Democracy Now!
Daily Digest
A Daily Independent
Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González
|
 |
democracynow.org
Stories:
In Landmark Ruling, U.S. Ordered to Release Memo Behind Targeted Killings of U.S. Citizens
In a major development chipping away at the secrecy of the Obama administration’s drone wars, a federal appeals court has ordered the government to release a legal memo that provides the legal rationale for killing U.S. citizens overseas. The court ruled that the government had waived its right to keep the memo secret following public statements in defense of the killings by top officials, as well as the release of a Justice Department "white paper" on the subject. We speak with Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit to release the memo along with The New York Times.TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to new developments surrounding the secrecy of the Obama administration’s drone wars. On Monday, a federal appeals court in Manhattan ordered the government to release a legal memo that provides the rationale for targeted killing of U.S. citizens. The three-judge panel unanimously ruled the government had waived its right to keep the memo secret following public statements in defense of the killings by top officials as well as the release of a Justice Department "white paper" on the subject.
AMY GOODMAN: The Obama administration has admitted killing four U.S. citizens abroad, including Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011; two weeks later, his 16-year-old, Denver-born son, Abdulrahman. Among the officials who have spoken at length about the government’s purported right to kill its own citizens are Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: But when a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens, and when neither the United States nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot, his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was President Obama speaking last May about Anwar al-Awlaki.
Monday’s court ruling came in response to lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times. It also coincided with three days of U.S. drone attacks and Yemeni raids that killed scores of people in one of the deadliest chapters of the U.S. drone wars in Yemen. According to Yemeni government figures, at least 40 people and as many as 55 were killed in what the Bureau of Investigative Journalism called "the bloodiest spate of strikes since March 2012." While the Yemeni government said the victims were militants, at least three civilians are among the dead. At the White House on Monday, Press Secretary Jay Carney refused to provide details, referring questions to Yemen.
PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: In statements to the press, the Yemeni government has confirmed that air strikes were carried out this weekend against al-Qaeda militants in remote training camps and in a convoy. According to the Yemenis, these individuals were planning to target civilian and military facilities in al-Bayda and elsewhere. Now, I can’t speak to specific operations, but we have a strong collaborative relationship, as you know, with the Yemeni government and work together on various initiatives to counter the shared threat we face from AQAP.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.
For more on the latest strikes and the court’s order to release the memo on targeted killings, we’re joined here in New York by Hina Shamsi. She’s director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Welcome to Democracy Now! How significant is this federal court ruling, Hina?
HINA SHAMSI: Thank you, Amy. This is a very significant federal court ruling because it is the first time that a court has ordered the government to disclose a memo it has wanted to keep secret. The memo lays out the government’s legal justification, constitutional analysis, for killing a U.S. citizen even when he is far from a traditional battlefield.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know it exists?
HINA SHAMSI: We know it exists for a couple of different reasons. First of all, there were leaks about the existence of the memo. And government officials launched what one court has called a public relations campaign, saying that they had done the legal analysis and concluded that the targeted killing program by the Obama administration and the killing of U.S. citizens would be lawful. And this is what is a big deal about the court’s decision. So, on the one hand, you have a PR campaign by some of the highest officials in our land saying targeted killing program, killing of U.S. citizens, lawful, effective, wise. On the other hand, in court, the government refuses to provide the basis for its conclusion so that the American public can judge for itself whether the government’s arguments are legitimate or not. And now the court has said that with this campaign and also with the government’s disclosure of a Cliff Notes version of its legal memo, that means the government now has to provide its actual legal arguments, and it has to describe to us the other documents in its possession, and we can seek to challenge their withholding.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, the court was responding to two separate suits, one by The New York Times and one by your organization. Is there any—can you explain the distinction between them, if there is any?
HINA SHAMSI: Sure. We at the ACLU had sought the legal and factual basis for the killings of three U.S. citizens: Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old, as well as his father Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. The New York Times filed two similar requests that were somewhat narrower in scope.
AMY GOODMAN: This is for the reporters Scott Shane and Charlie Savage.
HINA SHAMSI: That is correct. And the suits were combined, and the decision was issued in both cases.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Attorney General Eric Holder in March of 2012 outlining the reasons why the U.S. would target a U.S. citizen.
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: So, though I cannot discuss or confirm any particular program or operation, I believe it is important to explain these legal principles publicly. Now, let me be clear. An operation using lethal force in a foreign country, targeted against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda or associated forces and who is actively engaged in planning to kill Americans, would be lawful at least in the following circumstances. First, the U.S. government has determined, after a thorough and careful review, that the individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. Second, capture is not feasible. And third, the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Eric Holder in 2012. During a major address in May of 2013, Obama explained his decision to publicly confirm the U.S. killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This week I authorized the declassification of this action and the deaths of three other Americans in drone strikes, to facilitate transparency and debate on this issue and to dismiss some of the more outlandish claims that have been made.
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama about a year ago. Hina Shamsi?
HINA SHAMSI: So, some of the statements that were made by Attorney General Holder were statements that we cited in our briefs to the appeals court, saying that when the attorney general can make statements about legal conclusions, then we ought to be able to know what forms the basis of those conclusions.
And look at what the attorney general was talking about. He said, one, that the killing might be authorized in response to an imminent threat. Well, you look at what the Cliff Notes white paper says about imminent threat, and it turns out that they define "imminence" as not requiring evidence of an actual plot that’s about to happen. So, the English language is not—you know, we’ve gone beyond what the English language permits when you’re talking about imminence. They do something very similar with "feasible."
