Original subtitles

Ten, nine, eight,

seven, six, five,

four, three, two...

New years eve, 2011,

most Americans are intoxicated,

or about to be,

and the news cameras are setting up at Times Square.

In Washington, a more somber ceremony is under way.

Invitation only.

President Barrack Obama

sings into law the NDAA, or National Defense Authorization Act

Like so many war related bills, the NDAA

has been rubber stamped by the House and Senate,

receiving near-unanimous support, by both Democrats and Republicans

Yet, this bill had a very special clause.

The rules formerly applied only to foreign terror suspects,

or "enemy combatants", would now apply to American citizens themselves.

Overturning hundreds of years of common law,

Americans could now be subject to indefinite detention, and even murder,

without the benefit of due process.

You have elites at the top, and then you have ordinary Americans who

who are subjected to this harsh system of punishment

and now we've created a new category, an even lower category,

as part of the war on terror, that is for people who are accused - accused

of being involved in some way with terrorism.

Including people who are American citizens and those who are found on American soil.

So, if you are poor and indigent,

you will be assigned a public defender who can spend an average of 7 minutes

speaking with you during the course of your case, even if you're charged with a felony that can send you to prison

for decades, but at least you get the pretenses, the trappings of due process.

But if you're accused of terrorism,

you basically are in a world where you are a sub-person.

A non-human. A world of complete lawlessness.

Which means that you can be detained by the government, or even

killed by the government, without even a shred of due process.

I talked earlier about how I stopped litigating and began writing about politics

because I perceived there was this creeping extremism.

The case that really alarmed me the most, initially,

that led me to do that was the case of Jose Padilla,

who was an American citizen arrested on US soil at Chicago International Airport in 2002.

And rather than being charged with crimes,

and having evidence presented against him and a jury of his peers convened,

in order to see if he could be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt with his guilt established,

Padilla, instead, was declared by the President,

with no oversight or checks of any kind, to be an "enemy combatant" and put into a

military brig in South Carolina

where he remained for the next three and a half years,

was never charged with a crime,

and was even held completely incommunicado -

he was barred from any communication with the outside world, including even a lawyer.

And was then tortured to the point that he now has

very crippling and permanent psychological

disabilities. This was the President of the US asserting power without much resistance

to imprison - he was an American citizen, born in the US, as much of an American citizen as anyone that you know -

and, yet, he was imprisoned for three and a half years without charges of any kind because the

President claimed the right to imprison accused terrorists without having to prove their guilt.

I had thought that was the most radical power that we would see a president assert, the most lawless and radical power, until

a year ago, when the Obama administration went much further than that,

and announced that it believes it has the power not only to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants,

or to detain American citizens without due process,

but to target American citizens for death, for assassination,

without a shred of due process, transparency, oversight or checks and balances.

And the Obama administration not only asserts this power, but has applied it

and seized it by targeting the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki

and then killing him several months ago in Yemen

by sending a drone over a car in which he was driving,

far from any battlefield, and ending his life along with the lives of two other human beings in the car, one of whom was an American citizen.

Then two weeks later, another drone flew over Yemen and

killed his 16 year old son, also an American citizen and his 17 year old cousin.

So, here you have a world not where due process is woefully inadequate,

but where it simply doesn't exist. It's literally a world of lawlessness.

And this is really what the abandonment of the rule of law has brought,

which is that justice system treats you

not based on what you've done,

as blind justice requires, but based almost entirely on

who you are. That really is the definition of the abandonment of the rule of law.

Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the veil had been lifted once and for all.

At least for those willing to switch the channel.

"Charlie Sheen has never been more candid about it and makes no excuses for it.

He also shared with us some of what really happened that night last month,

when he was rushed to the hospital after a drug-filled night with porn stars."

"Now to the latest on Lance Armstrong and all the fallout after

his admission to Oprah that he doped

to win the Tour-de-France and other races during his cycling career."

"I want to discuss the last Fox debate in which a gay soldier

got up at the debate on video and asked whether or not as president,

you would reinstate 'Don't ask, don't tell'."

"Marry Christmas or Happy Holidays? A Christmas tree or a holiday tree? Which should it be? Depends on whom you ask.

