01/09/13 – Marcy Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, so welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is the great Marcy Wheeler.
Empty Wheel, they call her in the blogosphere.
EmptyWheel.net.
Welcome back to the show.
Marcy, how are you?
Hey, good to be here, Scott.
Good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Happy New Year and all those things.
Listen, tell me everything in the world that anyone knows about John Brennan, because I know you know all of that.
Um, the quick versions is he was at CIA for 25 years.
As part of that, he was the Riyadh station chief.
So he's buddies with the Saudis.
He was George Kennan's chief of staff as we were ramping up the war on terror.
He was involved in targeting for the Chinese illegal wiretapping program.
And then he has been Barack Obama's Dick Cheney, if you will, over the last four years, including convincing him not to back immunity for telecoms.
And he's been in charge of the drone program and all of that stuff.
So great guy.
Yeah, incredibly.
I mean, to be fair, he's incredibly experienced.
He's qualified to be director of the CIA.
But he's also been very much involved, not just with the worst of the Bush administration and frankly, the worst of the Obama administration.
But yeah, I also think he's got real close ties to the Saudis that we ought to think about as well.
Okay, well, so that's a lot to go over right there already.
First of all, if he was Tenet's chief of staff, well, what does that really say about his role in the decisions Tenet was making?
Because, of course, Tenet was in charge of the entire torture program.
Yeah, so he left that part of the CIA in 2000.
I'm trying to remember the years exactly.
I mean, so he got out of that line of command in 2002, 2003.
So he was right into the program.
It's he, according to all known sources, he did not object to the program, although he did not pick and choose the program.
Although he also has celebrated Kofor Black, who's the guy who drummed up the program.
So, you know, he thinks Kofor Black's a hero.
Kofor Black is the guy who decided we should take gloves off.
So he's pretty supportive of it.
And then, you know, he also has been pretty dubious on Iraq because he was there long enough to be involved in the beginning of the Iraq debacle.
Do we know for a fact that he was involved in torture, or we just don't know whether or not he was involved in torture?
So far, we don't know that he was.
Well, what we know is what Dianne Feinstein has.
I mean, Dianne Feinstein may be terrible on a lot of things, but she did put in the effort to write this 6,000, to get the 6,000 page torture report done.
And she actually does.
She is good on torture, meaning she is good at combating torture.
And she has leaked already that John Brennan, you know, they and the White House have looked at what the torture report says about John Brennan.
And while he was read into the program and did not object to the program, he wasn't the guy who designed it.
And it sort of makes sense because we know that the torture program was designed by Kofor Black, who was in a different line of command from, I mean, Brennan at that point was kind of right inside Tenet's office.
And Kofor Black was in charge of Counterterrorism Center.
Now, one of the things that I think is really important about John Brennan is that all of these things, certainly the torture, certainly the targeted killing, and the person assassination squads, the partnering with Libya and Egypt and Syria to torture people, all of that stuff was not actually authorized by the OLC memos we blame John Yu for.
They were authorized by a presidential finding the day before the Afghanistan war was declared.
And Brennan still thinks in those terms.
And there's this interview from 2006 where he still is talking about, oh, yeah, we had to make sure we got the findings first.
And that's important for two reasons.
And that's important for two reasons.
One is because it says he believes, as most CIA people believe, that all you need is presidential okay to do these things.
You don't need it to be legal.
You need the president to say it's okay.
The other reason is that the Obama administration has really gone to the mat in the last two and a half years to make sure that the finding that Kofor Black basically wrote and George Bush approved, which was bad enough to begin with, but it also included all these kind of loopholes, so nobody was held responsible.
The Obama administration has gone to the mat to make sure that'll never become public.
And Brennan knows that.
And so Brennan knows that he's got this carte blanche, and no one will ever see it, except for a couple people in Congress who haven't shown any real interest in providing oversight.
Anyway.
A finding is the president ordering the CIA to go ahead and break the law, because I'm the president, I'm telling you it's okay to.
Right?
That's what his finding is in the first place.
Right.
And one of the really interesting things about that is when a judge last week refused to let the ACLU get a copy of, and they asked for not the OLC memo, they asked for records that authorize the killing of Amar al-Awlaki.
When the judge said you can't have it, there were some hints, I think, that she was actually talking about the finding.
So in other words, is it possible that the Obama administration has said it's okay for the CIA to kill American citizens, overseas, yadda yadda, imminent terrorists, all the stuff that they say, with no evidence and no judge to check it.
Is it really the case, is it possible that Obama has said, yeah, I've said it's okay to do this just on the basis of a document that George Bush signed back in 2001.
And there's a lot of reason to believe that that's the case.
Yeah.
Well, I don't even know why they pretend to go by the law anymore at all, but I guess they still got to pretend sometimes.
