i started off in brooklyn new york with an event with my with my colleagues and and it was the day before we learned or the day after star that we learned that the reverend daniel berrigan had had passed away and he would have been ninety five years old this week and i had the honor of knowing damn barragan and having him as a close friend and he had a tremendous impact  c figures of the anti vietnam war movement and that's certainly true but they were so much more than that and in a few days it will be the anniversary of the most famous antiwar action that they organized in may of  men that were going to be drafted and sent to the war in vietnam a war where disproportionately the poor and people of color were sent and the children of the elite largely avoided any at deployment political book and he won a very prestigious poetry prize and he was a pretty prominent figure within the catholic community the world over and his books had already been published in many many languages around the world and at that time you know there were only a handful of news stations and any time something big would happen it would end up spreading pretty quickly so the berrigan brothers and seven of their their friends all of whom were members of the catholic laity some of whom who had spent time in guatemala and in south asia and elsewhere working with the poor working with victims of state organized violence and they went into this customs house and they stole in full view of the clerks hundreds of draft files out of the cabinets and poured them into metal waste baskets and then they took them to the parking lot in front of the customs house and they piled them up and they then burned them with homemade napalm that they had manufactured from a recipe that they had found in the u s army's field manual and daniel berrigan wrote a statement on behalf of the kittens will nine and it's a statement i've read many many times i basically have it memorized but there's one line from it that i i always remember when we debate about whether or not the united states should be overthrowing governments and the question of civilian deaths and war and the statement that daniel wrote and then read while the draft files were burning began our apologies good friends for the fracture of good order the burning of paper instead of children and it was it's such a i still to this moma when i read it or say it it gives me chills because it is one of the truest things that's ever been said about war that we are taught to believe that the that the good order involves militarism that the good order necessitates peace through  was such an incredibly powerful symbol of an alternative reality alternative to what was being done at the pentagon to what was being portrayed in the in the u s media and dan berrigan had been  very intensely influenced by another catholic priest ate a trappist monk named thomas merton and merton was one of the very early voices to write in opposition to the war in vietnam before there was a mass movement and and merton was once asked early on when he was opposing the expanding u s involvement in vietnam a question that many critics of war are often asked in this country and that is well if you're against this do you support the other side you know so you think saddam should have stayed in power you think assad should stay in power as though there there is a necessity to embrace another evil in order to oppose the evil that emanates from your own country and merton was asked what does this mean that you support the men or the vietcong or the north vietnamese and who do you support and merton said i'm on the side of the people that are being burned and it was such a profoundly honest searing statement i'm on the side of the people that are being burned that rises above the framework that we're all so often provided with that we're told this is the acceptable range of of debate do we bomb with drones or do we send in ground troops there's no analysis or questioning of the fact that our own policy is helped to destabilize countries that now are hotbeds of terrorism and brutality and and genocidal policies and so  you know i fear in our current society in an age when and i love social media as much as the next person and i really enjoy twitter but if we're just tethered to our devices if we are just distilling every thing we have to say in the world into one hundred forty characters roughly a sentence and a half then how are we actually going to confront any of the ills facing our society you know there was a profile recently in the new york times magazine of a guy named ben rhodes who is  twenty seven years old they've never been anywhere we basically can write their stories for them and he was bragging about this but let's be clear about one thing president obama is surrounded by people like ben rhodes ben having be rhodes decide who's going to bomb next is like going into a frat house pulling someone away from their beer bong and saying who do you think we should bomb next these are frat boys that are that are somehow deciding the entirety of us what's called us national security policy it is it is a dangerous click of young white guys who actually are making these decisions and have the ear of the president and i cannot for the life of me understand why those are the people that president obama has basically put in charge of our foreign policy ben rhodes is the epitome of the kind of person you don't want making decisions about who to bomb and who not to bomb around the world he has no world experience he has no on the ground experience in the muslim  world and there have been numerous articles about this click of you know white twenty and thirty somethings who have the the the social culture of being frat boys and somehow they have been put in the most prime positions of authority in the u s government and i encourage everyone to read that profile of ben rhodes and ask yourself do we want this kind of person making decisions about what we are told is our national security policy i  mean it's it makes us look insane if you actually are interested in the facts i think a lot of people believe that there's all of these veteran policy people making these decisions you read about someone like ben rhodes and it should give you trembles for what's going on in the world today and who's making these decisions we are we're gathering at a moment in an election year when the three remaining candidates for president of the major political parties all three of them support the kill list yes bernie sanders also supports the kilis all three of them are totally fine with drone warfare around the world now we can we  can spend a lot