Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, this is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton, I appreciate y'all tuning in to this shoopy-dang-on show today.
Alright, our first guest today is Mike German, he's a former FBI agent, now with the ACLU.
He is policy counsel on national security, immigration, and privacy.
Welcome to the show Mike, how are you doing?
Very good, thanks for having me.
Well I really appreciate you joining us today.
So let's talk a little bit about your career in the FBI, it says here that you thwarted several terrorist attacks.
Now I haven't heard of a legit al-Qaeda being in this country since Moussaoui, so who did you prevent from blowing something up?
I worked a case in Los Angeles in the early 90s targeting neo-Nazi skinhead groups that were involved in some violent activities.
And then later in the 90s, in the mid-90s, with anti-government militia groups up in the Northwest.
Oh really, and they were going to blow stuff up when you stopped them?
Yeah, fortunately I was able to separate them from their bombs and either buy them or recover them before they were able to use them.
Were you involved in investigating the Oklahoma City bombing case?
No I wasn't, most of my work was undercover, so I wasn't involved in sort of post-explosion investigations.
Well, were you undercover at Elohim City?
No.
Alright, well I figure it's worth a shot.
Interesting stuff.
So there's so much stuff in the news about expanding powers of the FBI, I'm not even really sure where to begin.
I think one of them at the top of my mind recently is something about expanded power of the FBI to seize all of our internet records without so much as even a national security letter or any kind of authorization whatsoever, is that really right?
Well, I think you're mixing up a couple of different things.
There is a request that the FBI has made to change the definition of transactional records in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which would open up their obtaining a lot more information about internet activity than they currently have.
But one interesting thing when you talk about national security letters and the FBI's use of Patriot Act powers is that the Inspector General last year issued a report on the FBI's abuse of this authority through so-called exigent letters, where the FBI created fake emergencies to demand records even without any sort of legal process.
And one interesting part of that report, the FBI, after years of acknowledging the Inspector General's audits uncovered this illegal activity, instead forwarded or put forward what the Inspector General called an alternative novel theory for why they were allowed to collect this information without any legal process, information about toll calling records.
And the Inspector General asked the Department of Justice in 2009 to review it, and in January of 2010, apparently the Department of Justice okayed the FBI's new interpretation.
Now that section of the report is very highly redacted, so it's unclear what exactly the FBI is claiming, and the Department of Justice is acknowledging that they're allowed to claim this type of data without any legal process and without any emergency.
So it's, you know, part of the problem with this secret surveillance society is that it's hard to have a public discussion about what the authorities are and what legal authorities regulate them when we don't even know what it is they're doing.
That's funny.
Yeah, I think I just coined a new one.
The era of the novel legal theories, right?
None of these things are about the broad interpretation of my liberty.
They're all about the broad interpretation of the state's power.
Right.
And, you know, it's interesting to argue over, you know, these legislative initiatives when we don't even know how the government is interpreting the language that's being used in these laws.
So it's really a problem when we actually have secret laws that we don't, that the layman, that the member of the public can't understand.
Yeah, it's absolutely amazing.
Well, now, how many years were you in the FBI?
16 years.
Okay.
Now, was there a point where you just said, I just can't take this anymore because it's, the change has come.
It's been, it's so much different than it used to be.
Or it was the same thing for 16 years was finally too much or, you know, what was your perspective on this?
Was there a breaking point?
That kind of thing?
There certainly was a market change after 9-11 and, and having been involved in terrorism investigations previous to 9-11 and understanding what the problems were with the FBI's management of those cases.
It was very frustrating to see that the management of the FBI presented these theories that conflicted with the facts as far as what the problems were and, and in a justification for more authority rather than addressing the real management problems that caused the breakdown.
And unfortunately, because they were able to pull off that sleight of hand cases that I was working, one case in particularly, were continuing to be mismanaged to the point that an illegal wiretap had occurred and misuse of an informant.
And and I reported that misconduct through the chain of command.
And unfortunately, the FBI wasn't really interested in, in finding out what the problems were within the counterterrorism program and instead retaliated against me.
Ah, well, so you were really a whistleblower, went through all the official channels and everything and they fired you or what?
Well, they didn't fire me.
I just wasn't able to do any work.
