06/24/13 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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And lucky us, last minute here, got a hold of Jonathan Landay, the great reporter from McClatchy Newspapers.
If only you all had listened to him and read his reporting in 2002, there never would have been an Iraq war.
Welcome back to the show, Jonathan.
How are you doing?
I'm well, thank you very much, Scott.
Very happy to have you on the show today, and I really appreciate you doing it on short notice here.
Obama's crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
Well, that's a pretty broad way to state it in your headline here at McClatchy, D.C.
Please elaborate.
This is a story that I worked on with my colleague, Marissa Taylor, that we published at the end of last week on what the Obama administration calls the insider threat program.
And this is a program they launched after the arrest of Private Manning in the WikiLeaks case.
It's intended to crack down on leaks of classified information by government agencies, but under the sort of very broad guidelines that were issued by the White House, some agencies have gone beyond that and extended it to unclassified information.
And it's reliant to some extent on federal workers keeping tabs on their co-workers to watch their co-workers' behaviors in case it indicates some kind of security risk and also urges managers to punish people who fail to report their suspicions about their co-workers.
Well, and now listen.
I know you've worked on the intelligence beat and who knows what before that, but I know you've done the intelligence beat, very serious, very high-level type people you've talked with and reported on for years and years and years now.
And so I know that you've got the background to answer this question, I think, which is don't they already have a very careful and delicate balance worked out about just this sort of question?
How do you keep enough tabs on people that hopefully you can make sure that they're not doing wrong, but then again you don't want them to hate their bosses so much that they refuse to work or that everybody just starts pointing fingers at each other and turning each other in over not real infractions, but just vendettas and whatever.
I mean, we've had a government for 240 years, the same one this whole time.
It seems like they already know just how far you can crack down before you blow it.
And when I'm reading this thing, this is absolutely ridiculous.
I mean, this sounds to me like they're just going to grind themselves to a screeching halt.
The thing is that individual agencies within the intelligence community, for the most part the Defense Department, had their own individual programs.
What this is for the first time is the President of the United States setting standards for the government writ large.
And this program extends beyond the Pentagon and the intelligence community to federal departments and agencies such as the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration, the Education Department, the Agriculture Department, any federal agency that has access to classified materials.
But as I said, because of these very broad definitions of what an insider threat is, agencies have enormous latitude to determine their own policies and including what kind of unauthorized disclosures they are going to crack down on.
And those, in some cases we have found, include unclassified information.
Now, you're right in terms of this idea that coworkers need to look at or have to watch what they call these behavioral indicators in terms of trying to suss out security risk.
But for the most part, that really existed only within the intelligence world and the Defense Department, not in these other agencies.
Well, and I mean, in talking to your sources, in reporting this, I mean, did they all seem pretty incredulous about this?
Like kind of, geez, Jonathan, you wouldn't believe what's been going on here sort of thing.
That's the way it reads.
Well, the amazing thing is about this is that we did a lot of this reporting based on documents that we were able to get a hold of, both online and some that were given to us.
And none of which are classified.
The fact is that the president issued his executive order on this to put this program in the works back in October of 2011.
So this is something that has been well underway for almost two years now.
And we'll just have to wait to see where this goes.
But, you know, yes, we've talked to – I mean, the fact is that even now, when you try to talk to people who you've talked to within the government for a very long time, people who trust you because you maintain their confidences and they respect your ability to handle this information that they might – that they give you in a responsible and objective way, they are – some of them are unwilling to talk now because of the atmosphere that now exists within – across the government, because of this fear that they will suffer retaliation if they do talk to a journalist without permission.
And the thing is, though, is part of this program, the president issued new and stricter guidelines on protection of so-called whistleblowers, you know, people who blow the whistle on government waste, fraud, and abuse.
The problem is that the government only considers whistleblowers, true whistleblowers, those who use the internal mechanisms for reporting these waste, fraud, and abuse.
And the problem with that is that there have been numerous cases that we know of where people have used those internal reporting mechanisms to try and alert both their superiors and Congress to serious problems within their agencies.
And those people, instead of having their cases investigated fairly and dealt with fairly, suffer job retaliation from their bosses.
So there's a problem here with the way that this program has been structured in terms of giving weight – the weight of this program is put on sort of the idea that you have these people inside who can't be trusted rather than looking at how you achieve the balance that you were talking about.
And the way I think that you achieve that better balance is, look, there are almost 5 million people with clearances in this country now.
A lot of them are contractors.
The government over-classifies things, has been doing that for a very long time.
So I guess one of the best ways of dealing with this problem would be to reduce the number of people who have access to secrets and reduce the number of secrets that the government keeps to only those things that truly need to be kept secret.
Yeah, they put themselves in an impossible position here when they classify so much.
And then it's always worked.
I think my kind of politics 101 at junior college textbook sort of frames it where leaks to the media and investigative reporting, that's all part of the political game.
That's all part of the system in America is people got to be able to talk from time to time, even off the record, to tell journalists what's going on, and that's why it's the fourth branch, the fourth estate, and this and that and whatever.
That's how it's supposed to be.
Now they want to keep everything secret, but they don't want the people or the media to know anything that they don't hear from a government press conference.
And that's absolutely impossible.
And the other thing, though, that this system doesn't accommodate from what we can tell are leaks like the Pentagon Papers, for instance, which were highly classified documents showing the true history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the Indochina conflict that once exposed by Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times and the Washington Post showed how the success of American governments had misled and lied to the American people about the conduct of that war.
Now that kind of leak under this system would be heavily, heavily penalized, and whoever leaked it would obviously almost certainly be facing charges similar to those that are against Snowden, Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who's now on the run.
