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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
David Remnick and Jane Mayer on counterterrorism after Boston.
00:16:14
David Remnick and Jane Mayer on counterterrorism after Boston.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:14]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, April 24th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. President Obama's counterterrorism, rhetoric and methodology often appear little different from those of his predecessor. Here's George W. Bush in 2002.
- [01:34]
David Remnick
These evil ones still want to hit us. But after September 11, America is now ready. We're after them. Any hint of somebody wanting to harm our country, we're acting.
- [01:46]
Dorothy Wickenden
And here's Barack Obama in 2010.
- [01:49]
David Remnick
We are at war.
- [01:51]
Jane Mayer
We are at war against Al Qaeda.
- [01:53]
David Remnick
A far reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9 11.
- [01:57]
Jane Mayer
That killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and that is plotting to strike us again.
- [02:02]
David Remnick
And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them.
- [02:05]
Dorothy Wickenden
In the wake of the bombings at the Boston Marathon, we're talking today about these policies and about how effective they've been with David Remnick and Jane Mayer. David, tell us a little bit about the background of the Tsarnaev brothers and what sort of policy implications, if any, these bombings will have.
- [02:21]
David Remnick
Not sure they have any policy implications. In fact, what's most miraculous to me, although it may be a bad week to say it, is that this hasn't happened more often. I think that anybody who lived through 911 and looked at the complexity of that plot, which killed over 3,000 people, began to wonder why in the aftermath there weren't smaller, you know, God forbid, somebody going into a department store with a backpack and go near a a crowded area where shirts are being sold or ties or dresses or whatever it is, and knock off 30 people or at a shot or 50 people, the way you see all the time on the streets of say, Baghdad or Kabul. And we haven't had that. And what we saw in Boston was a kind of, what seems to be horrible as it was a rogue mission by two brothers, one clearly more radical and ideological and quote, unquote, mature in his thinking, as horrible as it is, who influenced the younger one severely, and they pulled this off. But it's a wonder that this hasn't happened more because these are very soft targets. We cannot control absolutely everything all the time.
- [03:38]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I also want to ask you, David, about the media's response to all this. Has the media overreacted? One thing that Bin Laden was an evil genius at was learning how to use propaganda and foment fear. Is there not a case to be made that when a terrible event like this happens and it's played 247 for several weeks again and again and again, we are doing exactly what these younger terrorists who have learned some of their techniques, at least from.
- [04:05]
David Remnick
No, I think what would be worse, immensely worse, is to distort our democracy, which is what happened in many instances in the aftermath of 911 to tie ourselves up into angry knots, begin behaving in a way that really is a defeat. I mean, you saw little hints of this in the aftermath of the Boston bombing. You saw calls to treat the Tsirnayev, the younger Tsarnaev brother, as an enemy combatant, for example. And this was quickly and thankfully brushed away. We should remember that there's a 100% record of prosecuting terrorists on our territory. 100%. Our justice system is pretty damn good when it comes to this. Yes, there might have been some overreaction in some quarters of the media. I'm even more concerned about some of the crazy inaccuracies and the rush to judgment. But I understand totally why this got so much attention.
- [05:02]
Dorothy Wickenden
Jean, talk a little bit about this ongoing legal fight. The truth is, as far as I know, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are still pressing for the younger Tsarnaev to be classified as an enemy combatant.
- [05:15]
Jane Mayer
Well, I think they've actually thrown in the towel on him per se, but they are still holding open the idea that it should be a possibility when you pick up a terrorist in this country or a terrorist suspect. And their argument has been that you can't question a suspect well enough if he has a lawyer present and knows his Miranda rights. And according to someone who I consider to be really the most expert on this subject, David Criss, who headed the national security in the Justice Department both under Bush and until recently under Obama, they're wrong. If you have a lawyer present, a suspect is more likely to cooperate because the lawyer points out to the suspect that it's in his interest to try to cooperate because he's already in custody. And if he wants to start to try to make deals, this is the way to begin. So they've actually had better luck getting information out of people when they have lawyers present. It's interesting to me that Lindsey Graham continues to push this so hard. He's up for reelection this year, and people have suggested that he may be facing opposition from the right and he wants to look really tough. And this is one of those issues where the facts run one way and the politics runs the other way, you know, so you have people like Donald Trump saying, we ought to waterboard the guy and thinking that that sounds tough. Well, the reality is you would get less out of someone that way, and you might get really bad information out of them if they said anything at all.
- [06:46]
David Remnick
The fact of the matter is that we are getting tons of information within a week and a half of the event using the proper means available to the Justice Department, the FBI, and everybody involved in the interrogation. What we now know about the plot itself, how it originated, who influenced it, where the weapons were gotten, is an enormous amount already.
