democracynow.org
Stories:
Matt Taibbi: Eric Holder Back to Wall Street-Tied Law Firm After Years of Refusing to Jail Bankers
In the latest sign of the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, recently retired U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is returning home — to the corporate law firm Covington & Burling, where he worked for eight years before becoming head of the Justice Department. During his time at Covington, Holder’s clients included UBS and the fruit giant Chiquita. The law firm’s client list has included many of the big banks Holder failed to criminally prosecute as attorney general for their role in the financial crisis, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup. We speak with Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine. "I think this is probably the single biggest example of the revolving door that we’ve ever had," Taibbi says.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the latest sign of the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington. Recently retired U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is returning home—to the corporate law firm Covington & Burling, where he worked for eight years before becoming head of the Justice Department. During his time at Covington, Holder’s clients included UBS and the fruit giant Chiquita. The law firm’s client list has included many of the big banks that the Justice Department under Holder’s leadership failed to criminally prosecute for their role in the financial crisis, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup.
AMY GOODMAN: In a new interview with The National Law Journal, Eric Holder said his, quote, "appropriately aggressive," unquote, challenges to financial and corporate fraud could mean certain institutions "might not want to work with me," he said, "and ... that’s fine," unquote. However, in 2013, Holder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and suggested some banks are too big to jail.
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large. Again, I’m not talking about HSBC; this is just a more general comment. I think it has an inhibiting influence—impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined by Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine, who writes about Eric Holder’s time at Covington & Burling and much more in his book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, which is now out in paperback.
It’s great to have you back, Matt.
MATT TAIBBI: Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: So you were tweeting up a storm yesterday as this news came of the former attorney general, Eric Holder, going back to Covington & Burling. Talk about the significance of this.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I mean, I think this is probably the single biggest example of the revolving door that we’ve ever had. And we’ve had some whoppers in our past. I think previously the worst one was probably Louisiana Congressman Billy Tauzin leaving Congress and taking a $2-million-a-year job with PhRMA, right after he helped pass the prescription drug benefit bill. But what Holder just did just blows Tauzin away. I mean, he spent six years essentially guiding all of these Wall Street firms, which many of them are clients of this company that he’s now working for—he guided them all back to profitability. He allowed bankers to escape prosecution. And now he’s going right back to that firm, where he’s going to enjoy a very lucrative partnership, whether he ever works again, you know, for the rest of his life.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Holder also sort of became a point person for these, quote, "extrajudicial settlements."
MATT TAIBBI: Right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you explain what those are and how they worked?
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, Holder, in general, pioneered a number of different ways that essentially a lot of these too-big-to-fail companies were allowed to buy their way out of trouble. And one of the most notorious, I think, was that he concluded a number of the biggest settlement deals with banks like JPMorgan Chase in ways that were not reviewed by a judge. Because we did have some instances during this time period where pesky judges—I think one of the most infamous, in the eyes of Wall Street, was Jed Rakoff, who threw out a settlement with Citigroup because he thought it wasn’t harsh enough—well, to fix that problem, Holder just started striking deals and not submitting them for judicial review. So he did a $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase where no judge signed off on the deal. The whole thing was done in secret. He essentially institutionalized the back room. This was just a deal where a bunch of bankers got together with a bunch of Justice Department officials, money changed hands, and that was it. The whole—all of their criminal problems went away. This is a very different way of doing business than what we’ve ever seen before, and it’s very dangerous, I think.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And he also took the term "collateral damage" into the financial world out of the military world, didn’t he, as well?
MATT TAIBBI: Right, yeah. He actually predated the collateral damage idea back when he was a lawyer in the Clinton Justice Department. He wrote a memo that—you know, it’s now known as the Holder Memo, where he outlined a policy that is called "collateral consequences," and basically all this says is that if you’re a prosecutor and you’re worried about prosecuting a company that employs a lot of people and you’re concerned that innocent people might suffer as the result of a prosecution, you may pursue noncriminal remedies when you go after this company.
The problem was that when—by the time he became attorney general, the economic landscape was dotted all over with these enormous, too-big-to-fail companies, and there was a real threat that if you prosecuted these firms, that it might cause serious damage to the overall economy. Obviously we saw what happened with Lehman Brothers, for instance. So this became sort of the unofficial policy of the United States. We started taking companies that had done very bad things—you know, HSBC is probably the biggest example, laundering money for drug dealers—and instead of throwing people in jail and extracting huge individual penalties from the guilty parties, we just got the banks to pony up a big fine that shareholders paid, and they got to stay in business.
AMY GOODMAN: As you were tweeting your criticism yesterday, a lot of Obama supporters were also on social media pushing the line that Holder did not send anyone to jail because there were no laws broken.
MATT TAIBBI: Right, yeah, and this is—this comes, I think, directly from something that Barack Obama himself said on 60 Minutes once. He said some of the worst behavior on Wall Street was not illegal, some of the least ethical behavior was not illegal. But he crafted that phrase very carefully. He didn’t say all of it was not illegal. He said some of the worst behavior, and that’s true. But some of it was very illegal.
And again, just to go back to some of the worst cases, HSBC admitted to laundering $880 million for a pair of Central and South American drug cartels, including the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is infamous all over the world for these torture videos. So, we have HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, is washing hundreds of millions of dollars for people who chop people’s heads off with chainsaws. That’s a crime. I mean, there’s no—that’s the worst crime that a bank can possibly commit. And anybody who thinks that Holder didn’t send people to jail because they didn’t commit crimes is not really paying attention to what went on during this time.