And that’s why one of our main arguments to the court was that there’s not just a problem with respect to excessive secrecy around this program, including with respect to U.S. citizens, but also more broadly; there’s also a problem of selective disclosure. And our concern, and the concern of Congress when it passed the Freedom of Information Act, is that government officials may not be able to selectively disclose facts that make their side of the story look good while withholding facts and law that might call their reasoning into account. And so, what you have is claims that, for example, in Yemen, alleged militants have been killed. Well, that may well be true, but what about the civilians who have died? And there is a pattern of U.S. officials emphasizing success, without our ability to know how success is defined, what it means, who it’s carried out against, while minimizing the things that might cause us as a public to question the legality, the wisdom and the strategic effectiveness of this program, that is toxic, Amy, in many parts of the world.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And was it your sense from the—from the hearing before the court of appeals that the justices were concerned with what many Americans are concerned about, how our government is targeting and killing American citizens without any kind of due process? And especially, as you say, when the memos—this issue of the imminent threat is very elastic, as the government defines it.
HINA SHAMSI: You know, I think that the judges’ concern is really effectively put forward in their opinion and came out in the hearing itself, which is that when government officials selectively disclose information, the public has to be provided the full context, because when Congress was passing the FOIA, it said something very important, which is, you know, government officials always have an impetus to proclaim their successes and minimize the things that are not successes, that might call those successes into question. And that’s exactly what’s happening here. And so this is an important step in telling the full story.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a clip of Nasser al-Awlaki speaking about his grandson, Abdulrahman, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen October 14, 2011, just weeks after the killing of his father, Anwar al-Awlaki. Abdulrahman was eating dinner with his teenage cousin when the drone struck. He was 16 years old. We interviewed Nasser. ACLU also made a video of him, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights.
NASSER AL-AWLAKI: I want Americans to know about my grandson, that he was very nice boy. He was very caring boy for his family, for his mother, for his brothers. He was born in August 1995 in the state of Colorado, city of Denver. He was raised in America, when he was a child until he was seven years old. And I never thought that one day this boy, this nice boy, will be killed by his own government.
AMY GOODMAN: Nasser al-Awlaki, talking about his grandson who was born in Denver, Abdulrahman. Well, in 2012, former White House press secretary, then-Obama campaign adviser, Robert Gibbs, was asked about the killing of Abdulrahman. Gibbs responded by blaming his father for his son’s assassination by U.S. drones. He was questioned by reporter Sierra Adamson.
SIERRA ADAMSON: Do you think that the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, who was an American citizen, is justifiable?
ROBERT GIBBS: I’m not going to get into Anwar al-Awlaki’s son. I know that Anwar al-Awlaki renounced his citizenship—
SIERRA ADAMSON: His son was still an American citizen.
ROBERT GIBBS: —did great harm to people in this country and was a regional al-Qaeda commander hoping to inflict harm and destruction on people that share his religion and others in this country. And—
SIERRA ADAMSON: That’s an American citizen that’s being targeted without due process of law, without trial.
ROBERT GIBBS: And again—
SIERRA ADAMSON: And he’s underage. He’s a minor.
ROBERT GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father. If they’re truly concerned about the well-being of their children, I don’t think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the former White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, now a contributor at MSNBC. Hina Shamsi, his response?
HINA SHAMSI: You know, Amy, we brought a lawsuit seeking due process, accountability and answers for why Abdulrahman was killed, and the other two individuals, as well. And earlier this month, the district court in Washington, D.C., dismissed our lawsuit. And with respect to Abdulrahman, the judge did something that was a legal sleight of hand, in essence, saying that because he hadn’t been targeted, he didn’t have a Fifth Amendment claim to ask for answers in the court.
She also did something very interesting with respect to drones that I think is worth mentioning. She said that for Fourth Amendment purposes, the use of lethal force through a drone can’t count as a Fourth Amendment seizure, because drones are meant to kill, not capture. Now, that’s squarely contrary to Supreme Court precedent, but I think the important thing is that the court in that case has thus far decided that national security and secrecy concerns would prevent our lawsuit from going forward in order to find answers about why Abdulrahman and the others died.
AMY GOODMAN: Hina Shamsi, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project.
When we come back, a new film has just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival; it’s called Silenced, about whistleblowers. Stay with us.
Silenced Film Explores the Human Toll of Obama's Crackdown on National Security Whistleblowers
How far would you go to tell the truth? That is the question posed by the new documentary "Silenced," which follows three national security whistleblowers who fight to reveal the darkest corners of America’s war on terror while enduring the wrath of a government increasingly determined to maintain secrecy. The three are former Justice Department lawyer Jesselyn Radack, former senior National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, and former CIA officer John Kiriakou. On the heels of the film’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, we speak with director James Spione about the extraordinary lengths the government has gone to in order to wreak havoc on the whistleblowers’ personal lives through a sustained campaign of intimidation and harassment.TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: How far would you go to tell the truth? That’s the question posed by a remarkable new documentary called Silenced, which just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It follows three national security whistleblowers who fight to reveal the darkest corners of America’s war on terror, challenging a government that is increasingly determined to maintain secrecy as it expands its powers. They are former Justice Department lawyer Jesselyn Radack, former senior NSA official Thomas Drake, and the former CIA officer John Kiriakou. The film depicts the extraordinary lengths the government traversed to wreak havoc on their personal lives through a sustained campaign of intimidation and harassment. This is the trailer for Silenced.
THOMAS DRAKE: Part of the purpose of doing what they’ve been doing for the last several years is to destroy you.
JOHN KIRIAKOU: I never thought of myself as a whistleblower. Sometimes I go back and forth in my mind, where I wish I had kept my mouth shut, and other times I wish that I had shouted it from the rooftops.
JESSELYN RADACK: There is information that the public, in a functioning democracy, has a right to know.
PETER VAN BUREN: Thomas Jefferson said that an informed citizenry is the crucial part of the democracy.
