07/31/14 – Marcy Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is Marcy Wheeler.
Emptywheel.net is the name of her blog.
That's how you get there, too, you know.
Her address bar, emptywheel.net.
And she's got a couple other good writers that join in and write on her great blog as well.
And you can follow her on Twitter at Emptywheel as well.
Welcome back to the show, Marcy.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing really good.
Oh, I better turn up your volume a little bit here.
Hey, so lots of important stuff going on on your beat here.
And that is national security, state news and legalities and these kinds of things.
Torture and spying and all of that.
And so I guess first things first, let's talk about torture.
And the torture report.
And I guess, could you give us the status of the haggles and then, you know, over who's releasing what and when?
And then what about these new talking points that were accidentally leaked, they're saying?
I don't know.
Well, first, did you see the breaking news that John Brennan has confessed that CIA did illegally spy on the Senate?
Oh, yeah, that was in there, too.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Talk about that.
Now the DOJ has cleared the CIA is not going to criminally investigate them.
John Brennan came to Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss and admitted that, in fact, they had broken the law and spied on their congressional overseers.
So that's the back.
That's where we end up.
That is such a big deal, too.
I mean, if there weren't, you know, six wars in the prospect of eight going on right now, that would just be the absolute constitutional crisis of the decade right there.
Imagine the CIA spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
What?
Right.
And spying to figure out what they were doing with the torture report, which is due, which is probably got dumped back in Dianne Feinstein's lap at the same moment as this IG report showing that she had been spied on.
So it's a crazy week for her.
The interesting one of the interesting as.
So so the Senate intelligence, the torture report, barring gross redactions that the Senate will fight.
We should expect the Senate torture report to come out in the next couple of weeks.
One of the things the Senate torture report reveals is that a Colin Powell was not briefed on the torture that we actually knew, or at least I knew, because I reported back in 2009.
But, you know, the AP is catching up on that that front.
But what's interesting is that some of the ambassadors in the countries where we were torturing people, so places like Thailand, Poland, Romania, Egypt.
Some of those ambassadors did know about the torture and they were instructed not to tell their bosses about it.
That's amazing.
And you think that that really held that that many ambassadors refused to tell Colin Powell what they knew about torture going on under their jurisdiction?
Well, not all of them knew.
And then I mean, I looked at I looked at just two examples.
One is the the ambassador in Thailand while we were torturing Abu Zubaydah literally got his ambassador papers.
I mean, he presented his credentials, which is the formal part of of presenting yourself to the host country.
He presented his credentials the day after Abu Zubaydah was captured.
So he comes in and all of a sudden he has to find he has to deal with torture on his watch.
So, you know, I don't know if they told him or not.
What a what a way to start the job, though, right?
Is your your country's using the country that you're that you are the ambassador to to torture one of the other interesting ambassadors.
And again, we don't know whether these people were briefed or not.
But Chris Hill, who was the ambassador to Poland, a career diplomat, ambassador to Poland from 2000 to 2004.
So during the time when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded there and Abu Zubaydah was there and Abd al-Rasheem al-Nashiri and several other people were all there in Poland.
And what's interesting about that is Chris Hill went on to have a really poor relationship with Dick Cheney.
He was he subsequently got moved to North Korea or sorry, to Korea, to South Korea, and was really involved in the six party talks with North Korea.
And Dick Cheney did not like him.
And then he subsequently went on to be ambassador to Iraq.
And, you know, I'm sort of intrigued that Dick Cheney.
I mean, he he took him on, probably spied on him, really did not like Chris Hill.
And now I'm really curious whether Hill got briefed about the torture going on in Poland.
So so interesting questions there.
And and the other interesting part of that is that basically AP got this story because the White House accidentally, they say, sent the State Department's talking points about the torture report to an AP journalist, which is interesting because the talking points are kind of crazy themselves.
You know, it's it's the State Department trying to put a good spin on on the Senate, kind of confirming that we tortured and we were out of control.
And CIA was lying to its overseers.
Hey, there's a theme to this discussion, isn't there?
And, you know, they basically their argument is it worked like that, that our democratic system worked because nobody was held responsible for torture.
And now 12 years after it started, it's finally becoming public.
Right.
Yes.
In fact, our system works so well, we quit torturing even without accountability of any kind.
See?
Right.
Yeah.
And ask some of the detainees at Gitmo whether that's actually true.
Right.
Yeah.
And Bagram and Somalia.
Right.
So the State Department wants this to be a democracy success story, which I'm a little bit skeptical about.
But whatever, they've got to say what they've got to say.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It really is incredible there.
So now and the best we're ever going to get here, unless somebody uploads it to WikiLeaks or something like that, is just the summary of the report.
And at that point, the summary is redacted by the Senate, the CIA and the White House.
Anybody else?
Senate, CIA, White House.
I'm betting that Poland and the UK got a shot at the content that pertains to them because they're pretty they're pretty squeamish about this report.
So, you know, I'm sorry to go back a second to the Colin Powell question there.
You link to this article.
I'm sorry.
