For Pacifica Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and tonight's guest is Marcy Wheeler, a.k.a.
The Empty Wheel.
She's a blogger who used to write The Next Hurrah, and then wrote at Fire Dog Lake for quite a while, and now she's back at her own blog, Empty Wheel, at EmptyWheel.net, and she writes so much, and of such high quality, it definitely goes in your list of bookmarks.
Welcome to the show, Marcy.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us this evening.
Glad to be here.
All right, so I thought we could treat this interview a lot like your blog, a hodgepodge of all different kinds of things.
You have mostly domestic police state-type stuff, but some overseas coverage, too, all kinds of interesting things to look at.
But first of all, before we get too far into domestic police state stuff, I was hoping that you could talk about your blog entry from the 16th, The Other Drinking Soldiers, and talk a little bit about your perspective on the story that this one guy, Sergeant Bales, was responsible for the Afghan massacre.
It seems like there's so much conflicting information coming in.
I just wonder where you're at on your understanding.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's a really remarkable media study since the massacre happened, because DOD immediately said one soldier, we won't tell you who it is, he's in custody, won't tell you who it is.
Very early on, Western reporters on the ground talked to some survivors, and the survivors all said more than one.
We heard drunken soldiers together, more than one soldier.
And then there was an Afghan parliamentary inquiry.
They said lots more.
And then just in the last day, you'll recall that Sergeant Bales in question, his story, which is all we get to hear about in the United States, but his story says, oh, well, one of his buddies lost a leg the day before this incident, and maybe that's why he went crazy and started killing everyone.
And if you watch the references to that, it's very interesting, because even his defense attorney says, well, yeah, Sergeant Bales and all the guys were really upset about that.
In the last day, there's been reporting that there was a roadside bomb that exploded the day before the incident, and I think there was another one three days before the incident.
And the local villagers, it happened right by one of the villages where the massacre happened, and the local villagers were told by Americans that there would be retribution for these roadside bombs, for IEDs, basically.
And that story is just coming out.
So there are at least indications that the soldiers in question, not just Bales, but everybody else who was involved in this unit, were really pissed off because they believed local villagers were setting off IEDs.
And it's not even clear that it would have been the villagers, because the Taliban are working there and they like to exacerbate relationships between the Americans and local villagers.
So there's this question of whether or not it was a response to an IED attack earlier in the week.
Yeah, almost it sounds like a Haditha massacre in slow motion.
The day after tomorrow, we're going to come back and do a Haditha massacre here.
Well, and there's a bunch of details that I don't think have got enough play.
For example, one of the most interesting witnesses, kinds of witnesses to this, is the Afghan Guard, because they're the ones who guard the perimeter of the forward operating base.
And then there are cameras and so on.
And there were three of them, I think, that have been interviewed by Western journalists.
And between the three of them, they support the notion that this guy, Bales, left the base twice that night.
And nobody has asked him that I've seen whether the first time he left, whether he left with more than one person.
There's the whole incident where one of the families, 11 people, mostly women and kids that were killed, they were burned.
Those bodies were burned.
There's actually a story in the Wall Street Journal today saying that a two-year-old may have been burned alive in that attempt to presumably cover up the bodies or cover up the evidence, which if your listeners do have access to Wall Street Journal, I really recommend it because it's told from the story of the villagers.
It tells about their family members that they lost.
And one guy said, well, at least I was able to buy my son the bike that they had asked for before they died.
It's really heartbreaking.
The title of it is Afghan Father Copes with Aftermath.
And the lead byline is Charles Levinson.
They describe how the Mohammed Wazir was off working and his entire family was massacred, and he came back to find them all dead.
He's the one who says his two-year-old might have been alive when the burning started.
Now, I guess it's sort of just left up to our imaginations or something.
I don't know if there's actually any real credible reporting about this either way.
Is there about whether it's possible or likely that one guy really did do all this himself or whether this had to have been a squad of men he's covering for them, perhaps involuntarily?
You know, I'm not sure we'll ever know.
