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 drop Site that a lot of people in the media would be envious though interviewing somebody, let's say that's.
Hy uk In Hamas journalists should have an ethical obligation 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, you know. 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 gonna help Trump. No, we're going to help the public to have a real understanding, and I think we have to. 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 were joined by my colleague at drop Site News, Jeremy Skhill, which is part of our kind of ongoing series of getting to know in the Pennant journalists better, how they got into journalism, how they how they approached their craft. If people missed our long interview with Matt Taibi, that was a fun one. Oh there were times during that interview where I kind of forgot the cameras were rolling.
Can be dangerous, but it's good, Like that's what you want. That's the best 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.
Don't blame you.
So you guys were both just talking about your shared Wisconsinant upbringings. Shared a lot of similarities, seems like both both from the Catholic families with any social justice leftyism in back in your Wisconsin family.
So my dad has is from a Catholic family in Watosa, and there's seven of them, so in there, I think, just in the mixt Yeah, absolutely, I didn't grow up Catholic, but yeah.
I did, but you know, I mean Milwaukee.
I I grew up in an interesting household because my my dad was very nearly a priest, you know, my mother prevented that and also the Vietnam War. I mean, he he grew up. His parents were Irish immigrants, you know, came to the US as teenagers, and you know, he had two sisters and the he was the only boy, and it's like, okay, you're going to be a priest. So I think for much of his life he thought he was going to end up being a Jesuit priest.
And he got politicized by the Catholic left at the you know, sort of at the height of the Vietnam War. He 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 may become the first saint known to have had an abortion. But he was really you know, because he grew up in this Irish
Catholic family. The kind of weaving in scriptural reference to opposition against war really you know, 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 dad this is my dad, Yeah, And you know, so he was there and actually he when he was there, it was like about ten 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 methods used in the It was a violent revolution. And you know, my dad was just a kid from the South Side of Chicago, and you know, he had never really been anywhere, and Dorothy Day asked him if he wanted to go to the harvest of
ten million tons. In nineteen seventy one, my dad went on the second venceer Ramo's brigade to Cuba and he spent a couple of months cutting sugarcane and he meets you know, remember this is you know, the height of Vietnam War, civil rights movement, the 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 you know, he
was on the bus also with like supporters of the Weather Underground and you know, 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 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. There was a big believer in the Sermon on the Mountain, 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.
And well, it sounds like it actually may have altered your life as well, huge impact, 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 a lot of those sentiments often but is basically alone in it, is not entirely serious about it, and 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, 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, you know, as you know, also there were there were a string of socialist mayors in Milwaukee, Frank Zeidler, you know, perhaps the most famous among them. And you know, you as a kid, you grow up and you aren't you think your parents are boring, and you know, it's.
Like I just knew.
In fact, I actually had a lot of interactions with kids at school who, you know, would make fun of the fact when they would say, what do your parents do?
And I would say, my parents were both nurses, your dad is a nurse.
You know, is this sort of you know, thing of having to grapple with the fact that my dad was a male and he was I was a nurse. But you know, I think it was probably when I was around maybe like ten or eleven 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 you know, all kinds of revolutionaries, violent, nonviolent 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, you know, and you know, there was this spirit, you know, it's particularly with my dad, of just servitude to others, and you know, 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 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 are 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, but I was a voracious reader. And you know, I remember when I when I left high school, it was you know, I was having trouble getting at any university. I did get into a university, but I just I really my guidance counselor in school said that I should consider, you know, 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.
You know. The university wasn't you know what I didn't. 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 you know, my dad wrote this letter to me before I went to you know, off to college which I would then drop out of, that said, don't let school get in the way of your education.
And you know, and I I 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. I was certainly not.
Freeing books are having too much fun.
I was a mixture of both. But you know, really I would, I would. It was funny when I would would, 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 ninety I believe it was in nineteen ninety five, we staged a huge sit in at the administrative buildings at the University of Wisconsin. A mother Jones named us one of the top activist campuses in the country, and I was one of the students.
That coordinated that.
It had to do with the university's treatment of homeless people who were living around the campus and the way they wanted to eject them. But also I watched how as 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 medicine. 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 hitchhiped 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 from the Capitol. And when I was 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 on your iPhone. But I would 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, Nute Gingrich, and confronting him over the Contract with America and his agenda about women. And if you remember at the time Gingrich, Gingrich's mother had been interviewed. This is in the mid nineteen nineties. 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, Kanyie
Chung had asked her, what did your mother think? What does your mother think of First Lady Hillary Clinton? And they talked about it, Well, what does Nut Gingrich, your son think of First Lady? Oh, I can't say it. You know, she said, I can't say the word, and you know, one of them said, does it rhyme with which?
