10/11/24: Jeremy Scahill TELLS ALL: BlackWater, Israel, Cheney's, 2024 Election
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Like a good neighbor? State Farm is there. State Farm, proud sponsor of My Cultura Podcast Network. To be a journalist, it is like a working class job. You have to get your fingers dirty. If you really do journalism right, you have to be out there with the people. It shouldn't be reserved just for people who have fancy degrees. You've landed some interviews at Drops Light that a lot of people in the media would be envious of. Interviewing somebody, let's say, that's high up in Hamas. Journalists should have an ethical obligation to go and interview those people.

and to tell their readers back in their home country what the objective reality looks like on the ground. Our job is not to get Kamala Harris elected. Our job was not to get Barack Obama elected. Our job is to hold politicians accountable regardless of which party they're a member of. People are saying, "Oh, what are you doing? You're going to help Trump." No, we're going to help the public to have a real understanding. And I think we have an obligation to point that out and not just treat it as, you know, "Orange Hitler is coming back into power."

Today on CounterPoints, we're joined by my colleague at Dropsite News, Jeremy Scahill, which is part of our kind of ongoing series of getting to know independent journalists better, how they got into journalism, how they approach their craft. If people missed our long interview with Matt Taibbi, that was a fun one. Oh, yeah. There were times during that interview where I kind of forgot the cameras were rolling. A hundred percent. That's the best kind of interview. It can be dangerous, but it's good. Like, that's what you want. That's the best kind of interview. Yeah.

It is. So, Jeremy, welcome to Washington, D.C. You don't get here very often, so it's nice to see you in person. Try to avoid it at all costs. Don't blame you. So you guys were both just talking about your shared Wisconsin upbringings. Shared? Wow. A lot of similarities, it seems like, both from Catholic families. Any social justice...

leftism back in your Wisconsin family? So my dad is from a Catholic family in Wauwatosa, and there's seven of them. So in there, I think there's a little self-dressed in the mix. Yeah, absolutely. I didn't grow up Catholic. Yes. I did. Yeah, Jeremy did. You know, I mean, Milwaukee, I grew up in an interesting household because my dad was very nearly a priest. My mother prevented that, and also the Vietnam War. I mean, he

He grew up, his parents were Irish immigrants, came to the US as teenagers and he had two sisters and he was the only boy and it's like, okay, you're gonna be a priest. So I think for much of his life, he thought he was gonna end up being a Jesuit priest and he got politicized by the Catholic left at the height of the Vietnam War. He tells the story of seeing Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who's up for beatification right now and in fact may become

the first saint known to have had an abortion.

But he was really, because he grew up in this Irish Catholic family, the kind of weaving in scriptural reference to opposition against war really took hold of him. And he sort of altered his path in life and he ends up going to New York City and moving into the Catholic Worker House with Dorothy Day. This is your dad? This is my dad, yeah. And so he was there and actually, when he was there, it was...

about 10 years after the Cuban Revolution. And there was a very kind of close relationship between the Catholic Worker Movement and the Cuban Revolution, although the Catholic Worker Movement was an anarchist pacifist movement. So Dorothy Day had gone to Cuba many times, was a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, but critical of the

the methods used in the, you know, it was a violent revolution. And, you know, my dad was just a kid from the South side of Chicago. And, you know, he, he had never really been anywhere. And Dorothy Day asked him if he wanted to go to the harvest of 10 million tons in 1971. My dad went on the second Spencer Ramos brigade to Cuba, and he spent a couple of months cutting sugar cane. And he meets, you know, remember this is, you know, the height of Vietnam war,

civil rights movement, Black Panther Party. And what had happened is that Fidel Castro had issued this call to young people and revolutionaries around the world to come to Cuba. And my dad took a bus from New York City to Mexico City. And he was on the bus also with like supporters of the Weather Underground and people who were part of sort of movements in the US that were on the hard left of the movement. So he goes down there and he ends up writing an article

about the Cuban Revolution, defending the Cuban Revolution. It was called Up From Nonviolence. And it was grappling with how can you be an American pacifist, a Catholic,

and believe that you have some moral authority to stand in judgment over the people who felt that they needed to take up arms to confront a dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and remove it when Americans had failed to prevent their own government or stop their own government from propping up these kinds of dictatorships and entities in Latin America. And that altered his life and he ended up deciding to become a nurse actually because he wanted to work. He was a big believer in the Sermon on the Mount and

you know, and took it very seriously. So he spent, he and my mother both were nurses and spent their whole life working, you know, in hospitals and clinics in Milwaukee. Well, it sounds like it actually may have altered your life as well. Huge impact, yeah. Massively influential and maybe a good way to get into that. I don't know if you have other questions to start, Ryan, is like the influence of social justice, Catholicism on the Democratic Party is literally waning in the figure of Joe Biden right now in the White House, somebody who invokes the

a lot of those sentiments often, but is basically alone in it, is not entirely serious about it in the way that a lot of radicals were during the period of the Vietnam War. So tell us a little bit about how that influenced you and where you've kind of seen it go over the arc of your career. Yeah, you know, one other thing that relates to this about Milwaukee is it's also the home of one of the most prominent white civil rights priests in the United States at the time, Father James Grappi. Mm-hmm.

who then left the priesthood and ended up becoming a union organizer with the bus drivers. And he actually drove a bus himself in the city of Milwaukee. And there, as you know also, there were a string of socialist mayors in Milwaukee. Frank Zeidler, perhaps the most famous among them.

And as a kid, you grow up and you think your parents are boring. And it's like, I just knew. In fact, I actually had a lot of interactions with kids at school who would make fun of the fact when they would say, what do your parents do? And I would say, my parents are both nurses. Your dad is a nurse? You know, it was this sort of,

you know, thing of having to grapple with the fact that my dad was a male and he was a, I was a nurse. But, you know, I think it was probably when I was around maybe like 10 or 11 years old, I started to realize that there was some, you know, my dad was telling these stories about another part of his life and I finally stopped being a knucklehead and started saying like, what was that about? And, you know, our house was filled with all of these books

from all kinds of revolutionaries, violent, non-violent, social justice writings. And yeah, we grew up, but it wasn't so much like my parents were not the kind of people who would drill these things into your head. It was more watching how they treated other people. And there was this spirit, particularly with my dad of just servitude to others. And I think that when you grow up in a house where you see your parents treating other people with dignity,

And then you start to put that together with injustice in the world it you know You get set on a path and I so I think it wasn't that my parents like trained me to be anything They just they had an example and then when I expressed interest in it I started to realize there's layers behind it that are not just about personal values, but our political values also So what's the path there then into journalism? Oh, I mean, you know, it's funny is I was I was never a good academic student and

but I was a voracious reader. And I remember when I left high school, I was having trouble getting into any university. I did get into a university, but I just, I really, my guidance counselor in school said that I should consider maybe being an electrician or a plumber going to trade school. And I found that so offensive at the time, but I was wrong. And actually the guidance counselor was right. I needed to go into a trade. The university wasn't, you know, what...

I didn't feel comfortable there. It wasn't because I wasn't thirsty for knowledge. I was. It was that the way that the schools were structured just didn't speak to me as a person. And my dad wrote this letter to me before I went off to college, which I would then drop out of, that said, don't let school get in the way of your education. Oh.

And, you know, to this day, I think about that. But what happened is that, so I was at the University of Wisconsin. I was on academic probation. I, you know, I was certainly not going to be there much longer. Reading too many books or having too much fun?

Um, I was a mixture of both, but you know, really I would, I would, uh, it was funny when I would, when I would actually do the work, like at a history course, I would, I would get, you know, pretty good grades, but it was more that I was so, I was involved with everything else. I was involved with the newspaper and activist causes and, you know, and in 90, I believe it was in 1995, we staged a huge sit-in at the administrative buildings at the University of Wisconsin and Mother Jones named us one of the top activist campuses in the country. And I was one of the students that coordinated that and it had to do with the university's

treatment of homeless people who were living around the campus in the way they wanted to eject them. But also I watched how, when students were trying to get their professors to kind of join them, there was a lot of cowardice. And the professors would preach a kind of social justice gospel in this liberal Hamlet in Madison. But then when students would say, hey, can you join us

you know, on the line, it was hard to get them to do it. So for a combination of reasons, I ended up leaving the university and hitchhiked out to Washington, D.C., and I moved into the nation's largest homeless shelter at the time, which was the Community for Creative Nonviolence, just a few blocks from the capital. And when I was there, a lot of what I was doing was mopping floors, cleaning toilets, taking, you know, guys to

doctor's appointments, you know, the number of veterans who were homeless was stunning to me. But I listened to a lot of talk radio and, you know, my Walkman for, you know, younger people may not know it, but it's sort of like, you know, when you're listening to music or on your iPhone. But I had this like, you know, I had my headphones and my little Walkman because I would be just waiting all day or cleaning. And I heard this woman on the radio who was confronting then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

and confronting him over the contract with America and his agenda about women. And if you remember at the time, Gingrich's mother had been interviewed. This is in the mid-1990s. Gingrich's mother had been interviewed by Connie Chung, who was then one of the most famous news people in America. And she had said, Connie Chung had asked her, what does your mother think of First Lady Gingrich?

