point then that that would give the administration or AUMF that that even by its plain language.
And we know that the administration doesn't abide by plain language in AUMF, but even by its plain language would allow it would give it the authorization to use military force from the borders of Israel all the way, you know, well into Pakistan.
And and that's sort of where this could end up.
Well, and, you know, at this point, in fact, especially, you know, in regards to that language that what it said was they were basically referring to Hezbollah and Iran and their alliance with Syria and any cooperation and weapons traveling here or there that Obama can fight that, too, I think is what you're referring to.
But, of course, that would include Iraq, where America just fought a eight or nine year war to install Iran's best friends in the Shiite United Iraqi alliance led by the Dawa party in power in Baghdad.
And John Kerry, of course, has been complaining to Nouriel Maliki, hey, stop letting the Iranians fly planes full of weapons to Syria for Assad to use, where now we're on the side of the Sunni based insurgency against the Shiites there.
And so I wonder if that means that Obama was pushing literally for the authority to reinvade Iraq if he wanted to.
Well, he still has that active AUMF.
I mean, I bring that up pretty much every time I get on radio that we never ended that war formally.
And so if we feel a need to go back in, we've got the authorization to do so.
Yeah.
George Bush's big mistake.
And see, that's really the thing is, even though the most work America ever did over there was fighting the war in Iraq for the Iranians friends, that was the aberration.
The policy really has been since the Carter years to fight for the kings of Saudi Arabia.
Yeah.
So I guess that's what we're doing in Syria again now.
And right.
And and until I mean, look, until we get some leverage over the Saudis and, you know, for better and for worse, in both words, that's what the fracking that's why we've embraced fracking so blindly in this country, because we're trying to get some leverage over, you know, over the oil market.
But but until we get some leverage over the Saudis, we're still going to continue bumbling along in the Middle East.
And we're not going to take a step back and say, you know, how do you make this more stable and how do you make it better for the people who actually live there rather than, you know, continuing it as a chess game between Saudi King Abdullah and Vladimir Putin?
Well, and then, of course, you have the Likud party that rules Israel that apparently cannot think more than one week out strategically.
And apparently they would prefer to have al Qaeda to Hezbollah on their northern border there, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I can't explain that.
Well, OK, so let's talk about this end of it.
In Washington, D.C., the Israel lobby was virtually the only ones who actually were pushing for this thing other than just McCain and Lindsey Graham themselves.
There's no popular support for this war whatsoever.
All the phone calls and telegrams and emails and whatever were coming in at more than one hundred to one against this war across the country.
I guess if they just called people at home, they could get more people to support it than that.
But as far as anybody who was animated to call the Congress about it, they were virtually united against it.
And then you had AIPAC representing the Israel lobby up there or representing the state of Israel, more or less pushing for this thing.
And I wonder, you know, just what you think of this.
It seemed like a pretty historic victory, with or without AIPAC, that the American people would rise up against a war and really bring it to a halt like that.
But then I also wonder whether you think that this will be, you know, have much of an effect on their power and influence going forward after this is pretty much blown up in their face, it looks like.
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm really happy that Obama took the opportunity that presented itself, because I think going to war on the terms he was going to go to war on were going to be disastrous.
We haven't avoided the disaster yet.
And now we're stuck cooperating with Putin, which, you know, has its major downsides as well.
But I'm glad he took the opportunity.
But there's a part of me that really wishes the vote had taken place so that people in D.C. would learn they could actually stand up to AIPAC and get away with it, because we could use a little of that going forward.
Look, I mean, I think what actually terrifies the people in D.C. is that the left-right coalition, the anti-authoritarian coalition of libertarians, Ron Paul supporters, and progressives will be able to join together on issues like this.
And with the Amash Conyers bill on the NSA funding almost passing, and now with people coming out and saying, can we raise that again?
I'd like to vote against it.
And with this war effort, I think that, you know, on issues, there certainly is a whole swath of issues on which they're not going to agree.
But on a significant amount of issues, that coalition can defeat D.C. conventional wisdom, the people who are being enriched by the warmongers.
And that's really important for them to realize, because they haven't been afraid of continuing kind of brainless, stupid war national security policies before.
And now I think they're beginning to get not afraid yet, but at least worried.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it is.
It's a question of priorities.
I mean, there are all kinds of disparate factions in the Democratic Party and some disparate factions that unite to make up the Republicans.
And really, you know, if you put war in the Bill of Rights first, then, you know, maybe we need a whole new arrangement where you have the Democratic Republicans on one side and the war party on the other.
Because right now they've had it pretty much 50-50 in each party where you always have a Russ Feingold or a Ron Paul, but they're never the ones running things in either party.
You know what I mean?
Right.
And they will.
And up until now, they were never able to get 50 percent of the vote in both houses.
I don't think we're there yet in the Senate.
I mean, I think we're probably closer to 35 votes in the Senate, but clearly there were 207 votes for Amash Conyers, which didn't include a lot of progressives, but did include a lot of people who aren't really part of that libertarian wing of the Republican Party.
But we're getting close.
And certainly on the war, we were far beyond that on the Syrian war, but we're getting close to that 218 number.
Well, you know, politically, it's interesting how liberals and progressives and Democratic Party rank and file types, they pretty much gave Obama a free pass on escalating the Afghan war.
I mean, that doesn't even get any coverage at all.
He escalated that war for years over there.
And then also for Libya, too.
It was a nice, clean, surgical strike kind of a war, at least as far as TV portrayed it.
And there wasn't too much of a rebellion over that.
But on this one, the progressive left said, that's it.
No, you're not crossing this line.
