All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos Radio 92.795.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.and the Fourth Amendment, obviously, and there's always a theoretical risk that there will be a terrorist attack.
Nobody says that it's impossible or conceivable that there will be another one.
And I think their idea is, look, we're sitting pretty now.
Every poll shows that we're in the lead in terms of party identification and generic congressional ballots and presidential races, and so we don't want to do anything to rock the boat.
But if, you know, just in the rare chance that there is a terrorist attack in this interim, we don't want to give the president a political weapon, so we're just going to continue to give him what he wants, and, you know, hopefully in 2008, we expect that we'll have a Democrat in the White House who will get to use all these great new powers that were created.
Okay, now Glenn, you're a former constitutional litigator, and forgive me because I'm just going from memory here, but the law of the land does, in fact, say that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
Is that not the case?
That is true.
That's what the Fourth Amendment says.
And so, basically, the 1978 FISA Act was already unconstitutional before they even started tinkering with it.
They were already violating our Fourth Amendment.
Well, it's interesting, there was a Supreme Court case in 1972 where the Nixon administration had, there was a whole variety of domestic terrorist groups that were opposed to the Vietnam War and other aspects of the Nixon administration's domestic policy, and they were going around blowing things up here and there.
And the Nixon administration and the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover were conducting terrorism investigations into these domestic terrorist groups.
And one of the things they did was they began eavesdropping on telephone calls without warrants, without search forces, as the Fourth Amendment requires.
And the case made its way up to the Supreme Court, and the Nixon administration said, under the Constitution, the President has the duty, a constitutional duty, to protect the American people from these attacks.
And therefore, he's entitled to eavesdrop without warrants because the Constitution grants him his power.
By an 8-0 decision written by a Nixon appointee, Lewis Powell, the Supreme Court said, no, the Fourth Amendment, for purposes of investigating domestic terrorism cases, precludes, prohibits any eavesdropping without warrants, that the search warrant, the probable cause requirement of the Fourth Amendment, requires you to get a warrant if you want to eavesdrop.
They said, you know, we're only dealing with the question of domestic terrorism cases and not international terrorism cases, and international terrorist groups, which might create different questions because then it involves war and peace and matters of the military.
But the analysis of that decision was exactly the same as it would be for any context, which is that the language of the Fourth Amendment is clear that the whole purpose of what the founders created was that the executive, on its own, can never fault investigate and make decisions about who shall be investigated.
They investigate, they go to a court, they convince the court that there's probable cause to believe that you've committed a crime, and only then can they search your home or intrude into your conversations.
And whether it's domestic terrorism or international terrorism, the law, the constitutional law, is crystal clear.
Yeah, but, you know, I don't have anything to hide, so I don't have anything to worry about.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, I mean, you know, one of the reasons why the Democrats capitulate is because, and I talked to a lot of them, both in the past month and in the past couple of years, and especially in the past month, about just having Pfizer built to people in Congress, to senior aides, to senators, and other people like that, about what can be, if anything, making this Pfizer bill permanent.
And what they all think, what they all believe, and what they will all tell you is that it's a losing issue for them, because, just as you suggested, Americans don't really care about these liberties, that they don't really think that if you have nothing to hide, there's any reason to worry.
They think the government's not interested in what they're talking about.
And polls actually show that that's not quite true, that, you know, it's not as though there's some, you know, raving, crying political movement in this country demanding war and low surveillance or amnesty for telecoms.
People realize that there are things that make our country different, things in the Constitution that restrain what our government does.
We're taught that from the time we're children.
The problem is there are no political leaders making those arguments, making appeals grounded in that, and so it's just not prominent in our political discourse.
And if people in the country see both Republicans and Democrats basically agreeing that there's nothing wrong with violating the Constitution, there's nothing wrong with giving the president power that the founders didn't want him to have, of course they're going to conclude, well, there must not be anything particularly wrong with it.