I actually only hovered over the link, but I'm pretty sure it was that ABC article about they choreographed the torture of Katani down there at Guantanamo Bay and the whole cabinet was there.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, you know, so there were a bunch of stories in 2009 that tried to place Colin Powell at the scene of the crime.
And even then, that's one of the reasons why I was pretty sure that we knew Colin Powell hadn't been briefed there.
There's a narrative that came from the Senate Intelligence Committee back in 2009 that actually was the initial beginnings of this torture report.
It was done under Jay Rockefeller.
And that showed that Colin Powell was not fully briefed on all the torture techniques until September 16th, 2003.
So you're talking a year and a half after even CIA, I think, now admits they started torturing after a year and a half after we got Abu Zubaydah.
They were already torturing with Egypt doing the torture for us.
But so basically what happened is the State Department in January of 2002 balked and said, you know, you you have to abide by the Geneva Conventions and the Bush administration's response to that.
And I think this is this.
I strongly suspect that the torture report is going to confirm this.
The Bush administration's response to that was just to make sure that nobody at state learned about the extent and the techniques that we were doing that the kinds of tortures that we were doing.
So, you know, they had to bypass Colin Powell and the rest of the State Department to be able to do this.
Have you talked with Lawrence Wilkerson about this at all?
I haven't not.
No.
Well, maybe I should get him on the show tomorrow.
Yeah, you should, actually.
Yeah, it's been a while since I've spoken with him about this, but I know, you know, he told me years ago it got headlines more recently.
But he told me years ago he'd be happy to go in front of a grand jury and testify against Dick Cheney for this torture stuff.
And he knew all about it.
And I'm trying to remember now his narrative about when he first became hip to these truths.
Well, and remember that there are really good allegations that we tortured to get evidence for Iraq.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's where we're going to pick up this conversation on the other side of this commercial break.
Thank you, Marcy, for saying so.
A very important point.
Marcy Wheeler, the great Marcy Wheeler.
Empty wheel online.
Empty wheel dot net.
And at Empty Wheel on Twitter.
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All right.
Surreal on CNN right now, they're interviewing an American who's going to join up the service.
The Israeli Defense Forces that is all right.
Good times.
Is that legal?
Oh, there's no law.
OK, good.
Amazing.
Now, yeah, speaking of there not being a law, it was rumored before, although I guess it was just PR that torture was against the law in America and that the law in America applied to government officials, too.
And now, of course, we have the ultimate example of that.
Just not being the case at all with the torture regime we're talking about here.
And right as we're interrupted by the break there, Marcy, we're just beginning to get into the primary question on the lips of every CIA torturer.
And that was tell me about Saddam.
Well, tell me about the relationship between Al-Qaeda and Saddam and how.
And and while I am making you think you're drowning, tell me that Al-Qaeda provided chemical weapons to Saddam.
So more specifically, it wasn't just to tell me about Saddam.
It was invent a relationship between Al-Qaeda and Saddam so that we can attack Saddam under the guise of counterterrorism.
Right.
Yeah.
And then as my friend is pointing out in the chat room here, of course, the whole scam was we need somebody making these accusations on tape and then they're just going to destroy the tapes anyway.
They could have just made it up without even torturing anybody.
They didn't need to torture Al-Libi or anybody else into this stuff.
Well, you know, they never mind.
I was going to get into how Al-Libi sort of got suicided at the time in 2009 when the Senate Intelligence Committee was just investigating this.
But maybe we should talk about NSA and the reform.
That's not really all that great.
Yeah.
Well, on one more note on that is that and I'm sure that you have the encyclopedia of it somewhere on EmptyWheel.net, but I could also recommend Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers, who did a great report on the connection between the torture regime and the lies, as you say, connecting Saddam Hussein's apparatus with that of Osama bin Laden.
So that's not just some conjecture.
There's, you know, a lot of solid reporting about that if people want to look into it.
Anyway, yeah, Landay did a great work on that.
Yep.
All right, as he did a lot of that stuff.
All right.
So yes, please talk to me about the new Leahy bill, Patrick Leahy in the US Senate, the USA Freedom Act.
Is that what it's still called?
We're still a call.
I haven't thought of the nickname for it yet, but once I once I do, I'll let you know that, you know, the original one, USA Freedom became USA Freedom because it got watered down.
Then it became USA Freedomer because it got watered down still further.
This one's probably around the same level as USA Freedom.
It has maybe a few more transparency pluses and then some other things that concern me.
But, you know, so Leahy is trying to do so.
I mean, to his credit, I think he genuinely wants to do something to improve the dragnet surveillance and got together with the administration, probably with Bob Litt again.
And Bob Litt is, you know, he's a jerk, but he manages to kind of own all the people in Congress that he tries to negotiate with.
So congratulations to Bob Litt for being good at his job.
Bob Litt is the general counsel for James Clapper.
And, you know, they put together a bill that is better than the USA Freedomer Act.
But still, just as an example, remember how witness after witness after witness after witness got before Congress and said, well, we get the phone calls from bad, evil suspect and all the people he calls and then we also get the people, all those people call.
And the entire premise of this program, according to every witness who has testified, is it's about finding who bad people call and who those people call, right?
It's about calls, phone calls actually made.