We've seen controversy, most notably prompted by the White House:

it sent out cards - this card, as a matter of fact - wishing a holiday season of hope and happiness.

No mention of Christmas."

"Guess what?

There are bigger things out there going on in the world,

in the news, in this country specifically!

So, here, I'd like to play just a little bit of catch-up, since we've been on break.

Just in time to start off a brand new year, president Obama went ahead

and signed NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act.

The same Authorization Act that also includes provision

for indefinite military detention."

"A group of individuals from a wide range of backgrounds to file suit

against president Obama, Leon Panetta and six members of Congress.

The plaintiffs include rights activists, whistleblowers,

authors and professors, among them Chris Hedges,

who all believe their first amendment rights have been violated

and feel imminent danger due to the president's recent

National Defense Authorization Act, known as the NDAA."

"We had a huge turnout this morning.

There were several hundred people waiting in line,

from what I also understand, people were coming in the front entrance as well.

The main courtroom, from what I understand, was full capacity and

we spilled over into a secondary room on a lower floor,

and there were probably at least another 100, 200 people present in that room."

"On December 31st, 2011, President Obama signed into law

the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012.

A bill passed each year. Section 10-21 of the bill

provides sweeping powers of detention through vague and undefined terms.

Critics say it grants the government to arrest any American citizen

or anyone anywhere without warrant

and to indefinitely detain them without any charge."

"Whatever high ground that we ever held

in our moral conviction that we believed in a democracy,

no longer applies. I mean, we now,

are the people that are conducting the war of terror.

It's not the war on terror, it's the war of terror."

"On September 12, 2012, the suit had one of its biggest victories."

"The judge did rule in favor of the plaintiffs

that portions of the act were not constitutional.

That was heartening to hear, that a judge would say that at the federal level.

Locally, here in New York, I guess it's the southern district

and that was overturned in the appeals court."

"On October 2nd, 2012, a state against a permanent injunction was granted

by a 3 judge motion panel of the 2nd district US Court of Appeals,

pending appeal on the merits."

"The government is being more and more aggressive.

It's asserting more and more rights to enter other parts of civil life

in the name of fighting terrorism. That goes too far.

If we don't have cases like this, fighting back,

the government will grasp more and more power."

"Wednesday's court hearing was open to the public."

"Campaign partners say that over 60,000 emails

have been sent to Congress calling on the reversal

of section 1021 of the NDAA.

Basically, what they're saying is that everyone,

from journalists, to war correspondents, to activists, are in danger

of imminent detention and arrest.

Susan Modaress, Press TV, New York."

"But for my purposes on the

so called war on terror,

what it does is continue the, what I call the Bush-Obama policies.

The first of those policies is indefinite detention.

That you can pick up people anywhere in the world,

and what's interesting - including American citizens,

and hold them indefinitely without trial,

and even hold them off-shore.

We expected this last Congress to try and

put in legislation that would at least prohibit the holding of US citizens.

They didn't, so it's still authorized by the law,

and of course, that's the lawsuit that Chris Hedges and Daniel Ellsberg

are going to court to try and declare that section of the old law,

now the new law, unconstitutional.

So you have an NDAA that, first, allows

indefinite detention of anyone in the world, including US citizens.

Secondly,-" "Before you get into that, Michael,

wasn't there some amendment that came out of the Senate that

ensures, or at least is supposed to ensure habeas rights for US citizens?"

"Well, they have a habeas right, but they can still be held indefinitely

in detention."

"So, explain what means, the habeas right, and then..." "Okay."

"Everyone, now, because of the cases we won

at the center over the last 10 years

has a right to go to court and say to the

court, which will say to the jailer, the US:

'Are you holding me legally?'

The problem with it is, is legally is now defined

by the NDAA as holding someone in indefinite detention."

President Obama had been elected with the promise of change,

including in the foreign policy arena.

Widely perceived as an anti-war candidate,

he would, instead, codify into the executive branch the rights of a medieval king.

In a series of intentional leaks to The NY Times,

Obama boasted of preparing kill lists,

of militants in several countries around the globe.

At one point, during his first term, he was attacking people in five separate countries.