I rely on the two-party system, and if there's something really wrong that one side wants to do, I expect the other one to be stomping their feet and yelling and screaming when they see that that doesn't happen.
They assume that there must not be anything particularly alarming about it.
You put that so well.
That's exactly the way it is.
Same thing with the accusations against Iran, for example.
Well, the Democrats all voted for the bill that made all the accusations, so it's true now.
If it wasn't true, the Democrats wouldn't have all voted for it.
Yeah, you know, I mean, it was a 75 to 25 vote, and I think you're exactly right.
The American people who, you know, you and I as part of what we do, you know, either as a vocation or our living or whatever, are very unusual in the amount of attention that we're able to pay to the political process.
Both Americans rely upon, you know, either political pundits in the establishment process and, more importantly, their representatives, the politicians that they have asked and sent to Washington.
You know, they assume that, given how poorly the Iraq War has turned out, that they assume that, you know, the Congress is not going to empower this president to start another war against another country based on the same exact accusations about nuclear programs and all of that, unless there's good reason.
And I think you're right.
When they see, you know, Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate, and most of the Senate Democrats voting to declare, you know, part of Iran's military a terrorist organization and essentially use the language of war against Iran as this resolution, they assume that this threat must be real that time.
I mean, there's nobody really making the case in a way that is really resonating with them.
People who don't, you know, troll the internet looking for counter opinions, who rely on, you know, the mainstream discourse, they're not exposed to the arguments that demonstrate why this is all the same kind of hysteria and deceit that led us into Iraq.
And, you know, I'm sure you saw that Bill Moyers special about the media a few months back.
I did.
There's one scene in there, I'm trying to remember who it was, I think it was somebody from ABC News maybe, and he said they had this thing that they would do to Ronald Reagan called truth squatting, where they would ask him a question and he would give an answer that had no truth to it, and then they would have another reporter on the other side of the room follow up and they would keep after him until he had to admit that he was wrong or, you know, whatever it was, and they got so much pressure from that for being such Reagan haters that a new policy was invoked from on high, and the new policy was you may not contradict the president unless someone from the other party does, then you can cover that.
But unless someone from the other party contradicts him, then you are not to.
And that's basically where we're at right now.
If Hillary Clinton said that Dick Cheney was a liar, then we could discuss it.
But since she is a liar and goes along with every one of his lies, then there's nothing to dispute.
Yeah, I think you put your finger on the really important point, and actually I focused on that point for the first time when I watched that Bill Moyers special as well, because actually, and it might be the same thing we were talking about, but it might be different, but Tim Russert was interviewed as part of that by Bill Moyers about why the press did such an unbelievably poor job in investigating and subjecting to scrutiny claims by the Bush administration prior to the Iraq war.
And what he said in the essence of what you just described, which was the duty to dispute what the government is saying, is the duty of the opposition party.
And if the opposition party doesn't do that, then the fault lies with them, not with us.
And the premise of that is that our duty as journalists is confined to calling up the government and writing down what they say, and then calling up the other side, the Democrats, and writing down what they say, and if among what they say is not the truth, then we won't report the truth.
I mean, it's not our fault.
Our only duty is to be equal stenographer, to write down what both sides say and go home at night and get a good night's sleep.
And that clearly is what the role of the establishment press is, and more than anything else, that's what's killing our political culture.
Yeah.
Hey, I don't know if you're a Simpsons fan, Glenn, but are you familiar with the character on The Simpsons, Rich Texan?
Not really.
Oh, well, there's a character on The Simpsons named Rich Texan, and he always yells, yee-haw!
And carries pistols everywhere he goes and has a bunch of oil money, apparently, et cetera, like that.
Well, I bring that up because I met a guy exactly like Rich Texan from The Simpsons about, I think this was before September 11th, actually.
And he was smoking a big cigar and had been drinking whiskey all night and had very loose lips.
And it started telling me the story of how he and his brother had created some telecom in Houston that was apparently some big deal during the dot-com boom or what have you.
