Abby Martin interviews former Technical Director of the National Security Agency, Bill Binney, who blew the whistle on warrantless spying years before Edward Snowden released the evidence. They discuss the US empire’s mass surveillance program and dangers of the Intelligence Industrial Complex.

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Today, the mass surveillance of all Americans by the US government and its corporate partners is a totally normalized reality. Despite its widespread acceptance, it is an outrageous, blatant violation of our constitutional rights.

It’s difficult to ascertain how the “chilling effect” of dragnet spying has changed society in the post 9/11 world.

However, many insiders in the intelligence community understood the dangers of these programs from the beginning.

Edward Snowden is celebrated as a hero for bringing proof of NSA’s mass spying and bulk collection to the world.

But years prior, Bill Binney had blown the whistle on this very same program. A 36-year NSA veteran, Bill Binney was the technical director, responsible for developing and overseeing the agency’s spying technology.

He even developed Thin Thread, the data monitoring program that was later hijacked by the Bush administration to implement widespread warrantless surveillance.

Mounting pressure caused Obama to pass the USA Freedom Act in 2015, which only outsourced it’s bulk acquisition to telecom companies, using the secretive FISA court as an intermediary.

And nearly 20 years after 9/11 these unaccountable agencies are using new fears, like of Russian cyber-warfare, to grow their power and operations.

I caught up with Binney in Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia, where he received the Allard Prize for International Integrity, to talk to him about blowing the whistle and the fight against the surveillance state today.

 

Abby Martin:   So you were the technical director at the NSA for many, many years. Talk about what you were trying to do with the creation of THIN THREAD.

Bill Binney:    It was basically to try to solve technical problems that the analysts were having. There were about six thousand analysts involved in analyzing all the data from all the countries in the world. So, the biggest problem I saw was the basically ballooning information from the digital world.

The point was there was too much data, even back then in the nineties, when there wasn’t anywhere near the capacity they have now to collect data.

So even then they were buried. I mean they got ten, to twenty or thirty thousand items every day from the day’s take. They’d start through them – if they ran into something they had to report they’d go report it and stop. Then at the end of the day they’d leave and all the rest of it wasn’t looked at. So then the next day came in, the same, another twenty thousand or so items came down on them to look at. So they started the same process again. So even internally in the NSA they were saying ‘we are over burdened by overload’.

I said ‘Well, if you look at the data itself, you’re doomed. Because there’s just too much of it’. So the metadata was the key to be able to pull out what was relevant and let the rest of it simply go by and don’t let your analysts look at it. Just don’t take it in.

AM:     And the haystack just keeps getting bigger, Bill. I mean give us a sense of how much data we’re talking about in 2019.

BB:    Probably a couple of petabytes a day. Which is like a million terabytes.

AM:    Several billion messages, right?

BB:    I think they were getting all the emails, so yes it was about 90 billion a day for emails alone. I mean I estimated 12 billion phone calls in a day. About 3 billion in the US alone. And by the way, I did have evidence of them using transcription algorithms to transcribe the phone calls, which meant they could do millions and millions and millions of them. And then they used algorithms to go through the transcripts.

AM:   So they’re actually doing transcriptions?

BB:   Yeah. And then refer it to humans to transcribe. They have like two thousand, (they’ve had since 2002 or 2003), about two thousand transcribers at Fort Gordon, Georgia, that they refer them to. All these calls are indexed by number and they can call up any number and then listen to it.

AM:   THIN THREAD was in direct competition to TRAIL BLAZER of course, the program that former NSA director Michael Hayden was shopping around to private intelligence firms. Why did they go with this program, Bill, considering the encryption that was available within THIN THREAD, and the fact that it was far cheaper?

BB:   The basic things they removed from THIN THREAD before they used it to create STELLAR WIND, the filtering up front. We were selecting based on the deductive, inductive, and abductive criteria for looking at people either as known, or suspected terrorists, or criminals of any sort. Dope smuggling, all of that. So, the filtering then just let everything else go by. That’s not what Cheney wanted. Cheney wanted everything. That way he had knowledge about everybody.

So that filtering was removed. So, everything came in. And then beyond that, if we pulled you in and you weren’t known to be a terrorist and they didn’t have a warrant on you, we encrypted your attributes so that nobody could tell who you were, even inside NSA.

So, the FBI couldn’t come into the NSA database to randomly search for crimes by known persons because it wasn’t equivalent, you know, it was an encrypted version. So, we were protecting the identities even at that point.

But the final one was the real kicker for them. That was the one that basically analyzed the network log, and when we said that we would monitor all of this and keep track of all of it and show a return on investment.

Management in NSA said, ‘you mean Congress could come in and see all this and know what we’re doing?’. And we said sure they could do that. There answer was you are never going to do this.

So we did it secretly in the lab and incorporated it back into THIN THREAD and that was another thing they got rid of. Because they didn’t want anybody to know what they were doing.

So, getting rid of the filtering they took in everything, getting rid of the encryption meant they knew who everybody was and getting rid of the auditing program meant that no one could find out what they’re doing.