And, again, one of the other interesting details is Bales, the defense attorney, said, this is going to take two years to go to trial.
And I find that, I mean, if you look at the example of Bradley Manning, that's not surprising.
But I find that really interesting because in two years' time, of course, most of our regular troops, at least, we'll still have special forces there, but most of our regular troops will have been pulled out from Afghanistan.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. tried to stall on the trial here so that any evidence that did come out would come out after, quote-unquote, we were no longer there.
Well, they sure were able to clamp down on even releasing his name with no leaks for a week, I think, until they deliberately decided to let it go.
So maybe the truth won't come out.
Well, and even flying him to the United States, the Afghans all say, I would like to try him in a local court.
We got him out of Afghanistan before we gave a name, and out of Kuwait because they didn't want him there.
But that means, at least as I understand the way military commissions work, that they're going to have a really difficult time forcing any Afghan witnesses or even getting any Afghan witnesses to testify.
And, of course, they're the ones who are the witnesses.
So I think it makes it likely that the trial is going to be relying on U.S. forensics and those videos they have and not a lot of the first-hand testimony from the Afghans.
All right.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with the empty wheel, Marcy Wheeler.
She's not so empty.
She knows a lot of things.
And, yeah, oh, I wanted to bring up a couple of footnotes there from the discussion of the massacre.
It was in the Australian and in the Christian Science Monitor, too.
Both had, and I think perhaps the Associated Press, but definitely the Australian and the Christian Science Monitor had stories where the local villagers described all the men being put up against the wall and warned, some of them thinking they were about to be shot right then and there, that we're coming back here and we're going to get revenge for this bomb that went off nearby.
So that's some pretty tough stuff.
All right.
So, again, yes, it is Empty Wheel on the line, EmptyWheel.net.
I wanted to ask you now about James Risen at the New York Times and the recent pieces.
In fact, there's a brand new one out in Reuters today, but I think the most important ones probably are James Risen at the New York Times has done two recent pieces about how the CIA and, in fact, the rest of the intelligence community and even in agreement with the Israelis have concluded, like we should already all know, that the Iranians are not making nuclear weapons and have not made the decision to begin making nuclear weapons.
And I was wondering if I could get your comment on the newsworthiness of the fact that James Risen wrote this in the Times, which is possibly the most important part of the story.
Right.
I looked.
James Risen had written, I think, 14 stories in the last year.
You know, he's been kind of busy trying to avoid testifying in another Iran case, which is the Jeffrey Sterling case, where Risen exposed the Merlin program, where we dealt nuclear blueprints to Iran as an attempt to make them screw up their development program.
And so I think it's notable that James Risen, who really hasn't been on his beat much, there's been some congressional stories.
There was a story or two, I think, about Qaddafi, how he was staying alive and the money he was getting.
And that's about it.
So it's, I think, remarkable to see Risen both talking about Iran intelligence again, and he even brought up another example from his book where somebody within the CIA basically wrote to all of the CIA's human assets in Iran and exposed them, because the person she was writing to was a double agent.
And then I also think it's interesting, because one of the interesting things about his story is he talked about the centrality of intercepts in our understanding of Iran right now, because we don't have humans on the ground.
Iran rolled up our forces in Iran again earlier in the last six months.
So we don't have human assets on the ground, and we're really relying on intercepts, which, of course, the NSA is the other big story that James Risen wrote.
I think it's also really interesting, given that the government is pursuing Risen for his sources so hard, I mean, who risks talking to Risen to get the story out there that Mossad agrees with us, which is that Iran doesn't have a nuclear program?
And I think that that is, I think you're right.
I mean, it's a very interesting counterpart to all of the long string of Sanger stories, and clearly there are people within the administration.
I mean, was it a sanction leak to Risen?
I don't know.
If it were sanctioned, they would go to David Ignatius, who seems to be the go-to guy for that lately.
And instead, they give it to Risen, and it's really important that Mossad also knows Iran doesn't have nukes.
