Death By Metadata: Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald Reveal NSA Role in Assassinations Overseas

#NSA #Metadata #Assassination

“We can kill you if we don’t know your identity, but once we kill you, we want to figure out who we killed.”

Death By Metadata: Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald Reveal NSA Role in Assassinations Overseas

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/10/death_by_metadata_jeremy_scahill_glenn

JEREMY SCAHILL:

Well, Amy, first of all, we saw very recently that the U.S. carried out a drone strike that killed many members of a wedding party in Yemen.

The question should be asked: How is it that those individuals were selected on that day for that strike?

And, you know, what the president is saying is very misleading, according to people who actually work on this program.

And in fact, when we asked the White House for comment, we went to the National Security Council spokesperson, Caitlin Hayden, and asked directly,

“Is it true that you’re ordering strikes where you don’t actually have any human intelligence?”

And the White House refused to directly answer that.

They just said,

“Well, we don’t select targets based on only one source of intelligence.”

Well, we knew that already, and we told them that we knew that.

The point here is that they don’t actually have a requirement to confirm the identity of the individuals that they’re targeting, and that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing so many innocent people being killed in these strikes.

It effectively amounts to pre-crime, where an acceptable level of civilian deaths is any civilians who die in the pursuit of a limited number of so-called bad guys.

AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t the spokesperson also say, though, confirming that human intelligence was used—

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —tried afterwards, but not before—after attack?

JEREMY SCAHILL:

Right. I mean, I’m not sure that they’re aware of the kind of twisted irony of the statement that they issued to us, because

on the one hand they’re refusing to acknowledge that they don’t actually need to confirm the identity of people who they’re trying to target for death;

on the other hand they say,

“Oh, well, when we kill someone, we do actually confirm whether or not civilians were killed by using human intelligence.”

So, it basically is—the standard is:

We can kill you if we don’t know your identity, but once we kill you, we want to figure out who we killed.

[....]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

We are broadcasting our exclusive first interview with Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald upon the publication just hours ago of their new piece, “The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program.”

http://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/

The article appears at TheIntercept.org, a new digital magazine launched today by First Look Media.

Glenn and Jeremy co-founded The Intercept with filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Glenn is with us from his home in Brazil, and we’re going to talk about whether he plans to come into the United States.

And Jeremy Scahill joins us from Los Angeles. Jeremy’s film, Dirty Wars, has been nominated for an Academy Award.

Glenn, can you talk about the legality of publishing this information, the way it’s been challenged by the administration?

In your piece, you have Caitlin Hayden, spokesperson for the National Security Agency, saying,

“the type of operational detail that, in our view, should not be published,”

she said, referring to the questions that you both were asking her.

You are a former constitutional lawyer, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right.

The position of the U.S. government is that it’s illegal to publish any kind of classified information that you are not authorized to receive.

It’s of course illegal, in their view, for a government employee or contractor to leak it without authorization.

But their view, as well, is that it’s actually illegal, even if you’re a journalist, to publish it.

And they believe that’s especially the case if the information pertains to what they call signals intelligence.

And if you look at the Espionage Act of 1917 and other relevant statutes, it does seem to say that it is illegal in the United States to publish that kind of information.

The problem for that view is that there’s a superseding law called the Constitution, the First Amendment to which guarantees that there shall be a free press and that Congress and no other part of the government has the right to interfere with it.

Drones, metadata, and ‘Dirty Wars’

Chris Hayes talks with “Dirty Wars” author and filmmaker Jeremy Scahill about the bombshell revelations on the NSA’s metadata campaign.

http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/drones-metadata-and-dirty-wars-146454084002

Obama once reportedly told his aides that it “turns out I’m really good at killing people.”

The president added, “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”

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