AM:   And this was a fire sale, kind of opening it up to private intelligence firms to capitalize on TRAIL BLAZER not THIN THREAD, because it was far more expensive. What was the incentive, though, because this was before the fire sale that opened up after 9/11?

BB:    The CEO of QUEST, Joe Nacchio, was approached in late February of 2001, six months before, seven months before 9/11, to turn over all the data on all his customers. And the person, they were from NSA to do that. So, this is like, the intent is there to collect data on US citizens and everybody and bulk acquisition was their motive. And the reason was because in order to do that it’s going to cost an arm and a leg.

AM:    How many other companies are we talking about here and how much money are we talking about here?

BB:   Well my estimate of the budget for NSA is around 15 billion dollars a year and that means – about 70 % of that goes to the companies, for contracts.

AM:   So we’re talking about 75 % or so that’s outsourced.

BB:   Yeah. Yeah and I think it’s grown. The outsourcing has grown even further since I left.

AM:    I’m sure it has. In WATCHDOGS DIDN’T BARK, immediately after 9/11, it tells the story about you and your colleague. Your colleague was told by higher-ups at the NSA to not embarrass large companies affiliated with the intelligence failure, and that ‘if you do your part – you’ll earn your share’, and saying that they could ‘milk the cow’ for fifteen years. Now Bill this seems like a very odd thing to say in the immediate wake of the most devastating terrorist attack on US soil.

BB:   Well you see the focus is on getting money and that’s the reason they say those kinds of things. It’s not to fix the problem. The point is to keep the problem going so they keep asking for more money.

AM:    There wasn’t a moment of reckoning?

BB:    Not among greedy people. No. That includes the management of NSA.

AM:    I mean, what was your response to this.

BB:    My response is testimony, in various places, that they traded the security of the people of the United States and the free world for money.

I mean they still have the same problem. They haven’t changed a thing. So, what it means to everybody in the world is people keep dying from these attacks that they could stop. I mean look at every attack that’s happened. Every one is basically done by people who are already known to be bad. Well the issue is why aren’t you focusing on them and reduce your problem and get rid of all the other people in the world.

AM:   Paint the scenario that you’re talking about. About preventing terrorism with the 9/11 attacks. You talk about how THIN THREAD could have prevented this. You were looking at these centers in late December 2000.

BB:    Right. Before 9/11, yeah.

AM:   So, elaborate on that.

BB:  That’s why I came up with the vision statement for all these companies working for NSA. They all fail, to some degree, on every program so they can keep it going. So, originally I thought their vision statement was, ‘aim low and miss’. Because they failed at everything. But it really is, ‘Keep the Problem Going so the Money Keeps Flowing’.

AM:  Let’s talk about just about one center, the Yemen facility that the hijackers were communicating with. This was a heavily monitored facility from the NSA. What went wrong there?

BB:   Again, you know, I can’t really explain it. I mean all that data was in the NSA data as it happened. So. And this is what (General) Alexander says. We could not tell who it was in the US. That’s false. That’s in the data that the analyst gets to see. That’s a minimalization process that occurs when he pulls the data. The real data is all in the collection database, and that data was there, and it was the people in San Diego.

AM:   And one of them was a perpetrator of the USS Cole bombing.

BB:   Yeah. And in fact we knew those people before they, you know, I mean we knew the entire Al Qaeda network worldwide from about 1996 on. So, if NSA didn’t want to publish anything that I thought was important to get to people in any agency, I used what was called the gray phone, you know, it’s the encrypted line. I would just call somebody on it, and just tell them – ‘this is happening’. So, I would go around it.

AM:   Why did no one do that?

BB:   See, that’s the real problem. That’s why a lot of people at NSA were really depressed after it because they knew that what they did not do, contributed to the failure. At the working level they couldn’t understand management not wanting to report things.

AM:   And at that point Bill, I mean after 9/11 of course you and your colleagues had to make a choice. You had to make a choice to protect the constitution against the government that you were serving for decades. Talk about what you did. You went to your management and you described the scenario. You ended up resigning in disgust.

BB:   When I first learned about the spying on everybody in the country, US and Canada and then spreading to the world. When I first learned about that was the second week in October of 2001. That’s when we saw all this equipment coming in and they were moving it down the hall. When they were setting it up and then starting to take in data, it was about the second week in October.

See they had to use our software to do it because they couldn’t manage large scale data inputs. So, we had the only program that worked.

AM:    They still needed you!

BB:    But they didn’t want me to know because they knew I would never put up with this. You know, this is not something I would be quiet about. And I wasn’t alone. Most of the people in leadership in [SART?] were people, – were straight laced people – you obey the constitution; you follow the law. It’s all of that.

And so, they did this down the hall from us separately and they were building it up, and then they started using our contractor to set up the software, take the inputs and started running.

 And then when they did that one of the contractors came to me and said ‘you know what they’re doing down there. Their taking in all the data on US citizens.’ Everything that AT&T has they’re taking in. All the transmissions and calls – to, from, duration, date, time – all that. So, all that was being taken in and that’s a direct violation f the fourth and first amendments – the constitution.