It would be really nice if The New York Times could then get to the next point, which is why are we so gung-ho to go to war against Iran if it's not about nukes, which it's not.
It's about hegemony in the Middle East.
It's about Saudi control of the Middle East.
It's about our little oil world.
But, you know, I'm not convinced that the mainstream discourse is going to get there anytime soon.
Yeah, well, in fact, that's something that our assistant editor at Antiwar.com, John Glazer, has been keeping track of very closely on our blog there the past few weeks, is how many times officialdom comes out with, again, like the new Reuters piece today, reminding everyone that our own CIA says they're not making nukes over there in Iran, so don't panic.
And then how many times will all the cable TV news hosts, especially people like Wolf Blitzer, how many times will they just go on completely oblivious and run with the idea that, oh, you know, the Iranians, they could give a nuke to an al-Qaeda terrorist tomorrow, and no kind of truth or details or knowledge or anything has anything to do with it, really.
It's all just, well, like when the president talks.
It's just the teleprompter.
It doesn't have to have substance in it, really.
Right, right.
But, again, I mean, I think that's why it's important to have licensed reporting out there, because you're more trustworthy than a lot of these teleprompter journalists, as you might call them.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what?
It might sound strange to people hearing a conversation all about, you know, who's who of all these writers at the New York Times, but there's some real good journalists at the New York Times, and then there's David Sanger and Michael Gordon and some of these others who, you know, they may not actually even be journalists.
Sometimes I wonder whether they just work for someone else under the guise of journalism.
But anyway, in fact, that's sort of a segue into another thing I wanted to ask you about, Empty Wheel, which is Charlie Savage's work at the New York Times.
He's sort of their civil liberties beat reporter, and he's got a story about the Counterterrorism Center treating, as you write it at your blog, EmptyWheel.net, as though all of us are terrorists.
Say it ain't so.
Oh, it's so.
I mean, this is actually something that the National Counterterrorism Center and DOJ ended up releasing publicly to their credit.
I mean, basically, you know, it's the difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration.
The Bush administration did this all in secret.
This is an incredible power grab, and it's incredible.
I mean, they are basically implementing the total information awareness database that John Negroponte implemented a billion years ago and got shot down because American citizens didn't want it.
And what it basically amounts to is the National Counterterrorism Center has the authority.
Their job is to kind of collate all of the terrorist information.
They're not supposed to have say over domestic terrorist information, but because they're allowed to get domestic terrorist information if they need it, they're pointing that and saying, well, that allows us to get any federal government agency database that we can use it for data mining and then pass on the results of our data mining.
That's what it amounts to, and so they're going to take things.
I mean, you know, they're definitely going to take things like the visa applications that the State Department has, but who knows what else they're going to use.
I mean, are they going to use Social Security?
I mean, you know, surely they're going to use the terrorist, the no-fly list, but are they going to use financial data?
Are they going to use tax data?
Are they going to use health and human service data?
Are they going, you know, there's all of those databases.
If the National Counterterrorism Center argues that there's sufficient, that there's a bunch of terrorist information in there, then the National Counterterrorism Center now can go and say, okay, give me the entire database so that I can do pattern analysis on it and then pass on that information not just to other intelligence community entities, so not just to, say, DOD or CIA or what have you, but also they're allowed to share it with certain foreign allies.
Now, the Counterterrorism Center, is it part of any other agency?
It's part of, now it's under DNI, the Director of National Intelligence.
I see, but that's sort of just an office rather than a department.
But it's not under the Justice Department or the Department of Defense, though?
No.
This agreement yesterday came with significant involvement of DOJ.
And DOJ, you know, there's no oversight on this either.
In other words, I think what you're trying to tell me then is, you have this agency directly under the Director of National Intelligence, and they can integrate any kind of data from hook or crook or wherever they get it, whether it's FBI phishing expeditions or breaking into privately owned databases in the world or national security letters they delivered to the guy that you bought your truck from or whatever kind of thing, and integrate it all into this not terrorist database?
They're not telling us what databases they want, but the reason they say they need to do it is because, A, the people who are investigating Nidal Hassan within the army didn't have his contacts back and forth with Anwar al-Awlaki, so they're envisioning that somebody should have all that data in one place, meaning National Counterterrorism Center, which, as you said, I mean, that then means that they're going to go after the National Security Agency's intercepts of an American citizen, although Awlaki was an American citizen.
And then the other example they use, which is even more ridiculous, is the underwear bomber who, because the National Counterterrorism Center, because that entity itself screwed up and didn't get their databases together quickly enough, the underwear bomber, whose father had gone and reported him to the local embassy, and the State Department didn't get that information to the people who made the no-fly list quickly enough, the NCTC now says, well, we have to have all that information in real time.
Well, and that one's even worse, because I forget which Kennedy it was.
There's so many.
Maybe it was Patrick Kennedy from the State Department testified before Congress that they had flagged Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, and they were trying to keep him from traveling to America, but then they got notice from another American police and or intelligence agency that they wouldn't name publicly that told them that, no, we are watching this guy.
Go ahead and let him through.
And then that gets to become their excuse.
The fact that he almost, well, I don't know how close he really got, but the fact that he was able to try to blow up a plane over Detroit, that becomes their excuse to clamp down even further on you and me, Marcy?
Right.
I mean, that's the thing, is that nobody, if you recall, I mean, the Senate Intelligence Committee did a report trying to say whose fault was it, and they pretty much across the board said, I mean, the big entity that screwed up was the NCTC.
But nobody got fired, right?
And I don't know if you remember, but Michael Leiser, who was in charge of the NCTC at the time of the underwear bombing, he went skiing right after the attack.
So rather than firing him, they let him go skiing.
He stayed in government for another year and a half.
He left, I think, last summer.
And rather than holding him responsible, they're now going to take all of our data and make it accessible.
You know, NCTC is not supposed to have non-terrorism data, but if they can make an argument that says, well, there's a really good reason we'd like to have X, Y, and Z, then they're going to get, they're not only going to get, you know, they're going to be able to integrate the databases into their own and do pattern analysis, the kind of data mining that everyone was opposed to when, you know, when George Bush was pushing it.
All right.
And now, well, as always, there's too much to cover.
Of course, I talked with James Bamford earlier in the week about his new piece in Wired magazine and an update at Wired.com about the National Security Agency vacuuming up so much, or at least whatever it is that they want, of internal American communications and the government's denials, insisting that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court still decides on a case-by-case basis, despite much evidence.
And people can go to AntiWire.com/radio and find that archive soon enough anyway.
But I wanted to ask you real quick something that not nearly enough people have been writing about, but something that you have very importantly here at EmptyWheel.net is the Secret Patriot Act, basically.
In other words, a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act that says things that you can't find in there, but apparently a court or a bureaucrat somewhere can.
Can you explain?
Well, yeah.
And that actually goes back to Bamford's point, because when Pete Alexander, who's the head of the NSA, was asked, he said, oh, you know, we can't get that information.
Only the FBI can get that information.
And he didn't deny that the FBI is getting that information.
He only said that the FBI is.
And we have a lot of reason to believe they're getting a lot of that information, the call data, not the content, which they still, I think, need some kind of warrant for, but they're getting the call information, who called whom.
They're getting things like, and we know they're doing this, they're getting things like big lists of everyone who buys acetone and hydrogen peroxide.
They're getting things, and again, Ron Wyden has not confirmed this, but strongly indicated that this is part of what's going on.
They're getting our GPS information from our phone company and sticking all of that in the database.
And so I think if you put the stories together, what you're seeing is that the FBI is using what's called Section 215, which allows them to get quote-unquote business records.
And they're getting business records.
They're going to AT&T and saying, well, give me the GPS locations of all the people who have smartphones.
And they're dumping that into these.
And, you know, I mean, I don't really care who owns those databases in Utah, aside from the federal government, but we know that those databases in Utah store an unbelievable amount of data.
And we know, and that's what the NCTC stuff is.