- [07:09]
Jane Mayer
I think it's been a real wake up call for people probably too, about the extent of surveillance that takes place in major US Cities at this point. The idea that you could see all those photographs in the crowds, that combined with people's cell phones, I think, has been pretty amazing to people. Plus, I think what a lot of people are learning about now is that the national security departments in this country are very plugged into who's looking at what on the Internet. And the word they've been using is that they get pinged when you're online and you're looking at certain websites if they are considered dangerous material. It seems to be Pinging some parts of the government. And so there are a lot of ways that law enforcement's involved in trying to stop terrorist acts in the country.
- [07:56]
Dorothy Wickenden
That is interesting, Jane. And this is something else I wanted to ask David. The pinging I hadn't heard about. But it seems as though these brothers learned much of what they knew about radical ISL about bomb making from what they read on the Internet. Talk a little bit about what you know about that beyond what we've been reading.
- [08:12]
David Remnick
Well, I think I've been. I must have been pinged too, because I spent last week all day Friday on or a lot of it on jihadi websites. And it wasn't for the first time. I think journalists do this all the time. And the point is that many, many people go onto these sites and the notion that we're going to somehow arrest them for going on these sites is not realistic at all.
- [08:31]
Jane Mayer
Well, you wouldn't be arrested, but you.
- [08:32]
David Remnick
Would be be surveilled.
- [08:34]
Jane Mayer
You might find yourself on a watch list. And the watch list, by one estimate I looked at, said 700,000 people are on a regular watch list, you know, routinely.
- [08:44]
David Remnick
And yet Tamerlan, who was on one of these watch lists, was able to commit this crime pretty much unhindered.
- [08:50]
Jane Mayer
And now, of course, it's going to become a big political fight with the Republicans on the Hill going after various parts of the Obama administration for not speaking with each other about the fact that he'd gone to Russia and come back again.
- [09:03]
David Remnick
I think it's a legitimate discussion.
- [09:05]
Jane Mayer
I think so, too, because basically this is what we learned after 9, 11. There was, you know, no coordination between the FBI and the CIA.
- [09:12]
Dorothy Wickenden
But Jane, I thought that this was one of the things that people have commended the various agencies on in the wake of this doing better. There was enormous collaboration, which is one of the reasons they got caught so quickly.
- [09:24]
Jane Mayer
I mean, the facts are unclear. There are about three different versions of this information that are floating around, and I don't feel like we really know yet whether there was negligence or not. He was on the radar of the FBI, he was on the radar of the CIA, and he was on the radar of the Homeland Security Department.
- [09:40]
David Remnick
And he was on the radar of Russian intelligence.
- [09:42]
Jane Mayer
Right.
- [09:43]
Dorothy Wickenden
And he was questioned by the FBI.
- [09:45]
David Remnick
Right. And he made that trip back to Dagestan. In addition to being in Dagestan, he also made a couple of trips to see family in Chechnya, which is very nearby. It is troubling. I mean, as a civil libertarian, I still value the safety of Our cities and towns. And these are very difficult choices and decisions to have to figure out what to do, how to balance the old question of balancing civil liberties and safety.
- [10:11]
Dorothy Wickenden
When Bush, George W. Bush was in office, we used to talk a lot and write about in the magazine about how the administration whipped up these fears, this sense of paranoia that we were constantly under attack. The country fought two very long wars. One, the war in Iraq started on a false premise, the allegation that they were weapons of mass destruction. We now have this, as we've been discussing this vast multi agency system to track terrorists. What have we learned from all of this?
- [10:39]
David Remnick
Well, on the other hand, since September 2001, we have not had a major terror attack. And if you talk to anybody, honest people who are in the high up in the national security apparatus, they will tell you that the briefings that they get, the chatter they listen to, the things that are stifled quietly, that we don't always hear about, are frightening. And we want that to happen. We want those things to be stopped. Recently we did hear about one, about a train being derailed out of Toronto, possibility of a train being derailed. We want those things to be nipped in the bud and at the same time we want to preserve our way of life of a kind of fluid, frictionless, open democracy. Those are very, very hard things to balance.
- [11:24]
Dorothy Wickenden
And do you think Obama, his counterterrorism policies, that he's got the balance just about right?
- [11:29]
David Remnick
Well, I think the big issue is the business of drones, the business of saying, look, we have security interests but we don't want to commit military troops because the losses would be too big and we're going to use this new technology and we will quote, unquote, take these dangerous elements out the backwash of this, the difficulty of this moral and otherwise, the degree to which it may or may not create more terrorists is an open one and I don't think we've dealt with it. The technology makes it seem all so easy and it's far from it.
