This interview is from couple years back when Gaza was under attack by Israel. But, since, nothing has changed in conditions of Gaza, Israel or other stakeholders (US, Middle East countries etc.), this interview is still very much relevant today. This interview is interesting due to its discussion of 3 main topics which give Israel the legitimacy to build an open air prison (Gaza is essentially an open air prison) & then use it as its weapons testing facility (which Israel actually does, as discussed in another blog post earlier in 2017):
1. US sharing intelligence with Israel is nothing new. Israel is considered an staunch ally in the Middle East by US, & hence, it bends over backwards to accommodate any reasonable or unreasonable Israeli requests. US would even throw its own citizens under the bus, proverbially speaking, to furnish Israel's requests. US may not have enough money to help solve its own problems (homelessness, education, crime, unemployment etc.) but it has to give billions in financial aid to Israel every year, besides, military & intelligence sharing.
2. Arab dictators legitimizing Israel's occupation of Palestinian land is the worst form of crime against Muslims. Muslims fully expect to be railroaded by non-Muslims, but what can be said & felt when your own Muslim leaders, esp. those leaders who are called the "custodian of the 2 holy mosques" of Islam, make friends with Israel. Why? Because they operate per the idea that enemy of my enemy is my friend. Since. Iran is considered an enemy by both Israel & Saudi Arabia; that enmity of Iran made friends & allies of Israel with Saudi Arabia.
On top of that, since, Saudi Arabia is the leader of Sunni Arab world, other Middle Eastern / prominent members of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) are also following the lead of Saudi Arabia; countries like Kuwait, UAE, Qatar etc.
So, Palestinians not only have Israeli, European, & North American Zionists & Evangelical Christians to deal with, they also have Muslim leaders from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, & Kuwait etc. working against them & Iran.
Further to that, another tangential, but related, point, is that this alliance of Israel, US, & Saudi Arabia & its followers, show the American hypocrisy. The slogan of democracy is all well & good in theory, but in reality, as long as, American political & energy interests are secure, it doesn't matter to US & Western governments, what happens to human rights in Middle Eastern countries. As Glenn Greenwald says in the interview that the Western governments "... actually give the Saudis training and technology that bolster their surveillance, one of the most repressive regimes in the world, at the very same time that we pretend to be campaigning for democracy."
3. The role of media in US has become more of propagating what the government is saying. So, although, the Western governments talk about freedom of the press, the mainstream press has lost its way, & become the mouthpiece of their respective governments. The public has realized that & hence, a large majority disregard the media, & that's exactly, what Trump seized on, but he & his followers took the problem to the other extreme & label anything spewing out of Trump as facts & everything else as lies.
Western governments & press disregard media of countries they think are their enemies, for instance, North Korea, Russia, China etc. & bill the national media outlets of these countries as mere mouthpieces of their respective governments. But aren't the media of the Western governments doing the exact same thing for their own governments? For example, American news outlets like CNN, ABC, Fox, MSNBC etc. played a crucial role in drumming up the war rhetoric for Gulf War I, Gulf War II, Afghanistan, Iraq & Libya.
We can all blame the actions of the media losing its integrity due to their never-ending chase of the TV ratings & advertisement dollars but what's more troubling is the hypocrisy; bringing the perfect proverb to my mind that "kettle is calling the pot black."
The new administration of Mr. Trump is predictably doing what several other past administrations have tried to do, previously; broker a peace deal between Israel & Palestine, & finally bring the peace in the Middle East. However, the peace deal is like a corporate vision, which will never actually be attained & always remain an elusive dream, because the peace deals are not being negotiated with honesty. Hypocrisy & double agendas rule the day. Israel needs Gaza & West Bank to always show the world that they are in threat & is the victim (in addition to being those places as live testing places for Israel's billion-dollar arms industry). America needs Israel & repressive Middle Eastern regimes to control its own interests in Middle East. American media has also become the pawn of the government & the public is being fed the lies about Muslims, Islam, Israel, Palestine, & Arab countries to help manufacture domestic support for whatever American government actually wants to do in the Middle East.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So what do we know about this targeting? If I understand it correctly, the documents that Snowden released aren't about this particular attack or this specific attack on Gaza, but in the past there's evidence not only of intelligence sharing, but the word that leaked off the page to me when I was reading your piece was targeting. What do we know about that?