of time talking about all of the ills of and dangers of a trump presidency and i'm perfectly happy to do that and be there with everyone in doing that but that's low hanging fruit donald trump is expressing overtly fascist sentiments but he didn't bring fascism to this country in an over way he what he did was he brought it to the public light and revealed that there is a sizable minority but it is sizable of people in this country that that actually i hold fascist bigoted beliefs as core values and there's an analysis that we could do many analyses of why that is but trump didn't create this phenomenon trump merely brought it to the public light and gave voice to people who felt like they were the the white silenced majority in this country and and so when we look at the dangers of who donald trump is to just simply focus on stop trump or trump as the man or trump as the candidate ignores the fact that we have hardcore neo kook klux klan members in our midst in this country and they don't wear hoods anymore but they certainly are showing up to vote for someone who is  the views that they felt like they weren't allowed to proclaim publicly in our society but so too is it is it easy to go after hillary clinton hillary clinton is is the empire candidate hillary clinton is a part of the permanent deep state hillary clinton is is someone who is now getting endorsements from the leading neo cons i will not be surprised and i'm not saying this facetiously i'm saying this is an actual prediction i would not be surprised if the organ of the neo con movement the weekly standard of fish really comes out and endorses hillary clinton for president that's not a joke that's i'm not being flip i'm telling you i think that that is a very real possibility why do i believe that because william krist who is one of the brain child of the modern neo con brain children of the neo modern neo con movement william kristol has been tweeting and speaking publicly in praise of hillary clinton and saying that she really is the only person that can state keep the study course of the empire max boot who is another very prominent neo con who has never met a war that he didn't love for other people's children to fight in also has been publicly advocating for hillary clinton in fact members of the public and leadership are going to come out and endorse hillary clinton hillary clinton has is largely the beneficiary of republican craziness when it comes to very real scandals her e mail server issue is a real problem this is not nothing when bernie sanders said the american people don't give a damn about your e mails i cringe because we should actually give a damn about it why hillary clinton's husband is the head of the of a of a parallel almost government called the clinton global initiative they set up this private server in their bathroom at their mansion north of new york city not for convenience but so that they could operate a parallel government where bill is raising billions of dollars around the world while his wife was simultaneously acting as the top diplomat for the united states government often meeting with world leaders who bill was trying to get money from there is a scandal there but there's also a scandal in the fact that hillary clinton was receiving classified information on her e mails but she plays with words and her campaign people are so smart how they spin the media they say she never received any classified documents and when they say that they know that most people have no idea what that means sounds reasonable she never received any classified documents yes we don't like the fact that the secretary of state at a private e mail but what's the big harm well that's not how classification works when when a document is is created in the form of an e mail it becomes classified based on what's in it the very creation of an e mail hitting the two box in an e mail and putting an address in there does not make it classified but when someone then e mails information about what's happening on the ground in a country where the united states has intelligence personnel or military operations then it needs to be reviewed to determine if it should be classified and if so at what level she received thousands of e mails that dealt with very sensitive u s policy positions and ongoing operations and is trying to say well none of those were classified of course they were classified because you didn't subject them to anyone to review for classification that's not how it works so they're all playing with with words there and i raise this about hillary clinton for this reason this is ministration has waged a war against whistleblowers president obama has utilized the espionage act his justice department is utilize the espionage act more than every single president in history combined since it was first passed in one nine hundred seventeen and if you know anything about the espionage act you know that the intent the public intent of that bil that that was then signed into law was to try to target individuals who were believed to be collaborating with foreign powers in the context of world war one but its actual use and the intent of it was to target leftists who were perceived to be enemies of the established u s state and you fast forward then to the present and obama is using it to go after a wide range of people who provided journalists or the  public with information that the government was withholding including information that revealed unconstitutional activities like spying on american citizens and collecting their metadata in direct contravention of the spirit of the laws that congress thought that they had enacted  chelsea manning is doing thirty years in a military prison and regardless of what you think of wiki leaks or what chelsea manning did i hope that everyone if you only are going to look at one thing look at the video that was called the collateral murder video that chelsea manning provided to wiki leaks and what you will see on that video is u s military personnel gunning down iraqi civilians and two reuters journalists and then circling around and attacking the first responders who tried to pull their bodies away from the the gunfire that was crystal clear evidence of a war crime that was exposed because of a low ranking military individual who decided to blow the whistle the treatment of edward snowden the fact that he's in exile right now the u s likes to make much of the fact that he's in moscow and they act as though edward snowden intended to go to moscow but if you actually follow the story if you know the facts then you know that the u was the entity that put him in moscow because he was going to