Hillary Clinton and they talked about it. Well, what is Newt Gingrich, your son, think of first lady? Oh, I can't say it. She said, I can't say the word. And one of them said, does it rhyme with which? And it's yes. So I heard this journalist confronting Newt Gingrich. Remember, he had the daily speaker's press briefing. And so this journalist confronts him about it and he gets completely flustered. And she says, so are you saying that your mother is a liar? Right.

That's a great question. Well done, Connie. And that was the last daily speaker briefing that Newt Gingrich did. And the journalist who was questioning him was Amy Goodman, who would then go on to become the founding host of Democracy Now! And the Washington Post headline at the time was something like, Gingrich can't ditch bitch comment. But I had never heard someone with that kind of backbone temerity taking on this incredibly powerful person. And then I started seeking out, what is this Pacifica radio? I started listening to it.

And then when, yeah. At the time, was she like the congressional correspondent or the Washington correspondent for Pacifica or something? Yeah, she was one of the most important figures at their news division. And, you know. But she was also a foreign correspondent then too, right? She had, yeah. I mean, Amy Goodman is, her whole life story is really extraordinary. But she had been, yeah, she's, I mean, she has a really interesting, she's also an extraordinary baker, by the way. And she had a whole other life too, where she was, yeah, she worked in a bakery. But,

But Amy Goodman had, in the early 1990s, she had gone to East Timor when it was still under the control of Indonesia with a journalist that I consider one of the most important mentors in my life, an investigative journalist named Alan Nairn. The two of them were in East Timor. Pope John Paul II was going to be visiting there, largely Catholic population in East Timor.

in this former territory of Indonesia that was under a mass extermination campaign from a U.S. armed and funded Indonesian military. And they went there ahead of the Pope's visit because the people of East Timor felt that if the Pope comes, their plight was going to be

made clear to the world that when powerful people come somewhere, then the media comes. But the way that the Indonesian regime responded to local people was to commit a horrific series of massacres, the most famous of which was called the Dili Massacre. And Amy and Alan were there and watched scores of people being gunned down with US M16s

and they were themselves beaten almost to death. Allen's skull was cracked open, and both of them believed that they pulled out their American passports and were pleading with their would-be murderers, assassins, to spare them. And Amy and Allen both have said that they believe that

the Indonesian soldiers realized that the guns in their hands were from the United States and that there would be a consequence for killing people with a passport of the nation that is providing them with the support and the guns. And so they lived and they survived. And because of the two of them and a handful of others, the world understood what was happening in East Timor. And when East Timor became an independent country, they were both given credit by the new leaders of the country for having been crucial to the independence of East Timor.

And so you start

So I started stalking Amy Goodman. She had to decide whether to let me volunteer or get a restraining order against me. I would actually send her real letters and I would go to all of her events. They were like magazine cutout letters. No, no. I would sign my actual name. But what I was also doing at the time, I moved to this community in Baltimore called Jonah House. And I lived with the...

the late father Philip Berrigan and his wife Liz McAllister and Jonah House was a was a

a community of resistance, but also of service rooted in Catholic liberation theology. And for people that don't know, Philip and Daniel Berrigan were the two organizers of an action in 1968 known as the Catonsville Nine. And what they did is, these were two Catholic priests at the time, Daniel Berrigan, they're both priest brothers, Philip and Daniel. Daniel Berrigan was a well-known author and poet. And

and a significant voice opposed to the war in Vietnam, but they didn't want to just be involved with kind of abstract theology. They wanted to take action. And so they organized a raid on a draft house in Catonsville, Maryland in May of 1968 that had hundreds of A1 draft files that were being used to send young Americans to the war in Vietnam. And so in the middle of a workday, these two Catholic priests and their seven comrades go into

this draft house in Catonsville, Maryland with little metal garbage bins and they proceed to take out the draft files right in front of the clerks of the house and put them into this garbage bin. They bring them into the parking lot of the Catonsville draft house

They burned them with homemade napalm and they had made the napalm because of the US Army field manual that had been made public. And the opening line of their, you know, this was a protest against the war in Vietnam, the opening line of the statement of the Catonsville Nine that Daniel Berrigan wrote was, "Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children."

And so I lived with Phil Berrigan. And they said, if you want to follow Jesus, you have to look good on wood. And so they both spent a considerable amount of time in and out of prison. So you're at Democracy Now! Well, I was at Jonah House, but we would listen to the radio every day still. I was still stalking Amy Goodman. I then moved to the Catholic Worker in New York, in part because I knew Amy Goodman was there and Democracy Now! was there.

And to make a very long story short, Amy Goodman made the mistake of coming to do a story about an art exhibit about the life of Dorothy Day that I had helped organize with some friends. And I went up to her and I'm like, I'm the guy who's been writing you. And it's like, literally, I like, I know this too. Yeah, she was sort of looking like, I'd wish I had a security guard here. But she actually then agreed and said, okay, we can try it for one day. And I went into the old studios of WBAI in New York across from

Madison Square Garden and sort of that was the beginning of like my life as a journalist and Amy taught me how to edit she was an incredible editor of audio tape like the old reel to reels where you would cut it with an actual razor blade so she taught me how to do that because she was a master at it and I became pretty proficient at

editing and other journalists would ask me to edit their stories. And that's why I learned. So to go back to the very beginning of our conversation, my guidance counselor said, you should go into, you know, look at, look at a trade. I ended up doing that. The trade was journalism. That's always what I tell young people too. You know, I'm, I'm almost 50 years old and you know, it's hard to think of myself as being that old, but like I often tell young people it's, you know, to be a journalist, it's, it is like a working class job.

You have to get your fingers dirty. If you really do journalism right, you have to be out there with the people. And it shouldn't be reserved just for people who have fancy degrees.

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Journalism as activism and journalism as social justice activism, it seems to me that a lot of people that go through that pipeline now are hyper-educated. They have master's degrees. They all live in—they come from similar backgrounds. They actually tend to come from upper-middle-class backgrounds. It's not to say everyone, but it's become really different than it was in the past. I wanted to get your take as somebody who's been sort of through all these different steps from Democracy Now! to The Intercept to Dropsite.

of how that has perhaps influenced the way that the media talks about social justice. Yeah, and I think it's a great question and issue. I also think, though, that you can come at journalism from a number of different pathways, and I certainly came at it from

a kind of social justice activist perspective mixed in with sort of liberation theology. But you then, there's a point at which you have to learn the actual trade of journalism and that facts matter, that context matter, that history actually matters. So that's really important no matter what path you took to it.

It's also like, I think that there are really responsible, good journalists who are conservatives, who I don't agree with politically, but I know when I read them that they're making an effort, that there is a dedication to

facts. And that's how I kind of draw a line. When I was doing the work on Obama's drone wars and stuff, there were a lot of journalists on a totally different political perspective than myself who I thought did really good reporting on it. I think the key is, do you keep that same principle when your guys are in power? And that's where I think we have...

you know, sort of main, you know, major problems. You can't be a vegetarian between meals. You can't be like, oh, I'm a journalist now that, you know, Donald Trump is in power. Now this goes to your other question. This happened to Ryan too. When Trump was president, I mean, clearly Donald Trump is not someone who represents much of my worldview.

But there were elements of Trump's foreign policy that represented a departure from what we saw under the eight years of Barack Obama or kind of the elite consensus in Washington, D.C. And anytime we would point out, like I did a story at one point where I was talking about Trump's kind of stated opposition to forever wars.

And I wrote something and did a podcast on it that said that Trump might be our best bet to actually get out of some of these. And I was making a complicated argument that had to do with the nature of this alliance between the neocons and the Democrats and how Trump, whatever you think of him, represented, you know, Cy Hersh said at the time he was a circuit breaker. Mm-hmm.