THOMAS DRAKE: I had took an oath. I had to deal with a government who was in violation of the oath, and I couldn’t remain silent.
JESSELYN RADACK: I could not live with myself knowing that another human being could be put to death because I kept my mouth shut.
BRIAN ROSS: Would you call it torture?
JOHN KIRIAKOU: Waterboarding is probably something that we shouldn’t be in the business of doing.
I was the first CIA officer to confirm the use of torture techniques against al-Qaeda prisoners.
JESSELYN RADACK: Our country had instituted a torture policy, and we ran head into that.
PETER VAN BUREN: You’re supposed to accept these things as normal, because to the people who have been there, it is completely normal.
THOMAS DRAKE: NSA would now instrument of the United States of America for the purposes of dragnet, blanket electronic surveillance on a vast scale.
JESSELYN RADACK: I explained the facts of my case to my lawyer. He said, "Wow! You meet the classic textbook definition of a whistleblower."
PETER VAN BUREN: We’re people who joined the government for all the good reasons, worked for a number of years and then confront something that just stops us.
THOMAS DRAKE: White House has approved it. It’s all legal. As soon as he said it’s all legal, the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
JOHN KIRIAKOU: They began asking me questions. Well, I’ve spent my entire adult life working with the FBI. So the FBI needs my help? I’m happy to help.
JESSELYN RADACK: He looked at the file and said very matter-of-factly, "This file has been purged."
THOMAS DRAKE: They’re now engaged in an active cover-up at the highest levels.
JOHN KIRIAKOU: It wasn’t until I was about an hour into this interview that I realized, wait a minute, they’re investigating me.
THOMAS DRAKE: The apparatus of the U.S. government was turned against me. Every phone call you’ve ever made, emails you’ve ever sent, your bank statements, tax records.
JESSELYN RADACK: I was trying to be honest and obey the law, and yet I’m the one who ends up having to hire a team of lawyers.
THOMAS DRAKE: They set the target. They put the bullseye on me and said, "We’re going to make an example of him."
JOHN KIRIAKOU: I have to try to protect my children from being exposed to it. I’ve got the FBI surveilling me on and off for the last seven months.
THOMAS DRAKE: You have to mortgage your house. You have to empty your bank account.
JOHN KIRIAKOU: I’ve applied for every job I can think of. Haven’t gotten even an email or a call back.
PETER VAN BUREN: The people that you used to work with have turned against you. Your neighbors are at least suspicious, because it’s not every day that government investigators are knocking on their doors.
HEATHER KIRIAKOU: What has now happened to my family, it’s a very tormented existence.
JOHN KIRIAKOU: You’re not loyal. You’re not a good American. You’re a terrorist sympathizer.
JESSELYN RADACK: That secrecy regime, despite President Obama’s pledges of transparency and openness, has only continued to expand.
JOHN KIRIAKOU: I’m not the pushover that these guys think I am. I’m as tough as they are. And I’m going to fight.
AMY GOODMAN: That trailer for the new documentary Silenced, just premiered at Tribeca Film Festival. We’re joined by the film’s director, James Spione. His previous documentary, Incident in New Baghdad, was nominated for an Academy Award.
Welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about why you chose these three people—Tom Drake, Jesselyn Radack, as well as John Kiriakou.
JAMES SPIONE: Thank you for having me, by the way.
Well, I really—making my previous film, Incident in New Baghdad, it was already—this was on my radar. Of course, that film was made possible because of that footage released by WikiLeaks, and we now know it was Chelsea Manning who released this footage of an Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad. And so, that got me to thinking about this whole—you know, who controls the information; who’s allowed to release it, who’s not; what is the American public allowed to see, and what aren’t they allowed to see; and who are the people who kind of have the courage to step up and say, "Wait a minute"—when the whole bureaucracy is going another direction, they say, "Well, I’m not sure about this," you know, and dissenting against what’s the common practice. So I thought, well, these are kind of rare individuals, and I want to learn more about them. And that’s when I started researching the people in my film.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, let’s go to a clip from Silenced. Here, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou talks with Jesselyn Radack about the implications of his silence.
JESSELYN RADACK: This is why they want you to bargain on this count. They know that they are weak. They know that IIPA is written so narrowly that it’s virtually impossible to prove.
JOHN KIRIAKOU: We talked about this all night long. That’s why I come home, I take the kids to school, I come back, and I sleep on the couch for an hour, because I’ve been up all night long. She doesn’t make enough money to support our household. We can borrow enough for two years to keep her going, probably without filing for bankruptcy. But if I—if I were to be found guilty and got more than two years, I mean—we think we’re ruined now? We’d be ruined permanently after that.
Tom Drake thinks I should fight it. And, you know, in my gut, I want to fight it. But I have kids. And I just can’t risk them losing me for six to 12 years.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. The importance of his actions and his case?
JAMES SPIONE: Well, certainly, torture is back in the news right now, this whole program that we created. We’re still not sure what exactly it was. And the CIA is wrestling with the Senate right now to try and limit what we can know about it. But John Kiriakou was the first, of course, to publicly acknowledge—the first government official, or former CIA official, to publicly acknowledge that waterboarding was indeed a program, not just some rogue event, but an actually government-sanctioned policy that came from the top. And that got him in hot water, and investigations started behind the scenes.
And he did a number of things over the ensuing years that kind of irritated those in charge, and became a more vocal critic of these policies during that time and then, finally, ended up being charged in 2012 with releasing the name of a covert agent to a member of the press, in connection with—you know, it was sort of, from what I understand, a routine sort of inquiry, like, "Hey, is this guy someone I can talk to about this?"—the kind of thing that goes on all the time behind the scenes in Washington. You know, a lot of the stories you read are, you know, "Washington sources," "inside sources say," and a lot of this material that’s released is perhaps classified—
AMY GOODMAN: And the reporter didn’t use the name.