he was flying to russia as a gateway to go to latin america where he had been negotiating asylum with a number of countries and while he was in the air the united states cancelled his passport and so when he entered russia he didn't have a valid passport and the russians wouldn't let him leave the airport and he still doesn't have a valid passport so that's why he was stuck in russia he didn't go there with any documents that he shared with russian intelligence that's all propaganda you know i mean  i now know edward snowden personally i don't agree with him on everything he's a pretty hard core libertarian but i think the the general principles upon which he based his decision to do this are very sound and they are moral a t their core and i totally support amnesty for edward snowden and i totally believe that chelsea manning should be freed from that military prison particularly if david petraeus is somehow considered an acceptable member of our society when he leaked classified information and shared classified information with a woman that he wanted to look like superman in front of who happen to not be his wife but he was sleeping with you know you do that and you're fine you're a member of the club you can move on you  can get a cushy job at a university giving one lecture a year for a six figure income all of these guys fail upwards when they break the law all of these people then are allowed back on c n n or allowed to go on the distinguished lecture circuit  chelsea manning asked to do thirty years in prison thomas drake who blew the whistle internally at the n s a before ever going to a journalist tried to do what they say snowden should have done tried to go up the chain of command when he did that when he reported what considered to be abuses being committed by the n s a and this was a guy who spent twenty seven years working for the u s government he was not a low level twenty something he had been in the air force and then he was at the n s a when thomas drake went through the system and blew the whistle his house was ra his reputation was smeared and thomas drake now works at an apple store and in virginia making slightly above minimum wage he was a guy who spent three decades of his life working on behalf of the united states government and his crime that he committed was not going in holding a press conference or giving julian assange documents it was blowing the whistle internally the same thing happened to bill binney another n s a whistleblower he blew the whistle internally his house got raided while he was in the shower and they pulled him out naked and handcuffed him and then they smeared bill binning this is what they do to people who are leaking information with any kind of a moral code informing it but when you leak it to make yourself look like a hero to your mistress or when you lea it like john brennan did after the operation in about a bad that killed osama bin laden john brennan blatantly lied to journalists for days on end making up bullshit like bin laden there was an intense firefight bin laden put one of his wives in front of him it was all not true and then the few days later the white house said oh actually we were mistaken about those things but no one ever pays attention to that the original story is what with sticks and they knew what they were doing it was a well managed information operation they knew what they were doing and they knew that the overwhelming majority of journalists in the washington press corps would just eat it up and so there's never a penalty for those kind of leakers there's a difference between whistleblowers and leakers whistleblowers go to jail and leakers go to jail  and that and the blowers are heroes and the whistleblowers are criminals so you can have the current head of the cia blatantly lie to the media to try to make one of the most sensitive operations in u s military history seem like this captain america movie and there's no consequences for him he'll be just fine but low ranking people who blow the whistle they're going to go to jail the documents that we publish in this book represent the first time that the american public has had a chance to see raw documents on how the drone program functions to see what the actual kill chain looks like which officials are involved with deciding who's going to live and die around the world on any given day one of the charts that we publish shows that hillary clinton when she was secretary of state was signing off on every single person who was assassinated in a drone strike but were too busy analyzing donald trump's talkable task any real questions in this election season about the role of hillary clinton and any of this stuff about her role in regime change in libya that directly led to the death of our ambassador there chris stevens you know the benghazi committee hillary clinton is so lucky that the most bat shit crazy people in the u s are running that committee because they will they're never asking a real question they've made it into a partisan witch hunt and hillary's right when she says it's a partisan witch on she's right because they're not asking the real question which is that  policy led to the destabilization of this country your policy of covert action that killed important tribal figures in benghazi resulted in the raid on our annex and the consulate there this had nothing do with a video of the prophet muhammad this was that they were running covert cia special operations forces targeted killing operations and they killed the wrong people they killed people that were connected to truck powerful tribes and those tribes attack the the consulate and the annex in retaliation from a hit program that john brennan was running inside of benghazi but you will never hear hillary clinton asked about that you only see the fictitious movies thirteen hours in benghazi zero dark thirty that's how history now is is told in our country so we don't we don't ever have to ask questions of someone that very well may be the next commander in chief in the next president because we're too busy dealing with what donald trump was eating and then go foz that hill we clinton when someone actually almost says god and god we trusted hillary clinton's rally that's the big story today and right wing media that someone almost was going to mention god at a hillary clinton rally and then they stopped themselves and that's proof that hillary is the is the anti christ so it's i mean that's that's the nature of the discourse here but these documents that we're publishing in this book are the only primary documents i have ever been released on the drone program how it works how they determine who