This isn't to praise him, it's to state facts. Well, people went completely nuts. Oh, Scahill is pro-Trump. Oh, you called Trump the dove. I never called Trump the dove. The guy expanded drone strikes. He used the mother of all bombs. He assassinated Qasem Soleimani. I mean, Trump was a highly militaristic president, but he had certain basic things that he had put on record that were a departure from the way that Democrats and Republicans talk. And I think we have to, we have a,

obligation to point that out and not just treat it as, you know, orange, orange Hitler is coming back into power. Like we have a responsibility to say what's true and what's not. So, and, you know, working democracy now to the intercept to drop site, I think that, you know, the, the, the spirit that Ryan and I and our colleagues are trying to embrace is, is one of, we called it non-aligned journalism at the beginning. That doesn't, you know, it

Nonpartisan is, that's tired. But I think non-aligned, this idea that facts actually matter and that we're not afraid to say that the Democrats are engaged in a genocidal war and that we're not gonna pull punches because people are saying, "Oh, what are you doing? "You're gonna help Trump." No, we're gonna help the public to have a real understanding. And people like us who are perceived to be on the left or sometimes people erroneously call us liberals,

Our job is not to get Kamala Harris elected. Our job was not to get Barack Obama elected. Our job is to hold politicians accountable regardless of which party they're a member of. And I think that on the right, you don't have many people that are willing, maybe it increased a bit because of Trump, but in general, I don't think you see

Look, our old colleague Glenn Greenwald, he went way out on a limb and he was, I think he's right about cancel culture and speech issues. But he also saw in a very real way that some of the people that he thought were allies in this, all of a sudden when it comes to Palestine, they wanna shut down that speech. So I think that...

The people I respect, regardless of their political outlook, are people that apply the same principles regardless of who's in power. And there are a lot of people who, in conservative media actually, which I'm a pretty staunch defender of, who do unfortunately see their job as helping a candidate. And I think journalism is about helping facts and truth. You just have to, if you want to be on a team, that's fine, but it's not journalism. Right, go do that. Yeah, if you think that's the just way to go about your business, fine, but...

It's not journalism. But also look what we're witnessing right now with Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney endorsing Kamala Harris. And not just endorsing Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris then does an event with Liz Cheney in Wisconsin in which she goes out of her way to praise Dick Cheney for his service to the country. This is one of the most notorious villains in modern American history. I mean, people talk about

I mean, Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger are on the same level of the amount of destruction that they wrought in the world.

And to have Kamala Harris, there would have been a different way to handle that. But to actually go out of your way to thank him for his service, this was a- Like what service? I mean, if you- You want to specify what service you're thanking Dick Cheney for there? First of all, these guys thought that the Nixon administration was a model for how you should deal with Congress and deal with secrecy.

Dick Cheney, when he was in Congress, wrote the so-called minority report for the Iran Contra scandal saying not only should no one go to jail for this, but this is actually a model for how we should be doing it. They believe that the president, when it comes to quote unquote national security policy, should effectively operate a dictatorship of the executive and that Congress's only function is to fund the operations.

But then you talk about when they were actually in power. The torture, the man still defends waterboarding, he still defends torture. These were the guys that were big into the warrantless wiretapping, the secret prisons, the torture, the wars of aggression, the declaration that the world is a battlefield.

what is Kamala Harris thinking saying she's thanking this person for his service? To me though, it's indicative, the Bill Kristol neo-con wing of the Republican Party, it's not, this narrative that they're just concerned about the fate of American democracy is complete nonsense. And actually it's an insidious narrative because the truth is,

they're totally, they totally love what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are doing on a foreign policy level right now in the Middle East. They're just like, Dick Cheney loved the fact that Obama was able to normalize drone strikes and assassination as a fundamental part of American policy for liberals. And so you message that and people say, oh, what are you doing trying to help Trump? Well, what is the Democratic Party doing

proactively praising Dick Cheney's record. Kamala Harris can't help it if Dick Cheney says, I'd rather have Kamala Harris. But then she goes out of her way to say this about someone that Democrats used to say was one of the most notorious war criminals in modern American history. Joe Biden was on TV in the Bush era saying that he had shredded the Constitution. He didn't care about the Constitution. One interesting thing about Joe Biden, early in Joe Biden's career, he

focus pretty intensely on the War Powers Act, you know, and if you go back and you look at Joe Biden's career, he actually understands these issues of war powers. He was, at times, he dissented within the Obama White House, but what we're seeing now, you know, and there's talk of the United States potentially participating in an offensive attack on

you know, on Iran, which would be a clear violation of the War Powers Act. Biden's career, though, shows that when it actually comes down to when your people are in power, those things go out the window. And under Democratic administrations, Biden made all sorts of excuses and exceptions under Clinton and certainly under Obama for violating the War Powers Act.

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And so then in the 2000s and 2010s, you became known for your reporting on mercenaries and then also drone strikes and America's dirty wars. So as you're at Democracy Now!, late 90s, early 2000s, lead up 9-11, then the lead up to the war, how do you go from the editing room, mopping the floors, to I presume you continued doing those things, but then also getting to

in the tradecraft of producing it then gets edited. What happened was that in 1998, Amy Goodman wanted to go to Nigeria to investigate

the role of oil companies in that country. And she had done one of the only US interviews with the poet Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was a world-renowned poet from Nigeria, one of the leaders of the Ogoni tribe in the Niger Delta. And with the complicity of the Shell Oil Corporation,

the Nigerian military junta hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others. They were known as the Ogoni Nine. But Amy had interviewed Ken Saro-Wiwa when he came briefly to the United States in the midnight. I think it was even months before he was hanged. And Amy really cared deeply about, she was deeply moved by meeting Ken Saro-Wiwa and started working on an investigation. She actually asked me to go along with her to Nigeria

And so I went kind of as her assistant, more or less. And we traveled all around these riverine communities of the Niger Delta. And I mean, it was incredible to watch Amy Goodman work as the most tireless, aggressive journalist I've ever met. I mean, she is...

She is a force of nature. I'll just tell you one story though. So we go, we interviewed, we documented this massacre of indigenous villagers who had protested Chevron. And it was clear that Chevron had provided them with company helicopters, the paramilitary force with Chevron helicopters to go and attack these indigenous villagers that were doing a nonviolent occupation of one of their oil barges.

So we went and we did the people side of the story. We interviewed survivors, witnesses, et cetera. And then we went back to Lagos. And at the time, the dictator, Sani Abacha, had just died. It was an extremely dangerous situation in Nigeria. Another military figure had taken control of the country. And we went to Chevron's headquarters in Lagos.

So we were in a car with the drivers, me and Amy. We pull up. We had no appointment. We had figured out the name of the managing director. Amy said, "We're here to see the managing director." And they're like, "Well, do you have an appointment?" And she said, "We're Americans." And he said, "Okay, yeah, but do you have an appointment?" "We are Americans. We need to see him right now. Chevron's an American oil corporation." And she talked her way through the security. We go in there, and within minutes, we're sitting face-to-face with the managing director of Chevron in Nigeria.

And Amy proceeds to get him to admit to the entire thing, just in the course of this interview. And at one point, he says to her, she's asking about the helicopters, the providing of helicopters. He says, "Oh, actually, our head of security went with them." Chevron's head of security went with this force. - You guys have a recorder running? - Oh yeah, she was recording, Amy was recording the whole thing, huh? - That's nice detail, yeah. - So Amy said, "Oh, can we talk to him?" "Oh yeah, we can get him." So they bring him into the room, and she's saying, "Oh, do they have any weapons?" "Well, they had like voodoo charms," he's saying. They made up, they had this whole thing.

the congressional, we come back then, we do this documentary called Drilling and Killing Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship. It wins the George Polk Award that year. And the Congressional Black Caucus did an investigation. And, you know, I learned,

I learned journalism as a trade like you would be an apprentice. So I soaked up everything. I had notebooks filled not just with what we were seeing, but what I was witnessing Amy as someone I considered to be my mentor, how she worked, the aggressiveness, the temerity, the thoroughness. I mean, Amy is a relentless fact checker. I mean, she is incredible to watch a journalist work like that. And I mean, I think about it every day because it's...

I think if you look at how much laziness there is in journalism today, also what our devices have created. People think you can just text the source, oh, can you give me a quote? Everything is now being done remotely. We lose something when we're not in the field, when we're not talking face to face with people. - And so then you had an interesting arc in the sense that after the war breaks out

And you've got these war criminals, Bush and Cheney, in the office. You become kind of like a hero of Democrats because you're out there criticizing, you know, eventually Democrats. No, they support, I mean, Democratic voters who are against the war. Democrats themselves, half of them voted for the war.