And how the National Security Agency came to him and his brother and said, listen, you are going to build your company from the ground up with us.
And if you don't, then you are doomed.
We're going to regulate you right out of business.
You're going to do everything we say.
And this guy, Rich Texan, was scared to death.
The way he was talking to me, and he was kind of drunk.
The way he was talking to me was, I'm frightened.
I left the business to my brother and quit, and I don't go near windows now.
I'm scared of these guys.
And this is something from long before September 11th.
The National Security Agency, assuming we can take this guy's word for it, came to him and said, oh, so you're going to build a telecom, huh?
Well, this is Mr. Jenkins from the National Security Agency, and he'll be building your network with you from the ground up, and you have no choice.
I mean, I believe that, and I'll tell you why.
I actually wrote about this today.
And there's a lot of documents coming out, finally, about some of these issues as a result of the criminal prosecution of Joseph Macchio, who was the CEO of Quest Communications.
And Quest was one of the companies that was approached by the Bush administration prior to September 11th, and as well as after September 11th, demanding that it cooperate fully in turning over its customer databases and providing unfettered access to the calls of its customers to the National Security Agency.
And while AT&T and Verizon and most of the telecom industry agreed to do so, Quest refused because they believed that what they were being asked to do was illegal, which it was, and they were concerned about legal liability.
And as a result, the Bush administration ended up criminally prosecuting the CEO for insider trading.
And in any event, as part of his criminal case, a lot of documents have been disclosed slowly and in partial form, heavily redacted, but still what they demonstrated is really rather something extraordinary, which is the extent to which the national security officials of our government in the National Security Agency and in the Pentagon, and not just in the Bush administration, the Clinton administration too, but certainly escalated significantly before 9-11 with the Bush administration, worked so cooperatively with the telecom executives of our country, almost hand in hand, they're essentially a consortium working together, building networks, ensuring access, and billions and billions of dollars of taxpayer money are being transferred to these telecoms in order to ensure government access to these vast telecommunications networks and the maintenance of databases, vast databases about who we call and who calls us, and unfettered access literally tapping right into the telecommunications systems and telecommunications companies that refuse, don't get the regulatory favors that they need in order to prosper.
They get intimidated and threatened.
And in the case of the Quest CEO, they get prosecuted.
And what's so interesting about it is, you know, Mike McConnell, before he became the director of national intelligence, he was essentially the point man for the telecom industry, coordinating these efforts to vastly increase the cooperation between the federal government and the telecom industry in terms of outsourcing and privatizing everything the government wanted to do to the telecom so that the government has unfettered access to the telecommunication infrastructure.
It's incredibly alarming.
And beyond the learning, it's also something that's happening in almost a virtual secrecy.
I mean, there's no congressional investigation into it.
The only chance we really have to learn about any of this are these lawsuits that are pending against the telecoms, which is why the Bush White House and the telecom industry and the Congress are so eager to grant amnesty to these telecoms, because doing that will put an end to the lawsuits and an end to our only chance to really learn about what's going on.
Wow.
Yeah, that's really groundbreaking stuff.
And that's, by the way, if you go to Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon.com, that is the top entry today, I believe, right?
Right.
I did write about that today.
I had a week of reading those Nasio documents and was really impressed by, you know, Condoleezza Rice and General Hayden and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Clarke, all before September 11th and one meeting after the match with telecom officials working on these joint government telecom projects.
Mm-hmm.
I really like the way you put that.
And I think that that's the closest to the truth that you can get, is that really, there is no distinction.
The telecom industry of this country is basically part of the national government, or, you know, vice versa, I guess.
Right.
Yeah, it is.
And, you know, what's so amazing about it is, I mean, you know, it's been recognized for a long, long time.
