GLENN GREENWALD
Glenn Greenwald is an investigative reporter and co-founder of the adversarial news media organization The Intercept. He won the Park Center IF Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008. Among his books are: No Place to Hide, With Liberty and Justice for Some and How Would a Patriot Act?
Do you think Americans can simultaneously oppose the Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections, while also becoming more educated about the US government’s history of overthrowing foreign governments in ways that were much more consequential for the citizens in those countries? I think for a long time Americans haven’t cared at all about the fact that their government has been interfering in severe and aggressive ways in the internal affairs of other countries. Now that Americans have discovered their distaste for this type of intervention – because it was done to them and not by them – I think it is a good opportunity to force them to confront what they have been overlooking, ignoring or favoring.
Is one of your worries about the Trump-Russia investigation that the lionizing of current or former members of the CIA, FBI and NSA in the media because of their anti-Trump positions will make it harder to criticize these agencies in the post-Trump era?
I think this has been happening. There is a perception, probably an accurate one, that parts of these agencies are devoted to undermining the Trump presidency and have been from the very beginning. In this era when people are convinced Trump is this singular evil, anyone who is seen as opposing Trump or doing something to undermine his presidency is viewed favorably. Among the main factions being viewed this way are the security state agencies that you just described, even though they have been involved in some of the worst evils in American history.
For readers who are not aware of some of the most notorious episodes in these agencies’ histories, could you discuss some the most egregious actions of the CIA, FBI and NSA?
The CIA has been overthrowing governments for the past seven decades because of their perception that those governments were not serving US interests. They have used violence and all types of deception to destabilize countries and overthrow countries throughout Latin America and Asia. Even in Europe, the CIA is involved in a number of countries, including Russia.
In the post-9/11 era, the FBI has been focusing in all kinds of disproportionate ways on American Muslims: infiltrating their mosques, monitoring them and surveilling them. They helped round them up after 9/11 and kept them imprisoned for months with no trial or charges of any kind.
The NSA has been engaged in all kinds of mass surveillance, including domestic surveillance that the courts have ruled to be unconstitutional. This is just a small portion of the evils committed by the institutions in the last several decades.
The conventional argument for the clandestine nature of these agencies is that they must exist because they exist in every other country. How can these institutions be democratically accountable?
There was a pretty significant movement to reform some of these agencies in the mid-1970s after the Church Committee discovered abuses by the CIA and the FBI that were carried out with no accountability. Some of these abuses were carried out without even Congress being aware of them. The movement sought to impose oversight and transparency requirements on the agencies. However, even some of the modest reforms these agencies were forced to implement were killed during the Reagan administration or after 9/11 in the name of terrorism.
These are really sprawling agencies. Even the people who direct them admit they often have no idea what they are doing, they are just too big to monitor and keep track of. There is almost no transparency. Most of what we have learned about them has come from whistleblowers and leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
Since you have a finite amount of time in your day, how do you go about deciding whether to write about your criticisms of the mainstream media’s coverage of the Trump-Russia investigation, or the Trump administration’s attacks on democratic institutions?
I try to use my platform to maximize the impact of the reporting I’m doing. So, if there are things that I want to say that a lot of people are already saying, then all I would be doing was joining a chorus or an echo chamber. I don’t take up my time or my readers’ time writing about those sorts of things because they don’t seem particularly fruitful to me. I tend to try to use my platform to write about or say things that nobody else is really paying attention to.
What are your thoughts on the relationship between Trump and Putin? Are you as confused as a lot of people about what the state of US-Russian relations is today?
Trump ran on a platform explicitly saying that he thought the US and Russia should have a better relationship, in part because they have large nuclear stockpiles pointing at each other’s cities, and in part because they have a lot of common interests in the world. President Obama actually viewed Russia the same way. He worked a lot with Russia to get the Iran deal done and on fighting terrorism in the Middle East.
There is a lot of ideological affinity between Trump and Putin. They both tend to be pretty nationalistic and conservative. They view the world through a fairly similar ideological prism, so I don’t think it’s surprising that they have a good personal working relationship. Trump tends to admire people he perceives as strong, and he perceives Putin as strong – probably stronger than he really is – and he likes him for that reason.
However, at the same time there is a huge, powerful, national security apparatus in the United States and in Russia that Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans about, and any sophisticated observer of Washington and Moscow understands this. The political classes and the military classes of Russia and the US have hated each other for many decades and they still hate each other. I think there is a lot of animosity between Russia and the US that is still visible, and Trump’s policies are not necessarily because of Trump’s own personal views – they may even be despite his own views. There is this divergence between Trump’s statements on the one hand, and his policies on the other.
What would you like to see revealed to the public after Robert Mueller completes his report on the Trump-Russia investigation?
I would like to see as much as possible revealed without endangering the lives of people. Obviously, if the Americans have intelligence sources inside the Kremlin, those should be protected. If there are specific ways that the US has been eavesdropping on the Russians or otherwise monitoring their communications, those should be legitimately concealed as well. But, in general, I think we should see as much evidence as can be disclosed to demonstrate that Robert Mueller’s allegations are accurate and not just something that we are taking on faith. ■
MICHAEL KAZIN
Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent magazine and an expert on social and political movements in the United States. He contributes to newspapers, periodicals and websites such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, The Nation, American Prospect and The New Republic. Kazin’s book American Dreamers: How the Left changed a nation was named the best book of 2011 by The Progressive, The New Republic and Newsweek/Daily Beast.
Can there be a patriotism that doesn’t confine empathy to one’s borders and regards the lives of people in other countries as of no less importance than American lives?
I think most people in the world have a group feeling. Sometimes it’s an ethnic group, tribe, religion