GLENN GREENWALD, AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST, THE INTERCEPT: It's no secret that the U.S. is the key party enabling Israeli militarism and aggression. In general, it provides, obviously, huge amounts of cash to the Israelis, even in an ongoing attack, such as the one currently taking place in Gaza. The U.S. just in the last week has furnished arms and munitions and grenades to the Israelis that they're using in the attack.
So our piece focused on the role that the NSA and the intelligence apparatus that the United States has built plays in enabling the Israeli attack. And we revealed some documents showing that the relationship has grown substantially over the last decade between the NSA on the one hand and the Israeli counterpart, the SIGINT National Unit, on the other, in which the NSA provides the Israelis with all kinds of surveillance technology, training, but also lots of data that they collect in the course of doing surveillance that the Israelis then use to target people in Gaza, in the West Bank, and throughout the region, first for surveillance, but then, obviously, also for targeting with violence. And so the U.S. really is at the center of every form of Israeli aggression that takes place in that region.
JAY: Now, we're led to believe that the American satellites have the capability of actually seeing faces on streets. I mean, one, do we know whether that's true? And two, if that level of technology is being transferred, that would mean active, real-time involvement of the U.S. intelligence or U.S. army in Israeli warfare.
GREENWALD: The Americans share the vast bulk of their surveillance technology and surveillance activities in the region with the Israelis. It's a very close cooperative sharing arrangement.
I don't think there's any question that the Israelis are being reckless and more or less indiscriminate in the violence they're wreaking on Gaza. I mean, there are Israeli generals who have inadvertently acknowledged, essentially, that they are attacking heavily civilian areas and with their knowledge that lots of civilians are going to be killed. They have targeted UN schools that they knew and that coordinates for which had been provided to them many, many times. And so I don't think there's a lot of efforts being undertaken by the Israelis to be very precise or careful in the kinds of people that they're killing.
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... I think they're interested in knowing the whereabouts of people who are of greatest interest to them. And certainly the sharing arrangement with the U.S. helps them to know where people are, and it helps them to geo-locate them. ... .
... I think the important point is this is not a careful and precise operation, where they're targeting people very carefully and then killing only them. They're engaged in the destruction of entire blocks, blowing up huge apartment buildings and homes. And that's why the death toll of innocent people has been so high.
JAY: Is there any limits on what type of technology the United States gives to Israel that you're aware of? Are they getting the same kind of technology that the American Armed Forces has itself?
GREENWALD: A lot of it, yeah. ... there was an agreement whereby the NSA agreed to provide raw communication, even of U.S. citizens, to the Israelis without first even minimizing--meaning safeguarding the identity of the American citizens to whom that communication pertained. ... it isn't that the NSA just wholesale hands over everything to Israel. But in some cases the NSA cooperates more aggressively with the Israelis than they do even with their closest surveillance partners in the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. ... it's just reflective of this overall policy that the U.S. government has to be incredibly loyal to the Israelis when it comes to providing pretty much anything the Israelis want.
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JAY: ... the political side of the American administration's essentially driven by domestic politics. But ... this is more about big money than it is about Jewish voters.
GREENWALD: ... what's interesting is there's this sort of taboo on how you're supposed to talk about the role that domestic politics plays in our policy toward Israel, because it touches on longstanding anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish money controlling foreign policy for the benefit of Israel and at the expense of the United States or other countries. But if you look at what political consultants and the like say when they're speaking candidly, ... that's more or less what they say. Hank Sheinkopf is one of the most sort of savvy and experienced political operatives. He was a high-level aid to the Clintons. He helped run Hillary Clinton's Senate campaigns in New York. And there's this fascinating New York Sun article from 2007 that talks about how all of the Democratic presidential candidates, like John Edwards and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the like, are parading before AIPAC and speaking very, very aggressively and militaristically about Iran. And they asked Hank Sheinkopf why that is. And he said, well, it's very simple to understand: it's because Jewish voters are essentially the ATM of American politics--in New York.
But I think it's not just Jewish voters. I think it's really important to understand that one of the biggest factions supporting Israel, probably in a more aggressive way than a lot of Jewish voters, are evangelicals, who for religious reasons believe that it's really crucial that Israel occupy not only Israel but sort of what they view as greater Israel, which includes the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, because they believe God wanted Israel to possess that land and that a unified Israel, as they see it, is necessary for the return of Jesus and for the rapture. And so you have not just Jewish voters, but evangelical Christians who are very fervent in their demands that the U.S. government support Israel, even at the expense of American interest. And that definitely is a big part of the domestic pressures.
JAY: ... the other issue is do you not think that much of the foreign-policy elite, professional and political, share this vision of Israel as this necessary outpost for America in a sea of oil with angry Arabs that don't like Americans very much, so it's not just about the potential money in American elections, it's also a convergence of interest and seeing that Israel, for better or worse, is absolutely essential to American hegemony in the Middle East?
GREENWALD: Yeah, I think it's an important point. First of all, ... I don't think that the issue with Israel is different in terms of domestic politics than pretty much every other issue, which is that money dominates, and there's much more money on the side of pro-Israel or support for Israel than there is, say, support for the Palestinians, which is why it's so lopsided. ... .
But the point you make is an important one, which is sometimes it gets depicted that Israel is this kind of domineering force that kind of commandeers American politics for its own interest at the expense of the United States. I think you're right, though-- it's much more of a two-way street than that. The Americans definitely look at Israel as an important weapon that they use to advance their interests in the Middle East, just like they look at support for the dictatorial regimes that are their allies as well, in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain. You know, these are just ways that the United States kind of dominates that region in order to secure their energy and oil interests. And Israel is an important weapon in the eyes of a lot of American policymakers. It's not just that they're forced to do so because of domestic political constraints.
JAY: And this relationship with the Saudis is kind of an interesting piece of this puzzle, because ... the Saudis are also in on this intelligence sharing. So you have both Israel and Saudi Arabia within the American intelligence confidence circle. Supposedly, the Saudis are so in support of the Palestinians. But sort of at a deeper level, you almost have a kind of quasi-alliance between the Saudis and the Israelis to help manage the region under this American intelligence and military umbrella.
GREENWALD: Oh, there's definitely a de facto alliance, or at least a coalition, between the U.S., the Saudis, and Israel. Especially since the Saudis began viewing Iran as their great rival in the region, they viewed working cooperatively with the Israelis as something that was very much in their interest. And, of course, they made kind of meaningless pronouncements in support of the Palestinians because they need to do so for political consumption. I mean, even the Saudi tyrants care a little bit about the public not viewing them as partners of the Israelis.
But that is one of the most undercovered and underexamined issues in U.S. foreign policy is the unbelievably close relationship between the U.S. and the Saudis, and now increasingly the Israelis. I mean, we did do an article a week ago publishing the documents showing very close intelligence sharing between the Saudis and the Americans. We actually give the Saudis training and technology that bolster their surveillance, one of the most repressive regimes in the world, at the very same time that we pretend to be campaigning for democracy.
But the thing that's even more amazing about that is we've had this 12 year period of running around trying to pin the blame of 9/11 on all sorts of parties, from Saddam Hussein to Iran to whoever the sort of enemy du jour is, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and yet the country that probably bears most of the blame, if anyone does, is Saudi Arabia. 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. You have people in the Saudi government who at the very least were close to some of the people who were helping to plan the 9/11 attack, probably financing the people who were responsible. And yet they become our closest allies. It's just one of those ironies that underscores how propagandistic the war on terror has become.
JAY: ... how much is mainstream media paying attention to the some of the kind of stuff you're breaking?
GREENWALD: I mean, I think they're paying attention in several different respects. I mean, the stories that we've broken, the Snowden revelations in general, have made a big impact on the media landscape. I think part of that is just the drama of it all, the sort of spycraft, the drama about where Snowden can go or where he would get asylum, all of that.
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... I think that the stories themselves get some media attention. But I do think that some get more attention than others based upon not what's actually newsworthy, but based upon the kinds of things the American media likes to systematically ignore.
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And I think some of the revelations that we published about spying with Saudi Arabia, about spying with Israel, have been more or less ignored by the American media for the same reason, that it's just so contrary to the narrative that we like to sustain about what the role of the U.S. government in the world is, and any kind of attention to that sort of stuff would require a whole lot of digging and further investigation that American media outlets in general like to avoid because of how uncomfortable it makes people.
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... They like to propagate that narrative and avoid things that call any of it into question. And I think that's actually one of the reasons why people have lost faith in established media outlets is because it doesn't really seem to serve any real purpose if all they're doing is bolstering and propagating what the government is saying instead of questioning and investigating it.
