09/27/13 – John Knefel – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
First guest today is John Neffel, with a silent K, that is.
He's an independent journalist, writes for, well, you can find him at Rolling Stone and Alternet and other places like that.
This one's at rollingstone.com.
Is the FBI's domestic spying out of control?
A new ACLU report shows how the Bureau's domestic surveillance program has exploded since 9-11.
So welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Good.
Great to be here.
Good to have you here.
So is the FBI's domestic spying out of control?
And out of control of who?
Well, that's, I mean, that's really the question that's going to be at the forefront for civil libertarians for the foreseeable future.
And what the ACLU report details very clearly is that following 9-11, the FBI created an Office of Intelligence.
And since then, they have really institutionalized this intelligence gathering process in the FBI, and they've turned away from a sort of their, what they traditionally had as a sort of strictly law enforcement mandate.
And although certainly over the FBI's history, they engaged in a lot of intelligence gathering, it's now formalized in a way that we haven't seen before.
Okay.
So that's interesting to me, the Office of Intelligence, is that the same as a division?
Like they have the criminal division and the counterintelligence division?
Is this a new separate division?
Or it's under one of those two?
Or how does that work exactly?
And it's different from the counterterrorism division, I guess, too.
Yeah, I believe that it was started as part of the counterterrorism division.
I'm actually not entirely positive about that, but it's something that has engaged in all kinds of very, very shady behavior using informants, mapping, mapping Muslim communities, things like that.
All right, well, and so let's talk about that first and foremost here, the mapping.
What do you mean by that?
And what's so bad about that?
Right.
So there's this program called Domain Management.
And it was partially introduced, implemented by this guy, Philip Mudd, who is a former CIA agent who then went to the FBI to help the FBI with its intelligence gathering.
And what Domain Management does is it allows the FBI to map regions of the country by race, by religion, by ethnicity.
And one of the specifics that I detail in the story that I did is that the field office in Detroit requested permission to do domain management to map the Middle Eastern population and the Muslim population in Michigan, because they say in this memo that was released as part of a FOIA lawsuit that a lot of State Department-designated terrorist groups come from the Middle East.
There are a lot of people of Middle Eastern descent in Michigan.
And so they need authority to map who lives where in Detroit and in Michigan, because they are Muslim, and they say because so many of these State-designated groups come from the Middle East.
And so it's a pretty clear, I think, example of profiling.
That's not what the FBI says publicly.
They say that the program of domain management is only for specific cases, not for general intelligence gathering.
But one of the people that I talked to for the story, Trevor Aronson, who's done a lot of looking into the FBI for a book that he wrote called The Terror Factory, he said that FBI agents have told him that they call domain management battlefield management.
So that gives you a sort of sense of how at least some agents are approaching this topic.
Yeah, like they're Stanley McChrystal fighting the Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq or something, right?
This is your kill box.
Right, exactly.
Exactly.
And it's...
Well, now, so hang on a second here, John, let me ask you something from a devil's advocate kind of thing.
Because for me, of course, I want the FBI abolished, you know, 10 years ago.
I don't think they should do anything at all.
But so maybe that's not necessarily the best place to question you from.
How about, hey, come on, they got they got to protect us from the bad guys somehow.
And they are a bunch of dunderheads.
And so it's not like they can just magically know who the bad guys are.
They do need webs of informants throughout the Muslim community to...
Somebody's got to be...
Someone's got to be around to tell them that, hey, the preacher at that mosque is getting pretty crazy.
And some of the young men listening to him seem even crazier than him.
And maybe you guys need to go and check out what they're up to.
And...
Right?
Or not?
Well, what the FBI can do is investigate acts of criminality.
And arguably, that's the only thing that they should be doing.
The author of this report, McTermin, is a former FBI agent, uses the example of Kamerlin Tsarnaev.
And so there are these, of course, the accused Boston bomber, one of the two.
So in the case of Kamerlin Tsarnaev, you have these stories of him, you know, giving these outbursts in the mosque and challenging the imam and saying that America is the devil and various things like that.