AM:   So, what happened when you guys resigned? Why did you make that final decision?

BB:   Three of us, Ed Loomis, Kirk Wiebe and I, were already eligible for retirement, so we retired real quickly, you know. ‘Course I went directly Diane Roark on the House Intelligence Committee. So, she managed all the write ups of all the money requests from NSA and all the programs and everything.

So, I went there, and I said you know what they’re doing here, taking in all this data and she said that’s obviously a violation of the constitution And my assumption was very simple. Hayden would never have done that unless he had approval from higher up – meaning the White House.

It made sense to me at the time that Cheney, being the Vice President, was directing this, and with the approval of Bush. And Bush said, ‘Cheney you take over’, but the problem is he took a lot a lot of people with him and now they’re… he took a lot of countries with him now, so they’re all doing this. And it’s all fundamentally violating their constitutional human rights issues.

AM:   We’ve gone so far with the bulk acquisition it seems impossible to start to roll it back.

BB:   Actually, that’s not true. You un-fund them. When you cut their budget, they can’t do it.

AM:   Yeah, but isn’t there a kind of intelligence-security complex that’s – you can argue that it’s just operating on its own?

BB:   I call it the Praetorian Guard. Those who want to manage who is President and leader and what they do. They can control what they do by simply modifying, selecting, only certain information and making it available to them. It kind of gives them the ideas – what would give the President the idea of doing this? So, you select the data that would influence him in making a decision to do that.

AM:   In 2007 Bill, the FBI raided your home alongside colleague Kirk Wiebe. What was that experience like for you guys and were you surprised at the aggressiveness of the response?

BB:   Yeah well, I was in the shower at the time and they broke in and pushed my son out of the way at gun-point, came up and pointed guns at my wife, came in the shower and pointed guns at me. And I said, ‘why am I a threat?’

So the point was, and I’m pretty sure that Attorney General Gonzales sent them there to keep us quiet because he’d just testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the President’s terrorist surveillance program where he only talked about the tapping of phones when someone in the US is talking to a foreigner.

That was the part they talked about. They didn’t talk about any of the rest of it which was total bulk acquisition of everything that everything  every US citizen does on the internet, on the phone network, and in financial transactions. Anything in financial transactions. Credit card use – everything. So, all that they didn’t talk about.

They were afraid. They knew we had experience of going to committees in the Congress. They didn’t want that to happen and so Gonzales said, ‘you better hit them now’, and so they did.

AM:    They were desperate.

BB:    Yeah. They were. They wanted to keep this out of court – no public exposure on the surveillance program so – concoct something about it. And they were doing that to us two, and they tried three separate times to indict us.

At the same time I was accumulating evidence of malicious prosecution on the part of the [Department of ?] Justice and, also the FBI. When it came time to do that I got the information to them that I was preparing to charge them with malicious prosecution when they took us to court for this fabricated conspiracy charge they were manufacturing.

AM:   The NSA says that none of this data that you’re talking about is used maliciously against US citizens. Talk about why that’s not true and, also the parallel construction, of retroactive framing of how you can use this.

BB:   When they say that, they’re speaking for analysts in NSA. That’s the only people they’re speaking for. But they don’t tell you that they left taps in for CIA and FBI and DEA, and they also didn’t tell anybody that the FIVE EYES, GCHQ in Britain, Canadians, Australians and New Zealand also had direct access to that database.

This is the collection of bulk acquisition of data all piled into the, I assume it’s all basically in the Utah 1 million square foot storage facility. And they (have) direct access to interrogate it and that’s all done without any oversight whatsoever. And then they use it against Jim Rosen, the Associated Press and…

AM:   So, they have already used this data to spy on activist groups and whistle blowers and groups like Occupy Wall Street?

BB:   Right. And reporters of all sorts.

AM:   They’re already using it and the DEA has access, all these other agencies have access. And, also what you and Snowden have frequently talked about, which is the retroactive prosecutorial aspect of this.

BB:   Yes. That’s the next step. Once you’ve got the data and access to it, you can search, target people. For example, if you get a tip from the streets – somebody’s a dope dealer – go into this data and look at everything that person’s doing, assemble evidence for prosecution, and you could say ‘go arrest these people’.

So that’s the way they originally arrest people. Then, when it comes to going to a criminal court, they actually do the parallel construction. Which means they use standard policing techniques to look for data that will implicate them in the crime. And it helps that they know where the data is.

AM:   But they pretend it’s not from the NSA that they acquired it?

BB:   Right. They substitute that for the NSA data in a court of law and say here’s the evidence we used to prosecute them, or to arrest them. That’s basic perjury. And this is policy of the Department of Justice of the United States.

And they use the two-hop principle that Obama thought was really the way to do it. We told him it wasn’t. He needed to add some restrictions. Because it meant that, like if I called Google, that’s one hop, or if I got into email with Google. That’s one hop. The next hop is Google out.