Where, previously, assassinations had been considered taboo,

they would now be celebrated as the new model of efficient warfare.

Most of the known assassinations carried out by the US,

are conducted by drones, piloted by people sitting at comfortable desks.

The drone operator can kill dozens of people with a flick of the wrist,

then walk down the hall for a meal at the cafeteria.

The dehumanization inherent to such methods can be seen in the language employed by drone operators.

Harkening back to the most vicious propaganda campaigns from past genocides,

the human beings killed in drone strikes are referred to as "bug splats".

"The training time greatly reduced,

the sophistication greatly increased,

and we saw those thousands of hours

that teenagers and young adults spend gaming

directly applicable to unmanned systems operations."

"I wanna make sure the people understand, actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.

For the most part, they have been very precise, precision strikes against Al-Qaeda

and their affiliates."

The President is lying.

Equally disturbing as the civilian casualty rate for drone strikes,

the CIA often targets individuals

whose identity is not even known at the time of the strike.

He or she is merely suspected of being a so called "militant".

"Someone goes into a shopping mall in pursuit of one of their enemies

and opens fire on a crowd of people, and guns down a bunch of innocent people in a shopping mall -

they've murdered those people.

If- when the Obama administration sets a policy

where patterns of life are enough of a green light

to drop missiles on people, or to use-

to send in AC-130s to spray them down..."

"But that wasn't the case here, you're talking about the targeted person here."

"No, no, no, that's not, but, but I'm- "But that wasn't the case here, you're talking about the targeted person here."

"No, no, no, that's not, but, but I'm-

if you go to the village of Al-Majalah in Yemen,

where I was, and you see the unexploded cluster bombs

and you have the list and photographic evidence as I do,

of the women and children that represented the vast majority

of the deaths in this first strike that Obama authorized on Yemen,

those people were murdered by President Obama on his orders."

One of the things we found is that there are entire communities

who live in areas

where drones are flying overhead

24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at times.

And these people don't know when those drones will strike.

They don't know who they will strike.

The result is symptoms

of psychological disorder,

of trauma,

of severe anxiety and of dysfunctionality.

We heard stories of people who won't leave their houses

"When we interviewed psychiatrists and psychologists

who had treated people with these symptoms,

they said that a number of people displayed

very serious symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD."

We may not have declared war on Pakistan,

but for the people living in north-west Pakistan, under drones,

they're in a war zone.

One of the things we found and documented, were incidents of "double tapping".

"There will be an initial strike on a target, and then very shortly after,

a secondary strike. What has happened in the

period between the first and the second strike is that neighbors,

or people nearby, or family members,

or, in some cases, doctors, have come to assist

those who may have been injured and still survived."

And when they're doing that, a second drone has hit.

The people with whom we spoke in the communities affected,

almost without exception, told us:

"When there's a drone strike, we won't go near afterwards."

And we even heard this from some medical professionals.

These so called "militants"

are doing precisely what US citizens would do

if a foreign power were bombing and/or invading the US.

They would defend their homeland.

Tears and anger after another air-strike left, again,

innocent civilians dead.

This time around, the attack took place in Garuch,

a remote village in the Laghman province that was attacked

by coalition forces for the fourth time in the past year.

These people show us the clothes of those who died.

"I lost everything", says this woman, "I lost my husband and my two sons.

What have I done wrong? There is nothing left for me except his orphans."

Days after the attack, the villagers are still collecting the body parts,

and children cry fearing that the bombs will come again.

The people in the village say they are tired of the bombs and of seeing their children die.

"There is no Al-Qaeda here. No Taliban", they say.

To me, what I wrote about recently, is I think the central problem is a lack of empathy.

My biggest wish is that every American in sort of a national collective exercise

would spend just 10 minutes thinking about the following question, which is:

Suppose there was a Muslim country

that invaded the US with a 150,000 troops

and proceeded to occupy our country for the next 8 years, dropped bombs on wedding parties,

slaughtered men, women and children who were innocent, created prisons in our country

where they arrested American citizens and put us for years without charges,

created an overseas island prisons where they shipped some of us to there

without any recourse whatsoever, and at the same time were threatening to do that

to several other western countries, how much rage and anger

and a desire for vengeance and violence would we feel towards that country

that was doing that to us? I mean, just look at what a

singular one day attack at 9/11, the kind of anger and rage it unleashed.

