Nermeen Shaikh

What Will Happen Now to Separated Migrant Children? No One Seems to Know

The government has no plans to reunite thousands of children who have been separated from their parents at the border, despite President Trump’s executive order claiming to end family separations. We speak with Zenén Jaimes, advocacy director for the Texas Civil Rights Project. He is part of their team that goes to the federal courthouse in McAllen each day since Trump began his “zero tolerance” policy, and collects information from parents who had their children taken away from them before they were taken to court to face criminal charges for crossing the border.

TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: “How Long, How Long Blues,” the legendary singer Barbara Dane, performing yesterday in our Democracy Now! studios. Tonight, she’s performing at Joe’s Pub in her first New York City show in 15 years. May 12th was her 91st birthday. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We go now to McAllen, Texas, where we’re joined by Zenén Jaimes, who is the advocacy director for the Texas Civil Rights Project. He is part of their team that goes to the federal courthouse in McAllen each day since Trump began his “zero tolerance” policy and collects information from parents who had their children taken away from them before they were taken to court to face criminal charges for crossing the border. So Zenén, can you talk about your response to the executive order and what you have learned from the parents who you have spoken to at the courthouse?

ZENÉN JAIMES: Thank you so much for having me on. I think your guest already hit the nail on the head. This is for us no solution to what the crisis is actually happening. Now since the “zero tolerance” policy was announced, we knew that McAllen and South Texas was going to be ground zero, because this is where we are seeing most of the crossings as well as asylum-seekers.

And so since the end of May to today, we have interviewed over 350 people and done intake with them. And these are people who have been separated from their children. This is just in the McAllen courthouse. And as of right now, we’re looking to connect all of them with legal counsel, but the crisis remains. We have no idea what the next steps are to connect them with their children, who are currently in ORRshelters.

And speaking personally, having done these intakes myself, we have spoken to mothers with children as young as four years old, to fathers with children who are 16 years old who came here because they were being threatened by gang members or being threatened to join these gangs. And Bob also had talked about this very clearly, but the crisis was from the beginning the “zero tolerance” policy. Instead of going back on that, the executive order yesterday actually doubled down. We can still expect the same number of prosecutions to be happening in the McAllen courthouse.

And for us, it it going to be just as important to keep going because actually the separation will continue. When someone is sent from the CBP processing center to the McAllen courthouse, they will not be with their child. There is going to be around a 72-hour turnaround from when that person is getting their criminal prosecution to when they are exactly going to be sent to a family detention center, which is still unclear where exactly, because we are already at capacity with almost all of these centers.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you also say something, Zenén, about the Flores settlement, and whether you think it’s actually possible for it to be negotiated or changed in such a way that the Trump administration will actually be able to detain children for more than 20 days?

ZENÉN JAIMES: Many people have fought for the Flores settlement for many decades, at this point. We now sort of see and understand—and many people have been raising this alarm for many weeks now—that this was the initial intention of the administration. To [inaudible] a ruckus, separate these people, and then when it came down to it, when the images became too horrific, to say, “Well, OK, well, we can keep them together. We’re just going to keep them together in jail.”

Now, it remains to be seen how exactly this is going to work. We are sort of hearing different things, but we think that it is going to be the intention of the administration to basically try to violate the Flores agreement and this way force an entire conversation on this. And that would be catastrophic, because it would lead to the indefinite detention of these families, which we know this is what the administration is seeking in the first place as a way to deter people from even coming.

And we have to keep that in mind. They’re trying to punish children and families to basically send a message to the rest of the Americas and all over the world that if you come here, not only will you get criminal prosecution, but we will hold you in a prison for an indefinite amount of time.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what it means, Zenén, when the government announces today if parents want to get their children back, they have to go through the normal sponsorship process? And really, what exactly is happening? We spoke to Congressmember Jayapal who went to a prison in Washington state where well over 100 women are held. A number of them, their children—they don’t know where they were. They were shipped to—the mothers were flown to Washington state. Meanwhile, you have the secretary of Homeland Security saying, “Oh, they can Skype their kids all the time.” They don’t know where they are. And what it means to say they can now go through the normal sponsorship process? When they call a number that they were handed in court, it says something like, “If you want to get your kid back, you can leave a message here, but know that what you say here can and will be used against you in court.”

ZENÉN JAIMES: Yes exactly. And you sort of highlighted the exact nature of the black hole of all of the information here. What we’re currently thinking what will be happening—and remember, this is just all very new, and the administration has not been clear—is that parents who are currently in immigration detention will have to go through the normal Office of Refugee Resettlement process to sponsor and get their children back.

Now, this in itself is a long and arduous process, and remember that ORR is under the Health and Human Services department. This can involve months of background checks, fingerprinting, and in some instances a saliva test. Part of the ACLU lawsuit that happened a couple months ago showed that one mother had to take saliva tests four times to basically prove that it was her child.

At the end of the day, the administration is making it even more difficult to get children sponsored. So it might be many months, and in some cases maybe over a year, before parents—who, remember, are in detention facilities—many of them will not have legal counsel or any kind of help to navigate all of the system before they even get a chance of sponsoring and seeing their children again.

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Obama Paved Way for Haspel by Failing to Hold Torturers Accountable: Reporter Jeremy Scahill

On Capitol Hill Wednesday, President Trump's nominee to head the CIA, Gina Haspel, announced she would not restart the CIA's interrogation program. But she repeatedly refused to call the CIA's post-9/11 treatment of prisoners "torture," and declined to state whether she believes torture is immoral. Haspel's comments came in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, as she made her case to become the first woman to head the agency. Haspel is a 33-year CIA veteran who was responsible for running a secret CIA black site in Thailand in 2002, where one prisoner was waterboarded and tortured in other ways. Haspel also oversaw the destruction of videotapes showing torture at the black site. At least two Republican senators have come out against her -- Rand Paul and John McCain, who said her "role in overseeing the use of torture is disturbing & her refusal to acknowledge torture's immorality is disqualifying." But Haspel may still be confirmed with the help of Democratic lawmakers. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has already announced he will back Haspel. We speak with Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept and host of the weekly podcast "Intercepted."

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Trump Escalates Already Deadly U.S. Border Policies, Ordering National Guard to Mexican Border

A new wave of troops could soon be deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border, even as border crossings by undocumented immigrants are at their lowest levels since 1971. The move comes as a caravan of Central American migrants and asylum seekers in Mexico has prompted a series of threats from President Trump. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports the Trump administration is requesting that the U.S. military build walls for at least one military base along the U.S.-Mexico border. We go to Tucson, Arizona, for an update from Todd Miller, a border security journalist and author of “Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security.”

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Saudi Crown Prince Welcomed in U.S. as Trump Touts Weapons Deals

On Tuesday, President Trump met with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House, where the two leaders finalized a $12.5 billion weapons deal. This comes less than a year after Trump announced a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudis. During the meeting, Trump held up posters of recent Saudi weapon purchases from the United States and said, “We make the best equipment in the world.” Human rights groups warn the massive arms deal may make the United States complicit in war crimes committed in the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen. We speak with Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan and Medea Benjamin of CodePink.

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Rebecca Solnit on #MeToo, Mass Movements and the 10th Anniversary of 'Men Explain Things to Me'

This month marks the 10th anniversary of Rebecca Solnit’s groundbreaking essay, “Men Explain Things to Me.” In 2008, Solnit wrote, “Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. … Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.” The essay has also been credited with launching the term “mansplaining,” though Rebecca Solnit did not coin the phrase. 

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Watch: A Million Students Walk Out of Schools to Demand Action on Guns in Historic Day of Action

In a historic day of action, more than a million students from over 3,000 schools walked out of classes to protest gun violence on Wednesday. Walkouts occurred in all 50 states as well as some schools overseas. The nationwide student walkouts occurred one month after 17 students and staff were shot dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. At many schools, students walked out for 17 minutes—one minute for each person murdered in Parkland. The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are now organizing a massive March for Our Lives on March 24 in Washington, and solidarity marches are planned across the country. We air moments from marches in New York and talk with Luna Baez and Citlali Mares, two students in Denver, Colorado, who helped organize their school’s walkout for gun reform Wednesday.

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Farmworkers Bring Human Rights Fight to Wendy’s Doorstep, Fasting & Calling for Boycott Over Abuses

Dozens of farmworkers with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers have entered their last day of a 5-day fast outside the Manhattan office of Nelson Peltz, the board chair and largest shareholder of the restaurant chain Wendy’s. They are demanding Wendy’s sign onto the Fair Food Program, which would require the fast-food giant to purchase tomatoes from growers that follow a worker-designed code of conduct that includes a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment and abuse in the fields. Wendy’s is the only major fast-food chain that has refused to sign onto the Fair Food Program. Wendy’s competitors McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Chipotle and Taco Bell all have joined the Fair Food Program, which CIW members say has virtually ended sexual harassment and assault for tens of thousands of workers on participating farms in seven states. The fast today will end in a “Time’s Up Wendy’s” march in New York. For more, we are joined by Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a farmworker and an organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

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Remembering Courtlin Arrington: The Victim of a Recent School Shooting Largely Ignored by Media

Wednesday’s nationwide student walkout occurred one month after 17 students and staff were shot dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Many students left classes for 17 minutes—one minute for each person murdered in Parkland. But in Alabama some students walked out for 18 minutes to remember another student who was recently killed by gun violence at school: Courtlin Arrington, a 17-year-old African-American student who was shot dead last week at Huffman High School in Birmingham, Alabama, by a fellow student. She was a high school senior who was planning to attend college next year. She had dreams of becoming a nurse. While the Parkland shooting has dominated national headlines for a month, far less coverage was paid to the death of Courtlin Arrington. We are joined by Courtlin’s aunt, Shenise Abercrombie.

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Trump Is Determined to Provoke War to Draw Focus from Racist and Erratic Behavior

The New York Times reports that the Pentagon is proposing widening the permissible use of nuclear weapons to include responding to cyberattacks and other non-nuclear attacks to U.S. infrastructure. The Pentagon has already outlined this expanded nuclear strategy in a draft document sent to President Trump for approval. It comes amid a series of moves by the Pentagon and President Trump that have escalated the threat of nuclear war. The Wall Street Journal reports the Pentagon is planning to develop two new sea-based nuclear weapons. The New York Times also reports the Pentagon is conducting a series of war games to prepare for a potential war with North Korea. We speak to Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, who has been covering Donald Trump for nearly 30 years. His latest book is just out, titled “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.”

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High-Profile Women Break the Silence on Sexual Assaults, but Activists Warn Low-Wage Workers Are Still Vulnerable to Abuse

On Wednesday, Time magazine announced the 2017 “Person of the Year” goes to the women who have spoken out against sexual assault and harassment, sparking an international movement. It called the group “the Silence Breakers” and included Hollywood actresses, journalists, farmworkers and hotel cleaners. We look at how sexual abuse also thrives in low-wage sectors like farm work, hotel cleaning and domestic work, where workers are disproportionately women of color and immigrant women and are highly vulnerable to sexual harassment and sexual violence. We speak with Tarana Burke, founder of the “Me Too” movement and one of the women featured in Time’s new issue. She founded the organization in 2006 to focus on young women who have endured sexual abuse, assault or exploitation. She is now a senior director at Girls for Gender Equity. We are also joined by Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter and strategy and partnership director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and by Mily Treviño-Sauceda, co-founder and vice president of the National Alliance of Women Farmworkers. She is a former farmworker and union organizer with the United Farm Workers.

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Segregation Alive and Well in U.S. Schools

As the U.S. Supreme Court upholds a ban on affirmative action in Michigan and the country marks 60 years since the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education, we look at how segregation is still pervasive in U.S. public schools. An explosive new report in ProPublica finds school integration never fully occurred, and in recent decades may have even been reversed. Focusing on three generations of the same family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the story concludes: "While segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened." We are joined by Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose article, "The Resegregation of America’s Schools," is the latest in the ProPublica series "Segregation Now: Investigating America’s Racial Divide."

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Father Fighting to Overturn Death Penalty for Man Who Killed His Son

We are joined by Bob Autobee, a Colorado resident who is opposing the death penalty for the prisoner who killed his son Eric, a prison guard, in 2002. During the original trial, Autobee supported a death sentence for Edward Montour. But the Colorado Supreme Court threw out Montour’s sentence in 2007 because it was imposed by a judge, not a jury as is required. A decade later, Autobee has now changed his mind. In the new murder trial that begins today, he wants to make a victim’s statement to the jury asking them not to impose the death penalty — but the judge in the case has barred him from doing so. Autobee describes why he opposes the death penalty in this case, and why he wants to see it abolished overall. "You’ve got to be willing to heal, and you’ve got to let the hate go," Autobee says. "To me the death penalty is a hate crime, a crime against humanity." We are also joined by Democracy Now! producer and criminal justice correspondent Renée Feltz, who notes that 80 percent of Colorado voters actually passed a constitutional amendment in 1992 that enshrines the rights of victims to make a statement in cases like Autobee’s.