And those would be espionage charges, because that's the other part of this program.
The part of this program emphasizes at least the way it's being implemented in the agencies that we looked at, and that includes the Peace Corps, emphasizes leaks as being the equivalent of espionage.
If you leak information, and the emphasis again is on classified information, that's tantamount to helping the enemies of the United States, only that doesn't accommodate a leak like the Pentagon Papers.
Right.
Well, and look, I mean, you're Jonathan Landay.
Everybody, look, in the summer and the fall, well, look, the whole time, but especially, let's say like right when Congress was going to vote on the authorization, Landay and Strobel are publishing in Knight Ridder mid-level CIA guys saying, Nuh-uh, man, this isn't true.
And Doug Feith is running an ad hoc thing where they're digging through our trash and making up nonsense over there in Rumsfeld's office.
And the people need to know about this.
And, you know, it may not have run in your local paper, but it did run in the McClatchy Papers.
And these are the exact kind of people that Obama would be charging with espionage for.
In effect, it would be tantamount to helping Saddam Hussein.
In other words, it could have saved America the trouble of a giant war that didn't do anything except help Iran and kill a million Iraqis for nothing.
I mean, the fact is that stuff is over-classified.
Information that's not correct is classified to protect it, to conceal it from the American people.
And in the case of the war in Iraq, or at least the lead-up to the war, there were classified information that was selectively leaked to certain news organizations that was not just bogus or exaggerated, but involved defectors who weren't defectors, you know, information that was just totally wrong.
And it was put in papers like the New York Times by senior administration officials who could then go on the Sunday talk shows and talk about, not about the secrets that they were keeping, but the information that was now appearing in the New York Times.
They were free to talk about it in that context.
And so, yeah, I mean, it's a system that's badly broken that needs to be fixed.
And the fact is that what I think governments fail to understand is the harsher they are perceived to crack down on information that should be public, on civil liberties, on privacy, the greater the chances you're going to have an Edward Snowden or a Private Manning who are going to say, you know what, this isn't the way things work.
And they will end up revealing secrets to a journalist.
Yeah, well, I mean, it is really ham-handed, isn't it?
The way they indict him for espionage.
If anything, they should have been saying, listen, pal, we'll charge you with the lightest felony that we can find.
Just please come home.
Instead, they chase him to Russia.
Like, what are they doing?
Well, I have to tell you, just to go on the record here, I think that there were certain things that perhaps he shouldn't have revealed.
But the idea that the government is collecting the millions of data from millions of Americans' daily telephone calls is just reprehensible.
And I think that, obviously, that's what drove him to do what he did.
And as I said, I think the more that that kind of thing happens, and the harder the government tries to crack down on that kind of thing, the more Edward Snowdens we're going to have.
Right.
And then instead of us learning just the worst parts, we could end up with us learning all kinds of things, sources and methods compromised on the next one.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
Worst problems.
Exactly right.
And now, I have to say this.
I'm sorry to just kind of tack this on to the end of your interview.
You can comment on it if you want.
It seems to me that it is a major part of the story here is that this is the choking life that Osama bin Laden was trying to trick us into creating for ourselves, and we've fallen for it.
That is the whole point.
The action is in the reaction.
So you knock the towers down to try to provoke an overreactive invasion of the Middle East to lead us to bankruptcy and all that, but also create a police state in America that the people resent enough that finally we will make our government just pull the bases out of Saudi Arabia then.
We don't want to live in a police state, and it's just the long way out of Arabia to me.
We could have knocked all this off a decade ago.
I can't comment on whatever his motives were in that regard, but certainly the government, the United States government, has a habit, predictably, of overreacting to these kinds of things.
Instead of taking a step back and a deep breath and saying, you know what, the Europeans have been dealing with terrorism and violent terrorism for a very long time, but they don't react by going and invading other countries.
They use their police.
They use their intelligence services.
They do it in very intelligent ways, and they understand after dealing with this for literally centuries that you're not going to be able to wipe it out, and you need to be able to deal with it in a responsible and balanced way.
Instead, here, I've always looked at al-Qaeda and the international terrorism threat and said, you know what, we are treating these guys like, or I should say the United States government is treating these guys, and in that I include Congress very much, like the modern-day equivalent of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
They are an existential threat to the United States.
Look, they can create huge tragedies for the people who they kill and their families, but the fact is, I believe, short of them ever getting a nuclear weapon, the biggest threat they are to the political standing of whoever happens to be in the White House and Congress when they succeed in, for instance, using an underwear bomb to blow up an airliner over an American city.
That would be a huge tragedy, but it's not going to end the United States as we know it.
Unfortunately, this is the way these kinds of things are treated.
Well, yeah, and by blaming freedom and clamping down the way they do, they are ending the United States as we knew it, and now we live in the homeland, and it's a wholly different place.
As you said, they're keeping track of our moms' phones and everything.
Yeah.
I mean, I would have assumed they were tapping your phone, Jonathan, but you deserve it because you do such great work.
I sure hope they are, but I do assume now dealing – I've assumed for a long time that when dealing with sources that, yes, my phone may not be clean.
All right.
Hey, listen, thanks.
I've already kept you extra.
Thank you very much for your great work.
I appreciate it.
Sure.
All right, everybody, that's Jonathan Landay.
This piece is with Marissa Taylor.
She's actually the head on the byline here.
It's just I know his email address, that's all.
Marissa Taylor and Jonathan S. Landay at McClatchy Newspapers.
Obama's crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
This is a really important one.
I highly suggest that you read it from cover to cover here.
It's a very important article.
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