And I think if Americans were to think about how we would react towards other countries and what we would want to do to them,

if they were doing to us what we are now doing to them. I think

a lot of light would be shined on what it is that we're really achieving in terms of our national security.

"Oh, shit!" "Oh my God! Holy shit!"

"Lord, please let it stop. Please let it stop-"

"Shit! Oh God, don't let the next one be any closer, just let 'em stop, Lord."

"?!? No way!"

As acknowledged by Robert Grenier,

a former CIA counter-terrorism head,

the inevitable result of bombing foreign countries

is actually to increase, not decrease,

the number of people who are willing not only to defend their homelands with force,

but who may even engage in actual terrorism against the US.

If Grenier and other counter-terrorism experts are correct,

the drone strikes and other violent forms of counter-insurgency,

are actually creating more enemies, rather than less.

Why are other options not being pursued?

To ask this question, is perhaps to miss the entire point.

"War", said General Smedley Butler, "is a racket."

Without enemies, there can be no war.

And without war, there can be no military-industrial-intelligence complex.

Security is tight.

Secret service agents flank the presidential candidates, on the lookout for trouble.

Meanwhile, out in San Diego harbor,

a secret and elite Navy corps patrols the dark waters on red alert.

But the soldiers in this unit aren't human.

They're dolphins!

This is the Nano Hummingbird, it's been in development for 4 and a half years

and it was funded by DARPA, which is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

and they fund the, kind of, extreme R&D (research and development) projects for US military.

The idea of this, it would be a small, covert,

unmanned surveillance aircraft that could do unique missions,

flying outdoors, as well as indoors. It has a video camera

and the unique part of it is it uses flapping wings for both propulsion and control,

and it has the capability of flying in forward flight, as well as in hover flight.

So, it can actually cover in place, it could hover outside of a window,

as well as flying in forward flight, going from point A to point B fairly rapidly.

With the bird body and the video camera and the transmitter, this flies for up to about 5 minutes.

It has a speed range of up to 11 mph,

it can fly sideways, it can rotate on its axis,

it actually can fly backwards up to 5 mph, which is very unique.

It has a range of about a 100 yards or so for the communications.

There are no immediate uses for the Nano Hummingbird by the military right now, it has a long ways to go.

The aircraft will either be a useful surveillance aircraft on its own,

or it might be that just the technology, that elements that we've developed for this get

integrated into other drones and other aircraft systems.

So, the use could be any number of directions.

It's not unusual to see small insects and birds flying through the air.

So common, they often go unnoticed,

and that's exactly how the US Air Force wants the next generation of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) - unnoticed.

"These are vehicles and systems that are modeled after birds,

they're about the size of a bird, they're biomimetic,

a lot of them actually look like birds,

so that they can be concealed in the military environment or in a military mission."

Missions that may be too dangerous for human pilots.

James Grimsley is the CEO of Design Intelligence, Inc.

the Oklahoma company that is designing unmanned air vehicles

to take on our most dangerous threats.

"In particular, we're working with very very small vehicles, called micro air vehicles (MAVs).

These are the vehicles that are going to be used by our military in the next 45 years for reconnaissance, surveillance,

and just a variety of purposes and even, possibly, weapons.

They will carry a variety of payloads from sensor to warheads, to just, you name it.

So, we work with very, very small stuff."

So small, they can go virtually anywhere, virtually undetected.

In a promotional video for Design Intelligence, Inc.

we see just how advanced the new vehicles could be.

"It will blend in with its surroundings and operate undetected.

MAVs will use microsensors and microprocessor technology

to navigate and track targets through complicated terrain, such as urban areas..."

The ability to travel complicated terrain unnoticed

may make UAVs the new future of our military.

"It is used to track human motions, may make UAVs the new future of our military.

"It is used to track human motions,

so right now it's tracking my hands, my arms,

my whole body gesture, actually,

and then we interface that information to the system which allows me to, then,

tell the vehicle exactly where to go, and I can even do things like: tell it to go up,

do a flip,

come to me,

move it around in general."