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Karim Khan, Anti-Drone Activist Who Lost Family Members to U.S. Strike, Goes Missing in Pakistan

An anti-drone activist and journalist has gone missing in Pakistan just days before he was due to travel to Europe to speak with Parliament members about the impact of the U.S. drone wars. The legal charity Reprieve says Karim Khan was seized in the early hours of Feb. 5 by up to 20 men, some wearing police uniforms. He has not been seen since. Khan’s brother and son were both killed in a drone strike. In addition to public activism, Khan was also engaged in legal proceedings against the Pakistani government for their failure to investigate the killings of his loved ones. We are joined by filmmaker Madiha Tahir, who interviewed Khan for her documentary, "Wounds of Waziristan."

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

Nermeen Shaikh: We begin today’s show in Pakistan, where an anti-drone activist and journalist has gone missing just days before he was due to travel to Europe to speak with Parliament members about the impact of the U.S. drone wars. The legal charity Reprieve says Karim Khan was seized in the early hours of Feb. 5 by up to 20 men, some wearing police uniforms. He has not been seen since. Karim Khan’s brother and son were both killed in a drone strike. He told his story in the recent documentary "Wounds of Waziristan."

Karim Khan: [Translated] In 2009, my home was attacked by a drone. My brother and son were martyred. My son’s name was Hafiz Zaenullah. My brother’s name was Asif Iqbal. There was a third person who was a stone mason. He was a Pakistani. His name was Khaliq Dad.

Their coffins were lying next to each other in the house. Their bodies were covered with wounds. Later, I found some of their fingers in the rubble.

As you know, my son had memorized the Qur’an. He was a security guard at the girls’ school, and he was studying for grade 10. My brother had a master’s degree in English. He was a government employee. He loved to debate, but he was so short, he didn’t reach the dais, so they wouldn’t give him many chances to make speeches.

Amy Goodman: Karim Khan speaking in the film "Wounds of Waziristan." Since his son and brother were killed in 2009, Karim became a prominent anti-drone activist. He’s been missing since last week. The executive director of Reprieve, Clare Algar, said in a statement, quote, "We are very worried about Mr Khan’s safety. He is a crucial witness to the dangers of the CIA’s covert drone programme, and has simply sought justice for the death of his son and brother through peaceful, legal routes," she said.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Madiha Tahir. She made the film "Wounds of Waziristan." She is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Vice, BBC, PRI’s "The World," Global Post and other outlets, as well as co-editor of the anthology "Dispatches from Pakistan."

Madiha Tahir, thanks so much for being here. We broadcast "Wounds of Waziristan" and got tremendous response to it. Now one of the key figures who you interview in it, Karim Khan, is gone, at least for the moment. Explain who he is, his significance.

MT: Karim Khan is actually one of the first people to bring a case in the Pakistani courts on — about drone attacks. So he’s the one who started to bring cases forward, and he has been working with a lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, who has been fighting on behalf of drone survivors and families of the dead. And Karim was working with Shahzad to help, you know, not only in his own case, but also to help and assist in other cases that were being brought forward in Pakistani courts to demand restitution and demand transparency for — you know, for these attacks.

NS: Madiha, can you give us a sense of how many such cases have been filed and whether other anti-drone activists in Pakistan have been targeted in any way or in fact picked up in the way that he was, Karim Khan?

MT: So, Karim is the first, that I know of, that has been picked up who is an anti-drone activist, but disappearances in Pakistan are very common. It’s a common state tactic. It has been happening in Balochistan, where there is a separatist movement, for a long time now. And, in fact, three are families protesting. There were mass graves found in Balochistan of missing people quite recently, only a few weeks ago. So this is a very common tactic by the state, and now, clearly, the Pakistani establishment, which is to say the intelligence agencies and the Pakistani army, want to send a message to the anti-drone movement to tell us to — you know, to tell the movement to shut up, basically.

AG: I want to go back to your film, "Wounds of Waziristan." In this clip, Karim speaks to you, Madiha Tahir.

KK: [Translated] You asked me a question about terrorism. Can I ask you one? What is the definition of "terrorism" or "terrorist"?

MT: [Translated] I don’t know. What do you think it is?

KK: [Translated] I think there is no bigger terrorist than Obama or Bush, those who have weaponry like drones, who drop bombs on us while we are in our homes. There are no greater terrorists than them.

AG: There again, Karim Khan, who went missing last week. And the people who took him, how many people saw this go down?

MT: His family was at home. His wife and his children were at home when it happened, so they saw it, and there are other eyewitnesses who saw it. He was picked up by 15 to 20 people. It seems to be people who were dressed in plainclothes, as well as police officers, who picked him up and disappeared him. His whereabouts are unknown. His family has not been able to find out where he’s being kept. Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer, did file something on his behalf in the Lahore court, and the court has ordered the intelligence agencies now to produce him by Feb. 20 before the court. So we have to wait for that date and see what happens. But the best scenario would be that he is released before then.

NS: And Karim Khan moved from Waziristan to Rawalpindi. Can you talk about the significance of the area from which he was picked up and whether it’s significant that — or whether it ’ widely believed that the people who were responsible for picking him up were the ISI, the intelligence services, or the military, or a combination?

MT: I mean, I think it is significant. It speaks to the nature of — again, it speaks to the nature of state violence in Pakistan. I think the news media both in the United States and in Pakistan has been — and, you know, rightly so — discussing the attacks by militants that have happened in Pakistan, and those acts, you know, have been reprehensible. Just two days ago, there was a bomb blast in a Peshawar cinema that killed anywhere between 11 to 13 people. But it’s important to realize that that violence happens in a context, and that context is state violence, which has been brutal, in the sense of it’s very quiet, there are disappearances like this. In this case, it’s a high-profile activist, but there are many people who we don’t even know have been picked up and disappeared by the state. So it is — you know, there’s a cyclical pattern between state violence and the non-state violence that is happening in Pakistan.

AG: Madiha, talk about what he would say if he did get out. Where was he going in Europe? Who was he going to be addressing?

MT: Karim Khan was actually slated to speak to several European parliaments next week, and he was going to talk about the drone attack that killed his son and his brother on New Year’s Eve in 2009. And he would have talked about the cost of these attacks on the people in the tribal areas in Pakistan, who are some of the most marginalized communities in Pakistan. For simply for wanting to speak out about what happened to him and what is happening and continues to happen in that area, he has been disappeared by the Pakistani state. And certainly, I think, you know, we shouldn’t forget that the United States has backed and funded the Pakistani military, and this is happening, so, in conjunction with these states working together, both Pakistan and the United States.

NS: Madiha, you also spoke about the increasing cycle of violence in Pakistan, both state violence and anti-state violence. Could you draw the links between what you think is the correlation, or if there is any, between the increasing number of drone strikes and really the unprecedented number of suicide bombs that occur now in Pakistan, a place which never knew suicide bombs 10 years — you know, 10 years ago?

MT: Yes. I mean, I think it’s — we have to be wary of drawing simple causes. So it’s not that, you know, suicide bombings are happening because. You know, it’s not a straightforward cause; however, there is a linkage. And you’re right, there is a correlation. The suicide attacks have increased in the last decade as Pakistan has been attacked by drones and has participated in the war on terror. The violence in Pakistan has gotten so much worse, not just suicide bombings, but all sorts of blasts happening. So, certainly, the war on terror, if it was meant to protect Pakistanis, is not working at all. It has actually had an adverse effect. By some estimates, you know, anywhere — you know, something like 30,000 Pakistanis have been killed in attacks by non-state actors. So, the war on terror is something that is something that the U.S. and the Pakistani government have been sort of working on together, but it’s certainly not had — it’s certainly not been to the — on behalf of Pakistanis.

AG: Madiha, I want to go back to your film, "Wounds of Waziristan," where you speak with Karim Khan’s lawyer, the man you just mentioned, Shahzad Akbar.

MT: This is Shahzad Akbar. He’s Karim’s lawyer. They’ve filed a case against drone attacks in Pakistani courts. He told me why it’s difficult to narrate his clients’ lives for the court and the media.

Shahzad Akbar: For example, you know, when I have a client and we want — OK, this was a person who was killed, so we’d like to construct his life on photographs. You know, you have family photos and — of when he was young, when he was in school, when he was in teens and when he grew up — in all those photos. They’re missing. They’re not there, because, you know, you don’t have the culture of taking pictures for that matter.

AG: In 2012, Democracy Now! spoke to Shahzad Akbar, the co-founder of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, an organization that represents victims of drone strikes in Pakistani courts. Again, he is Karim Khan’s lawyer. And Akbar explained why he decided to visit the United States at that time.

SA: I, on behalf of the victims in Pakistan, wanted to reach out to Americans so that they can make an informed judgment on drones. Their opinion matter, and it’s going to matter in next elections, as well. So they need to know what drones are doing to humans in Pakistan, many of them who are civilians. And it has been said by independent groups and journalists, as well, a bigger — higher number of civilian victims. And that has to be reported to the American public so they can make an informed judgment on drones, that if American government should let be killing people overseas in their names.

AG: Now, this is Shahzad Akbar, who you’ve just watched and listened to. He was in the United States in 2012. But this past year, when some of his clients came to the United States, drone victims — the Rafiq Rehman family, little girl, little boy, both injured when their grandmother was blown up in a drone strike — he was not granted a visa to come to the United States. The significance of this, Madiha Tahir? Of course, it made it much more difficult. They didn’t speak English. He would have been as much their navigator and their comfort. They were in a strange land, in fact a land where the drone came from that killed their grandmother.

MT: I mean, these are people that are seeking peaceful, legal routes for restitution for something — for a great harm that has been done to them and for a loss they will suffer for the rest of their lives. And so, to not allow their lawyer is to say that the U.S. doesn’t care about legal — about the rule of law and about the legal process at all, to not allow their representatives to come to the United States and to speak, you know, to stand by his clients and to speak alongside them. I think it’s highly problematic, but I think it speaks to the secretive nature of the American state.

NS: And, Madiha, can you give us a sense of how many victims or families of victims of drone strikes have attempted to bring their cases to the courts, either in Pakistan or indeed in the U.S.?

MT: I’m not sure exactly what the figures are at this point, because the cases are at different levels. Some of them are still — they’re — Shahzad and others are actually still in the process of gathering information in order to, you know, get the cases out there. So the most significant cases right now are — you know, there’s been the Karim Khan’s case and also Noor Khan, who is the son of the tribal — the mullah who was killed on March 17th in a drone attack on a jirga, a gathering, that killed upwards of 40, 50 people.

AG: The Obama administration is facing criticism over reports it’s debating whether to kill a U.S. citizen living in Pakistan who’s allegedly plotting terror attacks. On Monday, I spoke with journalist Glenn Greenwald, who recently launched TheIntercept.org with Jimmy Scahill and Laura Poitras. I asked Glenn about the initial Associated Press article that broke the story. And folks can go to our website at democracynow.org to hear what Glenn responded. I think, actually, we have it for you right now.

Glenn Greenwald: The very idea that the U.S. government suspects an American citizen, not of having already engaged in crimes, but of planning to do so, as Jeremy said, it’s like a pre-crime framework, where the U.S. government tries to guess at who will engage in crimes in the future and then treat them as a criminal — but then, not just treat them as a criminal, but declare them guilty in secret proceedings, not involving any court, but by the decree of the president of the United States to literally, A, declare the person guilty, B, impose the death penalty, and then, C, go out and carry out the execution — just like they did with Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan. And now they are obviously viewing it as a regular practice. I mean, no American, no matter your political affiliation or ideology, should accept the idea that the president of the United States has the power to order American citizens killed, not on a battlefield or anywhere else that is in a war zone, but simply on the suspicion that they intend to engage in future criminal behavior. To describe that power is to describe the most extremist and out-of-control government you can get.

AG: That is Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept. Madiha?

MT: Yes, I mean, I agree with Glenn Greenwald. It is — you know, it is a kind of pre-crime for which this American citizen is now going to be possibly attacked for by the United States. I think it’s important to remember that most of the people who are being attacked in exactly a similar way are not Americans, they are Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somali, etc. In Pakistan, as you know, there has been the tactic of what are called signature strikes, which are strikes that aren’t actually targeting a specific, named, high-value target or anything of that nature, but rather people whose behavioral patterns, for one reason or another, appear to trigger a suspicion in the U.S. intelligence apparatus that they may or may not be militants. We don’t actually know. But simply on that basis, on very faulty intelligence, much of which is happening through cellphone — unreliable cellphone data, you know, a lot of these attacks are carried out, and why we have the figures that we have of the numbers of people killed.