And it's yes.
So I heard this journalist confronting new Gingrich. Remember he had the Daily Speakers press briefing, so 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?
Qunnie?
And that was the last Daily Speaker briefing that knew Gingrid Shid And the journalist who was questioning him was Amy Goodman, who would you know, 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 it was I had never heard someone with that kind of like backbone to merity taking on this incredibly powerful person. And then I started
like seeking out, what is this PACIFICA radio? I started listening to it.
And then when at the time, was she like the congressional correspondent or the was Washington correspondent for PACIFICA or something?
Yeah, she was. She was one of the most important figures at their news division.
And you know, she was also a foreign correspondent then too.
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 you know, but Amy Goodman had in the early nineteen nineties, she had gone to East Tmoor when it was still under the control of Indonesia with the journalists that I consider one of the most important mentors in my life, an investigativejournalist named Alan Nairn. The two of
them were in East Timor. Pope John Paul the second, was going to be visiting there largely Catholic population, you know, in this former territory of Indonesia that was under a mass extermination campaign from a US armed and funded Indonesian military. And they went there ahead of the Pope's visit because the people of East team were felt that if the Pope comes, their plight was going to be made clear to the world, that it would you know, the when
powerful people come somewhere, then the media comes. So the way but the way that the Indonesian regime responded to local people was to was to commit a horrific series of massacres, the most famous of which was called the Dilly Massacre. And Amy and Allen were there and watched scores of people being gunned down with USM sixteens and they were themselves beaten almost to death. Alan skull was
cracked open. And both of them believed that they pulled out their American passports and we're pleading with there would be murderers, assassins to spare them. And 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 they 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 Timoor. And you know, when East Timor became an independent country, they were both given credit by the new leaders of the country for for having been crucial to the independence of East Teamoor.
And so you start, you start, so.
She had to decide whether to get like to let me volunteer or get a restraining order against me. You know, I would actually send her like real letters and I would go to all of her events, and it's always wild.
They were like magazine cutout letters.
And I sign my actual my actual name. But what I was also doing at the time, I I I lived.
I moved to this community in Baltimore called Jonah House, and I lived with the late father Philip Brigan and his wife Liz McAllister. And Jonah House was a was a community of resistance but also of service, rooted in, you know, in Catholic liberation theology. And for people that don't know, Philip and Daniel Berrigan were the two organizers of an action in nineteen sixty eight known as the Catonsville Nine. And they what they did is these were
two Catholic priests at the time, Daniel Bragan. They're both priests, brothers, Philip and Daniel. Daniel Berrigan was a well known author and poet and a significant voice opposed to the war in Vietnam. But they didn't want to just be involved
with kind of you know, abstract theology. They wanted to take action, and so they organized a raid on a draft house in Catonsville, Maryland in May of nineteen sixty eight that had hundreds of A one draft files that were being used to send Americans young Americans 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 and right in front of the clerks of the of the house and put them into this garbage bin. They bring them into the parking lot of the Catonsville Draft House and they burn 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, just 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, you know.
Like.
And so so I lived with Phil Brigan, and you know, they they said, if you want to follow Jesus, you have to look good on wood and so you know, they both spent considerable amount of time in and out of prison.
So you're then you're at Democracy Now well as.
I was at Jonah House and then, but we would listen to the radio every day. Still I was still stocking 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 it.
I'm like, I'm the guy who's been writing you, and it's like literally like I know this too when I speak. 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 my life as a as a 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 so to go back to the very beginning of our conversation, my guidance conselor said you should go into you know, look, look at a trade.
I ended up doing that. The trade was journalism. And that's always what I tell young people too. You know, I'm almost fifty 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's not it shouldn't be reserved just for people who have fancy degrees.
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 and 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. And wanted to get your take as somebody who's been sort of through all these different steps from democracy now to the intercept to drop site of how that has perhaps influenced the way that the media it talks about social justice.
Yeah, and I think and it's a great question and issue. I also think though that what you know, you can come you can come at journalism from a number of different pathways, and I certainly came at it from you know, a kind of social justice activist perspective mixed in with sort of liberation theology. But you you then there's a point at which you have to learn the actual trade of journalism, and you know and the and and that facts matter, that context matter, that you know that history
actually matters. So you know that 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 that there is a dedication to facts, and that that's how I kind of, you know, draw a line. When I was doing the work on Obama's drone wars and stuff, there were a lot of you know, journalists on a totally different political perspective, myself, who I thought did really
good reporting on it. I think the key is, do you, you know, 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. I mean, 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 were 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, sy Hirsch said at the time, as a circuit breaker, this isn't to praise him, it's a state facts. Well, people went completely nuts. Oh sk Hill is pro Trump.