Yeah. So what's that experience like to go from... Oh, it's surreal. Every, you know, MSNBC and... Yeah. You know. Sort of marginalized leftist. And then everybody's loving what you're saying and then all of a sudden... Oh, yeah. You're saying the exact same thing. I mean, so... New boss and...

So I had spent years going in and out of Iraq. Even before 9/11, I started going to Iraq in the late 1990s. Amy supported me going to do that. So I was doing reporting from Iraq starting in the 90s when Saddam Hussein

was in power. And a lot of what I was, one important thing in journalism is to be humble enough to know what you don't know. And Amy also told me that too. She said, you don't feel like you need to tell the whole political story. When you go somewhere to report, remember, you're just starting doing this. It's valuable to tell the stories of what you see around you.

and don't pretend that you're an expert on something that you're not. And so a lot of what I did in my early reporting, I was in Serbia during the 1999 NATO bombing, I was in Iraq under the sanctions and the no-fly zone bombings of Bill Clinton, and a lot of what I did was to go

talk to ordinary people about what happened today in your family, you know, telling these stories of ordinary people. And in Iraq, I had, you know, did a lot of stories about the hospitals in Iraq. So when, when the Iraq war happened, I already had spent years going in and out of Iraq and I understood the dynamic. I knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction. I was there when the weapons inspector stuff happened. And, you know, anyway, then

Democrats largely opposed the war, although people like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden was a major facilitator of the Iraq war, no matter how he wants to try to revise history. He was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a time when they should have been pointing out all of the problems with the administration narrative. And Biden largely was a facilitator of the

of the war. So Democrats as an institutional power entity should not be ever let off the hook for their role in that, but the base was opposed to that war. So when I then started doing this reporting on Blackwater, it tied together so many things. I first encountered Blackwater in New Orleans actually, in the aftermath of the flooding of the city and Hurricane Katrina. It was like a surreal experience to see these guys walking the streets of an American city

with automatic weapons and to say that they've been deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana to shoot looters.

and to discover that these forces, and at the time, nobody really had heard of Blackwater yet. There had been an incident where four Blackwater operatives were ambushed and killed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which then gave the U.S. an excuse to lay siege to it, and it was one of the most horrifying episodes of the early stages of the Iraq War. But in general, people didn't know much about them. And then we did this reporting showing that they were in, and this was for The Nation magazine at the time,

that they were in New Orleans. And I became obsessed with this company and this kind of shadowy figure, Eric Prince, and his family history, and the fact that they were some of the premier funders of the radical religious right. And the Prince family was one of the main founders

funding engines for the merging that happened in the Republican Party between what's now known as the religious right and then the kind of traditional conservatives bringing them together. People don't know Betsy DeVos is his sister. Betsy DeVos is Eric Prince's sister and, you know, of course was a cabinet official in the early days of the Trump administration. Fantastically rich. You know, they were the main funders of like focus on the family and, you know, all, you know, this and Eric Prince's mother continued to be the premier funder of, uh,

defeating ballot initiatives on gay marriage, et cetera. But so I started writing article after article and I had gotten a fellowship at the Nation magazine. My friend Naomi Klein had recommended me for it, which generally means you get paid a small amount of money to do as much work as you possibly can while keeping your head above the water. And I mean, the Nation was so, it was so great. I loved the Nation. I had applied as a young person for an internship and got rejected.

And then years later, I would be hired as their national security correspondent. And I'm doing all this reporting on Blackwater. And Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Betsy Reed, the editors at the time, said, you know, we love you. We love the work you're doing. But we are a pretty small magazine. We can't publish an article every week about the same company. Like, you either need to diversify your beat or, like, write a book. So I wrote a book. And...

you know, my advance for that book was $30,000, which means that you get $10,000 when you sign it. I mean, I didn't have health insurance or anything at the time, or, you know, I had a small amount of money from a fellowship and then I get this $30,000. And I didn't understand how the book advance worked. You know, you get paid

- A third of it. - $30,000. - I was like, okay, I can do that. That should last me for months. I can do this. And then you get the first check and it's pre-taxed 10,000. - The agent has taken 15,000. - Right, and you're like, I didn't even have an agent at the time. - Well, at least you got 15% then, yeah. - And so I wrote the book and I thought that I was gonna be selling it out of my backpack. I really was kind of naive in that part of life. I wasn't doing it because of money. Most people don't make any money from a book.

So I write this thing and it debuts at number nine on the New York Times bestseller list. - What year is this by the way? - This was 2007. - Okay. - And so it debuts at number nine. And next thing I know, I'm like getting interviewed on big TV shows. But remember what happened that year in 2007

is in September of 2007, Blackwater mercenaries opened fire on a crowded traffic circle in Baghdad known as Nisr Square, and they killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians. And it was an enormous story at the time, huge story around the world.

Actually, that night I had been out with my friends in New York and one of the things we were kind of celebrating is that I was sort of saying, "I'm going to be done with Blackwater now and I want to move on to try to do other reporting." And I had gone out with a bunch of friends that night until like four in the morning. And one of the things we were kind of jokingly celebrating was that Jeremy is going to find something else to do with his life. And then I wake up that morning to a series of text messages from Amy Goodman and other media outlets saying, "Can you come into the studio?"

And from that moment for like months on end, I was permanently on TV. I was on CNN, NBC, Fox, MSNBC, regularly on all of these things. Then I ended up being a correspondent on the Real Time with Bill Maher. I wasn't a known person at that time. I was probably considered like a up and coming independent lefty journalist or something, but I wasn't anything mainstream. All of a sudden now I'm on TV all the time.

And that lasted for a sustained period where I would be called to talk about the Iraq war, about Blackwater, et cetera. And as long, when Bush and Cheney were in power,

Democrats were very happy to have me. I testified in front of Congress multiple times. I had good relationships with a number of Congress people. They would ask me about legislation that they were gonna put in on these issues. And then Obama becomes president and people didn't like it when I then applied the same

standards to what they were doing in the realm of assassination and drone strike. - Was there anything in particular that got you like an MSNBC ban or was it just gradual? - Well, there were two things that happened. That world of being banned at these networks, it's very hard to like nail it down. I was told by a friend within MSNBC

that after a particular incident occurred that a no-book order had been issued on me. And for a long time after this happened, I was not allowed on. What happened is that I was on Rachel Maddow's show, and it was when my book Dirty Wars and the film Dirty Wars were out. And Rachel had had me on a lot, and Keith Olbermann used to have me on all the time. So I was on with Rachel, who I always had a...

You know, I don't know her as a person. I know her superficially, but she always was pretty supportive of my work. So she has me on and we were talking about the drone strike that had killed a 16-year-old American citizen teenager in Yemen named Abdulrahman al-Laki. His father, of course, was Anwar al-Laki, who the United States openly said was on a kill list. And then they did, in fact, kill him in a drone strike. But then two weeks later, they killed his teenage son, Abdulrahman. So I was on Rachel's show.

And right before that segment,

where Rachel interviews me, she had had Robert Gibbs on, who at the time was an MSNBC contributor. And Gibbs had been the campaign spokesperson for Barack Obama's reelection campaign, in addition to having been an official in the- He was the press- Oh, I think I might, go ahead. I thought he was the press secretary. He was the press secretary. And then when he said the thing that I'm gonna tell you, he was the campaign spokesperson for the Obama reelection campaign. He said it to me. Yeah, okay. Oh my gosh. That's funny. So what happened is- That's good. Gibbs-

had been asked about the killing of Abd al-Rahman al-Awlaki by Ra... - In a spin room. - Okay, all right, good. The story's even better. - At every debate afterwards, there's the spin room and they send the surrogates out to talk to the reporters. And the question you're supposed to ask is, did Obama do what he needed to do against Mitt Romney? And then you get the spin from Robert Gibbs. I said, Obama just assassinated a 16 year old boy in Yemen.

What's your reaction to that? Is he going to win the election? What's your reaction to that? And Gibbs said he should have had a better father. He should have had a more responsible father, yeah. I sent that comment to the White House. And I remember they put enormous pressure on me. This Politico? You were at Politico? I was at HuffPost at the time saying he really regrets having said that. He shouldn't have said that to you. Can you please not? Really? I never heard that part of it. Can you please not publish this? Wow.

