MP3 here. (19:59)

Allie Bohm is an advocacy and policy strategist for the ACLU.

MP3 here. (30:14)

Elaine Cassel is a  civil liberties attorney and author of The War on Civil Liberties: How Bush and Ashcroft have dismantled the Bill of Rights.

MP3 here. (20:23) Transcript below.

James Bovard is a contributor to The American Conservative magazine and policy advisor at The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal and many other books.

—————————–

Transcript – Scott Horton interviews James Bovard July 30, 2010

Scott Horton: All right y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton. I’m joined on the phone by my friend Jim Bovard. He’s the author of The Farm Fiasco and The Fair Trade Fraud and Feeling Your Pain and Freedom in Chains, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, and Attention Deficit Democracy is so good – it’s a couple of years old now, but still – man what an awesome book, Attention Deficit Democracy. I’m sure I’ve left half of them off the list there, but that’s Jim Bovard’s work. He is the most accomplished libertarian journalist in history and of course he’s a fellow over at the Future of Freedom Foundation as well. Hey Jim, how’s it going man?

James Bovard: Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on the air.

Horton: Well I appreciate you joining us again on the show today.

Bovard: Hey, it was a really great interview that you did yesterday with Julian Assange. It’s great that you guys are putting the transcripts online. You know, I’ve been hearing a lot of stuff in the Washington press corps and the Washington Post about kind of telling you that the release a couple of days ago wasn’t as big as the Pentagon Papers. It’s nice to see from your interview there’s a whole lot more coming, and you know this game is only starting and it’s getting better all the time.

Horton: Well, thanks very much. Two things there: First of all, Angela Keaton gets the credit for producing this show and getting all the guests lined up, like you right now, but like Julian yesterday as well – she gets all the credit for that. And then, secondly, the transcripts are thanks to a small group of volunteers I’ve been able to put together. I think at least some of them have told me not to say their names or whatever, so I guess I won’t say their names, but anyway there are about five people who are working together to put together the transcriptions and then go over them and get them in final draft form for me, and then, as you mentioned, they got that Julian Assange interview transcript together, ready to post in real time with the archive of the audio last night. So I’m very thankful to all of them for that. It’s really something having the transcripts up.

Bovard: Yeah, and it’s so helpful for folks who might not want to listen or folks who are more print oriented, kind of like geezers like myself.

Horton: Well and it’s a matter of time too, you know.

Bovard: That’s true. That’s true.

Horton: You listen to a half-hour interview, you can read it in four minutes, you know?

Bovard: That’s true, and something which is nice about being able to read it is that you can annotate it.

Horton: Right, yeah, copy, paste.

Bovard: And there are certain quotes – like the thing a half an hour ago, I did a blog on your interview, and it was nice to be able to pull out a couple of sentences from his comments and just pop them right in there, so…

Horton: Right, well and you think about some of the things I get, former CIA agents and former National Security Council staffers and other people who will say on the show – a lot of those things could be news stories themselves, and I think now that we’re getting them in print, and especially fast like this, maybe we can get to building some news releases around them. You know, because Flynt Leverett on this show, the things that he says – that’s a news story itself, that this guy Flynt Leverett told this guy Scott Horton X and such.

Bovard: Well, yeah, but the downside to all this is it means you’re going to have more trouble with groupies.

Horton: Yeah! Well that’s always been a real problem around here, believe me.

Bovard: Well, I saw it happen at that Future of Freedom conference. My goodness, you know, it was dangerous standing close to you. You know? I felt like I had to do my middle-linebacker, you know, always be on defense.

Horton: Well, it’s nice to know you have my back, Jim.

Bovard: All right.

Horton: Hey, by the way, when are they doing another one of those Future of Freedom Foundation conferences? That thing was awesome, man.

Bovard: Good question. Don’t know. That’s a good question for Bumper [Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob Hornberger] next time you talk to him. They’ve been cooking some other stuff up, so I don’t know.

Horton: You know, people go on the YouTube and look – that was in 2007, right?

Bovard: There was one in 2007. There was one in 2008.

Horton: Okay. Well maybe that was the 2008 one. Or maybe – I don’t know. Yeah, I guess that was 2008. So, anyway, go and look at the YouTube y’all, and there are excellent speeches by Ron Paul, and Stephen Kinzer, and Andrew Bacevich, and you’re one of them too, aren’t you?

Bovard: I was one of them. There was Glenn Greenwald…

Horton: Karen Kwiatkowski. Yeah, Greenwald. Anthony Gregory gave a great speech about why it’s immoral to drop high explosives on peoples’ heads from your airplane. Yeah, it was awesome – always is. And of course Jacob’s speech was great too.

Bovard: Yeah, he’s a first-class hell raiser.

Horton: All right. Well, so, we got to cover some news or something important or something, so let’s talk about this WikiLeaks thing. That’s kind of where we started here with the Julian Assange. I’m trying to be hopeful that – and this was going to be one of my questions for him before I ran out of time yesterday, and I don’t know, he doesn’t have any inside information on this, I guess. But what I’m hopeful about, Jim – and I wonder whether you think that this will be the case, is that WikiLeaks will inspire competition, and more people, more computer geniuses with encryption skills and whatever are going to figure out ways to do their own little separate WikiLeaks.

Bovard: That would be great. I mean, as long as there’s some type of quality control. Because I would assume at some point that people inside of the government are going to be trying to feed false information through the different people that are sending information to the various –

Horton: Well, the more the merrier, right?

Bovard: Absolutely.

Horton: I mean that’s where we get our checks and balances in the market. And, well look, as we’ve been discussing, as I think you brought up – yeah, because you’re talking about the Washington Post there and the way that they treat this thing – we have to come up with our own journalism. Ray McGovern yesterday called it the “Fifth Estate” – “the Ether” – and the establishment can’t do nothing about it. It’s the Internet. It’s CampaignForLiberty.com (I’m looking at your article, “The Fraud of ‘Big-Picture’ Thinking” right now). It’s Antiwar.com. It’s WikiLeaks.org and Salon.com/Opinion/Greenwald. And this is the future of journalism in the world.

Bovard: I hope you’re right. I’m not entirely confident the government cannot find some way to sabotage it. I would also – I will be curious to see what they try to do as far as lawsuits; I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in Congress tries to pass a law that would somehow attach liability to people who pass on government confidential documents. I mean, there’s all kinds of peril laying out there, and it was surprising to see some of these liberal mainstream journalists prior to this most recent leak kind of taking shots at WikiLeaks. I mean, it’s almost as if some of the liberals thought that they should be a team player, and I’m thinking, you know, it doesn’t make sense to trust the government to tell us the truth because the government’s had plenty of opportunities and it hasn’t done it.

Horton: Yeah, well, we’re doomed.

Bovard: Well, I don’t know that we’re doomed, but I expect that there’ll be a lot of surprises and tussles coming up here. But it’s very encouraging to hear that those folks have got a lot more surprises in the pipeline, and you know, the thing that’s shocking to a degree is how much the established media – you know, there have been individual journalists who have done a great job in Afghanistan – people like Carlotta Gall for the New York Times and some other folks, but so much of the mainstream press coverage – well, it’s been government-fed, which is why that Rolling Stone story was such a shock. It’s like the evidence was out there, but it was almost as if some of the journalists were bending over backwards not to connect the dots.

Horton: Yeah, well and you’re right. I mean, you do have Carlotta Gall and a lot of other good reporters at the Times and even at the Post and other places, but it’s the narrative that sticks, you know? No matter how many times Carlotta Gall reports about, I don’t know, Pakistani help for the Taliban, or whatever, and it’s the kind of thing that people who are paying attention already know – the narrative really never changes from, whatever, “It’s hard work but we’re making progress – all we got to do is surge some more troops in there and everything will end up going our way.”