So, you know, the timing is all remarkable that all these things are coming together because we know now that the NCTC has the ability to take these databases and data mine them.
And you're right, nobody is really talking about it.
But what it means is they're sucking up all of this data between the FBI, the NCTC, and the NSA.
It's going into these databases.
It's being data mined.
And your data and my data is in there along with people that they think might actually be terrorists, although given, you know, these definitions, who knows what they've got on them.
But that data will be there.
I mean, this latest NCTC thing is, well, it's only going to be there temporarily.
But our definition of temporary is five years, unless some executive order or some law or some other reason means we have to keep it.
So there's no reason to expect they'll get rid of this data in five years.
Zero.
Right.
Well, and that's how these things always work, too, is, well, look, we're just looking at these people, not those people, whatever.
And then the amendment comes a year or two later, and nobody really squawks.
But, yeah, it looks like we're headed toward a situation where, well, Christopher Ketchum wrote a piece for Counterpunch years ago about main core, where you don't really have to have some giant government supercomputer holding it all or anything.
All you need is a keyboard.
And you just type in the name and you hit enter.
And if you have access to the correct national government system there, then it will just pull together the ultimate file from every different source all at once for you.
And so the days of, you know, people who aren't criminals being tailed by the FBI, compiling these dossiers on them like J. Edgar Hoover times or whatever, all of that basically becomes automatic for any of us at the asking.
They just have to hit the button and all of a sudden the full file on empty wheel appears, you know, kindergarten on or whatever they got, your first shots.
Well, and not only that, but the standard they're using now, because they're doing it as pattern analysis, is they get to keep it and send it on to other agencies if they, quote, unquote, reasonably believe that you're a terrorist.
And their, quote, unquote, reasonable belief comes through pattern analysis, not like, you know, you got half tied to somebody who's actually a terrorist, but you've got five falafels from a falafel joint the terrorists also buy falafel from.
It's that kind of, you know, attenuated relationship that they're now arguing is proof that somebody's a terrorist.
And, of course, none of this data will ever go to court where we can, you know, laugh at it and throw it out because they're going to keep it secret.
And so, you know, it's guilt by not even association at this point, although it could be guilt by, you know, it could be that you meet this nice Muslim guy and four years from now he decides to become a terrorist, but they're going to go back and find out that you knew him four years ago and declare that an association.
I mean, that's one of the dangers with this five-year, you know, which will become 10 and 20 and 30.
But the other thing is that they're not even, it's not even about real relationships anymore.
It's about pattern.
And patterns are not guilt yet.
That, you know, because they're calling it intelligence, not actual criminal stuff, they're going to treat it as intelligence, and then it's going to affect your life and the way you get treated and the jobs you get and whether you can get on a plane and what have you.
Yeah.
Well, you know, government language always kind of ruins everything because, you know, the question that issue is whether any of this data amounts to information and whether knowledge about what's actually happening can be gleaned from that information.
And then whether the wise choice and how to move forward can be deduced from there.
That's humans thinking rather than just pointing at a screen and say, well, the computer says lock them in the hole forever, you know.
Right.
And the other thing is they're drowning in data already.
I mean, they are drowning in data.
They don't, you know, they can't get to the actual intelligence they need.
They can't process it quickly enough, although that's one of the reasons they opened a location in Utah is because they've got lots of good translators there and they're trying to catch up.
But they're drowning in data.
They're drowning in data.
And so their solution to that with this NCCC thing yesterday is to add more data.
It just doesn't make any sense.
All right.
Well, we'll have to leave it there because we're all out of time.
But thank you very much for your time on the show tonight, Marcy.
All right.
Take care, Scott.
Everybody, that is the great blogger Marcy Wheeler, otherwise known as Empty Wheel.
Her website is EmptyWheel.net.
And she writes brilliant things about everything.
That's it for Antiwar Radio tonight.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We're here every Friday night from 630 to 7 on 90.7 KPFK Pacifica in Los Angeles.
Full interview archives are at Antiwar.com/radio.
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