So that happened in 2011. He said it. Yeah. So you told him to pound sand. And I published it. Yeah. The killing happened in 2011. So this must have happened like 2012 or so. Yeah. Because it was right. Right. Okay. So that makes sense. That was Gibbs. So this would have been then 2013, I guess, when I was on with Rachel and we were talking about this episode. But Gibbs had been on talking about something unrelated before me because he was an NBC contributor at the time. So

So then when the interview starts with Rachel, I mentioned the fact that you just had Robert Gibbs on and one of you should ask him about this because we were about to now talk about the killing of this kid that Ryan had questioned him about. So I said, you know, one of you guys should ask him about this. You know, now that he's an MSNBC contributor, you know, it's shameful to I don't remember my exact words, but I made the point that it's, you know, it's shameful to imply that this

kid deserved to die because his father wasn't responsible, that therefore it's okay to drone assassinate a kid that no one has ever made any allegation, he had any connection to terrorism or anything whatsoever. And the fact that he was also an American citizen. Yeah, I said to Rachel during, I wasn't attacking Rachel Maddow, I just made a comment.

And after the show ended, I don't remember exactly what Rachel said, but she made a comment to me that, you know, that was not appropriate, that I had done that or something like that. Did you get the sense that it was from someone in her ear telling her to say that or was it genuine? I don't think Rachel needs anybody. She's kind of a company person. I don't think she needs anybody to tell her. No. And I, you know, I mean, again, just, you know, to clarify, I don't know Rachel Maddow well. She always had been very,

positive about my work, but that was the last time I ever saw her. I was certainly never invited back on again, and then I wasn't invited on others. And then what happened with CNN was when Trump authorized the missile strikes against Syria early in his administration, I was on Brian Stelter's show, and on his show, I went after Fareed Zakaria,

I said that, you know, Fareed loves these missile strikes. And if he could have sex with a cruise missile strike, he would. And then I started talking about the, like, he's just like in love with these things. It's so, but it's creepy when you watch sometimes his reaction to,

to these military actions, it's really, I find it creepy with some of these pundits, how giddy they get. There was that famous Brian Williams thing about the beautiful lights and everything. But so I'm on that show. And then I also called out their generals and I named some of their generals and said that you aren't disclosing the fact that they have a profit motive for advocating this kind of military action. And after that, I was told there was a no book order issued on me on CNN after that.

So what I had to give Gibbs his pushback, I just found this story from October 2012. He said what he was trying to say was that he didn't realize that the son was killed two weeks after the father

And I guess he thought the kid was just killed with his father. So that was his... I find that a difficult explanation. What I was told at the time was that Brennan, John Brennan, the CIA director, that Obama himself was livid when he heard that the kid had been killed, that the 16-year-old had been killed.

And, you know, I tried to track them. Because it's unjustifiable. It's completely unjustifiable. But, you know, I had been told at the time I had good sources in that world. And I was told that both Obama and Brennan were trying to figure out how exactly the kid was killed because there's been a lot of suspicion that they intended to kill him. No one has ever proven that.

My best guess is that part of what happened is that they were using, there's a whole convoluted story about why that kid had run away from home and was looking for his dad that I won't get into now. But the short of it is, I think that the disposition matrix, we know that the child, we know this from leaked documents, whistleblower documents, that Abdurrahman al-Awlaki, 16-year-old American citizen, was assigned a terrorism tracking number by the United States government.

Which is not necessarily shocking given that his dad was a wanted figure. He would have been considered like a known associate or family member, but he did have a terrorist tracking number. And certainly his cell phone and other communications would have been monitored when the US was hunting for his dad. And the initial reports was that he was killed in an area with people who were members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

What may have happened is that they use these formulas where it's like, if this SIM card is communicating with this SIM card and these five SIM cards are now together and we're tracking it, we know that that's a personality, you know, that it has the, sorry, the signature of a group of terrorists. Rather than it being a personality strike where you know who you're getting, they have enough signatures of being a terror grouping that we bomb them. So it could have been that. It could have been that someone signed off on killing him. We don't actually know. But

I don't find Gibbs's explanation credible, given that I believe that Obama and Brennan at the time were concerned about the fact that that kid was killed.

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So what I find fascinating about all of that is this is sort of the era when I was coming of age, Dixie Chicks, culture wars era. And I remember shows like Real Time with Bill Maher. I remember outlets like HuffPost and The Nation and the early days of The Intercept. I'm curious how you guys would weigh in on this sort of platforming, I think in a really good way, a lot of this almost like crunchy leftist kind of social justice,

- Watch it now. - Well! - Crunchy. - If the Birkenstock fits. But, you know, I really-- - I did have granola this morning that I made. - Right, yeah, you do like homemade granola. But I really found that stuff to be actually very compelling and

It just, a lot of those institutions, MSNBC is such a good example. Rachel Maddow herself is such a good example in that she used to have conversations with people like you. They seem to have made a business decision that in the Trump era especially, this no longer sold. This was no longer the product that would do best for them. Obviously, the politics conveniently underlined or were conveniently aligned with that as well. But what I'm so curious about is at Dropsite now.

I think there is an incredible market for exactly the type of journalism that you do, whether it's pegged as, you know, unfairly, I mean, as like crunchy leftist whatever, or if it's just good journalism that happens to be by people who are on the left. It seems like there's a huge mistake on the part of MSNBC, a huge mistake on the part of places like HuffPo missing that there's a real audience for this. I remember being in Chicago at the DNC when there was a drop site party.

Your guys' turnout was incredible and also just the enthusiasm for the product, the loyalty to the product. I mean, Dropsite fans love both of you. It's a real like allegiance to your guys' work because it speaks to them. And what I find very interesting is the business decision that the media made after the Bush era, after the Obama era to walk away from having some of these much more challenging conversations. Seems to me like what you guys are doing at Dropsite proves that that was wrong.

You know, I think that era that you're describing too, let's remember there was a moment where Chris Hayes was given a weekend spot on MSNBC. I think it was Up with Chris Hayes. Still Up with Chris Hayes. Yeah, still up or what? And I would go on that show a lot and he would have really interesting, diverse panels of people. And I thought it was really one of the best shows on television at the time because it

You had people from different, he would have Eli Lake on debating someone like me. There was this intellectual opening that was so unusual for MSNBC at that time. I thought it was remarkable what was happening on those weekends with Chris Hayes. And of course, that was short-lived. But yeah, they've totally leaned into this

identity as they are the kind of media front that's gonna prevent Orange Hitler from taking power. And I have deep concerns about Donald Trump. I think that man is an utter disaster. I think that the narratives about Trump that his supporters and defenders try to offer up to people on the left, they just don't hold any weight whatsoever. - Did you hear that, Ryan?

- Huge Trump fan. - Big Trump fan over here, yeah. - Well, no, I'm making it clear that I think that there is a way to approach covering this election that is not a mirror image of the critique Democrats offer of Fox News. - Yes. - And I find it totally intellectually dishonest. And I think that it's not about whether it's fair to Trump or not. It does a disservice to their own audience.

On the issue of the Gaza war, news organizations should be aggressively questioning Kamala Harris. She wants to have it both ways. She's saying, "Well, I've been a part of every single decision that's been made."

but then her supporters say, "Yeah, but she's not the president." But then every opportunity she's given to explain what she would do differently, she takes that opportunity to say, "Nothing. Nothing. I would do nothing differently. Maybe the rhetoric would be different." And so I don't believe in pulling punches

because the audience is going to be upset that you've landed them on a powerful person. I think, to me, I don't see integrity in that. And so I think the people that are subscribing to Dropsite

They don't think that Ryan and I are right every single time, but I think they know, I think we've both proven over the course of our time in journalism that we are willing to apply the exact same standards of critique, analysis, investigation to Democrats as we are to Republicans when they're in power. That should just be basic journalism, though. This shouldn't be something unusual. Right. And I think even though we clearly have a perspective that we're coming from in our reporting, the fact that the

perspective and the principle has stayed the same no matter which party is in power, lets people who disagree with us read it and let them think for themselves. It's ironic that the mainstream media says that they're the kind of you from nowhere. Like they're the objective ones who are just the facts and we're going to let you decide. Mm-hmm.

But in fact, they're actually just, they obviously have a perspective. Everybody does. But it's very hard to tell what it is. And so people don't know when they're being fed propaganda. Whereas with us, they're always getting our perspective. Yeah, they're trying to. And so they can take it or leave it, but they know that the facts are going to be asked.