JAMES SPIONE: No, no, he did not. And, in fact, he didn’t even write about it. But the fact is, it’s—you know, whether you release classified information or not depends on whether it makes the government look good or bad. And if it makes the government look bad, then you get in hot water. And John certainly got in hot water.
AMY GOODMAN: He’s in prison now.
JAMES SPIONE: He is in prison. And this scene you just saw is a pretty good illustration of the kinds of pressures that are applied to people in these situations. And, you know, one of the things that my film—that I set out to do was to get behind the sort of sound bites that we’re used to seeing and the sort of media meme of "hero or traitor," and just let’s look at who these people are as real-life human beings, with families and jobs. And, you know, they’re not heroes or traitors; they’re kind of like regular people who were kind of thrust into these extraordinary situations.
AMY GOODMAN: He was sentenced to?
JAMES SPIONE: Thirty months.
AMY GOODMAN: He has five children.
JAMES SPIONE: Yes, he has—yes, two older children from a previous marriage, and he has three young children at home. And all three of the people in my film were very gracious in allowing me into their private lives, and so I spent a lot of time with John and his wife and his children, seeing how this process of going through this Espionage Act charge against him really affected the whole family. And you see that in all three of the cases that I look at in my film.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And we’ve talked often on this show about the Obama administration prosecuting more whistleblowers than all other previous administrations in history. Your sense of the time in which we are in now and this anomaly of this liberal Democratic president being the one who’s prosecuting all of these whistleblowers?
JAMES SPIONE: Yes, well, it’s certainly been an education. I think one of the things the last few years have taught me, and especially making this film, is I think we need to get beyond the partisan blinders a little bit, to see—to look at the institutions we have and the laws we have and the government we have. And no matter who’s in charge, it’s been going in one direction in this one area. In this—in terms of national security, the policies between the Bush administration and the Obama administration have been pretty seamless. You know, as Jesselyn Radack puts it in my film, after 9/11, the pendulum swung in one direction, but then it just kept swinging, and it never came back. And so, yeah, there’s been this concerted effort under the Obama administration. It’s really been a coordinated effort to crack down on dissent, really. And that’s a very troubling notion, that—you know, that you’re not allowed to criticize government policy in certain areas. And they’ve kind of normalized that. The Espionage Act is this incredibly draconian, harsh charge that you really—very hard to prove against anyone, and never really gets proven against any of these people, because they—as happened with John Kiriakou and some other people, you sort of crack under that pressure and will plead to something else, because you’re looking at many, many years under an Espionage Act charge, which carries with it, you know, all sorts of other associations like traitors and so forth.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Jesselyn Radack, the former Justice Department spokesperson, in your film, Silenced.
JESSELYN RADACK: I’m fighting to have my September 10th country back. It’s a very, very dangerous direction. The pendulum swung after 9/11, and instead of swinging back to some kind of equipoise, it just swung even further in the direction of secrecy. And that includes overclassification. That includes a crackdown on whistleblowers. That includes secret signing statements. It includes shutting down lawsuits with the state secrets privilege. I mean, there is a whole bevy of secrecy tactics that the government uses. Every time you bring up civil liberties that have deteriorated or been tossed out completely in the name of national security, people think somehow you’re siding with the terrorists. "Oh, you want our country to suffer." Quite the opposite: People want our country to continue to live up to the ideals on which it was founded.
AMY GOODMAN: Former Justice Department attorney Jesselyn Radack, who got ultimately pushed out because she said John Walker Lindh should have an attorney, and now is—works with whistleblowers like Tom Drake and John Kiriakou, who you feature in this film.
JAMES SPIONE: Right. All three of them—Jesselyn, Tom and John—sort of share this same, similar kind of story of believing in their job, being patriotic public servants, really, and then coming up against something that they feel like—that tweaked their conscience, in a way, and that kind of flew in the face of what they understood their constitutional obligations were, you know, to uphold the Constitution. And that’s the central conflict, really, right now, in a way, of our age, in this kind of unending war on terror. Even in your previous segments, you were kind of talking about the same thing, like what are individuals’ recourse, what are civil rights that we can rely on, our constitutional rights, in this time we’re—
AMY GOODMAN: James, we’re going to have to leave it there. James Spione, director, producer of the documentary Silenced. Congratulations on your film.
That does it for the show. I’ll be speaking at the Green Festival Saturday at 3:00 at 54th Street in New York at Pier 94. Juan will be speaking in the Congressional Building on Tuesday 5:30 after a showing of the film Harvest of Empire. And I’ll be at Dartmouth College the following Friday night.
Muslim Americans Accuse FBI of Placing Them on "No-Fly List" for Refusing to Become Informants
Naveed Shinwari is one of four American Muslims who filed suit against the government this week for placing them on the U.S. "no-fly list" in order to coerce them into becoming FBI informants. The plaintiffs say the government refuses to explain why they were named on the no-fly list. They also believe that their names continue to be listed because they would not agree to become FBI informants and spy on their local communities. "It’s very frustrating, you feel helpless," Shinwari says. "No one will tell you how you can get off of it, how you got on it. It has a profound impact on people’s lives." We are also joined by Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is seeking to remove the men from the no-fly list and establish a new legal mechanism to challenge placement on it.TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show with the story of four American Muslims who say they were placed on the U.S. no-fly list by the FBI after they refused to become government informants. They say they were barred from flying, not because they were accused of any crime, but because they refused government requests to spy on their own communities. On Tuesday night, the men filed a lawsuit seeking their removal from the no-fly list, as well as a new legal mechanism to challenge placement on it.