Bovard: Well, yeah. I mean there is a fair amount of that. The interesting thing about Gall is she had the first bombshell story on the U.S. use of torture after 9/11, using it there in Afghanistan, but if memory serves, the New York Times editors basically sat on the article for a long time and then kind of buried it in the middle of the A section or the front section, and did not give it anywhere near the play. And if the New York Times had not flinched on that, it might have been more difficult for the Bush administration to make an institution of torture in so many different places around the world. And it’s surprising to me that Carlotta Gall has not gotten a lot more credit for what she’s done, because – well, anyhow, that’s another story.

Horton: Well you know when you talk about the Democrats turning on WikiLeaks. I was just looking at Greg Sargent’s blog, actually at the Washington Post – Glenn Greenwald had a link over to it – and it’s this Jason Chaffetz, a Republican congressman who voted against the Afghan war funding, is being attacked for betraying the troops by his Democratic opponent. And on down the chain of BS we go, just switching roles back and forth between these two stupid parties.

All right, y’all, it’s Jim Bovard the genius on the show, on the line. We’ll be right back after this.

* * * * *

Horton: All right, y’all. Welcome back to the show, it’s Antiwar Radio, I’m on the phone with former Kelly Girl typist Jim Bovard.

Bovard: [laughs]

Horton: He’s the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, it’s really a great book, you guys really ought to read it. I know I sit here and I tell you about all these books you got to read all the time. I can’t even read all the books I got to read, and that’s my job. But this is one that you actually go and get and read, not just hear about: Attention Deficit Democracy. And, yeah, he knows it’s not supposed to be a democracy, it’s just a stupid title.

Bovard: [laughs] Oh thanks, that’s a great plug.

Horton: Yeah, yeah, quote that one on the back of the next one, you know?

Bovard: Sounds good to me.

Horton: All right, so let’s talk about –

Bovard: – Bob Barr has a blurb, but go ahead.

Horton: Oh, yeah, yeah, no doubt. Hey, by the way, did that guy ever give you the money he owed you? Ok, nevermind.

Bovard: Oh, now there’s a question. Things are proceeding on the litigation front.

Horton: Well the guy is a former federal prosecutor, so I don’t expect him to have any honor or anything, but I guess we’ll see how that goes. Well, yeah, and speaking of that, I want to pick on the FBI.

Bovard: Go for it.

Horton: I know they’re one of your favorite government agencies to pick on. These guys – well, two things. First of all, it says that they want to just be able to seize whatever information they want from any ISP in the country without any warrant. But I thought they could already do that, because of the Patriot Act, because of the National Security Letters and administrative subpoenas and so forth, so I was hoping you’d set me straight as to exactly how that works. And then the second thing is, all the cops were cheating on the test about when you’re allowed to seize what – to see whether they’re allowed to be cops in the first place.

Bovard: Well this is – yeah, the second story, the FBI agents probably apparently cheated en masse as far as being able to answer the question about when they’re allowed to do these – seize people’s private information without a warrant, but that’s a harmless error because it works out well for the government. And the second one – front page of the Washington Post today – the Obama administration is pushing to allow the FBI to seize far more personal information about people’s computer use without using a warrant. This is basically a change in the standard which the National Security Letters would be used for.

National Security letters have already been a complete disaster. The FBI has used those to put the Fourth Amendment through a shredder. We have no idea how many innocent people’s privacy has been violated by that, because there have been some very good inspector general reports, but the actual damage to privacy is far greater, and the government leaves out all the details, so we don’t know what the government did with the information it got. And so the folks in the Obama White House think the answer is to give the FBI a much bigger vacuum cleaner and basically change the law to make it much clearer that the FBI is entitled to far more sweeping information on people’s Internet use, the times and dates they sent email, the subject lines, and also possibly a person’s browser history. So if someone out there clicks on Antiwar.com, that could go on their permanent federal FBI record.

Horton: Well look, I think everybody ought to understand already that it does go on their permanent National Security Agency file forever, if not the FBI, at this point.

Bovard: Well, it’s really hard to know – well, you know, sometimes bureaucrats share, and we have no idea how much information is being passed back and forth.

Horton: Right, I mean, that’s the real concern, right? I mean, hell, Jim, if we left it up to the FBI to build the Cray supercomputer to enslave us all, we’ll be free forever, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that you change an “and” to a “to” in some legislation somewhere, and now the National Security Agency’s powers over all of us are available to the cops who actually can use these things in court against us, and the National Security Agency – I guess they could contract out a secret hit with the CIA to kill you or whatever, but they don’t have any police power over us here other than through the FBI.

Bovard: Well, the FBI or perhaps other federal agents or federal agencies, because we don’t really know how much else, how many other laws are being broken right now. It’s been a long time since federal law enforcement was on a leash, and we really don’t know who they’re ravaging. But it’s appalling to see the Obama Administration, “Mr. Constitutional Lawyer,” coming in there and just pushing these things, which are just one more wish list for law enforcement and the intelligence types and one more trampling of privacy. I mean, it is an outrage that these folks want to give more power to the government on this when they have not yet disclosed how the government abused the power it already had.

Horton: And even if you check out the Priest-Arkin version of the national security state in the Post, they’re saying, “It’s out of control.” I think that was the title of the first piece of that last week was “Out of control, National Security State” – no one’s in charge, certainly not elected representatives of anybody.

Bovard: Well and Congress is supposed to have oversight. I would wager heavily that probably less than a third of the members of Congress even read that Washington Post series. Because members of Congress almost never read. I mean, you know, it’s like – well, anyhow.

Horton: Well, you know I’m actually going to interview Barbara Lee later today.

Bovard: Oh good!

Horton: It was supposed to be at the beginning of the show, and that was going to be one of my questions for her, is, “How dim is the average member of Congress?” I mean not even in the sense of, “Do they disagree with me about X, Y or Z?” Lord knows Barbara Lee and I disagree about all kinds of things, I’m sure. But it seems to me like most of these members of congress, Jim – and I know you’ve covered most of them live there at the Capitol – it seems like they don’t even care about stuff. They’re not even interested in what’s going on.

Bovard: Right. Yes. I mean, something that you might want to do with Barbara Lee is ask her what her assessment is of how much the average congressman knows about what the government is doing either in foreign policy or in the surveillance stuff. And ask her if her fellow members of Congress ever read anything about these things, because that might get a very interesting answer.

Horton: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious to listen to these people talk that they’re a tenth as informed as the average reader of Antiwar.com. You could even tell, in the Bush years, there were times where you could tell that George Bush actually knew less than the readers at Antiwar.com. Whatever it was they were telling him didn’t include a lot of the story.

Bovard: Scott, Scott, Scott, this is damning with faint praise as far as your readers –

Horton: Well, no, I don’t mean – I mean what he’d even been briefed on.

Bovard: “Knows more than George W.” I mean, this is something to pat yourself on the back about. It’s like being a Rhodes Scholar these days.

Horton: No, no, you know what I mean, where he’s just talking about – I wish I had a good example, but, you know, going on about Iran and Iraq, and you can tell he really doesn’t know that he’s been fighting for Iran in Iraq for years on end. I mean, most of these guys knew they were lying when they said something like that. Nobody ever even told him, you know? All he had to do was get a laptop and start googling, he’d have found out a lot more than Condoleezza Rice ever let him know.

Bovard: Well, and the thing that’s unfortunate – it was so rare in an interview with Bush that some journalist would ask him a question that would actually test his factual knowledge, because that would tell us a lot more as far as whether he had any clue in Hades as far as what was going on. But the journalists almost never did that. There was a short little Irish lady who interviewed him in the summer of 2004 and Bush just had a snit because she was pushing him on torture, and the White House just about fell apart on that.

Horton: Right, yeah, how dare she? And you know, this is the symptom of the whole larger thing – I hate to even bring this up. But I obviously don’t want to talk about the subject, but it’s an example/side-issue thing – is the upcoming marriage – apparently, I hadn’t read anything but a headline, can’t avoid them – the upcoming marriage of the daughter of two presidents ago. And this is like some kind of like the – when I was a kid and Lady Diana got married to Prince Charles or whatever. I mean, really, I’m supposed to care about Bill Clinton’s daughter? This is news? It’s like we do live in England with this kind of weird pseudoroyalty that they got from Arkansas.