They sort of put me in the penalty box.
And after two years of trying to work through the system to get it corrected, it was clear that that the process was simply broken and wasn't going to work.
And it was just a waste of my time to do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day and not be able to use what I had learned over a 16 year career to actually try to, you know, help the FBI manage its counterterrorism program.
Well, so I guess this is something that I've kind of picked up talking with former FBI agent types along the way here on the show, I guess, really starting back with Frederick Whitehurst, you know, back 10 years ago now or something, I guess, is when I first talked to him pretty close.
And basically, I think what I learned from Fred is the FBI bosses don't care about anything but the FBI and all FBI agents are supposed to love the FBI more than their own family and whatever.
And and the highest priority is simply making the FBI look good or covering up anything that makes the FBI look bad.
And anything else, whether it's prosecuting John Gotti or stopping Ramsey Yousef or anything is 10th on the list after there.
It's like a big PR organization that has no other purpose but to serve itself.
Is that your interpretation?
Is that what you believe about the FBI?
That's pretty close.
You know, when I joined the FBI, I went to the FBI Academy was a childhood dream.
You know, I was interested in that from the time that I was a little boy.
And when I got there, there was this mantra that was taught to you, which was never embarrass the FBI.
And I thought that meant, you know, never do something illegal, never do something inappropriate, never do something that would bring disrepute to the FBI.
But as as I was in the bureau and learned how it worked, and particularly after 9-11, what I learned was that it's really don't reveal the FBI's excesses, don't reveal their mistakes, don't reveal them to the public.
So I think that is pretty much another way of saying just what you said, that it's more concerned with its image than with actually getting the job done.
Well, now, after September 11, something that happened was there's a big debate.
And, you know, David from Don't anyone ever forget this with Richard Pearl proposed that we create a new American M.I.5, the FBI is just not up to it.
In fact, I interviewed Peter Lance years and years ago, I think before the Homeland Security Agency was created, when it was still the office, it was 2004 or something.
And Peter Lance, at least at that time, reluctantly supported the creation of the Department of Homeland Security because he said anybody but the FBI.
Just forget it.
The FBI cannot be relied on to protect the American people from terrorism at all.
Forget it.
They're absolutely worthless.
They're worse than worthless.
They're in the way.
And if it's got to be some kind of new agency, oh, I hate to create a new agency.
You know, he's politically he ain't into that kind of thing.
But he said, that's just, I guess, what we'll have to do.
And it does seem to me, Mike, and I guess this will be my question for when we get back is whether you think that the change of the mandate to the FBI, that now they're to have this preventive role instead of a prosecutorial role, was really just uses them by an excuse to go after everybody but terrorists with those kinds of new powers.
That's what it seems like to me.
And so that's the question.
We'll be right back with Mike German, former FBI agent, he's at the Campaign for Liberty in the ACLU.
You can put the Liberty Radio Network on the air in your area.
Visit broadcast.lrn.fm to learn how.
Broadcast.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott.
I'm talking with Mike German.
He's a former FBI agent.
And now he's with the ACLU and apparently writes for the Campaign for Liberty as well.
CampaignforLiberty.com.
And you know, I just got a wax philosophical about the ACLU here.
Where would we be without the ACLU?
I remember realizing as a real little kid, you know, maybe, you know, sixth grade or something watching 2020 on Friday night that like, wow, so if these people don't make it their business to sue the government, it doesn't get sued.
If these people don't make it their business to defend the rights of the innocent, they don't get defended.
Somebody's got to do it.
And that's what the ACLU is.
And I don't agree with them on every single thing.
I wish they were a hell of a lot better on the second and the ninth and the tenth amendments and whatever.
But you know what?
I'll take it because if it wasn't for them, we would all be slaves right now.
That's the fact.
That's not even a question.
The question, Mike, actually, it was two of them.
I kind of, I tried to make one question out of it.
It didn't really work.
The first question is, do you think that it was a good idea to create the Department of Homeland Security?
Because is the FBI that worthless and incompetent at protecting the American people from attacks?
After all, you don't want to just prosecute Mohammed Attah's dead body after he kills 3000 people.
You want to prevent that kind of thing from happening.
