Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Assassination Complex 20160731

Put your hands together. They will continue to perform throughout the night. Im going to be your host throughout the evening thank you for coming out. Its an incredibly important piece of work. [applause] [cheering] it is incredibly important work when you think the president is setting up policies, targeted assassination, terrorist watch lists and violating peoples civil liberties. So thats why its so important that we do see this kind of work into College Policies because of for the most part i think that when people are uninformed, then they cant necessarily push back. Then things like drum strikes and targeted assassinations or killings as the government likes to call them to come the butt of jokes. I dont know if you watch any of the speeches given by the president and larry will mark this past weekend but they make jokes about raining down bombs on people so thats why its so important that this work is really out there. Thats one thing that i would like to say. [applause] also, its important because increasingly doing National Security reporting is a job that puts journalists at risk and thats because of the aggressive policies by the government of blurring of the lines where the First Amendment and freedom of speech should be very clear. I was in washington, d. C. This weekend surrounding the events and its not the same group of people that you see there wining and dining with people of power that you see here. I didnt get invited to the event. Im proud to call these people my friends into the last thing i will say is unlike edward and the nsa documents with the drone papers, they may not know who the source is, but the fact there is a source already tells you that transparency is contagious and whistleblowers who want to expose wrongdoing are not being scared away from doing so, that inspired. Without further ado let me introduce the first speaker tonight. Please stay with us for the whole program and the editorinchief betsy reed. [applause] this book had its origins in a series we did last fall called the drone papers and it was the product of a longterm effort by the whole organization and its a series of secret documents shared by the whistleblower. This is someone in the Intelligence Community so heavily weighed on his conscience. Its in this world and secret of the fact that we have a government that is carrying out assassinations with no transparency, no trial. They bring their risk to jeremy and i want to Say Something about the number of people that are involved at theintercept was a Massive Group effort. We hope to bring a whole range of skills and multimedia. We are grateful for the opportunity that we have at the intercept to pursue this kind of original journalism thats hard this day and age. Its to have a permanent artifact that you can share and read. Its clear that you are motivated and care and that you regard hes revelations as serious and important that as we can see in the Political Landscape today that isnt a widely shared view and some just thank you for coming out and i hope that you read the book and share it and carry on. Thanks. [applause] had to take a sip of my beer. Sorry im late. Betsy reed, everyone. Yes, another round of applause. Coming up next, id like to introduce peter. Im sure you know his work. Hes going to read an excerpt from the book. All right. Listen. You have to remind people i have kids. I start off every story like that. Why i leaked the watch list documents. The following statement was provided by the source that leaked the 2013 watch listing guidance. Over the past few years weve heard a lot about president obamas secret code list that we know nothing about its implementation. Despite the my old congressional scrutiny, aclu lawsuits directed at the shroud of secrecy some secrecy remains unanswered. How do you get on this list, and i on the list, who put me on the list. The truth is there are several such lists. They are kep kept closing to spd multiple intelligence and local Law Enforcement agencies. The list to capture targets and others were intended to threaten and the persons activities however they originate from the terrorist identities environment that terrorism cente center the existence of tied get details of how it functions in the government are completely unknown to the public. In august, 2013, the database reached a milestone of 1 million entries. Today, it is thousands larger and is growing faster than it has since its inception in 2003. The march 2013 guidance lays out the criteria for nominating someone to the database not only the right to store your name, date of birth and other identifying information but also your medical records. Passport data, license numbers, email and cell phone number along with the International Mobile subscriber identity and station equipment numbers come in your bank account numbers, purchases and other information including dna and photograph capable of identifying and using facial recognition software. The National Counterterrorism center collaborates with agencies from the International Alliance to supplement any information missing from entries already in its database or to add more entries individual entries in the database are a signed a personal number from Osama Bin Laden to a a la, the sum of n. Noir a la and the son of a covert operation was first assigned a tpm and monitored by all agencies who followed long before they were eventually put on a separate list and extrajudicially sentenced to death. There were checks on power especially when they consider their own citizens to be a threat. There is approximately 21,000 of those that are american citizens by leaking this information that is unclassified but by the reverse logic considered sensitive to be released. To know what kind of activity might lead to their being placed on the list used to monitor their everyday activity. Its that could potentially do tleadto their own trial by drone strike. Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstone of the presidency. Its crucial to an open society. If this administration lacks the courage to uphold its promises to the people than i and others like me will do so for them. [applause] i cant imagine that president Hillary Clinton o are President Donald Trump would make anything better. Now i would like to introduce three people, all incredible in the work they do for the director of the National Security project at the acl view and both reporters and writers at the intercept to focus on the Security Issues and right. [applause] good evening everyone. I want to begin by thanking you guys and everyone else as well as your source of tremendous Public Service that you can buy shining muchneeded light on the area in which there has been far too much secrecy. I think about what your sources said about president obama said earlier and i counter that with transparency and accountability with the rule of law yet with respect to the consequential programs and policies that have a huge impact on the civil and human rights citizens alike from the nofly list we have lacked transparency and accountability. And this is something that the aclu has worked on. We expect whichever administration comes next. With that, i want to talk about the specific revelations to provide the public in the book through the drone papers. I want to begin by asking you first about the article and the book which is by you and jeremy and its called death and the watch list and i ask about the revelations in that piece. Thank you for the kind words. It is a compilation of a couple different stories which were about the watch listing complex you can get on the screening at airports. We published a sort of rulebook that exists to govern the use processes and it is a list of people fall for for years and years and once we start digging into it, you see a system that is so elastic they could be meaningless. You could bend them to be whatever he wants them to be and it created a system that is overloaded and still that way today with all kinds of questions about how effective it is and whether this is a real deterring or whether we are building something to make ourselves feel more comfortable. But as the guidance itself to see how these were actually managed. It is the groundwork for a bottle of other lists and it builds to other lists that have consequences for much more serious. I want to highlight the guidance provided how perilous this country has blocked on when presenting them to do something as personal and professional based in a future prediction of harm that they have not committed. How do you prove yourself innocent of something that you have not done that is one of the things we are trying to litigate in court. Thank you for that. I want to turn to you in your articles up work on the kill chain that youve provided and written about based on materials about the kill list and how it is more broadly applied. I worked on two articles in the buc book. One of the documents we received was an internal study evaluating the military program to target members in yemen and somalia and its an internal pentagon will get its own study so they are evaluating it on its own terms. One was a map in the horn of africa where the planes are flowing from and the infrastructure in the ethiopia and djibouti for the other planes over yemen and somalia. The document shows it approves people for targeting with lethal strikes and once approved by the president there is a 60 day window the military has to target them so that is a 60 day definition of eminent which isnt it common sense one. Another thing that is where laboratory is the administration said they have a presence for capturing rather than killing but they contain quite a bit showing that they are nonexistent and when they did happen they relied on other governments probably in this case to carry them out which raises a whole other issue of human rights and other issues. Finally, the most damning thing about the study is the pentagons own administration of the limitations of the program. You hear a lot from these weapons but it laid out in a lot of detail the problems that they had on the positive identification of the targets that they lacked the resources and the technological capacity to always know who they were targeting. And the study also said at any given time Something Like 20 people on the list we know over two years in 2011 and 2012 there were more than 50 strikes, some 300 People Killed at least 50 of them civilian and so they are killing a lot more than the socalled highvalue targets whove been an imminent threat to the United States. One of the important things you have in the revealed details is these are strikes being carried out in countries with which we are not at war. The expansion of the global war paradigm without territorial or temporal limits, which is very dangerous and we can think about how that is and how the next president might even if you are inclined to trust president obama with these decisions who will the next president who claims authority. But even with respect to the use of drones and the traditional actual battlefields, you worked on an article that talked about observation haymaker, and if you can talk about what that revealed. This was one of the documents about a campaign in afghanistan that stretched for a number of months from 2012 to 2013 and it was a targeted killing campaign aimed at wiping out the al qaeda prominence in the hindu kush and the documents revealed is in about nine out of ten of these operations, not race o raised oe ground but actual airstrikes they were not killing the person they were going after committing or telling other people. We dont know who they are but they get labeled as enemy killed in action. So that sort of statistic generated a lot of attention because it is quite alarming that there is another element to the campaign but i found after spending weeks and weeks and months and months looking at the document it was revealing that the americans had gone in with this idea that they were going to retake this province picking off the highvalue targets and if at the end of the day according to their own estimates they feel about this and i talked to a lot of people who spent time in the kunar working on campaigns and researchers in this part of afghanistan not knowing what they were doing or anything about the people that live there or the history and they end up getting duped and it became a microcosm of the way the war in afghanistan unfolded the last decade and a half and to me it became really symbolic of the convenient way in which this country has gone about war post9 11 in a convenient way that in the end it doesnt get us to where we want to be and it has a tremendous toll. Its a really illustrative example to look at when we think about Going Forward and who will be in the white house in a year. Part of the story that is a continuing one, what you have is despite the transparency accountability that repeated failures. We still dont know the names at the status of people that have been killed in the drum strikes outside actual battlefields. Except for a handful of western victims and that is a shameful record. Its about standards and strategy and the consequences, limitation, but with