That’s to 1.5 billion people a day, roughly. So, within a few days you had virtually everybody in the network on. So that means you can spy on anybody.

NSA was happy with that. Once NSA is happy you know there’s something wrong. It’s real simple.

AM:   Bill, we didn’t hear much about Vault Seven and the Wikileaks revelation about that. The CIA spying apparatus that’s potentially more unaccountable than the NSA. Talk about how far reaching that is.

BB:   Actually, I think what they had in Vault Seven was a contribution from NSA and GCHQ and the other FIVE EYES combined.

‘Here’s all our attacks. See what you can do with it’. And they may have developed some of their own by actually capturing them from foreign countries.

The ability – once you acquire it – to manipulate it, change it, make it look like someone else is doing a hack or something like that. It was a set of programs that would allow them to make it look like the Russians did it, or the Chinese.

All those kinds of things are possible too. They could even go in and attack your computer, look into your files and change and modify what you have there. So, they can make it look like you’re guilty of any crime.

AM:   Before Snowden’s revelations, before 9/11, Americans had a different mentality, where we had the memory of the Stasi, Nazi Germany. Where you could ask people – (they’d say) Oh God I’d never support something like that. Right?

Why this mainstream complacency, the mantra now where, ‘I have nothing to hide, so why should I have anything to fear?’.

BB:   The great quote from Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister for Hitler. You know? Those are great quotes. That’s exactly how totalitarian states operate.

That’s the point. This is a totalitarian based slide. This is where we’re going. I think they’ve done it by basically generating fear in the population. The fear that something‘s going to happen unless they do this. When in fact we knew that was a fraud from the beginning. You don’t have to give up any privacy to have security.

AM:   Let’s move on to the allegations of Russian hacking into Podesta’s email account and the DNC. Can you first go over the evidence that Mueller claims to have to prove that it’s Russia?

BB:   Well you see I really don’t (know) of any evidence that Mueller has because he never made it public. The only evidence I have is what’s made public and from that it went into the Rosenstein indictment, the Guccifer 2.0 and DC leaks data. And they talked about that, the evidence for the indictments and so on.

They claimed that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian. But the time stamps that we have on the programing inside the data that was published by Guccifer 2.0, shows time stamps that are consistently inside the United States.

But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is with the data itself and how quickly it was downloaded. I was incompatible with a transfer across the net to anywhere, over any distance. If it went beyond the high-speed line that you had dedicated to you then it slowed down.

AM:   Explain that in layman’s terms. Why you think this was an inside leak as opposed to a hack.

BB:   OK. Well the fastest download speed that we had was a 49.1 Megabyte rate. Which meant that the hacker was taking the data out at that rate across the network, wherever they were, they could be local, they could be anywhere.

So, we said, ‘OK, what is the capacity of the lines going across to Europe?’ And at that point everything failed. You couldn’t get it across that fast. But you could do a thumb drive, or something local.

Some of our people disagreed with that. They said they thought it could. So, we said OK we’re going to try it. So, we got hacker friends in Europe and a friend in the US trying to put up a Gigabyte of data and said, ‘Here try to pull it across. See how fast you can get it’. And the fastest they could get was from a data center in New Jersey to the UK, in London. And that was 12.0 Megabytes/sec. Less than one fourth the necessary capacity to transmit the data alone.

AM:   What about the time stamps? Do you think that Russia could have been throwing off analysts by planting false time stamps?

BB:   Well, first of all, you have to understand the massive surveillance that’s involved. Everything is captured – by NSA. So, NSA should have some of that evidence somewhere, and they have failed to come forward.

Even in the Intelligence Community Assessment, (that Russia hacked it), the NSA had moderate confidence.

AM:    Right. What does that mean?

BB:    That means, we have no evidence.

AM:   Because the other intelligence agencies said they had confidence, but the NSA said they had moderate confidence.

BB:   But you see they aren’t relevant. When it comes to communications, NSA is the only one that matters. The rest of them don’t.

AM:   And did they explain what the moderate confidence that they had meant?

BB:    No. To me that’s language for ‘I have no evidence.’

AM:   So, look. I wanted to get this out of the way because it’s always interested me. Because you claim that British diplomat Craig Murray corroborates this. That he claims that he handed over a drive to someone.

BB:   Well. He talked to somebody who was involved in transferring the data.

AM:   So, he himself talked to someone.

BB:   Even from the forensic evidence based on the Wikileaks exposure of data that they published, there were multiple ways that they got it.

AM:   And who else has corroborated your findings?

BB:   A number of technical people. People in the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and others – around the world, by the way.

AM:   You’re not hesitant to call people in the US government criminals, co-conspirators. Are there any enforcement bodies that are still doing their job and following the constitution at this point?

BB:   Ah, actually it’s getting hard to find them. Even the Rutherford Institute, looking at the application of law around the world – local and state people – are seeing the idea that they have scrapped the Fourth Amendment, in terms of arresting and searching people and things like that.

AM:   What about the CIA? Should that agency be abolished?

