06/06/14 – Norman Solomon – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, I'm Scott.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I got Norman Solomon on the line.
He's the guy that directed that great documentary, War Made Easy, which man has he got some great clips in there and I hope he doesn't sue me for pirating them from him all the time.
The movie tone news of the Gulf of Tonkin attack being announced and this kind of stuff, hilarious.
The babies and incubators and all the rest, War Made Easy, Norman Solomon.
And so then there's this brand new thing called expose facts.org.
And if you go to the blog at antiwar.com, you can read about it.
And you can also watch this video by Daniel Ellsberg, the heroic liberator of the Pentagon Papers, introducing this.
And this is as Dan has been saying on my show since 2005, he's been calling for government whistleblowers to come forward to expose wrongdoing surrounding the Iraq war and the rest of it this whole time.
And this is just a continuation of that same project, only now better.
It's expose facts.org.
And Norman is also helping on the board of this project here.
So welcome to the show, Norman.
How are you doing?
Hi, thanks, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
Been way too long since we spoke.
Good to have you here.
So tell us everything that you can, everything that we need to know about expose facts.org.
I can get started anyway.
And of course, there's a lot more information at expose facts.org.
You quite appropriately referenced Daniel Ellsberg and his appeals for many years now for people with information inside the government and elsewhere, information that the public should know and has a right to know, that that information be shared with the public because you obviously, although from the news media, it's not so obvious, apparently, that you can't have informed consent of the governed unless the governed have information and are informed.
So Daniel Ellsberg's efforts to encourage whistleblowing, I think, are getting a boost.
And Daniel Ellsberg was our first advisory board member for expose facts.org.
We launched on Wednesday.
We are encouraging people who have information, who are potential whistleblowers, to visit our site and learn how the site operates.
We have a secure drop mechanism.
And in this day and age, nobody can credibly promise absolute anonymity.
But as a journalistic enterprise, expose facts.org is committed to doing to the best of our ability the process of securing anonymity for all sources who seek it.
And we're about 48 hours old.
And the response has been very strong from a wide range of news media.
And we're going to continue our outreach, of course, ongoing.
Cool.
I talked with Trevor Tim recently, and he talked about some of the places that are beginning to now use secure drop for their own.
And he named a few different papers around the country, that kind of thing.
But this really is the future.
And I guess, so I don't know, if a skittish government employee who has evidence of wrongdoing really thought that maybe now was the time to do a little something about it and turn it over to a journalist, and they wanted to use secure drop, can you reassure them?
Can you explain how secure drop works, so that maybe they don't have to be Edward Snowden-level computer geniuses to know whether they can trust it or not?
Yes.
I mean, the most reliable way is to go to expose facts.org, because there's a little bit of complexity to it.
And we've put a lot of energy to really lay it out in a coherent way to explain.
Nobody has any certainty, and we don't know what's going to happen.
But we can say that Bruce Schneier and other leading tech experts on the planet have vetted and troubleshot the secure drop technology.
You mentioned Trevor Tim with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and they've been very generous in providing the software and training and installation and consultancy in kind for us.
And so we have the technological apparatus in place, and equally important, we have the commitment as independent journalists to function as journalists should, but rarely do in our society, which is to say that the public has a right to information, and we should not be counter-intimidated by government authorities who would just assume that some things stay in the dark, even though it is in the public interest for them to come into the light.
Right.
Well, and you know, the thing is, I don't know, maybe I always think this, Norman, but it seems like they have just worn it out so bad with the way that they have persecuted journalists and sources lately.
And just, of course, you know, with the percentage increase of classification in the last decade, or the era of the terror war increasing by 10 zillion percent, or whatever the exact number is, you know, we just, we absolutely need this.
They have, I think, discredited their own position, the endless accusations that Snowden really worked for Putin all along, and all this kind of crap.
It's all ring and hollow.
Nobody's really believing it.
Everybody is concerned to Snowden about the path that we're headed down here, and that kind of thing.
So I think that the real definition of journalism, not that it's by and large, you know, what's being practiced in the majority now, but I think it's going to be on a big upswing now.
We're going to have the Bob Woodward effect, right?
All the young people inspired by the movie of all the president's men who became journalists, some small percentage of them good ones, you know, in that era.
That's going to happen again now from Snowden, Greenwald, and et cetera like that.
And now with the technology, it seems like, you know, independent journalists who are willing to do this kind of work, and aren't too worried about sucking up and going to, you know, the MSNBC cocktail party or whatever it is.
They'll do the work, and they'll publish it in ways that maybe the Washington Post would have sat still or something like that, you know?
Well, that's key that independent journalists desperately need whistleblowers, and whistleblowers desperately need independent journalists.
That's what I was trying to say.
Exactly.
Thank you.
And without both of them working together affirmatively and constructively, then the public is just kept in the dark, and all we're going to get then is the official story.
And we know that the official story is routinely partial.
It is often mendacious, and it is routinely misleading.
And that's how we get dragged into one war after another, how the growing gap between rich and poor is accentuated by Wall Street and banking getting away with murder under the rubric of free enterprise, and on and on.
So whether it's climate change or poor people being ripped off by banks and any other number of issues we could talk about, the First Amendment has to be utilized, or we will be sunk.
And the way to utilize it is to actually take seriously the principle that the press must be independent, and any pressure, corporate or governmental, to force us into a corner must be resisted.
There you go.
So again, back to the actual technique here, this secure drop.
You had me at Bruce Schneier there when you said it's been vetted.
Again, nobody can say it's perfect, and the NSA's got a lot of capability and a lot of brilliant mathematicians, and so nobody can give it 100% assurance, but that's no joke when you have people of that caliber giving this thing the thumbs up to move forward here and that kind of thing.
And I think people will readily agree with that too, so it's worth emphasizing.
And this just seems like such a great project, and my understanding of the law, not that that really counts, says that they're not going to be able to do a damn thing to you all about this either, and so long live this great project.
I sure hope people go to exposefacts.org, help contribute.
There's a donate link right there at the top of the page, and you can read all about it and that kind of thing.
And if you're a government employee, you should know that that's the only kind of tattletailing that's actually good, is to go ahead and rat on your boss for breaking the law and violating people's rights, going outside their authority and committing crimes against the Constitution, against what's supposed to be going on around here.
Go ahead.
It's perfectly good to be a whistleblower.
It's the only kind of rat that we all love in this culture.
No matter what they say about you, we, the regular people of America, love you and appreciate it.
So exposefacts.com to learn all about how you can install TOR and access this secure drop and figure out a way to provide the proof that you have to journalists who will use it.
So thank you so much, Norman, and everybody else involved, and thank you for your time on your show.
And we actually have about 20 seconds if you have anything else to say.
Well, thanks to you, Scott.
Thanks to you and to antiwar.com, and I look forward to us being in touch.
All right.
Talk to you again soon.
Appreciate it.
Bye.
That's Norman Solomon, everybody, and watch his documentary, War Made Easy.
I bet you can find the whole thing online.
It's so good.
In fact, I think you can find it at my website in the documentary section there on YouTube or something.
Check it out.
War Made Easy.
It's just great.
And we'll be right back.
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