law without official information and indepth comes the necessity. We expect a little bit more transparency in the aclu lawsuit in the next six weeks. The administration said its going to provide its president ial policy guidance and playbook for the socalled targeted killings on the active battlefield. Am i optimistic . Long experience. But its especially important in the last period of the legacy to push for meaningful transparency and accountability on the limitations both with respect to law and policlaw and policy bece administration is doing now, worse could come on the next one. Thank you all. [applause] thank you all very much. Incredibly important words about the dehumanizing effect. I just want to say we are about to perform a few more songs before we can continue on with more speakers. Dont forget its out in the back if you want to purchase them on the intercept tshirts. If you have to avoid the line and already have your book then you can do that quickly just a reminder that has been subsidized so that is 20 all proceeds. Thanks. [applause] this song is called i think i am emma goldman this is an amazing event. Thank you. Is this really going to be on cspan, all my cussing . This next one is about google. I wish i didnt use their product, but it is what it is. If you can guess the chorus, sing it with us. We are out of here. Thank you. [applause] all right, all right, all right. Hope everyone is getting the book. Give a round of applause. [applause] and now for another reading, peter is coming back. This time he will be reading an excerpt by an essay from Edward Snowden thats featured in the book. [applause] you will all have to buy the book to read it for your self. I was going to read the whole thing but one thing ive wanted to say is when i was a kid living in Oklahoma City every morning we did okay, better than okay. We did the pledge of allegiance. But it got to me and i considered myself not just a patriot, but somebody that really believed in the United States as the greatest country in the world. I really felt that in my heart. And as i became an adult, it was disappointment after disappointment, but thats what it means to grow up. The United States are your parents. When you are vacated, they are your parents. You love them, follow them, then you grow up and get a mind of your own. [cheering] the biggest adult among us here, Edward Snowden. Elected by circumstance, Edward Snowden. Ive been waiting for years for someone like you. Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me. We felt an intimate kinship. We both knew what it meant to be irrevocably changed by revealing secret truths. One of the challenges is living with the knowledge people continue to sit at their desks in that unit throughout the agency who see what you saw without resistance or complaint. They learned to live not just with the untruth that the unnecessary untruth, the dangerous untruth, corrosive untruth. It is a double tragedy. What begins as a survival strategy ends with a compromise of a human being it sought to preserve in the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice. But unlike Daniel Ellsberg, i didnt have to wait 40 years to witness other citizens breaking the silence with documents. Oseberg dave peters to the New York Times and others in 1971. Chelsea manning provided the iraq and afghan war blogs. [applause] and the materials in 2010. I came forward and 2013 and now here we are in another person of courage and conscience made available a set of extraordinary documents that are published here. We are witnessing a compression of which the policy shelters in the shadows. Ashadows. The timeframe of which unconventional activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience. And this temporal compression has a significance beyond the immediate headlines that permits people to learn about critical government actions, not part of the historical record but in a way that allows direct action through voting. In other words, in the way that informs them to defend the democracy and that state secrets are nominally intended to support. When i see those coming forward it gives me hope that we wont always be required to curtail the illegal activities of the government as if it were a constant task to uproot official lawbreaking as we know the grass. Interestingly enough, that is how some have begun to describe the remote killing operations, as cutting the grass. A single act of whistleblowing doesnt change the reality that there are significant portions of the government that operate below the water line, beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue to state reforms, but those that perform these actions now have to live with the fear that if they engage in activity contrary to the spirit, the society is even a single citizen is categorized the categorized e they might still be held to account. The thread by which Good Governance hangs in this a quality before the law. The only fear of the man who turns the gear is that he may find himself upon them. Hope lies beyond when we move from extraordinary acts of revelation to the collective culture of accountability all of us, right, the collective culture within the community here we have taken a meaningful step towards that have existed for as long as our government. General David Petraeus provided the unfavorable biographer information so secretive defied classification including the names of the covert operations and the president private thoughts of matter. Petraeus wasnt charged with a felony as the Justice Department. As the Justice Department had initially recommended but what is instead to plead guilty to the misdemeanor, he had enlisted soldier of modest frank pvt having an enlisted soldier of modest frank pulled out a stack of highly classified notebooks and handed them to his girlfriend to secure so much as a smile he would be looking at many decades in prison not a pile of character references from the whos who of the deep state. There are authorized leaks and also permitted disclosures. It is rare for the officials to ask a subordinate week the officers name to retaliate against her husband as it appears to be the case with the valerie plane. Its equally rare from month to go by in which some senior official doesnt disclose some protected information that is beneficial to the political efforts of the parties that are clearly damaging to National Security under the definitions of the law. Im going to skip. I want to believe that when we hear this, everyone in the room feels proud. [applause] at the heart of this evolution was a radicalizing event and i dont mean extreme i mean it in the traditional