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U.S. Plunges in Global Press Freedom Rankings as Obama Wages 'War on Whistleblowers'

A new survey of press freedom around the world finds the United States has plunged 13 spots, now ranking just 46th among 180 countries. The annual survey by Reporters Without Borders also says Syria is the most dangerous country for journalists, showing a correlation between conflict zones and a low level of press freedom. Other countries that fell lower than in the previous year’s survey include the civil-war-torn Central African Republic, down 43 spots to 109, and Guatemala, where four journalists were killed last year alone. This comes as the United Nations General Assembly recently adopted its first resolution on the safety of journalists. The group has now called on the United Nations to monitor how member states meet their obligations to protect reporters. We are joined by Delphine Halgand of Reporters Without Borders.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

Nermeen Shaikh: We end today’s show with a new survey of press freedom around the world that finds the United States plunged 13 spots and now ranks just 46th among 180 countries. The annual survey by Reporters Without Borders says Syria is the most dangerous country for journalists, showing a correlation between conflict zones and a low level of press freedom. Other countries that fell lower than in the previous year’s survey include the civil-war-torn Central African Republic, down 43 spots to 109, and Guatemala, where four journalists were killed last year alone.

Amy Goodman: This comes as the United Nations General Assembly recently adopted its first resolution on the safety of journalists. The group has now called on the U.N. to monitor how member states meet their obligations to protect reporters.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Delphine Halgand, U.S. director for Reporters Without Borders.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about who’s on the list and also the United States dropping so far to 46. Why?

Delphine Halgand: So, in our annual ranking, we rank the level of press freedom in 180 countries. We publish this ranking every year since 2002. But as you highlighted, the decline of the U.S. this year is one of the significant decline of the year. So there is actually many reason to explain this decline.

So, first, if you want to give a title of 2013 for the U.S., we could say that the whistleblower is the enemy. Just to remind you, you know that since Obama took office in 2009, eight whistleblowers have been charged under the Espionage Act, which is the highest number under any administration combined. So, really, this is a strategy. It’s not a coincidence. And you just have to remember that leaks are the lifeblood of investigative journalists. And mostly in a country where every information related to national security is classified and considered secrets, without leaks there is no other explanation of what is happening except the official version.

So, with the idea that now it’s clear that whistleblowers are the enemy of the administration, 2013 will remain as the year of the AP scandal, when the Department of Justice acknowledged that they seized the news agency’s foreign records. But also 2013 will be remembered as the year where the whistleblower Manning was condemned to 35 years in prison. Another whistleblower was imprisoned in 2013, John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who was condemned to 30 months in prison. But on the top of that, 2013 will be remembered as the year of Edward Snowden’s revelation on the NSA mass surveillance methods, which has also for journalists very concerning consequences for the protection — for the possibility to even protect your sources, if you contact them by email or phone. So, all these reasons explain this very significative decline for the U.S. this year.

NS: And, Delphine Halgand, could you also speak about Syria, Syria being the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, and how the situation there in 2013 compared to the year before?

DH: Yes. So, since the conflict started in March 2011, Syria is the deadliest and most dangerous country for journalists. And it’s — even if the situation has been dramatic for years, we can observe that every day the situation is declining and declining, getting worst and worst. Just to give you numbers, but then I want to tell you some stories to get some perspective on what is happening, so since the conflict started in 2011, more than 130 news providers were killed in Syria, including 45 last year.

Another dramatic number is that at least 16 foreign reporters are currently missing, detained or kidnapped in Syria. Among them are two American reporters, a amazing human being, a great journalist, James Foley, and Austin Tice. James Foley is a very experienced journalist who has been already reported in Libya, and he was kidnapped there. He’s an amazing human being, always thinking to his colleagues. Austin Tice is a young independent journalist who was reporting for McClatchy or The Washington Post, and we are waiting to hear news from them.

But as I say, the situation continues to decline. Because the situation is becoming more and more complex, now reporters are attacked by all sides. On one hand, they are still targeted by Bashar al-Assad’s regular army, who is still try to silence all the news provider who wants to document the conflict. And on the other end, reporters are now targeted very violently by a Islamist group, who are supposed to have liberated the north. So the consequences are dramatic, actually —

AG: The —

DH: — because so many — yes, sorry.

AG: I wanted to move from Syria to Mexico before we end, because we only have a minute.

DH: OK.

AG: Tuesday night, people in Mexico City joined a nationwide call to protest the murder of journalist Gregorio Jiménez in the state of Veracruz. His wife told police masked gunmen broke into their home last Wednesday, dragged him away. His body was later discovered. Jiménez had recently published a story about a wave of kidnappings of migrants. This is the protest organizer, Gisela Martínez.

Gisela Martínez: [Translated] The authorities can’t even guarantee minimal protection to journalists. We have seen how, little by little, freedom of expression has been undermined all over, from the repression against protesters struggling for their rights, something we ourselves have experienced, but we’ve also seen how this has been happening for a while. And in various states, there’s an imposition of silence because journalists are scared to speak. This is converted into not even a gag, but an outright slaughterhouse, where speaking the truth carries with it a death sentence. We’re appalled and enraged and sad, because there is no justice.

AG: Special thanks to Andalusia Knoll for that clip. At least a dozen journalists have been slain or gone missing there [in Veracruz] since 2010. Mexico ranked 152nd out of 180 countries in this year’s index. Delphine, we just have 30 seconds, if you can wrap that into the overall findings?

DH: So, the situation in Mexico remains very concerning, but I just want to highlight that in the last year we observed a decrease of violence. The number of journalists killed has a little bit decreased, so it’s a hope, I hope. But now, as your report pointed out, impunity stay a major concern. Almost all journalists who were killed stay completely unsolved, and nobody has been jailed for and be taken responsible.

AG: Well, we’re going to link to the index. We thank you so much, Delphine Halgand, the U.S. director of Reporters Without Borders.

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'It Was Time to Do More Than Protest': Activists Admit to 1971 FBI Burglary That Exposed COINTELPRO

One of the great mysteries of the Vietnam War era has been solved. On March 8, 1971, a group of activists — including a cabdriver, a day care director and two professors — broke into an FBI office in Media, Pa. They stole every document they found and then leaked many to the press, including details about FBI abuses and the then-secret counter-intelligence program to infiltrate, monitor and disrupt social and political movements, nicknamed COINTELPRO. They called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. No one was ever caught for the break-in. The burglars’ identities remained a secret until this week when they finally came forward to take credit for the caper that changed history. Today we are joined by three of them — John Raines, Bonnie Raines and Keith Forsyth; their attorney, David Kairys; and Betty Medsger, the former Washington Post reporter who first broke the story of the stolen FBI documents in 1971 and has now revealed the burglars’ identities in her new book, "The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI."

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

Nermeen Shaikh: Today, we will spend the rest of the hour unraveling one of the great mysteries of the Vietnam War era. On March 8th, 1971, a group of eight activists, including a cab driver, a daycare director and two professors, broke into an FBI office in Media, Pa., and stole every document they found. The activists, calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, soon began leaking shocking details about FBI abuses to the media. Among the documents was one that bore the mysterious word "COINTELPRO."

Amy Goodman: No one involved in the break-in was ever caught. Their identities remained a secret until this week. Today, three of the FBI burglars will join us on the show, but first I want to turn to a new short film produced by the nonprofit news organization Retro Report for The New York Times. It’s entitled "Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets."

Narrator: It’s the greatest heist you’ve never heard of and one of the most important.

Harry Reasoner: Last March, someone broke into the FBI offices in Media, Pa., stole some records and mailed copies of them around to the several newspapers.

N: Those records would help bring an end to J. Edgar Hoover’s secret activities within the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

John Chancellor: He ordered his agents not only to expose New Left groups, but to take action against them to neutralize them.

Unidentified: Many Americans were tapped and bugged, had their mail opened by the CIA and the FBI.

N: The burglars were never caught, and the details have remained a mystery until now. A new book, "The Burglary," reveals for the first time who did it and how they used a crowbar to pry open one of the best-kept and darkest secrets in American history.

John Raines: We were early whistleblowers before whistleblowers were known as such.

N: The burglars are stepping out of the shadows just as new revelations about secret intelligence operations have many people asking, "How much is too much when personal privacy is at stake?"

In the spring of 1970, the war in Vietnam was raging.

JC: American battle deaths in Vietnam now number 40,142.

N: And at home, antiwar protesters and law enforcement officers were violently clashing.

Bonnie Raines: It felt like a nightmare was unfolding. I took what was outrage and horror about what was going on, and I realized that I had to take it somewhere.

N: Bonnie Raines worked at a daycare center in Philadelphia. Her husband John taught religion at Temple University. They were the very picture of a golden couple.

BR: We had an eight-year-old, a six-year-old and a two-year-old. We were family folks who also wanted to keep another track active in our lives, which was political activism.

N: That activism attracted the attention of the FBI. Its director, the powerful and feared J. Edgar Hoover, perceived the antiwar movement, which ranged from radical revolutionaries to peaceful protesters, as a threat to national security.

BR: At one rally, I had one of my children on my back, and not only did they take my picture, but they took her picture.

N: Protesters like the Raines became increasingly convinced the FBI was conducting a covert campaign against them, tapping their phones and infiltrating antiwar groups.

JR: We knew the FBI was systematically trying to squash dissent. And dissent is the lifeblood of democracy.

N: Determined to get proof, the FBI was crossing the line, fellow activist and Haverford physics professor William Davidon hatched a plan. He reached out to the Raines and six others, including a social worker, a graduate student and a taxi driver named Keith Forsyth.

Keith Forsyth: We agreed to meet someplace where we could talk. And he says, "What would you think about the idea of breaking into an FBI office?" And I look at him, and I’m like, "You’re serious, aren’t you?" I was pretty vehement in my opposition to the war, and I felt like marching up and down the street with a sign was not cutting it anymore. And it was like, OK, time to — time to kick it up a notch.

N: The crew decided to break into a small FBI field office in Media, Pa.

KF: Once I got over the shock of thinking that this was the nuttiest thing I’d ever heard in my life, I’m like, this is a great idea, because we’re not going to make any allegations; we’re going to take their own paperwork, signed by their own people, including J. Edgar Hoover, and give it to the newspapers. So, let’s see you argue with that.

N: In the Raines’ third-floor attic, the team divvied up responsibilities and assigned tasks. They hung maps to learn about the neighborhood, planned escape routes, and they took extensive notes on the comings and goings in the building.

KF: I signed up for a correspondence course in locksmithing. That was my job, to get us in the door. Practiced several times a week. After a month, you get pretty good.

N: Bonnie was assigned the job of going inside and casing the office.

BR: I was to call the office and make an appointment as a Swarthmore student doing research on opportunities for women in the FBI. So they gave me an appointment. I tried to disguise myself as best I could, and I went to say goodbye, and I acted confused about where the door was, and that gave me a chance then to check out both rooms and know where the file cabinets were.

N: Bonnie discovered there was no alarm system and no security guards. She also found a second door leading inside.

JR: When she came back with that news, we became convinced, yes, I think we can get this done. We had more to lose than anybody else in the group, because we had these kids.

BR: We faced the reality of, if we were arrested and on trial, we would be in prison for very many years. He had to make some plans for that.

N: With a solid understanding of how they would conduct the break-in, they now needed to figure out when.

JR: March 8th, 1971, Frazier and Ali were fighting for the championship of the world. And we had the feeling that maybe the cops might be a little bit distracted.

N: While the crew waited at a nearby hotel, Forsyth arrived at the office alone.

KF: Pull up, walk up to the door, and one of the locks is a cylinder tumbler lock, not a pin tumbler lock. And I just about had a heart attack. Bottom line is, I could not pick that lock.

N: They almost called it off. But that second door that Bonnie noticed gave them another chance.

KF: At that point, you know that you’re going to have to wing it. Knelt down on the floor, picked the lock in like 20 seconds. There was a deadbolt on the other side. I had a pry bar with me, a short crowbar. I put the bar in there and yanked that sucker. At one point, I heard a noise inside the office. And I’m like, "Are they in there waiting for me?" Basically said to myself, "There’s only one way to find out: I’m going in."

N: Next, the inside crew walked into an empty office wearing business suits and carrying several suitcases. They cleaned out file cabinets and then made their way downstairs to the getaway car and drove off unnoticed. The group reconvened at a farmhouse an hour’s drive away and started unpacking.

