1.
Goodman:
Do you think President Bush should be brought up on war crimes, and Vice
President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, for the attack on Iraq?
2.
Clarke:
I think things that they authorized probably fall
within the area of war crimes. Whether
that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But
we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The
Hague where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of
countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to
do that sort of thing. And I think we need to
ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of
members of the Bush administration. It’s clear that things that the
Bush administration did—in my mind, at least, it’s clear, that some of the
things they did were war crimes.
3.
Maté:
Now, Richard Clarke, you were obviously part of the Clinton administration, and
you took part in the discussions on the issue of who to target. So, on this
issue, in 2002, you testified before Congress, and it’s since been
declassified, and you said, quote, “We didn’t want to
create a broad precedent that would allow intelligence officials in the future
to have hit lists and routinely engage in something that approximated
assassination.” You went on to say, quote, “There was concern in both the
Justice Department and in some elements of the White House and some elements of
the CIA that we not create an American hit list that would become an ongoing
institution that we could just keep adding names to and have hit teams go out
and assassinate people.” Can you talk about the deliberations that took
place when you were there under President Clinton?
4.
Clarke:
So, we had established that bin Laden wanted to kill
large numbers of Americans. And the only option that we had to target
him, since we couldn’t fly in and pick him up and arrest him, although we had
tried that, was Cruise missile attacks. And those cruise missile attacks
created high risk of collateral damage and introduced a whole set of problems.
And so, we looked at, if you—if it was legal to use cruise missiles, which
would kill a lot of people, why wasn’t it legal to use something that was more
precise, that would just go after the very few people that we were concerned
with? And that discussion went on for a while. And we knew there was a barrier
there that we weren’t sure we wanted to cross. And
ultimately, the fact was that President Clinton did authorize CIA to attempt to
arrest bin Laden, and failing that, he authorized the use of lethal force. That was a time when we crossed the barrier and actually had
a name on a hit list. We knew, however, that the Israelis had been doing this
for a long time, coming up with hit lists. And
we knew it was extremely counterproductive in their case, and we wanted to
avoid that. Fast-forward to the Bush administration and then the Obama
administration, and you have, as I describe in chapter two of the novel, a kill committee,
people who sit around in the White House passing folders back and forth of
names and voting on who they’re going to kill. I just
find that it went way too far. If any of us back in the Clinton administration
would have imagined that in the same room, in the same chairs a few years later,
people would be sitting around with a long lists and folders with pictures and
names of people, and voting on who would live and who would die, I think we
might never have authorized the first use of lethal force against bin Laden.
5.
Goodman:
Richard Clarke, I want to go to a clip of journalist Glenn
Greenwald on Democracy Now! just a few weeks ago, talking about NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden’s reaction to drones.
6.
Greenwald:
One of the things that he told me was like a turning
point for him was he had an NSA job in Japan, where—and this was the job right
before Dell—that he said he was able to watch the real-time surveillance being
fed by drones, in which you could see an entire village in a place where
America is not at war, like Yemen or Somalia or Pakistan. And you could see
literally little dots of people and what they were doing, and then you would
have intelligence about who they were and who they were calling and this vast
picture that was able to be created of them by not even physically being in the
country. And the invasiveness and the extent of that surveillance, he said, was
something even he, working inside this community, had no idea even existed. And—
7.
Goodman:
He was watching a village before it was struck by a drone?
8.
Greenwald:
Right. I mean, these were surveillance drones, typically. And so, it wasn’t
even necessarily that the drones were killing people, though a lot of times
they did. That was the reason for putting these villages under surveillance,
was to decide who to kill. But he could watch just how much the U.S. government
covertly could put entire populations under a microscope. And the fact that
this had been done without any democratic debate or without his fellow citizens
knowing about it was extremely alarming to him. And the more he came to see
just how ubiquitous this system of suspicionless surveillance was, the more
compelled he felt not to keep it a secret.
9.
Goodman:
Now, that’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who, with Laura
Poitras, revealed the—a number of the documents that Edward Snowden made
available to them when they interviewed him in Hong Kong. Richard Clarke, you
sit on an NSA advisory committee for President Obama in dealing with these
revelations. In a sense, Edward Snowden is having the same reactions that you
had—alarmed at what he was looking at, villages that could soon be struck by
U.S. drones.
10.
Clarke:
Well, I did for six months serve on an advisory board that looked into some of
the revelations about NSA and recommended the termination of the so-called
Section 215 program, the telephone metadata program, recommended we close that.
We made 46 recommendations. They’re all unclassified, they’re all online. The
president has taken some of them. Unfortunately, he hasn’t taken all of them.
And that’s a subject for another discussion. I have no problem with reconnaissance. Reconnaissance occurs all
the time. There are lots of countries now that have satellites with
high-resolution cameras that take pictures all the time. That doesn’t trouble
me. I’ve grown used to it. I’ve grown used to the fact that in this
city of Washington, I’m probably on a hundred cameras a day, whether it’s in
the elevator or on the sidewalk or driving in my car. I know when the car—when
I’m in the car and the cameras get me, because they send me a ticket. But we’re on camera all the time, and not just by the
government. In stores, we’re on camera. [Foreign countries or the entire world
= Grocerystores.] And stores are now combining that information with our mobile
phones to look at our buying patterns and notice that we spent some time at the
perfume counter and we didn’t buy anything, and then we get a little text email
or something, you know, telling us about perfume, because we have an interest
in it, because they saw us on a camera standing in front of the counter. The
surveillance by government and by the private sector and the use of data, big
data analysis, matching data from one source with data from another, is a real
issue that we need to address as a government. President Obama has started
that. He has asked John Podesta to do a major review of the big data
possibilities out there. But I think we, as a country, need to have a discussion
about that.
11.
Goodman:
Your thoughts about Edward Snowden? In an interesting way, he’s similar to you.
You quit over the U.S. invasion of Iraq. You talked about how President Bush
came up to you and said, what, the issue was Iraq, and you looked at him
startled when—after 9/11, saying Iraq has nothing to do with it. You blew the
whistle, like Edward Snowden did. Your thoughts on that kind of parallel and
what you think should happen to Edward Snowden?
12.
Clarke:
Well, there’s not too much of a parallel. I resigned,
quit the government altogether, testified before congressional committees and
before the 9/11 Commission, wrote a book revealing what the Bush administration
had and had not done to stop 9/11 and what they did after the fact, how the president
wanted me, after the fact, to blame Iraq for the 9/11 attack. What
Snowden has done has clearly exposed programs that were stupid, that were, I
think, illegal, some of them—personally, my view—and those programs have, some
of them, stopped. And I’ve been part of the effort to stop some of them,
particularly the 215
telephone metadata program, which I did not know about. I had been out
of the government for 10 years. And when I found out about it as a result of
the Snowden revelations, I was gobsmacked. I couldn’t believe that the
government was doing that.
13.
Goodman:
Richard Clarke served as counterterrorism czar under
President Clinton and President Bush. He has just published a novel
titled Sting of the
Drone. He
recently served on President Obama’s advisory panel on NSA spying. If you’d
like a copy of today’s show, go to democracynow.org. Also on our website, you
can watch our interview
with the longtime Japanese-American civil rights activist, Yuri Kochiyama, who’s
died at the age of 93. She talks about being with Malcolm X when he was
assassinated in 1965, as well as her time living in a Japanese internment camp
in World War II with her family.
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