sense of the issue. At some point you recognize you cant just move a few letters around and hope for the best. You cant report this to your supervisor as i tried to because inevitably supervisors gets nervous and think about the structural risk to their career. They are concerned about rocking the boat and getting a reputation. The incentives are not there to promote meaningful reform in the open society that change has to flow from the bottom to the top. [applause] [cheering] i feel like we are all at the bottom. I know im the bottom. As someone who works in the Intelligence Community whos given up a lot to do this work, youve happily committed yourself to the radical restrictions and voluntarily undergo polygraphs and to tell the government everything about your life and wave a lot of rights because you believe the fundamental goodness of the mission justifies the sacrifice of even the sacred. Now im going to go to the end. Here we see the double edge of our uniquely brand of nationalism. We are raised to be exceptional us to think we are the better nation with the destiny to rule, the danger is that some will eventually believe this claim and some will expect the manifestation of our national identity. Unrestrained power may be many things but it is not american. It is, in this this sense that the active whistleblowing increasingly has become an act of political resistance. The whistleblower raises the alarm and it begins with paul revere. The individuals who make these disclosures feel so strongly about what theyve seen that they are willing to risk their lives and their freedom. They know we the people are ultimately the strongest and most reliable check on the power of the government. The insiders at the highest level have extraordinary capability, extraordinary resources, tremendous access to influence and a monopoly on violence. In the final calculus there is but one figure that matters, the individual citizen and there are more of us than there are of them. [applause] guys are awesome, thank you thank you. Thank you peter that was incredible. Amazing to hear Edward Snowdens word. The courage that it takes to be a whistleblower is contagious and you can see he was inspired by others and he has inspired others and not surprisingly those people in power either think their buddies should get off the hook if they do the same thing or the people like Edward Snowden are traitors and should be killed which yes some highranking officials like Michael Hayden have actually said. Just to give you Little Information on whats going to happen, we are going to have another speaker and another performance by mc sol and tga pain one and then jeremy will speak and then the book signing will begin. So now, let me please introduce, joining, joining us from far away, an incredible journalist mr. Glenn greenwalt who is the cofounder and intercept author of no place to hide. [applause] hi everyone, can can you offer me okay . Okay good. Thank you for coming out tonight. Im sorry that my scheduling issue prevented me from being with you in person, and im also really sorry for the weird creepy 1960s curtains that are behind me. When they turned on the video and i saw them i felt like i was on some sort of contestant for the dating game or something. I worried about it a little bit and then right before i came on i saw a twitter post from one of you in the audience who reported, and im quoting, people lighting up at the jeremys cahill and Glenn Greenwalt presentations. I thought most people will probably be totally fine with whatever curtains are behind me which is really comforting. One of the reasons im so excited about this event and the release of the book and the reporting that jeremy was able to do on the story is because its really a vivid expression of the vision that we had when we started the intercepts. We didnt have every single detail nailed down about what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it, as you might have heard but we definitely had some really clear Core Principles about what we wanted to achieve. One of the most important principles was that we wanted to create an environment using every conceivable resource, technology, expertise, resources in order to create a really safe and secure way that sources, people wanted to be courageous whistleblowers could come and. Guest us and provide information to the public through us in a safe and secure manner as possible. There was a lot of focus during the snowden debate over the effect that the surveillance has on the right to privacy and how it violates it. There was some discussion and debate about the way the surveillance arose with freedom of expression and free speech but there is not very much attention paid to the greatest harm of the surveillance and thats the way in which mass ubiquitous surveillance a rhodes free press. The right of journalists and our job is to shine a light on what the most powerful people are doing in the dark that they want to keep from the public. In order for us to do that we need people who have access to that information, you know whats going on and want to reveal it. If the government government is able to monitor everybodys medication activity and know everyone whos talking to everyone else, it becomes extremely difficult, almost impossible for journalists to cultivate free press to exist in any way other than a way that guaranteed on paper and when you combine that with what has been this incredibly vindictive mentality on the part of the u. S. Government in the last seven years to prosecute and persecute people who in good conscious expose what never shouldve been kept secret in the first place, you can really have a complete erosion of a free press. Part of what we wanted to do was find a way to devote the resources that are needed to compete with the u. S. Government to counter veil and counteract their efforts to know what everyone saying and with whom everyone is speaking to create a human wall that when enable sources to come to Media Outlets like us and journalists like jeremy and be able to provide information that the public should have had all along and so being able to do the story in that way was a really gratifying fulfillment of that vision that we think is just the first step to continuing to fortify that environment to have other sources be able to come to us or with similar usually consequential story. This was the vision that we had which is we wanted to make sure that when sources did come to us we were institutionally constituted from the beginning, never to hesitate about stories like this because of fear of consequences or judgment or scorn from government