And then on the other hand, you also have Kamerlin traveling abroad, possibly, traveling to get training to meet up with violent groups.
And as Mike German laid out, only one of those two is potential criminal behavior.
And it's only...
It's traveling, it's attempting to get training.
That's something that the FBI can and probably should be investigating.
But the problem is that once you start investigating people based on...and investigating groups based on protected First Amendment activity, then that's when you get into very, very serious problems.
And that's, in many cases, that's when the sort of the next step of bringing the informants in and establishing these sort of very elaborate stings comes to the forefront.
There's this case of the Newburgh Four in upstate New York who say that they were entrapped, and their case was actually recently...there was an appeal heard.
They were convicted of attempting to bomb synagogues, and on appeal, two of the judges said that the appeal...that the conviction should stand, and that it wasn't a case of entrapment.
If you look at the facts of the matter, you have somebody who really, under no reasonable circumstances, could have carried out a terrorist operation on his own.
You have the main...this guy, James Cromedy, who at one point is offered a quarter of a million dollars by the FBI informant to go through with this plan.
And so what you have is when the FBI starts singling out groups and looking at groups and potentially investigating them for saying something inflammatory about the United States, what that sometimes leads to is creating these elaborate stings that the FBI can then have these press conferences to say, look, we just foiled a homegrown terror cell, and that that justifies massive spending on counterterrorism measures.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this is one where I guess I'm not really sure if there's any indicators that we can look to to measure whether the people are catching on to this yet, but it's certainly, for anyone who's paying attention to it, it's the most obvious thing in the world that you can count the actual terrorist threats in America since 9-11 on one hand.
Moussaoui, who they'd only done their job, they could have stopped the thing in the first place.
But then there's Zazie from Denver and there's...what's his name?
The Times Square bomber, Shehzad, Faisal Shehzad, and I think I'm missing one other.
And the rest of them are all entrapment jobs, or at least, you know, trumped up charges based on a bunch of hooey, you know?
Yeah, the FBI really loves to try it out, that there have been 500, or they say more than 500 terrorism cases that have been successfully prosecuted since 9-11.
And some of those are sort of low-level money transfers, things that are not actually violent threats.
And then many of them are these trumped-up sting operations, and like you said, there are really only...yeah, you can probably count on one hand the number of actual threats.
And one of the really key points to remember here is that these threats are not as awful as some of them could have been.
We're not talking about existential threats to the United States.
And I think that a lot of people need to really examine the country's priorities in terms of what kind of violence is absolutely unacceptable, namely any violence that we call terrorism, and what kind of violence is acceptable, which is all kinds of violence, all kinds of death that comes from the stress of poverty, violence that comes from childhood obesity, gun deaths.
There's all kinds of violence in this country that people are fine with, but we as a culture have decided that the only appropriate number of violence from terrorism is zero.
And so the NYPD, the FBI, and other agencies have taken on this, I think, really problematic prevent philosophy, and what ends up happening is that you create these huge dragnets, and you end up really terrorizing a lot of local populations.
Well, then, of course, also it means missing real attacks and real threats like the Tsarnaev As we're saying on this show, which I guess it's pretty easy to just predict for the, you know, indefinite future or whatever, but the next time somebody tries to really blow something up in this country, we can thank, they'll get away with it, and we can thank the FBI for screwing around, chasing their tail, making up these fake attacks so that they can, you know, pat themselves on the back and do a little press conference and whatever and get their funding and all, but meanwhile, innocent people will be dead.
And that's what happened in Boston.
Right, right.
And the irony beyond that is that the people who come out, the activists who come out and say, this is unconstitutional, they themselves will likely be made targets of political surveillance either by the FBI or by local law enforcement forces.
Of course, there was a FOIA lawsuit by the Partnership for Justice Fund that revealed that even prior to Occupy Wall Street setting up camp in Ducati, members or activists were being surveilled by the FBI.