BB:   (Laughs) – Actually I think they do perform a function that’s meaningful to keep. But the rest of it, sure, there’s a big chunk of it that should be eliminated. So for NSA, also.

I think we can cut the intelligence budget, which is probably over 100 Billion Dollars a year – and they’re really trying to defend us? But have failed every time an attack occurs.

AM:   As you mentioned there’s barely anyone in Congress who has a different view on foreign policy, on curbing the surveillance state, curbing the police state.

What is going on here? Why is no one able to see what we’re seeing, Bill?

BB:   Well because were not members of the military-intelligence complex or the shadow government. We’re not members of that.

Everybody in that environment is in their own bubble.

AM:   Everyone in Congress?

BB:   A good many of them, yes. You must at all costs protect the program. Because if you don’t we lose power control and, eventually money.

AM:   I know that you said you don’t link up to wireless networks and surveillance technology but, what do you say to the audience who just feels completely disillusioned at this point, saying ‘look, we have to incorporate some of our lives on line’, what are they supposed to do?

BB:   It’s a matter of, don’t put anything out there that you don’t want someone else to read.

AM:   But even speak, at this point.

BB:   That too. That too. Don’t say anything you don’t want anyone else to hear.

AM:   That’s a pretty stark reality, isn’t it?

BB:   Now, I say everything because I want them to hear. Because I want them to know what I’m going to do in court.

AM:   But what about people who want to protect their privacy?

BB:   Then you invent your own encryption. And don’t pass it through [NISS?] because then the NSA will have it. So, you don’t use anything publicly because they’ve already got that.

AM:   The encryption methodologies that are available now – the NSA was involved in constructing themselves.

BB:   They also know the algorithms, all of them, they have the software for it. Because it has to run through NISS to do testing. They do the testing and then they approve it for public use.

So, I say, ‘hey, if you’re talking to your little community, make your own encryption.’ You’re not doing this publicly, we’re just doing it amongst ourselves. That would cause them a real problem.

 

In Part II of our series Trump Expanding the Empire, Abby Martin addresses the surprise order from Trump that he was “ending the war” in Syria.

Having drastically escalated the war in Syria and Iraq, find out what’s behind the supposed troop withdrawal and the hidden facts in the policies.

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“As we continue our series “How Trump is Expanding the US Empire,” Trump has jolted the establishment by announcing the removal of US troops in Syria.

The US military has 800 bases around the world, with soldiers in 70% of the world’s nations. Obviously, reigning back the US empire anywhere, and removing troops anywhere is a good thing.

So it’s been really atrocious to see the Democratic Party establishment working with most of the GOP and Pentagon to attack this decision from the right, decrying any troop withdrawal as dangerous for so-called national interests.

It’s amplified the claim by liberal pundits, journalists, and Democratic Party leaders like Hillary Clinton, that Trump is some kind of “isolationist” who wants to reign back America’s expansive military machine.

So, what is going on? Is Trump really curtailing the US empire and pushing back against the military industrial complex that has dominated US foreign policy since Eisenhower? No, in fact this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Like in Afghanistan, Trump is simply removing the troops he himself added in Syria since taking office.

While Trump railed against Obama for putting US troops in Syria, he left office with less than 300 US troops there––but through 2017, that number grew to around 2,200 today, approaching 10 times the number under Obama.

But it’s hard to know the true number, since Trump broke with Pentagon policy and actually stopped disclosing troops deployments to Syria and Iraq––how democratic!

And just as Trump started hiding from the public his large troop deployments, he broke with Obama’s policy of only sending Special Operations to Syria, but started sending large units of conventional forces.

And while I was the first to call Obama the drone king, Trump has drastically ramped up US bombing in every region of the world, along with a massive amount of civilian casualties. Not too surprising, considering he campaigned on a new major war to not only “bomb the shit” out of alleged “terrorists,” but their families too.

Trump definitely kept that horrific promise. In 2017, the number of US-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria increased 50%. But they became far more deadly for non combatants. While his airstrikes were a 50% increase from Obama, he increased civilian casualties by 215%, killing an estimated 6,000 civilians in a year.

Trump himself takes credit for that spike, bragging about giving the generals more freedoms to unleash their weapons of mass destruction.

And let’s just get this out of the way. The US military is not fighting a war in Syria to “defeat ISIS” just like it’s not fighting an endless war in Afghanistan to “fight terrorism,” just like it’s never fought a war anywhere for “human rights” or “democracy.”

The reasons they say at press conferences are never the reasons they talk about behind closed doors.

In reality, all these wars are about expanding US control. Syria has been a target ever since the won independence from British and French colonialism in 1963––and along with other Pan-Arab victories in the region like Libya, Iraq, Egypt and beyond, they were all on the chopping block for American capitalism.

And let us not forget that Trump’s first foreign policy act was crossing another line Obama was too scared to do, when he launched strikes against the Syrian state from the dining room of Mar-A-Lago. It’s the type of escalation that could lead to a new world war, but was flippantly carried out over chocolate cake.

