Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Thursday, 27 March 2014

Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Thursday, 27 March 2014
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The Unknown Known: Errol Morris' New Doc Tackles Unrepentant Iraq War Architect Donald Rumsfeld
Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris joins us to talk about his new film, "The Unknown Known," based on 33 hours of interviews with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The title refers to an infamous press briefing in 2002 when Rumsfeld faced questions from reporters about the lack of evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "The Unknown Known" is Morris’ 10th documentary feature. He won a Best Documentary Oscar for his film "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." His other films include "Standard Operating Procedure," about alleged U.S. torture of terror suspects in Abu Ghraib prison, and "The Thin Blue Line," about the wrongful conviction of Randall Adams for the murder of a Dallas policeman. The release of "The Unknown Known" comes in a month marking 11 years since the U.S. invaded Iraq, leaving an estimated half a million Iraqis dead, along with at least 4,400 American troops.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Excerpts of "The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld," a song cycle of actual Rumsfeld quotes by composer Bryant Kong and vocalist Elender Wall. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, this month marks 11 years since the United States invaded Iraq, and the legacy of that invasion is staggering. At least half a million Iraqis are dead, along with at least 4,400 American soldiers. Thousands of civilians and soldiers have been left maimed and continue to suffer from mental trauma. One Harvard study estimates the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined will cost the United States as much as $6 trillion.
Well, we spend the rest of the hour looking at a key architect of the Iraq War: former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He’s the focus of a new documentary by Oscar-winning director Errol Morris called The Unknown Known. The title refers to an infamous press briefing in 2002 when Rumsfeld faced questions from reporters about the lack of evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This is the trailer.
ERROL MORRIS: Let me put up this next memo.
DONALD RUMSFELD: You want me to read this?
ERROL MORRIS: Yes, please.
DONALD RUMSFELD: "All generalizations are false, including this one." There it is.
NEWS ANCHOR 1: Rumsfeld survived Watergate with reputation intact.
NEWS ANCHOR 2: Possible vice-presidential running mate with President Ford.
NEWS ANCHOR 3: Questions about Rumsfeld are whether he’s too ambitious playing second fiddle to Reagan.
DONALD RUMSFELD: The credit belongs to people who are carped at and criticized and said, "Oh, my goodness, you’re warmongers." And we need to understand how we got to where we are. Who do we want to provide leadership in the world? Somebody else?
ERROL MORRIS: When Shakespeare wrote history, the motivating force was character defects, jealousies, etc., etc., etc. Maybe Shakespeare got it wrong.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Maybe he had it right.
Governor Reagan decided to have George Bush to be vice president.
ERROL MORRIS: It seems to me that if that decision had gone a slightly different way, you would have been future president of the United States.
DONALD RUMSFELD: That’s possible.
ERROL MORRIS: How do you think that they got away with 9/11? It seems amazing, in retrospect.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Everything seems amazing in retrospect.
Stuff happens. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And you have to pick and choose. Well, to the extent you pick and choose and you’re wrong, the penalty can be enormous.
Subject, unknown knowns. That is to say, things that you think you know, that it turns out you did not.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the new documentary, The Unknown Known. Its director, Errol Morris, joins us now. This is the 10th documentary feature he has made. He won an Oscar for Best Documentary for his film Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, which is about another secretary of defense, this time in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. His other films include Standard Operating Procedure, about alleged U.S. torture of terror suspects at Abu Ghraib, and The Thin Blue Line, about the wrongful conviction of Randall Adams for the murder of a Dallas policeman, the movie credited with leading to Adams’ exoneration. Film critic Roger Ebert called Morris’s first film, Gates of Heaven, about the pet cemetery business, one of the 10 best films of all time. He was also one an executive producer of the Oscar-nominated film, The Act of Killing. Errol Morris is a regular contributor to The New York Times opinion pages, where he is currently in the middle of a four-part series titled "The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld."
Errol Morris, welcome to Democracy Now! Why Donald Rumsfeld? Why did you choose him to be your subject of this film?
ERROL MORRIS: Things take on a logic of their own. I had made The Fog of War about Robert S. McNamara, a central figure, for me, as a young man, because of the war in Vietnam, one of the great disasters in American history. And I made the movie because of questions about that war. How did we get into such an incredible mess? Fifty-eight thousand American soldiers dead, millions of people in Southeast Asia dead. Call it the salt-and-pepper shakers or the bookends, but another disastrous war, another secretary of defense, and I decided that I wanted to do it again. Also, I had made a movie about Abu Ghraib, so there are a whole number of issues which are of great interest to me.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But the interesting thing is McNamara was sort of the reluctant warmonger, whereas Rumsfeld, in your film, is so certain about everything that he does. How did you first get him to agree to sit down, not just for an hour or two hours, for 33 hours of interviews, and to reveal so much about his own thoughts to you?
ERROL MORRIS: The simplest answer is because he wanted to. He wanted to explain himself. He wanted to provide an account of what he had done. Very early on, our first meeting—
AMY GOODMAN: Did he call you, or you call him?
ERROL MORRIS: I called him. I sent him a copy of The Fog of War in a letter. And I was told by his lawyer, Bob Barnett, that he would never, ever, ever speak to me. He said, "Forget about it. This is never going to happen." But he did call me. I went to Washington. We met. And this film is the result.
AMY GOODMAN: In that trailer we just played, he talked about the possibility of having become president. How would that have happened?
ERROL MORRIS: Could have happened in a whole number of different ways. He was extraordinarily successful at a very young age—four-term congressman from Illinois and then a whole number of Cabinet-level appointments in the Nixon administration.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: He was the youngest secretary of defense in the history of the country, right?
ERROL MORRIS: Eventually, in the Ford administration, one of the youngest chiefs of staff, if not the youngest, before his assistant, Richard Cheney, took his place, and then the youngest secretary of defense. He has that distinction of being the youngest and the oldest secretary of defense, first time around for Ford and, of course, second time around for George W. Bush.
AMY GOODMAN: He wrote like 20,000 memos?
ERROL MORRIS: They were called "snowflakes," because there were so many of them, probably more—
AMY GOODMAN: And they were on white paper.
ERROL MORRIS: Probably more than 20,000.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn back to the film, Unknown Known.
ERROL MORRIS: How about "a lot"? We’ll call them—he wrote a lot.
AMY GOODMAN: Donald Rumsfeld talking about those memos that he wrote on Iraq.
DONALD RUMSFELD: If you look at the range of my memos, there might be one-tenth of 1 percent about Iraq. The reason I was concerned about Iraq is because four-star generals would come to me and say, "Mr. Secretary, we have a problem. Our orders are to fly over the northern part of Iraq and the southern part of Iraq on a daily basis with the Brits, and we are getting shot at. At some moment—could be tomorrow, could be next month, could be next year—one of our planes is going to be shot down, and our pilots and crews are going to be killed, or they’re going to be captured. The question will be: What in the world were we flying those flights for? What was the cost-benefit ratio? What was our country gaining?" So you sit down, and you say, "I think I’m going to see if I can get the president’s attention, remind him that our planes are being shot at, remind him that we don’t have a fresh policy for Iraq, and remind him that we’ve got a whole range of options"—not an obsession, a very measured, nuanced approach.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known. Our guest, the Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris. We’ll be back with him in a moment.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest this half of the show is Errol Morris, the director of the new documentary, The Unknown Known. He has won an Oscar for Best Documentary for his film The Fog of War. That was Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. This film is about Donald Rumsfeld. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in this clip from The Unknown Known, our guest, Errol Morris, asks Rumsfeld about the torture memos that authorized techniques such as waterboarding against prisoners captured by the United States.
ERROL MORRIS: What about all these so-called torture memos?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, there were what? One or two or three. I don’t know the number, but there were not all of these so-called memos. They were mischaracterized as torture memos, and they came not out of the Bush administration, per se; they came out of the U.S. Department of Justice, blessed by the attorney general, the senior legal official of the United States of America, having been nominated by a president and confirmed by the United States Senate overwhelmingly. Little different cast I just put on it than the one you did. I’ll chalk that one up.
ERROL MORRIS: Was the reaction unfair?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, I’ve never read them.
ERROL MORRIS: Really?
DONALD RUMSFELD: No. I’m not a lawyer. What would I know?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Errol Morris, talk to us about that exchange you had with him.
ERROL MORRIS: Strange, looking at the clips, even here. They’re clips, of course, that I’m more than familiar with, having spent so much time with Donald Rumsfeld and having spent so much time edited this movie. Things surprised me in the interview and still surprise me. Someone asked me, "Is he completely insincere?" And I said, "No, the problem is he’s completely sincere." When he tells you he never read those torture memos, I don’t think he did. When he reads the laundry list of enhanced interrogation techniques, a.k.a. torture, he himself seems surprised by what he’s reading, as if he had never really carefully read them before. He suddenly says, "Good grief, that’s a pile of stuff." There’s this odd disconnection between these policies and what he thinks he’s doing.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about his—there are two things that struck me in the film. One is his periodic smile, that this—
ERROL MORRIS: The grin.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The grin of complete certainty about everything that he’s saying. And then the other thing is his relationship to language and his use of language. It’s certainly—he always seems to believe he has a better command of the answers than—clearly, than anyone asking him the questions.
ERROL MORRIS: I would put it differently. Orwell, George Orwell, wrote about how language could be used by people in power to control others. Often, I think this is a new twist on the story. He’s controlling others, hiding things from others, and also hiding things from himself. The end of the story, he retreats into a kind of strange Looney Tunes world of language, where he thinks if he can just find the right set of words, everything will be OK.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Oh, but I just want to ask him about that grin, the smile. Your sense of it?
ERROL MORRIS: My wife calls him the Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland. Alice says about the cat, "I’ve often seen a cat without a grin; I’ve never seen a grin without a cat." It’s this strange, disembodied grin almost, this look of self-satisfaction, of pleasure, the cat that swallowed the canary. This is one of the strangest and most disturbing interviews I’ve ever done.
AMY GOODMAN: Of those tens of thousands of memos, what most shocked you? I mean, you’re bringing us, as you did with Fog of War, the war—then Vietnam, now Iraq—from the perspective of the person who’s running that war, or one of them.
ERROL MORRIS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, the question is: What about at the target end? Do you have a desire to make a film from a victim’s perspective?
ERROL MORRIS: I had a desire to make a very specific kind of film. I call it history from the inside out. This was also true of McNamara, Fog of War. How do they see the world? The memos, the oral history is a way in. I didn’t interview 15, 20 people. I interviewed one person.
AMY GOODMAN: Though you did interview many people; you just used one in the film, right, around this film, asking them their thoughts about Rumsfeld?
ERROL MORRIS: I interviewed only one person on camera. I actually interviewed two people on camera, but I knew I wasn’t using the second interview. It was an interview with his wife Joyce, who I very much liked.
But you asked me a question about whether there was one memo among these tens of thousands of memos that stood out among others. And I would say, yes, the most disturbing of the disturbing memos, of Rumsfeld’s greatest hits. Here’s a man of slogans and epithets and rules, etc., etc., etc. "Weakness is provocative." "Pearl Harbor is a failure of the imagination." But the most nefarious of them is: "Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence." And he said this to—guess who—the president of the United States. I see him reading this memo. Where does it come from? From the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It was used by the British astronomer Martin Rees and by Carl Sagan. We’re looking for intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. Universe is a very big place. We haven’t found evidence, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not out there. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, he’s talking about weapons of mass destruction.
ERROL MORRIS: This gets transferred over to—guess where—Iraq.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One of the—I want to play an exchange—
ERROL MORRIS: Where it makes no sense, I might add.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to play an exchange from the Pentagon briefing in 2002, the infamous briefing when Rumsfeld first described his ideas about the known unknown to the public. He was questioned by NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski.
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: Could I follow up, Mr. Secretary, on what you just said, please? In regard to Iraq, weapons of mass destruction—weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction? Because there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: The reports that say there’s—that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because, as we know, there are known knowns—there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones. And so, people who have the omniscience that they can say with high certainty that something has not happened, or is not being tried, have capabilities that are—what was the word you used, Pam, earlier?
PAM HESS: Free associate?
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: Yeah, they can—they can do things I can’t do. Barbara?
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: Excuse me, but is this an unknown unknown?
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: I’m not—
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: There’s several unknowns, and I’m just wondering if this is an unknown unknown.
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: I’m not—I’m not going—I’m not going to say which it is.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Donald Rumsfeld back in 2002. But Donald Rumsfeld has been back in the news this week. During an appearance on Fox News, he said a trained ape could do a better job in Afghanistan than President Obama.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Yeah, our relationship with Karzai and with Afghanistan was absolutely first rate in the Bush administration. It has gone downhill like a toboggan ever since the Obama administration came in. Now, take for example the fact that we have status of forces agreement probably with 100, 125 countries in the world. This administration, the White House and the State Department, have failed to get a status of forces agreement. A trained ape could get a status of forces agreement. It does not take a genius.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Errol Morris, your reaction to this latest statement by Don Rumsfeld?
ERROL MORRIS: Horrified. We all know that the various officials of the Bush administration, George W. Bush himself, will never be held accountable for most, if not all, of the things that happened under their watch. They can now sit back and crow about one thing or another and indulge in one form of partisan politics after another. Maybe that’s the most disturbing thing about this story. If they took us to war for no good reason, shouldn’t they be in some way held accountable for that fact? Isn’t that important to our democracy, that we just don’t simply sweep the past under the rug, that we deal with it in some fashion?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, interestingly, in your interview with Rumsfeld, one of the—one of the mistakes he believes he made was not resigning after the Abu Ghraib revelations, even though he hastens to add that it was overblown as a systemic problem rather than a problem with a few guys, a few bad apples in the military on a night shift.
ERROL MORRIS: He tendered two resignations, neither of which were accepted by the president. He often wants to have it both ways. He will provide some gesture suggesting that he takes complete responsibility and on the other hand take none.
AMY GOODMAN: Does he ever apologize?
ERROL MORRIS: That word is not really part of his lexicon. No, there are no apologies.
AMY GOODMAN: What most shocked you in your 33 hours of conversation with Donald Rumsfeld?
ERROL MORRIS: So many things. The fact that he unendingly says things which are not true, about—he unendingly says things that are false. Does he even realize it?
AMY GOODMAN: So you say he lies throughout?
ERROL MORRIS: Lying—
AMY GOODMAN: We have two seconds.
ERROL MORRIS: —depends on a conscious element. Who the hell knows what’s going on upstairs. I most certainly don’t.
AMY GOODMAN: Errol Morris, I want to thank you for being with us, the director of the new documentary, The Unknown Known. It opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 2nd.
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Targeted by Firebombing, Legislation, and Now Vandalism, Montana Abortion Provider Shutters Clinic
A Montana medical office that provided abortions, among other services, has been forced to close after a vandal systematically broke or slashed practically every object and surface inside. All Families Healthcare saw the destruction of its plumbing and heating systems, plants pulled up by their roots, and holes stabbed through faces in family photographs. The accused vandal, Zachary Klundt, is the son of a former board member of the anti-choice group Hope Pregnancy Ministries. Twyla Klundt resigned after her son’s arrest. We are joined by All Families Healthcare owner Susan Cahill, who is facing the latest threat to her work following decades of providing abortion as part of family healthcare. Another clinic where she worked was firebombed in 1994. The following year, the Montana state Legislature passed a measure known as the Susan Cahill Law to ban physician assistants from providing abortions. Cahill was the only physician assistant providing abortions in the state. The Montana Supreme Court later upheld her right to do so.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to Kalispell, Montana, where an attack by a vandal has destroyed one of four facilities in the state that provided abortions.
ALL FAMILIES HEALTHCARE VOICEMAIL RECORDING: You have reached All Families Healthcare. Our business is—no longer exists due to being destroyed by a hate crime.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was the voicemail message patients received after hours, starting earlier this month, when they called their healthcare provider. Early on March 4th, a vandal systematically broke or slashed practically every object and surface inside All Families Healthcare. He destroyed the building’s plumbing and heating systems, pulled plants up by their roots, stabbed holes through faces in family photographs. In a letter to the local paper, owner Susan Cahill wrote, quote, "This person took meticulous time destroying EVERYTHING that was important to me."
Later in the day, police received a report of another break-in at a local bail bond office. Nearby, they found 24-year-old Zachary Klundt. His shoe tread matched a print found at the health office. When he was arrested, Klundt was carrying a fully loaded pistol with a spare magazine in the holster. He faces arraignment today on four felony charges, including burglary and criminal mischief. Zachary Klundt is the son of Twyla Klundt, a board member of the anti-choice group Hope Pregnancy Ministries. She resigned following her son’s arrest.
AMY GOODMAN: The office that was destroyed on March 4th had just opened three weeks prior to the attack. That’s because Susan Cahill had been forced to relocate after a new owner purchased the building that housed her former office. The executive director of Hope Pregnancy Ministries has now admitted to buying Susan Cahill’s old building. In a statement to Democracy Now!, Michelle Reimer wrote, quote, "We made a stand for the prolife position in a legal, peaceful and non-confrontational way, purchasing the building in order to advance the cause of life," she wrote.
It’s not the first time Susan Cahill has faced attempts to stop her from providing abortions. Another clinic where she worked was firebombed in 1994. The following year, the Montana state Legislature passed a measure known as the Susan Cahill Law to ban physician’s assistants from providing abortions. Susan Cahill was the only physician’s assistant providing abortions in the state. The Montana Supreme Court eventually upheld her right to perform abortions, which she has been doing as part of family healthcare for 38 years. Susan Cahill joins us now from her home in Kalispell, Montana.
We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Susan. Can you talk about what happened on March 4th?
SUSAN CAHILL: Well, early in the morning of March 4th, my receptionist came to work and went in the back door and saw that the glass had been broken through and, smartly, didn’t go in, went upstairs to the landlord, who happens to be a lawyer, and said, "We’ve been broken into. Please call 911." Then she called me. And by the time I got there, the place was swarming with policemen and FBI, and they would not let us go in. And, in fact, I couldn’t go in 'til the next day in the afternoon, and they worked all night long. And I didn't know—you know, you don’t know what to expect; you have no idea about this. And they just kept telling me that "You have to be prepared. There’s a lot of damage." And at one point, the head police officers asked me if I wanted to see some videos before I walked in, and I declined. I just was anxious. I wanted to go in and see for myself. So we just—that day, we just hung out in shock and waited.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the—when you got the news of the arrest of a suspect in the incident, could you talk about that and also who the suspect is?
SUSAN CAHILL: Well, it just fit a lot of little pieces, of course, together, because I find out Zachary Klundt, the son of Twyla Klundt, who was one of the founders of Hope Pregnancy Ministries and who I have met about five years ago. I invited her for lunch kind of to mend fences, talking about our different views. I went and visited Hope Pregnancy Ministries. I invited her to visit my clinic, which she declined. And so, when I heard it was him, it didn’t surprise me. And then I also found out what I suspected, which was that Hope Ministries had bought my previous office. So, I just put the pieces together. Didn’t take too much work to do that.
AMY GOODMAN: Susan Cahill, you describe what the vandal did. Tell us about the shape of your offices. What did he destroy? What kind of weapons did he have?
SUSAN CAHILL: I can only surmise what kind of weapons he had. And it’s very hard for me to talk about my office because I get very emotional about it, because it was awful. And only three weeks previously, I had—because I had moved, I had painted it, I had new cabinets, I had window coverings. I had friends come; we put up artwork. It was really, really lovely, and I was very happy with how it looked. And so, to see that whole thing destroyed—and I really can’t tell you how much he meticulously worked at breaking absolutely everything that you can imagine. I mean, I even had an award, because I got an award as a risk taker from Lifetime TV back in 2003, and it was this big, heavy glass award, and he smashed it to smithereens. And I suspect that it was a hammer. I don’t know. He put claw—I think the end-of-the-hammer claw marks into all the pictures, my personal family pictures. He broke the glass on absolutely everything that has—had glass, whether it be cabinets or my artwork. He completely destroyed my ultrasound machine, of course. And then there were just papers. The couches had big holes in them. The exam tables had holes in them. The blood pressure cuff was completely broken, bent, destroyed. Tools were completely bent. I mean, he took a lot of care to do all this damage. And then there was—
AMY GOODMAN: Family photos?
SUSAN CAHILL: Family photos were destroyed. I mean, they—I’ve kept them, but they have holes in them. The glass was broken out. I had a picture of me and my son framed, because my son had written a very lovely letter to the editor in 2003, when I came back from doing some work in upstate New York, and I had framed it. And he put holes in both of our faces and destroyed the newspaper article that was framed.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Susan, we invited Michelle Reimer, the executive director of Hope Pregnancy Ministries, to join us on the program today, but she declined. She did issue a written statement, though. She confirmed the mother of the suspect in the attack on your clinic served on the board of directors of Hope Pregnancy Ministries. Reimer said Twyla Klundt has since resigned, quote, "in order to keep Hope Pregnancy Ministries from being unjustly accused or associated in any way with Zach’s actions." She also wrote Hope Pregnancy Ministries was "shocked and saddened" by the attack on your clinic, calling it "abhorrent and a totally unacceptable manner by which to express opposition to abortion." Your reaction?
SUSAN CAHILL: Well, of course she’s going to say that. I mean, what is she going—she’s not going to say, "We’re happy about it." I mean, that wouldn’t be appropriate. But I think that she needs—they need to take—they need to be accountable for what happened. I wrote a letter to the physician, who I’ve known very well for 38 years, who is the the physician for Hope Ministries—Pregnancy Ministries. And I said to him, you know, "I’m a victim here, but so is Zachary Klundt, because babies are born in innocence and love, and they are taught to hate." And I think that that is where they have to be accountable.
AMY GOODMAN: How was he caught, Zachary Klundt? Not in your offices. And how long do you expect he spent destroying your medical clinic?
SUSAN CAHILL: You know, it’s a very good question, and lots of people who saw the destruction keep saying, "How could one person do so much damage?" So, a lot of people think there’s got to be more than one. I don’t know. It’s hard to grasp those things, because when you can’t imagine doing it yourself, I mean, you just can’t imagine anybody doing something like that. So, I think he must have had to spend a lot of time there. And I don’t know what this other bond—you know, the bail bond place that he got into, what that was about. You know, my first thought is either he was set up to do that so that it looked like a random act; the other thought was that he was drunk with power over what he had just done and continued on. I don’t know.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you now, it’s been decades now that you have been conducting your work amidst enormous hostilities, to the point where the Legislature attempted to write a law specifically aimed at you. Could you talk about the toll it’s taken on you and why you persist so much in maintaining the right to abortion for women?
SUSAN CAHILL: Because it’s the right thing to do. That’s why I have continued on. I mean, I grew up when abortion was illegal, and became legal when I was a young woman. And as a young woman, it made total sense to me that women have to have this medical availability safely. And when I went to PA school from '74 to ’76, I was taught to do abortions during my schooling, which is—doesn't happen anymore. And then when I came out to Montana, the physician who was—who was working at the time, Dr. Armstrong, who was also from New York originally, had vowed, because he saw women die every day, when he was in medical school, of illegal abortion, and he vowed that if it ever became legal, he would do it as part of his family practice. And by the time that I got on the scene, he was so inundated with requests for abortion services that he needed help, and he saw that I had been trained, so we hooked up. It has never been a doubt in my mind how important this is. And when I wrote the letter to the newspaper, I said, rightly so, abortion is a very simple, safe medical procedure, and it saves women’s lives, because we know that women will always seek abortion services, and there is absolutely no reason why women should die from it. And it’s so clear to me, because life is hard, and families and women need choices in their lives. And reproduction is like key to being able to make choices in your life.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Susan Cahill, you are a physician’s assistant, and the law that the Montana Legislature passed was directly targeting you, saying a physician’s assistant cannot perform abortion, but then was overturned by the Montana Supreme Court a couple of years later?
SUSAN CAHILL: Correct. What happens is that when abortion became legal, Roe v. Wade said only medical—only doctors, trained physicians, could do abortions, which was in response to the illegal people that were doing abortions before Roe. So—and there weren’t a lot of allied health professionals at the time. We were just starting out—"allied professionals" meaning physician assistants and nurse practitioners, particularly. And so, there weren’t those, so you weren’t going to add them. So then, when they were trying to stop me from doing them, they went to that law. And it took two years for the Montana Supreme Court to say, you know, that’s not what the law was intended to mean. It meant that people who were trained and skilled should be able to do this procedure. So that’s why it was overturned.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Susan, I wanted to play a clip of one of your former colleagues, Dr. Susan Wicklund, who recently closed her clinic in Livingston, Montana. She’s the author of This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor. In 2009, during a talk at Revolution Books here in New York City, Susan Wicklund described how a shortage of rural abortion providers compelled her to travel to five clinics across three states—Wisconsin, North Dakota and Minnesota—to provide abortions, and then anti-choice groups figured out what she was doing. She describes how they came to her house in northern Minnesota and formed a blockade out of cement barrels.
DR. SUSAN WICKLUND: The day that they had put cement barrels in my yard and to try to keep me from going to the clinic, which is the same day that I snuck out of the house carrying a loaded 45, which is the same day I drove, you know, all night long to get to the clinic in Fargo, and then that morning showed up at the clinic—and the protesters, of course, thought I was barricaded in my house, because their buddies, 260 miles away, of course, were holding me captive. And they were quite shocked when, for the first time ever, I stepped out of that clinic with my scrubs on and my lab coat, and I put my fist in the air, and I said, "Yes, there will be clinic today! You are not going to stop this clinic!"
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Dr. Susan Wicklund. She went on to describe how the anti-choice extremists went to her daughter’s school and put up posters bearing Susan’s face with the words "Wanted for the murder of children." Susan Cahill, your response?
SUSAN CAHILL: I know Susan Wicklund very well. My response is, it’s painful, but not surprising. And this is why it’s getting harder and harder for us, as abortion providers, to offer that service, because it’s nonstop. And I don’t know what to say about that other than I just wish that everybody would be—would say this can’t go on. This is a safe, legal medical procedure, and it’s the only medical procedure that is allowed to be demonized continually, and the people who do them to be demonized continually. And it wears you down.
AMY GOODMAN: Susan Cahill, is the FBI looking at this as terrorism?
SUSAN CAHILL: I don’t think that they are looking at it as terrorism. But they’re quiet about what they’re doing, so I have to respect that. I felt that they’ve been very supportive, so I just have to respect that. I don’t know.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about the Hope Pregnancy Ministries. The Montana Human Rights Network has accused Hope Pregnancy Ministries of receiving support from white supremacists. It cites a post by a local resident, April Gaede, on the neo-Nazi site Stormfront in 2009. Gaede wrote, quote, "If you want to do something to help save White babies please donate to this group. I have personally met many of these people and they are some of the most devoted to saving the unborn that I have ever met. ... Since our local population is over 95% White you are pretty much guaranteed to be helping to save White babies." Michelle Reimer, the executive director of Hope Pregnancy Ministries, denied the link in a statement to Democracy Now!. She wrote, "We have no record of Ms. Gaede ever making a donation to Hope Pregnancy Ministries."
SUSAN CAHILL: Did you want me to comment on that?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, Susan, about this—or at least this supposed link between Hope Pregnancy Ministries and a white supremacist site.
SUSAN CAHILL: Well, again, I—it doesn’t surprise me. And from what I know about that—and it’s only secondhand—is that once it came out and the Human Rights Network pushed it, Hope Ministries backed off and said, "No, we don’t want a connection with them," just like they’re now saying, you know, "We abhor this violence" to my clinic. I mean, they are going to say that, because it doesn’t make them look very good. They want to look like they’re just these nice little people that are trying to save babies. And I think that they’re very dangerous people.
AMY GOODMAN: Zachary Klundt, what kind of weapons did he have when he went into your office, into your clinic?
SUSAN CAHILL: I don’t know that either, but all I know is that—what was reported, which was that he had on his person—you know, I don’t even know about arms, except that he had a semi-automatic rifle in his car, and he had a semi-automatic, I think, pistol on his person, with an extra round. And I would venture to guess that they were with him at the time, but I’m not sure of that.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned about your own personal safety?
SUSAN CAHILL: I absolutely believe that this man—this is what I think happened. The Reimers bought my office, hoping that that would stop me from having a business, because it’s not easy for me to find a place to rent. It took me a long time to find the place on Meridian Road, and—but I did find one. And so, I think that that pissed off—pardon me—the Hope Pregnancy Ministries, and so they decided to destroy my office. And my feeling is that if that had not been successful, because of the incredible violence and hatred that was palpable in my office, I think that they would have destroyed me. That’s how I feel. So, yes, I am nervous about that.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what are your plans now for the future? What’s been the reaction in the—in your community to the attack? And are you planning to seek to try to reopen again?
SUSAN CAHILL: This has been probably the most dramatic situation of my life so far, which is saying a lot, considering I’ve gone through a fair amount. But this has been big. And it feels bigger because it was an attack on me personally from somebody else in the community. And our firebombing in 1994 was from a man from—I think he was from Texas, and he had done it to three clinics. So, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I haven’t made any decisions, and I’m taking the summer off. My phone lines are open; my faxes are open. I talk to patients—mostly, my patients are regular patients—and try and help them with whatever they need, including referrals. And I’m not making any commitment to anything until I really think deeply about this.
AMY GOODMAN: Susan Cahill, I wanted to end by asking you to tell the story behind the painting that was destroyed in your office. It’s the Norman Rockwell painting, Golden Rule, which bears that text: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The glass broken, the painting slashed. What’s the history of this painting, where you first got it and where else it’s hung over the years?
SUSAN CAHILL: Yeah, it’s a good story. Dr. Armstrong and I were at a meeting, a National Abortion Federation meeting in Philadelphia, and we went to the Norman Rockwell Museum. And it’s a small—it’s an interesting museum, and it goes around in a circle, and we kind of both went in opposite directions to come back to the sales desk. And when we got there, Dr. Armstrong was there already, and I came up, and I said to him, "I think that we ought to get The Golden Rule for our office." And he looked at me, and he just pointed to the salesperson, because she was wrapping it at the time. So, we bought that together. And it was being framed when we had our firebomb in our office. So when we rebuilt, which took five months, that was the first thing that went up in our office in the waiting room, and it stayed there forever. And then, when Dr. Armstrong retired and I opened up All Families Healthcare, he gave it to me to put in my office.
AMY GOODMAN: And that was the painting that was destroyed on March 4th.
SUSAN CAHILL: Correct.
AMY GOODMAN: Susan Cahill, I want to thank you for being with us, owner of All Families Healthcare, one of four facilities in Montana that provide abortion. Her clinic was destroyed March 4th. Another clinic where she previously worked was firebombed in 1994. The following year, the Montana state Legislature passed a bill that became known as the Susan Cahill Law to ban physician’s assistants from providing abortion, but the Montana Supreme Court eventually upheld her right to practice abortion, which she has been doing as part of family healthcare for 38 years. A campaign to raise funds for her after the attack has raised more than $62,000 at the website Indiegogo. Susan Cahill, all the best to you. Please be safe.
I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. When we come back, we will be joined by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris to talk about his new film, The Unknown Known. Stay with us.
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Headlines:
Obama Chides Russia on "Brute Force," Rejects Iraq War Criticism
President Obama continues an overseas tour in Italy today where he’s meeting with Pope Francis for the first time. Wrapping up a visit to Brussels, Obama delivered an address criticizing Russia for annexing Crimea and using what he called "brute force."
President Obama: "Of course, Ukraine is not a member of NATO, in part because of its close and complex history with Russia. Nor will Russia be dislodged from Crimea or deterred from further escalation by military force. But with time, so long as we remain united, the Russian people will recognize that they cannot achieve security, prosperity and the status that they seek through brute force."
In his remarks, President Obama tried to counter Russian claims of U.S. hypocrisy with what critics called a revisionist take on the Iraq War. Obama said the U.S. tried to "work within the international system" before the Iraq invasion.
President Obama: "Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an example of Western hypocrisy. Now, it is true that the Iraq War was a subject of vigorous debate, not just around the world, but in the United States, as well. I participated in that debate, and I opposed our military intervention there. But even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people."
Obama’s comments omitted the U.S. attacked Iraq without Security Council approval and that the subsequent occupation lasted over eight years.
Ukraine, IMF Agree on $18B Aid for Austerity Reforms
Obama’s comments come as Ukraine has secured a massive bailout from the IMF. The Ukrainian government will receive up to $18 billion in credits and aid in return for accepting austerity measures rejected by the ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych.
Philippines, Muslim Rebels Sign Landmark Peace Deal
The Philippine government has reached an historic peace deal with the country’s largest Muslim rebel group after decades of conflict. The agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front would create an autonomous government on the southern island of Mindanao. In return, the group will renounce armed struggle in its fight for self-determination. An estimated 120,000 people have died in years of fighting between the Philippine government and rebel forces.
Egyptian General Resigns to Clear Run for Presidency
The head of the Egyptian military has stepped down, paving the way for his candidacy in the upcoming presidential elections. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led the coup that ousted Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, last July, and has overseen the ensuing crackdown that’s left hundreds dead and thousands behind bars. Sisi has a strong base of support and is expected to win. On Wednesday, one person was killed near Egypt’s Cairo University in ongoing protests against the sentencing of over 500 Muslim Brotherhood members to death. The protests come as over 900 additional Brotherhood members were ordered to stand trial on charges of terrorism and murder.
Study: Executions Rose Worldwide in 2013
A new study says capital punishment is on the rise across the globe. Audrey Gaughran of Amnesty International blamed Iran and Iraq for an increase of over 100 executions over the previous year.
Audrey Gaughran: "Almost a hundred more people were put to death in 2013 compared to 2012. The countries responsible for that sharp spike are largely Iran and Iraq. Four countries also resumed executions during 2013, which was quite troubling. But that said, the overall picture, the long-term picture, in terms of abolition of the death penalty is positive, and if we look back over 10, 20 years, we see a steady decline in the use of the death penalty."
The United States was fifth on the list of executing countries, with 39 killings in 2013.
Oklahoma Judge Strikes Down Secrecy on Execution Drugs
An Oklahoma judge has struck down a law that hides information on the drugs used in lethal injections. Two death row prisoners had sued the state to disclose the source of the drugs to be used in their executions. On Wednesday, District Court Judge Patricia Parrish ruled Oklahoma has violated the Constitution by failing to disclose the name of the drug supplier, the combination of chemicals and the dosages used in executions. The ruling could delay executions in other states where prisoners are challenging similar laws.
Northwestern University Football Players Win Right to Unionize
Football players at Northwestern University have won a historic victory that could change the world of college sports. On Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Board ruled players at private colleges qualify as employees under the law and accordingly have the right to form a union. The Northwestern players are not seeking a salary from the billions in revenue generated by the NCAA, but want medical protections for concussions and other injuries, as well as guarantees on their academic scholarships.
Bank of America in $9.3B Settlement for Selling Toxic Bonds; Ex-CEO Faces 3-Year Ban
The financial giant Bank of America has finalized a $9.3 billion settlement for selling toxic mortgage bonds to the government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the financial crisis. The Justice Department says Bank of America executed a scheme that would blindly hand out mortgages without proper checks and then turn around and sell the toxic loans to Fannie and Freddie. While Bank of America reaped a windfall, Fannie and Freddie were stuck with huge losses and foreclosed properties. Bank of America has also reached a settlement for misleading investors in its takeover of the troubled firm Merrill Lynch. Under the agreement, former Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis is banned from serving as an officer or director of a public company for three years.
Connecticut Lawmakers Advance $10.10 Minimum Wage
Connecticut’s state Senate has advanced a measure that would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, the nation’s highest statewide rate. The bill now goes to the state House where it’s expected to pass.