Bovard: Well, yeah, and it’s similar to the British Royalty because it’s fairly inbred.

Horton: [laughs] Yeah, indeed. I always did think that – well, never mind, I’m not going to say it.

Bovard: [laughs] Okay.

Horton: I had something really funny I was going to say, but never mind.

Bovard: Okay, well, we’ll just try to keep up to you.

Horton: It would have been worth that laugh I got out of you.

Bovard: All right, well, you know I was waiting for a zinger.

Horton: Well, yeah, there was a zinger but I stifled it, man.

Bovard: A Bill Hicks cyber zinger – You know, I was looking for some Bill Hicks caliber right there.

Horton: Yeah, no. There’s nothing Bill Hicks caliber here, man. Anyway, we try. Well, so, hey, here’s this too, man, is the Iraq war – you think that’s ever going to end?

Bovard: Well, there’s still quite a few Iraqis alive, so um…

Horton: Yeah, I guess we still got a job to do.

Bovard: Well, and it’s fascinating how the mainstream American media has basically gone with this notion that the U.S. won – and it’s like a hell of a definition of victory.

Horton: And it really has worked – You know Biden here says the headline, “U.S. Troops Halted Chaos and Destruction in Iraq.” They really got away with that. We really live in a world upside down.

Bovard: Well, it almost makes you cynical.

Horton: Yeah, almost – well good thing you’re not yet. Everybody go look at JimBovard.com, would you? And thanks, Jim.

Bovard: Hey, thanks for having me on, Scott.

Horton: We’ll be back.

MP3 here. (28:24) Transcript below.

James Bamford is the author of three books about the NSA and a former Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight. The Emmy nominated PBS Nova program “The Spy Factory” can be watched here.

————–

Transcript – Scott Horton interviews James Bamford July 29, 2010

Scott Horton: All right everybody, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m reading the closed captioning on the MSNBC over my shoulder here. They’re explaining how war crimes can’t be war crimes when Americans commit them – everybody knows that. All right, anyway, our next guest on the show is the great James Bamford. He’s the author of course of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets and The Shadow Factory about the National Security Agency, and of course A Pretext for War. And you can also – I highly recommend you go online and watch his Nova special about the National Security Agency. It’ll knock your socks off. And also you should read him in Rolling Stone magazine where he’s got a couple of really good ones, including “The Man Who Sold The War” all about [John] Rendon and the PR group that worked with Chalabi and the Neocons and the CIA to lie you into Iraq. The great James Bamford – welcome to the show! How are you doing, Jim?

James Bamford: Well, thanks, I appreciate it. I don’t know if I deserve the comment, “great,” but I appreciate you having me on your show.

Horton: And you hear that, he’s modest too, ladies and gentlemen – check it out. Alright, so Jim, let’s begin this interview with you where you end your book: “More than three decades ago, when the NSA posed a fraction of the privacy threat that it poses today with the Internet, digital communications and mass-storage, Senator Frank Church, the first chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, investigated the NSA and issued a stark warning:

‘That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left. Such is the capability to monitor everything – telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government – no matter how privately it was done – is within the reach of government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. ‘”

And then you write, “There is now the capacity to make total tyranny in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss – the abyss from which there is no return.” And now I wonder about, you know, how far down we’ve fallen into that thing, because I haven’t heard of a law being around in a long, long time now.

Bamford: Well, the interesting thing was Senator Frank Church – who was the very first person ever to really explore NSA, look into NSA and find out what the agency really does, that was back in the mid-70s – said that when the NSA’s capability was simply to eavesdrop on landline phones and really didn’t have too much capability to do domestic telephone interception back in those days. When you compare that to today, when the NSA has the ability not only to eavesdrop on telephone calls everywhere, it has the ability to eavesdrop on e-mail and every kind of electronic transmission. So at one point, the NSA could eavesdrop on basically a handful of domestic communications, and today it could basically get into your mind. You know, if you get a week’s worth of a person’s entries into Google and so forth, you can get a pretty good idea of what goes through that person’s mind every day. And so that’s really the danger, and that was not even forseen by Frank Church when he made those comments.

Horton: You know, I think you were one of the sources for this article. . . Christopher Ketcham in Counterpunch [it was Radar Magaizine -ed.] – all about “Main Core,” the database, the table of contents, I think he called it, that they put under the Department of Homeland Security because the CIA and the FBI already had some guidelines kind of preventing them from doing something like this outright, but under the DHS it’s all new, and so they put this together and I think basically, what he says in there is it amounts to sort of the insta-FBI file. You know like, people used to talk about this guy or that guy had an FBI file. Well, this is the thing where if they just push “Enter,” the computer will automatically assemble the entire file for them right there, on the spot, from all the disparate sources of information – all the disparate government databases and private ones too. And so, you know, you just type in “Suzie Q,” and it just pulls up every single thing about “Suzie Q” that Big Brother has on file.

Bamford: Well, I’ve never heard of “Main Core,” so I’m not familiar with that operation, and it’s just something that, you know, a few people have written about, but I haven’t really come across it in my research. But what you’re basically describing isn’t really any more sophisticated than simply a Google search. I mean if you just apply Google-style search engines to an enormous database of communications, you’re basically doing the same thing. You’re able to go in there and zero in on every communication, e-mail or phone call that a person might make if he just interchanged the effort and hit the button and all those communications would come together just like it would on Google, and that’s really the danger now, is the fact that the NSA is acquiring so much information.

I mean one example of that is the article I wrote for the New York Review of Books a few months ago – I think it was in November I wrote it. And what I talked about in that article was this new data storage facility – very, very secret data storage facility that the NSA is building in Utah – out in the desert in Utah – and it’s going to be one million square feet and cost about two billion dollars. Now, you know if you consider how much information can go on a little flash drive – three, four, five gigabytes worth of data, which is an enormous amount of data – think how much can go into a building that’s a million square feet. That’s the size of the capitol plus one third additional. And that was after the NSA just built another enormous data center down in San Antonio, Texas that’s almost the size of the Astrodome.

So, you know, they’re building these enormous, very secret databases. The question is, “What’s going into the databases and what happens to the information that does go in there.” The big problem we have is lack of transparency. The NSA seems to have a right to be able to do anything it wants to in secret – which is fine as long as they were obeying the law and doing all their eavesdropping overseas. But now that they are doing all this domestic eavesdropping, plus building these enormous data–centers within the United States. There’s an obvious need for more transparency in what’s happening – what’s going in there, what’s coming out of it, what are they doing with the information inside and how much of that is US vs. foreign?

Horton: Well, according to your research, how much of an overstatement would it be to just say, “Well they’re getting everything.” They’re vacuuming up the whole Internet every day, right, every bank transaction, every e-mail, every Google search. Not necessarily that they have access to examine all of it, I guess that’s a different question, but aren’t they just basically getting everything?

Bamford: Well, it all has to be speculation. I’m always the outsider looking in. I’m not on the inside looking out.

Horton: Right, but you’re the closest to the inside that we’ve got, Jim.

Bamford: Right, exactly, so I can tell you that they’re building a big data facility. I can tell you how much it costs and how big it is, and what their potential is. I can’t tell you what is going through those routers in there, or what’s going into the Cray supercomputers or whatever. I mean, I wish I had that crystal ball, I can’t.

But that’s what I’m saying is that in a perfect world, the NSA would be called before some committee in congress in open session and say, “OK, we’re giving you two billion dollars to build this facility. Now tell us – you don’t have to tell us everything that’s in there – just tell us how much of what’s going in there is domestic vs foreign? What’s being done with it in there? How much data–mining is being done? What happens with the private information that comes out? Is it e-mail? Is it telephones? What is it? I mean, those are the kind of things that should be told to the American people. It’s their communications that are being worked on.