And so you see that level of sort of granular thing at activists, and you also see an enormous amount of cooperation, sometimes some friction, but a lot of cooperation between federal and state officials in these fusion centers that exist throughout the country as a sort of joint task force where information is centralized and could potentially be used either to find new informants, to flip informants, things like that.
All right.
All right.
Now, oh, there's a line in here.
This is a minor point, John.
There's a line in here where I can't even imagine he wrote, I'm blaming the editor.
It says, you know, the NYPD would go so far as to entrap somebody, which to the FBI is completely beyond the pale.
But, huh?
Oh, that's the case of Ed Sarhani.
So that line is about the similarities between the FBI and NYPD programs.
But there are some cases in New York where this guy, Ed Sarhani, where even for the FBI, that case seemed too much like entrapment for them.
So that was a case of the NYPD going so far beyond the pale that even the FBI, who has shown its willingness to engage in all kinds of very questionable things, even they weren't willing to get on board with the prosecution and the investigation of Ed Sarhani.
Oh, yeah.
I actually remember that one.
You know what?
I just misread it like it was talking about what the FBI would ever do.
But I do remember that in this case, the NYPD was going so far that the FBI said, man, you guys take it from here.
We don't want anything to do with this.
Yeah, exactly.
And Ed Sarhani was, people might remember him.
He was called the synagogue bomber.
He's a man that the NYPD spent a lot of time investigating, setting up a sting on.
He has a history of mental illness, which was very, very well known to the NYPD.
He had been in custody for mental health-related incidences throughout his teenage years.
And his case really is, I think, quite emblematic of how far the NYPD is willing to go to set up some of these cases.
People want to read more about it.
I wrote about it.
And the headline for that story is, Did the NYPD Entrap Ahmed Sarhani?
All right.
Now, so here's the thing about all this, John.
I mean, what we're talking about here, mostly 15,000 informants and these insane national security letters that certainly are not Fourth Amendment warrants.
Anyway, all this, it only applies to Muslims.
And they're the other anyway, right?
I mean, they're just a bunch of gooks.
They might live here, sort of.
But that doesn't really mean that it's our rights being violated.
It's just their rights being violated.
And so who cares?
Yeah, well, I mean, you do hear that from people.
And it's amazing because one thing it shows, I think it's sort of really just awful lack of caring about another human being, first and foremost.
But it also displays a real ignorance of U.S. history.
There have always been demonized groups in the United States, whether it's religious or ethnic minorities, whether it's people who had communist leanings, whether it's LGBT activists.
And so one of the things that the ACLU often says is the rights you are protecting might be your own or are your own.
And what's really incredible about people who say that, well, this doesn't apply to me, and so I'm not going to care about it, you even hear that from some sort of liberal leaning people who apparently don't think that there will ever be a Republican president again or, say, an anti-choice president.
It's very easy to imagine these kinds of apparatuses being used on all sorts of people, on reproductive rights activists, on LGBT activists, on activists who advocate for universal housing, for raising the minimum wage.
There's all kinds of undesirables out there, and at some point you never know when you or somebody that you care about could find yourself on the target end of that.
And I think that that's true.
I think that's important to remember.
Remember the fusion centers and the FBI?
They've said look out for anybody who calls himself a patriot, who talks about the Constitution, who has a Ron Paul bumper sticker, who owns a gun, who's anti-abortion either, right?
Because what we're really talking about, John, is not really left-wing or right-wing issues.
What we're talking about is people who have politics that are different than the agenda of the state at any given time.
So right-wingers have more reason to be concerned when the Democrats are in power and vice versa.
But still, the point being that we've seen in just the recent history, of course, it's not even hypothetical at all.
We've seen the national security letters and all these abusive powers invoked against hippies at the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy everything.
In fact, they coordinated through Homeland Security and the fusion centers the nationwide simultaneous raiding of the Occupy movement.
We've seen anti-war activists infiltrated from all over the place.
And we've also seen the Hutteri militia and all of this Rachel Maddow-esque trumped up wannabe Oklahoma militia terror stuff or whatever, scaremongering against right-wing groups too.