KF: We were like, "Oh, man, I can’t believe this worked." We knew there was going to be some gold in there somewhere.

JR: Each of the eight of us were sorting files, and all of a sudden you’d hear one of them, "Oh, look! Look at this one! Look!"

N: After several long nights digging for documents that looked the most revealing, the burglars sent copies to journalists, including Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger.

Betty Medsger: And the cover letter was from the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, and the first file that I read was about a group of FBI agents who were told to enhance the paranoia in the antiwar movement and to create an atmosphere that there’s an FBI agent behind every mailbox.

N: Attorney General John Mitchell asked the Post not to write about the stolen documents, saying it could endanger lives.

BM: The attorney general called two key editors and tried to convince them not to publish.

N: But the Post did publish the story, on the front page. It was the first of several reports and told how agents turned local police, letter carriers and switchboard operators into informants.

BM: There were very strong editorials calling for an investigation of the FBI.

N: Another stolen document would prove even more explosive: a routing slip marked with a mysterious word, "COINTELPRO." While reporters tried to uncover its meaning, the FBI was desperate to find the burglars. The bureau put nearly 200 agents on the investigation. Hoover’s best lead was the college girl who had visited their office.

BR: His command was "Find me that woman!"

N: Agents actively searched for Bonnie, but there were many antiwar activists who fit her description.

JR: We could hide within, you know, thousands of people. There were so many of us who were active.

N: Two years later, NBC reporter Carl Stern figured out the meaning of that word, COINTELPRO.

JC: Secret FBI memos made public today show that the late J. Edgar Hoover ordered a nationwide campaign to disrupt the activities of the New Left without telling any of his superiors about it.

Carl Stern: Many of the techniques were clearly illegal. Burglaries, forged blackmail letters and threats of violence were used.

N: The FBI initially defended its actions.

Clarence Kelley: The government would have been derelict in its duty, had it not taken measures to protect the fabric of our society.

N: But the bureau’s techniques were worse and the targets more far-reaching than the burglars ever imagined.

David Brinkley: Diplomats, government employees, sports figures, socially prominent persons, senators and congressmen.

Walter Cronkite: The FBI at one time sought to blackmail the late Martin Luther King into committing suicide.

U: Marriages were destroyed. Violence was encouraged. Many Americans were tapped and bugged, had their mail opened by the CIA and the FBI, and their tax returns used illegally.

AG: An extended excerpt from "Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets," a short film produced by Retro Report for The New York Times. To watch the full video, visit RetroReport.org.

When we come back, three of the activists join us in studio — Keith Forsyth, Bonnie and John Raines — as well as the former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger, who first broke the story of the stolen FBI documents in 1971. This week, she revealed the identities of the burglars in her new book, "The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI." We’ll go back in time and talk about today, as well. This is Democracy Now! Back in a moment.

[Break]

NS: Joining us now in our studio are three of the activists who broke into the FBI office in Media, Pa., on March 8th, 1971. The break-in led to revelations about the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO program that targeted activists across the country.

None of the burglars were ever caught. On Tuesday, their identities were revealed for the very first time. Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Raines and John Raines all lived in Philadelphia in 1971. Forsyth was working as a cab driver. He was chosen to pick the lock at the FBI office. Bonnie and John Raines hosted many of the planning meetings for the burglary at their home, where they were raising three children. Bonnie, who worked as a daycare director, helped case the FBI office by posing as a college student interested in becoming an FBI agent. John Raines was a veteran of the Freedom Rides movement and a professor at Temple University. He used a Xerox machine at the school to photocopy many of the stolen documents.

AG: We’re also joined by Betty Medsger, author of the new book, "The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI." Medsger first reported on the stolen documents while working at The Washington Post. She uncovered the identities of most of the burglars in her new book.

And we welcome you all to Democracy Now! Keith, I want to begin with you. Talk about the time and how you ended up going into the FBI office. What spurred you on?

KF: So, at that time, we had just, within a few years, gone through the sort of peak of the civil rights movement, and many of the laws, like the Voting Rights Act, had been passed some years before, but the reality of racial justice was still far from complete. There were — the war in Vietnam was raging at that point in time. And so, there were many, many people who were working for change in those areas, in particular.

My main focus at that time was the antiwar movement. I was, you know, spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest — didn’t seem to be getting us anywhere. The government wasn’t listening. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at — at Jackson State. And — I’m sorry, I’d think I’d have this down after all these years. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just — than just protest and just march with a sign. And I joined the so-called Catholic Left, which is where I met John and Bonnie and also Bill Davidon. And from there, the next step was the Media action.

NS: Keith, could you also talk about how you were invited to join this plan to break into — by William Davidon?

KF If memory serves, he called me on the phone and asked —

AG: And explain who William Davidon was.

KF: Oh, I’m sorry. Bill Davidon, at that time, was a professor of physics at Haverford College, and I knew him mainly as a fellow activist in the peace movement. He was very prominent in Philadelphia in both the legal and the illegal peace movements. And he called me on the phone one day and asked me if I wanted to come to a party, which was code for an action. And I believe I said, "Sure, I’m always up for a party." You can check the FBI transcript, because they were tapping his phone at the time. And so, we met at an outdoor location, where we couldn’t be bugged, and he presented the idea to me then.

AG: And, Bonnie Raines, talk about your involvement. What motivated you? You were a young mother of three.

BR: Mm-hmm.

AG: How old were your children?

BR: They were eight, six and two at that time. We’ve since had a fourth child. I became involved, as Keith said, beginning with the civil rights movement and when we lived in New York and were students. Then we moved to Philadelphia, very much opposed to the war in Vietnam, and found a whole community of activists in Philadelphia. We became acquainted with the — what was called the Catholic Left at that time. And the Berrigan brothers, Bill and Dan, were the leaders in that. And we participated with that group, called the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, in a draft board raid. We went into a draft board in the middle of the night as part of the draft resistance movement.

AG: Where was that?

BR: In North Philadelphia, a draft board in North Philadelphia. We targeted that draft board because it was in one of the poorest sections of the city, where they were bringing many, many, many young, poor young men into the armed forces to be sent as cannon fodder to Vietnam. Our government was lying to us about the casualties, both civilian and military casualties. So I participated, along with John, in going into a draft board and removing files and destroying those files so those young men could not be drafted.

AG: And you mentioned the Berrigan brothers, the priests.

BR: Yes, yes.

AG: Phil, the late Phil Berrigan —

BR: Mm-hmm.

AG: — and Father Dan Berrigan —

BR: Yes.

AG: — who’s still alive. Catonsville, how significant in 1969 was this for you? I wanted to go to a clip right now —

BR: Mm-hmm.

AG: — of the Catonsville action. That was Catonsville, Maryland, where a group of activists, led by Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan, burned draft cards with napalm. They stole hundreds of draft records and torched them. They were sentenced to three years in prison, their action helping ignite a wave of direct actions against the draft in the Vietnam War.

Father Daniel Berrigan: We do not believe that nonviolence is dead, and that we don’t believe in interposing one form of violence for another, and that we believe that an action like this will still speak to our fellow Americans and bring home to them that a decent society is still possible, but it’s totally impossible if these files, and what they represent, are preserved and honored, and even defended, as those poor women tried to.

AG: That was Father Dan Berrigan, as they stood around in a circle and burned, with napalm — napalm being used in Vietnam — draft records.

BR: Yes, mm-hmm. That was a very dramatic moment for all of us, I believe. It took civil disobedience to another level and really brought us, clearly, to another level of protest against the war in Vietnam. And we followed their lead in targeting the draft as one of the real evil systems of that war. And that’s how we became involved in covert actions with draft boards in Philadelphia.

NS: And, John Raines, can you talk about your sense that the antiwar movement itself had been infiltrated by FBI informants?

JR: Oh, sure. I mean, that was obvious, for any of us who were involved in the civil rights movement, because it happened in the civil rights movement. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was all over the civil rights movement with infiltrators and surveillance, intense surveillance, and people that would report back on meetings and so on. And, of course, we’d all know that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI went after Martin Luther King, tried to discredit him — indeed, even sent him a note suggesting that because of his activities with other women besides his wife, he now had no option but to commit suicide. That note was sent to Dr. King, suggesting — and it was from the FBI, suggesting that Dr. King commit suicide. So that we knew, from the civil rights actions, that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI were very much against anything that promised significant social change. We brought that information, that knowledge, north with us when we came to the antiwar movement. And it became clear that the tactics he used to disrupt and destroy — try to destroy the protest movement in the South, he was using once again against the protesters against the war in Vietnam.

The problem was, J. Edgar Hoover was untouchable. He was a national icon. I mean, he had presidents who were afraid of him. The people that we elected to oversee J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI were either enamored of him or terrified of him. Nobody was holding him accountable. And that meant that somebody had to get objective evidence of what his FBI was doing. And that led us to the idea that Bill Davidon suggested to us: Let’s break into an FBI office, get their files and get what they’re doing in their own handwriting.

AG: You and Bill Davidon were professors.

JR: Yes.

AG: He a professor at Haverford, you a professor at Temple University.

JR: Yes.

AG: What did you feel about the risk that you were taking? Were you concerned about getting caught?

JR: Well, Bonnie and I were parents, and we had three kids under 10, and that was a very serious consideration. We had to be persuaded that we could get away with this. And we had learned nice burglar skills from priests and nuns. And we had cased the FBI office in Media very carefully.

AG: You had thought about Philadelphia, but thought it was too secure?

JR: Oh, yes, it was a big building downtown, as — you couldn’t touch that. But Media, you could. And we felt quite confident that if we could get in there and get out without leaving any physical evidence behind, that we could then disappear into the very, very large antiwar movement, thousands of people in the Philadelphia area.

AG: You had prepared, in case you were caught, to have your children taken care of?

BR: We had. We had. We knew the risks. We knew the jeopardy. We weren’t going to be reckless. We weren’t going to move ahead with our involvement except with the leadership of Bill Davidon, who we all had so much admiration and respect for. But we did feel that it was necessary to speak to John’s older brother and his wife and to my mother and father about caring for our children if — should the worst happen and we would be convicted and sent to federal prison.

AG: Keith Forsyth, you chose the night of the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight —

KF: Mm-hmm.

AG: — to break in. Why? Why was this so significant, March 8th, 1971?

KF: Well, it was just — you know, there were many steps that we took to try to avoid getting caught, and this was one of them, because whoever suggested it — and I have no idea who it was — thought that it would add to the distraction, not only of the police, but of just people in general. The building in which the office was located had a live-in supervisor, and his apartment was directly below the FBI office. So, he was going to be on the next floor down while we were inside walking around opening cabinets. So, anything that could keep his mind off of the ambient sounds sounded like a good idea.

NS: How did you know that you would find what documents you would find, or did you know?

KF: We didn’t know. We were — we were pretty sure. You know, bureaucracies are the same everywhere. They love to keep records. But we really — we were taking a shot. So, in that sense, we got lucky that they did keep records.

AG: This brings Betty Medsger into the story, whose book this week, "The Burglary," reveals the identities of the activists involved in this burglary. Looks like J. Edgar Hoover found his match in this group of people. Talk about receiving in the mail the documents. You were a reporter at the time for The Washington Post.

BM: OK. I’d just like to say something about Bill Davidon, if I might, first, that the idea was Bill’s. And Bill participated in preparations for the book and the documentary that’s been made, "1971." And we should note that we’re all very sorry that Bill’s not with us. Bill died in November. But he was sort of a genius in coming up with this idea, because although many people in the various movements at that time thought that there was — there were FBI informers in their organizations, there was no evidence of that, and the public didn’t know. And Bill had this deep commitment that if the public could be presented with evidence, they would be very upset. Even though there — Hoover was an iconic figure, that if they knew that there was massive surveillance of the — political surveillance, that they would care and do something. And that’s what happened.

I was a reporter. And one day this envelope appeared in my mailbox. And it said it was from Liberty Publications — that was the return address — Media, Pa. That didn’t mean anything to me. But when I opened it, there was a cover letter, said it was from Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. That was a new organization to me. And there was — the letter explained that a group of eight people had burglarized an FBI office on the night of March 8th, and that enclosed were some of the files that they had removed from the office.

And some of those files were very shocking. I think the one — and you showed the excerpt from this on the Retro Report — the first shock — and this also resonated very much with the public when it was published and discussed — was the one that instructed agents to enhance the paranoia and then also make people think that there’s an FBI agent behind every mailbox. And that was a pretty stunning statement and said so much. And the burglars were — themselves, were shocked, I understand, when they found that the first — saw that document the first night after the burglary. So that stunned me.