is a civilian and who is not a civilian one of the most damning  pieces in this which was written by my colleague rand ever oh shows that in one period that the military studied about assassination operations that nine out of the ten people that the special operations forces were killing in mostly drone strikes nine out of those ten people were not the intended target of the strikes now that doesn't mean that they were all civilians it means that they don't know who they were but they then labeled them as ek enemies killed in action and that remains their designation unless someone posthumously proves that they were not a suspected militant a term that has no legal definition that they were not somehow connected to terrorism if they died alongside what they call in these documents the jackpot meaning the intended target of the strike they are preemptively labeled as enemies killed in action unless they are visibly identifiable to the drone operators or or others as women and children and the only way you get that des nation off of your corpse in death is if someone a journalist a human rights worker or someone else goes there investigates it and proves that this was a botched strike against a wedding party not a convoy of the pakistani taliban or the taliban or al qaeda in the arabian peninsula it's like reverse due process except you're dead you can't appeal once you've been killed by a by a drone strike and to me that embodies the entire chaotic out of control system that now has the stamp of legitimacy from a constitutional lawyer nobel peace prize winner who told us that he was going to operate the most transparent administration in history obama has put a stamp of democratic party legitimacy on policies that were dreamt up by dick cheney not when he was in the white house this time but going all the way back to the ford administration rumsfeld was the youngest defense secretary and the oldest defense secretary this was a life long project of rumsfeld and cheney to achieve what they viewed as a necessary dictatorship of the executive branch of the united states government when it came to war policy when it came to national security policy and if you actually pay very close attention to what obama says about the legal authorities to run this program he's not relying on the two thousand and one authorization for the use of military force which was passed in the immediate aftermath of nine eleven only one member of either house of congress voted against it representative barbara lee of california every young person in this true all of us really but i really think young people this country should go on youtube later and watch barbara least speech when she rose to oppose four days after nine eleven rose to oppose that bill that was was signed into law she was trembling she was getting death threats every word she said when she stood to oppose that bill ended up being prophetic about what would happen if we gave these authorities to the bush cheney administration and president obama campaigned on the idea that he was going to roll back the excesses the abuses of that era and on some issues he did do that but on the most core issues involving assassination the drone program he pushed it farther than john mccain or mitt romney ever would have been able to because he got liberals to join in on it he got liberals to to to learn to love the idea of assassination and covert war and drones at the height of the drone wars two thousand and eleven to two thousand and thirteen some polls indicated that seventy percent of self identified liberals supported the u s conducting of drone strikes and support for those strikes only drop negligibly when it was an american citizen who was the target even if they had never been charged with a crime or had ever been indicted of a crime that that is that that was entirely due to who o is that has nothing to do with whether liberals actually think that's a good idea they were sold a bill of goods by their guy when he was in office as though there's a such thing as a democratic or republican cruise missile or a democratic or republican republican drone strike there's no such there's no partisanship when it comes to these operations and there's not going to be selective targeting of the politicians who implemented these policies when blowback comes there's going to be attacks against any americans that they can lay their hands on and the people that want to retaliate as a result of their loved ones being killed won't necessarily be terrorists there are people that are like all of us in this room who when confronted with the extrajudicial killing of one of our relatives probably will have an instinct that we want something done to those people now i'm against the death penalty and the but the people that i admire most and that i respect most who are opposed to the death penalty are people who are from an organization called murder victims families for reconciliation people whose own loved ones were killed including women whose teenage daughters were raped and murdered who then oppose the death penalty for their child's rapist and killer the reason i bring that up is because i think most people's gut instinct is not to do that those are extraordinary people most people will want revenge that's what happened after nine eleven it's it seems to have been a natural instinct i'm not saying it's right i'm not making a moral judgement about it i'm saying that's just reality so we can choose the  response to policies that we support or allow to be enacted around the world that end up killing innocent people we don't determine what the response to those deaths of civilians are going to look like now to publish documents like this requires someone from within the state to provide them and someone who would provide these will certainly know that the odds are that they will be charged with espionage and that they will be arrested and that they will be prosecuted and yet we had an incredibly brave whistleblower who worked on the assassination program that provided us with these documents and i want to just share with you briefly an essay that the source for this book for many of the documents in this book provided to us and i should just say before i read this brief section that this individual also provided us with what was called the watch listing guidance in two thousand and thirteen it was the government's secret rulebook for placing people on the watch list on the terror watch list on the no fly list and we publish that one hundred eighty eight page in the government freaked out when we when we were doing that and then they tried to run to a journalist from a corporate media