And then secondly, is are they just using the excuse of this preventive role to just bludgeon all the rest of us?
You know, this was sort of one of the big misleading efforts that the FBI engaged in, because the fact of the matter is the FBI was always an intelligence agency and a law enforcement agency in one.
There was literally two houses within one agency.
And on the foreign counterintelligence side, that was the side that, you know, looked for KGB spies and other sorts of foreign threats.
And when international terrorism became a problem, it sort of didn't fit that FBI's model very well.
They weren't exactly foreign spies, but they weren't.
You know, they appeared to be more than just criminals.
So what do we do with them?
And they basically split the terrorism baby in half, where if it was domestic terrorism, it was treated as a criminal matter.
And if it was international terrorism, it was treated as an intelligence matter.
So rather than acknowledging at the very beginning, when 9-11 happened, that it was the intelligence model that failed, that the criminal justice model actually was pretty effective in combating terrorism domestically and internationally, once a bomb actually went off.
You know, whether you look at the first World Trade Center bombing or some of the East Africa embassy bombings, the criminal justice side of the FBI, it was actually very effective.
And I think the reason for that is that it was publicly accountable.
You know, it had to go through these trials where the evidence that they collected was tested, where their methods were tested.
So they had to sort of keep the shop clean.
On the intelligence side, however, they never got tested.
There was never any housecleaning.
It was one error after another.
And, you know, unfortunately, rather than acknowledging what the problem was, because if you look through the 9-11 Commission report, all the problems they identify are on the intelligence side of the house.
None are on the criminal justice side of the house, literally none.
So if, you know, if we had identified that problem, I think the answer would have been pretty simple to empower the criminal justice side of the FBI to tackle terrorism.
But instead, we went into this intelligence model.
And you know, the problems with that model are so long standing and extreme, and not just at the FBI, but at every other intelligence agency, foreign or domestic, that it's just a problem of methodology that the type of information that gets bandied about is never tested.
So there's no reliability to it.
And yet people make decisions based on it.
And that's why there are so many faulty intelligence reports and why somebody's personal dislike for a certain political group often ends up in these, you know, broad investigations.
And you know, we've seen that with the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, where an ACLU FOIA revealed that they were targeting a number of different political groups, including things like the Catholic Workers League and PETA and Greenpeace, rather than focusing, like you say, on actual terrorists.
And that's the kind of activity that couldn't take place in the criminal justice system, because you actually have to come and show your work at some point.
Yeah.
But even then, I mean, we've seen, you can just go down the list, I think, two in Virginia, one in New Jersey, four or five in New York, in Detroit, in Lodi, California, Miami 7.
I mean, there's been nothing but bogus terrorism trials.
Hell, they convicted Jose Padilla of knowing a guy who knew a guy who once sent money to Chechnya back when America was backing the Chechen Mujahideen against the Russians, for Christ's sake.
An American jury, they don't, you know, checking their work means nothing now anyway.
Innocent people go to prison, never even mind Guantanamo or any of that madness, but on domestic terrorism charges all the time over nothing.
Right.
And, you know, certainly the FBI's use of informants has been extremely problematic, and particularly since 9-11, and particularly in the cases that you mentioned.
And, you know, I'm not pretending that the system is perfect, but at least we know about those cases, and we can say things about those cases.
You know, it's the ones that are hidden, people who lose their jobs, never know why.
People whose bank accounts are closed, who never know why.
And it's, you know, this sort of secret ability of government to act that actually, you know, starts to chill free speech, you know, where people say, well, you know, I don't want to go out to this protest because I know the FBI surveils these protests, and it might, you know, get the wrong idea about me, and sure, I oppose the war, but, you know, I'm not a terrorist, and if I go, you know, and show up at this public protest, it's not worth the trouble.
So that's the type of thing where it really starts to harm our democracy entirely, and not to mention is extremely wasteful and ineffective, as the Washington Post's Top Secret America series revealed clearly.
Right.
Right.
It's just a big jobs program for millionaires and billionaires, and I guess people that make at least six figures, you know, are at the low end.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, and that's a big part of the problem, is that this thing has expanded, this surveillance apparatus has expanded so quickly that literally the people who are involved in it and who ostensibly run it don't even understand its scope.