And I guess the other files — there were many about individuals, and they were all serious, but the — one of the things that I remember most from those files was the truly blanket surveillance of African American people that was described. It was in Philadelphia, but it also prescribed national programs. And it was quite stunning. First, it described the surveillance. It took place in every place where people would gather — churches, classrooms, stores down the street, just everything. But it also specifically prescribed that every FBI agent was supposed to have an informer, just for the purpose of coming back every two weeks and talking to them about what they had observed about black Americans. And in Washington, D.C., at the time, that was six informers for every FBI agent informing on black Americans. The surveillance was so enormous that it led various people, rather sedate people in editorial offices and in Congress, to compare it to the Stasi, the dreaded secret police of East Germany.

NS: Could you talk about how the editors at The Washington Post responded when you showed them these documents?

BM: The editors responded very positively to them. I should point out that — two things. First, this was the first time that a journalist had ever received secret government documents from a source who had — from the outside, an outside source who had stolen the documents. So that tended to pose a different kind of consideration as to what you would do — in their minds, as to what you’d do with the documents. But it was a particularly tough decision for Katharine Graham, who until this time had never faced anything like this.

AG: The publisher.

BM: The publisher, Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, because it was the first time that she had been faced with a demand from the Nixon administration that she suppress a story. And she did not want to publish. And the in-house counsel, the lawyers, also did not want to publish. But two editors, from the beginning, realized it was a very important story and pushed it — Ben Bradlee and Ben Bagdikian. I was just back there innocently writing my story, talking — I had been a reporter in Philadelphia and was talking to sources from the past, confirming information. Didn’t know until 6 p.m. that there was a question as to whether or not they would publish. By 10 p.m. that night, she decided to publish.

AG: And talk about the reaction, and the reporters who did not get to publish the story, because you weren’t the only person that these activists sent the documents to.

BM: They sent them to five people. These are the first files that they released. They sent them to Senator George McGovern and Representative Parren Mitchell from Baltimore. And they immediately returned the files to the FBI when they received them and didn’t make them public. They sent them to three journalists. In addition to sending them to me, they sent them to Jack Nelson at the Washington Bureau of the Los Angeles Times —

AG: The great crusading reporter who wrote "Terror in the Night" about the Klan in the South.

BM: Right, and Tom Wicker, columnist then at The New York Times. Now, it’s also important to keep in mind, in addition to the fact that we didn’t really know — the public didn’t know what was happening inside the FBI, that very few journalists ever wrote investigative work or critical comment about the FBI. And Jack Nelson and Tom Wicker were two of about three or four who had, up until that point. At the L.A. Times, Jack never received the envelope, even though it was addressed to him, and it was delivered to the FBI immediately. I didn’t know this until years later, when I read the investigative report on the FBI’s investigation. It’s a little less clear what happened at the Times as to whether Tom Wicker received, and what they did do was the same thing: They immediately gave the files to the FBI. And — but they apparently kept them and copied them, unlike the L.A. Times, because the day after we broke the story, then they wrote stories on the same files.

AG: Keith, before we go to break, can you talk about parallels to today? It is hard to look at — and for a moment, I want to turn to the Church Committee hearings that took place a few years later. Senator Frank Church of Idaho led this investigation. The Senate’s Church Committee investigated the CIA and FBI’s misuse of power at home and abroad. The multi-year investigation in the mid-'70s followed the exposure of COINTELPRO, which stands for Counterintelligence Program — and it was the first time people had seen that word, was in the documents you released — examining the FBI and CIA's efforts to infiltrate and disrupt leftist organizations, the CIA’s attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, and much more. This is Senator Frank Church speaking during one of the committee’s hearings.

Sen. Frank Church: We have seen today the dark side of those activities, where many Americans, who were not even suspected of crime, were not only spied upon, but they were harassed, they were discredited, and, at times, endangered.

AG: That was Senator Frank Church. The Church Committee hearings led to major changes in what the FBI could do, and also dealing with the press, as well. You listen to Frank Church, you could be hearing possible hearings today, though they haven’t started, to do with Edward Snowden.

KF: Right.

AG: What are your thoughts on Edward Snowden today?

KF: I think there are some parallels. It’s not an exact parallel. But, to me, one of the most significant ones is that not long before Edward Snowden released these documents, James Clapper went in front of Congress and the American public and was asked a direct question whether the NSA was engaged in this kind of surveillance, and he said no, which was obviously a lie. And I think if he had said, "Oh, we can’t talk about that because that’s national security," I might have had some respect for that answer. But to come out and lie to the public about it — and, of course, not suffer any punishment as a result — so, to me, Edward Snowden — I’ve seen no evidence, personally, that Edward Snowden has released anything that was actually harmful to our national security. You know, certainly has been embarrassing, but, to me, the young man is definitely a whistleblower and has performed a great service by enabling us to have the conversation. You know, we couldn’t — we couldn’t have the conversation about whether this is right or wrong before, because we were not told about it. So he’s made that conversation possible, and I think — I think we owe him something, a debt for that.

AG: We’re going to break and come back to this conversation. Our guests are Keith Forsyth and Bonnie and John Raines. They were part of the — what they called themselves, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, activists during the Vietnam War era who broke into an FBI office in Media, Pa., and took the documents they got and sent them to The Washington Post and other publications to let people know what the FBI was doing. We’re also joined by the woman who has revealed the names of these activists — and we’ll talk about why they decided to come forward — Betty Medsger, former Washington Post reporter, author of "The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI." Stay with us.

[Break]

AG: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, "The War and Peace Report." I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we continue our discussion looking at how activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pa., in 1971 and disclosed secrets about the FBI’s COINTELPRO program — that’s Counterintelligence Program — first came to public attention with the release of these documents. We are joined, as well as Bonnie and John Raines, who were among those who broke into the FBI office that day, March 8th, 1971, by the reporter who broke the story then and now, released the names of those involved with this break-in, Betty Medsger. She wrote "The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI." We’re also joined by David Kairys, who has represented this group until this day for what, more than 40 years?

David Kairys: Forty-three years.

AG: Forty-three years. But, John Raines, why have you decided to come forward 43 years — what, 42 years later?

JR: Well, the simple answer is: A book came out. And, of course, that’s not accidental. We decided years ago that we would trust Betty with this story. And she’s done a wonderful job, spending years of research writing a very substantial book. It tells a very interesting story.

We decided that it was time to, once again, come forward with the question of government surveillance, government intimidation, and the right of citizens to vocally dissent. I think that the gasoline of democracy is the right to dissent, because wherever there’s power, wherever there’s privilege, power and privilege are going to try to remove, insofar as they can, from public discourse anything they want to do. That leaves the citizens’ right to dissent as the last line of defense for freedom. Now, that’s what we were faced with back in 1970s. I think that’s what we’re faced with once again today. It should not surprise us. I mean, it should not surprise us that those in power in Washington want to make the decisions that really count off stage, out of sight from the rest of us. But democracy depends upon the rights of citizens to have the information they need in order for them, the citizens — who are the sovereigns — for them to decide what the government should be doing and should not be doing. They must have that information so that they can make up their minds.

AG: Explain that moment that night when Betty Medsger came over and you revealed who you were. What year was it?

JR: I think that was in 1988. We had known Betty when she was a reporter there in Philadelphia.

AG: That was more than 20 years ago.

JR: Oh, more than 20 was ago. And Betty was then living in San Francisco, but she was on a trip to the East Coast. And we invited her for supper, and Betty was nice enough to say, "Sure, I’ll come." And I think it was — we had had supper, and finally, our youngest daughter, Mary, came down. She was, I think, 12 or 13, something like that. And without thinking about it, I just said, "Mary, come on in. We want you to meet Betty Medsger, because she was the one that we sent those FBI files to." And Betty’s chin dropped down to her chest, and it was out of the bag. That’s how it started.

NS: David Kairys, as the attorney who has worked on this case for so long, could you talk about the significance of the statute of limitations on the case, as well as what you saw as the illegality — what was indeed the illegality of what these documents exposed about what the FBI was doing?

DK: Well, sure. The statute of limitations, by any fair reading, is five years. The FBI themselves closed the file in 1976, because five years had elapsed and there was no charges. Excuse me. There are arguments one can make, but there’s really no legitimate or good-faith basis to bring any legal — any legal charges at this point.

As for the illegality of the FBI, they’re supposed to enforce the law. Here they are interposing themselves as almost a political counterforce to stop certain movements. And it had a direction to it: They were stopping left-liberal movements. And they were using techniques that we usually associate with state police in countries and systems that we usually think of as alien.

NS: And how did you come to become involved in the case?

DK: Well, I was regularly doing civil rights work, and I was — I would represent demonstrators of all kinds. And so, two of them checked with me before, what’s my home number. And they — Keith kids me that he’s still got my phone number from back then on his arm. And so, that was the beginning. I didn’t know then exactly what they were going to do, but then two of them got arrested in the Camden 28 case, where I was lead counsel.

AG: And, in fact, remarkably, five days before this break-in, Bill Davidon met with Henry Kissinger at the White House, the national security adviser for Richard Nixon.

DK: Yeah.

AG: We don’t have time for the story, but we’re going to talk about it in our post-show interview, and we’ll post it online at democracynow.org. How was this secret kept for so many decades? It’s not just the two of you, John and Bonnie Raines; there were nine of you. One person dropped out. There were eight of you. This is decades later. How did you keep this secret?

BR: Well, we —

AG: A hundred FBI agents looking for you. And, Bonnie, you had gone into the FBI office in Media to case it out and pretend you were a young woman looking for an FBI job and sat with the official there.

BR: Mm-hmm, and did not know, following that, that there was a sketch that was then circulated of me by the FBI. It was — we knew —

AG: We have 30 seconds.

BR: We knew that we had to pull the curtain down, not meet after we did our work, and just not talk about it with anybody at all, because our work was done at that point, and we were not looking for anything more than for the general public and Congress to follow suit in a way that we hoped they would.

AG: Do you feel it accomplished what you wanted?

BR: I think, in certain ways. In certain ways, it did. We were encouraged when there was a Church Committee that was — that was taking their task seriously, and there were reforms that did take place.

AG: I want to thank you so much for all being with us, and also thank Johanna Hamilton. Her film, "1971," on the same subject, is just coming out. We’ll be interviewing her. The book is "The Burglary." Thanks so much, all, for joining us.

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The Brilliant Mind of Noam Chomsky...Heading to a Movie Theater Near You

We spend the hour with French filmmaker Michel Gondry, the director of a highly unusual new film, "Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?" It is an animated representation of Gondry’s conversations with the legendary political dissident, linguist, author and MIT professor, Noam Chomsky. The innovative documentary introduces viewers to Chomsky’s theories and ideas through a series of conversations brought to life by Gondry’s vibrant hand-drawn animations. As Chomsky speaks, Gondry’s rapidly moving pencil illustrates his words. The men discuss everything from Chomsky’s pioneering work in childhood language acquisition to his views on education, religion and astrology. Gondry’s past films include the Academy Award-winning "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," the musical documentary "Dave Chappelle’s Block Party" and "The Science of Sleep." He has also directed dozens of music videos by artists including Björk, Kanye West, Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Today we spend the hour with the French filmmaker Michel Gondry, the director of a highly unusual new film called Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? It’s an animated representation of Gondry’s conversations with the legendary political dissident, linguist, author and MIT professor, Noam Chomsky. The innovative documentary introduces viewers to Chomsky’s theories and ideas through a series of conversations brought to life by Gondry’s vibrant hand-drawn animations. As Chomsky speaks, Gondry’s rapidly moving pencil illustrates his words. The men discuss everything from Chomsky’s pioneering work in childhood language acquisition to his views on education, religion and astrology. This is the film’s trailer.

NOAM CHOMSKY: How do we identify something as a tree? You plant a tree, it grows, you cut a branch off it, and you put that branch in the ground. And suppose it grows and it becomes exactly identical to the original tree. Is that new one the same willow tree? Why not? It’s not so simple.

MICHEL GONDRY: As you can see, I felt a bit stupid here.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Why should we take it to be obvious that if I let go of a ball, it goes down and not up? Learning comes from asking, "Why do things work like that? Why not some other way?" The world is a very puzzling place. If you’re not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else’s mind. Visual experience is just simulations of the retina, but we impose an extremely rich interpretation of it. We see the world in terms of trees and dogs and rivers and so on, but then the question is, "Well, what are those concepts?" People are just not satisfied to think, "I go from dust to dust, and there’s no meaning to my life."

MICHEL GONDRY: What makes you happy?