Well, the bill that Leahy and a bunch of national, a bunch of non-governmental organizations, things like people like the ACLU and EFF, they're embracing, doesn't chain on actual calls made, it chains on connections.
And I don't know what that means.
I know as much about this phone dragnet as anybody outside of government.
And I can't tell you what that means.
And neither can any of these people who are running up and down and applauding this bill.
And so for all we know, it's what it's going to do is basically put the NSA inside your smartphone at the, you know, inside the offices of an immunized telecom.
There's no language to prevent that.
There's, you know, the only restrictions on what the NSA does once it gets into the offices of these immunized telecoms is that they have to have some kind of call record at each stage of the chaining process.
But, you know, a phone number is a call record.
A cell phone handset ID is a call record.
So it's not clear what this bill does.
And yet everyone's running around trying to get it passed already.
Huh.
And including you're saying all the activists.
And it's not that you haven't read the ACLU's blog where they explain their support.
What are they saying about it?
They just don't get it either.
But they don't they're not seeing what they don't get the way you do.
Is that it?
Well, there's this kind of weird trauma in the surveillance, the, you know, the anti-surveillance community wherein every time we get to a deadline, you know, so the 2012 deadline for Vice Amendments Act, the 2011 deadline for USA Freedom, 2010 USA Freedom, 2009 USA Freedom, every time we get to one of these deadlines, you know, the administration runs around screaming and then we don't make any improvements.
And so I think their strategy is to trade away the farm ahead of time now rather than at the last minute because what this bill also does is extend the deadline for USA Freedom.
It would be June of next year.
So, you know, if this bill doesn't pass, the government's going to have to do something just to preempt this last minute capitulation and capitulate ahead of time.
I mean, that's, you know, I don't know.
It doesn't it it this bill is this bill is not going to pass until after recess.
So we've got a couple weeks to figure out what the heck the bill does.
And the and the activist community, not all of them, but many of them came out ahead of time and said, Yeah, Bill, you know, we support this bill without finding out very basic things.
Like what does connection chaining mean?
And I I that just mystifies me.
But, you know, I I'm not a membership organization.
I'm just me.
If anybody wants to donate to me, that's great.
But otherwise I just do what I do in my room every day and and call it like I see it.
And I see that this bill is an improvement off of USA Freedom Act.
It doesn't entirely end bulk collection.
In fact, I believe that it sort of, you know, For one kind of Section 215 stuff, it it requires you to use an individual.
For the other kind, the kind of traditional kind, it requires you to use a person.
And and the only reason to make that distinction is if you mean person in the broad sense, including corporate people.
So in other words, they think that you can that that it is not bulky to collect data on a corporation like Western Union, which there have been multiple reports CIA has done under Section 215.
So in other words, they're collecting Western Union and sorting through it to try and find terrorist finance that way.
Yeah, if I understand you right, Marcia, what you're telling me is they're simply shifting, you know, maybe a little bit about, you know, which database they're looking at and they're shifting the terms used.
But oh, we're looking at the connection, not the spreadsheet or whatever.
But meanwhile, all they mean is which numbers are calling which numbers just like before.
They need the haystack to find the needle and all that crap.
No, I think.
No, I think it's actually radically different.
Okay, I'm an idiot.
Pardon me.
No, no, no, it's all right.
What this bill does clearly is it defuses the safely kept nuclear bomb of the government having all phone records of all Americans.
And that's important.
I don't want to minimize that.
So in other words, the U.S. government will no longer have all our phone records for the past five years.
So though it'll take them five years to age it off.
So they'll have all our phone records from the last four years and then three years and then two years and so on.
In exchange for that, they have to go to the court and say, this is a bad guy.
We want to go chain on this guy's calls in exchange for that.
I believe what they are getting because they have gotten immunity, immunity for the telecoms.
They have gotten compensation for the telecoms.
They can dictate what kind of resources they need at the telecom.
I strongly suspect and nobody knows the answer to this who can speak about it.
But I strongly suspect that in exchange for that, they are going inside people's smartphones at the telecom.
So that's fine if you don't know anybody who is is a terrorist suspect or who could be deemed a terrorist suspect.
But if you do, then there then I think this bill significantly raises the chance that the NSA is going to be able to collect domestically things like your geolocation and things like your address books and things like, you know, your calendars.
And that's what I that's what has me so concerned about this.
Right.
Well, yeah.
And the location data seems like it's the all important thing because, well, just as much as I guess the cell phone data.
I mean, the the number calling data, but it's what we're talking about here really is the automation of governmental conspiracy theories about people.
Right.
That's what we're doing.
Whose living room have you been in?
And then what might that mean?
Right.
And their interpretation is always going to be the worst about any association.
Right.
And again, I want to I want to stress we don't know that, but we also don't know what they do.
And there's nothing in the bill that prohibits that.
So that's why I'm concerned.
I see.
All right.
Well, thank you for correcting my errors.
I do my best.
That's why I keep bringing you on is because, you know, the stuff so well.
And I sure appreciate all your work.
Thank you.
Great to be on, Scott.
All right.
So that's the great Marcy Wheeler.
Empty wheel dot net is her website.
And also, of course, her Twitter handle.
Empty wheel.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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