- [12:03]
Jane Mayer
I was just having dinner this week with someone who left the Obama administration recently. He was in the White House and he said his greatest regret was the drone policy, which was interesting to me. I think there's a kind of a growing sense that there's going to be a price to pay. There are going to be unintended consequences. One of the bigger surprises about Obama is that he came in and I think he has certainly made significant and important changes in terms of fighting terrorism. From the way that Bush went about it. Bush basically felt that the commander in chief was above the law. Obama doesn't buy that. He's reconstructed a careful legal regime. But what he has done that's surprising to critics, I think, is that he's accepted the idea that terrorism is a war, that terrorists are warriors, which many people think flatters them, and that they're just basically really craven criminals. But because of that paradigm that allows this country to kind of range anywhere around the world and pick off terror suspects without any kind of judicial process, because it's considered a war, and they are enemy combatants. And so that has changed what might have been regarded as targeted killing and assassination, you know, probably illegal in the past, to what is now part of legalized warfare, and that's drone strikes. But the rules of the game are pretty hazy, and there's actually a movement afoot now in Congress to take a closer look at them. I think Senator Durbin is moving towards holding hearings on what the rules should be. Anyway. It's a story that has a lot of pros and cons and.
- [13:44]
David Remnick
And moral difficulty, because you may not like the notion of it as war, but to merely label them as criminals as if they were bank robbers or murderers on a local level, it doesn't quite do the job either, does it? I mean, you do have groups small and large that spread martial propaganda, ideological propaganda, and either organize or inspire acts that are warlike, that are attacks, whether it's on the scale of 9, 11 or smaller, or. And we've seen them all around the world. So there is a difficulty of definition, which then has to be translated into what you do about it in terms of law enforcement or military action.
- [14:34]
Jane Mayer
Well, it's not really a new problem. I mean, there have been, you know, terrorists certainly throughout the 19th century today.
- [14:41]
David Remnick
But the instruments are different, the capacities are different. The 19th century terrorists did not have available to them the weapons that 21st century terrorists have available to them, both in reality and potentially, or the means of communication and the capacity to spread the word.
- [14:59]
Dorothy Wickenden
Jane, let me shift the focus just a little bit, because probably the most troubling symbol of all of this is Guantanamo Bay, and there's a big hunger strike going on right now. And there these prisoners are prisoners, enemy combatants in legal limbo. What can we do about them? And here, too, is a question about whether we are inadvertently creating more enemies than we would have had otherwise.
- [15:25]
Jane Mayer
Well, this is. I mean, the thing is, under a war paradigm, if you want to be strictly legal about it, they can be held. There are 166 people there. There are 93 of them on a hunger strike. And under a war, you can hold prisoners of war until the conflict's over. So if the conflict is to end all terrorism, obviously, practically that means these people probably be held for life. And that, I think, conflicts with many of our sort of legal values. But at the same time, just sort of technically speaking, it's legal under the laws of war. But this is another reason why describing the war on terror as a war is really complicated.
- [16:04]
Dorothy Wickenden
But it's a conundrum for President Obama, too, who, you know, one of his first vows as president was to shut down Guantanamo Bay.
- [16:11]
Jane Mayer
Yeah, I mean, and I'm, in some ways, I know there are people on the left who are really furious with Obama for not shutting down Guantanamo. I think it is a disgrace that it's still open. But he actually did try to. And there's no way in this Congress that he could get anywhere. It's not necessarily his fault. And in some ways, unless the public cares more about it, which it doesn't seem to, it's very hard to get up the political pressure on Congress to make a change its posture on this.
- [16:40]
Dorothy Wickenden
David, any final word?
- [16:42]
David Remnick
I agree with Jane, and I find it unconscionable that it's not closed yet. And I think the United States should either act on these people that they have imprisoned or not. And to have them in legal limbo is a horrendous symbol or a counter symbol to what our justice system should be.
- [16:59]
Dorothy Wickenden
Thank you both. Jane Mayer is a staff writer, and David Remnick is the editor of the New Yorker. This has been the political scene. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [17:07]
David Remnick
You can subscribe to this and other free New Yorker podcasts in the itunes store. The weekly audio edition of the magazine is available at audible.com subscribers can read the magazine online@newyorker.com and also in the tablet edition on the iPad and the Kindle Fire.
- [17:29]
Katie Drummond
What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I' hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [17:56]
David Remnick
I want a shark that.
- [17:58]
Katie Drummond
That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [18:02]
David Remnick
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote. To the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online.
- [18:09]
Katie Drummond
To the best of my ability, every week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False.
- [18:28]
Jane Mayer
Tell me more.
- [18:30]
Katie Drummond
Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcast.
- [18:41]
Jane Mayer
From. PRX.