The New York Times reports the list, officially called the Terrorist Screening Database, has grown to at least 700,000 people. The government refuses to reveal who is on the list, how one can get off it, and what criteria are used to place someone on it in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined by Naveed Shinwari, one of the four American Muslims filing a lawsuit accusing the FBI of unjustly placing them on the no-fly list and trying to coerce them to spy on their community. Also with us is Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. CCR is representing the four men, along with the City University of New York’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility program, or CLEAR.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Naveed, let’s begin with you. Tell us your story. What happened?
NAVEED SHINWARI: Thank you, first of all, for having us. I’ve been a big fan of the show since college days.
Well, in October 2011, I went on a Hajj pilgrimage, religious pilgrimage, with my mother. And after that, we went to Afghanistan, and that’s where I got married, too. On the way coming back, late February of 2012, I got—I was trying to obtain a boarding pass in Dubai. My flight was from Kabul to Dubai and then to Houston. And I was denied boarding pass in Dubai. I was told that I had to go outside and meet with the immigration, U.S. immigrations, or the embassy, consulate. I had to obtain a temporary visa. And my mother and I, we went out, out of the airport.
And then I was interrogated by two FBI agents for roughly about four hours, and I was told to—I was pressured to give them everything that I knew in order to go back home. And then they will—the more that I give them, the better chances of me coming back home that I had. I was told to take a lie detector test, and they wanted to take photos with their phone of mine, and which, both of them, I refused, because I was very truthful to them from the beginning.
Finally, after five days, we were able to—we had to buy new tickets, and we were able to come to the U.S. Then I was interrogated at the airport in Washington by a couple of FBI agents. And then I had several visits in my house. In March of 2012, I found out that I was on the no-fly list, when I had a flight to Orlando for a job. And in the airport, I was escorted by police officers telling me that I could not fly anymore. That’s the first time I found out.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: When you say they interrogated you the first time around, what kinds of questions were they asking you?
NAVEED SHINWARI: They told me to "tell us everything. And where did you been—where have you been? And have you attended any training camps in Afghanistan, or even to Pakistan?" And to all of those questions, my answer was negative. If you met individuals that pose a threat to national security, and my answer was negative, of course.
AMY GOODMAN: What are your feelings about being on the no-fly list? How has it affected your life? Where is your wife now, by the way?
NAVEED SHINWARI: She’s in Afghanistan, and it’s been 26 months, counting, that I have not seen her.
AMY GOODMAN: For more than two years.
NAVEED SHINWARI: That’s correct. I spent a month with her, and then I had to leave. And then, ever since, I haven’t been able to go back.
AMY GOODMAN: Shayana Kadidal, what is the legality of this?
SHAYANA KADIDAL: Well, I think it’s completely illegal. You know, most people find out that they’re on the list the same way Naveed did. They try to fly, and then they’re denied boarding, and sometimes a gate agent will tell them, "Well, you’re on this list."
Now, there’s a process to challenge it, nominally, through the Department of Homeland Security, but when you file a complaint, you never get told whether or not you’re on the list or whether you’ve been removed from the list. The government never tells us what the criteria for being on the list is. We think it has something to do with whether you’re a threat to civil aviation, whatever that means, but they’ve never sort of published a definition, and they never tell you what evidence, you know, they’ve used to put you on there, right?
And a lot of times, I don’t think the government knows what evidence they’ve used to put you on there, because a field-level FBI agent, for all practical purposes, can nominate someone like Naveed. Those guys who interviewed him in Dubai could do it on their own discretion, just as if a New York City beat cop could put you on the no-fly list. And it’s basically a rubber stamp, the level of review that it gets once it goes into the Terrorist Screening Center that runs the list.
So, you know, you get this situation that’s ripe for abuse. And Naveed, like our other clients, you know, I think the FBI put him on the list basically because they knew there was no process where he could challenge it, where he could get off, other than coming to court, like we have now, and therefore they could use it very effectively to twist their arms to work and spy on completely innocent members of their Muslim community.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Right, and this issue of some of your clients being—or your clients being asked to spy on their communities, could you elaborate on that?
SHAYANA KADIDAL: Sure. Well, so you see Naveed, you know, answered all those questions negatively and was still—and still ended up on the list, right? They are asking people not to spy on friends and family and acquaintances who the government suspects of involvement in crime or terrorism; they’re asking them to troll the Muslim community for information. You know, it’s the same mentality as underlies the NSA surveillance programs, right? Gather every bit of information on civil society, and then we’ll figure out why we wanted it later.
AMY GOODMAN: Aviation security specialist Glenn Winn told San Diego news station 6 that people are not put on the no-fly list arbitrarily.
GLENN WINN: There’s something has arisen in his background, and it has restricted his movement on a U.S. carrier of the United States, i.e. a threat.
AMY GOODMAN: Shayana Kadidal, your response?
SHAYANA KADIDAL: I mean, I think, you know, the most obvious response to that is to look at the Rahinah Ibrahim case that was just litigated out on the West Coast and where the government for eight years fought, you know, invoking every secrecy doctrine you can imagine, to resist telling a former Stanford Ph.D. student whether or not she was on the list. Turned out they had accidentally put her on the list because an FBI agent had kind of incompetently checked the "yes" box instead of not checking it as he intended to. They took her off the list in 2005, and yet they fought for eight years in court to avoid having to tell her that and to really avoid telling the public that they made a spectacular mistake.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in December, we spoke about the hidden cost of being placed on the no-fly list with the lawyer for Stanford University student Rahinah Ibrahim. Ibrahim sued the U.S. government after her name was placed on the no-fly list and she was barred from flying back from Malaysia to the United States in 2005 to complete her studies at Stanford. This is her attorney, Anya Bernstein.