And, you know, that the secrecy that covers that opens the door to all sorts of, you know, intentional misconduct and illegality, as well as just error and abuse.
Well, I'm not sure I want to belabor this point too much, because I'm not sure if I really have a point, but it seems worth bringing up, I guess, that, you know, the Peter Lance narrative in A Thousand Years for Revenge and his timeline, and the story of Al-Qaeda in America from the time that they first got here in, I guess, right around 1989 or so.
And then the assassination of Rabbi Kahane in New York and the First World Trade Center bombing and then through all the rest of it, all the way through September 11th.
The story he tells is of the FBI, and I think this includes the criminal division, routinely blowing each and every case.
And the reason why is because they blew all of them.
And so every time they blew a case and something horrible happened that they could have stopped, they had to cover up that fact.
And in covering up that fact, they never followed the leads that they needed to follow in order to stop the next one.
So, for example, they pretended that the assassination of Kahane was a one-man operation, when in fact it wasn't.
And then, you know, the World Trade Center is, that's kind of a complicated thing, but we all know about Imad Salem and the proposal to not, to use an inert powder instead of a real bomb, that they blew that case, and they had to cover that up.
And it goes to Michael Shoyer's accusation that using police power to take care of these terrorism problems isn't good enough.
You know, his point being, we've got to have a war.
So anyway, back to that question of the police power versus, you know, intelligence and special forces and whatever for dealing with the very small al-Qaeda problem in the world.
Because I want to prefer yours, but I want to give you a chance to convince me, basically.
Sure.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Mike German.
He was a special agent at the FBI for 16 years.
Now he's at the ACLU.
He's got an article here at the Campaign for Liberty called, We Need Whistleblowers.
Got that right.
Okay, so the FBI criminal division covered up their mistakes.
Al-Qaeda attack after al-Qaeda attack after al-Qaeda attack.
I think Lance makes the case they could have stopped the embassy bombings.
They could have stopped the coal bombing.
The FBI could have even, if they had, and never mind even the first World Trade Center attack, if they had just, you know, fessed up to their mistakes in the first place and followed all the leads where they went and that they refused to do so.
And I think, you know, I one time mentioned the name John O'Neill to Michael Shoyer and I thought he was going to have an aneurysm.
He said, John O'Neill is why 9-11 happened.
It's all his fault.
The FBI screwed up everything.
Every time we had good intelligence, they wanted to take it and make it secret before a grand jury or some nonsense.
And there's a real conflict there.
And so, you know, I would prefer to have no government at all, really.
But if I have to have, you know, a war on terror or whatever, I'd much rather have the FBI agents fight it, even worldwide, like under the 90s model than the war on terror that we have now.
But I guess I need you to prove to me that that could be effective.
And you know, I mean, I'm not here to defend the FBI.
The FBI is woefully mismanaged and has been for some time.
And you know, the historical cases you mentioned reflect some of that.
But if you dig a little bit deeper, what you find is a large part of that was this separation of between the FBI's two houses, where if you look at the criminal prosecutions, you mentioned the Mayor Kahani assassination, that case was successfully prosecuted.
But what happens is, is the way that the FBI managed those international terrorism investigations is once the criminal prosecution was over, it became an intelligence matter and went over to the other side of the house.
So it was, again, that putting the information into the other side of the FBI left the criminal justice system with an inability, the criminal justice side of the FBI, with an inability to collect that information continuously, where they could have proceeded from one investigation to the other, purely out of mismanagement by the FBI.
They made up this idea of a wall.
But the 9-11 Commission report was clear that it was a misunderstanding of the legal rules that created a wall, not an actual legal wall.
But rather than, you know, again, recognize what the real problem was, they simply expanded the intelligence side of it.
And, you know, with all due respect to Michael Scheuer, there were a lot of, you know, the FBI, the CIA and the military in NSA also had significant failures that led up to 9-11.
So the idea that the CIA's record before or since has been perfect is highly misleading.
And in fact, I would put the FBI's criminal justice prosecutions of terrorism up against anything that those other agencies have done.
You know, and I think the critical mistake was made was to put all the significant resources into the black ops and the military involvement, which, of course, you know, cost trillions of dollars and blood and treasure.