Horton: All right everybody, we’re talking with Jim Bamford. He’s the author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. We’ll be right back to talk a little about the structure of the national security state when we get back. Right after this. In a sec.

––– break –––

Horton: All right y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott, I’m talking with the great James Bamford. You’ve got to read this book, The Shadow Factory. I read it and then I listened to the thing on audiobook, and then I loaned them both out, and, thank my lucky stars, I actually got the book back, which is pretty good! Fifty percent, I’ll take it. You’ve got to read this book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America by James Bamford.

Bamford: Scott, just one comment. The book I wrote, The Shadow Factory, we did as a TV documentary also on PBS Nova which was called The Spy Factory and last week it just got nominated for an Emmy Award, which I was very happy about, for Outstanding Investigative Journalism.

Horton: Hey, congratulations.

Bamford: Thanks, but that – anybody that watches the video will see some of the ideas that I talked about a little earlier transformed into visual objects in the documentary.

Horton: Well, and it also shows how this book was written, “I’m standing here in Yemen at Hani Hanjour’s father-in-law’s house, where the al Qaeda switchboard was” or “I’m standing here in Malaysia where the guys met before getting onto the plane to Bangkok” and yeah, now I know why this book is so good. There it is.

Bamford: Thanks, I appreciate it.

Horton: Man, I’m telling you, this is what journalism is supposed to be. This is what all those other journalists don’t measure up to, is what’s in this book. Yeah, ok so enough of that, let me ask you about this Perfect Citizen Program real quick. Do you know about that?

Bamford: Well, the Wall Street Journal had an article about that a few weeks ago. Yeah, again, I just wonder who at NSA comes up with these titles. “Perfect Citizen” sounds like something out of Big Brother, George Orwell or something. But what it basically is, is this idea that NSA has of putting sensors into the sort of data and electronic infrastructure within the United States. Their idea is that by putting sensors into the electronic grid and the nuclear power plants and things like that, they’ll be able to see if some outside force – whether it’s a terrorist group or a foreign country – is trying to probe those areas or plant viruses or conduct electronic or cyber warfare. That’s the idea behind [Perfect] Citizen is the NSA’s ability to penetrate the US electric grid and pretty much its entire infrastructure – electronic infrastructure – in order to put sensors in there that will give them an idea if there’s some penetration by some outside force. That’s the positive thing, if that works.

The negative thing is that, as I mentioned before, since there’s a lack of transparency in NSA, you don’t know what else is being done with all that. They plan all these sensors everywhere – I mean we already know they have sensors within the telecommunications structure to get e-mails and cell phone calls and all that kind of electronic communications. The question is what happens when they start putting these sensors all through everybody’s infrastructure for electronics. Where does that affect the average citizen? And those answers are classified. You can’t find out what’s going to happen or what exactly they’re going to do, and that’s the problem. The problem is always not knowing, and always being given some very bland cover story for what’s really going on, you know?

Horton: You know what I wonder? When you kind of look at the long term, do you get the feeling that the Internet is going to stay free and be basically what it’s, you know, more or less been – this Web 1 and Web 2. 0 and whatever we have here? Are we going to end up with just, you know, the whole world is going to have like a Chinese Internet where ultimately the American Politburo is watching everything we do and decide what it is we’re allowed to do and say, whether we can have an Antiwar.com or not.

Bamford: Well, there is that danger, and there is a movement, a fairly large movement, to make it that way, because you see the China situation where they’re trying to control exactly what goes on the Internet and what comes off it. But there’s also moves within the United States by a number of groups that are interested in censorship for the purpose of their own philosophical ideas or whatever. They don’t want anybody else’s ideas to get on the Internet.

So there are these movements all over the world, not only in China, but also in the United States to put restrictions on the Internet and – you know on the surface, some of them sound fairly benign – but once you start looking into it and once you start expanding it, giving this group permission to take something off the Internet, then giving another group, pretty soon you don’t have an Internet anymore, you just have the same thing you have in mainstream media, which is a lot of censorship.

Horton: Yeah, well, you know, it’s no mystery why the establishment and the corporate media are threatened by the Internet. They denounce it all the time for being “Not good journalism” like they do, or whatever, which, you know, you had to quit ABC News to continue doing real journalism in your career; you serve as a pretty good example there.

Bamford: Well, I left because of Monica Lewinsky. I didn’t want to spend a year chasing Monica around Washington. I thought writing Body of Secrets would be a lot more interesting.

Horton: Exactly my point. Yeah of course. And it was, to people who are interested in interesting things. But it’s not just, you know, pressure groups, it’s the executive state, I mean they keep talking about all this cyber warfare, and Joe Lieberman has a bill where he wants to be able to I guess send in guard troops to seize all the routers and shut down the Internet in case of a war, or in case of profound criticism of Israel or something like that.

Bamford: Well, the other problem is that the technology does exist for, sort of, ultimate censorship, this “deep packet inspection” is what it’s called, so that everything that crosses the Internet can go through these devices that provide “deep packet inspection.” So if you’re saying something – if there’s a word or a phrase, if there’s communications from a certain web address that the government doesn’t want – it’s possible to, what they call “mitigate” it, which means exclude it. So that technology is there, and to a large degree, it’s set up in a lot of these countries. A lot of these devices are actually made in the United States and then exported – the software, hardware – exported to these countries where they use them for censorship in Vietnam and China and other places. So that’s the problem, you’ve got the technology there to allow the censoring of the Internet and probably just have to be very conscious not to let that happen.

Horton: Now is there any chance I could keep you one more segment here, Jim?

Bamford: Sure, yeah, that’s fine.

Horton: Ok, wonderful. Everybody, it’s Jim Bamford, the book is The Shadow Factory, and we’ll be right back.

––– break –––

Horton: All right, y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m talking with James Bamford. He’s the author of The Shadow Factory, and I appreciate you reminding me, Jim, the name of the Nova special – now the Emmy-nominated Nova special – is The Spy Factory which everyone can find at PBS.org. Of course, Nova is the great science show there, and this is the science of Big Brother vacuuming up your entire life and keeping the closest tabs on you. So now in this segment Jim, if we could, I’d like to focus first of all on some of the software, and kind of the history of how – maybe even you know some of the scandal – about the NSA trying to work out which programs to use and where they get them from – the programs that they use to sift all this data to try to, I think as you quote somebody saying in the book, “They’re trying to surf on the ocean of information rather than drown in it. “So I wonder how this software works. If you can help us understand a little bit about that, and then maybe we can wrap up with a bit of the structure of the national security state and the public-private partnerships – as they like to call them – that make it all happen.

Bamford: Sure. The way it works, basically, is in terms of telecommunications – most communications these days – in terms of international communications – enter and leave the United States via undersea cable and they come in to about six or so places, six or eight places on the east coast and six or eight places on the west coast, called “cable heads,” where the cables actually come ashore. And once they come ashore they go to various telecommunications switches which are usually large buildings like ten-story buildings that have no windows, and that’s where the NSA begins its first interception of communications.

For example, when the communications come across the Pacific Ocean and then enter the United States, they go to this enormous building in downtown San Francisco. And because of a whistleblower who was very courageous in terms of giving information about what he saw going on inside that building – which was AT&T’s switch for that part of the country – he said he saw the building of this very secret room within the AT&T switch. It was a room that virtually nobody had access to, and was locked all the time, and I think there was just one person that was allowed in and out of it.

So what happens is that the communications come into the building on these cables or fiber-optic cables, which means that the communications are transmitted by photons – little bits of light – and they go into this machine. The cable actually goes into this machine called a splitter, and what it does – it’s basically a prism – and it divides the light. It actually duplicates the light, so if you have one photon coming in, after it hits the splitter there’s two photons, there’s the original photon and an identical photon.