ANYA BERNSTEIN: People are harmed by being on these watch lists. They’re harmed by being not allowed to fly. They’re also harmed by being subject to a lot more scrutiny from law enforcement officers every time they run into them. So if you’re on a watch list like this and you are stopped for speeding, the officer runs your license through a computer system, and he’s informed that you’re on the watch list. And then, naturally, he’s going to be paying a lot more attention to you; you’re much more likely to be arrested and to receive a certain kind of treatment. So, those are—those are more due process rights that may be infringed, and those are kind of the obvious costs of the terrorist watch lists.
The hidden costs are the systemic costs that people don’t really talk about as much, such as the effects on policy. So, one of the striking things about these watch lists is that, as far as we know, there is absolutely no mechanism for the agencies who run them to assess how well they’re doing. There’s nothing built into the system for people to review and say, "10 years ago we thought this was a bad guy. How did that turn out? How did our prediction pan out? And if it didn’t pan out, maybe we’re doing something wrong. What should we change?" So, one of the hidden costs is the bloating of the watch list with lots and lots of people who are most likely or even definitely not harmful and don’t pose a threat, and yet give us the impression that the main danger we face today is terrorism.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Anya Bernstein, attorney for the only person who has been able to successfully challenge being on the no-fly list. The impact on you and other people that you personally have been acquainted with who might have also been placed on the no-fly list?
NAVEED SHINWARI: It’s very frustrating, and you feel helpless. No one will tell you how you can get off of it, how you got on it. And it has a profound impact on people’s lives, and it has had a big impact on my life and on my family. And so, this is one of the reasons that I wanted to come out, was to—that there might be a lot of people that are afraid to speak up. And I wanted to—you know, I wanted to come out and show to everyone that, you know what, you don’t have to be afraid in this country, and you can come out and speak your mind, and we have to come together in order to resolve these kind of programs and these sort of issues.
AMY GOODMAN: Shayana, can you describe the other men who are suing?
SHAYANA KADIDAL: Sure. Well, you know, so Naveed hasn’t seen his wife in 26 months, right? We have another plaintiff who hasn’t seen his wife and his three small daughters for five years because he’s on the no-fly list. You know, all of our clients have family overseas. Two are Pakistani-American. Naveed’s Afghan-American. One’s Yemeni-American. And, you know, another client has a 93-year-old grandmother in Pakistan who’s begging to see him, because she’s gravely ill, she can’t travel here. You know, this woman raised him, and he can’t fly back there because he’s on this list. It’s devastating, you know, and there’s a stigmatic element to it, too. You know, there are people in the community who have turned away from some of our clients, because they wonder, you know, why did the government put them on this list. Surely there must be some reason, right?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about this in the context of the other instances of surveillance of the Muslim community in the United States? Obviously, in New York City we had the notorious example, now stopped by the de Blasio administration, of conducting random surveillances of the Muslim community.
SHAYANA KADIDAL: Mm-hmm, right. Well, I think, you know, we have—you know, after 12 years since 9/11, 13 years, we have a huge, very well-financed infrastructure for counterterrorism, and it—you know, it generates a need, pressure to produce, quote-unquote, "results," right? So FBI agents feel pressure to hit numerical quotas to produce a certain number of, quote-unquote, "informers." Doesn’t matter whether the, you know, quote-unquote, "informers" have any tie to crime or terrorism or whether the people they know do, either, right? It’s, again, part of this program of just surveilling the community for surveillance’s sake.
AMY GOODMAN: A pro-Palestinian activist named Kevin Iraniha said he was mysteriously questioned by the FBI after a trip he took to the Middle East. He later found himself on a no-fly list while trying to fly to San Diego from Costa Rica. The law student reportedly returned to California by flying to Mexico and then walking across the border. He addressed supporters after returning home.
KEVIN IRANIHA: I’m happy to be home, finally, in my own hometown, you know, where I was born and raised. You see my bloodshot eyes. I’m still—I’m still going through it. It’s very tiring, and it was very depressing. This is very disappointing for anybody—to happen to anybody, you know, especially if they were born and raised here, or anybody on—outside also, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin is a U.S. citizen, and so he holds this news conference. Naveed, you’re here talking publicly. What about the repercussions for you? Are you concerned about any, about how people will view you?
NAVEED SHINWARI: Yes. Even within my household, there were—they were not in favor of me coming out. And they thought that this might make your situation difficult in bringing your wife here in the future. So that’s even within my house. Outside, many friends and family were against this, as well, too. But in every civil rights case, or whenever civil rights are violated or abused, people have to speak out. And if I don’t do it, who else will do it? So there are 16,000 to 21,000 people on this list, and the majority of them are innocent people, and they don’t know what they have done wrong. And I think we—it’s about time we need some openness to this program.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Naveed, we want to thank you for coming to Democracy Now! and telling your story. Naveed Shinwari is one of four American Muslims who filed a lawsuit accusing the FBI of unjustly placing them on the no-fly list and trying to coerce them to spy on their community. He has not seen his new wife in more than two years. Shayana Kadidal is senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, a federal court has ruled that a memo must be released that explains the rationale for killing the Awlakis, Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman, as well as other American citizen, Samir Khan. Stay with us.
Headlines:
Obama Admin Details Historic Clemency Eligibility for Drug Offenders
The Obama administration has unveiled its plan to grant early release to federal prisoners sentenced under harsh drug laws. The Justice Department will widen the criteria for clemency to consider nonviolent felons who have served at least 10 years behind bars and who would have received shorter terms had they not been sentenced under old laws. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced sentencing disparities between users of crack cocaine and powdered cocaine to address a racial imbalance in prison terms. But the law did not apply retroactively. Deputy Attorney General James Cole said the new policy is a matter of basic fairness.