NOAM CHOMSKY: I don’t really think about it much.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the trailer for the new film, Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? by filmmaker Michel Gondry. His past films include the Academy Award-winning film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; the musical documentary, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party; and The Science of Sleep. Gondry has also directed dozens of music videos by artists including Björk and Kanye West, Paul McCartney, Rolling Stones. Nermeen Shaikh and I talked to Michel Gondry last week when he was in New York. I started by asking him how he decided to make a film about Noam Chomsky.

MICHEL GONDRY: When I was invited at his school, MIT, as an artist in residence several time, and I asked to meet with him, because I was meeting with all sort of teacher, in astrophysics, in neurobiology and so on, and I was really intrigued by him and fascinated from his political views to his scientific work. And so I met with him several time over maybe three, four years. I submitted to him this idea to do an animated representation of his scientific work.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So why is it that you chose to focus on his scientific work rather than on his more well-known, in some circles, anyway, political work?

MICHEL GONDRY: Well, I think he’s very exposed, he’s very present with his political work, and I think it’s probably the more—most important work because he’s trying to save—to save lives and make a change in the world. But I felt that my contribution could be more important if I would talk about his scientific work. And, as well, I always was in—I have passion for science. Even though my memory is not great, I have problems to accumulate data, but I felt it was just amazing to be able to meet somebody of this kind that is still alive.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So what was it about his scientific work that you wanted to convey? What is it that you want audiences to understand about his work?

MICHEL GONDRY: Well, obviously, his theory on language, genitive grammar, his philosophy on the perception of the world. But, to me, it was important that I could show his human side, because he’s a very friendly person, and I think he’s very honest, and he lives by his principle. And I wanted to show that to the audience, because it seems that they have a distant idea—they have an idea of a sort of distantiated man, and he’s not like that, so I wanted to convey that, as well as why I’m talking about his wife and—I mean, he’s talking about his wife, his family and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to another clip of the film. This is Noam Chomsky talking about his late wife Carol and the life they shared together.

 

MICHEL GONDRY: But I think that you had the perfect relationship, from the outside point of view.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, nothing’s perfect.

MICHEL GONDRY: Yeah.

NOAM CHOMSKY: But it was very intimate, yeah.

MICHEL GONDRY: I think a lot of human beings spend a lot of their life trying to solve problems of relationship or find a relationship and—

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, we pretty much solved it when we were children. We were children when we got married.

MICHEL GONDRY: Yeah.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Carol was 19, I was 20.

MICHEL GONDRY: And do you think it helped you in your work?

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s hard to say. I mean, Carol was kind of a social butterfly. You know, she was, as a teenager, you know, normal—kind of parties, dating, this and that. I was very solitary. But—and for a couple years, we more or less lived her style of life. But, you know, I’d sit in a corner at the parties. But after a while we just drifted into a very private life—you know, saw a couple friends. I mean, we weren’t hermits—like, you know, children, grandchildren, friends and so on, but mostly we preferred to be alone.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky talking about his late wife Carol in this remarkable film that has just been made by Michel Gondry called Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? Talk about the musical track here that you chose. And also, people all over the world are watching this or listening to this or reading it, and for those who aren’t seeing it, talk as well about how you do the work, how you animated this.

MICHEL GONDRY: Well, this song you can hear is written by Mia Doi Todd, who’s a folk musician. She has many record, and I love her music. I felt it was—it has a very sweet and unique quality that could fit with—that’s the only pop music, in a way, that is used in the film. And the technique I use is very simple, basically. I have a lightbox, and I put paper on it, and I animate with Sharpies, color Sharpies. And I have a 16-millimeter camera that is set up on a tripod and looks down, and I take a picture. I do a drawing and take a picture. And generally, I switch to negative in post-production to get this sort of a glowing effect, but most of the time—I mean, all the time it’s just a 16-millimeter camera, and frame by frame as I’m drawing.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And who was responsible for the music in the rest of the film? It’s an extremely powerful musical score.

MICHEL GONDRY: It’s this English composer who’s called Howard Skempton, who does this very—it’s sort of the French school of music from the 20th century. He’s still alive, and I think he wrote some music for Debussy or one of those guy a long time ago. Yeah, he’s a great composer. I always wanted to work with him, and that was the first time I could really.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And the animation that you describe, the form, the technique, did you know you were going to employ that form the minute you were going to make a film on Chomsky, or did it come to you as you heard him speak?

MICHEL GONDRY: No, I had this idea—yeah, I had this idea before, and I showed to Noam a clip I had done. Actually, it was a clip that was part of Dave Chapelle’s Block Party. This singer that’s great called Cody Chesnutt had made a song, and I illustrated with abstract animation. And I showed that to Noam, because I felt it would work well with his way to explain the science. And abstraction allows me to still be accurate, even though I’m not sure I understand exactly what—all the nuances of Noam’s speeches, but it stays accurate. And sometime I can go to more narrative animation where it’s more on the narrative subject.

AMY GOODMAN: The famed French filmmaker, Michel Gondry, the director of Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?, about the life and work of Noam Chomsky. We’ll continue the interview and then hear Noam Chomsky respond to this highly unusual animated film about his life and work. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: "I Gave You My Home" by Mia Doi Todd, music from the film Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we continue our conversation with Michel Gondry, the director of this new film, an animated representation of Gondry’s conversations with the legendary political dissident and linguist, Noam Chomsky. Let’s go to another clip of the film.

MICHEL GONDRY: I wanted to know if the education you gave to your children was influenced by what you believe in language acquisition or what’s going on with the brain.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the education at home, yes, so, you know, we read to the kids, encouraged the kids to read and encouraged them to follow their own interests. The three kids were quite different. My son, from a very early age, was mostly interested in science and mathematics, so by the time he was 10 years old, we were reading together popular books on relativity theory and things like that. But we just let the kids go where they wanted. They went—and encouraged them. You know, they went in different directions. It was fine with us, and, you know, tried to just encourage them to do what they wanted.

School was conventional. We wanted them to go to the public schools, and it worked reasonably well. When one child was not making out in public school, we moved her to a Quaker school, which was better.

They essentially picked their own paths. As soon as they left home, they went off to become political activists. One, my older daughter, spent a couple of months at college, couldn’t stand it, went off and joined the United Farm Workers, and ever since then has been very involved in political activity. Her younger sister went to Nicaragua in the 1980s and stayed. My son went off in a different direction.

But my children grew up in an atmosphere of extreme political tension. I don’t know how much they felt. For example, I was in and out of jail and was facing a long jail sentence, enough so that my wife went back to college after 17 years to try to get a degree, an advanced degree, because we assumed she’d have to take care of the children, she’d need a job. And the kids kind of grew up in this atmosphere, but I don’t think they felt any particular tension. My wife told me once that my probably eight—10-year-old daughter, I guess, told her when she came home from school—she asked, "What did you do in show-and-tell?" She said, "Well, I described—I told them how my father was in jail."

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky in a clip from Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? I asked Michel to discuss what Noam Chomsky said about the effect of his work on his children.

MICHEL GONDRY: Well, he talks about how his kids were not affected. So I was sometime—I always wonder if he tried to express something different than exactly his word, and maybe what he wanted to say is that maybe some parents are reluctant to take to the street because they feel their children will be traumatized or—if there is violence or if there is danger. And he says that his kids grew up in this tension but didn’t really felt it. Or it’s simply an observation. I don’t know. I mean, I transcribed his words. To me, of course, it’s important to mention his activism, and it’s a great part of his life and his work. And in a way, he sort of—he’s big in activism like in the late ’60s. And in a way, I—in my drawings of where I have to illustrate his word by my own drawing, the urgency to finish the project led to a sort of simplicity, and it reminded me—the work I do reminded me a bit of the ’60s activism posters. So, I felt really at home. I felt at home with this part of the story.

AMY GOODMAN: In this clip, Noam Chomsky uses the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to explore complex notions of continuity.

 

NOAM CHOMSKY: Take the Charles River over there, the river going past the building. What makes it the Charles River? You can have substantial physical changes, and it would still be the Charles River. So, for example, you can reverse the direction. Still be the Charles River. You can break it up into tributaries that end up somewhere else, and it would still be the Charles River. You can change the contents, so maybe you build a manufacturing plant upstream, and the content is mostly arsenic, let’s say. Well, it’s still the Charles River.

On the other hand, there are very small changes that you can make, in which case it won’t be the Charles River at all. So, suppose you put panels along the side and you start using it to ship freight up and down. It’s not the river anymore; it’s a canal.

MICHEL GONDRY: Oh, yes.

NOAM CHOMSKY: And suppose you make some minimal physical change, almost undetectable change, which hardens it—it’s called a phase change, undetectable—but it makes it glass, basically, and you paint a line down the middle, and people start using it to commute to Boston. It’s a highway; it’s not a river. No, somehow, we—we can go on and on like this.

We understand all these things without instruction, without experience. They have to do with very complex notions of continuity of entities a physicist cannot detect, because they’re not part of the—I mean, of course, the physical world is part of them, but it’s only one part. A major part of how we identify anything in the world, no matter how elementary, is the mental conceptions that we impose on interpreting very fragmentary experience. And our experience is, indeed, very fragmentary. So, visual experience is just, you know, stimulations of the retina.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s an excerpt of the film Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? It is made by renowned French director, screenwriter, animator, producer, Michel Gondry. Yes, that’s Noam Chomsky. You spoke to Noam for hours in a series of interviews. In fact, when you started, his wife Carol was alive, and by the end she had died of brain cancer. Talk about how you selected the topics you did and how you came up with the title.

MICHEL GONDRY: Well, I talked to him a lot, but the interviews were about three hours long in all. So, basically, I took half out, and it’s edited in the order—mostly in the order that he spoke. And there is subject, like the perception of the world, on which he comes back a second time. I don’t know if he forgot he had told me already, but his examples were different, and I think it’s such a complicated subject to understand, it’s so important, that it was important—it was worth it to show it twice. But basically I showed—I followed the flow of the conversation.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And the title? How did you come up with the title?

MICHEL GONDRY: Oh, yeah. The title is a sentence that—Noam takes sentences to illustrated the generative grammar, and sometimes they are just funny. It’s about a dog, or sometime you hear about Nixon. But like the meaning doesn’t have really a great importance. That’s the construction. And it was interesting because sometimes I gave him as an example that "A man who is tall is in the room," and he changed it without paying attention to "The man who is tall is happy." And basically, you ask a child to formulate the question that gives his response, and the child picks the right "is" to put it in front. So I wanted to really illustrate that in a very basic and graphic manner, which is kind of complicated to do. So I was proud that I did this work, and I thought, OK, that’s a good reason to pick this sentence. But it doesn’t have much meaning in itself.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you’ve also suggested that there is some connection between your work and the work that Chomsky does. Could you explain what you mean by that?

MICHEL GONDRY: Well, I felt, of course, it would be very, very hard for me just to follow up with him—to follow him, and I felt a little ignorant. But, on the other hand, I thought that if I do 24 drawing per second, I could add in depth and sort of balance out his depth and complication, the complexity of his purpose. So I thought animation would help to—help me to feel adequate, basically.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was Noam Chomsky’s reaction to the film?

MICHEL GONDRY: I think he really loved it. He never watches movie, and even movies about him, especially movies about himself, but this one he watched twice already. And he was very happy. And, I mean, in the film he says he never goes to see any movies, especially since his wife died, and I got him to go twice in the movie theater to watch this one. So, in fact, I did that to him.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In the beginning of the film, you—there’s mention of Manufacturing Consent, whose director, Peter Wintonick, just recently passed away. Could you talk about the significance of watching that film for your interest in Chomsky and his work?

MICHEL GONDRY: Well, it was crucial, because basically that’s how I heard about Chomsky. I mean, coming from France, he’s very much ignored in France from some ridiculous issues that they keep bringing from the ’70s.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Such as?

MICHEL GONDRY: You know, the Faurisson revisionist book, and they have all these issues with liberty of freedom of speech in France. They don’t see it the same way that you guys see it in France. So, I was introduced to him through Manufacturing Consent. And I have to say—and maybe my generation, we watch a lot of TV, and sometimes such documentary open our mind. Like recently I watched Dirty Wars, that really opened my eyes on these problems, or Gasland really changed my thinking about those issues. And I think those documentaries are really doing an amazing job in reaching out to my type of people.

AMY GOODMAN: Michel, how does doing this film about Noam Chomsky, animating his ideas, from his private life to his politics to his linguistics, compare to making a music video for Björk or Rolling [Stones] or whoever?

MICHEL GONDRY: Well, it’s—you know, it’s funny, because I had a project with Björk. We wanted to make a feature film based on her music and science, and we couldn’t do it. And I think this is a little bit close. Working with Noam and animating science concept, it’s always something that I wanted to do. But, of course, the difference is—well, like the rock 'n' roll, you know, legend and attitude, it’s something that doesn’t really move me. And Björk is different, because she has—she has a very curious mind. But like doing a video for The Rolling Stones, it’s not—I mean, of course it was really important for me, but meeting with somebody like Noam Chomsky is more life-changing. So, that’s a huge difference. I mean, I try to work my best all the time, but—and it’s interesting, because I saw him as a father figure in a way, so I really wanted him to approve of the result, so I was thinking of that when I was working.

AMY GOODMAN: Michel, you are very well known for your music videos, also for the film for which you won an Oscar, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Talk about how you got your start.

MICHEL GONDRY: I was in art school for not very long. We started a band, a new wave punk band in the early '80s. The band was not successful, but I bought this camera, which is exactly the same one that I used for Noam's film.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Where were you?

MICHEL GONDRY: In Paris.

AMY GOODMAN: And this was Oui Oui, your band, Yes Yes?

MICHEL GONDRY: Yeah, Oui Oui, yes, yes, yes. So I started to do videos for my band, which were animated film. And little by little, I included people in my videos; it was not only drawings. And I started to do video for other bands. And like in the late—in the '90s, I moved to Los Angeles, and I tried to do a movie. That's how I met Charlie Kaufman, who wrote my two first movies, including Eternal Sunshine.

AMY GOODMAN: Your grandfather was an inventor?

MICHEL GONDRY: Yes, he invented many things, like the electronic bell, some miniature transistor on the synthesizer, what’s called the Clavioline.

AMY GOODMAN: Did Noam remind you of your grandfather?

MICHEL GONDRY: No, because my—I guess more like a father, I would say. My grandfather has—he was a bit boring. But he was—he had great stories. In fact—in fact, I just realized—

AMY GOODMAN: He obviously was a pretty creative guy.

MICHEL GONDRY: Yeah, he was creative, but I don’t know. I mean, I kind of liked my grandfather, but I was the only one in my family to enjoy his stories. It’s like my auntie. She’s a school teacher, and I made a documentary about her. And I think, from a young age, I always liked to hear stories about older people. I mean, for one thing, they are close to death, and they don’t seem to be afraid, and I am very impressed by that. And I think that if they lived 80 years or so, they must have good stories to tell.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of which, did Noam talk about what he was afraid of?

MICHEL GONDRY: No, because he didn’t seem to be afraid. I mean, yes, he is afraid of climate change. And when I had finished the first part of the film—between the two interviews, I showed him the result. And he said, basically, "I agree with it," which was agreeing with himself. And—but I was still happy he said that, because it meant that I didn’t distort his words or misinterpret. But he said that it will take a few generations before people start to really accept those idea on the linguistic and philosophy. And I asked him if he was upset that he will not be around to see that. And he said, "Yes, I’m upset because nobody will be around." And he was talking about the climate change. That was his main—one of his main concern in the world.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And this film is playing now here in select theaters. Has it also released in Europe, and will it?

MICHEL GONDRY: Not yet, no. It’s going to be in the spring in Europe. I’m curious. Like, the reaction here of the press was extremely positive. Even The New York Times, who sometimes they get some friction with Noam, were really adamant about the film. I think in France it may be different.

AMY GOODMAN: The famed French filmmaker, Michel Gondry, the director of Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? about the life and work of Noam Chomsky. When we come back, we conclude the interview and then hear Noam Chomsky himself responding to the film and talking about his life. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we continue our conversation with Michel Gondry, the director of the new film, Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?, an animated film of Gondry’s conversations with the legendary linguist, political dissident, Noam Chomsky. I asked him to talk about the range of his work and how it goes together, from Dave Chappelle to [Eternal] Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Noam Chomsky to his famous commercials for some of the biggest corporations in the world.

MICHEL GONDRY: Doesn’t go very well together. And I have to say, the process of doing advertising sort of sometime hurts my ethics. On the other hand, it allows me to choose any other project in feature film. So, when I do a feature film for Noam Chomsky, I am not earning money, and I pay for the—to start the project, so I don’t have to convince any producer. And this is because I have done some advertising and earned some money in doing so. So there is a contradiction with my ethics, because I really think advertising is—is terrible. I think, for instance, your news is—has quality because there is no advertising. That’s the main difference—I mean, not the only difference, of course, but that’s one of the main problems in advertising. It’s, of course, run by corporation. And there is this advertising that makes you think, "What am I looking at?" So I have a contradiction in doing advertising. I try to do as minimum, as little as possible. But, I have to say, they give me opportunity to make a living and then to choose projects like Block Party or Noam’s film.

AMY GOODMAN: So, interestingly, you’re really a master of manipulation. That’s why you’re so successful in advertising, why they pay you the big bucks to do it, that allows you to do your other work. So, by being the master of it, you’re an expert in it. Can you explain it to people? What makes an effective advertisement?

MICHEL GONDRY: Well, I don’t think I’m a master of manipulation. I think more illusion maybe. And the advertising are conceived by a team of creative that are not necessarily including me in the creative aspect. So, I mean, I work for them, and I represent their idea with my images and so on. But in term of manipulation, I mean, I know that when I talk about that in the film, that sometimes documentaries, who are made with live action, when you—real footage of people, you forget that—you just think that the person on the camera, on the screen, you just think that’s his voice. But through editing, that is invisible, sort of alter the reality on it. And then there is manipulation. So, sometime it’s for the best, but it could be for the worst, as well. So I’m aware of that. And that’s one of the reason why I thought animation was honest, because it’s—you’re being reminded all the time that you’re being manipulated. I mean, it’s not manipulation if you see it.

AMY GOODMAN: Maybe I should have said just, you know how to touch people. You know what affects people. Or is it more that you just express yourself?

MICHEL GONDRY: Yeah, I think I express myself, and I don’t think of touching people. I mean, yeah, of course, I hope to touch people, but I try to touch myself—sorry, it’s—can be used in the wrong way. But to—you know, to—I cannot find other expressions, because I’m going to—I was about to say to please myself, but that sounds wrong, as well. But I do images I want to see most of the time. And maybe I have a sensibility that can resemble a certain group of people, so they like my work. But I don’t give too much thought into how to get people to like me, although I’d like them to like me, of course. But I didn’t study really this sort of manipulation.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I also want to ask about your 2004 award-winning film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here’s an excerpt.

 

JOEL BARISH: [played by Jim Carrey] Tangerine.

CLEMENTINE KRUCZYNSKI: [played by Kate Winslet] Am I ugly?

JOEL BARISH: Uh-uh.

CLEMENTINE KRUCZYNSKI: When I was a kid, I thought I was. I can’t believe I’m crying already. Sometimes I think people don’t understand how lonely it is to be a kid. Like, you don’t matter. So, I’m eight, and I have these toys, these dolls. My favorite is this ugly girl doll who I call Clementine. And I keep yelling at her, "You can’t be ugly! Be pretty!" It’s weird, like if I can transform her, I would magically change, too.

JOEL BARISH: You’re pretty.

CLEMENTINE KRUCZYNSKI: Joel, don’t ever leave me.

JOEL BARISH: You’re pretty. You’re pretty. You’re pretty. Pretty. Mierzwiak, please let me keep this memory. Just this one.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was an excerpt from your 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which won an Academy Award for best original screenplay. It stars Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey. So could you talk about that scene that we just saw?

MICHEL GONDRY: Yeah. Well, first of all, that the screenplay was written by Charlie Kaufman. The statue goes to him. But, I mean, I have a statue, too, in my living room, which is great, because I co-wrote the story. But it was like one page. So, it’s—I have to put things in perspective.

What this clip was, it’s a key moment in the story where the character of—played by Jim Carrey, Joel, realize—I mean, so he’s erasing all his—it’s being erased, all his memories of Clementine, his ex-girlfriend. At this moment, in erasing them, he relives them. So, in this memory, he realized how much he loved her, and he doesn’t want any more of the procedure to happen. He wants to stop the erasing. But it was interesting, because this scene, the way it was written was about a book, and it was not as touching as it should be. And we put it together, and we realized that it didn’t have the impact we were looking for. So I asked Charlie to rewrite the scene about her youth, something that would have been really touching about her youth. And I told him, "Use 20 percent of the words you already used." So, we come back to her lips to mimic those words, because we couldn’t reshoot it, so we just did the sound again. So we wrote the scene, like 10 minutes, using 20 percent of the word that were existing, and then we cut away to Jim Carrey when she speaks different word, and then we come back to her when she resays the same word. And this scene, who was one of the favorite scene of most of the audience, was actually completely re-edited and transformed. So, maybe that’s manipulation. Maybe here I at least tried a sort of manipulation.

AMY GOODMAN: For people who haven’t seen the film, this idea of the erasure of memory, I think of Norm Chomsky in exactly the opposite way: He is the global memory.

MICHEL GONDRY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: He talks about what happens today and what happened in the past. He reminds us. Can you put those two together?

MICHEL GONDRY: Well, what—one of the things that impresses me the most in Noam is that, his capacity to remember all the data. And that’s why he is very hard to beat. I mean, I’m not trying to beat, to compete with him, but I can debate. He always back up his idea with very solid data. And that covers all the subject he can think of. And when he doesn’t know the data, he is not going to engage in the conversation, or he is going to admit, "I’m not aware of that." So, of course, it’s sort of working in opposite direction. Like in Eternal Sunshine, we erase memory, which is mostly how I feel, because I’m navigating in the fog. And Noam has a very solid and detailed memory of everything. And it’s interesting because his brain work by association, so when he start an idea, he is going to lead to the next one and then to the next one. And if you don’t stop him, he can talk forever on one question, on one subject, because it’s all—and it reminds me of my auntie who was schoolteacher, and she had a million stories to say. Each time she would start a story, it would lead to the next one and the next one, and you can’t stop them. And I’m really impressed by those brains, who seem to work so well.

AMY GOODMAN: Did Noam change you?

MICHEL GONDRY: Yes, of course. It’s life-changing to meet somebody like that and spend—to spend time with him. And, I mean, the way his ethics are—I mean, the strength of his ethics and his non-compromising attitude makes me look at what I do and how I can live by my principles the way that he does. So that’s something I always think of, and I think it comes from him.

AMY GOODMAN: Michel Gondry is the director and animator of the new film, Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?

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Jeremy Scahill: Obama Is an Enforcer of Empire

In an address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama openly embraced an aggressive military doctrine backed by previous administrations on using armed force beyond the international norm of self-defense. Obama told the world that the United States is prepared to use its military to defend what he called "our core interests" in the Middle East: U.S. access to oil. "[Obama] basically came out and said the U.S. is an imperialist nation and we’re going to do whatever we need to do to conquer areas [and] take resources from people around the world," says independent journalist Jeremy Scahill. "It’s a really naked declaration of imperialism ... When we look back at Obama’s legacy, this is going to have been a very significant period in U.S. history where the ideals of very radical right-wing forces were solidified. President Obama has been a forceful, fierce defender of empire."

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How the U.S. Narrowly Avoided a Nuclear Holocaust 33 Years Ago

The following is a transcript from Democracy Now!

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Thirty-three years ago today, the United States narrowly missed a nuclear holocaust on his soil that would have dwarfed the horrors of the Hiroshima bomb blast that killed approximately 140,000 people. The so-called Damascus accident involved a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile mishap at a launch conflict outside Damascus, Arkansas. During a routine maintenance procedure, a young worker accidentally dropped a nine pound tool in the silo, piercing the missile skin and causing a major leak of flammable rocket fuel. Sitting on top of that Titan II was the most powerful thermonuclear warhead ever deployed on an American missile. The weapon was about 600 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. For the next nine hours, a group of airmen put themselves at grave risk to save the missile and prevent a massive explosion that would’ve caused incalculable damage.

AMY GOODMAN: To find out what happened next, we turn to a shocking new book called, "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety." In it, author Eric Schlosser reveals how often the United States has come within a hairs breath of a domestic nuclear detonation or an accidental war. Drawing on thousands of pages of recently declassified government documents and interviews with scores of military personnel and nuclear scientists, Schlosser shows that America’s nuclear weapons pose a grave risk to human kind. We are joined by Eric Schlosser, author of a number of books, including the best-selling "Fast Food Nation." Welcome to Democracy Now! So, talk about that story 33 years ago today.

ERIC SCHLOSSER: Thirty-three years ago, during a routine maintenance procedure, a tool was dropped and it set in motion events that could have led to the destruction of the state of Arkansas and it just so happened that Bill Clinton was the governor at the time. Vice President Mondale was in the state at the time. And it is one of those events that literally could have changed the course of history. So, the book is a minute by minute account of this nuclear weapons accident. It’s unfolding, but I use that narrative as a way to look at the management of our nuclear weapons really from the dawn of the nuclear era to this day.

A great deal has been in the media lately about Pakistani nuclear program, India nuclear program, Iran’s, but not enough attention has been paid to our own and the problems that we have had in the management of our nuclear weapons. And it’s a subject that I think is really, really urgent. It’s interesting, as I was watching Bill McKibben, who I consider a true American hero, and I was just seeing the title of the show, Democracy Now, the whole system of managing nuclear weapons is an inherently authoritarian. And if you look at the kind of secrecy that we have now in this country, and the national security state, it all stems from the development of the atomic bomb, the secrecy around it, and the real point of this book is to provide information to Americans that the government has worked very hard to suppress, to deny an enormous amount of disinformation and misinformation about our weapons program.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: You also point out, Eric Schlosser, that there is a link between the amount of secrecy around nuclear weapons and the level of their and un-safety. Could you elaborate? Could you explain why that is the case?

ERIC SCHLOSSER: During the Cold War, and to a certain extent, today, there was such intense compartmentalized secrecy within the government, that for example, the engineers and physicists who were designing the weapons weren’t allowed to know how the weapons were being used in the field. And the Air Force and Navy and Army personnel who were handling nuclear weapons didn’t know about the safety problems or safety issues that the designers knew. One of the people I write about in the book is an engineer named Robert Peurifoy who rose to be a vice president at the Sandia National Laboratory, and is a remarkable man who realized that our weapons might be unsafe and pose a threat of accidental detonation.

Again, in the book, I go through a number of instances that we almost had American weapons detonate on American soil. So, I write about his effort to bring modern safety devices to our nuclear weapons. Through the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to get about a 250 page document that listed all these different accidents, mistakes, short-circuits, fires involving nuclear weapons, and I showed it to him, and he had never seen it. This is somebody who were decades was at the heart of our nuclear weapons establishment. So, the secrecy was so intense, that the Air Force wasn’t telling the weapons designers problems that they were having in the field.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us some of those accidents, some of those near misses and how things are being handled today.

ERIC SCHLOSSER: Yeah, I mean, one of the most significant near misses occurred just three days after John F. Kennedy was inaugurated. A B-52 bomber broke apart in the sky over North Carolina, and as it was breaking apart, the centrifugal forces affecting the plane pulled a lanyard in the cockpit, which released one of the hydrogen bombs that it was carrying. And the weapon behaved as though it had been released over the Soviet Union, over an enemy target deliberately. It went through all of its arming stages, except one. There was one switch that prevented it from detonating in North Carolina. And that switch, later, was found to be defective and would never be put into a plane today. Straight electricity in the bomber as it was disintegrating could have detonated the bomb.

The government denied at the time there was ever any possibility that weapon could have detonated. Again and again there have been those sort of denials. But, I obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act that say conclusively that that weapon could have detonated. I interviewed former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who had just literally entered the administration, and was terrified when he was told the news of this accident when it occurred. The official list of nuclear weapons accidents that the Pentagon puts out lists 32. But the real number is many, many higher than that. And again —

AMY GOODMAN: What are some of the more recent ones?

ERIC SCHLOSSER: Well, just this summer, two of our three Minutemen missile wings were cited for safety violations. A few years ago, the Air Force’s largest storage facility for nuclear weapons, the group that ran it was de-certified for safety violations. And one of the more concerning things right now, this sounds like a Hollywood movie, is the potential vulnerability of our nuclear command and control system being hacked to cyber attack. The Defense Science Board put out a report this year that the vulnerability of our command and control system to hacking has never been fully assessed. There were Senate hearings on the spring that didn’t get very much attention, but in 2010, 50 of our missiles suddenly went off-line and the launch control centers were unable to communicate with them for an hour. It would later turn out to be one computer chip was improperly installed in a processor, but what we have seen with Snowden and a relatively low level private contractor able to obtain the top secrets of the most secret intelligence agency, the cryptography and some of the code management of our nuclear weapons, is being done by private contractors.

AMY GOODMAN: Who is doing it?

ERIC SCHLOSSER: I think Boeing is doing some of it. And again, they may be doing a wonderful job, but when you’re talking about nuclear weapons, there is no margin for error. If you managed nuclear weapons successfully for 40 years, that is terrific. But if you make one severe error and one of these things detonate, the consequences are going to be unimaginable.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: You’ve also said that the command-and-control structure system in place for nuclear weapons has actually weakened since the end of the Cold War. Is that right?

ERIC SCHLOSSER: One of the things that has happened and one of the problems the Air Force is having is once the Cold War ended — and during the Cold War, having control of nuclear weapons was a high prestige occupation in the Air Force and the Navy, but since the Cold War, it has been seen as a career dead-end. So, there have been all kinds of management issues, underinvestment — and I’m not saying we should be building hundreds and hundreds of new bombers or — but if you’re going to have nuclear weapons, no expense should be spared in the proper management.

AMY GOODMAN: How many do we have?

ERIC SCHLOSSER: And what I was going to say was, some of the systems we have right now are 30, 40 years old. We’re still relying on B-52 bombers as our main nuclear bomber. Those are 60 years old. They haven’t built one since the Kennedy administration. The Titan II missile that I write about it some length in my book, one of the problems and one of the causes of the accident was that it was an obsolete weapon system. Secretary of Defense McNamara had wanted to retire it in the mid-1960s and it was still on alert in the 1980s. 
And again with nuclear weapons, the margin of error is very, very small.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to President Obama in June. He was speaking in Berlin, in Germany, and called for nuclear reductions.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Peace with justice means pursuing the security of a world without nuclear weapons, no matter how distant that dream may be. And so, as president, I strengthen our efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and reduce the number and role of America’s nuclear weapons. Because of the New Start Treaty, we are on track to cut American and Russian deployed nuclear warheads to their lowest levels since the 1950s.

AMY GOODMAN: That was president Obama speaking in Berlin in June. Shortly afterwards, Fox News contributor, Charles Krauthammer, criticized Obama for discussing nuclear arms reduction.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The idea that we’re going to be any safer if we have 1000 rather than 1500 warheads is absurd, so why is he doing this? Number one, he has been obsessed with nuclear weapons and reducing them ever since he was a student at Columbia and thought the freeze, which was the stupidest strategic idea of the 1980s, wasn’t enough of a reduction, and second, because I think that is all he has got.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Charles Krauthammer on Fox. Eric Schlosser?

ERIC SCHLOSSER: I think that given his record on the Iraq war, nothing he says should be taken seriously. The fact of the matter is, every nuclear weapon is an accident waiting to happen or a potential act of mass murder. The fewer nuclear weapons there are, the less likely there is to be a disaster. I think that President Obama on this issue has been quite courageous in calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It’s something that presidents have sought in one way or another since the end of the Second World War. I think that it is urgent that there be real arms control and reduction, not just of our arsenal, but of worldwide arsenals of nuclear weapons.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to turn to a video released by anti-nuclear weapons group, Global Zero, that shows many members of Congress don’t even know how many nuclear weapons the United States has. Here members of Global Zero approach Republican Representative Morgan Griffith of Virginia, Republican Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri, Republican Representative Rob Wittman of Virginia, and Democratic Representative Pedro Pierluisi of Puerto Rico, Republican Representative Duncan Hunter of California, Republican Representative Mark Amodei of Nevada and Republican Representative Bill Flores of Texas.

GLOBAL ZERO INTERVIEWER: Do you happen to know roughly know how many nuclear weapons we do have?

REP. MORGAN GRIFFITH: Uh...

REP. BLAINE LEUTKEMEYER: Well,...

REP. ROB WITTMAN: The current arsenal, I don’t have an exact number.

REP. DUNCAN HUNTER: My understanding is it’s about 300.

REP. PEDRO PIERLUISI: No, no, it is much more than that.

GLOBAL ZERO INTERVIEWER: It’s more than 15,000?

REP. PEDRO PIERLUISI: In terms of nuclear heads? Of course.

GLOBAL ZERO INTERVIEWER: More than 15,000? Really?

REP. PEDRO PIERLUISI: Well, I don’t know.

GLOBAL ZERO INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea about how many nuclear weapons we have?

CONGRESSIONAL REP.: Uh, no.

REP. MARK AMODEI: Nope, not the exact number.

REP. BILL FLORES: It changes every day.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: According to the group, Global Zero, more than 70 members of Congress were polled and more than 99% of them did not know, even roughly speaking, how many nuclear weapons the United States has. Eric Schlosser, your remarks on that?

ERIC SCHLOSSER: It’s not an entirely fair question because the numbers are very different whether they are being counted for the SALT Treaty, how many are in reserve, etc. So it is a difficult thing to say specifically. We have about 1500 under the SALT Treaty deployed. We have a few thousand other—

AMY GOODMAN: And where are they?

ERIC SCHLOSSER: ... in reserve. They’re mainly on our nuclear submarines that are at sea. We have 450 strategic land-based missiles that are in the northern Midwest. But it is important to keep in mind that there is grounds for optimism. At the height of the Cold War, the United States had 32,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union had 35,000. So right now, the number of weapons that both the Soviet Union and the United States have on alert ready to be launched combined is maybe 2000, 2500. So, to go from 60,000 to 2,500, you know 8,000 to 10,000, is a huge achievement; but there need to be much greater reductions.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there a possibility of a domestic Stuxnet, you know like the U.S. released against Iran, a virus that would affect command and control?

ERIC SCHLOSSER: It is a great concern. These weapons are not connected to the internet, but there are command information systems that run software. During the Cold War, Zbigniew Brezinski was woken up in the middle of the night. He was National Security Adviser. He was told the United States was under attack. He got another call and was basically preparing to call President Carter and advise a retaliation. It turned out that there was a faulty computer chip in the NORAD computers that was saying that Soviet missiles were coming toward the United States and they weren’t. So, as long as you have a weapons stance in which we need to be able to retaliate immediately, it puts enormous pressure on acting quickly and there’s are all kinds of possibilities for error.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what has to be done?

ERIC SCHLOSSER: I think firstly, the reason that I wrote the book, is in a democracy these sort of decisions need to be debated by the American people. And really, since 1944 or 1945, fundamental decisions about nuclear weapons have been made by a small group of policy makers acting in secret. So firstly we need openness, secondly we need a debate, and thirdly we need fewer nuclear weapons much more carefully managed, not only in this country, but in every country.

AMY GOODMAN: Eric Schlosser, we want to thank you for being with us. "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety" is the book. It has just come out.

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Bill McKibben: National Day of Action Against the Keystone XL Pipeline on Saturday

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We continue now with Bill McKibben, Co-founder and Director of 350.org, which has called for a day of action this Saturday to protest the Keystone XL and demand that President Obama stop the proposed pipeline. Already this week on Monday, 13 people were arrested during a protest in Houston in front of the offices of TransCanada, the company behind the controversial project. Also this week, Bill McKibben’s new book was released. It’s called, "Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist." You can go to our website to read chapter one.

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Senate Set to Confirm New FBI Head Who OK’d Waterboarding, Defends Mass Spying, Indefinite Detention

The following transcript originally appeared on Democracy Now!:

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Ex-CIA Agent, Whistleblower John Kiriakou Sentenced to Prison While Torturers He Exposed Walk Free

NERMEEN SHAIKH: A retired CIA agent who blew the whistle on the agency’s Bush-era torture program has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. John Kiriakou becomes the first CIA official to be jailed for any reason relating to the torture program. Under a plea deal, Kiriakou admitted to a single count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by revealing the identity of a covert officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. Under the plea deal, prosecutors dropped charges brought under the Espionage Act.

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Australia on Fire: Record-Shattering Heat, Wildfires Engulf World’s Largest Exporter of Coal

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin our show in Australia, where hundreds of bush fires continue to rage amidst the country’s fiercest heat wave in more than 80 years. It’s so hot, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has taken the unprecedented step of adding two new colors—deep purple and pink—to its weather maps to show temperatures between 122 and 129 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Will Fossil Fuel Divestment Be a Key Tactic in 2013 Battle over Climate Change?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to a conversation about global warming and how to confront it. Some have called 2013 "year zero" in the battle over climate change. This comes as 2012 was a year of extreme weather, from the melting of the Arctic to Superstorm Sandy, to the massive typhoon in the Philippines. It was also the warmest year on record in the United States, with massive droughts and frequent wildfires.

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Police or Paramilitary Forces? The Militarization of American Law Enforcement

The following is an edited transcript of a Democracy Now! segment in which Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh discuss the militarization of America's police force. 

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