The US Empire’s proxy in the Middle East, Israel, carried out even more bombing. Trump ushered in a new phase where Israel began targeting Syrian forces––bombing them at least 10 times in the last two years! These airstrikes would likely never happen without approval, assistance or orders from the Pentagon.

Remember, Trump didn’t announce an end to the US operation in Syria. He simply said he’s removing 2,000 troops. Nothing about the continued bombing, which he dramatically escalated in his first year. And even though bombings dropped in intensity in 2018, after there was basically nothing left to bomb, large numbers of airstrikes continue, contradicting the claim the war is over. In the last two weeks of 2018 alone, the Pentagon says they carried out over 1,000 “engagements” in Syria and nearly 500 airstrikes.

Nothing about supporting it’s foreign surrogates, like Turkey, to do all the dying in place of US troops. Trump has been pushing his far-right collaborator Erdogan to purchase vast amounts of US anti-aircraft weapons, no-doubt for proxy aggression against Iran, Russia and Syria.

Not to mention there are over 5,000 private mercenaries in Iraq and Syria already working for the US; Trump has said nothing about removing them.

And even the withdrawal timetable keeps changing. On December 19 Trump ordered a “rapid withdrawal” of US troops from Syria, to be carried out within 30 days. But four days later, he tweeted that the “rapid withdrawal” is now a “slow pull out.” Sarah Sanders also reassured the war-hungry press that US forces would be “ready to re-engage” “at a moment’s notice in Syria.”

He even sent his cretin John Bolton on an apology tour to assure Israel that the US could leave some troops in Syria indefinitely, while building up forces in Jordan, Iraq and Turkey to fight Iran.

Trump bizarrely diverted questions about the changing timeline by criticizing Obama for not bombing Assad. And in one of the most brazen imperialist statements ever made by a US president, Trump admitted that there was nothing for big business to steal in Syria’s deserts.

It seems like Trump and his friends are only interested in what resources they can pillage and what markets they can open and plunder as a consequence of US invasions. The thing is, Trump isn’t talking at all about withdrawing any troops from Iraq, where he wants to pillage the oil.

If you look at a map of where US troops actually were set up in Syria, it is literally just a few miles from the border of Turkey, Jordan and Iraq, where the US military has bases and large numbers of troops already stationed. So it’s really just a repositioning of US forces.

And when you see that Syria is actually completely surrounded on all sides by hostile US lapdogs, most hosting large US military installations and American troops, the ability for the Empire to withdraw troops but continue aggression is pretty clear.

While Trump’s Syria troop withdrawal got all the attention, what went totally under the radar is that he simultaneously announced the indefinite extension of the criminal occupation of Iraq.

Trump campaigned on opposing the Iraq war “from the beginning”. But the reality is he was actually just for the war being done “the right way.”

But it doesn’t so much matter what Trump said about Iraq before he had any political power. Now that he’s Commander in Chief, what he’s done is all we can go by.

By the 2008 election, public opinion was deafening: the people wanted troops out now. It’s a central reason Obama was elected.

Under Obama, the number of troops precipitously dropped from around 180,000 to just 5,000 through the last years of his administration. While Obama did start adding larger troop deployments in 2016 to “fight ISIS”, Trump came in and hit the gas.

By the end of his first year in office, Trump had nearly doubled the number of US troops in Iraq. And they were doing much less “advising and assisting” and much more “killing and dying” on the front lines.

So much so that more US troops have been killed there during two years of Trump, than in the previous 4 years combined. 37 soldiers have lost their lives for Trump’s ISIS mission, but you would never know it by watching the news, as if the war is long over.

Trump essentially cemented a new Iraq war, and doing so means that at any moment it could escalate in size and violence.

US presence there is a powder keg ready to blow. And remember, he coupled this with a ruthless bombing escalation that caused civilian casualties to skyrocket.

In a single series of US airstrikes in 2017, possibly over 500 civilians were killed at once in what became known as the Mosul massacre. It was the single largest death toll inflicted since the war began in 2003. That blood is on Trump’s hands.

Of course, this airstrike was not the only one like it. It’s likely thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed by US bombs ordered by Trump’s cabinet, but they’re not really concerned. Over the summer, the Pentagon stated that “we’ll never know” how many civilians the US killed under Trump’s leadership. And I guess they’ll never care.

For those of us who care about ending the crimes of the Empire, we have to look at these actions in a larger context; that a scale-down of military operations in one area also means a pivot to build-up operations elsewhere.

In Syria and Iraq, all US troops, airpower and mercenaries should be brought home immediately. Not these minor reductions in favor of more bombing and sanctions that Trump is giving us.

While nobody should oppose the fact Trump is removing these troops, we shouldn’t give him credit either; he is the one who ramped up bombing, ramped up troop numbers and ramped up death and destruction in the region.

Trump is a war criminal, and that’s what he will always be, for the death and destruction his aggressive policies have caused, where millions more are now suffering under the boot of US domination.