officials and their loyalists in the media and it was really fulfling and gratifying to see from the very beginning that our entire team led by our editorinchief and our lawyers and editors never blinked. There was never a moment of doubt of should we or shouldnt we pursue this story. It was simply question of how best can we do this reporting in a way that serves the public and adheres to our obligation to protect our source and fulfill the promise. I dont think there are very many institutions in the western world that are both equipped with the resources and the staff necessary to do a story like this as well as the institutional egos to do it in a really unflinching and unhesitating way. To see all that finally come to fruition from start to finish is really gratifying. I think its a vindication of what we created the intercept to set out to do. So there is one other important aspect, a vision that was fulfilled in a unique way and that was the vision that entered snowden had what he decided to disclose the information he ended up disclosing. There are a couple controversial aspects to the whole snowden story. There actually numerous but a few in particular which are relevant to what i want to discuss witches, a lot of people said, why did he feel the need to identify himself. Why didnt he do what a lot of sources do and conceal his identity and try to keep it a secret and hide must mark another question was why did it end up that there was so much focus on Edward Snowden the person . Didnt that distract from the substance of the revelation . Wasnt it counterproductive . As you just heard from the essay that ed wrote for this book as it was very dramatically interpreted by peter, snowden was not a person who acted in this blackhole. He saw himself as being one of this line in the lineage. He was very influenced by Chelsea Manning and tom drake in a variety of other people over the past two decades who risked their lives in liberty and careers for selfless and spirit had there not been a Chelsea Manning or tom drake to influence snowden and to spark his own sense of obligation as a citizen and as a person with access to this information to get them to think about what his duties are and see the possibilities of what could be accomplished through this act, had it not been for any of them there wouldnt have been an Edward Snowden. Or it wouldnt have occurred to him or have been bold enough to do it. The big part of what i feel is so critical in pushing him into the spotlight against his desires and instincts was to contribute to this line and create this model so that someone inside the government would end up hearing Edward Snowden talking about why he did what he did and how he has no regret of any kind having done it and in fact is he always said my one regret, when he was asked, is that he wouldve done it sooner. We wanted to make sure there are people out there who have the benefit of hearing from him and about him the way he got to hear about all of the people who preceded him and inspired him so to see the intercept, its really the first huge story that we got at the inception had to see that it was a very similar kind of pattern where somebody through no expectation of self gain or material benefit, simply through an act of conscious and aware of what he had done and what prior whistleblowers had done. They literally ripped everything of significance to all of us as human beings for no reason other than to make all of us aware of what we should have always been aware of and what is a real threat to democracy and the real threat which is the fundamental questions of how our government is targeting whatever human beings it wants all over the world with no accountability and no due process. So i think its not just the fulfillment of the vision but its a fulfillment that he had when he came forward and i always felt like the most enduring part of the snowden story was not going to be the specific revelation triggered by these documents that he turned over. I thought the consequence was going to be what it inspired all kinds of other people all over the world. I think this is just one example of many of the kind of benefits we will continue to reap from Edward Snowden way beyond the realm of the surveillance that he enabled us to have one of the really fascinating aspects of how information is now stored is that it has gone from being stored on paper to being stored digitally. There was an expectation on the part that likes to keep things secret that this transformation of how information is stored would enable them to more efficiently keep things secret, would empower them to conceal information in large amounts from anyone they didnt want to have it. In some ways that actually has happened. It is easier to see her care information when its on a thumb drive encrypted by a password with all sorts of electronic securities. The people who created the system and had an expectation to help keep things secret have created the weapon that are now most threatening to their ability to do so. If you talk about the time it was to leak the pentagon paper, his biggest challenge was how do you leak 10,000 topsecret documents documents to the New York Times without people knowing that youre doing that. Just physically, logistically, how do you make a copy of 10000 pages, do go to the drugstore with this huge bag of dimes and put it one by one in the xerox machine in front of the pharmacists . That was his really big challenge. It was a real impediment to getting these papers to the public. Now, if you look at how Chelsea Manning leaked her information to wikileaks, basically downloading huge amounts of data onto a tiny thumb drive while she listens to lady gaga cds to cover up what she was doing, you see how easy it is for this huge amount of information to get out of the world most power potent Power Centers and into the public. If you look at the wiki leak releases to the recent Panama Papers to things like the hack of sony are the leaks that anonymous did, this is going to be one of the most important means of how we learn about what the worlds most powerful factions are doing, through huge leaks of massive amounts of data that are now more easily transported and more difficult to detect than ever before. To be able to create a system that enables that and fosters that, i think think is one of the most important challenges of journalism and im so thrilled that we have a staff in place and the resources devoted to creating that so we can have many, many more Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning in the future and im also really glad that we have journalists on our map who have the skill and more importantly the bravery and commitment to what journalism is really about which is not helping to conceal things but helping to bring them to light and you see the benefit when it works really well in the vast amount of light that we were finally able to shine on the Obama Administration Assassination Programs. Thank you for listening and helping us celebrate early for this book. [applause] Glenn Greenwald, everyone. My friends and colleagues used to think i was so annoying because i read his blog religiously. It definitely influenced my world view and now he has a pulitzer. I think i have been vindicated. So a reminder for you that the books are on sale. Later on we will be signing those books and theres also a limited number of tshirts made by the intercept. Right now theyre going to perform another song for you and we will be hearing from jeremys cahill so make sure you stuck around for that. [applause] thank you i just want to say, its really crazy to get on stage after seeing Glenn Greenwald up there. Ive been a student of democracy now for probably 20 years, listening to that show every day so to say im friends with jeremys cahill is just a real honor to me because its really important. Obviously you all know. Im not going to blab about it but i just want to acknowledge what an important event that were wrapping up and how special it is. Thank you all for listening and coming out and put dissipating in this event. Give it up for the intercept one more time for this amazing book. [applause] are gonna switch that. The is a love song. Its up to us. We have to put our bodies on the line like these brave whistle blowers. We have to fight back individually personally and physically make some noise. This is going out to all victims of Police Murder over the last decade and the last year. Poco thank you, thats all we have for right now. [applause] [applause] all right, thank you so much. As well as the book, they also have music back there you can purchase. Let me just mention that. Thank you so much for being here tonight and sticking with us as a whole event this far. Now i would like to introduce the final speaker, this is someone that i am fortunate enough to call my friend and i really am truly inspired by this individual. If theres any kind of journalism or work that i would like to do, i just want to do what jeremys cahill does. What can i say. Let me introduce jeremy. He is a cofounder of the intercept, he is the author of blackwater, dirty wars, journalistic extraordinaire. [applause] thank you so much for sharing this event with us and, i know a lot of events that are done about very serious issues tend to attract a little bit of an older crowd but i am so happy to see so many young people here tonight so thank you to all of you young people who are taking your future so seriously that you want to Pay Attention to these issues. Except you okay fine you have some gray hair. I have them gray here too. I just want to Say Something about our team at the intercept. When we started this journey, we had a kind of surreal origin story which is Glenn Greenwald and i had started to talk about working on some stories together. Glenn was at the guardian and i was just finishing up the dirty wars projects and writing for the nation but i was looking to do something a little bit different. Our friend and colleague was also looking to do something that would build up independent media institutions and i had never been to brazil before and i had met glen once in person and this was back in 2013. We had communicated a lot. We had an open chat channel but i had never really out with him and i had a story that i wanted to work on with him and it required me going to brazil because glenn had just been in hong kong meeting with Edward Snowden and obtaining the documents that now constitute the Edward Snowden nsa documents and i flew to rio, not the worst place to have to go for work after youve been in yemen and somalia its like sorry i have to go to rio for this assignment. Glenn lives way up in the mountains. Hes making fun of the 1960s curtain behind him, glenn had to go to a Hotel Tonight because he still does not have a good Internet Connection at his house. He had a go down the mountain and go into a hotel with 1960s curtains in in order to do this event tonight. I go there to glenns house and it took me like four hours to get from the airports to lend house because no taxi driver knew where it was. I go up and i enter the glenn countdown. It was like canine planet of the apes. There were a bazillion dogs barking. There were monkeys, actual monkeys in the trees who were eating bananas and then they would tease the dogs by throwing banana peels at them. This is my introduction to the world of Glenn Greenwald and then glenn, i guarantee you, i dont know where why he wore a suit but hes wearing a suit and he has a tie on and i guarantee you he has shorts on. So i go there im a little jet leg, glenn is there and hes sitting on his porch the next morning and hes got flowered shorts on, flipflops any sitting there with a bag, he called it his bag of goodies. He had a bag of all these encrypted drives with Edward Snowden on them. This is the beginning stages, glenns partner David Miranda had just been detained at Heathrow Airport in london for nine hours, most of it without any access to a lawyer so there was a very serious political context to what was happening with glenn and david and laura and snowden hes on his porch Drinking Coffee wearing flowered shorts and flipflops and hes like oh my gosh, you you have to see all the documents i found. We were working on something that had to do with the joint special Operations Command and the Assassination Program and how the nsa was monitoring and collecting metadata from cell phones around the world that could be used to track and whack people as the cia put it. Glenn and i in this weird canine planet of the apes environment started working on the stories. While i was there, i was there for ten days, on day 45, glenn gets an email from trevor tim who is a great Media Freedom privacy advocate saying i dont know if youve heard of this guy, but hes interested in starting a News Organization and hes interested in talking to you and his name is pierre and he was the founder of ebay. I think he put Something Like he is the 108th richest person in the world. Glenn is reading this email out loud and said do you think i should respond to this and im like maybe. At the time we were talking about forming a News Organization so glenn writes him back and in the midst of me, glenn, dog, monkeys, and an appeals, surfer shorts, flipflops and targeted killing, we end up with the strange situation where this guy who was extremely wealthy, who is a big fan of glenns work because he was opposed to government intrusion on the privacy rights of americans, primarily, hes basically saying glenn, id like to start a News Organization. Ive organization. Ive considered buying the Washington Post but id rather build it. [laughter] as one does, so that the little look into this crazy thing that happened by the end of it glenn and i were like were starting a News Organization thats going to be funded by the do dude that founded ebay and i was like my parents are nurses and i lived at the catholic worker and i used to live in a homeless shelter. What am i doing with this guy. It was like a no attachment commitment to fund the journalism that we wanted to do. That was basically how all of the started. We went through a hole mass and made mistakes but the point was it started a process to creating an ability to have an autonomous News Organization where the air never tells us what to do, what to write, what not to write and so many journalists are fighting over how do you do this kind of journalism and we feel very blessed to be in the position that were in. We started what is now known as the intercept. We brought in people like cora courier was always one of my favorite young journalists and Ryan Devereaux and others and we started to build something that we did it in a waiver we didnt know exactly where we were going but we got to the point where we have an incredible editor in chief, betsy reed, who i have worked with for so long who is an incredible leader. Shes quiet and humble but she is an incredible editor and has amazing insight into the kind of news that is not being done anywhere else. We have this freedom to work on the stories that we are pursuing without regard to any hurdles that are thrown in our direction. We have great lawyers working for us and others. Before i talk about the content of what we are here about which is the assassination complex, i want to say one thing. We are incredibly grateful to the individual who risked liberty, freedom and their life to leak these documents to us. [applause] we are living in a moment when a man who is in the white house right now is a constitutional lawyer by trade and training, who won the nobel peace prize, who was portrayed as a transformative figure in american politics and is presiding over a global Assassination Program. He is presiding over the most intense persecution and prosecution of whistleblowers in u. S. History. He has use the espionage act more during his two terms and office than all of the presidencies in u. S. History combined since that act was signed into law in the early 1900s. This president , obama is viewed as this great liberal leader who had incredible support and yet dick cheney, i imagine him flyfishing somewhere in wyoming, having a good chuckle over how great this period has been for their agenda, for the agenda that john mccain wouldve never been able to implement or mitt romney would never implement. Barack obama has used his credibility as a popular democrat and a constitutional lawyer to seek to legitimize what amounts to a global Assassination Program. You know every president since gerald ford has upheld an executive order that says the United States does not assassinate people and yet the u. S. Congress has not only avoided legislating that issue or defining the term assassination but has actively refused to do so. The reason is because if Congress Actually defined assassination, if they said okay, thats an executive order and were now going to translate that into law, it would mean you would have 500 plus lawmakers would be also responsible for this policy. Instead of assassination, what were told as we are engaged in targeted killing. Were engaged in a high value targeted campaign. No. What we are engaged in is a global hit program. We are the embodiment, he told congress in a secret hearing that the reason that clinton didnt want to do all of the kinds that we are seeing right now is they didnt want to give the perception of running an israeli style Assassination Program. You fastforward to the present time and we have a popular liberal democratic president who has basically said it is legitimate for the United States to have a parallel judicial system whereby people are sentenced to death by committee that meets on terror tuesday and puts terror statistics on baseball cards and it goes up the kill list chain of command and he acts in the spirit of emperor and decides who will live and die on any given day because he says so. I want to know, all the liberals who have supported this policy, and at one point it was 70 of self described liberals support a drone strikes abroad. How of those people when they hear President Donald Trump kill list are still going to believe in that principle because ill tell you something, theres no such thing as a democratic or republican Cruise Missile. Theres no such thing as a democratic and republican drone strike. Every nation in the world has a right to defend itself. That is not a question. By nation i would also include native americans in the United States. Every nation in the world has a right to defend itself. What we are engaged in, and what i say we, if you pay taxes you are a part of this, we are engaged in preemptive warfare which was the cheney doctrine and what president obama has done which will endure for generations to come is he has made it possible for whoever the next president is, Hillary Clinton, the Cruise Missile or nutty as a fruitcake who believes muslims should only able to visit this country even , they are going to continue these policies. For Bernie Sanders, by the way, and im so sure there are people who are feeling the burn in this room and theres a lot of things that Bernie Sanders says that i think are really worth supporting and its unusual to hear the kinds of things on a National Stage that he is saying, but the reality about Bernie Sanders is that when the ground work was being laid for the future invasion of iraq in the 1990s, Bernie Sanders supported legislation in 1998 of the iraq liberation act which made regime change in iraq the law of the land. He endorsed a bill, supported it publicly and with his signature that was drafted by Donald Rumsfeld who is not yet the defense secretary, william and others who brought the invasion of iraq. Bernie sanders supported the legislation that they drafted in an early stage in the form of a letter to president clinton that then laid the groundwork for the invasion of iraq. Bernie sanders then supported the most merciless regime of economic sanction in modern history against the iraqi people in an attempt to starve them into overthrowing the government of saddam hussein. It did not affect his regime that it killed hundreds of thousands of iraqis. He rightly blasts Hillary Clinton for being a regime change man and she is. She is as hawkish as they come. He blasted her for her alliance with Henry Kissinger and she should be blasted for that but the fact is we are not democrats or republicans. We have an obligation to hold anyone in power or seeking power accountable. If you think Bernie Sanders seeks are clean, theyre not. [applause] Bernie Sanders was asked by chris hayes of msnbc at the most recent democratic town hall hall directly if he supports the kill list and Bernie Sanders said as its currently being administered, yes i do support support it. As its currently being administered is laid out in this book. This book that we produced is a complete team effort of all of these investigated journalists who worked with us on this book that did the reporting on it, we poured poured over these documents and try to present people a counter narrative based on the governments own documents of what is happening around the world. What these documents show is that the Obama Administration is relying on a system that depends on a mathematical formula for determining how many civilians are killed in these drone strikes that basically is guaranteed to almost always result in the number zero. Obama is set to release their statistics on the number of People Killed outside of declared war zones and they will say a minimum number of people have been killed but what theyre not going to tell you is that in many cases they declare that anyone killed in drone strikes is an enemy killed in action until or unless posthumously proven to have not been. Its turning the due process in a very gruesome lethal way on its head. This kind of reporting that we are doing at the intercept is the result of an Incredible Team effort of Fact Checkers and lawyers and we have an incredible design team of people who try to visualize the data so it can be shared and digested and understood but theres one person i want to point out in particular and that is my amazing colleague, roger edited this book and he did it on his own time in addition to being fulltime at the intercept. I want to thank him for all the work he did on this. [applause] the final thing i want to say is that we are living in a time and moment when there is a war against independent journalism. There is a war against independent journalism in the form of targeting whistleblowers theres a war against independent journalism in the targeting of journalists phone records and surveilling their communications. This administration which claims to be ushering in the area of the most Transparent Administration in u. S. History has sent a message to those in government who want to blow the whistle on government misconduct , unconstitutional activity, extrajudicial killing that we will pursue you to the end of the earth. What that means is that when things like the killing of Osama Bin Laden happen, john brennan can leak like a sieve until everyone lies about a shootout happening and all of the other stuff they said. Those are official leaks. Those are acceptable. When David Petraeus wants to leak or share classified information to make himself look like superman in front of his mistress, thats acceptable. Hillary clintons email would be an elder scandal if it was up private citizen who was doing that. Some Government Contractors that i want to have classified material sent to my personal email address, those people would be going down on espionage charges but instead she might be the next president of the United States. The fact is we live in a society where so many people that are at the bottom of the chain of command are the ones standing up. Chelsea manning was sentenced to 30 years in a military prison because she blew the whistle on war crime. You just watch one thing and that was the collateral murder video where a rocky civilians and journalists were gunned down to applause and laughter by mender under members of the u. S. Military. The idea that Chelsea Manning is serving 30 years in prison for exposing that and other misdeeds and illegal activity by the government and David Petraeus is a professor somewhere and william to grave and is a professor somewhere and the head of the entire university of texas educational system, someone who tried to give sheep to the afghan villagers to apologize for killing their loved ones and digging bullets out of the bodies of pregnant women. We live in a society where its up to the young people and lower command people to blow the whistle and those who cover it up because they want to sleep with someone, thats a sick commentary and our society. [applause] im going to end the chat part of this evening by saying this. What we are trying to do at the intercept is flawed and were open to criticism and we listen to people who way and then have something critical to say about us. We are not arrogant about what were doing. We are trying to build something different. We are seeking different ways to fund journalism. Ive been at the other end where you spend three months of your year begging for funding and finance. Try to convince people what youre doing is worth something. Were not perfect but what were trying to do is create an independent Media Organization that people will when they come to our site they know where were coming from. The notion of objectivity is total bull ship. The New York Times is not objective. The New York Times is an advocacy publication. Cnn is not objective, its an advocate for the way things are in view of the state. We dont want to go to the white house correspondents dinner, we want to dwell with people like you. We want to dwell with people who live on the other end of the barrel of the gun and the last thing i will say is this. I want to dedicate this entire evening, and i hope all of you keep this in your heart and mind when you leave here today, to all of those whistleblowers known and unknown risk life and liberty to tell us stories we wouldnt hear otherwise. Those are the true heroes in our society. Thank you very much. [applause] [applause] heres a look at some books being published this week. Glenn beck criticizes politicians in both parties for using the public spheres to their advantage. Author and new yorker staff writer Jeffrey Toobin recalls the kidnapping and trial of patty hearst. John dickerson anchor of cbs news face the nation remembers important moments in the american president ial campaigns