- Look at what we've seen, it highlights Ryan's point, but from a little bit of a different angle. When you look at the broader corporate news or mainstream news coverage of Gaza, the view from nowhere is actually if you drill down and say, what's happening here? What's happening is that for the Palestinians,

of Gaza and increasingly of the West Bank and certainly now the people of Lebanon, for their plight to be recognized or for the crimes committed against them to be recognized as crimes requires so much evidence that it makes it almost impossible for their humanity to be recognized in any just objective way. The assertions made by the Israeli state for an entire year straight are often treated as though there are facts. And

When you look at the narrative around hospitals in Gaza or the number of people killed, this administration, the Biden-Harris administration, has promoted some of the most nefarious lies and propaganda of the Israeli state from the beginning. And news organizations,

The framing of it is often that you trust but verify, supposedly, the Israelis, and with the Palestinians, there is no initial, they must be lying. But that also, if you apply it to American politics, there's the same kind of intellectual dishonesty at play there and deference to the powerful that you see among elite media toward their own preferred candidates. You don't trust the powerful, then verify. Right.

- Right, it's just, yeah. I mean, and especially you should assume that the powerful are not telling you the truth, but it's your job then to go and verify what the facts are. And that is the policy toward all Palestinians who have anything to say about, you can have a child, you can have American doctors saying that they saw

infants or tiny children shot with sniper bullets in the head in Gaza. - Dozens of times. - And it's like, it doesn't even make a dent in the public consciousness. I mean, think about this. We have multiple doctors who sent this letter recently also to the administration and they were saying all of us have seen evidence or treated people

where you have younger than teenage children being shot with sniper rounds there. And this is almost a non-story. You know, I mean, right as we sit here, the Israelis...

are laying siege to the north of Gaza. They basically issued an order, flee immediately or be considered a combatant. It's being done with US weapons, with the support of a president of the United States who goes out of his way constantly to say that he is a Zionist and that he continues to portray Israel's offensive actions as defense.

I mean, shame on the broader press corps for the way in which it has not held this administration accountable. But more than that, 170 plus journalists have been killed

In Gaza, almost all of them are Palestinians and almost all of them have been killed by the Israeli government with American weapons. A Fox News reporter recently, I don't have his name, maybe you guys can look it up. - Trey Yinks. - Yeah, Trey Yinks, their chief foreign correspondent. He posted, and I give him total credit for doing this. And actually, this wasn't the first time that he made that point. Trey, through the months, he has consistently raised this issue. People might have criticisms of how he's done it.

I give him immense credit because you look at some so-called liberal journalists who have never had a word to say about Palestinian journalists being killed. It also raises a point that goes back to something earlier.

When James Rosen at Fox News, when there was an investigation over him for this North Korea reporting that he had done and it became clear that the government had been also reading his G-mails and I stood up and defended James Rosen. - Of course, we called for Eric Holder to resign over that.

We're going after this Fox News national security correspondent. I don't think that would happen at HuffPost today. Well, I mean, if it happened today at Dropsite, we absolutely would report on it. You know, and it's, you know, I think that

A huge mistake is made when there's a core freedom that's being attacked in journalism. And this goes to the earlier comments too about cancel culture stuff. And then all of a sudden the Palestine thing shows that all those people, almost all of them were total frauds on that issue. But the same is true of media freedom. I believe the Russians had no business locking up Evan Gershkovich in that prison. And I'm happy that the Wall Street Journal reporter was freed.

And I saw all of these famous journalists, Jake Tapper and others, every day putting up a thing about Free Evan. Where are they on the traumatic head injury of a journalist this week in Deir el-Bala? Where are they on the decapitating of Ismail al Ghul? Where are they on the mass murder of...

Wael Dawdu's family, the former Al Jazeera bureau chief in Gaza. Where are they on the killing of any of these journalists? Mujahid Al Saadi. Shireen Abou-Akla. Who wrote for Dropside. Yeah, even before the Gaza, you know, the October 7th justification, an American citizen, uh,

quite clearly assassinated in the West Bank. You know, the Biden administration has, and the FBI under Biden, has not done anywhere near the kind of aggressive investigation that they should be doing about this killing of an American citizen by an American ally when she was doing her job as a award-winning journalist.

journalists. But I say shame on all of these people who have never had a word to say. The fact that a Fox News journalist issued one of the strongest condemnations of the killing of Palestinian journalists by any mainstream American journalist, unto itself is a damning condemnation of the so-called liberal media.

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To close the arc on consistency to the Edward Snowden leak. Yeah So what what you know, how'd you learn about what was your role with Glenn on that? Because you and Glenn and Laura then go on to found the intercept

So, I mean, Glenn and I had known each other for some years. And when he started his blog and then he was at Salon, there was a lot of overlap and we got to know each other just sort of online and had only met a couple of times in person. And I don't remember how far ahead of it was, but like some, it could have been days or maybe a couple of weeks before that.

Glenn and Laura flew to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden. Glenn had gotten in touch with me and said, I remember I was actually at a restaurant with Michael Ratner, the late head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who was a dear friend of mine, one of the greatest lawyers in American history. And I see I have this call from Glenn, so I step out and I talk to Glenn and Glenn says, "I can't tell you much about this,

but I need somebody I trust that can be sort of my contact person for something I'm going to be doing. I'm gonna be flying to the other side of the world to meet someone who has information that if it's true and valid is going to be a volcanic explosion to the national security state. That was how Glenn had described it. And he said, can you be available?

And I said, of course, yeah. And, you know, so Glenn, they go and, you know, we had developed a way to be in touch. So Glenn was just sort of, you know, a lot of journalists do this when you go to a dangerous place. You have somebody that you always touch base with when you're in a place. So for, you know, in a very behind the scenes way, I was honored to like, when I then realized what it was, you know, honored to have helped, but I wasn't like, you know, in on the Snowden thing. It was, you know, I played a very minor role in, you know,

helping out a friend and a colleague who was going into what he described as a potentially dangerous situation. And I knew enough to not ask him any more detail about it. And so, you

There was a battle in The Guardian too that took place at the beginning of this. Of course, the White House pushes back immensely against this. I think they were only just starting to realize the problem and there was some question of whether it was gonna end up getting published in The Guardian. So Glenn had asked me to work on a backdoor alternative. So we actually started talking to other news outlets about publishing it if The Guardian didn't publish that first story right out of the gates, which they ended up doing and they won a Pulitzer for the series.

I mean, imagine the pressure that all of them were under. So, you know, then I'm visiting Glenn, you know, after that down in Brazil with his like five bazillion monkey, dogs and monkeys and other things in his thing. You're at the zoo. Yeah, you didn't need to go. Yeah, you'd be there. You know, Glenn is sitting there with like, you know, he's got his laptop. He's wearing his Bermuda shorts and his flip flops. And he's sitting there just completely exhausted.

taking on the most powerful government in the world with his Bermuda shorts on. Glenn is one of the most unusual, interesting people that I've ever met. And we ended up starting The Intercept with Glenn and Laura and myself.

And related to DropSide too, remember what The Intercept was actually started to do. The purpose of it was to try to publish secrets that the government wanted to remain locked up, to provide a platform for whistleblowers and others to speak out and to do no holds barred journalism without fear or favor. And I think that's, we're trying to embrace

that original ethos of the intercept at Dropsite. Well, can you guys actually maybe talk about that? Because I don't know if you've ever talked publicly together about whether it's been hard to watch what happened to the intercept when you were on the inside, but also it has created a wonderful new product in Dropsite. So what has that just been like for both of you? Yeah, I'm curious for Jeremy to say, but institutions evolve. And also like two years ago,

Pierre Omidyar, who made an initial $250 million pledge, I think it was. That wasn't to The Intercept, though. It was to this whole thing. It's been misreported a little bit. Yeah, people exaggerate what The Intercept actually got. He was going to do 12 magazines. He was considering buying The Washington Post is what happened, and that's where that number came from. That's right. He wanted to buy The Washington Post. That was going to cost $250. He's like, well, why don't I just spend $250 and build my own? And he was going to do Racket,

by Matt Taibbi, which was going to look at, you know, economics and like corruption. Then he was going to do sports and leisure. Yeah, it was going to be like an omnibus news organization was my recollection. Yeah, like a good...

The Intercept was going to be like a vertical basically within it. Yeah, like a good VC who was buying at the top. This was the peak of digital media basically, and it collapsed after that. And so the only one that ever got off the ground was the Intercept because he cared about it, not as a commercial product. The other ones were supposed to be commercially successful products. But he cared about it a lot. And it very quickly became clear there was no digital market.

possibility there. But yeah, he cared about the idea of having a well-funded news organization that would take on these national security state projects and that had a legal defense fund, which was very important. Yeah. Because you're constantly getting lawsuit threats. It turned out to be very important. One thing that's also incredible, like the Looney Tunes stuff that sometimes gets thrown at us about the Intercept and about Omidyar and all of this, is that Omidyar was somehow in control and doing all these things.

