10/01/14 – Trevor Timm – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, we got Trevor online here, let me give him a call.
Trevor Tim, he writes for The Guardian.
He used to be over there at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and now he is with the Free Press Foundation.
Man, he's just been writing this great stuff, I was telling you before, he's just been kicking ass over here at The Guardian, where you can find his articles here.
It's the Freedom of the Press Foundation at PressFreedomFoundation.com.
That's the website.
Oh, yeah, and here he is at The Guardian.
Your iPhone is now encrypted.
The FBI says it'll help kidnappers.
Who do you believe?
Mr. President, will you tell us the truth, eight questions we must ask Obama about secret war.
Welcome back to the show.
Trevor, how you been, man?
Great.
Thanks for having me back.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Before we jump in, I have some great news for you, because I know you've been on me every time I come on.
We finally switched our URL, so it's easier to remember.
Yes.
Yes, it is freedom.press.
Freedom.press.
I didn't know .press was a thing.
It wasn't a thing until about two weeks ago, and so we were the first to snag it.
Great.
Freedom.press.
What a great URL, which is the exact opposite of the old situation.
Exactly.
Wonderful.
Wonderful.
Well, great news.
I just wrote it down, so I'll try to remember to say it at the end, too.
Great.
I got the new thing, the new software on my old iPhone here, and I kind of want to ask you about that, but I don't know.
That's not really as interesting as this other stuff, and I'll only have you for one segment here.
I guess if you could, just talk to me for 10 minutes about your two previous ones before that, the questions, but also this Clintonite, depends what the meaning of torture and murder is, is arguments about whether they're having a war, whether it's just a counterterrorism strategy and all of the just the blatant BS that they're using to get us into this thing.
Trevor?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, the language here is, you know, I think the phrase Orwellian is often overused, but here it's truly Orwellian newspeak, where they have taken basic definitions of words that we all know the meaning of and completely changed them, and to the point where it's hard to tell what's going on and what's not.
So for example, you know, I'm sure you've covered it before, but during the drone wars in Yemen and Pakistan, they basically changed the name of civilian, or changed the definition of civilian to include that all military age males in a strike zone are effectively combatants, unless they are approved otherwise afterwards.
So we saw this in play last week, where for almost a whole week, we knew that there were casualties in the first strikes in Syria, civilian casualties, because the Free Syrian Army, which we support, had been saying it, there was photos, there was videos, there was all sorts of reports, yet the administration wouldn't admit there were any civilian casualties.
You know, the same thing can be said for now the phrase, the newest phrase is combat troops.
You know, President Obama's been going on TV saying absolutely no combat troops in Iraq or Syria, that's our red line, yet while he's saying that, he's sending in, right now the latest number is 1,600 military advisors, quote unquote.
And military advisors are really just ground troops in disguise, because they are, can go to the front lines with their Iraqi troops, they can have weapons, they can fire on people if they're fired upon, and they can call in airstrikes.
And so, you know, in the New York Times, there was this great article which basically said that virtually every military expert rejected the Obama administration's definition of combat troops.
Right, and of course, those numbers, that's 1,600, that excludes the Special Operations Command, that excludes the Joint Special Operations Command, which is different, and it excludes the CIA and all their Merck friends, too.
Oh yeah, absolutely, anything that's covert, it is not, you know, included in these numbers, so really we have no idea.
And then there's the contractors, too, who, as many people have been reporting, think that Iraq and Syria are their next big meal ticket.
You know, you'll remember the contractors, most notoriously Blackwater, who were a big reason why Iraq was such a chaotic disaster just a few years ago.
So, you know, the language that they are using to redefine war, I think, is really disturbing and deserves a lot more attention than it's been getting.
Yeah.
I wrote in 2009, right after his first speech at Camp Lejeune in March of 2009, a month into his presidency, I said, those who bought into the slogans Hope and Change last fall should have read the fine print.
We were warned over and over during the campaign for presidency, Barack Obama made it clear that withdrawal from Iraq on his flexible 16-month timetable meant only the removal of combat forces.
He also made it clear all along that combat forces means whatever he wants it to mean until he decides to change his mind, at least he's honest.
And that was the thing of it, is because he made this clear from 2007 on, that, you know, we can have as many troops there as we want and we can call them something else if we feel like it.
There was no secret about it.
And I'm sorry I shouldn't have read that whole thing, but still.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, and look at the word imminent, which has now lost all meaning because, you know, when President Obama was running for presidency the first time, he said that it would be unconstitutional for the president to enter into airstrikes or war with the country if there wasn't an imminent threat to the United States.
And so now we have a situation where all of the intelligence agencies are widely reporting that ISIS is not an imminent threat to the United States.
You know, they may be barbaric and horrible and just, you know, a terrible, terrible influence in that region.
But they are not actively planning attacks inside the United States, at least according to the FBI, the DNI, and Department of Homeland Security.
Yet here we are going to war in a situation where it's not actually imminent.
And, you know, they've just changed that definition, too, to mean, you know, anything they want, essentially, you know, removing all sorts of checks and balances they used to have.
Oh, hey, Trevor, is there any way you can stay one more segment, or you really got to go?
No, actually, I'm good.
We can do one more if you want.
Okay, good deal.
Hang tight right there.
We'll be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
We're talking about Barack Clinton, our president, and the definition of is fighting age males means you can kill them, they're militants.
Imminent means, eh, you know, I don't know, it could be at some point, maybe.
Troops excludes everybody who's over there, rangers, spies, Delta guys, SEALs, whatever.
Marines, brand new Marine contingent landing in Kuwait right now, getting ready for a couple of weeks from now.
And, you know, another thing that they keep lying to us about here, Trevor, is, well, we just covered it with Murtaza Hussein about the attacks on the so-called Khorasan unit, which is just Al-Qaeda in Syria, the Al-Nusra Front that they were bombing, but they lied about it, one, to not anger our friends who are big fans and friends with the Nusra Front, but we're trying to recruit as our moderate third force in Syria, and that's a pretty damn big lie, this moderate third force, that they're going to create some army of 5,000 guys who are, you know, volunteers to fight in this thing, to kill people in this thing, but who only want to kill ISIS, Nusra, and Assad, and work for America, and they're going to train them for a year, and then, I mean, look, everybody in D.C. and New York and on Twitter and everywhere is just laughing at this.
Everybody knows it's completely ridiculous.
No one's even taking it seriously at all, and yet, it's the stated plan for moving forward with the airstrikes in Syria and the further intervention in Syria.
Not that I would recommend it.
I think it would be absolutely horrible and blow up in our face and all kinds of other objections, but under their logic, at least, it would make sense for the American government to realign with Assad, like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did, and help him kill jihadis, but no, they can't do that because of the politics of Israel and Saudi and Qatar, too, I guess, and so the moderates, we're supporting the moderates, which everybody who knows about this agrees, if there's any moderates at all, it's just because they're more criminals than they are Islamists, but they're certainly not nice guys, and there's certainly not any kind of force that even could be created there, much less already exist to ally with.
How's that for lying us into war?
Yeah, I mean, the situation is just so unbelievably complicated.
It's just hard to see how it could ever turn out well, even if everything that the administration says will happen will happen, which, again, is almost impossible.
So we have here this Free Syrian Army that's supposedly moderate, but which many people say isn't, which are openly aligned with the Nusra Front, which is basically Al-Qaeda, so we're essentially training, right now we're training fighters who are openly aligned with the terrorists we say that we're at war with in other countries, and they want to fight Assad and are now completely pissed at the United States, openly so.
There's a report in the Klatchee just a couple days ago about how there was thousands of people protesting in the streets over U.S. strikes because they're not going after the people that the rebels want to go after, and that they are trying to focus on ISIS, and they're also killing people that they think are allies, and it's just a disaster.
And then, meanwhile, one of the questions that I said that people should be asking President Obama was the fact that we've actually been training and arming the Free Syrian Army for over a year now.
We have this debate in Congress about whether we should fund them, whether we shouldn't.
We already have been, except it's been covert.
It's an open secret that the CIA has been training and arming them for a year.
It's been printed in virtually every major newspaper, but when a congressman asked Secretary of State John Kerry about it, he said that he couldn't confirm or deny that it actually happened.
So maybe we should go back and look at whether it's worked for the last year to give them a bunch of arms, and whether we should continue to do so, not whether we should do so from the start, because we know that all of these arms, or not all of them, but a lot of them have actually ended up in ISIS's hands, so it's already backfiring, yet we seem to want to ignore that evidence and go full steam ahead right into Syria again.
You know, someone pointed out in an article I think we'll be running on antiwar.com tomorrow that the Buck-McKeon amendment to fund the arming and the training of the Syrian rebels even has a provision that the military or whoever, CIA or whoever, I guess, the military in charge, they are to keep Congress up to date on the green on blue attacks, which they anticipate are guaranteed to result from this.
They're going to take a bunch of FSA guys to Saudi Arabia.
The moment they give them live ammo, one of these guys who's actually more loyal to the Islamic State or to Ghalani and the Al-Nusra Front is going to turn on his American trainers, turn on his fellows and shoot them, and so Congress is anticipating this, the hawks are anticipating this, and they're saying, make sure to keep us up to date on how that develops, the insider attacks, the fraggings, that's what they used to call it, fraggings for people confused about what the hell I'm talking about, that was jargon.
They're also basically admitting that by attacking, you know, going to war against ISIS, we're actually increasing our chances for a terrorist attack at home, you know, as soon as we started bombing them, there was all sorts of alerts from DHS and FBI saying, you know, be on the lookout for retaliation attacks or lone wolf attacks now that the U.S. is at war again, and so, you know, the very problem that we're supposedly trying to solve, we're actually just increasing by doing it.
