All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is James Banford, former ABC news producer, author of the Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and the Shadow Factory, all about the National Security Agency, America's high-tech snoops.
He also wrote a pretext for war, 9-11 Iraq and the abuse of America's intelligence agencies, and a bunch of great articles for Rolling Stone and a lot of other places, for example, The Man Who Sold the War, a profile of John Rendon from the Rendon Group, who worked with the Iraqi National Congress to sell us the lies that led to war, and on and on like that, always top of the line, five-star journalism.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
It's been too long.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I really appreciate you joining us today, and I want to make sure everybody knows that at politico.com, they can find this article, Post 9-11 NSA, quote, enemies include us, and I want to talk about that, but I want to hold off for a minute because it's a really important big deal in the news today, the big fight between Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.
Again, they got into it last night over the reason for the September 11th attack, and this is something that you explained in great detail, and I think your conclusions are quite contrary to Rick Santorum's sort of George Bushian mythology about what happened on September 11th there, and you cover this in your book, A Pretext for War, 9-11 Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies in depth, and I was just wondering if I could get you to explain your way, what was the purpose of bin Laden and Zawahiri wanting to do an attack like that against Americans?
Was it just simply to kill as many people as possible because they hate us because we're free and they're Islamic, or what?
No, it was very clear.
I've written several books that go into that topic.
It's very clear if you look into his background that he was seeking, I mean, several ideas as to what the outcome he thought might be, but in terms of the reason, there's not much debate.
It's because the U.S. has this relationship with Israel that oppresses the Palestinians.
That was always his number one goal in getting back to the United States for that, and the other reasons are the U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia, putting U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, and also the U.S. support of the dictators in the Middle East, the king of Saudi Arabia, and on and on.
So you have those as the key reasons, and those are the key reasons that the terrorists largely decided to do this suicide attack.
Mohammed Atta, for example, he swore his allegiance to Osama bin Laden, basically decided to become a terrorist the day that Israel invaded Lebanon.
And the same day, he went into a mosque in Frankfurt, or in Hamburg, rather, and decided to write his last will and testament because of that.
So there's really no question that the reasons behind Osama bin Laden's attacks in the United States had their roots in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Okay, I think it's confusing to the Tea Party audience at the debate last night, it certainly was anyway, that on one hand, Ron Paul, the way he put it was, they are trying to get us out of the Middle East.
They hate us for being in the Middle East, and then he says they're trying to draw us further into the Middle East.
Is that contradictory?
What does that mean?
Well, I'm in London, so I didn't see any of the debate last night.
But I'm not, I can't say what he meant by it.
But from my own viewpoint, the reason that the...
Well, I've seen your book on the shelf behind Ron Paul, when he's doing these interviews from his home office down in South Texas.
I'm pretty sure he's learned this part of the story from you, Jim.
Well, I think what he's talking about is that the overall goal of Osama bin Laden wasn't just to blow up a few buildings in New York and Washington and let that be the end of it.
He had a long-term strategy in mind, and I think that strategy included the drawing the United States into a quagmire in the Middle East.
I mean, you can see by history, the worst defeat the United States had prior to the 9-11, or the wars post-9-11, was the Vietnam War.
And I think that's what he had in mind, was to humiliate the United States, teach the United States a lesson, saying, don't come into the Middle East anymore, lick your wounds, and go back and stay in the United States.
That's basically what happened after Vietnam.
We left Vietnam and never went back.
I can't read Osama bin Laden's mind, but I think that's a pretty good estimation of what he wanted, and if that was what he wanted, that is what happened.
Sure.
Well, you know, in the October 2004 speech, he says we basically, in a nutshell, he says we wanted to replicate what we did against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
And his son gave an interview to Rolling Stone about one year ago, and he said, And his son gave an interview to Rolling Stone about one year ago, saying that this is exactly what my father wanted, was to reproduce the war that America helped them fight back in the 1980s against the USSR.
Because they learned the lesson that as long as you have an AK and true belief in Allah, you can bring down the biggest empire in the world.
The Soviets first, and America, you're next.
Well, I agree.