James Cole: "These defendants were properly held accountable for their criminal conduct. However, some of them, simply because the operation of sentencing laws on the books at the time, received substantial sentences that are disproportionate to what they would have received today. … Correcting these sentences is simply a matter of fairness that is fundamental to our principles at the department, and it’s a commitment that all Department of Justice employees stand behind."
The move marks the most substantial clemency effort since President Jimmy Carter offered a reprieve to those who avoided the Vietnam War draft. But while tens of thousands of prisoners may be eligible for the new clemency guidelines, experts warn a lengthy review process and other restrictions could lead to just hundreds being released. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, called the shift a small step forward, saying: "We’ve had a significant rhetorical shift in the war on drugs, but we’ve had a moderate policy shift." Both President Obama and drug reform advocates are now calling on Congress to take additional action with major sentencing reforms.
New FCC Rules Allow Tiered Pay System for Content Delivery
Federal regulators are unveiling new rules today that would effectively abandon net neutrality, the concept of a free and open Internet. The Federal Communications Commission will let Internet providers charge media companies extra fees to receive preferential treatment, such as faster speeds for their products and content. Under previous regulations struck down earlier this year, providers were forced to provide all content at equal speeds. In a statement, the media reform group Free Press denounced the FCC’s decision, saying: "Giving the green light to pay-for-priority schemes will be a disaster for startups, nonprofits and everyday Internet users who cannot afford these unnecessary tolls. These users will all be pushed onto the Internet dirt road, while deep pocketed Internet companies enjoy the benefits of the newly created fast lanes." The new rules will likely face a court challenge.
Palestinian Factions Reach Consensus Deal After 7-Year Rift
The two leading Palestinian factions have announced a reconciliation deal aimed at healing a seven-year rift. The agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas calls for the formation of a consensus government within five weeks followed by elections in six months. Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh helped unveil the deal in Gaza.
Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh: "This is good news to tell our Palestinian nation in the country and in the diaspora about the end of the era of division. President Abbas will start the discussions to form the unity government from today, and he should announce it within the legal time, within five weeks."
Israel, U.S. Reject Palestinian Unity Agreement
The two sides have been at odds since Hamas thwarted a U.S.-backed coup attempt by the Palestinian Authority seven years ago. The Israeli government has denounced the agreement. On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Palestinian Authority needs to choose between peace talks and Hamas.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "We’re trying to relaunch the negotiations with the Palestinians. Every time we get to that point, Abu Mazen stacks on additional conditions which he knows that Israel cannot give. So instead of moving into peace with Israel, he’s moving into peace with Hamas. And he has to choose: Does he want peace with Hamas or peace with Israel? You can have one, but not the other."
The U.S.-brokered talks have faltered over Israel’s continued settlement building in the occupied West Bank. The Obama administration is seeking to reach a framework deal before a self-imposed deadline at the end of the month. On Tuesday, the State Department criticized the Palestinian reconciliation effort, saying it would "seriously complicate" peace talks. The United States and Israel have long called on Hamas to renounce violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist and follow pre-existing agreements, but without asking Israel to reciprocate.
3 U.S. Doctors Killed in Afghan Shooting
A shooting at a hospital in the Afghan capital of Kabul has killed three American doctors. The shooter is said to be an Afghan security guard who worked at the facility. Two others were wounded. A spokesperson for the Afghan Interior Ministry announced the attack.
Sediq Sediqqi: "The attacker was a police security guard there, and he opens fire on foreign nationals who were there. Unfortunately, three of them have been killed. One is injured, and the injured has been taken to the hospital. And the police has arrested the attacker, as well, so we will investigate to find out the motives behind this attack."
The hospital is run by CURE International, a U.S.-based Christian group.
Deadly Clashes Erupt in Ukraine as Soldiers Confront Separatists
Violence has broken out in eastern Ukraine today following the collapse of a weekend truce. The Ukrainian government says its forces have killed five pro-Russian separatists in the eastern town of Slovyansk. Ukrainian troops reportedly seized separatist checkpoints and ordered others to vacate the government buildings they’ve occupied for weeks.
Obama Warns Russia of New Sanctions, Backs Japan in Island Dispute
Speaking today on a visit to Japan, President Obama said Russia has violated the spirit of last week’s truce deal and warned it faces new U.S. sanctions. Obama also offered public support for Japan in its spat with China over a group of islands in the East China Sea. Obama said the islands are covered by a defense pact between the U.S. and Japan.
President Obama: "And let me reiterate that our treaty commitment to Japan’s security is absolute, and Article 5 covers all territories under Japan’s administration, including the Senkaku Islands."
Japan is the first stop in Obama’s four-country Asia tour. He is expected to discuss the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secretive deal among Pacific Rim countries to establish a free-trade zone encompassing nearly 40 percent of the global economy. Critics say the TPP would further entrench the failures of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect 20 years ago and caused mass displacement in Mexico. Protests against the TPP intensified ahead of Obama’s visit, with several marches in the streets of Tokyo.
Mississippi Enacts 20-Week Abortion Ban
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant has signed into law a measure banning abortion at 20 weeks, with no exception for rape or incest. The bill takes effect 20 weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period — two weeks earlier than 20-week bans passed in other states. A law with a similar cutoff in Arizona has been permanently blocked by courts.
Georgia Expands Firearms Permits in Public Spaces
Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has enacted a measure that allows for a massive expansion of guns in public spaces. Under the new law, legal owners will have an easier time bringing guns into bars, churches, government buildings and schools.
Gov. Nathan Deal: "The Second Amendment should never be an afterthought. It should reside at the forefront of our minds as we craft, pass and sign laws. Our state has some of the best protections for gun owners in the United States, and today we strengthen those rights guaranteed by our country’s most revered founding document."