AMY GOODMAN: Also at Covington & Burling, Eric Holder will be reunited with Lanny Breuer. Explain who he was and the significance of them together.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, Lanny Breuer worked at Covington & Burling along with Eric Holder. He went to Holder to become his deputy for the early part of his tenure as attorney general. He was the head of the Criminal Division. Lanny, from the sources that I spoke to while I was researching all this material, was terrified of going to court when he didn’t have an absolute, guaranteed, sure victory. And so, what happened very early in their tenure together was that they did take one case to trial. They went to trial against a pair of guys from Bear Stearns who were accused of defrauding their clients. And they lost. It ended in an acquittal, even though they had very solid documentary evidence. From that point forward, they didn’t take anybody to court. And all of these cases involving all of these banks, they went the settlement route instead, presumably because they were afraid of going into a courtroom. They were worried that juries didn’t understand this material. They were worried that it was too complicated. And so, rather than risk losing and getting a bad headline, they let off all of these people who had done very, very bad things, and so we have this legacy of cash instead of punishment.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Can you talk also about how the Justice Department and other regulatory groups have changed the composition of the staffing, the high-level staffing, of these agencies during this period when Holder has been there?
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah. This is something that I heard over and over again over the years, which is that a certain kind of person who used to work in the regulatory agencies, you know, who was a kind of a career civil servant, particularly the law enforcement types, the people who grew up through the ranks, you know, just trying to get the criminal at all costs—they’re primarily motivated by trying to extract justice from wrongdoers—that kind of person is gradually disappearing from the ranks of the regulatory bodies, and they are being replaced, increasingly, particularly at the higher levels, by people from the corporate defense community. And Holder was very profoundly a symbol of that kind of person.
And the difference was, when you have people who come from the corporate defense world, like Holder, like Lanny Breuer, they tend to approach these settlements not to get a pound of flesh out of the wrongdoers, but instead they want to emerge with a settlement that leaves everybody happy when they walk out of the room. But that’s really not a good approach to fighting crime. That’s not the kind of attitude you want in your top crime fighter in the country. And as a result, that’s how we got so many of these settlements, which, again, were concluded in secret, in the back room. And people like Jamie Dimon were walking out of these settlements, saying, "Well, this wasn’t so bad." And their share price would go up the day after these settlements were concluded. That’s really not what we want from the top cop in the country.
AMY GOODMAN: And this goes to the central theme of your book, Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. I mean, Attorney General Eric Holder was hailed as a great civil rights hero. After Ferguson, he actually went to Ferguson. I was in the Selma church on the 50th anniversary of the Selma march just a few months ago, when he gave a powerful speech about young black men—his own son, Eric Holder III, in the front row—being killed, and kept repeating that. It reminds me of Reverend Barber in North Carolina, head of the NAACP, who, after Dylann Roof was arrested, the alleged shooter in the Charleston church, said, "The perpetrator has been arrested, but the killer is still at large." And he was talking, overall, about the system, beyond the Confederate flag, what it represents—for example, mass incarceration—and how these things have to change.
MATT TAIBBI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: So talk about what this means—on the one hand, a civil rights crusader, but when it comes to issues of who gets put in prison and who remains free, where Eric Holder has stood.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I mean, to be fair, Eric Holder, you know, has talked a lot about reform of prison sentencing, and according to their statistics, incarceration has actually declined under the Obama administration for the first time in I don’t know how many years—forever. But still we have these enormous problems, like the story that you reported on in the beginning of this show. You have people who are in jail for not just for months, but years at a time, awaiting trial because they can’t afford bail. We have millions of people behind bars for crimes that are far less serious than what HSBC, for instance, was doing. And there’s this enormous dichotomy.
I think, you know, this is the—the chief problem with what Holder did is that there are all of these people who are in jail for crimes because it’s easy to put away people who don’t have enough money to defend themselves, who can’t pay enormous fines. Those are the people who end up going behind bars for crimes like money laundering or drug dealing or whatever it is. But we have this rationale for companies like HSBC or JPMorgan Chase or Credit Suisse or BNP Paribas, that are caught with doing tax evasion or money laundering or fraud or whatever it is, that somehow this class of defendants, we can allow them to pay their way out of trouble, while this other group of people has to go behind bars. And we just can’t have that. I mean, that system is totally inappropriate. And as much as Holder wants to hold himself out as a civil rights leader, and has done some good things, this dichotomy is really his legacy, and that’s an enormous problem.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the issue of him returning to Covington & Burling, could you talk about that particular law firm, its role in the Washington scene? And also, what are the limitations on appointed officials, in terms of once they leave office what they can or can’t do, or did the Obama administration institute particular restrictions on their appointees?
MATT TAIBBI: They did. There is a two-year cooling-off period, they call it, where, you know, someone who leaves the Justice Department has to wait for two years before they can interact with the Justice Department again. This means that even though Eric Holder has gone back to work, he has to sit for 19 months during this cooling-off period and do I don’t know what. I’m sure he’s going to be compensated very handsomely during that time.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But he can advise the lawyers that do the direct interaction.