A real end to these criminal wars will not come from any president, or member of either ruling class party. It will come from the only force in history that has won progressive change: a grassroots movement of millions of people demanding it.“

In the first installment of this multi-part series, Trump Expanding the Empire, Abby Martin debunks the notion that Trump is an anti-interventionist president, outlining his first two years of aggressive foreign policy that has expanded US wars and occupations.

From the biggest military budget in history, to removing its restrictions to “bomb the hell out of” Iraq and Syria, to ramping-up brutal economic sanctions, to becoming America’s ‘Arms Salesman-In-Chief.’

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Transcript & Links:

“Welcome to Empire Files. I’m your host, Abby Martin. We started this show in 2015. And since then, we’ve maintained the premise that the US empire is not only a huge expanse, but is constantly expanding. Contrary to those who say the US empire is in decline, the war machine has been on a continuous march forward to swallow up new regions and markets, no matter the president.

Two years, into Donald Trump’s reign as CEO of the empire, we wanted to see if the trajectory has continued. At the beginning, I admit I thought Trump was a wild card. I considered the fact that Trump is an extreme narcissist that only cares about himself, not his fellow billionaires. I considered there might be a reason why none of the CEOs the top 100 largest companies in the nation backed Trump for president.

And true to the dizzying effects of having Donald Trump as president, anything was possible––he could go against the grain and start belligerent, major new wars; he could capitulate and be a loyal servant as long as they made him look good; or he could buck the establishment bourgeoisie and pander to a sector of right-wing isolationists and anti-interventionists, who support refocusing US wars on the border, against immigrants, rather than waste resources for so called nation building abroad.

After all, Trump did posture himself as the anti-intervention candidate in the 2016 election. It was a strategy that made sense. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans do not support endless wars abroad. The last 17 years of military conflicts have tainted any candidate who advocates more war.

Right-wing online forums were ablaze with theories that Trump was an isolationist who would fight the “deep state” on wasteful wars. But it was obvious to anyone watching that he was talking out of both sides of his mouth. Trump also campaigned on war, most notably threatening a major war with Iran, which would make Iraq look like child’s play. Not only that, but one of his main campaign promises was a major escalation of war and brutality in the Middle East.

His threats exceeded carpet bombing though, he even evoked the genocide of Muslims in the Philippines as a model, and the legend that General Pershing executed civilians with bullets dipped in pigs blood and buried their bodies with pig carcasses.

He essentially campaigned on a massive expansion of the bogus “War On Terror”. Far from “isolationist,” Trump presented himself as more of heartless warmonger who thought human rights law was a barrier that needed to be smashed––that the violence of the war machine was too soft, too restrained.

Candidate Trump didn’t just lament the restraint on American war crimes around the world, but also financial restraints on the military machine. Somehow, Trump argued that the country with the biggest military budget in the history of the world, was actually too small.

Candidate Trump has turned out to be a pretty good predictor of a president Trump. And it should’ve been clear to everyone what kind of President he would be when he hand picked his cabinet, stacking it with the craziest neocon outliers––ones too insane even for the Bush Administration––and more generals than any cabinet since World War 2, who are literal war criminals.

He even bragged about giving the Pentagon maximum power to act, free from annoying checks and balances. And true to his word, he also shattered all records for our already obscene military budget.

Before Trump came in, it was already larger than all these countries combined. But apparently that wasn’t enough, so within his first year Trump kicked in the biggest defense budget in history––close to one trillion dollars.

The increase in military spending alone equates to more than Russia’s entire annual military budget. The new $750 billion war toy chest included another $705 million for Israel, $100 million to deter “Russian aggression” in the Baltics, and another $500 million to arm Ukraine, equipment that seems to keep getting into the hands of neo-nazi militias.

But the most interesting part of the budget is the spending increase for what’s called Overseas Contingency Operations, which includes maintaining troop deployments and US bases, as well as new and expanding outposts. Since 2011, this spending has been capped by a federal statute. But Trump blew the caps off by $80 billion dollars!

This couldn’t have happened without Congress––or the full endorsement of the Democratic Party establishment. There is a bipartisan consensus in Washington to maintain the US empire, along with its 800 military bases.

And it’s not just gifting the military industrial complex with an open faucet of taxpayer dollars, but using US dominance to get them huge weapons contracts with foreign proxies.

Obama oversaw some of the biggest arms deals in US history, selling more than $115 Billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia alone, the most of any US administration.

But Trump has taken the role of CEO of the US empire to new heights, becoming the de facto arms salesman-in-chief.

Trump made it a priority to lift Obama-era restrictions on selling weapons to countries committing human rights abuses, like Bahrain. US diplomats were also instructed to become literal conduits for weapons manufacturers and push arms sales as part of their jobs.

In Trump’s first year, the State Department approved more than $75 billion in overseas weapons sales, topping the previous record of $68 billion in 2012.

It’s only ramped up since. In the first 6 months of 2018, the DOD brokered weapons deals to foreign proxies alone worth $46 billion, more than the $41 billion worth of deals made during all of 2017.