Oh you called Trump the dove. Never called Trump the dove. The guy expanded drone strikes, he used the mother of all bombs, He assassinated Costum Sully money I fact. 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 an obligation to point that out and not just treat it as you know, orange orange Hitler is coming back into power, like we have our responsibilities 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 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, nonpartisan is you know, that's tired, you know, but I think not online, this this idea that facts actually matter and that we're not afraid to say, you know, that the Democrats are engaged in a genocidal war, and that we're not going to pull punches because 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 people like us who are perceived to be you know, on the left or you know, sometimes people erroneously call us liberals. Our job is not to get Kamala Harris elected. You know, 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, you know, he went way out on a limb and he was you know, 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 want to shut down that speech. So, you know, 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 launch defender of, who do unfortunately see their jobs 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 at look what we're witnessing right now with you know, 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. You know,
I mean people talk about, you know, Henry Kissinger. 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 common Mala Harris, you know, 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 what service I mean, if you want to specify what service.
Dick Cheney was the guy who in Congress.
First of all, you know, these guys thought that, like 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 he should be doing it.
Right.
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 Hera thinking saying she's thanking this person for his service, you know, to me, though, it's indicative the Bill Crystal neo con wing,
you know, 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 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, you know. 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?
You know, it's 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 it 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 and he didn't care about the Constitution.
So, yeah, one interesting thing about Joe Biden. You know, early in Joe Biden's career, he focused 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 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 of the War Powers Act. Biden's career those 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.
And so then in the two thousands, and you know, twenty tens, you became known for your reporting on mercenaries and then also drones strike in America's dirty wars. So as you're at democracy now, late nineties, early two thousands, lead up nine to eleven, then the lead up to the war, how do you go from the editing room mopping the floors. Yeah too, I presume you continued doing those things, but then also getting to participate in the in the trade craft of producing it then gets added.
What happened was that the in nineteen ninety eight, Amy Goodman was 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 Sarah Wewa, who was the one of the lead. He 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 Sara Wewa and eight others they were known as the Ogoni Nine. But Amy had interviewed Ken Sarah Wewa when he came briefly to the United States in the mid nine It was, I think it was even months before he was he was hanged, and Amy really cared deeply about She was deeply moved by meeting Ken Sara Wewa and started working on investigation.
She actually asked me to go along with her to Nigeria and and so I went kind of as her assistant more or less. So 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 journal I've ever met. I mean, she is she 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 non violent occupation of one of their oil barges. So we went and we did the people side of the story. We interviewed survived 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 Legos, so we had We were in a car with the drivers, me and Amy.
We pull up. We had no appointment.
Amy, 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, 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 you know, in the course of this interview, and at one point he says to her, she's asking about the helicopters the providing helicopter. He says, oh, actually, our head of security went with them. Chevron's head of security went.
With this war. Oh yeah, she was recording. Amy was recording the whole thing.
Huh, it's nice to tell.
So Amy's can you talk to him? Oh yeah, we can get it. So they bring him into the room and She's saying out, did they have any weapons? Well, they had like voodoo charms. He's saying, you know, they've made up. They had this whole thing.
The congression. 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 Caucusted Investigation.
And you know, and 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 was, how she worked, the aggressiveness, the temerity, the thoroughness.
I mean, Amy is in a relentless fact checker. I mean she is incredible.
To watch a journalist's work like that, and I I mean I think about it every day because it's you know, 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 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've 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.
You know, sort of marginalized leftists, 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 had I had spent years going in and out of Iraq, even before nine to eleven, I started going to a rock in the late nineteen nineties. Amy, you know, Amy supported me going to do that. So I was doing reporting from Iraq starting in the nineties when Saddam Husin 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 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 you know, Serbia during.
The nineteen ninety nine 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, you know, Democrats largely posed 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, you know, pointing out all of the problems with the administration narrative.
And Biden largely was a facilitator 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, you know, it tied together so many things have I first encountered Blackwater in New Orleans actually in the aftermath of the flooding of the city and Hurricane Katrina.
So it was like.
A surreal experience to see these guys walking the streets of an American city, you know, 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 ambush and killed in the Iraqi city of Falluja, which then gave the US a 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.
They were kind. The Prince family was one of the main 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 Deva.
Betsy Devas 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 Erik Prince's mother continued to be the premier funder of defeating ballot initiatives on.
You know, 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, you know, as much work as you possibly can will keeping your head above the water. And I mean, like the Nation was was so it was, 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 Van and Hoovil.
And Betsy Read, 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 thirty thousand dollars, which means that
you get ten thousand dollars when you sign it. I mean I didn't have health insurance or anything at the time, or you know, I a small amount of money from a fellowship and then I get this thirty thousand. I didn't understand how the book advanced work.