I mean, the Communications Act, it was passed in 1934, and there were provisions in that bill all the way back in 1934 that prohibited telecoms from disclosing information about their customers without a court order, precisely because they knew how sensitive the information was that was being invested in these private companies, and to now have that wall completely eroded where there is no distinction, really, between it's pure corporatism, it's really a merging of the public and private sectors, so that all that data, all that information, all that access to our calls is now vested in the federal government with no oversight, no court warrants, nothing, is dangerous beyond what can really be described.
And illegal, not to mention.
And now, tell me more about Mike McConnell.
He's now the National Intelligence Director, which is basically the new DCI, right?
What exactly was his role in this before?
Well, Mike McConnell was at various telecommunications companies.
There's actually a great article in Salon that was written during the time that the Senate was considering whether to confirm him, which essentially made the argument that, you know, one of the real concerns about putting him in this position was that he was the principal liaison between the telecommunications companies and the Bush administration when it came to trying to expand the amount of cooperation between those two efforts.
I forget where he worked, but after he was an admiral, he left and joined the private sector.
And actually, I can tell you, oh, he was with Booz Allen, that's right.
He was an executive with Booz Allen, actually the Director of Defense Programs at Booz Allen Hamilton, which is the nation's biggest defense and intelligence contractor.
And he created an association between all the defense and telecom agencies designed to vastly expand the amount of privatization that the federal government did in terms of outsourcing its government defense and intelligence functions to the private sector to basically make the telecom industry a division of the federal government, and that's what Mike McConnell did.
He was a key figure in the private sector telecom companies, and that's why it's such an unbelievable conflict of interest for him now as Director of National Intelligence to argue that the same companies that just a couple of years ago he was working for and had vested interest in must have amnesty from these lawsuits because national security requires that they have it.
It's a complete obvious conflict of interest, and he was placed in that position because the telecoms are such a vital part of what our federal government does in the intelligence and defense realm.
Wow.
And if possible, I'd like to go back to the story of Joseph Nasio, is that right, at Quest?
He was prosecuted for insider trading.
Now, what does that say about the rule of law?
Was there any actual insider trading, or they were prosecuting him basically because he wouldn't go along?
That's what it sounds like.
Well, you know, the problem is that it's a bit like tax evasion.
The government could probably, if it wanted to, build certainly an indictable case against virtually anybody who files taxes and does anything more than the most simplistic deductions and claim that, you know, the expense deduction that someone took or income that they classified a certain way was fraudulent, and that's why so many people are at the government's mercy when it comes to tax evasion.
The famous rule for insider trading, when an executive of a company sells his stock shortly before the fortunes of that company decline precipitously, there's always the suspicion range that the stock was sold because the executive had insider knowledge that the public didn't have that the company was about to tank, and the stock price was going to go down, and that's why he sold it.
So whether this was a valid case of insider trading or not, I don't know.
What I do know is that the Department of Justice and the Bush administration have pursued very few cases against business executives, certainly in the telecommunications area, for transactions of this type, and yet they pursued it very vigorously against the CEO of one of the few telecoms that resisted the National Security Agency's demands to allow access to their customers' database.
Yeah, no secret what's going on there, and you're right, they could charge anybody with basically anything, right?
Mail fraud, if nothing else, they'll get you.
If you ever accepted anything in your mailbox, you're guilty of something.
Yeah.
You know, the interesting thing about that prosecution, though, is that one of the things that he's trying to show is he's trying to say, at the time I sold my stock, I actually had the opposite expectation.
I didn't think my company was going to tank.
I thought we were going to make huge amounts of money because look at all these government contracts, these lucrative government contracts that I was meeting with the Bush administration over and that I was being promised the Bush administration was involved in this project and this project and this project and this project with the telecommunications industry, and they were trying to get us on board in order to cooperate with all of them.
And that's why these documents have become so interesting because in trying to prove that defense, he has disclosed all sorts of facts that reveal the extent to which the government and the telecommunications companies are working hand in hand.
And one of the big points there, and you mentioned this, is the secrecy.
This is the kind of thing that judges are, quote unquote, admitting that they don't have the authority to rule over because it's a state secret, this kind of thing that Congress doesn't want to do anything about except aid and a bet.
And where do we go to learn about this stuff other than Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon.com?
Yeah, or anti-war.
That's really one of the most interesting things.
I went around today just kind of casually, and I looked at the New York Times and the Washington Post and some of the political sites that just engage in endless trashy gossip over the day-to-day campaigns of the various individuals running for president.
And you look at what our political process is talking about, and then you contrast it to the actually the most high impact and the most significant things that are going on.
And the things that actually matter, the things that actually involve billions and billions of dollars of our national treasure that involve our core constitutional liberties, they're not only being ignored by the media, but they're basically operating and occurring almost completely in the dark.
I mean, the idea of any open government is almost just a complete fiction at this point.
The most significant things occur almost all completely in secrecy, and things are routinely classified as secret without any real reason.
And so you're absolutely right.
I mean, these things that are going on are things we've learned about in drips and drabs almost accidentally through inadvertent or inflect disclosures and piecing things together.
And whether we want our government engaging in this massive databases of recording everything we do is something that we ought to debate, but we can't debate it because they're already doing it.
They're doing it without our knowledge.
Now when I think it was Garrett Garrett's book, The People's Potage that he wrote back in the early 1940s, and the first section is called The Revolution Was.
And he talks about how, don't look for the revolution coming.
It already came in the night of the Great Depression, singing songs of freedom and so forth.
And I wonder whether the experience of the last six and a half or so years living under Bush-Cheney in the United States, do you see this as truly a further revolution within the form of American government?
It does seem at this point that they have so much power and so much disregard for what the letter of the law says that really this is ex-America.
Whether what's going on now is fundamentally different than what's gone on since, say, the New Deal or the end of World War II and the creation of the national security state, or whether it's really just an extension or continuation of it, it's almost romantic.
I was having a discussion a couple of days ago with a reader of my blog who was very enthusiastic about a book she had just read called Legacy of Ashes, the History of the CIA, which sort of detailed how Harry Truman, when he created the CIA, invested it with all sorts of power to do all kinds of things, from overthrowing other governments to basically acting as a worldwide police force.
Really, there was no legitimate constitutional or legal basis to time for that kind of wild, unchecked, new executive force that was going to operate in the world, and yet once that was created and unleashed, and of course Dwight Eisenhower warned about it in his well address, it kind of set us on this course of this vast, unchecked national security apparatus that operates in the dark.
I think there's a difference, though, in that even in the 1970s when we started investigating that in the wake of the Nixon abuses and realized the extent to which it had gone really out of control and run rampant, we did put Congress regulatory schemes and laws into place that at least required oversight and provided some regulation for that so that the extent to which it could operate secretly was severely diminished.
I think that's really been the departure since 9-11, is the complete abolition of that entire oversight and regulatory scheme returning to the period when it was first created and when the abuses were at their greatest, when all of this operated completely in the dark at the behest of an unchecked executive.
That I do think is new, and it's unprecedented because that apparatus is so extraordinarily powerful now, but you're talking about a military that spends more than every other country combined, all of that placed under a $40 billion intelligence agency, all placed under the unchecked power and command of essentially one man and the president with no oversight and no checks.
It's obviously an invitation for extraordinary views.
Now, part of that is that the intelligence agencies are supposed to report to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, but the more that they outsource covert activity-type operations and, I guess, including spying to the military, then they don't have to talk to the Senate Intelligence Committees.
They don't have to reveal anything.
It's got that whole other layer of secrecy over it.
Is that what's going on here?
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And beyond that, though, there's so many layers of it that prevent any oversight.
I mean, even things that were within the CIA, I mean, you talked about the rendition of the interrogation programs, or even the national security agencies, multiple surveillance programs, data mining and databases and more of the surveillance, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee were kept almost completely in the dark and didn't mind that.