And then, of course, on the right, they think that Obama is Kenyan, Black Panther, commie, Muslim, something, whatever.
And so a usurper to the rightful throne or however it is they conceive it.
And so they don't trust him to be the commander in chief.
All that stuff about support the troops means support the policy no matter what goes out the window for them.
And so it's a great confluence of politics this time and against a war.
It's really incredible.
Right.
I mean, the other thing that didn't happen, and I was one of those on the left who didn't give Obama a free pass on Libya, because on Libya, Libya was in many ways legally, constitutionally worse than the Iraq war was.
And one of the things that really irks me is that the people who are pushing this war in Syria have never done.
I mean, you know, the whole Benghazi thing was kind of nuts.
But what should have come out of the Benghazi attack a year ago, in addition to some focus on what the CIA was doing, which purportedly was arming the Syrian rebels.
But, you know, put that aside.
But what should have come out of Benghazi is a step back that says, you know, we couldn't we failed with both Iraq and Afghanistan and billions and trillions of dollars to establish a stable, somewhat stable country that that offers benefits to the people of that country.
We failed again in Libya.
You know, neither the surgical strike that purported surgical strike, nor these massive ground wars have succeeded in improving the welfare for people abroad.
And so, well, you know, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the to the notion that we don't want Gaddafi's and Assad's slaughtering their people.
We need to find better solutions.
And D.C. right now isn't finding those solutions, partly because, you know, there's one very well compensated hammer in D.C. in its war, and it's the war contractors and it's the people getting rich off this stuff.
And therefore, there's not even the ability to figure out how the U.S. can do good in the world.
Right.
All right.
Now, real quick, I'm sorry, we don't have too much time to discuss this, but I was hoping you could give us a little bit of a briefing on some of the most recent NSA revelations, Snowden revelations here, especially what the American government has been turning over on Americans to the Israelis.
Well, there's actually two really important revelations this week.
One is that the U.S. is violating, appears to be violating, although we don't know the timing on these, the minimization requirement.
What the government does is it goes to the FISA court and says, well, we'll take everything in the world, but here's how we're going to protect U.S. person identity.
And based on that, those assurances, the FISA court takes out its rubber stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp.
And one of the rules in those minimization procedures is you don't give unminimized data to any foreign country.
And I suspect there's always been these winks that say, sure, you give it to the five eyes, so Great Britain and all these other English speaking countries that also participate in spying with us.
But you don't give it to a country like Israel that is one of the most aggressive spires on the United States.
And yet it appears we actually do.
So the government is violating the minimization procedures that the court uses as its excuse to rubber stamp these massive data graphs.
One of the funniest things about that is that we had to tell the Israelis, oh, if you come across any data from congressmen or people in the executive branch or judges, you have to get rid of that.
And I guess that clarifies whether or not they're sucking up government data while we're collecting all of this.
But the other thing that came out this week is that EFF and ACLU have had this ongoing FOIA since 2011 on the Section 215 court documents.
And they got basically an entire ream of documents forced out of the Director of National Intelligence this week.
And they're stunning.
I mean, they are stunning.
They make it clear that the database that the government has been saying, oh, they've been trying to pretend that they only access it 300 times a year.
Back in the transition between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, and I think that's one of the things that was going on, they actually had 27,000 names that were approved or phone numbers that were approved for searching the database of all U.S. persons, 27,000.
And they, at that time, allowed more than the three hops which they now allow.
So if you do the math on that, they basically could use those names to map out the social networks of all Americans, everyone.
Right.
Now explain that, the three hops thing.
This is like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
It turns out, not just actors, it turns out everyone in the world is only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon, right?
Well, and people think that with the increased communication internationally, it's actually closer to four, and they were allowing four hops.
So in other words, you just keep rerunning the change, and you end up, because the identifiers, you know, it's not 300 identifiers, it's closer to 30,000, you know, 20, you know.
But also because they're allowing another level of hops beyond where they were at that point, beyond what they've been telling us they allowed.
It quite literally encompasses most of the United States would have.
And we don't know what they were doing.
Although one thing that these documents also made clear is that they were using this database, which shows the relationships of everyone in the United States, to find informants.
Right.
Now, really quickly now, because we're very short on time, but explain this.
This is how, well, this is the gigantic loophole.
Well, you know, we've been told that they were using this to find just terrorists.
So in other words, here's Al-Shabaab, here's a guy on the phone with Al-Shabaab.
Guess what?
This guy who's on the phone with Al-Shabaab is sending Al-Shabaab money.
Let's arrest him and prosecute him.
But they admitted in these documents, oh, by the way, we also use these to find informants.
And you find informants by finding people who break the law, but also by finding people who, for example, are engaged in an extramarital affair.
And that's the kind of thing that metadata shows you.
So, you know, basically this dragnet is, at least in 2008, was far more intrusive into the U.S., into Americans.
Lots of people who had no tie anywhere close to terrorism would be sucked up.
And they were using it not just to find guilty people, but to find people they could coerce into trying to entrap the guilty people.
Right.
Yeah, the quote unquote guilty, the entrap.
All right.
Amazing.
I'm sorry that we're out of time because there's so much more here to cover.
But thank you for coming back on the show, Marcy.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everybody, that is the great Marcy Wheeler.
Empty Wheel is what she's called on the Internet.
Emptywheel.net for her great blog.
Go and check it out.
That's it for Anti-War Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening, everybody.
We'll be back here next Sunday, 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. or the Pacifica station in your town whenever they play it.
Scott Horton.org for my full interview archive.
See you next week.
EMPTY WHEEL