All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Cora Currier.
She was previously on the editorial staff of the New Yorker.
She's written for the New Yorker's website, The European, Let's Go Guides, and other publications.
And she covered the youth vote in 2008 for The Nation magazine.
And she's got this great piece.
Um, it entertained my eyeballs and I was blown away.
Uh, by all the pretty colors and everything.
It's at ProPublica.org, Timeline, How Obama Compares to Bush on Torture, Surveillance, and Detention.
And that's exactly what it is, a timeline, uh, interactive with, uh, all web 2.0 technology and so forth for your, uh, you know, uh, Firefoxing pleasure and, uh, a great way, I guess, to, to get this information through to people, give them a new way to picture it.
Uh, so, uh, very good work by Cora Currier and, uh, also Lina Roerger.
Thank you very much for joining us on the show today, Cora.
How are you?
Great.
Thanks for having me.
Uh, I really liked this, the Bush Obama thing.
Now he hasn't had as much time to kill as many people as George Bush.
And I guess he hasn't started any wars quite as big as the Iraq war, but on so many things, there's such a continuity here.
And, and in fact, on at least a few, uh, things seem to be getting worse under Barack Obama when it comes to issues of foreign policy and the national security state here at home.
Correct?
Well, the, one of the reasons we decided to do this timeline was that there were very few, you know, there, there, it's, it's an area that's hard to capture in its, in its entirety, obviously national security is a huge, um, you know, arena.
And a lot of the attention gets focused on the actual ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And, uh, you know, since Obama has taken office, not so much attention on, um, you know, some of the particulars of, you know, how the, how the broader war on terror is carried out.
So, um, you know, that was one of the reasons we decided to do this was just in looking into it.
There were very few, you know, there were some timelines of documenting particular policies, especially under Bush.
Um, but very few people had done like a comprehensive, um, you know, comparison of the two, even though there'd been a lot of sort of editorializing on it.
Um, so we decided to look at how some of the, you know, of course we had to limit it somewhat, we couldn't cover every aspect of, of national security.
Uh, but we did try to look at some of the things that were most controversial about George Bush's policies and, and see what happened to them.
And as you, as you said, in many cases, um, you know, Obama's position since he took office has, has shifted from the, you know, some of the promises he made when, when he was campaigning.
And now, you know, people can always keep up with this by reading Glenn Greenwald, for example, but it really is useful to have this visual breakdown, uh, spreadsheet database type format thing, timeline, the way you guys have it and just go down a pretty short list of the most important issues here and just show, uh, how the policy has evolved or failed to evolve, uh, over the time.
So let's just start with the Patriot Act.
Of course, that was passed, uh, famously without anybody having a chance to read it.
Uh, shortly after September 11th, right?
Yeah, that was, uh, you know, first enacted in October of 2001.
So right after, right after 9-11.
And as you said, it happened without a huge amount of debate on it in the, um, you know, immediate aftermath of the attacks.
So, and, and, you know, president Obama was, has been, has, candidate Obama, I should say, and Senator Obama had been at various times a critic of, of some of the provisions in it and as a, as a candidate, he did, um, you know, promise to extend, you know, to, to fight for more, um, oversight, particularly of the surveillance programs, um, and the kinds of records that the government could demand from people.
Um, he did not, you know, the, he only had so much control over how the Patriot Act was, was amended because it was, you know, it's a congressional piece of legislation and Congress, um, you know, has renewed it several times.
So the last renewal, um, in May of 20, May of 2011, um, made extended three, uh, quite controversial segments of it for another four years.
So they'll, they'll be there till, uh, 2015.
And that includes the use of roving wiretaps, which are also known as John Doe wiretaps, where you can sort of get a blanket wiretap for someone, um, and not have to, you know, across all of their, their various phones and communications, it also, um, the, uh, kept in a provision that allows the government to, to, uh, request certain business records and also allowed surveillance individuals that were not affiliated with any known terrorist organizations.