You know, you get paid a third event. I was like, okay, I can do that. That should last me for you know months. I can do this.
And then you get the first check and it's pre TAXI.
Right, and you're like, I didn't even have an agent at the time. It just went with the Yeah.
And so I wrote the book, and I thought that I was going to be like selling it out of my backpack.
I really didn't. I really was kind of naive in that part of life. Like I didn't. I was.
I wasn't doing it because of money. You know, most people don't make any money from a book. So so I write this thing and it debuts at number nine on the New York Times bestseller list.
What year is.
By the way, this was two thousand and seven, and so it debuts at number nine. I had and next thing I know, I'm like, you know, getting interviewed on big TV shows. But remember what happened that year in two thousand and seven, is in September of two thousand and seven, Blackwater mercenaries open fire on a crowded circle, traffic circle in Baghdad known as Square, and they kill more than a dozen Iraqi civilians. And it was an enormous story at the time, huge story around the world.
And 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's 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. You know, like I wasn't a known person at that time. You know, I was probably considered like an up and coming independent lefty journalist or something, but like not, I
wasn't anything mainstream. All of a sudden, I'm on TV all the time, and that lasted, you know, for a sustained period where I would be called to talk about the Iraq War, about Blackwater, et cetera. And as long you know, when Bush and Cheney were in power, Democrats were very happy to have me. You know, I testified in front of Congress multiple times. I had good relationships with a number of Congress people would be they would ask me about legislation that they were going to 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 And.
Was there anything in particular that got you, like an MSNBC ban or was it just gradual?
Well, there was.
There were two things that I mean, you know, 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 I was that a note 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 you know, Rachel had had me on a lot, and Keith Oberman used to have me on like all the time.
So I was on with.
Rachel, who I always had a you know, I don't know her as a as a person. I know her superficially, but she's always 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 sixteen year old American citizen teenager in Yemen named ab the Rochman Alacki. His father, of course, was anwar a Lacki, 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 of the Rockman. So I was on Rachel's show, and right before that segment where Rachel interviews me, she had had Robert gibbson, who at the time was an MSNBC contributor, and Gibbs had been the campaign spokesperson for Barack Obama's re election campaign in addition to having been an official in the press.
I think I might go ahead.
He was the press secretary, and then he when he said the.
Thing that I'm going to tell you, he was the campaign spokesperson for the Obama reelection campaign.
He said it to me. Yeah, okay, my god, that's funny.
So what happened is that Gibbs had been asked about the killing.
Of the boy spin room.
So this was a right good The story's even better.
So the debate, At every debate afterwards, there's the spin room, and they send a Sturgets 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 sixteen year old boy in Yemen.
What's your reaction?
Is 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 respond 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 hof Post 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 twenty eleven?
He said it, yeah, yeah, to the Pound sand then and I published it.
Yeah, the killing.
Happened in twenty eleven, so this must have happened like twelve or so twelve, Yeah, because it was right, it was right, Okay, So that makes sense. That was Gibbs, So this would have been then twenty thirteen. 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 then when the interview starts with Rachel. I mentioned the fact that you just had Robert gibbson, 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 you know,
his father wasn't responsible that that. Therefore, it's like okay to drone assassinate a kid that no one has ever made any allegation he had any connection to terrorism or anything whatsoever.
And you know he was also an American citizen.
Yeah, I said to Rachel during it wasn't I wasn't like attacking Rachel Metow.
I just made 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, And did.
You get the sense that it was from someone in her ear? Telling her to say that, or was it anybody.
I don't think she needs anybody to tell her no. And I, you know, I mean again, just you know, to clarify I I don't know Rachel Mattow. Well, she always had been very you know, positive about my work, and but that was the last time, you know, 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 show, and I was and on his show, I went after Fared Zakaria. I said that, you know, Fared loves these missile strikes and if you could have sex with a cruise missile strike, you 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 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 you know, the beautiful 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 note book order issued out me at CNN after that.
So I had to give Gibbs this pushback. I just found the story from October twenty twelve. 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 I find that a difficult explanation. You Know, what I was told at the time was that Brennan, John Brennan, the CIA director, that Obama himself was, was livid when he heard that the kid had been killed, that the sixteen year old had been killed. And you know, I tried to trackl justifiable. It's completely unjustifiable.
But you know, I had been told at the time I had good sources in the 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. What I my best guess is that part of what is if 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 Abd Rochman Alacki's sixteen 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, you know, a wanted figure. He would have been considered like a
known associat or family member. But he did have a terrorist tracking number, and certainly his cell phone and other communications would have been monitored, you know, when the US was hunting for his dad, and you know, 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 used 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 kid was killed.