MATT TAIBBI: Exactly, yeah. They’ll figure out some way to do it so that it’s, you know, superficially legal. But there is this cooling-off period. Covington & Burling, what its significance is, it’s one of the biggest white-collar defense firms in America. It is notable because it has such a lengthy list of too-big-to-fail banks among its clientele. It also, very interestingly, played a very important role in helping to create the subprime mortgage crisis, because it represented a company called MERS, which was the electronic mortgage registry system, which helped create a lot of the confusion and chaos in the paperwork area of the mortgage system. All these people who were trying to find out who owns their home and can’t find the note, a lot of that is chalked up to the work that MERS did to eliminate paper mortgages. So they had an enormous role in helping create this subprime mortgage market. And then, of course, Eric Holder goes, and he’s the regulator for all that activity, you know, as the attorney general. It was a little weird, to say the least.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Keir Gumbs?
MATT TAIBBI: Keir Gumbs? I’m sorry.
AMY GOODMAN: Keir Gumbs—
MATT TAIBBI: Oh, who has just become the—
AMY GOODMAN: —the man that Senator Warren has been protesting, would be put—
MATT TAIBBI: Right, who’s going to be—who’s going to be on the SEC now, yeah. I mean, this is a—they’re putting him—he’s going to be an SEC commissioner, presumably. Covington & Burling is becoming essentially a kind of shadow Justice Department now. We have six alums from the Justice Department who have just returned to Covington & Burling, and now Covington & Burling is sending another person to occupy a very high-ranking seat in the SEC. You know, it’s problematic, clearly, when you have so many people from the same firm who are all going to be talking to each other. It’s kind of this secondary club. And what happens when all these people have this congenial relationship, they end up making deals that are much more favorable to their clients than they would be otherwise.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, they can all regulate all of the Goldman Sachs alums that are in other agencies in the federal government.
MATT TAIBBI: Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, right.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the significance of Gumbs, yes, coming from Covington & Burling, but also representing American Petroleum, he and colleagues at the firm writing a guide advising corporations on how to avoid disclosing their political spending to shareholders, Senator Warren wanting the SEC to require companies to disclose that kind of spending. And the question is: Will President Obama respond to Senator Warren’s pressure?
MATT TAIBBI: Probably not, I’m guessing. You know, I mean, but this—it says a lot that this is the kind of person that they’re going to be bringing in to the SEC. And I think, you know, again, people want a different kind of person occupying these regulatory positions. They don’t want a corporate defense attorney who’s just spent however many years telling companies how to avoid punishment, how to avoid taxes, how to avoid all these problems. You know, I personally would much prefer to have a career investigator, career law enforcement official in that job.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you, Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, now out in paperback.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we head across the pond to London, to security guru Bruce Schneier. Stay with us.
The End of Encryption? NSA & FBI Seek New Backdoors Against Advice from Leading Security Experts
FBI Director James Comey is set to testify against encryption before the Senate Intelligence Committee today, as the United States and Britain push for "exceptional access" to encrypted communications. Encryption refers to the scrambling of communications so they cannot be read without the correct key or password. The FBI and GCHQ have said they need access to encrypted communications to track criminals and terrorists. Fourteen of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers, computer scientists and security specialists have issued a paper arguing there is no way to allow the government such access without endangering all confidential data, as well as the broader communications infrastructure. We speak with one of the authors of the paper, leading security technologist Bruce Schneier.
Image Credit: Reuters
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to look at a major new push by the U.S. and Britain to allow law enforcement agencies to unlock encrypted digital messages. Encryption refers to the scrambling of data sent, for example, via your phone or applications like Facebook so it cannot be read without the correct key or password. The FBI and GCHQ have said they need "exceptional access" to encrypted communications in order to track criminals and stop them from acting. More recently, they’ve said new encryption technologies will prevent them from monitoring the communications of terrorists.
AMY GOODMAN: But in a paper released on Tuesday, 13 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers, computer scientists and security specialists argued there is no way to allow the government such access without endangering all confidential data, as well as the broader communications infrastructure.
Today, FBI Director James Comey is set to testify against encryption before the Senate Intelligence Committee. In a blog post on Monday, Comey wrote, quote, "The current ISIL threat ... involves ISIL operators in Syria recruiting and tasking dozens of troubled Americans to kill people, a process that increasingly takes part through mobile messaging apps that are end-to-end encrypted, communications that may not be intercepted, despite judicial orders under the Fourth Amendment." That’s Comey speaking about encryption. Let’s go to him speaking about it last October.
JAMES COMEY: We’re seeing more and more where we believe significant evidence is on that phone or on that laptop, and we can’t crack the password. If this becomes the norm, I suggest to you that homicide cases could be stalled, suspects walk free, child exploitation not discovered and prosecuted. Justice may be denied because of a locked phone or an encrypted device.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Meanwhile, a new report about wiretapping in 2014 that was published last week found that law enforcement personnel at the state and federal level were only hindered by encryption on four wiretaps all year.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to London, where we’re joined by Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and author of the book, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. He is one of the co-authors of the paper that was released yesterday by encryption experts called "Keys Under Doormats: Mandating Insecurity by Requiring Government Access to All Data and Communications." He’s also a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Bruce, welcome back to Democracy Now! A major paper that you all, the security technologist gurus of the world, have just released. Talk about the significance of what the U.S. and Britain are demanding right now and why you consider it such a threat.
BRUCE SCHNEIER: It’s extraordinary that governments—that free governments are demanding that security be weakened because the government might want to have access. This is the kind of thing that we see out of Russia and China and Syria. But to see it out of Western countries, I think, is extraordinary. What we wanted to do in the paper is say, as technologists, trying to do this will be incredibly damaging. There’s a policy debate going on right now. You talked about Comey talking before the Senate. We want to come together as technologists to try to inform that debate, and that’s why we wrote the report.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And why do you say it will be incredibly damaging?