So we call that, that's known as the lone wolf provision.
Um, and you know, about the Obama administration says that it's put in place some internal, um, limits on what the FBI can ask for, what the NSA can do.
Um, but it's, you know, and they, it's kind of hard to judge how those are happening because a lot of that happens, um, you know, in classified and under classified programs.
Yeah.
And, uh, it's interesting about the Patriot Act too.
And, uh, you know, I don't really have my phone on the pulse of what Americans really think or something, but it even seems to me like it's sort of not that big of a deal anymore when you talk about all the people who were tortured to death and stuff like that.
And also it's been so many years in a row.
Now we've had this Patriot Act.
It's just sort of part of the landscape.
It grows to be kind of accepted.
And if you have 50 outrages since then, a thousand outrages since then, that sort of seems to diminish in importance.
But when you actually break it down, like you just said, roving wire taps and cops writing themselves warrants to search everybody's financial data, if they feel like it and whatever else going fishing expeditions, uh, and all these things, that's a real problem.
That's a violation of our fourth amendment of our natural rights at the fourth amendment supposedly protects in this society.
Right.
That's not just some old, no big deal.
Well, like I said, I mean, they say they, they say that they have certain, um, you know, oversight in place like internal policies that, that are from the, from the executive branch, not from, from Congress that go above and beyond what, what Congress requires, what the Patriot Act requires in terms of, um, oversight of these programs.
But, um, you know, because so many of the individual cases are, you know, not public, it's kind of hard to judge how, how it happens in practice.
Right.
Well, yeah, those senators have said that, man, there are secret interpretations of the Patriot Act where you have no idea.
They've just used this as a floor to begin imagining stuff they can do with their power.
That, that is one thing that we, we didn't get to.
It was, you know, some things of course lend themselves more easily to the timeline format.
One thing that we didn't get, uh, get to include in the timeline was sort of, um, the use of, of, uh, state secrets privileges, um, which, you know, allow the government to say that they will not, uh, release information because it, uh, might come, it might compromise national security.
And those, that's, you know, been pretty consistently evoked, um, invoked by both the Bush administration and the Obama administration.
And now on the, uh, more or less wiretaps and data mining, that was all secret as your timeline shows here up until it was outed finally by, uh, James Risen, Eric Wickblau in 2005.
And then, uh, as you guys write, it was legalized by the FISA amendments act, basically of 2008 that Obama voted for when he was still in the Senate, right?
Yep.
Yep.
That's how it happened.
All right.
And then, so what does it mean on the timeline where it goes from legalized to collected and oversight here, 2010, 11, 12?
Well, this is one of those programs that it's very difficult to evaluate because, you know, sort of the government's official position is that they are all of the surveillance, all of the data collection that they do is within the bounds of the new FISA and that they are targeting, um, you know, purely communications that are, um, either, you know, with one, they're allowed to, to tarp, not allowed to target purely domestic, um, communications.
It has to be one, one person out of the United States, um, and other, you know, restrictions on how long they can keep information on people and, you know, how many, you know, what, how, how, um, you know, proven your connection to a suspected terrorist is.
Um, but again, there's been constant reports of, um, and very good reporting, you know, the Washington Post did a huge series called top secret America on this, um, reporting that the NSA is intercepting and storing, you know, billions of phone calls and other communications every day.
Um, Wired recently reported on a new, um, so-called spy center that's being built in Utah to, to house all this information.
Um, and so it's, it's very difficult, but however, the government's position on these things is that they are, you know, this is purely within FISA and there's nothing unusual going on here at all.
So it's, it's one of the things that's very, that's quite hard to evaluate what's actually happening.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the change that they really made was now the FISA court can authorize entire categories of kinds of information to be tapped, which basically is legalizing the carte blanche general warrant on all of us, right?
Right.
And there are several, I'm sorry, you know what?
I shouldn't ask you a question like that right before the break.
We'll pick it up on the other side of this break on just that issue with a core courier from po pro publica.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with court courier.
She and a coauthor put this timeline together at pro publica.org.
How Obama compares to Bush on torture, surveillance, and detention.
So I know you didn't have a room for preemptive wars or humanitarian missions overseas and every other thing, but still very important.
And when we left off at the break, we were talking about, well, I was characterizing the changes to the FISA law.
The way I understood it was that now the FISA court can authorize the FBI and, or I guess, especially the NSA to intercept entire categories of information way beyond the kind of power that they used to have.
And that it amounts to, as you put it here in the timeline, the legalization of Bush's completely illegal warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.
Well, and importantly, that legislation also provided immunity for the telecom companies who had participated in that warrantless wiretapping.
Right.
Yeah.
And Obama said he had promised that he would filibuster against it.
Then he turned around and voted for it and said, well, but poor private company owners, they didn't have a choice.
George Bush made them do it.
So, but don't worry, we'll go after the people in the government who are breaking the law.
And then of course that never happened either.
The people in the government who were the ones making AT&T go along, all that.
Yeah, it definitely was glossed over, I think, in later speeches on it.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry.
I actually made a little mental note to Google this up during the break, and then I forgot about it.
But Glenn Greenwald had a great piece about Guantanamo, where all these democratic politicians, I think, especially in the Senate, were saying that they already were starting to stick their neck out and do what it took to try to close Guantanamo.
But then all of a sudden they got no support whatsoever from the White House.
And Obama had basically made it clear, as they put it, he wanted to make it look like they wanted to close Guantanamo for their own base and for the overseas news audience.
But they didn't really want to close Guantanamo and they didn't make any real effort in the Congress to do so, especially, you know, as long as they figured they could blame it on the Republicans for not letting him do it.
They would go ahead and go with that.
Well, you know, there was a lot of back and forth.
There was a lot of politics between his, you know, his January order to that, that they would be closing Guantanamo and the, you know, March 2011 decision.
But, you know, where they didn't outright say that they would not close it, but that it became very clear that it was not going to be closed.
They, as you know, my colleague at ProPublica, Daphna Linzer, has written quite a bit about the process of the Guantanamo detainees and their court challenges, but she also, you know, wrote about the fact that the White House, in their decision not to close, you know, to look into start closing Guantanamo, they basically, they created a board to periodically review the year, the status of the prisoners there.
But it's, you know, it's a new, that was a new process, but it was a new process, but it was, you know, basically, there were already some similar processes to review detainee cases under the Bush administration.
So, in many cases, this is, you know, really a continuation.
All right.
Now, on the black sites, I think I'm going to have to disagree with you.
I guess it depends on how you categorize it, but Jeremy Scahill quite credibly reported in The Nation, I think, that the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command have a torture dungeon beneath Mogadishu, where they continue to do enhanced interrogation, all they feel like, in a secret site.
So, that's actually two on your list there, that supposedly were closed or banned by Obama, but not quite.
Am I incorrect?
Yeah, I mean, there has been reporting on this.
We went back and forth on, you know, we were, we decided to look, you know, to constrain it again, because we were looking at, like, from a comparative stance of, like, what the Bush policy, this broader network of CIA black sites, and we decided to, you know, limit our bar on it to that.
I did mention that the, you know, extraordinary rendition is still an Obama administration policy.
And, yeah, there has been reporting on, you know, if not the CIA sites and also JSOC sites, which fall under a, you know, a different, under the military's mandate, and they're reportedly operating jails in Afghanistan as well.
And that's an interesting point as well, that there's been, in addition to the CIA, and as we wrote about drone strikes and targeted killings by the CIA, but there's also been an increasing reliance on JSOC with, you know, now I think it's the number of troops I've seen has doubled or even tripled since 9-11.
And though, and JSOC, you know, though part of the military often report directly to presidential directive and operate in a lot of secrecy.
Well, yeah, I don't think you can overstate that it doesn't sound maybe like you just said something extremely important, but they really are the President's private army.