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, you know, shows like Real Time with Bill mar I remember outlets like huff Post 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.
I watch it now.
If the if the Birkensack fits. But you know, I've I really.
Right, Yeah you do like Homemadkeranala, but I really found that stuff to be like actually very compelling, and it just a lot of those institutions.
MSNBC is such a good example.
Rachel Matta herself is such a good example, and 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 or were conveniently aligned with that as well. But what I'm so curious about is
at drop site. 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 this is 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, Drop Site fans love both of you. It's a real like allegiance to your guys's work is 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 drop Site proves that.
That was wrong.
You know, I think I think that era that you're describing too. Let's remember there was a moment where where Chris Hayes was given a weekend spot on MSNBC. They was Up with Chris Hayes was yeah still yeah, still up.
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, uh, you know, you had you had people from different you know, he would have Eli lake On debating, you know, someone like me, and you know, there would be there was there was this intellectual opening that was so unusual for MSNBC at
that time. I thought it was remarkable with what was happening on that on those weekends with with Chris Hayes, and of course that was you know, that was short lived. But yeah, I mean they've totally leaned into this identity as they are. They are the kind of media front that's going to prevent Orange Hitler from you know, taking power. And I have deep concerns about Donald Trump. I I
I think that man is an utter disaster. I think that the narratives about you know, the narratives about Trump that his supporters and defenders try to offer up to people on the left, like, they just don't they don't hold any weight whatsoever. Did you hear that, Ryan, Well, no, I'm just I'm making it clear that I think that there is a way to to to to approach covering this election that is is not a mirror image of
the critique Democrats offer of Fox News. And you know, I find it totally intellectually dishonest, and I think that it's it's not about whether it's fair to to Trump or not. It does a disservice to their own audience on the on the issue of the you know of the Gaza war. Uh, you know there news organization should be aggressively questioning Kamala Harris. She she wants to have it both ways. She is saying, oh, I've been a
part of every single decision that's been made. But then you know, 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 I would do nothing differently, maybe the rhetoric would be different. And so, you know, I don't believe in pulling punches because the audience is going to be upset that you've landed them on powerful person. I think,
to me, I don't see integrity in that. And so I think the people that are subscribing to drop site, 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 isn't this shouldn't be something unusual.
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 be like and let them think think for themselves.
It's ironic. The mainstream media says that they're.
The kind of you from nowhere, like they're the objective ones, or it's just the facts and we're going to let you decide, but in fact they're actually just They obviously have a person spective, 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 and so they can take it or leave it, but they know that the facts are going to be.
A 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 you know 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 the you you trust but verify supposedly the Israelis, and
with the Palestinians, there is no initial they must be lying and and but that that also if you 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 immediately elite media toward their own preferred candidates.
Or you don't trust the powerful, then verify.
Right, yeah, I mean, and especially you should assume that the powerful are not telling you the truth. And and but it's your job then to go and you know, verify what the facts are. And that's that's that is the policy towards all Palestinians would have anything to say about. You know, 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, and it's like it doesn't even make a dent in the
public consciousness. I mean, think 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, one hundred and seventy 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 yeah, thanks, their chief foreign correspondent, you know, he posted and I give him total credit for doing this.
And actually this wasn't the first time that he made that point. He you know, Trey, through the months, he has consistently raised this issue. It might, you know, 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's also raises a point that goes back to something earlier when James Rosen at Fox News, when there was a you know, an investigation over him, you know, for this North Korea reporting that he had done. And it became clear that the government had been also reading his gmails.
And I stood up and defended James Rosen post.
We called for airic holder to resign over that.
We're going after this Fox News National Security correspondent.
I don't think that would happen at half Posts today.
Well, I mean, if it happened today at drops, that 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 question it comments to 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. Like I believe the Russians had no business locking up Evan Gershkeovic 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 in this week in Darryl al Bala, Where are
they on the decapitating of Ismael Alghoul. Where are they on the mass murder of wild Daudoo's family, the former Al Jazeera bureau chief in Gaza. Where are they on the killing of any of these journalists.
Who wrote for drops?
Yeah, even before the Gaza October seventh justification, an American citizen quite clearly assassinated in the West Bank.
You know, the Biden administration.
Has uh 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 an award winning journalist. 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 journalists under itself as a damning condemnation of the so called liberal media.
To close the arc on consistency too, uh, the Edward Snowden League, YEA, 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 Glen.
You know, Glenn and I had known each other for some years, and you know when he started when he started his blog and then he was at Salon. You know, there was a lot of overlap when we got to know each other sort of you know, online, and 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 Glenn and Laura flew to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden, Glenn had gotten in touch with me and said, uh, I remember I was actually at I was. I was at a restaurant with Michael Rattner, 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 talked to Glenn, and Glenn says, I can't tell you much about this, but I want, you know, I want I need somebody I trust that can be sort of my contact person for something I'm.
Going to be doing.
I'm going to be flying, you know, to the other side of the world to meet someone who has information that, if it's true and valid, is is going to be a volcanic explosion to the national security state. That was how Glenn had described it. And he said, you know, can you can you be available? And I said, of course yeah. And you know, so Glenn, they they go and you know, I 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 so for you know, in a very behind the scenes way, I was. I was honored to, like when I then realized what it was, you know, honored to to have helped.
But I wasn't like, you know, in on the snowedn thing it was.
You know, I played a very minor role in helping out a friend and a colleague league who you know, I was going into what he described as a potentially dangerous situation and and I knew enough to not ask him any more detail about it. And so you know, there was a battle in The Guardian too that took place at the beginning of this. You know, the god that of course, the you know, the 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 ended 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, you know, right out of the Gates, which they ended up doing, and they want to pullet serve for the you know, for the series. But I would imagine the yeah, the
pressure that all of them were under. So you know, then 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 and.
Ut the zoo.
Yeah, you didn't need to go to Yeah, you'd be there, you know, Glenn.
Glenn is sitting there with like you know, he's he's got his laptop, he's wearing his Bermuda shorts and his flip flop and he's sitting there just completely taking on the most powerful government in the world, you know, with
with his Bermuda shorts on and it was. I mean, it's it's Glenn is one of the most unusual interesting people that I've i've you know, that I've ever met, and and we ended up starting, uh, you know, starting the Intercept with you know, Glenn and Laura and myself and you know, related to drop site too, Like what
remember what the Intercept was actually started to do? You know that the purpose of it was, you know, was to try to publish secrets that the government wanted to you know, want to remain locked up, to provide a platform for whistleblowers and others to to speak out and to do no holds barred journalism without fear or favor, you know.
And and I.
Think that's you know, we're we're trying to embrace that original ethos of the Intercept at you know, at drop Site.
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're on the inside. But also it has created a wonderful new product and drop Site. So what has that just been like for both of you?
Yeah, I'm curious for Jeremy say you know, institutions evolved. And also, like two years ago Piero Midyard who was made an initial like two hundred and fifty million dollar pledge I think it was.
That wasn't to the Intercept though, it was the whole thing.
It's been misreported a little bit.
Yeah, people people exaggerate what the Internet was going to do well with their magazine. He wanted to He was considering buying the Washing Post, is what happened, and that's where that number came from.
Yeah, that's right.
He wanted to buy the washing Post that was going to cost two fifty and he's like, well, why don't I just spend two fifteen build my own? Right, And he was going to do Racket by Matt Taibi, which was going to look at you know, economics and like corruption.
Then he was going to do sports and leisure.
That 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, and like a good VC.
He was buying at the top, like this was thee 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, and he cared about it, and it very quickly became clear there was no digital like possibility there.
But yeah, he cared about the idea of having a well funded news organization that would take on like these national security state projects, and that had a legal defense fund, which is very important. Yeah, because you're constantly getting lawsuit threats.
It turned out to be very important.
Yeah.
One thing that's also incredible, like the Looney Tunes stuff that sometimes gets thrown at us about the Intercept and about Omitir and all of this, is you know that Omiitir was somehow in control and doing all these things. It was remarkable how much freedom pier Omidiar 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 Omitiar himself. And there was never there was never a takedown order, there was never pressure, There was never oh I want you guys to cover this it nothing, never did a single thing like that ever occur, which is you know, which is remarkable all of us.
I think we're feeling like a day is going to come when.
These guys are going to tell us you can't do this story And to his credit, that never happened with Omidiars.
Politics were different than certainly different than Glenn's. He was like a Russia Gate 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 ahead. I was just saying, like, personally too, what was that like? Not with a minyar, but just you know, there are people's who's added to towards things like surveillance. Really did shift because now there's all this talk of 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 ten plus years ago. And I imagine personally that's not been super easy.
I mean, yeah, politics change, and this is not the Edward Stoden era anymore. It's almost like the NSA one, Like Snowden exposed everything that was going on did lead to you know, did lead to reforms.
There are ongoing fights over.
FIZA and FISA Court, and it's like we've covered the fights here. There's this kind of transpartisan coalition of like libertarians and progressives who are still taking these issues pretty seriously about mass collection and what you can search through.
Some of it.
Project twenty twenty five by the way, excellent.
But the public is the public is like 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 it's also I mean to one of Emily's earlier points too, you know, uh, when when when when the Obama administration was doing these drone assassinations, and really and and and and the poll support for among liberals for targeted assassination, you know, drone strikes was going you know, was was going up because mister constitutional law scholar, uh, Barack Obama had normalized this for an entire class of voters.
Community organizer.
But 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.
You had Rand Paul in fact, right, you know, Rand Paul on multiple occasions participated in kind of disrupting business as usual on the floor of the Senate to speak out about you know, the assassination regime that had been put into place there.
I mean, even you know Michael at times, you know, and might Micha Lee.
Ran 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, you know, I mean, 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 you know, Obama, months after taking office in two thousand and nine, authorizes a series of secret air strikes
in Yemen. The first one killed dozens of civilians in a cruise missile attack, and they also used cluster you know, cluster bombs, cluster munitions, and they allowed the Yemeni government to take responsibility for it. But had you know, Obama intensifying the war with the war within the war in Afghanistan. You 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 administration throughout
the course of those eight years. And then with Biden, who you know, seldom in his fifty plus years in politics has met a US war. He didn't love support or facilitator.
At able in some way.
In fact, he made a mistake, you know, in the nineteen ninety one you know Gulf War. He he you know, opposed it, but then quickly.
Backtracked and the one popular.
On oh oops, I made a mistake.
Yes, I actually had never against the war again.
But we're, I mean, we're we're seeing the face of a powerful part of the Democratic Party in this policy over the past year in Israel. I mean it had had the had this not happened, what would we have talked about on a foreign policy level with Biden when it comes to Pitism. Certainly, the you know, the Ukraine issue, and you know the the aggressive support for Ukraine, the kind of Cold War, the embrace of the Cold War two point zero, that certainly would have been part of
what we were talking about with Biden. The Afghanistan withdrawal. Yes, this was a horrifying catastrophe that had 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 was trying to get this done in his first administration. I think he also deluded himself into assuming he was
going to be president for four more years. But also the military industrial political complex did not They did not want this to happen under Trump. So 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, you know, 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 drop site 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 were interviewing somebody, let's say that's high up in Hamas or anybody that actually finds himself in that or that you find yourself in that situation.
Do you have anything to add to it?
If you go back and think about you, You're Osama bin Laden was interviewed by CNN prior you know, prior to uh to nine to eleven, and uh, you know, and uh there was there used to be an understanding you can go back to World War two, and look at American journal less interviewing Nazi officials and uh, you know, and others.
You can go through all all sorts of wars.
The people that you're you're told are the enemy, journalists should have an ethical obligation 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 you know, I think objectivity as defined in our elite media culture is nonsense, you know, objective. You know, Caesar doesn't always deserve his say, you know, like they're What's what matters is are you being accurate?
Are you being fair?
Like?
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 you are not obligated to pretend as though person X says, this person X says.
Why, well, we just don't know what's true.
If you know that person X is largely telling the truth and person why is not, you you also haven't a responsibility to tell your readers that. So, you know, 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, you know, that are allowed of any of these officials.
I told them he should ask all the Hamas officials if they condemn Hamas, but do you Condemnmas?
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 seventh and other you know, I mean, I of course I did all of that questioning. I don't find some of the answers very satisfying at all, you know that that these guys gave.
And I have, you know, I have different answers they haven't eve figured out.
Which comes through the interview, by the way, which is why you do the interview, right.
But what I think, what I think is 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 it. That right, there is a starting point for journalists have an obligation to track that.
You know, is.
This speaking on behalf of the public. Is it being used in a way that's consistent with law, you know, 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 you know, the roughly one thy one hundred Israelis and foreign workers who died on October seventh, their lives must exist in a realm of importance that is a universe away from the lives of any Palestinians that we have at a minimum forty one thousand Palestinians who have been killed with US,
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 seventh. But if we're being told that this 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 too great public interest here. What did they think they
were doing on October seventh? And then after seeing all of the incredible destruction in Gaza, how they assessed what has happened in the time since then, How they answered to the question that you should have foreseen that Israel would do this. You've endured this for seventy six 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 two hundred and fifty people either hostage or prisoner, depending on whether they were civilians or soldiers. I mean, another interesting thing I said to them, to multiple Hamas and Islamic Jiad officials, like taking elderly women, babies, Like what what were you thinking? Like 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 maybe you know, but also it's like, this is a population that's lived in a prison camp and you know, and I think we have to. It's that doesn't justify anything you know that that you know is 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 they told you, and they've and they've said elsewhere that you know, in the days immediately after they said, we did not mean to take these many people. We will return all the civilian hossages in exchange for netya who committing not to do a ground invasion, bomb the hell out of us, like we'll have and then we'll have negotiations between the prisoners, the idea of soldiers that we have for our own prisoner exchange.
Dan Yaho 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 did.
There's thousands of civilians held hostage by Israel.
But at the same time that it's just the right thing to do.
And if you're going to like try to claim the moral high ground, but also like I can.
Sit there with you know, with officials from Hamas or Islamic Jihad, and ask them these questions. But if you then ask, if you ask an Israeli official or even an American politician defending israelis about the fact that there are ten thousand, for all practical verbs as political prisoners being.
Held administrative detemption, including.
Children, including journalists, including people that are being held for 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 you know that that is that's a non issue. Those are hostages too when you're taking especially I mean, 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 in that that proclaims itself a democracy that is putting children into military court systems.
Yeah, people arms, And that's what drove that's what drove like this hostage crisis, this vicious cycle of the only way to get somebody out of administrative attention is that then kidnap somebody else in exchange them.
Which is why the prisoner.
Exchanged yeah, and it's you know this, this is such a minefield to walk in because it's been 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 seventh, and I
would say that that is inconsistent with international law. It totally rejects the fact that we have a seventy five year history that led up to the events of October seventh, 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 you know, roughly eleven hundred people were killed on October seventh, thousands of other Israelis were We're wounded, that is a is
very relevant. We should talk about that the people who died, that they deserve that have their stories told, and they deserve justice. But to pretend as though it existed in a vacuum, that history doesn'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 so ultimately doesn't leave the Israeli people more safe either to ignore the larger history.
Managing the conflict is what the 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 drop site is up and is doing well. You have this amazing career going from Democracy Now to the Nation, to the Intercept and now to
drop site. 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 like strictly op eds, you know, 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. We want every article that we do, we want there to be information or a perspective in it that people wouldn't get but for that reading that article. And I don't just mean like an interesting take. I mean that we've talked to people on the ground somewhere, or that we're 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 his reporting, you know, recently has is a phenomenal researcher and is and is in the kind of spirit of if 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're they were under the clear understanding that Anthony Blincoln had signed off on you know, bombing AID trucks if they
had been believed to be hijacked by by Hamas. So you know, one thing that I've learned is that, uh, you know, opinions are are very very cheap, and that if you 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 I'm trying to figure out TikTok, you know, but I you know, I'm obviously, I've I've rekindled my addiction to Twitter.
I'm back. I'm back on it.
I've been you know, I called 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 what I think was great about the old Twitter too, is that you could mix it up with people that you disagreed with, and there was a it was much more of a global forum. I'm deeply concerned about what Leon has done with you know, Elon or whatever.
What he's doing, I think people do.
I think I call it that because I think that's one of the sub things that people call him Leon is a way to like not be tracked by him or something. But I think it's kind of you know, like the what I think what I've learned too is that you know, there's a lot of chatter, but if you 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 that has been kicked aside in
the current political culture. I think a lot of people look my family, working class people I have cousins and others they support Trump. I don't look at them and say,
you know, you're bad people. You listen to you listen to the why of it, and it's you know, and and if you're humble enough to actually listen, there's an interesting story about people feeling talked down to, you know, about people struggling about And I think that the Democratic Party has has engaged in really poor messaging, you know,
toward people that would be inclined to support them. And then when the actions then show that you don't have much, you know, regard for human life in the case of this war, you know, then then you want to say, oh, you're supposed to vote for US at election time, Well, they might find out, you know, like they they aft around and they might find out with continuing this genocidal war, and you know, they could hand Trump the White House. They want to blame Jill Stein, you know, they want
to blame the uncommitted people. They want to blame you know, Muslims or Palestinians in this country, or other people who are opposed to to genocide. When are they When is it ever time for the Democrats to take responsibility This tired old narrab oh Ralph Nader was responsible for 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 chickannery and thievery that went on, and then the Supreme Court. But it's like this narrative that somehow your respect 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 you're somehow it's going to
be your fault if they lose. This is the constant cry baby 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, all day.
I can 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 real for that. It's amazing how many people you talked to. I mean, it's Taylor as old as twenty sixteen, 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.
There we go.
What a beautiful note to end on Donald Trump, hope and change. Ryan Grimm said it.
There you go. Well, Jeremy, thanks so much for joining us here.
Welcome to the DC. I hope you enjoy your time here. I doubt you will, but.
I like the Imperial bubble. Oh, 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 Badger's fan?
You're Badgers?
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 of Yeah, Badger's always in my heart.
There we go, all right, well, drop site news. It is wonderful.
Subscribe if you haven't already, and we will be back here. Brian will be here with Tagger. I'll be on a work trip, but Ryan will be here with soccer for Bro Show on Wednesday, and we'll see you.
Then later
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