outlet to give them the story before we could publish it so that they could put us a spin on it but we were able to get it out and it sparked lawsuits across the country including in federal court in oregon where a judge ruled the watch listing process unconstitutional because american citizens don't have a right to understand how they've been put on the list or even if they're on the list so already the source of these documents had  a direct impact on some of the litigation being brought forth to try to challenge the watchlist and probe project so this is the essay of our of our source over the past few years we've heard a lot about president  obama's secret kill list yet still we know virtually nothing about its implementation despite mild congressional scrutiny and a c l u lawsuits directed at the shroud of secrecy some basic questions remain unanswered how do you get on the list am i on the list who put me on the list how do you get off the list can you get off the list the truth is there are several such lists used to target individuals for different reasons some lists are closely kept others span multiple intelligence and local law enforcement agencies there are lists used to kill or capture supposedly high value targets and others are intended to threaten coerce or simply monitor a persons activity however all the lists whether to kill or to silence originate from the terrorist identities datamart environment and they are maintained by the terrorist screening center at the national counterterrorism center the existence of tied his unclassified yet details about how it functions in our government are completely unknown to the public in and thirteen the database reached a milestone of one million entries today it's thousands of entries larger and is growing faster than it has since its inception in two thousand and three the march twenty third teen watch listing guidance lays out the broad criteria for nominating someone to the database not only does the terrorist screening center reserve the right to store your name date of birth and other basic identifying information but it also stores your medical records transcripts and passport data your license plate numbers e mail and cell phone number along with the phones international mobile subscriber identity and international station equipment identity numbers your bank account numbers and purchases and other sensitive information including d n a and photographs capable of identifying you using facial recognition software the national counterterrorism cent collaborates annually with agencies from the international alliance known as five eyes to supplement any information missing from entries already in its database or to add more entries individual entries in the database are assign the american son of anwar a lockie anyone who has ever been the target of a covert operation was first assigned a t p n and closely monitored by all agencies who follow that t p n long before they were eventually put on a separate list and extrajudicial be sentenced to death when governments begin to tally enormous enemies lists they run roughshod over our essential checks on power especially when they consider their own citizens to be a threat of the more than one million entries in the tide database approximately twenty one thousand are those of american citizens by leaking this information i hope to give the public an opportunity to know what kind of activity might lead to the being placed on the list used to monitor their every day activity for the first time the public has an opportunity to gain insight into the criteria that could potentially lead to their own trial by drone strike in two thousand and eight i hands with senator obama when he came through my town on his way to the white house after his inauguration he said quote transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency and quote i firmly believe those principles are crucial to an open society which is why i was compelled to reveal this information if this it ministration lacks the courage to uphold its promises to the people then i and others like me will do so for them this is an incredibly brave and principled individual who very well may be charged with with espionage and  one thing that i think all of us can do in our everyday lives everyone always says well what can we what can we do about this if you make it your business is to study any number of the whistleblowers that i was mentioning  tonight and really get your your head around the facts of their case who they were why they did what they did and then what happened to them as a result of it and you drop that into conversations with people that generally don't want to come to things like this with you and you start to raise this in discussion with people you already are doing something because one of the most horrifying aspects of what happened to chelsea manning after leaking hundreds of thousands of documents that were then used by newspapers across the world to sell papers and g viewers and win awards she was completely dropped by all of those papers the new york times which put those documents on the front page of its paper and won many awards didn't even cover her trial it was one of the most significant trials in modern american history and they finally sent a journalist at the very end of the trial because two independent reporters had shame them into doing so the same was true of c n n and then they sent a producer and a camera person there and the great independent journalist alexa o'brien began live tweeting the c n n producers naps every day in the courtroom wasn't even paying attention to what was happening in the court in fact when the government put in the military put chelsea manning on trial the judge said there will be no transcripts of this hearing and so we joined with a handful of other news organizations and sued them and we won the right to have the hearings documented they were going to not even have transcripts of this trial they said ok fine there will be a transcript but you have to pay for it ok so we all pitched in and we hired a court transcriber to go there what why is it that it's underpaid independent journalists have to shame the paper of record in this country to covering the trial of a whistleblower whose documents they put on their front page it tells you a lot about the priorities in our society chelsea manning is in that prison and no one cares how many people have ever discussed the wiki leaks documents the state department cables any of those things who are aware that chelsea manning is languishing alone in a military prison with a thirty year sentence hanging over her head so we all can