Oklahoma Supreme Court Reverses Execution Stay After Outcry from Gov., Lawmakers
The Oklahoma Supreme Court has reversed a decision that stayed the executions of two death row prisoners challenging secrecy over the drugs to be used in their lethal injections. The court granted the stay just this week pending the outcome of the prisoners’ challenge. But on Wednesday, the court abruptly ruled the prisoners, Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, aren’t entitled to know the source of the drugs that will end their lives. The decision follows an unprecedented and potentially illegal move by Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin that overruled the court’s initial stay. Some Republican lawmakers even called for the judges’ removal from the bench. The prisoners are now scheduled for execution next week.
Texas Couple Wins $2.9 Million over Fracking Near Home
A Texas couple has won a more than $2.9 million judgment against the energy company Aruba Petroleum for disruptive fracking near their land. A jury found Aruba "intentionally created a private nuisance" through its drilling and fracking operations near the home of Bob and Lisa Parr. The pollution was so bad the Parrs had to flee their home for months at a time. Their attorney says the case marks "the first fracking verdict in U.S. history."
Former Oil Exec Calls for Fracking Ban in New York
A former oil executive has joined calls for a ban on natural gas hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in New York. Speaking this week, Louis Allstadt, a longtime executive vice president of Mobil Oil, said: "Making fracking safe is simply not possible, not with the current technology, or with the inadequate regulations being proposed."
Army Whistleblower Chelsea Manning Granted Name Change Request
A judge has granted the request of jailed Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning to legally change her name. Formerly known as Bradley, Manning sought the name change to reflect her desire to live as a woman. Manning remains in a men’s prison at Fort Leavenworth, where she is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking government files to WikiLeaks.
Workers, Families Mark 1st Anniversary of Rana Plaza Factory Collapse
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh, one of the worst industrial disasters in history. The collapse of the eight-story building killed 1,135 garment workers and injured more than 2,500. On the eve of the anniversary, family members of the victims joined with workers and protesters outside the site of the collapsed factory. Roy Ramesh Chandra of the United Federation of Garment Workers called for compensation to the victims and their families in accordance with international conventions.
Roy Ramesh Chandra: "We are demanding the deceased’s family members and the injured workers should get the proper compensation as per the International Labor Organization’s Convention 121, based on loss of future earning and pain and sufferings. Our garments workers are workers of the global market; they should get the compensation as per the global standard. And the brands sourcing from here, they should pay this contribution to the trust fund which is organized by ILO."
-------
"Race Matters: Resegregation and the Rollback of Affirmative Action" by Amy Goodman
“I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” So proclaimed Alabama Gov. George Wallace more than a half-century ago. His proudly racist rhetoric was matched by heinous actions: Murders, lynchings and systemic violence, often endorsed or organized by state and local governments, were inflicted on African-Americans and their allies struggling for civil rights. Despite that, those fighting for equality prevailed. Among the successes were the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, affirmative action and court-ordered integration of schools. But with this week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting Michigan’s ban against affirmative action in state university admissions, and with the increasing resegregation of schools, it seems like Wallace’s dream of “segregation forever” may be alive and all too well.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist with the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, which has just published her yearlong, 9,000-word piece on the resegregation of public schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This remarkable report, “Segregation Now,” notes that “In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.” The Brown decision, issued in May of 1954, covered several pending court cases (all organized by the NAACP) challenging school segregation. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren authored the unanimous decision, writing, “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
Hannah-Jones tells the history of school desegregation in Tuscaloosa through the lens of three generations of the Dent family. James Dent grew up in Jim Crow Alabama, never sharing a classroom with a white student. His daughter, Melissa, first went to an integrated middle school in 1980. It had taken decades for Tuscaloosa to implement desegregation, and then only by additional court orders. The city’s two high schools were consolidated into one, Central High, which became a state powerhouse of excellence, both academic and athletic. Melissa went on to become the first in her family’s history to graduate from college.
But this golden era of desegregation was short-lived. “Tuscaloosa has become one of the most rapidly resegregating school districts in the country,” Hannah-Jones explained on our “Democracy Now!” news hour. “In 2000, when a federal judge released Tuscaloosa from its court order, the school board immediately voted to split up Central [High School]. Because of fears of white flight ... they created three high schools—two integrated and one that was entirely black.” Here is her key finding: a new kind of segregation. While there are no “whites only” schools in Tuscaloosa, as there were up until 1979, there is now a struggling “blacks only” school—Central High. “The irony is that Central High School is actually located in an integrated neighborhood, but the white students right across the street from the school are gerrymandered into a district to go to an integrated school, and that Central was created as a black school by the intentional drawing of district lines.”
The problem is not limited to the Deep South. UCLA’s Civil Rights Project has been tracking national trends. Surprisingly, it found that “New York has the most segregated schools in the country. ... Heavily impacting these state rankings is New York City, home to the largest and one of the most segregated public school systems in the nation.” The UCLA report repeatedly uses a term that is now common in academic circles studying resegregation: “apartheid schools”—those schools with less than 1 percent white student enrollment. The report continues, “Across New York City, 73 percent of charters were considered apartheid schools and 90 percent were intensely segregated (less than 10 percent white enrollment) schools in 2010.”
This week’s Supreme Court decision will surely continue the trend of resegregation from high schools into colleges. The 6-2 vote upheld the Michigan ban on race-based affirmative action in state university admissions. Chief Justice John Roberts expressed his feelings about race in 2007, when he controversially said, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent from the majority this week, wrote, “My colleagues are of the view that we should leave race out of the picture entirely and let the voters sort it out. ... It is a sentiment out of touch with reality.”
The reality is, racial discrimination and segregation go hand in hand. Racism may not boom from a governor’s podium as it did in 1963 with George Wallace, but a racially divided America can never be equal.
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
-------
No comments:
Post a Comment