BRUCE SCHNEIER: Because what Comey wants is encryption that he can break with a court order. But as a technologist, I can’t design a computer that operates differently when a certain piece of paper is nearby. If I make a system that can be broken, it can be broken by anybody, not just the FBI. So his requirement for access gives criminals access, gives the Chinese government access. We need encryption for security, for many more reasons than he wants to break it. Trying to break it just makes it weak. We all have less security because of that.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to FBI Director James Comey speaking in October, when he warned against smartphone data encryption.
JAMES COMEY: Encryption is nothing new, but the challenge to law enforcement and national security officials is markedly worse with recent default encryption settings and encrypted devices and networks, all in the name of increased security and privacy. For example, with Apple’s new operating system, the information stored on many iPhones and other Apple devices will be encrypted by default. Shortly after Apple’s announcement, Google announced plans to follow suit with its Android operating system. This means that the companies themselves will not be able to unlock phones, laptops and tablets to reveal photos or documents or email or stored texts or recordings in those instruments.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s FBI Director James Comey. Bruce Schneier, your response?
BRUCE SCHNEIER: So, he said that, and problem is, whenever we hear these arguments, we don’t get any examples. You mentioned the recent report that said encryption only foiled wiretaps in four cases. Comey has not been able to give good examples of iPhones being encrypted. He gave some examples; they were pretty much instantly refuted. So we get a lot of scare stories, but we don’t get actual credible evidence that this is hindering law enforcement.
It turns out we give a lot of data that is not encrypted and can’t be encrypted—Facebook, email, lots of conversations, location data on our cellphone. This is actually the golden age of surveillance. And a lot of this stuff can be used against us. Remember, Apple’s—the photos from Apple’s servers that were stolen and leaked, and these were compromising photos of celebrities. And this is how our data is being stored. The fact that some stuff is being put on phones, some communications are secure, that’s not a hindrance to him. He says it is, but it’s scare stories.
And we heard these scare stories before. In the mid-'90s, we had this exact same debate. And most of the group of us that wrote the report we released yesterday released a report in the mid-'90s saying the same things. Here we are 20 years later, and there hasn’t been a problem. So I don’t see a problem, and I’m afraid the solution is damaging.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bruce, there seems to be more attention to the issue of the potential isolated group of terrorists being able to take advantage of the Internet, and not all of the companies that, on a daily basis, are being breached in one way or another. Consumers are going crazy with their private information being grabbed by all kinds of other folks that are able to penetrate systems, so that the emphasis, it seems to me, should be on more encryption, more protection for consumers on the Internet, and not the government being able to access everything.
BRUCE SCHNEIER: I mean, that’s exactly right. We’re concerned about criminals. We’re concerned about Chinese nationals, other countries. We’re concerned about the security of our data, and encryption is a valuable tool. To deliberately weaken that at the behest of the FBI or the U.K. government, I think, is a really crazy trade-off. It doesn’t make us safer; it makes us more at risk.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you’re speaking to us from the U.K. What is David Cameron proposing for the United Kingdom?
BRUCE SCHNEIER: Cameron is proposing something even more extreme. He’s made statements saying that secure encryption should be illegal. Now, that, I think, would be incredibly damaging. It’s also unworkable. I mean, if he wants to make that so, he has to seize my computer, my laptop, when I enter the country. He’s not going to do that. That will destroy tourism. But the noise here is even more extreme, that it should be a crime to use secure encryption. I think it really should be the opposite, that not using it, you should be liable for damages.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Bruce Schneier, about the backdoors that exist, and especially for a completely lay audience around the world, what we should be concerned about right now, now and also what Britain and the U.S. are considering, what Comey will be testifying about today?
BRUCE SCHNEIER: It’s an interesting question, because while encryption is a very powerful too and very strong, computer security is very weak. We, as scientists, don’t know how to build secure computers. So I can protect the encryption of your phone, but I can’t stop someone from hacking into it. And if you look at what the NSA does, what the Chinese government does, what criminals do, they hack into devices. And that’s something that we’re still very much at risk at. The big breaches you’re seeing are not breaches of encryption. They’re hacking. We know the FBI does hacking.
And a lot of us on the group believe that lawful hacking is the solution to Comey’s problem. Don’t break encryption for everybody, but hack into the computers of just the suspects you want to eavesdrop on. That’s more powerful. That’s something we can’t really prevent. And that gives you, the FBI, the U.K. government, the access you need. And that is both a problem and a solution. We do need to get better at it. I mean, all the breaches you’re seeing show how bad it is, whether it’s Office of Personnel Management; whether it’s a cyberweapons arms manufacturer in Italy, Hacking Team, last week; whether it’s Target or Home Depot or any bank. You know, these are all breaches of computer security from these flaws.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I wanted to ask you about one of those, another story in the news. Leaked documents appear to show an Italy-based private spyware company known as the Hacking Team was selling its products to U.S. law enforcement agencies and repressive governments around the world. The Hacking Team sells software which lets users seize remote control of another person’s computer. Its customers include the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Army, as well as foreign governments including Ethiopia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The documents were published to the company’s own Twitter feed following an apparent breach.