All right.
Now, the wiretapping program, what all now was John Brennan's involvement?
I'm sorry, we're talking about Marcy Wheeler, the Empty Wheel, EmptyWheel.net is her great blog.
And we're talking about John Brennan, who was the head of counterterrorism in the White House.
I forget the exact title.
And now he's been picked to be the head of the CIA.
Could you tell us about his role in the wiretapping thing again?
So he was in charge of what was called the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in 2004 and 2005, and then went on to work in the private sector doing the same kind.
This is kind of data mining, basically.
Let's troll all of the databases to find the terrorists and go after them.
It's an important role, except that, hey, we know that in that time frame, the 2004, 2005, that was the group that was doing the targeting for Dick Cheney's illegal program.
So we know he was tied to it that way, which, again, given that the Obama administration, they went after Thomas Drake because they thought that he was the whistleblower who exposed that program, given that Brennan was involved in convincing Obama to give immunity to the telecoms, which has led to immunity to the government.
That's really troubling.
The other thing, which I forgot to mention at the top, was last year there was the National Counterterrorism Center, which is what the Terrorist Threat Integration Center became.
So data mining, let's find the terrorists.
Last year, they were trying to get a database from the Department of Homeland Security, and Homeland Security said, well, okay, but you've got to strip all of the American person data out of it within a month.
And then a month later, the NCTC came back and said, no, we haven't gotten it done.
So DHS said, okay, you get one more month.
And then NCTC came back and said, ah, we haven't gotten it done.
And John Brennan kind of stepped in and said, well, skip it.
Why don't we just give NCTC access to any federal database they want?
Any federal database that they say, well, we need it because it might contain terrorist information.
Let's just give that to NCTC and skip all of the rules about protecting American privacy, skip all the rules about protecting innocent Americans.
So he was also behind that.
I think this part of John Brennan's past has been seriously underplayed by those of us who think he would be a terrible CIA director, which is that he's been one of the leaders in making sure that American privacy is being basically abolished in these data mining programs that used to be illegal.
And now under Obama, they've become illegal.
Right.
Yeah, it's the general warrant, right?
I guess they don't call it that, but that's pretty much what it is.
Entire categories of information can be warranted to be eavesdropped on by the court now.
Yeah, I mean, we know that that's one of the things they're hiding in the FISA Amendments Act.
That's becoming increasingly clear.
But some of the databases that we would imagine NCTC going after include things like Americans who adopt children from overseas.
So the same database that tells you whether or not somebody has what kind of visa somebody came in the country on.
That also tracks Americans who, say, go to China and adopt a child in China forever.
And these people are going to be dumped into NCTC's data mining.
And who knows how they're going to end up being kicked on to be wiretapped or what have you, because they look funny on paper.
So, I mean, it's just great.
And again, you know, John Brennan has been really into that.
Yeah, that whole data mining thing is so back ass to me where, I mean, really what it is, is it's like making a computer program for coming up with conspiracy theories.
But then it's not just a dumb conspiracy theory, because it's the computer that says so.
And computers are really smart and logical and stuff.
Like the authority for being wrong, it doesn't matter because it's or the responsibility for being wrong doesn't matter because it's the inanimate object that gets it wrong if they ever get it wrong.
But it's basically the thinnest of stuff, right?
Like, I think that's what you're just implying.
Somebody goes and adopts a little kid from somewhere else.
Someday the computer might see that in a very strange light.
You know, I mean, it's crazy.
Right.
So maybe not China, but say you adopt a kid from Ethiopia or you adopt a kid from Guatemala, where, you know, we claim there are terrorists in those places.
And while you're there picking up your child, you meet an imam or you meet some local village chief or what have you.
Is that one day going to get a completely innocent adoptive parent at least investigated for being a potential terrorist just because the computer, as you said, I mean, there aren't enough terrorists for a computer to really learn what a terrorist looks like in a database.
And yet we're using this technology anyway to try and find terrorists.
Because, you know, why not?
Because John Brennan says we should.
Yeah.
All right.
And now on the Iraq lies, what all do you know about his participation in pushing the lies that led us into war 10 years ago?
I know less about that, but I just read I mean, there's a 2006 interview that he did with Frontline floating around, and this is why I think it's worth noting that he also kind of bought off on Iraq, because he was talking about, well, sometimes when you're fighting bad guys, you have to take the gloves off.
Again, a reference back to this presidential finding saying go break the law.
And the way he referred to it, even though the entire interview was him kind of saying, well, Chinese people were pushing this in the CIA.
Chinese people were behind it.
Nevertheless, in the interview, he said, well, we got to take the gloves off with Iraq as well.
And that's especially troubling because the only justification for that is if you believe the myth that Iraq had anything to do with terrorism, or maybe he's saying that, well, we went to war, created a lot of chaos.