So what you have is the communications come in, they hit the splitter, one section goes off to where it should go, you know, an e-mail to Kansas City or something. And the other side, the duplicate side, then goes down one floor into this secret room, and inside the secret room are a lot of computers–hardware and software designed to target communications. You know if you say the wrong word or if you have an address, e-mail address, on that watch list in there, or you’re communicating to an e-mail that’s on the watch list, all these things are programmed in there. They’re programmed into the software and then the hardware filters it all through these software filters and then when it picks up the software that’s targeted, or picks up the communications that are targeted, such as an e-mail to Jim Bamford or whatever, then it sends it off to NSA to be further analyzed.

So that’s pretty much how it works, it’s all done electronically and very quickly, and with software that’s designed to penetrate deep within the communications to pick out the target information it wants, and then analyzes it. And again all of this was never even dreamed of when Frank Church made that comment that you mentioned at the beginning of the show.

Horton: Yeah, well and as you talk about, it’s actually your comment at the very end there: It’s only the old law left over from when Patrick Henry and his militia were just as armed as the central state that that legacy of the law that, you know, attempts to put the State on some sort of equal footing with the regular people. Without that, we’re completely done for. It seems like right now, the law’s been abandoned to the degree that they have all the information about us that they never had access to before, but they can’t quite implement it yet. But then again I guess we saw in the Bush years, that these memos said that George Bush could use the army in America, he could override the First Amendment, he could override the Fourth Amendment, he could override Posse Comitatus, he could do whatever he wanted because the whole world’s a battlefield, and we really are getting to the point where if they get sick and tired of Jim Bamford, they can just shut up Jim Bamford, huh?

Bamford: Well, they can try anyway. I think I would find some way to evade their net or whatever. But that’s the problem. When I originally wrote that the idea was that the government would follow the law. And as we saw during the Bush years, you know, you got one terrorist incident and all of a sudden laws don’t apply anymore. And all these safeguards were put into effect in 1978 following Watergate and Nixon’s abuse of NSA and FBI and so forth, and that’s why they created the FISA court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court. But you know, you get one incident and all of a sudden all rules are over and the Bush Administration decided to bypass that safeguard, the FISA court, and conduct warrantless eavesdropping which – at least as of the latest court decision which was a court decision in California – ruled that it was totally illegal. It was illegal because it violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Horton: And then they just amended the FISA Act to say that the FISA court could now just give blanket warrants to entire categories of information and continue on doing the exact same thing again.

Bamford: Well, that was the problem with the FISA Amendments Act. Exactly. Pretty much give the imprimatur of legality to what had already been going on. Again, a large part of the problem is that much of that law was debated in secret, so you don’t know what exactly it is that the FISA court is doing. They certainly downgraded the FISA court and sort of emasculated it, so we’re pretty much in a situation where we were before, except now it has the imprimatur of law.

Horton: Yeah, never mind the Fourth Amendment; it’s as dead as the Eighth and the Fifth. All right well, so we don’t have very much time here, but I guess if you could give us a little bit of insight into the kindof military-industrial-technical-spying complex here, of course, the subject of the big Priest/Arkin series at the [Washington] Post last week, but it really is kind of where the military-industrial complex is – they haven’t just taken over the policy but they’ve kind of taken over the operation of the whole dang thing, huh? That’s part of the lawlessness too, isn’t it? And there’s the bumper music already playing…

Bamford: Well, yeah, in a sense, that’s right. The problem is the contractors don’t have accountability, and that’s where a lot of the authority is going.

Horton: Yeah, all right, everybody please read this book, The Shadow Factory. Go watch The Spy Factory at PBS.org. Thanks, Jim.

Bamford: Thanks, Scott, I appreciate it.

MP3 here. (29:02)

Bruce Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General and General Counsel to the Federal Communications Commission under President Reagan and author of The American Empire: Before the Fall.

————–

Transcript – Scott Horton Interviews Bruce Fein July 19, 2010

Scott Horton: All right y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton, and our next guest is Bruce Fein. He was the Associate Deputy Attorney General and General Counsel to the Federal Communications Commission under Ronald Reagan, and he is the author of the book American Empire: Before the Fall. Welcome to the show, Bruce. How are you?

Fein: I’m doing well. Thank you for inviting me, Scott.

Horton: Well, I really appreciate you joining us here. So basically the book is structured around the farewell address of the first President, George Washington; a speech on July 4, 1821, I think it was, by John Quincy Adams; and of course the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And you take these as a mandate from the founders of the American federal government – the general government, as they called it back then – to stay out of the world’s affairs.

Fein: I think that’s a fair approximation. I call these the charter documents. The philosophy is the United States of America is about protecting and securing the blessings of liberty for Americans, that the influence of America abroad was by the force of example – period. No entangling alliances. We build defenses, defenses, defenses for United States citizens alone. If people want to volunteer to do Good Samaritan work abroad, that’s up to them. But the government of the United States has no right or authority to coerce an American to spend a dollar to fight for the liberty of somebody who doesn’t owe their loyalty to the United States.

And the reason why – although it seems to some as callous – the Founding Fathers undertook this particular posture was because when you go abroad in search of monsters to destroy – as John Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State put it –you destroy the Republic. All power concentrates in the president. All due process is shattered. The money, the taxes, the contracts, the appointments, the desire for fame and remembrance – all pushes the President to inflate fear, to concoct excuses for war, and to destroy individual liberty at home in the name of having some particular obelisk built.

The Founding Fathers knew the executive branch was vulnerable to that temptation because that was their entire experience in observing the history of Europe prior to the Revolutionary War. It was the European monarchs that would fight for trivial causes. The Founding Fathers said, “No! We must stay away from these entanglements because it will destroy our republic.”

Horton: Well now, I guess it could be argued – I think I would argue – that the American state has really been at war since they created its power to raise armies and put taxes on people, and they hardly ever stopped. I mean, a lot of times we act like the Age of Empire began maybe when they stole Hawaii or something like that, but I think Noam Chomsky on this show called that the “saltwater fallacy,” and they waged war to seize this continent.

Fein: I think that that is an incomplete examination. I do think it’s fair to say that up until the Mexican-American War, the United States did expand – like the Louisiana Purchase that bought the land from Napoleon, from the French – and there certainly were clashes with Indians, but the major issue that destroyed the Republic is the legal architecture of war.

When you formally declare war, that’s the silence of the rule of law and the subordination of individual liberty. Up until the Mexican-American War – we did fight the War of 1812 over impressment and neutrality; the British had attacked, and they ultimately burned Washington on that occasion; but that was a war declared by the Congress of the United States. But until the Mexican-American War, I do not believe that we were using the legal architecture of war to justify the destruction of checks and balances and the securing of the unalienable right to life, liberty, and [the] pursuit of happiness, which is the goal of all government.

It was the Mexican-American War and this rather ridiculous idea of “manifest destiny” and a crusading spirit of bringing to all of the world United States’ values and free enterprise that launched us on the trajectory towards empire that now has reached its zenith, post-911, where we now have a military force in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which, if that ratio to the enemy was used in World War II, we would have had 3.4 billion Americans fighting Germany and Japan – which means multiplying the population by twenty-five and conscripting every one of them.

And I do believe that it was because the successors to the founding generation after Quincy Adams forgot the lessons, the creed of the founding Republic, that led them into this enterprise of domination for the sake of domination. That’s what we’ve got to get away from.

Our pride has to be in securing freedom for Americans, making us a more perfect union, and hoping the rest of the world, by emulation, may wish to copy us – but if not, that’s up to the rest of the world. We still have a union that treasures liberty – the individual as the center of the universe, not the government.

Horton: Well, and it’s fair enough that you focus on the consequences for the American people because, one, the American people don’t seem in majority, or in large measure anyway, to care about the lives of foreigners at all, so never mind the Indians or the Iraqis or the Pakistanis and what it’s like for them.

But you’re confronting one of the foundational myths of our entire civic religion in this society, which is that you and I couldn’t even be having this conversation if it wasn’t for the Army killing Iraqis, and that, you know, it’s good for the economy, etc. – that all this empire is for us, that we benefit from it, it’s why we have the Bill of Rights – it’s not the biggest threat to the Bill of Rights. That’s what the people are told to believe on TV all day.

Fein: Yeah. Well, and of course the fact is [that] empires ultimately end up in self-destruction because the arrogance and the duplicity of their motivations cause resentment and what you might call “blowback,” which is exactly what, largely, Osama bin Laden/al Qaeda is about.

It’s very striking, Scott, that if you examine the reported colloquy that was had in a New York Federal District Court up in the Southern District of New York recently between Faisal Shahzad – he was the individual who pled guilty to having the car with a bomb in New York Times Square – and the attempted conspiracy, if you will, to kill Americans – and he was asked by the judge when he pled guilty, “Well, why did you do this?” He said, “Well, we are at war with Islam; that’s what the Afghanistan and Pakistan wars are about.” And she said, “Well, but why are you killing women and children if it’s a war?” And he says, “Well, your drones don’t make any distinction when they come crashing into Afghanistan and Pakistan between women and children – they kill anybody. So why are we to play by Queensberry rules where you engage in atrocities?” And she didn’t have an answer for that.

And this was an individual – Faisal – who was a U.S. citizen. He didn’t say, “I hate American liberty.” He didn’t say that he despised the fact that women didn’t have headscarves on or burqas that caused him to do what he did. It was retaliation for exactly what we’re doing abroad.

This is the stupidity – we are creating a hundred new enemies for every drone that kills one militant, if we even know how to define a militant. This is quite stupid, but that’s the stupidity of empire – ultimately to destruction, like Rome, the Ottomans, the British, etc.

Horton: In fact I just interviewed a writer, a journalist named Stephan Salisbury, about some of these entrapment cases, these bogus terrorism cases since September 11th. And he talks about how the informants always use Israeli policy, American policy in the Middle East as their talking points to try to provoke these people into saying something stupid into an open microphone so that they can be prosecuted. And they don’t ever say, “Don’t you hate it that women can wear skirts to a primary election?” Or something like that. They always say, “Look at what’s going on in the West Bank! How can you not fight back?” That’s what the provocateur says to entrap.

Fein: Yeah, exactly! Because they know that, no, even if these people don’t necessarily embrace the American form of democracy, they don’t wake up each day and think, “Oh, I’m so angry that someone has freedom, that a woman can go to school.” That’s ridiculous! They don’t care about that 5,000 miles away from Afghanistan or Pakistan. It’s a concoction made to dupe the American people into thinking that these are non-human beings and that there will be a caliphate in Washington D.C. unless we’re sending Predator drones into their wedding parties.

Horton: Right, and that is the strength of this book. Again, it’s called American Empire: Before the Fall. And it seems like we are really pretty much at least at the top of the decline here. It seems like the apex of American power was in the last administration. I think Pat Buchanan wrote that the “high tide” was Fallujah, when they turned us back, basically. It was a giant massacre for nothing.

All right, so hang on the phone, Bruce. It’s Antiwar Radio. The music’s playing, we’ll go out to break, and we’ll come back and talk more about this excellent book – I really recommend you all run out and get it – American Empire: Before the Fall. It’s Antiwar Radio.

* * * * *

Horton: All right, y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton. I’m talking with Bruce Fein. He’s the author of the brand new book, American Empire: Before the Fall.

Now I want to ask you to kind of catalog, as you do so well in the book, the degradation of even the theory of the rule of law as binding the power of anybody in the government at all.

But first I want to pick a fight with you about what you say about how America should be unilaterally at peace – abandon collective security and all that stuff – and we should be unilaterally at peace, but we should threaten nuclear annihilation against anyone who ever attacks us. But it seems to me like, at the very worst, if we respond to somebody that attacks us, it should be proportional, not nuclear annihilation of women and children and other men who had nothing to do with the decisions of their politicians. That’s not any more fair than Iraq or Iran nuking us now for what we did to them.

Fein: Well, obviously you’ve got to – look, the purpose here of the threat is to try to deter war in the first instance. That’s the greatest tragedy.

Horton: Yeah, but then if somebody attacks us, we got to nuke ’em.

Fein: It’s hard to argue. Take, for example, Scott – was Hiroshima and Nagasaki disproportionate to Pearl Harbor and all the deaths that had happened in the interim?

Horton: Yes.

Fein: The main success is deterring war in the first instance. You want to promise, in my view, that someone who is the aggressor – and this is an aggressor state. An attack/war is not an individual who comes in and says, “I hate America” – that doesn’t justify a war response. I’m talking about an attack that’s an existential attack like Pearl Harbor with a country that’s got millions of people in the armed forces – Japan ultimately had over 10 million – a huge industrial base – that you want to prevent this catastrophe that comes in the first instance by saying, “Then you’re going to lose all of your power. Your country will be annihilated.” That’s the goal there.

Now you may disagree with regard to whether it will be effective. I think that’s far more beneficent towards mankind, to prevent war in the first instance, than saying, “Well, if you attack us, even if it’s unprovoked, we’ll only go back, and so you’ll suffer the same amount as we did.” I think that would be more encouraging to warfare, but we can debate that.

But I want to go back, if I can – well, I don’t want to cut you off. You may have a response to mine. It’s not fair for me to just say it without you responding to my observation.

Horton: Well, I mean, I would agree with you that the deterrence of having thousands of hydrogen bombs does work to prevent major-power war. It has worked. But it seems like at the same time we could absolutely annihilate the capital city of any major power that ever attacked us without nukes even. I mean, they’ve got all kinds of conventional weapons that can make life hell for anyone in the world without actually fusing hydrogen atoms together over their cities, you know?

Fein: Yes. Well, okay, let’s move on. I think we both agree that, whatever purposes, our posture ought to be defense and deterring war, not preemptive war.

Horton: Certainly. Now go ahead, go ahead, because time is limited.

Fein: Yeah. This would be just a catechism of all the lacerations of the rule of law. One, when war comes, the president claims – and he is claiming – a unilateral authority to identify Americans abroad who he says are an imminent danger and have them wiped out by assassination squads. We have one member that President Obama has identified as a U.S. citizen in Yemen who’s on the hit list for assassination. It’s a little bit like Vladimir Putin’s killing of one of his opponents, Mr. Litvinenko, in London with polonium-211.

The President then claims authority he can detain any American citizen, or noncitizen, without accusation, without a trial, as a so-called “enemy combatant.” So you just sit there and rot. It goes back to the days, pre-Magna Carta, where King John would throw people in the dungeon without any accusation to let them sit there until they turned into vassals or otherwise.

Then he claims the authority to use these military commissions, which combine judge, jury, and prosecutor in a single branch, for alleged “war crimes,” which include activities such as “conspiring to train in a terrorist training camp” even if you’ve never threatened an American at any time or any place. And military commissions are about as procedurally irregular as the Spanish Inquisition.

Then he claims he has absolute power, in fighting the war against international terrorism, to spy on us without warrant – that he’s gathering military intelligence on the battlefield when he undertakes this collection because with terrorism it can occur anywhere, so the geography of war is not limited, it’s everywhere on the planet. And he can collect “battlefield intelligence” with group warrants, or without warrants whatsoever.

He also claims the authority to act in secrecy. Congress has no ability to even subpoena a member of the executive branch and inquire as to how they’re running war. Which is of course is an enormously menacing proposition. We have government in secrecy instead of transparency. And we know that secrecy breeds abuses.

Let’s just think for a minute, Scott, about these Predator drones slamming into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Neither you, nor me, nor the audience, nor anyone in Congress, has any idea, how do these targets get selected? We read in the newspapers, “12 militants killed, and maybe some civilians.” Well how do we know there were 12 militants that were killed? Where’s the proof that that was accurate information? Where did you get it? Were the informants who you paid $10,000 the ones who you relied upon? Is the accuracy the same as the accuracy for detainees at Guantanamo Bay? Where 5 or 6 out of 7 get released once a court has an opportunity to examine the evidence, even if a bunch of it’s classified?

So this is basically running government in secrecy, which is the opposite of government by the consent of the governed. How can the people consent to government activity if you don’t even know what it is?

And this is truly, perhaps, the most destructive element of our entire constitutional system that has come into play with the so-called “war against international terrorism.” It’s all in secret. And I don’t know whether you read in today’s front page of the Washington Post about our new intelligence leviathan out there.

Horton: Yeah it was about [inaudible] part about how it says they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space. It’s the new post-9/11 only – never mind post-World War II – national security state, Bruce.

Fein: Yes, that’s right. And a million people with Top Secret security clearances that don’t even talk to each other. And what has resulted? You know, the recipients, the users, say this is useless. It doesn’t even give us any information that enables us to defeat the enemy, if you will, the terrorists. It’s utter and complete mindlessness, but you can imagine all the information that’s captured about American citizens, you know – to what end? Other than just make government bigger and giving them control over your life.

So that’s another element of the rule of law. And I suppose perhaps the most egregious comes to this issue of how we get into war in the first instance.

The Founding Fathers universally agreed that only Congress could be trusted with deciding whether to initiate war, because the president has such a temptation to concoct danger in order to get into clashes because war gives the President the taxes, the money, the contracts, the appointments, the fame, the jingoism that he thinks will let him profit politically and leave his mark in the footprints of time. And that was the statement of even the most aggressive proponent of the strong executive, Alexander Hamilton – the legislative branch decides on war or peace.

And now we’ve come in the empire phase where, no, the president unilaterally decides whether to go to war, or Congress delegates to the president, like the Iraqi War Resolution, “You decide, Mr. President, whether to go to war.” Same thing happened in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Same thing happened in Korea – President Truman unilaterally decided to call the Korean War a “police action” and said, “We don’t need any authority from Congress to fight this.”

Horton: Well let me ask you now, Bruce, is there any chance I can keep you for another 10-minute segment here?

Fein: Yes, you can.

Horton: Okay, great, hang on the line. Everybody, I’m talking with Bruce Fein. He used to be a lawyer in the Ronald Reagan administration, wrote the articles of impeachment of Bill Clinton, and wrote the book, American Empire: Before the Fall. We’ll be right back.

* * * * *

Horton: All right, y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton, and I’m talking with Bruce Fein. He’s the author of American Empire: Before the Fall. And you know, for those of you who have somebody that you’re trying to get the anti-empire point across to, this might be the one. In fact, I’m pretty sure this book will go down in history as part of the story of “Some Americans tried to fight this.”

But anyway, let me share a little bit of the table of contents with you guys:

One: Empire Without a Cause.

Two: How Far the Republic Has Fallen – From Lexington and Concord to the Korangal Valley.

Three: The Nation’s Charter Documents.

Four: America’s Descent into Empire: From the Mexican-American War to World War II.

Five: Twin Myths of the American Empire.

Six: Crucifying the Rule of Law on a National Security Cross.

And I’m going to skip ahead here to Chapter Nine: Restoring the American Republic. Bruce, how do you propose to do that?

Fein: Well, in some sense the ultimate solution, if you will, lies in the American people. We The People are still sovereign. It’s the first three words of the Constitution of the United States.

We have to insist, by our votes and by our opinions, that we withdraw all of our troops from abroad. Our military posture should be a thoroughly defensive one. We can spy and gather intelligence for defensive purposes, but we shouldn’t have a single soldier on any foreign soil.

We’ve got to renounce this idea that the President is there to make us safe. No, he’s there to give us freedom, along with Congress.

We have to restore checks and balances. We have to make certain that a member of Congress is not elected who will not impeach a president for unilaterally initiating war, who would not impeach a president if he withholds information and testimony from Congress, who will insist that we have a government that places the individual at the center of the universe, that protects privacy, that views the thrill of stealth government and transparency as the earmark of the United States, that differentiates us from citizens who are vassals and serfs of a leviathan at the federal level.

And that’s going to mean civic education. It’s going to mean a promotion of the idea that it is not great to dominate for the sake of domination. That is not the earmark of the destiny of the United States and of the Republic.

It’s America for Americans, not because we’re callous but because we recognize that by going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, we would destroy the Republic for ourselves. And the American people need to embrace this. We have to reject as a people the idea that absolute safety is what we crave more than anything else. We have to recognize that you have to take some limited degree of risk, because everybody is capable of evil – that is, no one can go and swear on Korans or Bibles or whatever that it’s impossible for them to do wrong.

That doesn’t mean we stick everybody in prison but that freedom and liberty thrive when there’s some measurable prudent risk out there that you can have a Timothy McVeigh. And that has got to be the creed of the United States of America.

Right now, Scott, all of the language, the grammar is, “Safe, safe, safe, safe.” It doesn’t matter how much you destroy the whole purpose of the enterprise, of freedoms. Just tell me it’s gonna make me safe, even if it doesn’t. Body scanners, whatever.

And one of the ironies of the gathering of the more information that was disclosed to be useless in the Washington Post today – you know, what is the government saying? “Give us even more analysts.” You know? And this makes the problem even worse, by creating even more useless information. That’s the kind of bureaucratic big government mentality that has to be repudiated.

But in the long run it’s got to be a change in the political culture. And that was what was so vibrant and thrilling about the founding generation. The American people understood and craved liberty over domination for the sake of domination.

When the Latin Americans and South American colonials erupted against Portugal and Spain, the American people didn’t say, “We have to go over there and run interference and engage in warfare.” No, we wished them well, but otherwise we remained Americans. America has to come first.

Otherwise I think the changes – the things that can be done incrementally by changing the laws – will not have the sustaining power to return to the Republic.

Just think, for instance, we have laws, Scott, against torture which includes waterboarding, which the president himself has said is torture. They don’t go enforced because we lack the political will to say, “Hey, this is the rule of law. If you want to pardon somebody and take accountability for committing torture, go ahead. But the president doesn’t have the authority to just ignore enforcing the law because he thinks it’s politically inconvenient.”

Horton: Well, yeah, and they’d have to repeal the Eighth Amendment to legalize torture, anyway, right?

Fein: They would have to do that, yeah. Or I suppose Congress could try to at least eliminate maybe criminal penalties, which they haven’t tried to do.

But that’s what the culture is about here in terms of restoring the Republic to what it was envisioned by the founding generation. We can’t just blame the individual leaders. We can complain about it, but it’s up to us to throw them out of office,  to give them a stigma. This is simply not acceptable.  Wedo not want the United States dropping Predator drones on wedding parties because there’s a one trillionth percent chance that someone might be a baby Osama bin Laden growing up in Kabul in the next 50 years coming as an individual and try to commit a terrorist attack.

No! We’re more than that. We care more about our freedom. We care more about transparency in government.  Even if it does [mean] taking some risks than it does domination for the sake of domination. The latter is the earmark of tyranny. It’s the earmark of the lion and the tiger in the jungle, just wanting to try to beat and brutalize and dominate for the thrill that’s rather visceral, a feeling that you’re the first guy on the block.

Horton: Well you know I think a lot of people would, you know, if you were one of the guys they talk to on TV all the time about these things, I think you could win people over to your position. In terms of what the people really want, I mean they’re mostly unconcerned with foreign policy anyway, but if you could truly offer them peace, I think they’d take it.

But what about the imperial court? You know, William S. Lind said on this show that you shouldn’t even call it Washington D.C.; it is simply an imperial court. And there are bazillions of uncounted, printed dollars flowing to specific extremely rich and powerful private interests that control the empire. And how are Americans supposed to believe that they can do anything about that? That’s why most people don’t care and don’t pay attention to these kinds of issues – it’s because they feel powerless. Why would they sit around and read Antiwar.com all day if all they’re going to do is shrug and pout and it does them no good?

Fein: Well, Scott, it’s certainly true that it’s an uphill battle. But the process of struggle itself is its own reward.

Just think about the initial effort in the United States to abolish slavery. William Lloyd Garrison, born in the place that I grew-up in – Boston, Massachusetts – he formed The Liberator magazine in 1831. He was tarred and feathered, driven out. He said people told him just what you told me – “Oh, slavery. There are too many monied interests involved here. It’s profitable. The North lends money to the South. The South gets the tobacco. They grow agricultural products at cut-rate prices with slavery. It’s hopeless.”

Lloyd Garrison, he came back despite being tarred and feathered. He was there when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified – abolished slavery in 1865 – then he shut down The Liberator magazine.

It’s true. Oftentimes it seems hopeless. But the quest itself, to do what is right, to pay rewards to the Founding Fathers, who had the right philosophy, has to be its own reward. You do it anyway even if it seems hopeless, like Lloyd Garrison did, because everything else would be ignoble. That’s why we fought at Valley Forge. It didn’t seem we were going to have a victory around the corner, but we persisted and ultimately prevailed.

But in some sense, Scott, even if we fail, it was worth it. Our legacy is our immortality in terms of the philosophy that will be there in future generations and maybe be taken up in more propitious times to carry the beacon of freedom and liberty, the way the Founding Fathers understood it to be there. That’s why we can never despair. We can never yield simply because it looks hopeless. We always fight and be uncompromised in our principles in knowing why we’re here between ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

Horton: Wow. So that’s Bruce Fein. He worked for Ronald Reagan in the Justice Department back in the ’80s. He wrote up the articles of impeachment against the felon, William Jefferson Clinton, in the 1990s, and now he’s the author of the book American Empire: Before the Fall. And this is some really good stuff, y’all. I highly suggest you go out and read it. And I want to thank you very much for your time on the show today, Bruce.

Fein: I’m really thankful, Scott, and I appreciate your audience being so patient. Thanks again.

John Dennis, 2010 Republican candidate for the House of Representatives in California’s 8th Congressional District (Nancy Pelosi’s seat), discusses his chances for success in an overwhelmingly Democratic district, NSA warrantless wiretapping at AT&T in San Francisco that Pelosi was likely aware of, how Ron Paul’s liberty movement can coexist with the Palin wing of the Tea Party and why Pelosi hasn’t had to run a real campaign since the Reagan administration.

MP3 here. (28:19)

John Dennis, an accomplished businessman and entrepreneur, has been a pro-liberty Republican for a quarter century. Born in Jersey City, the son of a longshoreman and a city hall clerk, he grew up in one of the city’s toughest public housing projects. After graduating from Fordham University with a degree in business administration, John co-founded Humanscale, which became one of the world’s top 10 design firms, specializing in office ergonomics.

After a varied career in global development and marketing, John created Foundation Real Estate, a San Francisco-based investment company with domestic and international holdings. He is the founder of the San Francisco chapter of the Republican Liberty Caucus and currently the head of the Campaign for Liberty San Francisco. John is a board member of the Republican Liberty Caucus California, has served as an alternate on the San Francisco Republican Central Committee and is a member of the National Rifle Association.

His campaign experience includes voter contact coordination with Mike DeNunzio for San Francisco Supervisor and Harmeet Dhillon for California Assembly. In 2008, he served as Phonebank and Get Out the Vote Director for the Ron Paul Presidential campaign in San Francisco.  John, his wife Heather and daughter Devan, make their home in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco.

MP3 here. (21:06)

Nate Cardozo is EFF’s Open Government Legal Fellow, focusing on the FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project. A refugee from BigLaw, Nate spent all of five months practicing corporate law before coming to his senses. Nate has a B.A. in Anthropology and Politics from U.C. Santa Cruz and a J.D. from U.C. Hastings.

MP3 here. (41:40)

Sibel Edmonds is the founder and president of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to aiding national security whistleblowers. She has appeared on national radio and TV as a commentator on matters related to whistleblowers, national security, and excessive secrecy & classification, and has been featured on CBS 60 Minutes, CNN, MSNBC,  NPR, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The American Conservative, and others. Her book, Shooting the Messenger, co-authored with Professor William Weaver, is forthcoming from Kansas University Press in the fall of 2010.

PEN American Center awarded Ms. Edmonds the 2006 PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award for her “commitment to preserving the free flow of information in the United States in a time of growing international isolation and increasing government secrecy”. She is also the recipient of the 2004 Sam Adams Foundation Award.

Ms. Edmonds worked as a language specialist for the FBI’s Washington Field Office. During her work with the bureau, she discovered and reported serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence that had national security implications. After she reported these acts to FBI management, she was retaliated against and ultimately fired in March 2002. Since that time, court proceedings on her issues have been blocked by the assertion of “State Secrets Privilege”, and the Congress of the United States has been gagged and prevented from any discussion of her case through retroactive re-classification issued by the Department of Justice.

Ms. Edmonds began her career in 1993 as Project Director for the Rostropovich Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian organization providing medical and food aid to children of the former Soviet Union. She re-located to St. Petersburg, Russia and managed correspondence, shipments, inventory and security precautions in the largest children’s hospital in St. Petersburg. Later, she worked as the Executive Director & Co-Founder of Edmonds Industries, a Consulting and Holding Company, investing in international business and residential real estate development. Ms. Edmonds also worked as a volunteer for the Alexandria CASA program (Court Appointed Special Advocate) for abused children, and as an instructor for the Alexandria Office on Women’s Domestic Violence Program.

Ms. Edmonds has a MA in Public Policy and International Commerce from George Mason University, a BA in Criminal Justice and Psychology from George Washington University, and AA degree in Science from NVCC. She is certified as a Court Appointed Special Advocate and as an instructor for the Women’s Domestic Violence Program. She is fluent in Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani.

The show is about an hour long and can be listened to here, beginning at 1:29 into the recording.

Scott Ritter discusses the Iranian nuclear program, James Bamford discusses the national surveillance state and Glenn Greenwald discusses what the upcoming Khalid Sheikh Muhammad trial in New York means for the rule of law.

Update: The pilot show will air again on Thanksgiving at 5 pm, 90.7 in L.A., 98.7 in Santa Barbara.

Update 2: If you liked what you heard, why not shoot an email  over to comments@kpfk.org?

MP3 here. (26:14)

Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CBS News’ Web site and writes a weekly column titled Other People’s Money. He became a senior writer for CNET News in 2002, and lives in the San Francisco area after spending over a decade in Washington, DC.

An award-winning journalist, McCullagh writes and speaks frequently about technology, law, and politics. From 1998 to 2002, he was Wired’s Washington bureau chief. Previously he was a reporter for Time Magazine, Time Digital Daily, and The Netly News, as well as a correspondent for HotWired.

McCullagh’s articles have appeared in scores of publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy magazine, George magazine, The New Republic, Communications of the ACM, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered, ABC News’ Good Morning America, NBC Evening News, Court TV, and CNN. He has been appointed an Adjunct Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He also was a lecturer at American University in Washington, DC where he has taught a graduate journalism class.

McCullagh moderates Politech, a well-known mailing list looking broadly at politics and technology that he founded in 1994, and has been online since 1988. He was the first online reporter to join the National Press Club; he participated in the first White House dot com press pool; and was one of the first online journalists to receive credentials from the press gallery of the U.S. Congress. McCullagh has spoken at schools including Stanford University, MIT, Harvard University, Georgetown University, the University of Chicago, and Duke University, and has testified twice before the Federal Trade Commission.

In addition to tinkering with his classic NeXT cube, McCullagh programs in C and Perl, and maintains a Linux server that supports about seven web sites, some with a MySQL backend. He rides a Honda 919 motorcycle, is a private pilot who flies a Diamond Katana, and lives with his wife in the San Francisco area.