And the point is that when there's no law that binds the power of what they can do, but there's only laws that can be applied by them to the rest of us, then it will work out that way.
Well, I'll find out real quick how much we have in common with the Muslims that lived two neighborhoods away and now live in the cell next to us.
Well, right.
And a lot of these policies too are kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Where in New York, if you were a Muslim and you Americanized your name, that meant you got put on the list.
Or if you were a Muslim and you took a more traditional name, that got you on the list.
If you displayed newfound religiosity, that got you on the list.
If you scaled back your religiosity, if you shaved your beard, if you started dressing more Western, that got you on the list.
And so like what you were saying before, these policies can be amended generally on the fly in terms of what is a sort of warning sign to the state.
Those can be changed.
They're often open to discretion.
And once an incredibly powerful security force has discretion, it will be abused, as we've seen from the NSA revelations.
Yeah, for sure.
And of course, whenever it comes out about, you know, an FBI file or another on a peace activist or another, it's always amazing the amount of detail of innocuous activity that the FBI will catalog.
I think ever since I was a kid, I was amazed.
I wouldn't even have known the words, really, to put my finger on exactly what the problem was.
But what was surprising to me was the inefficiency, the willingness of J. Edgar Hoover to send these guys out to just follow nobodies around all day, writing down everything they did.
I knew a lady who her boyfriend grew weed in California in 1967 or something.
She had an FBI file that was hundreds of pages long just based on that.
She was no kind of activist of any kind.
You know, she just was a hippie who knew a guy.
And like, it's just unbelievable the lengths that they will go to over what any reasonable person would say.
Come on, man.
All that is is, you know, a slightly left of Democratic Party activist.
Why would you hassle them?
They're not doing anything, you know?
Yeah, well, and the FBI's guidelines have changed now after the reforms that were put in place now following 9-11.
The FBI claims the power to attend any meeting that's open to the public without disclosing that they are FBI officers.
The NYPD claims the same power.
And so you have, that's clearly a recipe for generating all kinds of intelligence on people that should be protected by the First Amendment.
Right.
And all the while defining terrorism down, where they even, I think, said that going to a protest is like terrorism light or whatever, right?
Instead of...
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and that's, I think, something that we're going to, in the next, I don't know, five or ten years, I would not at all be surprised if, as the sort of anxieties about cyber attacks and sort of the collusion between national security and protecting bank, banking, websites, banking, online transactions, as that sort of flattens, I think that any attack whether even if they're non-violent protest against the status quo, I think that it's not inconceivable that within five or ten years, any sort of resistance to this supremacy of corporate banks will be seen as a form of, it might not be called economic terrorism, but a lot of the same tools that are put, that have been put in place to quote unquote fight terrorism will be used against anyone who's pushing back against any too big to fail bank.
Yeah.
Well, you know, from time to time, we hear the attitude that, well, you know, back when the Republicans were in power, they abused this stuff against left-wing activists.
So now it's time for revenge and vice versa, too, whenever it's the Republicans' turn.
Instead of saying, hey, you know, we conservatives need to stand up for the rights of those lefties so that we'll have ours, too, and vice versa, which is, you know, to me, the American way.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you actually, you see there's a sort of surprising coalition coming together to push back against some of the NSA revelations.
You have recently the NRA filed an amicus brief on behalf of an ACLU lawsuit.
And so when you have the NRA and the ACLU lining up to attempt to scale back the NSA, I think that that's a pretty remarkable development.
Yeah.
In fact, the ACLU came out in favor of some gun rights recently.
I forget exactly the issue at stake, but they came out on the side of the NRA on an issue recently, too.
So, yeah, that's the kind of realignment we're looking for here for peace and freedom.
It's nice to see when it does show up.
Well, thanks very much for your time, John.
Great work here.
Thanks.
Always a pleasure to be on the show.
All right, everybody.
That's John Neffel.
It's at the Rolling Stone.
Is the FBI's domestic spying out of control?
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