"How interested is the military in this technology?"

"They're extremely interested.

In the short term, it gives them a leg up on what the opponents can do. So,

it's a way to get an advantage. But, you see, that's the problem with it too, because then it leads to an arms race.

They develop this technology, they deploy it, then the opponents,

they develop that technology and then deploy it, and then, before you know it,

we have all of this technology being deployed in warfare,

and it just, kind of, raises the overall level of how technology is used in warfare."

"Right now, in war, for the most part, still,

there's a human being who's making a decision whether or not to fire a weapon of any type.

If robotics were allowed to fully develop,

and they were autonomous - killer robots, as I like to call them -

they would be able to be programmed, set free and make the decisions about when, where, who and how to attack."

"A number of governments, including US, are very excited about moving in this direction.

Very excited about taking the soldier of the battlefield and

putting machines on the battlefield, thereby lowering casualties."

"There's nothing in artificial intelligence or robotics

that could discriminate between a combatant and a civilian.

It would be impossible to tell the difference between a little girl pointing an ice cream at a robot,

or someone pointing a rifle at it."

"Killer robots don't exist yet.

There are precursors, systems that can make determinations,

but have a human who can override their decisions.

With fully autonomous robots, you take the human out of the loop."

"There are precursors both on the ground and in the air that are

problematic and show the development of autonomous technologies getting into a dangerous area.

There's a weapon called the X-47B, produced by the US. At this point,

it's designed to refuel by itself and land on an aircraft carrier by itself.

However, it is also designed to carry weapons

and if it can eventually fly by itself, as is intended,

it would also be able to identify targets and launch its weapons without any human interference."

Samsung's intelligence surveillance and security system

with the capability of detecting and tracking, as well as suppression,

is designed to replace human-oriented guards, overcoming their limitations.

"On the ground, there is a sentry robot, used by South Korea and Israel.

The sentry operates by identifying people that enter a certain area.

It then asks permission of a soldier back at base whether it should fire or not, if the soldier grants that permission,

it shoots the individual.

Our concern is that permission may not always be required.

That a robot could fire without any human intervention."

"If a robot goes wrong, who's accountable? It certainly won't be the robot,

but it could be the commander who sent it off, could be the manufacturer,

it could be the programmer who programmed the mission.

The robot could take a bullet and its computer can go berserk.

So there's no way of really determining who's accountable, and that's very important for the laws of war."

"Human Rights Watch is so concerned about the dangers

of these fully autonomous systems that, we think,

that a preemptive comprehensive prohibition on the development

or production of these systems needs to be enacted immediately."

"I believe that civil society has a right and obligation

to take action when they believe that a government or a military is

behaving incorrectly in their name.

That was part of what helped inspire the campaign to stop land mines, the

coalition to stop cluster munitions, both of which were successful, of course,

in achieving treaties.

I know we can do the same thing with killer robots.

I know we can stop them before they ever hit the battlefield. "

He may be playing the harmonica now,

but forty years ago, Frank Serpico was blowing the whistle on widespread corruption in the NY police department.

It made him a pariah on the force,

and he was shut during a drug bust in 1971, while screaming for his backup.

"This is what the system wants to do.

It wants to intimidate the good guys,

and that's why it's so important for individuals to stand up and

do the right thing."

The case against the CIA has always lacked information on how precisely its officers set about their covert action.

Philip Agee, now living in Cornwall, was such an officer.

And his diary, to be published by Penguin in the next few weeks,

gives his version of what life is really like inside the agency.

He names every officer and agent he's ever met

and describes a CIA man's work in daily detail.

"Why should I be delicate with them?

I don't expect any quarter in return,

because this is part of the conflict that's going on in the world right now.

the CIA is enforcing American economic exploitation.

And people are dying, and people are starving, because of this system."

My expertise, as you know, is CIA, marine corps, 3 CIA secret wars,

I had a position in the National Security Council in 1975

as the chief of the Angola task force, running the secret war in Angola,

it was the third CIA secret war I was part of.

They undertake, they run operations in every corner of the globe.