BRUCE SCHNEIER: So this is an amazing story. Hacking Team is a company—it’s a cyberweapons arms manufacturer—that sells both to the U.S. government and to repressive regimes all over the world. Hacking Team has been responsible for people dying. I have no doubt about that. And what happened is, some hacker decided to publish all of their documents. We learned some extraordinary things, like the company has secret access into the products it sold to all these countries and didn’t tell them. The company has problems. I mean, it’s one thing to have dissatisfied customers. Hacking Team has dissatisfied customers with hit squads. This is going to be bad. This is a company that I believe has behaved immorally. So I’m really kind of happy to see them on the ropes here.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about Edward Snowden. The person we were just talking about in the last segment, the former attorney general, Eric Holder, interestingly, after Eric Holder stepped down, he just recently said that he thinks the possibility exists for the Justice Department to cut a deal with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, allowing him to return to United States. I wanted to get your response to that and also how Edward Snowden’s revelations, now in political asylum in Russia, have informed your work, Bruce.
BRUCE SCHNEIER: You know, the data that Snowden revealed via the reporters has been nothing short of amazing. We’ve learned a lot about how the NSA works, the justifications behind what they do, the things they do. And by extension, we’ve learned what other countries do, as well. Right? The NSA is not made of magic. These are the same things Russia and China and Israel and France and other countries do. So we’re learning a lot about nation-state surveillance. And that teaches us how to make things more secure. At the same time, we’ve had this great political debate in the United States about what are the limits of U.S. surveillance. There’s been less of a debate in the U.K., but there has been some, as well. So Snowden has done two things, from my perspective: He’s shown citizens what the government is doing in their name, and he’s shown technologists what the capabilities of attack are, so we can build better defensive capabilities.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think he should be allowed to come back into the United States? And do you think he should be able to live as a free man?
BRUCE SCHNEIER: I mean, I certainly think he should. But this is—that’s very much a political decision. I’m a technologist. I think it’s still very—the emotions are very raw in the intelligence community. He did betray them. And I don’t know how many years have to pass before it doesn’t sting anymore, how many people have to retire. I think it would be great if he could return as a free man, but I don’t know.
AMY GOODMAN: Bruce, we want to thank you very much for being with us. Bruce Schneier, security technologist, author of Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, one of a group of 14 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers and computer scientists who have presented a paper challenging what the U.S. government and the British government want to do about encryption. We’ll continue to follow this story, of course.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, though, we’re going to Gaza City. It is the first anniversary of the Israeli assault on Gaza. Stay with us.
Has the World Abandoned Gaza? Region Remains in Ruins a Year After Deadly Israeli Assault
As Gaza marks one year since the launch of Israel’s devastating 50-day assault, it remains in a state of crisis. The assault killed 2,200 Palestinians, including 550 children. On the Israeli side, 73 people were killed, all but six of them soldiers. A year later, none of the 12,000 homes destroyed in Gaza have been rebuilt, in part due to the ongoing Israeli blockade. The World Bank is warning the Gaza economy is on the verge of collapse. Overall unemployment now stands at 43 percent — the highest in the world. We speak with Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer, author of "Shell-Shocked: On the Ground Under Israel’s Gaza Assault."
Image Credit: Reuters
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to Gaza, which remains in a state of crisis one year after the launch of Israel’s 50-day war. It was the third in Gaza in six years. Twenty-two hundred Palestinians, including 550 children, died. On the Israeli side, 73 people were killed, all but six of them soldiers. The attack destroyed 12,000 homes in Gaza. Another 100,000 were damaged. None of the destroyed homes have been rebuilt so far, due in part to the ongoing Israeli blockade. Channel 4 News in Britain has just posted drone footage showing how much of Gaza is still in ruins. A recent United Nations report found, quote, "serious violations of international humanitarian law" which "may amount to war crimes" by both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants during the assault.
AMY GOODMAN: The World Bank is warning the Gaza economy is on the verge of collapse. Overall unemployment now stands at 43 percent—the highest in the world. Sixty-eight percent of Gazans aged between 20 and 24 are unemployed. Two-thirds of Gaza’s 1.8 million residents are now recipients of U.N. aid in one form or another. To mark the anniversary of the war, UNICEF has just released video featuring a 12-year-old girl named Malak who survived last year’s attack.
MALAK: [translated] The doors are gone. The windows are gone. The walls—it’s as if we’re living on the street. It’s been a year since the war, and there’s still not enough water, not enough electricity. We’ll stay here because we have nowhere to go. I have nightmares every night. It wasn’t like that before the war. I want to become an engineer, so I can rebuild people’s homes, our house, our neighbor’s house, so I can help people, and they can be safe.
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Gaza City, where we’re joined by Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer. He is author of a new book, Shell-Shocked: On the Ground Under Israel’s Gaza Assault. He is past winner of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.
It’s great to have you with us, Mohammed. Talk about this first anniversary of the assaults. Where does Gaza stand today, where you’re standing?
MOHAMMED OMER: Thank you, Amy.
Well, in Gaza, today we mark the first anniversary of the war last summer, the 51-day war, which resulted in the killing of 2,250 Palestinians. The majority of them are civilians. Gaza is still living the same situation as right after the war and during the war. The only thing that we don’t have, Israeli F-16s overhead flying, and we don’t have the Israeli drones flying overhead. But we still have a lot of damages that are caused as a result of the war, and nothing have been fixed. Not one single home have been built after the war. Gaza is still struggling to survive. People are still struggling to get back to—to pick their lives from the beginning. Shejaiya, where I was just yesterday talking to people, they are still living in ruins. Some people are still living in prefabricated houses, and nothing has changed on the ground, really. The wound is still here.