The terrorists came in because we basically created the opportunity for them.
And therefore, now we've got to violate the rules of law, the law of war, just because we've created this opportunity for terrorists to come in.
And that gives us the opportunity to break the law.
I mean, that seems to be the logic there.
And that's really troubling, because most of the lawyers at least talking about the Iraq war said, oh, we can't do X, Y, and Z because we're not occupying power.
But it suggests that he was sort of thinking in a different way, which is, again, really troubling.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and it's funny, too, because it's kind of an echo of that flypaper thesis that, oh, in fact, now that none of the six reasons I told you in the first place have panned out, this one was a favorite of Andrew Sullivan, right?
Well, you see, the reason we invaded Iraq now is because just to lure terrorists there so that we can torture them there, or I guess he didn't say torture, but so we can stamp them all out and then the very limited number of people who would ever dare resist our occupation there will be dead and then we'll be safe.
Yeah.
Right.
Freedom.
Don't forget freedom.
That was the ultimate reason.
Oh, yeah.
Just don't check the headlines for news out of Iraq right now.
And you can believe that it all worked out great.
All right.
And then the kill list now.
So it was last May, correct, when the New York Times published this piece where it was, I think it was a pretty obvious conclusion to me, right?
That maybe you that the president had ordered his two or three dozen closest friends to go and talk with the New York Times about their kill list covert assassination program that includes whacking American citizens.
And and what we found out was that Brennan runs the whole friggin thing, huh?
Yeah.
And this is a really, really important point because it's being forgotten.
I mean, there's this great amnesia on the part of people covering Brennan in that they're saying, oh, he wanted to put a rule to the program, except they're forgetting that the most recent report on that says he dropped that after after Mitt Romney wasn't elected.
They're also saying, oh, he's in charge of the kill list.
And in fact, he's also in charge of and shortly after he took control of he's in charge of the signature strikes in Yemen.
And and the whole, in my opinion, the whole reason he got his 12 friends to go talk to the New York Times is so that we would be talking about the kill list and not the fact that John Brennan, even though his apologists now want to say he's opposed to signature strikes.
John Brennan, after the point when we learned that it was a real problem to do this in Pakistan, John Brennan OKed it for Yemen, which is more problematic even in Pakistan for a number of reasons.
But nevertheless, he OKed it.
So John Brennan controls the process.
Yes, for some high level people, there is this approval process and the approval process limits the number of human casualties, kind of civilian casualties, kind of.
And a lot of people get some say, although John Brennan's new system gave DOD less say in the process.
But in addition to that, so in addition to the kill list, there's also John Brennan saying, oh, sure, you see those state bearded men with guns.
Of course, they're terrorists.
Terrorists.
Let's take them out with the drone.
Right.
In other words, he's really good at PR this guy.
He really they got the New York Times to to pick up the spin exactly the way they wanted it.
They kill innocent people all day, but then they name those innocent people guilty.
And that's good enough.
Right.
I mean, one of the things that John Brennan that this whole approval process kind of bakes in is that any military aged male, though, including the 16 year old American Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki, who was killed, is considered a militia member unless he's proven innocent.
And so that's how a lot of people get counted as non civilians, just because they're a farmer standing next to somebody who may be a terrorist, but he's also a tribe member in Yemen or something like that.
Right.
Yeah, because that's one of the things baked in.
Yeah.
Anyone anywhere near the Duran line with a rifle must be an anti-American militant, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Just like everyone in Texas with a rifle is armed robber, too, I suppose.
Yeah.
Imagine if they said that in the United States, how how obviously wrong that would look and how offensive to supporters of the Second Amendment and defenders of the Second Amendment would find that to just tie a gun, you know, holding a gun with some kind of terrorist activity.
Right, Lisa?
Right.
Yeah.
So and then the signature strikes, you got to explain that, because I don't think everybody knows what that is.
OK, when drone strikes started out, they were always targeted at somebody we knew.
So it would be, oh, look.
I'm outside Afghanistan and Iraq, you're saying, right?
Well, yeah.
OK, so in Afghanistan, they were used as cover.
They were used just in the same way that that you would use air cover normally.
You know, you've got guys on the ground.
They're Americans.
You're trying to protect them.
We we began to use drones to do that because it was safer and you could get a better view of what was on the ground.
So you're talking about the secret wars in Pakistan and Yemen, et cetera.
Somalia.
Right.
So we would say, for example, well, we think we've got a clean shot at Zawahiri.
Let's shoot that house with a drone.
And that's how it started.
And we you know, there would be this whole approval process for people saying, you know, this guy's a bad guy.
Let's go see if we can, you know, this guy's a bad guy and we've got a lock on him or we know where he's been hanging out.