do something no matter what you do in your ordinary life i would say one of the most important things you could do to fight for transparency and any respect of a democratic process is to raise the stories of those people who took the risks to provide us with information that should have been provided by the state in order to encourage an informed debate in our country about life and death policies the fact that we are going to have the next president of united states carrying on this legacy expanding this program should be of grave concern to all of us how many of you are aware that there is an executive order that was that was issued under gerald ford saying the united states does not that were conducting the same types of operations but the sea one of the first things the cia did was to overthrow the democratically elected government of jacopo arbenz in guatemala it was a leftist government popular election jacopo arbenz was overthrown then most  death was overthrown in iran and then you had support for all of these military juntas in central in latin america and the support of the pinochet regime and then there were political assassinations inside the united states john f kennedy was killed bobby kennedy was killed martin luther king was killed malcolm x was killed fred hampton was killed some of them were killed by people with connections to u s intelligence some were killed by the chicago police department as in the case of fred hampton and others we don't know who killed them but there were so many political assassinations happening the congress finally said well we're going to investigate this but they didn't really investigate the whole program they took on a few issues and they had the church committee and then they had the house committee on political assassinations and and what ended up happening as a result of that was that you had some people saying well we need to shut the cia down well that wasn't going to happen nixon had been had had resigned ford was coming in as president cheney and rumsfeld were two of his top guys both of them were obsessed with one of the federalist papers called the unitary executive the idea of the dictatorship of the executive branch and they came up with this idea well if congress legislates this issue that's going to cause problems we don't want the term assassination to be defined under u s law we don't we don't want to have rules put in place that will limit the executive branch's ability to weigh wage war so they came up with this idea that ford would issue an executive order stating that the united states will not engage in political assassinations then when jimmy carter became president president carter amended it and he removed the word political and it was just said assassinations and then carter added anyone acting on behalf of the united states contractors or agents also is prohibited from engaging in assassination reagan upheld that order george h w bush upheld that order clinton upheld that order george w bush upheld that order and president obama upheld that order and every single one of those people has explicitly violated that order why because congress not only has never done this has never said this is what assassination is and this is our legislative interpretation of of this executive order which really is kind of an extrajudicial edict it's like it's like something an emperor would do the court prefers we don't assassinate you know but it's not it has no teeth so so congress not only hasn't done it but has stealthily refused to do it and when and it has happened when a member of congress says well what why don't we why don't we do this the full weight of both political parties comes down on them and they stomp it out so it's never happened and the after nine eleven richard clarke who was clinton's what they called counter terrorism czar was called in front of a joint hearing of the democratic and republican leadership of both houses as well as the intelligence committees of both houses and nancy pelosi was one of the chairs of of this hearing the t ranscripts of that were declassified a few years ago although there have only redacted i wrote about this in my previous book dirty wars but it is such a telling tale about where we are right now the point of that hearing from the republican perspective was to try to put the blame for nine eleven on bill clinton and they were trying to say well clinton could have killed bin laden and he never he never did it and it wasn't just bush bush's people missing the signs it was clinton that really did this so that was part of why the republicans want to richard clarke there and then the democrats wanted rich clarke there because they wanted to figure out a way to justify what was coming the gloves coming off the torture of the secret prisons etc but clerk said some interesting things in that hearing he said that they had contemplated killing osama bin laden and that they  wanted to do it in a tomahawk cruise missile strike on on a farm in afghanistan where they believed bin laden was was residing but they said that the lawyers on the national security council and from the cia and from the military were all concerned that if they did that it would violate the executive order on assassination which is kind of macabre and hilarious at the same time that it would violate and that any personnel that would have participated in it could have been indicted under international law or charged with war crimes and so they were very very conservative in authorizing any of those so called targeted strikes against bin laden they did ultimately authorize some of them but nothing like what we see today where they're just we're bumping people off left and right around the world but what clarke said in that hearing was that the the overall sentiment in the clinton white house at that time and the reason we didn't just run to the races with this idea that we can bump off bin laden was we didn't want to give the world the impression that we were running an israeli style assassination program that is what we're doing today we are doing what the israelis have long done and but we're doing it on a global scale and the u s is sending a message to russia and china and the other seventy five nations that have weaponized drones that this is acceptable when the most powerful nation in the world says there's no such thing as international law refuses to support an international criminal court that would have jurisdiction over the powerful wields its veto power at the u n when that country says well we can bump off anyone in any country at any time we choose that sends a message that that's acceptable on the international