The international community support to the people of Gaza is close to nonexistent, unfortunately. The people of Gaza are hoping that there will be some moves by the Palestinian Authority to take Israel into the International Criminal Court in The Hague. We don’t know if this is going to be happening anytime soon.
But the spirit of the Gazans is quite strong today, I would say, despite the fact that they are now mourning those that they have lost, and they are remembering the days of the war and the agony the days that they have lived during the month of Ramadan just last year, when Israel bombed the Gaza Strip for 51 days.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Mohammed, what about—why has there been no rebuilding taking place? What have been the obstacles to that?
MOHAMMED OMER: The United Nations have installed a U.N. reconstruction of Gaza mechanism. This mechanism has not been working really properly. The only thing we get is a few bags of cement for people who need to build their homes. But only the people who had partial homes that have been destroyed, they could fix these damages, and that’s not enough. For example, if someone had lost a living room, and then he wants to fix that, he is given only a few bags of cement and a few tanks of gravel and not so much of steel, which Israel does not allow into the Gaza Strip. That’s difficult. There are so many shortages of supplies, construction materials, that Israel is not allowing into the Gaza Strip, therefore this is slowing the process of the Gaza reconstruction.
That’s not only that, also aid distribution to the people. There are shortages of aid all the past year. And people are still living in very dire conditions, particularly in parts of the east of Gaza City and east of Rafah and east of Khan Younis and east of the northern part of the Gaza Strip, where people are still living on either ruins of demolished homes or refabricated homes. As I said, the international community has failed to deliver aid. It has failed to convince the state of Israel to allow construction materials into the Gaza Strip.
There has been, of course, some materials that got into the Gaza Strip. The only thing that people who have no means to build their homes, they end up selling their cement in the black market, because they want to survive, because they find that it’s more important that they get some food on the table and not necessarily to have a shelter over their heads.
AMY GOODMAN: Mohammed Omer, if the camera crew there could give you a hand mic? The wind is hitting your microphone sometimes, so it’s sort of—it’s making it a little hard to hear what you’re saying. But I wanted to ask about you—where you’re living right now. Your reports from Gaza last year were chilling. Are you continuing to live in Gaza?
MOHAMMED OMER: Yes, I am continuing to live in Gaza, and Gaza is my home. Gaza is where I’m living. Gaza is where I will stay. I don’t have anywhere else that I want to go, even though I am lucky enough that I have got the Dutch nationality. I could be traveling outside and living outside, but I choose to be here and to tell the story of my people, to tell the story of the people in Gaza and to document what’s happened, because the spirit of the Gazan people needs people who are able to tell the story in a very honest way. I don’t rely on international journalists to come only there in the Gaza Strip seasonal, when there is blood and when there is destruction. But there is also a lot of steadfastness and beautiful things in Gaza that we need to focus on. The spirit of the Gazans is something which I am very proud of and I want to continue as a Palestinian journalist to report on and to reflect on. This is something which I find extremely important, especially after seeing the life of people in Gaza and how much they have suffered. Still, they are living under a very good circumstances despite all the obstacles, because they simply have the good spirits to continue their life and not to give up to the depression around them.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about the U.N.’s refugee aid agency in Gaza. The director, Robert Turner, is leaving, and sometime this month. Last week, in an interview about his tenure in Gaza, he said housing reconstruction in the area could begin soon.
ROBERT TURNER: Finally, last week, the minister of public works and housing announced that technical issues related to total reconstruction had been resolved, that there now would be what’s called the residential stream for the Gaza reconstruction mechanism, which would allow for the reconstruction of homes. We immediately, the next day, submitted the first batch of names of refugee families that had been identified, had their building permits ready and their building designs ready. Those were approved yesterday. And we’re signing undertakings, and we’re trying to put money in their pockets next week.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Robert Turner, who’s leaving as director of the U.N.’s refugee aid agency in Gaza. Your response?
MOHAMMED OMER: Well, I don’t know what we really are expecting from the international community. I have a great respect for Mr. Robert Turner, who has done a great job running the UNRWA operations in the Gaza Strip. Gaza is still living under the most difficult circumstances. As I said, you know, the international community is not really able to convince Israel. I mean, one year, we have received a lot of promises that people will be receiving construction materials into the Gaza Strip, but so far people are fed up. It’s been one year and only promises that we are receiving. So, why did this promise come only now, after a year? It’s only after a year after the destruction of Gaza and the war and the damages that are caused.
People have survived a very dreadful winter in the different parts of the Gaza Strip, simply because they don’t have the proper housing. Have we seen what happened in Shejaiya refugee camp and areas where they—that sustained several rockets and missiles? Did we see how much the children suffered the cold weather and winter? Why the international community allowed the people to survive that long? And now we are saying that Israel is going to be improving this.
People on the ground, they don’t trust that Israel is going to improve the situation at all. I don’t see this is going to be changing, unless there is more international pressure on Israel to allow construction materials into the Gaza Strip. The U.N. mechanism is unfortunately failing to deliver what is needed to the Palestinians in Gaza, because the U.N. is simply not able to convince the state of Israel of the importance of rebuilding the Gaza. When Palestinians having no homes and there is no hope, what do you expect? I mean, there is no hope, really.
AMY GOODMAN: Mohammed Omer, we only have a minute to go, and I wanted to ask you about the Islamic State issuing a warning to Hamas that they’re going to take over Gaza. How real is this?