And I think if you ask the average American whether they feel safer than they did on September 10, 2001, despite all this expense of blood and treasure, I think most of them would say no.
So, you know, I mean, we can't go back and relive the history.
But I think if we had taken a criminal justice approach and used that money to instead build transparent and professional legal and law enforcement agencies within these other countries, we would be much further ahead, because, again, this is a very small number of people that are involved in these international terrorism groups and using a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer on them is actually more effective, because part of the problem with using a sledgehammer is, you know, goes back to a comment that Don Rumsfeld made early in the war on terror, where he said, you know, how do we know we're not creating more terrorists than we're capturing and killing?
And that's, I think, the problem here 10 years out, where we see, you know, people like the Underpants Bomber, who, you know, was only 15 years old on 9-11 and a high school student, and yet, you know, for some reason has decided that it's worth sacrificing his life for this movement.
And, of course, what stopped him wasn't the trillion dollar national security surveillance system, but rather a passenger.
So, you know, what's mistaken in all this is that these other methodologies are not actually working and not making it safer.
Right.
Well, it's worth pointing out that America had been bombing Yemen for three weeks straight leading up to that Christmas attack.
You know, people always want to get their cart in their oars in the wrong order.
So I always like to just point that out.
Not that you had deliberately left that out or anything.
I just wanted to take that on there.
So, listen, you heard the Foreign Legion song on the way in from the commercial there.
FBI spying on us through our radio antennas.
And I guess that's a little bit hyperbole, probably, right?
But I'm reading in the papers all the time that as long as my car is parked in the driveway instead of in the garage that I don't have, it's OK for a cop to put a GPS tracking device on my car?
That's pretty close.
Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, clearly, the FBI is...
This goes back to that sledgehammer thing.
They decided that they would just destroy all our freedom so they won't hate us for our freedom anymore.
And they turn the whole terror war against you and me here.
Exactly.
And that's the huge part of this, you know, surveillance methodology is by scooping up all the information, as we saw with the underpants bomber.
It makes it harder to find those few pieces that are actually meaningful, not easier.
And you know, I mean, one of the things that we've been doing here at the ACLU, we just issued a nationwide series of Freedom of Information Act requests because the FBI has started these domain management investigations under new authorities that they claimed through the Attorney General guidelines that were amended literally a month before President Obama came into office.
And under this domain management authority, they, according to their internal documents, are creating what they call geomaps of racial and ethnic communities inside the United States.
So we're trying to get to the bottom of that and find out what it is they're actually collecting.
And their internal documents say that they can collect things like the location of ethnic facilities and businesses and things like that.
So, you know, they've turned this super powerful spying mechanism internally against us.
And that's a huge part of the problem.
Do you have any suspicions about what that's in preparation for or anything?
Well, in 2007, the LAPD announced a Muslim mapping program that was immediately shut down after the public outrage.
So I think it was, you know, basically along those same lines that they they believe, you know, crime, different types of crime problems come from different ethnic groups.
So if we know where all those ethnic groups were, I mean, it's really a mind boggling sort of theory behind this.
But but yes, that appears to be what they're doing.
They're actually fishing expeditions.
Right.
Exactly.
And, you know, there was a 2006 article that that talked about them targeting Iranian immigrants in San Francisco.
And you might have seen Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly wrote a piece about how they were using falafel sales to decide where the Middle Eastern community was.
And the FBI denied it.
But Jeff Stein stood by his story.
And now this this internal documentation by the FBI certainly seems to suggest that tracking ethnic businesses is appropriate.
I am so glad these people are in charge of keeping me safe and persecuting me.
They're going to do a great job, at least at the second part, I'm sure.
Well, and is there like a law that forbids that or anything or what?
I mean, I want to man.
And now we're out of time.
This whole ethnic mapping thing is very interesting to me.
We'll have to follow up on this.
I think there's so many more abuses and you make for a really great guest.
You obviously have all the expertise in the world required to answer all the questions I got.
And you wouldn't believe the police state section of news stories that I have to discuss here.
So I hope we can do this again soon, Mike.
Anytime.
Just let me know.
Everybody, that's Mike German from the ACLU.
Used to be an FBI agent.
Now he's a good person.