They also undertook the license of operating, just totally above and beyond US laws,

they had a license, if you will, to kill, but also they took that to a license

to smuggle drugs, a license to do all kinds of things to other people

in other societies in violation of international law, our law,

and every principle of nations working together for a healthier and more peaceful world.

You come up with 3,000 major operations and over 10,000 minor operations.

Every one of them illegal.

Every one of them disruptive of the lives and societies of other peoples,

and many of them bloody and gory beyond comprehension almost.

"I realize now that my previous attitude had been simply mistaken,

that I wasn't discharging my responsibilities to the country,

to the Constitution, to the public, or to the troops,

by keeping those secrets which led to the escalation of the war, that that had been wrong."

One of the most startling cases of government whistleblowing is Sibel Edmonds,

who's been called "the most gagged woman in history".

Sibel is an Iranian-born former FBI translator

who has been fighting for years to tell her story, until now.

After waiting 340 days for FBI clearance of her memoir,

she decided to release the book on her own, in full, without any approval or redactions.

The book gives explosive allegations that indict multiple levels of the government in traitorous deception and coverup inside the FBI.

"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done - the back end part of it -

and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. So, that was the program they created, called Stellar Wind,

that was separate and compartmented from the regular activity that was ongoing,

because it was doing domestic spying.

When all the equipment was coming in I knew something was happening. But then,

when the contractors that I had hired came and told me what they were doing,

it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do."

For the first time, 25 year old US army private Bradley Manning has admitted

to being the source behind the largest leak of state secrets in US history.

More than a 1,000 days after he was arrested, Manning testified Thursday, before a military court.

He said he leaked the classified documents to the whistleblowing website Wikileaks in order to show the American public the true costs of war.

Reading for over an hour from a 35-page statement, Manning said:

Over the course of the hearing, Bradley Manning took responsibility for leaking the so-called

"collateral murder video" of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq.

One individual has been punished: Bradley Manning.

In jail, accused of leaking the video.

The charges: downloading and disseminating classified information.

"How could anyone justify shooting up that man,

shooting up the person who is crawling onto the curb. These are war crimes, pure and simple.

When I learned to be a soldier and officer in US Army,

I learned that you don't shoot at civilians,

you certainly don't shoot at people trying to rescue the wounded,

and you don't blow up vans with couple of children in them."

In the Pentagon investigation report, there's no mention of war crimes.

The pilots had reacted adequately.

"Here's the government saying that "we did no wrong", but yet, they lied,

they covered up the story. They covered up everything.

Then, all of a sudden, being like: "OK, well, Bradley Manning, who released this video,

he's the wrongdoer in this whole situation."

I think that Bradley Manning is a hero. I believe that this is a human being

who' is compassionate, who saw illegal activities being taking place on a video,

granted, it was a couple of years later, but still, wanted the world to see that

these actions are intolerable and...

Yeah, he's a hero for showing it. He's a hero for releasing it."

"My view on Bradley Manning is that he's a very courageous young man,

who at, it was 22 years, did

what I didn't have the guts to do during the Vietnam War."

"I started my change of views

as late as 1973 on the Vietnam War,

and then we progressed to the early 1990s,

and then we progressed to 9/11, and my views steadily became

stronger that what the CIA was doing was wrong.

I now am ashamed

to have ever worked there, and wish that I had not.

Up until a couple of years ago, I found that impossible to say.

Now, I think I must make that statement.

"And I think that we are going to need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, soon.

Not only for what our elite has done to Americans,

but for what our elite has done in our name to the third world and...

The USA set back national liberation and collective public intelligence by 30 years, easily.

"I believe strongly that until we have fundamental change in the US, domestically,

in the domestic system, until we have some kind of real

democracy in this country - participatory democracy, where people have a say,

and where we end the reelection of 95-97% of incumbents at every election,

where there is a real political debate - until we change the domestic system,

we're going to have elitist control of the US,

we're going to have these foreign adventures and the grizzly things, as I mentioned, that the CIA does abroad.

So, the real problem is here, at home."

"I always said that no matter how big, or how much corruption there is,

never greater than the individual, or the might of doing the right thing."

"A rat, if you turn a light - a bright light - in the rat's face,

and he'll run for cover.

And it doesn't make any difference whether that rat is in the city dump, or in the city hall."