stage so the stakes for us are very very high in this country we we have just by the fluke of our citizenship or where we were born or where we reside have have have a much greater burden than many people around the globe we have the burden of living in the empire of living in the most powerful nation on earth and for us to decide that we just want to sort of vege out and let it be on cruise control or check our conscience at the door of  every four years election is it means that we're part of this problem if we don't start paying attention to what's being done in our name around the world if we don't take a real interest in it if we don't defend the people that blow the whistle on it if if were if we don't have the time of day to get away from our machines in our computers in our daily grand life to do a little something to try to raise these questions in society then we are a major part of the problem the moment you see it any portion of your conscience to a politician is the moment you stop participating in a struggle for any kind of democratic values bernie sanders supported regime change in iraq bernie sanders voted for the iraq liberation act in one thousand nine hundred eight which was authored by the  sanders supported the sanctions on iraq bernie sanders supported the the longest sustained bombing campaign since vietnam under bill clinton in iraq bombing iraq every three days saying worst were protecting the shia and were protecting the kurds they were ended up killing more shia and kurds than any of saddam's people in those bombings and then he says well hillary clinton loves regime change ok bernie i agree with you on that but what's your answer about your record in supporting regime change in iraq before it became cool among the republicans you were there vocally supporting that now that's not the same as voting for the invasion of iraq but the invasion of iraq couldn't have happened on a legislative level had they not passed that bill in one thousand nine hundred eight that codified regime change as the law of the land now some some people you know blast anyone who criticizes their particular messiah hillary's people are very vicious on social media and come after you and anyone who criticize hillary clinton becomes a sexist immediately bernie bros all this stuff but then also when you criticize bernie sanders it's like you've you've  dropped the stink bomb in a room like you've done some vile act by pointing out facts journalists are supposed to present information with no regard to who the politician is you know we're supposed to hold those in power accountable whether they're bernie sanders or or george w bush or dick cheney our job isn't to be partisan warriors for any particular cause and if we're not a grown up enough society to deal with the facts and realize that our messiahs are actually not messiahs and what business do we have calling  ourselves democracy or democratic republic we don't have any business doing that so i think all of us have to sort of myself included we all have to kind of take a humility pill about where we are in this country the state of empire our impact on the world the perception of our national identity not just our national security policy but our national identity we have become a nation of assassins because we don't say anything about it we watch rachel maddow makes us all feel good bernie sanders oh yeah we're part of the revolution you know that that stuff that that stuff is plastic what's real is actually assessing who you are in the country you live in and what you're doing to try to change it or alter that path it's a challenge i think all of us need do this or people will die let's well i mean first of all i think i think that i would draw great distinction between who barack obama is and who dick cheney is i mean i actually do think that dick cheney is like dr evil in the lair i mean i think of him as like sitting there in a cave somewhere really plotting on how he can just fuck the world and obama you know i think is more sorry i know your torah fatema language than obama and i but i think obama is much more thoughtful and i think that it what's powerful about what's happened is that i think he's i think he's come to believe that this actually is the least bad way to do all of this and this is not a very sexy answer but i think it is the to my knowledge i think it's the accurate one when you run for president and you secure the nomination of one of the two major parties you then are are briefed you're given a classified briefing by not only the director of the central intelligence agency but by other senior intelligence and military officials and when obama beat hillary clinton in zero in the zero eight election and got the nomination he was briefed by general michael hayden at the federal building in chicago and there was a a pretty substantial shift in his rhetoric after that you know in the cia they call that the holy shit brief because they say that every incoming president uses the phrase holy shit once the cia briefs them about the sort of enormousness of the threats facing the country and it's intended to be that because you know there we have two governments in this country one is elected you know every four years or every two years or every six years when it comes to senators and congresspeople and presidents and then the other is never elected and that is the permanent bureaucracy at the state department the cia the military and those that permanent bureaucracy can wait out any problematic elected official because of term limits and they could say well he's going to gone in a few years so we'll we'll i kind of just like sit in the sides for a little while we'll let him think that he's reforming this or stopping this but really were running the game and what they do then once you become president is is they all come and they just inundate the new president with every possible threat that could hit the united states this building might get blown up this subway this kind of gas we're monitoring these people if you know and it's like i mean well obama's like well i want to do health care and i want to the economy so he gets briefed early on and he had campaigned on the idea that he wasn't going to do large scale military invasion but he was told by the heads of the military special operations in the cia if you discontinue the high value targeting campaign that was implemented by cheney rumsfeld bush were the odds of us getting hit in the united states are going to dramatically increase and so when he was asked when he asked all of these people four sets of options he selected the one that he believed was going to be the least politically problematic but also result in the least number of american deaths and would allow him to make an argument that this was the was a smarter way of waging war and that was that he gave tremendous power to the militaries joint special operations command expanded their abilities to strike in more countries began heavily relying on drone strikes and then moving to pull troops out of iraq and i think that i think he he was there was not like the generals threatened him there was going to be a coup i think that's how power works in this country who is actually going to say to all of the generals and all of the career intelligence personnel  thank you for your input but i've decided that i'm not going to do any of that you know rahm emanuel who was his chief of staff at the time who is a cynical bastard was was in on all these briefings he was in on all the national security briefings and emanuel really didn't give a shit about any of the stuff he cared about re election that was his entire job that's what they're the political people their goal immediately once they win is next term and so he's looking at it in his calculus is how do these policies affect our chances of  reelection and how does that affect our ability to get other domestic legislation passed and other agendas so they essentially cut deals with the most hawkish individuals in the national security state including on capitol hill and i think that obama really did feel believe that this was the least bad thing that he could do and i think it'll be interesting when he actually you know leaves office and some years down the line see what direction he goes in and if he ever actually addresses these issues because my guess would be that there are there are there are some serious reservations that he holds we've just got no public indication that that's the case but i do think that i do think it's just the nature of the beast and the overwhelming of a new president by the national security deep state thanks for coming jeremy i have a question about the companies and contractors that facilitate targeted assassinations do you see them as being immune to public pressure campaigns in divestment campaigns well you know if you go online and you watch any of the ads for lockheed martin for instance i mean those are really the kind of top tier crazy sort of celebrations of american privatized militarism you know they're very sophisticated you feel like you're watching the trailer to the next awesome blow shit up movie  and they basically i mean lockheed martin is basically a wing of the united states military and it personnel populate every single aspect of national he went on to become the head of the whole counterterrorism center any he and i were doing event together once and he told me that when he first got to langley to run this division that he was going around and meeting introducing himself to all of the heads of various departments that were working on the high value targeting program everything and he said that multiple people when he would introduce themselves would hand them a business card i mean these are people were running divisions of the cia and they would hand them a lockheed martin or a boeing business card you know say well this is they weren't they weren't employees of the federal government but they were running the whole aspects of this program the fact is that the politicians who represent the districts where these companies are from i mean you you all know the story here with with boeing and other corporations they will never stand up against those companies they will the people that would be in charge of overseeing them are funded by them and you know you're asking a question about  t and and pressure i think that that the war industry in general is largely immune to any public targeting because the people who are supposed to be overseeing it receive huge camp campaign contributions i mean i've long thought that when people are elected to congress they should have to wear suits that have the logos of all the companies that finance their their campaigns like nascar  that we have an understanding when you vote against this or for this ok well it makes sense you know because you know they've actually got the prime real estate you know on your on your lapel and you know i think in some cases it has in the case of blackwater for instance i do think that there there was so much public pressure that congress sort of was forced to do something that something that they did largely failed it only succeeded in getting blackwater to change its name basically and erik prince is very much in business we've been writing about him recently but no i mean i think i think when activists have tried to target directly these companies and war is business and ms mrs fantastic right now and so i don't  i think it's kind of ends up being a fool's errand to go after the companies even though i think they should be going after it i think it's a more strategic campaign to go after the politicians that are the main defenders of those corporations we don't get money is one thing that i passionately bernie sanders about if we do not get huge corporate money out of our politics the net nothing will ever fundamentally change in this country nothing no matter what issue any of us consider our most important issue i don't care what it is you can shout it out and i guarantee you this applies to it if you don't get corporations out of the electoral process none of those issues are going to be tackled in any meaningful way if they come up against corporate pushback and that's the way it is in this country there was a coup a long time ago and  wasn't violent coup at all it was a it was an information and corporate coup where we were groomed to start to believe that what happens in the cardassian household is reality and what happens in baghdad in mogadishu and elsewhere is not our business or nothing that we have to pay attention to i'm happy to but i'll leave you with this one quote from one of the best movies i think that's ever been made which is that the movie the usual suspects kevin spacey character at the end of that film says the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist and that's really how powerful coups happen that it's not doesn't require generals taking over it it happens when you don't even realize it's happening and then you wake up one day and you say how did we all become tethered to these electronic devices and obsessed with the lives of people that we don't even came and tell you why they're celebrities and so going after these companies would be great but their enablers in congress are the ones that actually