They're not under the Secretary of Defense, the JSOC, they're under the President only kind of thing, right?
Or at least more or less something?
I believe that they, you know, they are within the Pentagon's chain of command as well, but they also, you know, can be under presidential directive.
There's, you know, I'm not a veteran or anything, but I understand that's the big difference between the JSOC and the regular SOCOM is one really works for the army, the other is way above that, or at least to the side of that chain of command.
Yeah, that's my understanding as well.
And there's been a big, you know, a big increase, a big increase in the funding and the emphasis that's been placed on their operations.
Right.
Yeah.
Nick Turse, the secret war in 120 countries is the best footnote for that for the audience, in case you're interested.
Nick Turse, he's the best on a lot of things, actually.
All right, now on the targeted killing you briefly mentioned there, I'll give you a chance to talk about it, but I wonder exactly what it means by, you know, Bush, you say on this timeline here, had created the legal basis for it.
And then, oh, I see the legal basis was scuttled, but then killed is on the list to tell us exactly what you mean there.
Right.
So this is our sort of our, you know, these were our sort of shorthand for, you know, what on the timeline for you could you could roll over them and see more information.
The legal basis that both Bush and Obama have cited for, you know, the targeted program of targeting particular al Qaeda leaders is the September 2001 authorization for the use of military force, which Congress, you know, allowed, authorized the president to use all necessary and appropriate force, the phrase against terrorist organizations that were connected with 9-11.
And both both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have regularly invoked that 2001 authorization to justify the their their approach to targeted killing, including, you know, when we say killed the reference we have, we pick two of the most high profile, you know, targeted killings that have happened under Obama, which is, of course, Osama bin Laden last year, exactly one year ago.
And last September, the killing of our Lockheed and in Yemen, who was a U.S. citizen.
Now, when Bush killed an American citizen with a drone in Yemen in 2002, he said, well, you know, we were targeting his friend and that's his stupid fault for being for tagging along with a they they they labeled that, you know, collateral damage, which is not instantly is also what the there was a second U.S. citizen who was killed in the strike that killed our Lockheed as well.
And he was also registered as collateral damage.
Right.
But then when they killed his son, did they not leak that they thought he was older and a terrorist and then it turned out he was 16 or whatever?
Was that a lie?
I don't know.
What do you think?
I can't I can't remember the exact details of the report surrounding that.
But they did.
They have not.
We can put it this way.
They have not mounted a they have not done a public legal defense of that, of the, you know, killing of his son in the way that they have of our Lockheed.
I mean, they made it very clear that our Lockheed was someone that they felt legally justified in targeting, because, you know, even though he was a U.S. citizen, because they considered him an operational member of al Qaeda, there was apparently a memo that was went through the highest levels of the president's cabinet, making a legal case for his his targeting.
And they've in recent months, as you know, sort of that story kind of slowly gained steam and outrage.
And it's only in quite recent months that both, you know, Attorney General Eric Holder and the White House's counterterrorism expert advisor, Brennan, recently gave speeches sort of reiterating their legal basis for the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen.
Yeah, amazing.
You know, I guess we don't know this for a fact, but it seemed pretty credible when the survivors in the families still back here in the United States said, you know, the boy was 16 years old.
He ran away from home to go and find his dad, you know, which sounds like some Disney movie or something, right?
Goes to bring his dad home.
And instead, Barack Obama murders him with a robot.
I mean, that's pretty incredible.
I mean, Richard Nixon never claimed that power against American citizens, did he?
And he was the devil.
He was Richard Nixon.
He would have never dreamed of that, right?
I'm not an expert in Nixon's policy.
Well, you're very careful.
Thanks for humoring me.
Sorry for talking so much.
But this is it's a big deal when Bush was as bad as it gets.
And then Obama improves on that, you know, seems to me.
Anyway, great work.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
All right.
Thank you.
Everybody, that is Cora Currier from ProPublica.org.