Well, and as you say, and like in the previous interview with Murtaza Hussain about the Khorasan thing, it's all based on dishonesty and a complete and total lack of accountability for everybody who either lies in the first place or, you know, fails to call out the liars in the media who parrot this stuff and help it continue.
I mean, if they ever had to try to shoot it straight to the American people about who's on whose side in Syria, they would have to just throw up their hands and say, boy, it shouldn't be us on any side here.
I mean, the Khorasan thing is another example of them just twisting the English language so that they can somehow justify the legality of all of this.
You know, nobody in America knew what the Khorasan group was three weeks ago.
All of a sudden, these classified leaks started about a week before the strikes, and then, you know, the morning after the strikes, all of a sudden, the U.S. was saying that the Khorasan group was planning an imminent attack on the U.S., again, a legal word which they use which can justify airstrikes.
But then, you know, we found out a couple days later it wasn't so imminent after all, that a bunch of U.S. officials were saying that it was aspirational, that, you know, the U.S. wasn't sure if it was an actual plan, that it was operational, or that there was any time frame involved.
So, you know, here we have them taking a word that is supposed to mean, you know, something in a legal sense and completely distorting it so that it can basically use it as a means to an end.
Yeah.
And here again, they're at war with ISIS, which has actually not ever attacked the United States.
As embarrassing as it is that you got bin Laden reincarnated standing up there on the balcony in Mosul declaring himself the caliph and everything, they've actually never attacked the United States.
But the al-Nusra Front is, you know, if Zawahiri was the leader of a state, they're sworn loyal to him, and he's the butcher of New York, the al-Nusra Front guys are the al-Qaeda guys in Syria.
And here, the whole reason they're calling it, or part of the reason at least, they're calling it Khorasan, is so that it's deniable that they're at war with al-Nusra.
As you said, because everybody starts protesting and getting all mad because they like al-Nusra and they don't want us bombing al-Nusra.
They only want us bombing ISIS and Assad.
And so, here they're actually like laying off al-Qaeda, or trying to, well, we've got to get these few guys, but we don't want to pick a fight with the rest of al-Qaeda because we're too busy focused on ISIS and Assad.
It's crazy.
Again, if they had to be honest about any of it, they wouldn't be able to pursue it in this fashion.
Well, that's a problem.
I mean, think about how they're using their legal justification for this.
They are literally arguing that the Iraq War Resolution gives them the authority to bomb Syria.
I mean, if you can twist a resolution to bomb one country from 12 years ago to mean that you can bomb another country now, you can pretty much do anything with English language.
And it's also a failure of Congress.
We're blaming the President for a lot of this, and rightfully so, but Congress has been absolutely terrified to live up to its constitutional obligations to actually vote on this war and to provide some oversight.
They literally left the Capitol a week early than they were supposed to, basically fled out of D.C. so they could go back and campaign and so they wouldn't have a controversial vote on their record for the election.
It's kind of shameful that they are just going to take their sweet time for such an issue that they claim is so important to the U.S. that this is the greatest threat we've ever seen.
Yeah, and they're so dishonest about it.
Boehner's saying, well, I'll have a vote on it if the President will ask for one.
What?
And then, like you say about the Iraq Resolution, they also invoked the AUMF of 01 and they invoked the War Powers Act and they invoked that whole imminent doctrine.
And in other words, they got ten excuses and they know none of them are any good, so they try to use all of them to add up to one good excuse for running roughshod right over the Constitution in front of everybody.
Yep, hopefully public pressure can change things, but the Congress and the executive branch have been spending two months working everybody up into a frenzy that ISIS is now the new Hitler and that if we don't do anything, everybody's going to die.
And it would be nice if there was a little more nuance in these debates and that we can talk about the positives and negatives of going to war yet again in the Middle East and that a lot of times this stuff backfires, which it already is, which nobody's asking.
And I guess we'll just have to wait and see, but it doesn't look good right now.
Yeah, well, I absolutely agree with that.
Even though I'm a thousand percent peacenik and non-interventionist, I'm not afraid of the whole truth at all.
I think the whole truth is an argument for peace and non-intervention in a thousand different ways.
So, you know, I think that's why they got to lie all the time is so they can do the wrong thing.
So anyway, thanks very much.
I'm sorry for talking so much instead of asking you great questions, but you're really good anyway, Trevor.
Appreciate it.
Oh, thanks for having me back.
All right, Joe.
That's the great Trevor Tim.
He's at freedom.press.
Isn't that great?
Freedom.press.
That's it.
Freedom.press.something.com.
Just freedom.press.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation.
And where he sits on the board of directors there with Greenwald, with Snowden, with Daniel Ellsberg.
I mean, give me a break.
Freedom.press.
And then also he's at the Guardian.
Mr. President, will you tell us the truth?
Eight questions we must ask Obama about secret war.
We'll be right back.
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