It was remarkable how much freedom Pierre Omidyar gave to the people that he was funding entirely himself. I mean, one of the first stories that we did at The Intercept actually was quite critical of

Omidyar himself. - It's a good sign. - There was never a takedown order. There was never pressure. There was never, oh, I want you guys to cover this. Never did a single thing like that ever occur, which is remarkable. All of us, I think, were feeling like a day is gonna come when these guys are gonna tell us you can't do this story.

And to his credit, that never happened with Omidyar. - And his politics were different than, certainly different than Glenn's. He was like a Russiagate guy. - Later, yeah, I mean at the beginning, his whole thing was about, you know, he was, I think he was really deeply moved by Edward Snowden. He was really concerned about,

civil liberties and privacy issues and I think that was his motivation at the beginning was that he felt like this is a Crossroads moment in the history of the American Empire with this epic

courageous whistleblowing moment. - What about, oh go ahead, I was just gonna say like personally too, what was that like? Not with Amidyar, but just, you know, there are people who's added towards things like surveillance really did shift because now there's all this talk of like having this vast digital censorship apparatus and sometimes that's justified by people who would have been on the other side of the Snowden question 10 plus years ago. And I imagine personally that's not been super easy. - I mean, yeah, politics change, like,

And this is not the Edward Snowden era anymore. It's almost like the NSA won. Like Snowden exposed everything that was going on. Did lead to reforms. There are ongoing fights over FISA and FISA court. And

It's like, we've covered the fights here. There's this kind of transpartisan coalition of libertarians and progressives who are still taking these issues pretty seriously about mass collection and what you can search through. Some of it in Project 2025, by the way. Excellent. But the public is extremely cynical about it and just believes that

They already have access to everything. And so what's the point in fighting it? I mean, it's also, I mean, to one of Emily's earlier points too, you know, when the Obama administration was doing these drone assassinations and really, and the poll support for, among liberals for targeted assassination, you know, drone strikes was going up because Mr. Constitutional Law Scholar, Brezhnev,

Barack Obama had normalized this for an entire class of voters. Community organizer. But if you remember, you know, some of the heroes on Capitol Hill of that moment, you know, who really did have the courage to speak out at a high level, you know, you had Ron Wyden. Mm-hmm.

You had Rand Paul. In fact, Rand Paul on multiple occasions participated in kind of disrupting business as usual on the floor of the Senate to speak out about the assassination regime that had been put into place there. I mean, even Mike Lee. Mm-hmm.

At times, you know, and Mike Lee, Rand Paul has been very consistent on these issues throughout, you know, the aftermath of the launch of the so-called war on terror. But Mike Lee at times too has actually made really good points about issues that should be bread and butter issues for liberals. One thing I was thinking about last night in anticipation of talking to you guys also was just how utterly militaristic the Democratic Party has become when it's in power.

In the eight years of Obama, you look at the initiation of the air wars in Yemen that then led to a kind of genocidal situation with the Saudi air wars. But Obama, months after taking office in 2009, authorizes a series of secret airstrikes in Yemen.

The first one killed dozens of civilians in a cruise missile attack, and they also used cluster bombs, cluster munitions, and they allowed the Yemeni government to take responsibility for it. But you had Obama intensifying the war within the war in Afghanistan. You had the expansion of the drone strikes into Somalia, into Yemen, then the support for the Saudi attacks in Yemen itself. This was a very militaristic war.

throughout the course of those eight years. And then with Biden, who seldom in his 50 plus years in politics has met a US war he didn't love, support, or facilitate or enable in some way. In fact, he made a mistake in the 1991 Gulf War. He opposed it, but then quickly backtracked. The one popular war. It was like the one together. So it's inconvenient. Oh, oops, I made a mistake. Yes, I actually did. I'll never vote against the war again.

But we're seeing the face of a powerful part of the Democratic Party in this policy over the past year in Israel. I mean, had this not happened,

What would we have talked about on a foreign policy level with Biden when it comes to militarism? Certainly the, you know, the Ukraine issue and, you know, the aggressive support for Ukraine, the kind of Cold War, the embrace of the Cold War 2.0, that certainly would have been part of what we were talking about with Biden. The Afghanistan withdrawal, yes, this was a horrifying catastrophe that occurred. I think there's a legitimate, certainly, line of

attack and criticism against Biden for how that was handled. But largely speaking, Biden implemented a plan that was on the desk when Trump left office. There was a thwarting of Trump. Trump really did, he was trying to get this done in his first administration. I think he also deluded himself into assuming he was gonna be president for four more years. But also the military industrial political complex

They did not want this to happen under Trump. And Biden is the kind of empire politician that could make that happen, and he did make it happen. And at the time I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times giving Biden credit for actually doing it and saying that he shouldn't listen to hawkish voices like Hillary Clinton and others who were agitating against it at the time.

But we didn't just see Biden do the typical American, we support Israel. He went all in, in an over the top way over this past year. And it may well cost Kamala Harris the White House.

Well, you've landed some interviews at Dropsite that a lot of people in the media would be envious of and wish that they would have had. And I know Ryan and I want to talk a little bit about just process as a journalist, what it's like when you're interviewing somebody, let's say, that's high up in Hamas or anybody that actually finds themselves in that or that you find yourself in that situation. Do you have anything to add to that? Yeah, no. If you go back and think about it, you're...

Osama bin Laden was interviewed by CNN prior to 9/11 and there used to be an understanding

You can go back to World War II and look at American journalists interviewing Nazi officials and others. You can go through all sorts of wars. The people that you're told are the enemy. Journalists should have an ethical obligation to go and interview those people and to tell their readers back in their home country what the objective reality looks like on the ground.

And I think objectivity as defined in our elite media culture is nonsense. Caesar doesn't always deserve his say. What matters is are you being accurate? Are you being fair? Are you characterizing that person's position in a fair way? If you're making a serious allegation about someone, you have an ethical obligation to get their response to it. You are not obligated to pretend as though perpetrators

person X says this, person X says Y, well, we just don't know what's true. If you know that person X is largely telling the truth and person Y is not, you also have a responsibility to tell your readers that. So in terms of interviewing, yeah, we got attacked a lot because I did a series of articles where I interviewed senior officials from Hamas and also the number two figure in Palestinian Islamic jihad.

And we knew we were going to take heat for this because we didn't just say, you know, we didn't just ask them the kind of three questions that are allowed of any of these officials. I told him he should ask all the Hamas officials if they condemn Hamas. That would have been good. But do you condemn Hamas?

- But what, you know, so, and I did ask, you know, I asked the questions that you hear when you do see clips of them, you know, about the killing of civilians on October 7th and other, you know, I mean, of course I did all of that questioning. I don't find some of the answers very satisfying at all, you know, that these guys gave.

And I have like five different answers. They haven't even figured out. Which comes through in the interview, by the way, which is why you do the interview. Right. But what I think is important is if we, you know, we're being told that Israel deserves to have an endless supply of weapons produced, manufactured, authorized for sale or transfer by the government of the country that we're citizens of and that we live in. That right there is a starting point for journalists have an obligation to track that. You know, is this...

Is this speaking on behalf of the public? Is it being used in a way that's consistent with law, for instance? But also we're being told that,

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are the modern day equivalent of the Nazis. Repeatedly, they're compared to the Nazis. You know, there's an upside down world narrative about this where the roughly 1,100 Israelis and foreign workers who died on October 7th, their lives must exist in a realm of importance that is a universe of

away from the lives of any Palestinians. That we have at a minimum 41,000 Palestinians who have been killed largely with US weapons over the past year. Their humanity is degraded to an almost meaningless piece of dust on the ground in the narrative compared to any Israeli who was killed on October 7th.

But if we're being told that these are the modern equivalents of the Nazi party, journalists have an obligation to go, let's talk to them. Let's understand what is their idea. I think it was to great public interest to hear what did they think they were doing on October 7th?

And then after seeing all of the incredible destruction in Gaza, how they assessed what has happened in the time since then, how they answer to the question that you should have foreseen that Israel would do this. You've endured this for 76 years, beginning with the Nakba and the creation of the state of Israel. How could you not have assessed that if you were able to get into Israel and take 250

people either hostage or prisoner, depending on whether they were civilians or soldiers. I mean, another interesting thing, I said to multiple Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials like,

taking elderly women, babies. What were you thinking? How do you think that's defensible? And none of them tried to defend it. What they told was a different story, which had to do with the fact that there was a second wave of people that had come in. Maybe there were organized criminal gangs. But also, it's like, this is a population that's lived in a prison camp.