MOHAMMED OMER: This is not real. It’s not going to happen, because I believe and many people believe that Hamas is much stronger on the ground than the Islamic State, those people who have issued this. I have talked to Hamas officials, and they informed me that those people have a psycho distress, and they are people who do not know what they are talking about. They are just a bunch of people who are not necessarily able to translate what they have said on the ground. I believe Hamas is much stronger on the ground, that the Islamic State cannot turn Gaza into al-Yarmouk, as the Islamic State said. That’s one.
And I believe also that the environment in Gaza does not allow an Islamic State-like groups to spread in the Gaza Strip. People don’t want this type of mentality in the Gaza Strip. We have seen that across the Gaza Strip. People who are supporting the Islamic State, they have received resistance from people and from the Palestinian police in the Gaza Strip. So this is something which I doubt is going to be happening anytime soon.
AMY GOODMAN: Mohammed Omer, we have to leave it there.
MOHAMMED OMER: The Gazans are still continuing—
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, award-winning Palestinian journalist, reporting in Gaza City. His book, Shell-Shocked: On the Ground Under Israel’s Gaza Assault, has just been published. He tweets at the handle @Mogaza.
Headlines:
Creditors Set Sunday Deadline for Greek Bailout Deal
European creditors have given Greece five days to reach a deal to bail out its floundering economy. On Sunday, Greek voters overwhelmingly rejected further budget cuts and tax hikes in exchange for the bailout. As Greek banks remain closed, European leaders have given Greece until the end of Thursday to present a detailed reform plan ahead of a summit in Brussels this coming Sunday. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, said this week’s deadline is final.
Donald Tusk: "The stark reality is that we have only five days left to find the ultimate agreement. Until now, I have avoided talking about deadlines, but tonight I have to say it loud and clear, that the final deadline ends this week. All of us are responsible for the crisis, and all of us have a responsibility to resolve it."
Iranian Nuclear Talks Extended Again
Iran and world powers have extended talks on a nuclear deal for another few days after missing a self-imposed deadline Tuesday. U.S. officials are still hoping to secure a deal by Thursday, the last day before a mandatory congressional review period jumps from 30 days to 60 days. The talks have already been extended past a previous deadline of June 30. The White House says a deal is close but differences remain.
Afghanistan: U.S. Drone Strikes Kill 49
U.S. drone strikes have killed up to 49 people in Afghanistan. The strikes reportedly took place in an area along the Pakistani border where the Taliban and militants with the self-described Islamic State have been clashing. Local sources put the death toll as high as 49 and said the victims were militants. A spokesperson for the Afghan spy agency claimed the second-highest figure loyal to ISIL in Afghanistan, Gul Zaman, was killed in an airstrike in the area. Meanwhile, Afghan government officials and Taliban representatives met in Pakistan Tuesday, marking the first known talks between the two sides.
Kenya: 14 Killed in Al-Shabab Attack
In Kenya, at least 14 people were killed when the militant group al-Shabab attacked a residential compound with guns and grenades. The victims were mostly quarry workers who lived in the compound near the Somali border. Al-Shabab has staged a series of attacks in Kenya following Kenya’s 2011 invasion of Somalia. The massacre comes just weeks before President Obama is due to visit Kenya.
Carter Admits U.S. Only Training 60 Syrian Rebels
Defense Secretary Ash Carter has acknowledged the Obama administration’s program to train and equip "moderate" Syrian rebels currently has just 60 vetted candidates. Speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carter said the trainees have been subjected to intense screening.
Ash Carter: "We’re also in the early stages of our train-and-equip mission in Syria. Three months into our program, training is underway, and we are working to screen and vet almost 7,000 volunteers to ensure that they are committed to fighting ISIL, pass a counterintelligence screening and meet standards prescribed by U.S. law regarding the law of armed conflict and necessitated by operations. As of July 3rd, we are currently training about 60 fighters. This number is much smaller than we had hoped for at this point, partly because of the vetting standards I just described."
The Syrian rebel training program cost $500 million for this year.
South Carolina Senate Gives Final OK to Removing Confederate Flag
The South Carolina Senate has given final approval to a measure to remove the Confederate battle flag from the Capitol grounds. The final tally was 36 to 3. The vote came 20 days after the massacre of nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston by a white suspect who embraced the Confederate flag. The wife of one of the massacre victims, South Carolina state Senator Reverend Clementa Pinckney, visited the Senate chambers after the measure passed. State Senator Gerald Malloy addressed the family.
Sen. Gerald Malloy: "As you know, Ms. Pinckney, this state loved Senator Pinckney. And this state loves you and your girls, and they love the entire Pinckney family. And we will keep our arms wrapped around you and this family forever. It’s the least that we can do for our brother, Clementa. And we hope to have you back here soon when we hang his portrait and so that he’ll be sharing this spot with us forever."
The Confederate flag’s fate now rests with the South Carolina House. Meanwhile, activists from Charleston and a nephew of massacre victim Myra Thompson are heading to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., today to press lawmakers to approve legislation on gun control.
Madrid to Remove References to Franco in Street Names
In the Spanish capital Madrid, the new leftist city council has announced plans to remove all names relating to former Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco from city squares and streets. Despite a 2007 law aimed at replacing symbols of Franco’s decades-long rule, about 170 Madrid streets still bear the names of regime figures. Madrid’s new mayor, Manuela Carmena, is a retired judge who worked as a labor lawyer defending worker-rights activists detained under Franco’s Fascist dictatorship.