By pumping obscene amounts of cash into the war machine, while gleefully endorsing bombing and torture, Trump makes it clear to his friends that business will be booming for a long time.

Richard Aboulafia of the military think tank ‘Teal Group’ said of the policy shift: “diplomacy is out; air strikes are in…in this sort of environment, it’s tough to keep a lid on costs.”

It’s paid off for America’s five biggest defense contractors, whose stocks have more than tripled in the last couple years.

We’re told it “costs too much” to have medicare for all, yet money was no object when Trump ordered the DOD to establish a “Space Force” as a sixth branch of the military, projected to cost at least $13 billion dollars in the first five years.

The idea to militarize space was first proposed by the Bush administration, in their PNAC blueprint for the War on Terror. Trump is just another neocon puppet, eager to fulfill their Stormtrooper fantasy.

Not to mention the fact that alongside passing this record military budget, it was paid for with budget cuts to society’s most vulnerable, in particular, hungry children.

But Trump isn’t just making sure kids in the United States go hungry, but children in every country it deems our enemies. Because the US dollar drives the global economy, the empire frequently wields sanctions to bend countries to its will.

Anyone claiming to be anti-war, or even just anti-intervention, must oppose any and all economic sanctions. Make no mistake: sanctions are war. And not in a hyperbolic sense. They are real attacks, that kill real people.  

The impact of sanctions is never discussed in the US media. They’re always treated as a kind of “soft” solution, with the assumption that they only affect a society’s corrupt elites. These are assumption nowhere close to the reality.

Sanctions hurt the most vulnerable––and by design. That’s why they intentionally target medicine, clean water, and access to food. The logic of sanctions is, if you kill and starve enough innocent civilians, they will blame their own government, rise up and overthrow them so American force don’t have to waste any blood overthrowing them.

Their genocidal impact cannot be overstated. Looking at Iraq alone, US sanctions in the 90’s, that blockaded medicine from the country, killed 500,000 Iraqi babies. That is the true face of sanctions.

They are not an “alternative to war,” sanctions ARE war in every way. So what has Trump done with the daggers of US sanctions? He’s shown the true face of his foreign policy. Obama implemented hundreds of sanctions during his tenure. But Trump is ramping them up in nearly every region, adding hundreds more in his first two years.

The most destructive application of sanctions has been on Iran, where Trump upended Obama’s historic nuclear deal and added 143 sanctions that have since debilitated their economy.

Then there’s North Korea, where people give Trump credit for peace between the North and South. Amazingly, despite the media’s rhetoric of Trump bowing down for dictators, he has installed 80 new sanctions on the DPRK, compared to the 74 applied by Obama.

In Syria, Trump has authorized a stunning 287 new sanctions, almost double the amount applied under Obama. He’s administered 43 sanctions on Libya so far.

In Russia and Ukraine, Trump has defied the notion he is a puppet of Putin by sanctioning the region 105 times so far, for everything from annexing Crimea, to the alleged meddling in the 2016 election, to the attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal. Not to mention the 43 “cyber sanctions” put on the figures alleged to have hacked into the DNC.

Next is Venezuela. Even though Obama added 7 sanctions in his term, Trump’s laser focus is set on destroying the country once-and-for-all. He’s already employed 63 new sanctions to strangle Venezuela and undermine any chance for economic recovery.

He imposed many more sanctions on independent, progressive countries like Cuba and Nicaragua.

What do all those countries have in common? It’s not some standard of democracy or human rights––it’s that they are all independent of US domination. They chart their own path and decide what’s done with the wealth of their own country. The biggest thing they have in common, is that none of them pose any threat to us!

It would be bad enough if the Trump administration was only expanding economic warfare on these countries. But they’re taking it much further.

Any corner of the globe we look to, we see that he is indeed expanding the US empire’s influence and operations––he has ratcheted up, with new fire and veracity, covert and overt regime change operations; expansion of military bases, massive increases in bombings and civilian casualties, and belligerent escalations that put us on the brink of catastrophic war on multiple fronts.  

As we’ll show in this multi-part series, Trump Expanding the Empire, that whether or not Trump pisses off, offends or even destabilizes powerful sectors of the imperialist state, he has only put war and militarism on the march.

It may be confusing how Trump is still making proclamations about stopping endless wars, but we have to look at his actions, not his rhetoric.

And yes, there is growing opposition to Trump within the halls of power. But not because they think Trump is going to reign back the Empire––but because he’s simply self-absorbed and unpredictable.

With all the praise about the most diverse Congress in history, you can’t find any diversity in opinion when it comes to continuing US imperialism. We can’t let the democrats steer the resistance away from where it needs to be––in the streets, linking our struggles, fighting the expansive US empire.”

Since October 2017, America experienced three of the deadliest mass shootings in modern history. This epidemic coincides with a frightening resurgence of white nationalism. Sometimes the two trends overlap.

But why here? Both phenomena can be explained by a common historical thread—to unravel it Abby Martin sits down with indigenous scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz to discuss her latest book “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment”.

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From podcast Loud & Clear with Brian Becker: