Strategizing for the Elimination of Strategic Weapons, Taking Aim at the Pentagon Audit
I’ve
been writing on this blog on many occasions that the first stop on the road to
nuclear disarmament is the Pentagon, and by that I mean the entire American
military budget, not just spending on nuclear weapons. The vast, global empire
of American military bases and the massive American military budget for
conventional weapons are the two objects that form the bottleneck in getting
China and Russia to even begin talking about abolishing their nuclear arsenals.
Lee Camp: Welcome to Redacted Tonight VIP. If you’ve been watching Redacted Tonight recently, you know we’ve covered some pretty groundbreaking stories. The $21 trillion unaccounted for at the Pentagon over the past twenty years, as well as the forty-four thousand bombs Trump’s military dropped last year, which averages out to about one every 12 minutes. Both those stories are thanks, partially, to the investigative journalism of David Degraw (https://daviddegraw.org/). So I figured let’s get him in here. Here we go. David, thanks for taking the time to be here.
David Degraw: Hey, thanks for having me, Lee. It’s been awesome to watch you evolve into the force you’ve become, man. I really am inspired by your work.
Lee Camp: Thanks. I appreciate it. I’m inspired by yours. I want to talk about some of yours that has inspired me. Let’s start off with the largest theft in human history, I believe it could be called. I think that’s a good place to start. On my show several weeks ago, I covered the $21 trillion that is unaccounted for at the Pentagon, and I got a lot of that info from you and your reporting. How did you uncover that insane story?
David Degraw: Well, you know, I’ve been covering military spending for a very long time now, really since the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in the 90s. Military spending has been lacking accountability for decades, and weapons contractors have known this for the longest time—that there’s really no oversight over military spending, so they pretty much do whatever they want. And then, as you mentioned, Kathryn Austin Fitz and Mark Skidmore did excellent work looking through the DoD [Department of Defense] inspector general reports showing all this unaccounted-for money which we’ve always known was a problem, but we never really had an overall figure, an overall view of it, which that research team gave us, showing us the astonishing $21 trillion in unaccounted-for money, which is really just a partial view. It could be $30-40 trillion. Who knows? It’s just the surreally absurd corruption that is going on throughout military spending, throughout the entire governmental system. You know all about it.
Lee Camp: Yeah, it really is a tough number to get your head around at all. It took me a long time to even figure out how such a number could be possible, and you talked about how you’re just getting a glimpse of it. We’re not really seeing everything that goes on at the Pentagon, that goes on with our military. This was just certain numbers from the inspector general’s report, but a bit of breaking news this week. Is this right? They’ve now redacted the report from December 2017?
David Degraw: Yes, since we’ve all been making noise about this, their only response… our repeated attempts to get the Office of the Inspector General to respond to our questions have gone unanswered… the only two answers they’ve given us were: [1] When they decided to take all the reports offline, which you covered in a hilarious segment. They just basically took all the reports offline, but we had already downloaded them so they couldn’t cover it up that way. [2] And now the latest report they released where we’ve been getting all this information from, this annual report, is all redacted. This is the only way they can defend it—by redacting it. I spent a lot of time covering trillions of dollars of outright fraud through the financial crisis and one thing that I’ve always noticed is that when you catch them doing these colossal trillion-dollar frauds, as soon as you start closing in on them and getting the truth out, they wave the wand of national security and now they redact all the information. And, of course, the US mainstream press, which is owned by global war profiteers straight up… the US mainstream press is now a psychological operation, a divide-and-conquer of the American people. I don’t make money at journalism anymore because I’ve been so censored online. I do this because I’m genuinely worried about fate of the American country. I’m worried about my family’s future, our children’s future. We are in a debt death spiral, Lee. Just look at the numbers. Do the math, people. [There is] record-breaking national debt, record-breaking state debt, record-breaking household debt, record-breaking personal debt, student debt, medical debt, medical bankruptcies. 60 percent of bankruptcies are because of high medical bills. Lee, you know it. We are in a debt death spiral, and global war profiteers have taken control of the US mainstream media and both political parties, and they’re waving the flag. I mean come on. This is ridiculous.
Lee Camp: And even for those who want to say, “Well, debt doesn’t really matter because we can just pay off whatever we want and we can print more money,” [then it follows that] the trillions of dollars that are unaccounted for mean that, if that [information] got out into the American market economy, our money would have no meaning. It would be utterly meaningless, and the whole guise of the system would collapse. But I wanted to get back to something you said. No matter whether you want to want to say, “Oh my god, this is a death spiral,” as you called it, or this is incredible corruption, or you want to say, “Oh, no there’s a good reason for why trillions are unaccounted for,” either way shouldn’t this be reported on? Shouldn’t it be talked about? Where are your fellow journalists, David?
David Degraw: It’s absurd. US mainstream media is a straight-up psychological operation for global war profiteers. This is what American people need to understand: Global war profiteers have taken over the country, literally. They’re waving the American flag. This isn’t the American people. These are people pretending to care. Under the guise of national security and supporting the troops, they are stealing trillions in tax dollars! This is happening right in front of us! If anyone is tapped-in enough to watch your show, Lee, that means they have journalistic instincts. If you want to become a rockstar journalist, focus on military spending right now. There the corruption is insane. They can’t defend it. The only way they can defend it is by redacting information and waving the wand of national security. I have examples every day. I read reports about billions of dollars just disappearing. Read the inspector general reports on Afghanistan and Iraq. Man, we’ve lost the war on terror. We haven’t lost it militarily. We lost it economically. They robbed the Treasury. They robbed the Treasury, Lee. It’s done. I mean look, we’ve been at war for over 16 years now. Anyone who’s paying attention to the war knows that it’s all about keeping the Middle East destabilized to keep American taxpayer money flowing in and the oil flowing out, and it’s all for the benefit of global war profiteers. It’s not for the benefit of the American people. It’s not for the benefit of the troops. Lee, the troops are getting screwed. I get all worked up talking about this because it’s just so absurd. I don’t want to start cursing or anything, but the troops are getting screwed left and right. I mean are you kidding me?
Lee Camp: You’re welcome to curse. We’ll just bleep it out, so if you want to say we’re fucked, go swing for the fences.
David Degraw: Yeah, well, the troops are getting the shit end of the stick. Let’s just put it that way. They’re paying private contractors twelve times as much as they’re paying troops who do the same exact job. It’s obscene. Meanwhile, there is another thing I’ve been researching which I’m going to put out a report on as soon as I have time: Veteran charities. Veteran charities that you see on your television—the telephone [campaigns] they do raising money for the troops. Did you know that 95 percent of that money goes to the telemarketers, not the troops? The other 5%, you think, “Well, all right, at least the troops are getting five percent of the money that was raised.” No, they’re not. That goes to the non-profit organization executive director. We’re at peak corruption, man. It’s so bad. The more you look into military spending, the crazier it gets.
Lee Camp: There was some coverage of how awful it was for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were expected to buy their own armor, to try and protect themselves when they’re “in battle.” But let’s move on to the bombs that we are dropping and the non-American lives that we are destroying. The number of bombs is another story that I covered after you did the important work, the legwork to really investigate it. But the number of bombs being dropped under the Trump administration is totally insane: One every twelve minutes. Talk a little about that and where you got that.
David Degraw: Basically, Bush was dropping 30 bombs a day. Everyone was going crazy: “He’s a war president” and “He’s a madman” and then Obama upped it to fifty-four a day, or something like that, and then Trump gets into office and what Trump did was he told the CIA that they can fire drones and fire missiles at will. They don’t have to get a green light. Under the Obama administration, you used to have to get a green light from the administration and military generals. The CIA couldn’t just bomb whoever they wanted. They had to get the okay. Trump said, “No, bomb whoever you want,” and the same thing for military commanders on the ground and in the field. Any time they want to bomb, anybody, they can just go ahead and do it. They don’t need to get… There’s no oversight whatsoever. So once that happened, they started dropping about a hundred and forty-four bombs a day, and then as news was getting out about that in August and September of last year, they all of a sudden started redacting information on the bombing, so we went from 144 bombs a day down to like 40 bombs a day, after they started redacting the info. So this is what we see: colossal corruption, and as soon as we see it, they just break out their little black magic markers and start redacting.
Lee Camp: And it seems the CIA doesn’t even really know who we’re killing. They just call them enemy combatants and then allow them to just report that no innocent civilians were killed when in fact it’s just that anyone we hit is, apparently, a combatant.
David Degraw: Leaked CIA documents said that the people on their death-by-drone kill list account for two percent of the people getting killed by these drone bombs—Two percent according to the CIA’s own documents! This is a mess, Lee. This is the beyond… I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this, man. It’s time for all hands on deck. We have to focus on the Pentagon audit. I can’t say this enough. I get it with the identity politics. In a society overrun by corruption, everybody’s oppressed. I get it. And I understand institutional racism. I’ve covered it. I know what’s going on with the private prison industry and the incredible incarceration rates, the sexual discrimination. I get it, but we’ve got to think strategically. We have to come in over the Death Star and drop the bomb. And that bomb is in the Pentagon audit. We have people in Congress right now, the leader of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, has been one of the biggest critics of military spending. Lee, this is what people need to understand, okay. People who supported my work around military spending are people who are Pentagon accountants. They are former soldiers, former intelligence community people. These aren’t the normal left-wing hippies who are [all about] “peace, screw war.” These are people who are very concerned about the well-being and the security of this country. Anyone who knows anything about military spending knows that we are bleeding trillions to our enemies. To our enemies! We are, through military spending, funding and arming terrorists all over the planet. That’s according to Inspector Generals at the Defense Department. These aren’t people who just want peace. These are people who [are saying], “Oh my god. We’ve lost the war on terror. We’ve had trillions of dollars stolen from the US Treasury.” This is not a joke, people. It’s impossible for me to express this to people and not get all worked up and start looking like a crazy person because this is how this is. The future we’re leaving for our children, Lee, is horrifying. This is the dark night of the soul
Lee Camp: And then and the truth is the identity politics you mentioned is all interconnected. These bombs were dropping, these are are white supremacist wars we’re waging. We are willing to bomb people of various colors as long as they’re not white people and we don’t seem to care that their families are destroyed because it’s really a white supremacist mindset. I wanted to get to, before we wrap up, what’s kind of happened to your online presence. You and I met a few months before Occupy 2011. You were doing wonderful reporting on the inequality in this country, the trillions of dollars in that regard that’s being sucked to the top of the tiny top of the less than one percent, 0.1 percent, and after you were doing that reporting after Occupy started bubbling forth, you kind of had your online presence attacked in every way.
David Degraw: Basically, by early 2010, I was doing investigative journalism. I got so sick of reporting on intense corruption and no one ever did anything about it, so I started shifting towards organizing, and when I first wrote papers calling for a 99% movement, for people to occupy, they started going viral all over the place. In 2010, I put out a dozen long reports, the way I’ve been putting out reports about military spending. Each one of them went over a million page views. Because I focus on corruption. And because of that, I have libertarians and progressives, conservatives, liberals—basically anyone who doesn’t like having their money stolen was supporting me. And it was a very wide political spectrum, and we were able to convert that into the 99% and the Occupy Movement, but really since even before Occupy started in 2010, I’ve been… basically I haven’t had net neutrality since 2010. They’re taking away net neutrality right now, and you can consider me like a canary in a coalmine with net neutrality because I’ve been stuck in the slow lane since 2010. It’s a nightmare, man. I used to be able to make a very good living doing reporting independently online, but since all this happened, I can’t make any money anymore. Even your biggest supporters, if they sit around for ten minutes waiting for your website to load… it doesn’t work. And now with all the algobots, the algorithmic artificial intelligence, it’s like Orwell on steroids. They’re editing reality in real-time. With everything that came out with the Cambridge Analytica scandal—they’ve changed the name of now. It’s really Strategic Communications Laboratory, another private contractor who’s robbing everybody blind. But they have these artificial intelligence algorithmic bots, surveillance technology in general. They can pick any individual they want and they can just tear into their life, man. People who think about surveillance technology [may think], “I’m not doing anything, so who cares about it,” but you should care because if anybody with enough money doesn’t like what you’re doing, they can manipulate every part of your life, man. They can go into your phone and change the interview time that I have coming up in two weeks, and I’ll show up to the interview at the wrong time. If I went through the list of all the things that have been happening to me, I would sound like a crazy person. I started doing interviews when I was getting delisted from Google back in 2010, and I would do interviews and I would document it, and I would show how it was happening, and people just think you’re crazy. Maybe now people will start…
Lee Camp: People are people absolutely starting to get it. And I think the canary in the coalmine is a good way of putting it. You’ve been dealing with these attacks, but now it’s very widespread. It’s basically anybody putting forth anti-establishment views is getting crushed and tamped down, and Redacted Tonight’s views have been hit in a million different ways, so yeah, I think people are starting to get how serious that problem is. Well, unfortunately we’re out of time. I feel like we could talk for an hour. David, thank you so much for your work, and I highly recommend people check out https://www.changemaker.media/ as long as it’s still online.
David Degraw: Thanks, Lee. You’re an inspiration. Getting censored and stuff—it really kind of gets to your morale, but to see people like you jump onto this stuff and blow it up… Do it while you can, man. The Iron Curtain is coming down on us.
Notes
I’ve
also stated that the apparently global campaign to abolish nuclear weapons led
by Nobel Peace Prize winner, ICAN, seems to be curiously oblivious to this
bottleneck. They simply talk about nuclear weapons and ignore all other issues
related to military spending and international relations. They have failed to
take steps that would show China and Russia that they are impartial in
contemporary great power rivalries. It is not clear whether this is a conscious
or unconscious failure, but in either case, the failure is inexcusable. The
greatest example of this failure is in the very fact that ICAN accepted the
Nobel Peace Prize knowing, firstly, the Nobel Awards’ long history as a
pro-Western propaganda tool, and secondly, the disdain China and Russia have
for the awards because of this record. If the people at ICAN know this, then
they have revealed themselves as a pro-Western operation that will never make
any progress with China and Russia on nuclear disarmament, which means they are
self-defeating and insincere. If they are unaware of how their association with
the Nobel Awards is perceived in China and Russia, then they really don’t
deserve to be taken seriously as actors on the world stage.
The
Nobel Awards have a long history of working in the service of Western
interests. The only winners from communist countries are Western darlings—the
reformers and dissidents who criticized their governments. In the West, it is
the opposite. The most egregious example may be the 2010 winner, Chinese
dissident Liu Xiaobo, who wrote, “The free world led by the US fought almost
all regimes that trampled on human rights… The major wars that the US became
involved in are all ethically defensible.”[1] Western dissidents never win, but government
officials do. An unusual case was the prize given jointly to Henry Kissinger
and Le Duc Tho for the 1973 peace agreement in Vietnam. Mr. Tho refused to
accept the award because by the time the award was given, Henry Kissinger had
violated the truce for which it was awarded. Japanese Prime Minister Eisuke
Sato who won in 1974 for his “renunciation for the nuclear option for Japan,”
but years later it was revealed that, in spite of public pledges to the
contrary, Sato knew at the time the Japanese government had a secret agreement
with the US to allow nuclear weapons to be stored in Japan. The International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) won in 2005 “for their efforts to prevent nuclear
energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy
for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.” That came after
nineteen years of the IAEA’s cover-up of the health effects of Chernobyl, two
years before the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant cracked up during an
earthquake, and six years before the triple meltdowns in Fukushima. The prize
for literature has also been swung toward Western interests. The peace award is
not the only Nobel award that has been tainted by ideological bias. The CIA has
a long record of successfully influencing literature and films and lobbying for
certain works to be awarded prizes. One famous instance of this occurred when
the CIA successfully managed the distribution and promotion of Boris
Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, both outside
the USSR and inside it as a clandestine publication. Their efforts resulted in
the 1958 Nobel Award for Literature going to Pasternak.[2]
With
the rest of this post I would like to list a few sources that deserve honorable
mention for getting to the root of the problem, the impasse which blocks
progress not only in nuclear disarmament but in resolving every serious crisis faced
by the human race. As a Canadian living in Japan, I write about this “American
problem” because I see this as the
essential problem that concerns everyone, no matter where they live.
These
are some writers and campaigns that are worth supporting:
4.
And finally here a special mention to the work of David Degraw. You can learn
about his work from his interview on June 21, 2018 with Lee Camp on his show Redacted Tonight. The full transcript
follows.
TRANSCRIPT
Highlights:
… the astonishing
$21 trillion in unaccounted-for money, which is really just a partial view.
It could be $30-40 trillion. Who knows?
We are in a debt
death spiral, and global war profiteers have taken control of the US
mainstream media and both political parties, and they’re waving the flag… US
mainstream media is a straight-up psychological operation for global war
profiteers. This is what American people need to understand: Global war
profiteers have taken over the country, literally. They’re waving the
American flag… These are people pretending to care. Under the guise of
national security and supporting the troops, they are stealing trillions in
tax dollars!
Anyone who’s
paying attention to the war knows that it’s all about keeping the Middle East
destabilized to keep American taxpayer money flowing in and the oil flowing
out, and it’s all for the benefit of global war profiteers.
Leaked CIA
documents said that the people on their death-by-drone kill list account for
two percent of the people getting killed by these drone bombs.
I don’t know how
we’re going to get out of this, man. It’s time for all hands on deck. We have
to focus on the Pentagon audit. I can’t say this enough. I get it with the
identity politics. In a society overrun by corruption, everybody’s oppressed…
I get it, but we’ve got to think strategically. We have to come in over the
Death Star and drop the bomb. And that bomb is in the Pentagon audit.
Anyone who knows
anything about military spending knows that we are bleeding trillions to our
enemies… We are, through military spending, funding and arming terrorists all
over the planet.
They’re taking
away net neutrality right now, and you can consider me like a canary in a
coalmine with net neutrality because I’ve been stuck in the slow lane since
2010. It’s a nightmare, man. I used to be able to make a very good living
doing reporting independently online, but since all this happened, I can’t
make any money anymore… They can pick any individual they want and they can
just tear into their life…
|
Redacted Tonight
VIP, Episode 115, June 21, 2018
Lee Camp: Welcome to Redacted Tonight VIP. If you’ve been watching Redacted Tonight recently, you know we’ve covered some pretty groundbreaking stories. The $21 trillion unaccounted for at the Pentagon over the past twenty years, as well as the forty-four thousand bombs Trump’s military dropped last year, which averages out to about one every 12 minutes. Both those stories are thanks, partially, to the investigative journalism of David Degraw (https://daviddegraw.org/). So I figured let’s get him in here. Here we go. David, thanks for taking the time to be here.
David Degraw: Hey, thanks for having me, Lee. It’s been awesome to watch you evolve into the force you’ve become, man. I really am inspired by your work.
Lee Camp: Thanks. I appreciate it. I’m inspired by yours. I want to talk about some of yours that has inspired me. Let’s start off with the largest theft in human history, I believe it could be called. I think that’s a good place to start. On my show several weeks ago, I covered the $21 trillion that is unaccounted for at the Pentagon, and I got a lot of that info from you and your reporting. How did you uncover that insane story?
David Degraw: Well, you know, I’ve been covering military spending for a very long time now, really since the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in the 90s. Military spending has been lacking accountability for decades, and weapons contractors have known this for the longest time—that there’s really no oversight over military spending, so they pretty much do whatever they want. And then, as you mentioned, Kathryn Austin Fitz and Mark Skidmore did excellent work looking through the DoD [Department of Defense] inspector general reports showing all this unaccounted-for money which we’ve always known was a problem, but we never really had an overall figure, an overall view of it, which that research team gave us, showing us the astonishing $21 trillion in unaccounted-for money, which is really just a partial view. It could be $30-40 trillion. Who knows? It’s just the surreally absurd corruption that is going on throughout military spending, throughout the entire governmental system. You know all about it.
 |
| What is the meaning of the word "money" in a world in which $21,000,000,000,000 can be listed as "unaccounted for"? |
Lee Camp: Yeah, it really is a tough number to get your head around at all. It took me a long time to even figure out how such a number could be possible, and you talked about how you’re just getting a glimpse of it. We’re not really seeing everything that goes on at the Pentagon, that goes on with our military. This was just certain numbers from the inspector general’s report, but a bit of breaking news this week. Is this right? They’ve now redacted the report from December 2017?
David Degraw: Yes, since we’ve all been making noise about this, their only response… our repeated attempts to get the Office of the Inspector General to respond to our questions have gone unanswered… the only two answers they’ve given us were: [1] When they decided to take all the reports offline, which you covered in a hilarious segment. They just basically took all the reports offline, but we had already downloaded them so they couldn’t cover it up that way. [2] And now the latest report they released where we’ve been getting all this information from, this annual report, is all redacted. This is the only way they can defend it—by redacting it. I spent a lot of time covering trillions of dollars of outright fraud through the financial crisis and one thing that I’ve always noticed is that when you catch them doing these colossal trillion-dollar frauds, as soon as you start closing in on them and getting the truth out, they wave the wand of national security and now they redact all the information. And, of course, the US mainstream press, which is owned by global war profiteers straight up… the US mainstream press is now a psychological operation, a divide-and-conquer of the American people. I don’t make money at journalism anymore because I’ve been so censored online. I do this because I’m genuinely worried about fate of the American country. I’m worried about my family’s future, our children’s future. We are in a debt death spiral, Lee. Just look at the numbers. Do the math, people. [There is] record-breaking national debt, record-breaking state debt, record-breaking household debt, record-breaking personal debt, student debt, medical debt, medical bankruptcies. 60 percent of bankruptcies are because of high medical bills. Lee, you know it. We are in a debt death spiral, and global war profiteers have taken control of the US mainstream media and both political parties, and they’re waving the flag. I mean come on. This is ridiculous.
Lee Camp: And even for those who want to say, “Well, debt doesn’t really matter because we can just pay off whatever we want and we can print more money,” [then it follows that] the trillions of dollars that are unaccounted for mean that, if that [information] got out into the American market economy, our money would have no meaning. It would be utterly meaningless, and the whole guise of the system would collapse. But I wanted to get back to something you said. No matter whether you want to want to say, “Oh my god, this is a death spiral,” as you called it, or this is incredible corruption, or you want to say, “Oh, no there’s a good reason for why trillions are unaccounted for,” either way shouldn’t this be reported on? Shouldn’t it be talked about? Where are your fellow journalists, David?
David Degraw: It’s absurd. US mainstream media is a straight-up psychological operation for global war profiteers. This is what American people need to understand: Global war profiteers have taken over the country, literally. They’re waving the American flag. This isn’t the American people. These are people pretending to care. Under the guise of national security and supporting the troops, they are stealing trillions in tax dollars! This is happening right in front of us! If anyone is tapped-in enough to watch your show, Lee, that means they have journalistic instincts. If you want to become a rockstar journalist, focus on military spending right now. There the corruption is insane. They can’t defend it. The only way they can defend it is by redacting information and waving the wand of national security. I have examples every day. I read reports about billions of dollars just disappearing. Read the inspector general reports on Afghanistan and Iraq. Man, we’ve lost the war on terror. We haven’t lost it militarily. We lost it economically. They robbed the Treasury. They robbed the Treasury, Lee. It’s done. I mean look, we’ve been at war for over 16 years now. Anyone who’s paying attention to the war knows that it’s all about keeping the Middle East destabilized to keep American taxpayer money flowing in and the oil flowing out, and it’s all for the benefit of global war profiteers. It’s not for the benefit of the American people. It’s not for the benefit of the troops. Lee, the troops are getting screwed. I get all worked up talking about this because it’s just so absurd. I don’t want to start cursing or anything, but the troops are getting screwed left and right. I mean are you kidding me?
Lee Camp: You’re welcome to curse. We’ll just bleep it out, so if you want to say we’re fucked, go swing for the fences.
David Degraw: Yeah, well, the troops are getting the shit end of the stick. Let’s just put it that way. They’re paying private contractors twelve times as much as they’re paying troops who do the same exact job. It’s obscene. Meanwhile, there is another thing I’ve been researching which I’m going to put out a report on as soon as I have time: Veteran charities. Veteran charities that you see on your television—the telephone [campaigns] they do raising money for the troops. Did you know that 95 percent of that money goes to the telemarketers, not the troops? The other 5%, you think, “Well, all right, at least the troops are getting five percent of the money that was raised.” No, they’re not. That goes to the non-profit organization executive director. We’re at peak corruption, man. It’s so bad. The more you look into military spending, the crazier it gets.
Lee Camp: There was some coverage of how awful it was for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were expected to buy their own armor, to try and protect themselves when they’re “in battle.” But let’s move on to the bombs that we are dropping and the non-American lives that we are destroying. The number of bombs is another story that I covered after you did the important work, the legwork to really investigate it. But the number of bombs being dropped under the Trump administration is totally insane: One every twelve minutes. Talk a little about that and where you got that.
David Degraw: Basically, Bush was dropping 30 bombs a day. Everyone was going crazy: “He’s a war president” and “He’s a madman” and then Obama upped it to fifty-four a day, or something like that, and then Trump gets into office and what Trump did was he told the CIA that they can fire drones and fire missiles at will. They don’t have to get a green light. Under the Obama administration, you used to have to get a green light from the administration and military generals. The CIA couldn’t just bomb whoever they wanted. They had to get the okay. Trump said, “No, bomb whoever you want,” and the same thing for military commanders on the ground and in the field. Any time they want to bomb, anybody, they can just go ahead and do it. They don’t need to get… There’s no oversight whatsoever. So once that happened, they started dropping about a hundred and forty-four bombs a day, and then as news was getting out about that in August and September of last year, they all of a sudden started redacting information on the bombing, so we went from 144 bombs a day down to like 40 bombs a day, after they started redacting the info. So this is what we see: colossal corruption, and as soon as we see it, they just break out their little black magic markers and start redacting.
Lee Camp: And it seems the CIA doesn’t even really know who we’re killing. They just call them enemy combatants and then allow them to just report that no innocent civilians were killed when in fact it’s just that anyone we hit is, apparently, a combatant.
David Degraw: Leaked CIA documents said that the people on their death-by-drone kill list account for two percent of the people getting killed by these drone bombs—Two percent according to the CIA’s own documents! This is a mess, Lee. This is the beyond… I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this, man. It’s time for all hands on deck. We have to focus on the Pentagon audit. I can’t say this enough. I get it with the identity politics. In a society overrun by corruption, everybody’s oppressed. I get it. And I understand institutional racism. I’ve covered it. I know what’s going on with the private prison industry and the incredible incarceration rates, the sexual discrimination. I get it, but we’ve got to think strategically. We have to come in over the Death Star and drop the bomb. And that bomb is in the Pentagon audit. We have people in Congress right now, the leader of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, has been one of the biggest critics of military spending. Lee, this is what people need to understand, okay. People who supported my work around military spending are people who are Pentagon accountants. They are former soldiers, former intelligence community people. These aren’t the normal left-wing hippies who are [all about] “peace, screw war.” These are people who are very concerned about the well-being and the security of this country. Anyone who knows anything about military spending knows that we are bleeding trillions to our enemies. To our enemies! We are, through military spending, funding and arming terrorists all over the planet. That’s according to Inspector Generals at the Defense Department. These aren’t people who just want peace. These are people who [are saying], “Oh my god. We’ve lost the war on terror. We’ve had trillions of dollars stolen from the US Treasury.” This is not a joke, people. It’s impossible for me to express this to people and not get all worked up and start looking like a crazy person because this is how this is. The future we’re leaving for our children, Lee, is horrifying. This is the dark night of the soul
Lee Camp: And then and the truth is the identity politics you mentioned is all interconnected. These bombs were dropping, these are are white supremacist wars we’re waging. We are willing to bomb people of various colors as long as they’re not white people and we don’t seem to care that their families are destroyed because it’s really a white supremacist mindset. I wanted to get to, before we wrap up, what’s kind of happened to your online presence. You and I met a few months before Occupy 2011. You were doing wonderful reporting on the inequality in this country, the trillions of dollars in that regard that’s being sucked to the top of the tiny top of the less than one percent, 0.1 percent, and after you were doing that reporting after Occupy started bubbling forth, you kind of had your online presence attacked in every way.
David Degraw: Basically, by early 2010, I was doing investigative journalism. I got so sick of reporting on intense corruption and no one ever did anything about it, so I started shifting towards organizing, and when I first wrote papers calling for a 99% movement, for people to occupy, they started going viral all over the place. In 2010, I put out a dozen long reports, the way I’ve been putting out reports about military spending. Each one of them went over a million page views. Because I focus on corruption. And because of that, I have libertarians and progressives, conservatives, liberals—basically anyone who doesn’t like having their money stolen was supporting me. And it was a very wide political spectrum, and we were able to convert that into the 99% and the Occupy Movement, but really since even before Occupy started in 2010, I’ve been… basically I haven’t had net neutrality since 2010. They’re taking away net neutrality right now, and you can consider me like a canary in a coalmine with net neutrality because I’ve been stuck in the slow lane since 2010. It’s a nightmare, man. I used to be able to make a very good living doing reporting independently online, but since all this happened, I can’t make any money anymore. Even your biggest supporters, if they sit around for ten minutes waiting for your website to load… it doesn’t work. And now with all the algobots, the algorithmic artificial intelligence, it’s like Orwell on steroids. They’re editing reality in real-time. With everything that came out with the Cambridge Analytica scandal—they’ve changed the name of now. It’s really Strategic Communications Laboratory, another private contractor who’s robbing everybody blind. But they have these artificial intelligence algorithmic bots, surveillance technology in general. They can pick any individual they want and they can just tear into their life, man. People who think about surveillance technology [may think], “I’m not doing anything, so who cares about it,” but you should care because if anybody with enough money doesn’t like what you’re doing, they can manipulate every part of your life, man. They can go into your phone and change the interview time that I have coming up in two weeks, and I’ll show up to the interview at the wrong time. If I went through the list of all the things that have been happening to me, I would sound like a crazy person. I started doing interviews when I was getting delisted from Google back in 2010, and I would do interviews and I would document it, and I would show how it was happening, and people just think you’re crazy. Maybe now people will start…
Lee Camp: People are people absolutely starting to get it. And I think the canary in the coalmine is a good way of putting it. You’ve been dealing with these attacks, but now it’s very widespread. It’s basically anybody putting forth anti-establishment views is getting crushed and tamped down, and Redacted Tonight’s views have been hit in a million different ways, so yeah, I think people are starting to get how serious that problem is. Well, unfortunately we’re out of time. I feel like we could talk for an hour. David, thank you so much for your work, and I highly recommend people check out https://www.changemaker.media/ as long as it’s still online.
David Degraw: Thanks, Lee. You’re an inspiration. Getting censored and stuff—it really kind of gets to your morale, but to see people like you jump onto this stuff and blow it up… Do it while you can, man. The Iron Curtain is coming down on us.
Notes
[1]
Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong, “Do supporters of Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo really
know what he stands for?” The Guardian,
December 15, 2010 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/15/nobel-winner-liu-xiaobo-chinese-dissident.
[2]
Darien Cavanaugh, “The
CIA Battled the Kremlin With Books and Movies,” War is Boring, May 2, 2015, https://warisboring.com/the-cia-battled-the-kremlin-with-books-and-movies/.
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