Let's go take him out with a drone.
So that's that's one thing.
I mean, there are there are reasons to find that somewhat problematic.
And there are reasons to believe it didn't always work that well in practice.
And there are reasons to criticize some of the decisions made both in choosing who while who qualified also embedding the intelligence.
They want to one of the problems with our drone strikes is that we often are relying on either partners on the ground to kind of throw targets at somebody they think is a good target, which means it's really susceptible to them kind of sabotaging us.
We're really reliant in Yemen on both Saudi and Yemeni officials who have really different interests than we do in Yemen.
But, you know, that's that's the personality strike.
That's that's how it started, which was we'll pick somebody.
They're high level.
We believe we have no other way of getting them.
So we'll go in with a drone strike and take them out and try and limit the number of other people in the same car who we take out.
That changed partly because we had hit so many of the high level people, partly because we didn't know enough.
Again, like drone strikes are only as good as the intelligence that goes into them.
And even supporters of drone strikes admit that the intelligence often stinks.
But because we didn't have a sense of who all of the tribes were in Pakistan that we decided we had to take on as enemies, we would just say, well, those people look like it.
Those people, you know, we know there are two Taliban members with them.
They're all sitting in a big group.
So they must be having some war council.
And lo and behold, it turned out not to be a war council, but to be, you know, the equivalent of local government taking out a town hall meeting because you have bearded men and guns.
And and so there you're I mean, what they're really targeting on is pattern.
And partly it's the beards and partly it's the guns and partly it's the the way that they're moving.
There was a joke, actually, in that New York Times article about a bunch of people doing jumping jacks.
They must be terrorists.
And therefore, you have to take them out stuff like that.
Right.
So all this, this whole thing is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war, isn't it?
I mean, it's so funny that obviously there's the contradiction about the secrecy where they say, oh, the wars, the the secret covert wars that we're waging in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia.
And yeah, don't worry about those.
They're secret.
You can't review them and whatever.
But everybody knows about them.
But that aside, I mean, isn't it all just illegal?
Is it any different than like waging a war in Libya without authorization?
Or I guess they're just still relying on the AUMF.
And I guess like you were saying on the rest of it, they're just relying on the authority from executive orders right after September 11th.
Yeah, I mean, I think with regard to the United States in general, I think they're they're on safer legal ground with drones than they were in Libya, because Libya was a direct violation of the War Powers Act.
And because they had I mean, Obama had kind of been told you got to stop by April 1 and he kept going.
So, I mean, I think Libya is a bigger problem.
But I but but I also think that where they get into real trouble is in their interpretation.
So, for example, there's an LLC memo that says you can kill Anwar al-Awlaki if you can prove that, A, he's operational, that he's an operational leader trying to target the United States and B, that he is an imminent threat, meaning if you don't take him out today, then he's going to hit us tomorrow.
And some of the logic on that was based not in counterterrorism principles, but in, you know, can a policeman chasing a dangerous murderer who's trying to escape, can he shoot the tires out on the car and kill the guy?
That's the metaphor they were using for going after Anwar al-Awlaki.
And the problem with that is, A, it's not entirely clear who is operational or an imminent threat when they did take him out.
But they first tried to take him out in in December 2009.
And even according to the intelligence community, they didn't consider him operational until the day after they first tried to kill him.
So even according to their best argument, the government itself says that he was not considered operational when we first tried to take him out.
Right.
And I mean, they really haven't ever really done anything besides say that they think he was without explaining.
Right.
I mean, the closest I ever heard to him being guilty of anything was they thought he might have been in the room when Abdulmutallab was talking on the phone to somebody else.
What?
So, I mean, they had they claimed that Abdulmutallab testified that Awlaki is the one who told him to wait until he was over over Detroit.
Over Detroit before he let the bomber.
That's what they claim.
But what's really interesting about that, because that's their best argument for why Awlaki was was an imminent threat and frankly, why he was a bigger threat than these other guys up in AQAP who clearly are dangerous.
But what's really interesting about that is they've had three opportunities to present their argument about Awlaki in court, and they've always backed off of it.
So, in other words, they're willing to make that case so long as a lawyer can't go, hey, wait a second.
This this testimony was derived and basically they promised Abdulmutallab that he would have a better sentence if he said that it was Awlaki and he never got that plea deal.
So he never officially said it was Awlaki.
And that's what they're relying on to justify having killed this American citizen.
So we don't know.
And we, you know, until Abdulmutallab find some way to explain what he actually said, it's not clear.
That's not how we convict people in this country.
We we get to check the check the sources.
Right.
All right.
We got to go.
That's Marcy Wheeler.
Thanks very much, Marcy.
All right.
Take care, Scott.
Empty wheel dot net.
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