Bin Laden Son-in-Law Convicted in Terrorism Trial
The son-in-law of Osama bin Laden has been convicted on charges of conspiring to kill Americans. Sulaiman Abu Ghaith is the most senior al-Qaeda member to be tried in a U.S. civilian court in the years since 9/11. During testimony, he described meeting with bin Laden inside a cave in Afghanistan just hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but denied having prior knowledge. Ghaith’s court-appointed lawyer said his appearance in videos threatening the U.S. doesn’t prove his involvement in actual plots.
Stanley Cohen: "It’s not about words; it’s not about association. There are clear requirements under the law. You know, if you want to turn around and indict people for words, there’s about 270 congressmen and women right now that have said some pretty incendiary things about a lot of things; maybe we should start there."
During the trial, the court rejected testimony from alleged 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that Abu Ghaith had no role in al-Qaeda’s violent operations. He faces a sentence of up to life in prison.
Journalist, Anti-Nuclear Activist Jonathan Schell Dead at 70
And the journalist, author and activist Jonathan Schell has died at the age of 70. A leading advocate for nuclear disarmament, Schell’s bestselling book, "The Fate of the Earth," is recognized for helping spark the anti-nuclear movement of the early 1980s. Speaking to Democracy Now! in 2007, Schell said a nuclear-free world is an achievable goal.
Jonathan Schell: "If we had a president who was dedicated to this aim, I think it could become a reality. The problems — it’s not like global warming, where you perhaps have to change the whole way that we live on a global basis. We know how to get rid of these things. Already, we’ve come down about halfway since the height of the Cold War. We just have to keep going in that direction. It’s a tremendous task, but it’s a notably doable one."

Schell was a longtime writer for The Nation magazine. In a tribute, The Nation editor Katrina vanden Huevel said: "The power and persuasiveness of so much of Jonathan Schell’s work came not only from his elegant style, clarity of analysis and powerful logic but also in the enduring belief that there is no idea so powerful as a moral one."
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"Barack Obama: The Least Transparent President in History" by Amy Goodman
“My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” So wrote President Barack Obama, back on Jan. 29, 2009, just days into his presidency. “Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.” Now, six years into the Obama administration, his promise of “a new era of open Government” seems just another grand promise, cynically broken.
As the news industry observed its annual “Sunshine Week” in mid-March, The Associated Press reported that “[m]ore often than ever, the administration censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act [FOIA].” The AP report continued, “The government’s efforts to be more open about its activities last year were their worst since President Barack Obama took office.”
This comes as no surprise to Ryan Shapiro, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who just filed a federal lawsuit against the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency, seeking public records pertaining to the U.S. role in the 1962 arrest of Nelson Mandela, which would land him in prison for 27 years. When his FOIA requests on Mandela were denied, he sued. “I’m pursuing these records,” he explained to me, “mostly because I’m interested in knowing why the U.S. intelligence community viewed Mandela as a threat to American security and what role the U.S. intelligence community played in thwarting Mandela’s struggle for racial justice and democracy in South Africa.”
Shapiro filed a FOIA request with the NSA, seeking details on the arrest of Mandela over 50 years ago. The NSA wrote in reply, “To the extent that you are seeking intelligence information on Nelson Mandela, we have determined that the fact of the existence or non-existence of the materials you request is a currently and properly classified matter.” Half a century later? 
Shapiro also is seeking information on Mandela’s placement on the U.S. terror watch list until 2008, which was years after he had served as South Africa’s first democratically elected president, years after he had won not only the Nobel Peace Prize, but the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. I asked Shapiro why he was chasing down all these documents. “The answer,” he replied, “has to do with this blinkered understanding of national security, this myopic understanding that places crass military alliances and corporate profits over human rights and civil liberties.”
Shapiro has an interesting history, and a personal stake in the government labeling activists “terrorists.” In 2002, Shapiro engaged in an act of civil disobedience, infiltrating a farm where ducks are raised for the production of foie gras, exposing what he calls “horrific conditions which are the absolute norm on factory farms.” He said he and other activists “openly rescued, or stole, animals from a factory farm, made a movie about it. I did it as an act of civil disobedience, but it’s a real crime ... I did 40 hours of community service, and that was it.” Since that time, state after state has passed so-called Ag-Gag laws, which equate some animal-rights activism with terrorism, and which can include incredibly harsh prison sentences.
He says his dissertation in progress, titled “Bodies at War: Animals, the Freedom of Science, and National Security in the United States,” looks “at the use of the rhetoric and apparatus of national security to marginalize animal protectionists from the late 19th century to the present.” Shapiro is seeking a wealth of public documents to answer the question. He has close to 700 FOIA requests before the FBI, seeking 350,000 documents, leading the Justice Department to call him its “most prolific” requester. The FBI has labeled part of his dissertation a threat to national security.
In 2008, when campaigning, Barack Obama was often touted as a constitutional-law professor. As such, we can assume he studied writings of one of that document’s authors, James Madison, the fourth president of the U.S., considered the “Father of the Bill of Rights.” Madison wrote, in 1822, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.” With Edward Snowden’s revelations of massive NSA spying and surveillance, and the administration’s abysmal record on transparency, President Obama has tragically moved well beyond farce.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
© 2014 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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