And that's largely what I wrote in my book, was you had that bin Laden generation that was the first real successful generation of Arabs who defeated, instead of being defeated, as they were by the British and so forth, in past historical events, this was the first time they were actually able to defeat a Western power, and not only a Western power, but a Western superpower, the Soviet Union, and kick them out of Muslim country.
So now the second generation, the generation behind Osama bin Laden, was looking to do their part.
They thought that this was a good start, and we're going to continue it.
And they got rid of one superpower in the Middle East.
And so the idea was, now we'll get rid of the other superpower that's been oppressing us in the Middle East.
So I think there is a generational aspect to this.
Well, I think it was in 2006, not long after the Democrats won the midterm elections and took over the Congress, and the common myth was that they were going to do something to wind down the Iraq war or something like that.
And Ayman al-Zawahiri gave an interview to a Pakistani, I think, TV station, maybe it was a newspaper, saying that we don't want the war in Iraq to end yet.
We want the Americans to stay until they've lost three or four hundred thousand people.
That way, they'll be completely humiliated and bloodied and bankrupt, and then they'll really go.
Well, that was another aspect of it, was not just to humiliate the United States and force them out of the Middle East in the same way that we were basically forced out of Vietnam during the Vietnam War, at the end of the Vietnam War, but to bankrupt the United States.
That was sort of Reagan's philosophy during the Cold War, was to bankrupt the Soviet Union so that we would keep forcing them to build more arms, to put more money into military uses, and basically bankrupt them.
At least that's sort of the post-Cold War philosophy that people attribute to Reagan.
And again, that's largely what happened with 9-11.
It forced the United States into a very bad financial situation.
All right, we've got to leave it there.
We'll be right back with Jim Bamford right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line I've got James Bamford.
He's in England, so I guess that means guaranteed the National Security Agency is recording this call.
Jim's the author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory, all about the National Security Agency.
Is my assumption correct there, you think, Jim?
Well, that assumes that I'm important enough for them to listen to, so...
Well, it doesn't, though.
It only assumes that there's an ocean between you and I right now.
That's all, right?
That's right, yeah.
They could easily be suing me in.
So I remember after doing The Puzzle Palace, this is in 82, before the internet and all that, my publisher had a clipping service.
So, you know, if there was a story about me or a review about my book in a newspaper someplace, they'd send it to me, which I thought was really good, but they missed quite a few.
And when I did a Free Information Act request to NSA, they had everything.
I mean, they had every review I'd ever done.
They had every television show I'd ever done.
They had every radio program I'd ever done, all nicely transcribed there.
Well, it's pretty easy to see why, because what you know about the NSA, we get to find out by reading your great books.
And it's all, like, untouchable.
Who else's books about the NSA compare?
I guess there's one or two lately, but over 25 years, you've been writing about this.
No wonder they're...
Yeah, I mean, it's a sort of a passion of mine to follow the NSA over these years.
And when I started writing NSA, it had far less potential to get into everybody's mind and into everybody's communications than it does today.
I mean, there's almost no comparison.
Right.
Well, okay.
The new article is Post 9-11 NSA Enemies Include Us.
It's at politico.com.
And you, I think, make a pretty strong case in here that they can find out really kind of everything about you, including how you think, what your interests are in a depth that is unimaginable from the era of the Puzzle Palace.
Well, exactly.
At the time I wrote the Puzzle Palace in 1982, the only ways people could really communicate with each other was either on the telephone, which was all connected by wires in those days, or by the U.S. mail, which was...
And both of those were difficult for NSA to get.
The NSA had no access to the U.S. mail.
And everybody would be shocked if any government agent ever opened up somebody's letter.
And the NSA had limited amount of capability to eavesdrop on U.S. telecommunications, because they weren't hardwired into the U.S. telecommunications network.
They could only intercept satellite communications in and out of the U.S., which was somewhat limited.
Today, it's the opposite.
Today, they can read everybody's mail.
Not only can, they do.
They set up these secret rooms at the telecom switches around the country, so that all the emails coming in, going out, or going through the United States is what they call deep packet inspected.
It's inspected by the hardware and software before it ever gets to wherever it's going.