And I think we have to, that doesn't justify anything that involves taking a multi-month old baby. - I think a mistake they made, I'm curious if any of this came up, was so they told you and they've said elsewhere that in the days immediately after, they said, "We did not mean to take these many people. "We will return all the civilian hostages."

in exchange for Netanyahu committing not to do a ground invasion, bomb the hell out of us, and then we'll have negotiations between the prisoners, the IDF soldiers that we have for our own prisoner exchange. Netanyahu rejects that out of hand. I think at that point, they should have just let all of the civilians go.

Now they, but there's thousands, I understand why they didn't, because there's thousands of civilians held hostage by Israel. But at the same time, it's just the right thing to do. And if you're going to like try to claim the moral high ground, I don't know where... But also like I can sit there with, you know, with officials from Hamas or Islamic Jihad and ask them these questions about,

But if you then ask, if you ask an Israeli official or even an American politician defending Israelis about the fact that there are 10,000, for all practical purposes, political prisoners being held. Administrative detention, no charges. Including children, including journalists, including people that are being held for crimes

six-month stretches that can be renewed indefinitely, where they have no access to a lawyer or any other kind of visitors or communications, and that so many of them are minors

That's a non-issue. Those are hostages too. Look at the recent reporting on taking a five-year-old, seven-year-olds that they're taking and treating them as adults. It's the only country that proclaims itself a democracy that is putting children into military court systems. People don't understand that's what drove this hostage crisis, this vicious cycle of

The only way to get somebody out of administrative detention is to then kidnap somebody else and exchange them. Which is why the prisoner exchange. Right. Yeah.

This is such a minefield to walk in because it's a manufactured minefield as part of our political culture, but I'm not afraid to say it. Palestinians have a right to defend themselves, including by taking up arms against a colonial apartheid regime. We can talk about individual war crimes, and we should talk about them, and there should be accountability for them. But the underlying narrative is that they had no right to do anything on October 7th.

And I would say that that is inconsistent with international law. It totally rejects the fact that we have a 75-year history that led up to the events of October 7th, and it erases, as though the Palestinians are in a class of their own, their right as a people to rise up against what global law and institutions have clearly defined as an illegal occupation and an apartheid state. And that has to change. We cannot pretend that the Palestinians somehow have no right

they do have a right. You look at the stealing of Palestinian land right now, the expansion of the settlements, which is a US-backed Israeli government policy to support. This is, you know, all the lip service from Harris and Biden on the issue of settlements is worth nothing if the policy just goes forward with no consequence. So,

The fact that roughly 1,100 people were killed on October 7th, thousands of other Israelis were wounded, that is very relevant. We should talk about that. The people who died that day have their stories told and they deserve justice. But to pretend as though it existed in a vacuum,

that history didn't matter, that there doesn't have to be a discussion about what rights do the Palestinians have. I think this is an outrageously dishonest framing that we've tolerated for a year. Well, as it ultimately doesn't leave the Israeli people more safe either to ignore the larger history. Managing the conflict is what

the Netanyahu strategy was called. And if you're quote unquote managing the conflict, you're accepting that there's going to be endless conflict. And let's, maybe a good place to kind of wind down would be, Jeremy, if you could talk a little bit about now that Dropside is up and is doing well, you have this

amazing career going from Democracy Now! to The Nation to The Intercept and now to Dropsite. If you could talk maybe just a little bit about what you've learned in the last few months about media and the future of media, potentially as somebody who's seen, had a front row seat to so much of this evolution as technology evolved and the business evolved. What are some big lessons?

Yeah, I mean, one of the things when we decide how we're going to do a story or like if we're talking to, you know, freelancers that we want to work with or somebody on the ground somewhere, you know, we're

We don't want to run strictly op-eds, just telling people our hot take. That doesn't mean that there isn't going to be analysis or opinion in what we do, but we're trying to embrace a kind of hybrid approach. Every article that we do, we want there to be information or a perspective in it that people wouldn't get but for reading that article. And I don't just mean an interesting take. I mean that we've talked to people on the ground somewhere

or that were presenting information or facts that they wouldn't get elsewhere. An example of that is, you know, Yaniv Kogan, who's one of our contributors, you guys talked about his reporting, you know, recently, is a phenomenal researcher and is in the kind of spirit of I.F. Stone, you know, tries to dig up what is hidden in plain sight in Israel right now, and he's based in Tel Aviv. And, you know, and he did this story about the...

Israeli cabinet officials saying that they were under the clear understanding that Anthony Blinken had signed off on bombing aid trucks if they had been believed to be hijacked by Hamas. So one thing that I've learned is that opinions are very, very cheap and that if you take the time to do old school raking of the muck and you work the phones or you go out into the field to do reporting, that people actually do appreciate that.

I think social media is incredible. I, you know, I'm trying to figure out TikTok, you know, but I, you know, I'm obviously I've rekindled my addiction to Twitter. I'm back. I'm back on it. I've been, you know, I used to call myself a recovering Twitter combatant. But... You relapsed. I mean, I post things on like Blue Sky and other things, but, you know, I have to say, like, I...

What I think was great about the old Twitter too was that you could mix it up with people that you disagreed with and it was much more of a global forum. I'm deeply concerned about what Leon has done with, you know, Elon or whatever. I like Leon though. I think people do. I think that's one of the sub things that people call him Leon as a way to not be tracked by him or something. But I think it's kind of, you know, I think what I've learned too is that

There's a lot of chatter, but if you're presenting facts, enough of the public is intellectually honest and actually is concerned with it. I think that's a narrative that has been kicked aside in the current political culture. Look, my family, working class people, I have cousins and others, they support Trump. I don't look at them and say, you're bad people. You listen to the why of it.

And if you're humble enough to actually listen, there's an interesting story in it about people feeling talked down to, about people struggling. And I think that the Democratic Party has engaged in really poor messaging

toward people that would be inclined to support them. And then when the actions then show that you don't have much regard for human life in the case of this war, then you want to say, oh, you're supposed to vote for us at election time. Well, they might find out. They effed around and they might find out with continuing this genocidal war. And

They could hand Trump the White House. They wanna blame Jill Stein. They wanna blame the uncommitted people. They wanna blame Muslims or Palestinians in this country or other people who are opposed to genocide. When is it ever time for the Democrats to take responsibility? This tired old narrative, oh, Ralph Nader was responsible for George Bush winning the White House. It's empirically and literally just false.

who was responsible for George Bush winning was a combination of a bad campaign run by the Democrats and chicanery and thievery that went on and then the Supreme Court. But it's like this narrative that somehow if you don't vote for a party that has not listened to you at all, that continues to facilitate a genocidal war and that somehow it's gonna be your fault if they lose,

This is the constant crybaby game of the Democrats through all their electoral losses. It's always the fault of someone else except themselves. - I could do this all day. I could do this all day. - We could also talk about Donald Trump and his charlatanism and the dangers of his administration. But actually, I think people like us, I don't want Donald Trump to be in power.

But I can't in good faith stand here and say, oh, you have to vote blue no matter who. I think people have a right to make decisions based on their own principles and their own morals. And I think people from the left need to be willing to stand up and be honest about politicians that claim to speak for all of them.

Yeah, and their experiences too. I mean, I was in Butler this last weekend covering the Trump rally. Oh, you were there for that? It's amazing how many people you talk to. I mean, it's a tale as old as 2016. It's the same thing over and over again. They feel ignored, they're struggling, and he feels like hope to them. And journalists may lack the humility to see why that makes sense to people, but it does. A lot of people see that.

Well, there we go. What a beautiful note to end on. Donald Trump, hope and change. Ryan Grim said it. There you go. Well, Jeremy, thanks so much for joining us here. Welcome to D.C. Hope you enjoy your time here. I doubt you will. Life in the imperial bubble. No, I appreciate it. Thank you guys for all the work you do. Oh my gosh. Go Wisconsin. Yes, that's right. We didn't even, we could have debated so much more bitterly. Next time. Yeah. Are you a Marquette or a Badgers fan? You're Badgers. You went to UW. I have to be, yeah, I have to be.

I would say I was enrolled at UW. I wouldn't say I attended. That's a good way to put it. Yeah, Badger's always in my heart. There we go. All right, well, Dropsite News, it is wonderful. Subscribe if you haven't already, and we will be back here. Ryan will be here with Sagar. I'll be on a work trip, but Ryan will be here with Sagar for Bro Show on Wednesday, and we'll see you then. See you later. See you later.

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