I mean, they voted several times not to investigate various programs, and so even when it was in the Intelligence Committee and you theoretically had oversight, those oversight functions failed.
The press is supposed to provide yet another mechanism, of course, for investigating and checking.
And while there have been some instances where that's occurred, I mean, the Washington Post uncovered the black sites and the New York Times uncovered the warrantless surveillance program, by and large, the press has ignored virtually all of this and then taking it in.
And that was Rumsfeld and Cheney's great innovation.
So many of the most controversial programs and putting them in the Pentagon, as you say, really put it beyond the reach, even theoretically, of any oversight.
And that's why I say most of what is most important that our government has done has occurred largely in the dark.
And this is the kind of thing that just, it's a little thing, I guess, but it's so obnoxious to me.
You know, the White House for a time there tried to rename suicide bombing homicide bombing.
And I guess they all picked up on it for about a week or so, and then Fox News are the only ones who kept it up.
Everybody else went back to calling it suicide bombing and so forth.
But that's what happened with this warrantless wiretapping, which on its face by its name is clearly illegal.
They renamed it the terrorist surveillance program.
And it's not just Fox News.
It's the Post and the Times and the LA Times and the Miami Herald and the Chicago Tribune and the Dallas Morning News and the Associated Press, and everybody in this whole country refers to this warrantless wiretapping as a terrorist surveillance program.
Who could possibly be opposed to that?
Yeah, it's amazing.
You know, one of the things that I did is in writing my last book was I spent a long time reading news accounts from 2002 and 2003 in terms of how they were reporting on the so-called debate that we have had over the war in Iraq.
And one of the things I'd forgotten about, I think I had blocked it out just because it's too grotesque of a memory to maintain, was that the Pentagon had created those playing cards with the pictures of all the bad guys.
And everyone had a, you know, five of clubs and nine of weapons.
And of course, Saddam was the ace of spades and his sons were the ace of hearts and the ace of clubs.
And in reporting on the war, virtually every media outlet used those playing cards to refer to the various villains.
And, you know, they all had Lex Luthor-like names like Dr. German, Mrs. Ambrax, chemical Ali.
And, you know, you could go to their website even now and there's the New York Times, the CNN, all of them, they have interactive playing decks where you can click on the various numbers and suits and up pops the bad person with their cartoon name underneath and an X over their face when they've been apprehended or killed.
This is the sort of thing, I mean, that the media does in much the same way that the telecom industry plays the role of a division of the intelligence and defense department of the federal government.
The media really does play a propagandistic role for the government because they go to the government almost exclusively, certainly primarily, to get their information.
And the information that they get, they end up reciting and repeating in the form that they're given it with virtually no investigation, no skepticism, and no critical thought.
And the real role that they play is simply to amplify government claims and to give them credibility.
And whether it's, you know, domestic surveillance or the torture program, which is now coerced interrogation or enhanced interrogation techniques or, you know, as we've just been discussing, the new Hitlers in Iran or the old Hitlers in Iraq, you will find in virtually every case the media reciting the narrative of the government.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's funny, too.
I guess if we went back through that deck of cards, through some of the ones that they didn't catch, I wonder how many of those guys now are new allies in Petraeus's redirection and Sunni awakening and the new alliance with the Sunni insurgency.
How many of those guys are good guys now from that same deck of cards?
We're probably giving lots and lots of arms and cash to in order to convince them not to kill us for a while.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're all our good friends now.
And, in fact, I read something.
I wish I remembered the guy's name.
I read something not long ago about one of these former Baathist leaders who you could give this guy one of those cartoon nicknames.
You know, this guy's one of Saddam Hussein's most horrible henchmen is now an ally of the United States there.
Sorry.
I wish I could remember the guy's name off the top of my head.
Right.
It all switches.
And, of course, a principal Orwellian theme was that the only thing that governments really care about is making sure that we're always at war, who the enemy is switches from moment to moment.
And our enemy of today is our friend of yesterday and vice versa.
And you see that as clearly as it could possibly be seen.
I mean, look, we were attacked on September 11th by Sunni extremists.
A couple of years later, we're working now with the Sunnis because suddenly the Shiites in the Middle East are our enemies, the Shiites in Iran.
And so, I mean, it just shifts constantly because the theme of the enemy is about the pretext to justify the endless war.
And that's when you get that incoherence.
And the media goes along.
This goes back to that Bill Moyers special about the media again, a wonderful quote of Dan Rather.
I'm paraphrasing here.
He said, nobody has to send you a memo that reminds you that the company you work for is regulated by the national government from top to bottom, and that if you cross them, that you're putting your corporation in serious danger.
Nobody has to remind you.
Really, it's the same thing with the telecoms as it is with the TV and the radio, right?
They can't cross the national government because the national government owns the airwaves, owns their license, and can regulate them right out of business.
Yeah, you know, I think that's entirely right.
There was a recent book that was written by the media critic of CNN and the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz, and he recounts a story that was told by Katie Couric when she was at NBC.
And she had conducted an interview with Condoleezza Rice in 2004, where, at least for Katie Couric, it was somewhat of an acrimonious interview.
And she asked the same question three or four times that Rice had patently refused to answer.
And after the interview, she received an email that was sent to her by her boss at NBC News, which was in the form of a viewer complaint, complaining that Couric was too aggressive and too impolite with Condoleezza Rice.
And her boss forwarded that to her, and she said it was a clear signal to her that they did not want her being that aggressive with Bush administration officials.
And of course, the CEO at the time of General Electric, which owned NBC, was Jack Wells, whose company relied on all sorts of contacts with the Bush administration and who himself was a great war supporter and supporter of the Bush administration.
And there's all sorts of overlapping ties between the corporations that own the media and the media itself.
So when that happens, as you say, there's no need for centralized directives to be reporters about what to say and what not to say.
They know the culture in which they work.
They know the aims of those corporate executives, and they know that if they want to advance their careers, they need to promote those aims and not undermine them.
Oh, man, Glenn Greenwald, I feel like you just punched me in the head and just sent me hurtling into perception of reality.
The United States today, Katie Couric, rogue reporter, must be made to back off.
It's scary that she's an example of an aggressive and adversarial reporter.
It's really an indication of the state of things.
But the one thing I want to say is a lot of times, when I write about these issues anyway, I get readers on my blog and elsewhere, and the reaction I get is, oh, this is also depressing and it seems so grim and what has happened to our country.
And yet, I think that there is a lot of cause for believing that things can change and are changing.
And obviously, there is intense dissatisfaction among the American citizenry with what's happening in Washington and with the government, and technology allows all sorts of alternative means for addressing these differences and for communicating the truth and for investigating and disclosing information.
That's what blots are and alternative sites like yours are for, and I think that those are growing in power.
And I think the more dissatisfied the citizenry becomes, the more anger there is, the more that can be tapped into solutions.
So it is depressing and it is infuriating, but I think there's plenty of grounds for believing that things can be done about it as well.
Well, I sure appreciate that sentiment.
It's a nice little bit of optimism to end the interview on, and I think you're right.
I think ultimately, there's whatever certain percentage of the population of this country that doesn't care either way.
But there's another percentage of us that do care, and more and more are getting our priorities straight and seeing what the real challenges are and what needs to be faced.
And thanks to people like you, Glenn Greenwald, we have good information to go to.
At least we can be informed when we get in our arguments with the war party and we can win them.
Yeah, I agree with that entirely, and I think the new information is power and that's a cliche, but I think it's true as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, everybody, you heard it.
It's Glenn Greenwald.
He's from Salon.com, former constitutional law litigator.
Appreciate it very much.
Thank you for the great questions.
Appreciate it, guys.