It goes into the secret room.
It gets analyzed by the software, and if it contains a word or a phrase or a name or an address or whatever that the NSA is interested in, it gets a copy of it.
It automatically gets sent to NSA for further analysis and later storage.
So, in that sense, the NSA could not only just hear what we're saying on the phone, but they could also, to a large degree, read what's going on in our minds.
Because it's not just the phone and the emails, which is the equivalent back in the early 80s of the telephone and the U.S. mail.
They could also, not only can, they do actively follow what people read on the internet.
So, if you're doing a Google search or you're looking for something on the internet, all that is transiting the American communication system.
And, again, that's where NSA is hardwired into.
So, if you happen to be looking up, if your name is on a target list and, you know, it's between half a million and a million people on the target list, and you're looking at something that they think is suspicious, or you happen to log into something that they're targeting, that they're watching, then you're a target.
You've become a target at that point, and they start eavesdropping on whatever you're doing.
There was a time in the early 80s when they had a foreign intelligence surveillance support that was fairly aggressive in terms of who they could eavesdrop on.
But the Obama administration has largely watered down the the FISA court, as well as the Bush administration.
So, those protections aren't, the level of those protections aren't there like they used to be.
Well, and it sounds like if they, with all the storage and all the software that they have for accessing all these different databases at once and everything, really, if they just found out about you yesterday and they wanted to know about you, really, once they hit enter, they just, it's basically like you've been under investigation all along, because you have this massive computer paper trail that gets assembled on one page, right then and there.
Even if they just started investigating you today, they have all of this stuff on you to look at.
Well, and in order to, because all that takes up space, and even though you can compress data very greatly these days, the NSA is just in the process of building this massive data storage center in Utah.
It's going to be a million square feet and cost two billion dollars.
And it's a million square feet.
So, you could, if you, you know, think how much you could put on a little thumb drive, maybe five gigabytes or whatever, something like that.
You can imagine how much information you could put in that NSA, this highly secret NSA storage facility.
Could be up to, you know, a yodabyte of data, which is, translates to somewhere around a trillion pages of text.
So, the idea is that the NSA really wants to capture as much information as possible and keep it there.
So, if today, you know, you're not much of a threat, tomorrow they might see that you're accessing pages that they find suspicious, and then they've already got a lot of your communications already stored.
So, it's a very worrisome thing, but the Congress pays no attention to it.
They give the NSA basically whatever they want.
And President Obama, at one point in the campaign, was making, or expressing his fears about this type of activity and saying he would actually veto amenities of telecom companies for taking part in this.
Completely changed his viewpoint once he became elected.
Yeah, well, actually, even in the Senate, he had promised to filibuster it, and he didn't, and said, well, I'm going to go up to the government officials, though, but I'm not going to, I'm going to give immunity to the private people that bowed to the government's wishes on this.
Then he became president and didn't do anything about it, either.
Well, he's not only not done anything about it, once he became president, he's greatly expanded this data center being built under his presidency.
You know, he's greatly expanded what Bush started.
So, yeah, he made all these great pronouncements about how he was a liberal and was angered by the infringements on U.S. liberties by the NSA and by the Bush administration.
And then when Bush comes to shove, when the vote comes up in the Senate, he completely reverses himself in favor of both the legislation that expanded NSA's powers, as well as the immunity to the telecom system.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
I'm sorry we don't have more time to talk about it, but I can suggest y'all go back and listen to previous interviews of James Bamford I've done over the years where we've covered this stuff in a little bit more depth.
And please, why not read?
There's no good reason why not to read The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, The Shadow Factory, and A Pretext for War is also great.
But those first three about the National Security Agency and also check out on NOVA.
They did a great special called The Spy Factory where they did the, you know, like NOVA on PBS.
It's the science of how the NSA has basically, as just described, taken up the project of this total information awareness on all of us.
And it's absolutely groundbreaking.
Journalism can't be beat.
James Bamford, thank you so much for your time, Jim.
My pleasure, Scott.
All right.
Y'all once more post 9-11 NSA quote enemies include us by James Bamford.
It's at politico.com right now.
We'll be right back.