Guatemala: Gov’t-Backed Experts Say Ríos Montt Unfit for Trial
In Guatemala, government-backed experts have declared former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt mentally incompetent to stand trial for genocide. The National Institute of Forensic Sciences says Ríos Montt, who is 89, cannot understand the charges against him. The declaration could potentially derail attempts to retry Ríos Montt for overseeing the killings of nearly 2,000 Ixil Mayans under his rule in the 1980s. Ríos Montt was found guilty in 2013, but a court annulled his 80-year sentence less than two weeks later.
Top Computer Scientists Oppose FBI Push Against Encryption
FBI Director James Comey is set to testify against encryption before the Senate Intelligence Committee today. Encryption refers to the scrambling of communications so they can’t be intercepted and read without a key or password. The FBI and British intelligence have been pushing for expanded access to encrypted data. Fourteen of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers, computer scientists and security specialists have issued a paper opposing the push; we’ll speak with one of them, Bruce Schneier, later in the broadcast.
Report: Senator Warren, Allies Delay Corporate-Tied SEC Pick
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and progressive allies have reportedly stalled President Obama’s plans to nominate a financial regulator with ties to Wall Street. Politico reports Obama was planning to tap corporate attorney Keir Gumbs to fill a Democratic seat on the Securities and Exchange Commission. But activists protested Gumbs’ record, including his work representing the American Petroleum Institute before the SEC. Gumbs is a partner at the corporate law firm Covington & Burling — the same firm to which former Attorney General Eric Holder has just returned after leaving the Justice Department. Earlier this year, Gumbs and colleagues at the firm wrote a guide advising corporations on how to avoid disclosing their political spending to shareholders. Senator Warren wants the SEC to require companies to disclose such spending. Protests by her and others have now reportedly delayed Gumbs’ nomination, at least until August. We’ll talk more about Holder, Gumbs and their law firm with Matt Taibbi later in the broadcast.
9 Arrested in Anti-Fracking Actions Across Vermont, New York
At least nine people were arrested Tuesday as hundreds took part in direct actions against oil and gas extraction in Vermont and upstate New York. Protesters blockaded trucks carrying fracked gas in Addison County, Vermont; blocked construction on a fracked gas pipeline in Williston; and staged a lake flotilla in Ticonderoga, New York. Using the slogan, "Not by truck, not by rail, not by pipeline," organizers denounced attempts to make the Champlain Valley into an oil and gas corridor. The events are part of a week of action marking the second anniversary of the Lac-Mégantic oil train derailment, which killed 47 people in Quebec.
New York to Appoint Special Prosecutor to Probe Police Killings
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced plans to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate police killings of unarmed civilians. Cuomo said Tuesday he will appoint New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman under a one-year executive order. The move will make New York the first state to institute an independent prosecutor for police killings, a step recommended by President Obama’s task force on policing. Cuomo’s move came the same day mothers of New Yorkers killed by police rallied outside his New York City office to accuse him of backtracking on a promise to appoint the special prosecutor if state lawmakers did not take action. Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, who died after a police chokehold in Staten Island, said all cases should be investigated, not just those where police acknowledge the victim was unarmed. She also urged Governor Cuomo to appoint the special prosecutor for more than a year.
Gwen Carr: "We want justice for all, not for just some and just with the one year. One year is not enough. But he promised us that he would broaden the scope. It wouldn’t only be for one year; he would renew it after one year. And it wouldn’t be just for unarmed killings, because we know how things go. It’s not only — sometimes they’ll say the person was armed, and the person was not armed. We’ve seen South Carolina. We’ve seen different cases. But thank God for the videotape."
That’s Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, who died almost exactly one year ago, on July 17, after police pulled him to the ground in a chokehold and piled on top of him while he said, "I can’t breathe," 11 times. A grand jury declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who put Garner in the chokehold. The prosecutor in the case, Daniel Donovan, was recently elected to Congress. Garner’s death was caught on video by Ramsey Orta, who has been arrested repeatedly since Garner’s death. He alleges police harassment.
NYC to End Bail for Low-Level Suspects
New York City is announcing a plan today to end cash bail payments for thousands of people accused of low-level or nonviolent crimes. The city has faced calls for reform after a mentally ill homeless man died in a sweltering cell at Rikers Island jail because he couldn’t make a $2,500 bail payment. Protests increased after the recent suicide of 22-year-old Kalief Browder, who spent three years at Rikers as a teenager, after he was accused of stealing a backpack and couldn’t pay $3,000 bail. He maintained he was innocent, and the charges were ultimately dropped. The plan, described by the Associated Press ahead of today’s announcement, will replace bail for low-level suspects with daily check-ins and other measures.
NYC to Hold Landmark Ticker-Tape Parade for Women’s Soccer Team
And New York City has announced it will hold a ticker-tape parade for the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team over their World Cup victory, a rare honor for a team not based in New York. Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer had urged Mayor Bill de Blasio to hold the parade, writing, "New York City has a strong history of honoring sports achievements ... but has never held a parade to honor a women’s team. Our newest soccer champions represent an opportunity for New York to recognize that heroes and role models come in all genders." The last time New York City honored a group of national athletes was in 1984.
Follow:
WEB EXCLUSIVE
Greece
WORK WITH DN!
Engagement Editor
Senior News Producer
Fall 2015 Internships
207 West 25th Street, 11th Floor
New York, New York 10001 United States
___________________________________
___________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment