Original subtitles

And in all of my years of public life,

I have never obstructed justice.

And I think, too, that I can say,

That in my years of public life,

That I welcome this kind of examination

Because people have got to know

Whether or not their president is a crook.

Well, I'm not a crook.

To share with you what the United States knows

About Iraq's weapons of mass destruction,

Every statement I make today

Is backed up by sources, solid sources.

These are not assertions.

What we're giving you are facts

And conclusions based on solid intelligence.

Renewed hostile actions against United States ships

On the high seas in the gulf of tonkin

Have today required me

To order the military forces of the United States

To take action in reply.

So, what I wanted to see

Is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question:

Does the NSA collect any type of data at all

On millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

No, sir.

It does not?

Not wittingly.

You have to get rid of this ignorant

And meddlesome majority.

Control them, make sure they do the right things

All for their own good, incidentally.

If they're allowed to participate,

They'll make all kind of mistakes, errors,

But we, the responsible men,

We know how to do the right thing

Like get into the Vietnam war

And invade Iraq and deregulate the banks

So that everything crashes.

We... we get everything straight.

My fellow citizens, at this hour,

American and coalition forces

Are in the early stages of military operations

To disarm Iraq,

To free its people,

And to defend the world from grave danger.

I believe, very deeply,

In freedom of the press

And the role of press in a free society,

And I have ever since I was a kid.

You can't fulfill your function unless you're free.

One of the great reporters of the 20th century, I.F. Stone,

Told journalism students never to forget

That all governments lie.

He could speak with authority,

Having spent seven decades exposing deception

And official lies

By digging deep into government documents

And transcripts.

I tried to prove what I was saying

From the horse's mouth, as it were.

Using the government's own documents,

Government reports and transcripts

And press conferences, speeches,

And analyzing them the way... the way a historian would.

He gained his greatest fame and impact

Publishing a newsletter called "I.F. Stone's weekly."

Everybody in government and journalism knew Izzy stone

And read his stuff.

I.F. Stone's weekly is about this size.

Well, I.F. Stone's weekly was a classic example

Of an independent journalistic organization

That was able to report the truth

And that's the way alternative media,

Which I really think, is real journalism

Has always worked as a vehicle

That has exposed the collusion,

Hypocrisy and lies of the commercial media.

Do you presume to criticize the great oz,

You ungrateful creatures?

I mean, stone was kind of like Toto, you know.

It was like his job was to pull back the curtain.

The great oz has spoken.

Oh!

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

And to see what was behind that curtain

And what was behind that curtain, yes,

It was the all-powerful oz.

It was also just a frightened little man.

Nothing and nothing that any of us need to be frightened of,

And why are... why are we frightened of that?

That's the embodiment of what he and his weekly stood for

And it certainly was a huge inspiration to me.

I want surveillance of certain mosques, okay?

I watched in jersey city, new jersey,

Where thousands and thousands of people were cheering

As that building was coming down.

Donald J. Trump is calling for a total

And complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States

Until our country's representatives can figure out

What the hell is going on.

You have no choice.

Who would have thought that this circus would come to town,

But you know, it may not be good for America,

But it's damn good for CBS,

That's all I got to say.

The money's rolling in and this is fun.

I've never seen anything like this,

And you know, this is gonna be a very good year for us.

It's a terrible thing to say,

But bring it on, Donald, go ahead.

Keep going.

It makes you ask, seriously,

Whether those executives who run media conglomerates

Have any more ethics or morals

Than those who run the oil and gas industry,

The pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco industry.

It's an open question to me.

♪ Drivin' my limousine

♪ now it's all designed

♪ to blow our minds

♪ but our minds won't really be blown ♪

♪ Like the blow that'll get ya ♪

♪ When you get your picture

♪ on the cover of the rolling stone ♪

♪ Rolling stone

♪ wanna see our pictures on the cover ♪

♪ Wanna buy five copies for our mothers ♪

♪ Wanna see my smiling face ♪

♪ On the cover of the rolling stone ♪

We're in new Hampshire,

Which is like, the capital of depressed America, where,

You know, the manufacturing economy has disappeared,

And we really don't examine those issues at all.

We don't actually talk to people at all,

'cause you don't have time.

There's only time to watch the speech,

To ask the people in the audience

What they think of the speech

And then you go on

And you move on to the next spot.

The entire thing could be shot

In a sound stage in la with...

Just by rotating in a different audience each time.

Well, Donald trump, of course,

Remains the strong frontrunner up here

To win the republican primary in new Hampshire tomorrow.

It snows in new Hampshire,

People know how to put... get cars.

They got... they used to put chains on,

Now they got good tires.

Why should they trudge through the snow for Donald trump?

Well, you know, my whole concept

And my whole theme, frankly, behind it

Is make America great again.

Make America great again!

We're going to make America great again!

We're going to make America great again.

Build a wall!

Build a wall!

I'm very focused on the idea

That these voters have completely shifted their tune

About what they're upset about.

But you know, there's a lot of subtleties

That people in this kind of audience don't pick up on,

And he's smart enough to know

That he can just steamroll right past a lot of those problems

And they're not going to be noticed by anybody.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Wow, this is beautiful.

We had a lot of fun.

We gave very high grades on that.

Even people that hate me gave me good marks,

Isn't that amazing?

For the next 20 minutes,

He's talking about how he's gonna slap tariffs

On every country that imports to the United States

And yeah, how he's, you know, ford is gonna...

Want to relocate a factory and he's...

He, Donald trump, the president,

Is not going to allow that.

The idea of giving the government

That much power over... over corporate business

Doesn't seem to trouble this audience at all,

Which is odd when you think about it after...

After all those years of propaganda.

For years and years and years,

What was the party line that we got was that, you know,

Free enterprise cures all.

The market is self-correcting.

We're the best in the world.

We have confidence we're gonna do that.

Well, that's not what he's saying anymore.

People don't have confidence in that anymore.

Now they need...

Now they need the strong man to step in

And make sure that we all get paid.

I'll bring back our jobs from china, from Mexico,

From japan, from so many places.

I'll bring back our jobs and I'll bring back our money.

Matt Taibbi's acerbic writing on Donald trump

Is really reminiscent of I.F. Stone's writing

On the demagogue senator Joe McCarthy,

And presidents like Ike Eisenhower, john f. Kennedy,

Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon.

Matt is sort of a cross between I.F. Stone

And Hunter S. Thompson, the original gonzo journalist,

Who so raucously, viscerally,

Would skewer the powers that were

In the early '70s.

And as Izzy was drowned out

When mainstream media gave Joe McCarthy his megaphone,

Taibbi's independent voice can't really compete

When mainstream TV news, for months,

Provided a fairly uncritical platform

And a massive megaphone to trump.

When do we beat Mexico at the border?

They're laughing at us at our stupidity.

They're bringing drugs.

They're bringing crime.

They're rapists and some, I assume, are good people.

We spent about a year doing this story,

And we found evidence that bodies, human bodies,

Were buried in, I would say, a criminal way.

If we had 200 bodies that were buried in a criminal way

In the United States, if they were Anglo,

I think that we'd be hearing about it.

Because they're Mexican,

Or because they're from south of the border,

For the most part,

There wasn't any sort of an uproar.

The national media didn't pay attention.

We found mass graves in the United States.

We found people dumped into a mass grave,

And they were not catalogued.

They were not documented,

They were not properly treated.

Some individuals were buried in trash bags.

The mainstream media,

If we're talking about national media coverage

Of the migrant deaths in Falfurrias, Texas,

To my knowledge has been non-existent.

Media executives, for the most part,

People who make decisions on what's on television,

Are really some of the most ill-informed people

When it comes to the news itself.

The choices that are made

Are entertainment based.

Who's pretty?

Who speaks English?

These are things that I'm asked

When I'm pitching a story.

They're not going to watch a bunch of bodies

Being exhumed from a grave-site

And seeing law enforcement held accountable.

That's not something that's savory,

And I'm talking about all of the mainstream media

On major networks.

ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS.

We're being dumbed down, we're being watered down,

We're being misinformed, we're being misled,

And we're being told information which is false.

I remember pitching a story to 60 minutes,

Which I had done one for about a year prior,

And it was about the border and it was about migrants.

Stories that rarely get to see the light of day,

And they told me,

"john, we already did a border story for you."

It was a year ago, so there must only be one border story.

It's not what their audience wants to see,

So they're not interested.

Even if it's newsworthy,

They're going to consider the ratings first.

The heat index, a combination of temperature and humidity,

Is among the highest in the nation.

Pictures can't capture,

And I can't adequately describe,

How hot and how humid it feels.

It's like walking through soup.

Everywhere there are signs of migrants.

It's certainly a winter coat.

Some young woman,

Probably brought her best clothes and best jewelry

'cause she was here to get a job.

I think the last time I checked

There are over 10,000 people missing from records in Mexico,

Just in Mexico, not central America,

Who have crossed that border.

That means 10,000 families

Who are still looking for their loved ones

Who may have crossed that border illegally

And were never heard from again.

Where are they?

There are no records of them.

They're probably in some cemetery plot

Somewhere in Texas or Arizona.

This is going on all over the border.

My colleagues, we have an obligation to our citizens.

We have an obligation to this body

To see that our resolutions are complied with.

We wrote 1441

To give Iraq one last chance.

Iraq is not, so far,

Taking that one last chance.

We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us

And our responsibility to the citizens of the countries

That are represented by this body.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Did Colin Powell close the deal today in your mind?

I think for anybody who analyzes the situation,

He has closed the deal.

This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today.

Colin Powell brilliantly delivered

That smoking gun today.

It was so compelling,

I don't see how anybody at this point

Can not support this effort.

It was devastating, I mean, and overwhelming.

Overwhelming abundance of the evidence.

This was the mainstream media's darkest hour.

Go, go!

Fight, fight!

They were more than cheerleaders,

They were complicit.

He just flooded the terrain with... with data.

The Powell speech has... has moved the ball.

I think the case is closed.

You do not, under international law,

Wage a destructive sociocide.

They basically blew apart the country

'cause they wanted to get Saddam Hussein.

Well, this is like one of the greatest international crimes

Since world war ii.

This is ABC world news tonight.

This is NBC nightly news.

This is the CBS evening news.

And it was committed with the complete complicity

Of the mainstream media that kept critical voices,

Such as ours, off the air.

Oh, I think it's important to have experts explain the war

And to describe the military hardware,

Describe the tactics.

Talk about the strategy behind the conflict.

I went to the pentagon myself several times

Before the war started

And met with important people there

And said, for instance, at CNN,

"here are the generals we're thinking of retaining

To advise us on the air and off about the war,"

And we got a big thumbs up on all of them.

That was important.

Journalists, too many of them,

And some quite explicitly,

Have said that they see their mission

As helping the war effort.

At MSNBC, I was on the air daily

As a political and media analyst.

And if you define your mission that way,

You'll end up suppressing news

That might be important, accurate,

But maybe isn't helpful to the war effort.

But I lost my time because they had to make room

As we got closer to the invasion of Iraq

For this endless parade of retired generals,

Majors, admirals, former CIA chiefs,

And we know now those people had no independence,

They were being fed talking points by the pentagon,

And most of what they said, as our country was driven to war,

Was false.

Wealthy insurance.

From Pacifica, this is democracy now!

Democracy now!, it's slightly larger, I think,

Than the space I.F. Stone operated out of,

But very much modeled on this idea

Of the media being a sanctuary of dissent.

You know, necessity is the mother of invention.

We couldn't afford the satellites

That the networks had.

We worked with the internet from the beginning

Out of necessity.

Now, we're broadcasting on over 1300 radio

And television stations.

Public access TV, community radio,

Public radio, PBS, public television,

But we're not there to win a popularity contest.

We're there to bring out the voices of people

All over the world.

From Pacifica radio, this is democracy now!

Pope john Paul it's senior advisor has arrived in Baghdad

For meetings with senior Iraqi leaders.

Last night, he presided over a mass

At st. Joseph's church in central Baghdad.

Democracy now! Correspondent Jeremy Scahill was there.

Regardless of their faith,

Iraqis are praying for a miracle.

Almost no one believes that war can be averted.

John Paul ii has added his voice to the growing chorus

Against a war on Iraq,

But it's unlikely that George W. Bush will listen.

His own Methodist church has come out

Against an attack on Iraq,

And bush won't even meet with its leaders.

For democracy now!, this is Jeremy Scahill in Baghdad.

The problem is most of the big media are businesses.

They respond to their investors,

The stock market and their advertisers,

And independent journalists bring their conscience to work

And they call the situation as it really is factually,

So they're a rare breed.

They're not indentured to commercial motivation.

Well, the problem is is the illusion of free press.

You know, we don't have state media in the United States,

But if we had it, how would it be any different?

It's easy to criticize fox.

It's fox, it's CNN, it's the new york times.

That's why we need independent journalism.

You know, that's why we need a media

That challenges the corporate power.

When we cover war, we can't be brought to you

By the weapons manufacturers.

When we cover climate change, we can't be brought to you

By the oil, gas, coal, nuclear companies.

When we cover healthcare, we can't be brought to you

By the insurance and the drug companies.

We have to have a media

That is a counterbalance to those in power.

It's the only equalizing force.

I think the media is really nihilistic.

It's... it's about making money.

What makes money in this country happens to be

Avoiding difficult truths about our society.

You know, a story about what it's like to be on welfare,

That's not a story, right?

But you know, Kim Kardashian falls into a puddle

In central park, that's a story.

Well, Kim and Kanye, also known as Kimye,

Are expected to get married here in Florence this weekend

In a Medici fortress

That cost $400,000 to rent out.

Erin McLaughlin, CNN, Florence, Italy.

If you had to come up with a slogan

For what our new media venture is,

The one that Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras and I are...

Are building under the aegis of first look media,

You probably could use as a slogan,

"the spirit of I.F. Stone,

But funded with $250 million."

Glenn Greenwald has been a lightning rod for controversy

Since he obtained those secret NSA documents from Ed Snowden

And published some of them in the guardian.

Now he's launching a media company

Backed by wealthy ebay founder, Pierre Omidyar.

The main thing is you got to encapsulate all of this

In a way that it can't be decrypted

And read when it's in transit across the network,

Or on either of the end points.

Okay, I mean, just so you know,

These documents are basically all gonna be up-linked within,

Like, 48 hours, 72 hours.

This is... this is simply, you know,

You want to get in the process of doing this for everything

Because it seems hard, but it's not hard.

This is super easy.

Thank you so much to the academy.

The disclosures that Edward Snowden reveals

Don't only expose a threat to our privacy,

But to our democracy itself,

And I share this with Glenn Greenwald

And other journalists who are exposing truth.

Thank you.

Was Mr. Daoud killed immediately

Or did he live for a while after he was shot?

You saw the us forces take the bullets out of the body?

When Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill teamed up

Together at the intercept,

It was like a...

A dream for adversarial journalists.

And since 2014, they've been able, with their team,

To break story after story of political corruption,

Especially scoop after scoop

About the national security surveillance state,

Which mainstream journalists often tend to avoid

Out of a false notion of patriotism.

Good journalism today has the state in its cross-hairs,

And you never want to punch down.

You always want to punch up.

That's what I think we're trying to do

At the intercept.

And then once you have that file,

Just right click the file in the finder.

Were they... were they able to decrypt it at all?

I don't think so.

Well, you look behind me

And you see a news room full of fantastic,

Independent reporters who come from all sorts of backgrounds,

But this is still very much a... a project in development.

I would say our mission statement is...

Is to produce adversarial, fearless journalism.

This central idea that, I think, everyone shares

Is that the more power someone wields,

The more journalistic accountability

And scrutiny they need.

I mean, it says explicitly there that they're...

That it's supporting drone surveillance operations.

Most of the bandwidth is on galaxy 26,

And not an NRO secret site.

That must be the satellite.

Yeah, it can support up to 40 UAV sorties simultaneously.

And these are satellites showing construction

Of a facility in Germany

That the us uses as part of its drone program.

The German government basically is trying to argue

That it doesn't have any...

Any role at all

In the targeted killing program,

'cause that would be illegal under German law.

It's a story that involves many countries

Being involved with the us drone program

And their governments either are not aware of it, or...

Or they're lying,

And that's part of what we're trying to nail down.

Part of my discussion that was shown in citizen-four

With Snowden had some reference

To the use of Ramstein

As part of a chain of command

In which these drone executions are carried out.

You know that?

But the drone papers really solidified this...

This role in a way that is really important

And it created, actually, some debate

And some scandal in Germany.

The German population was almost entirely unaware of the role

That Ramstein is playing in this program, and obviously,

Germans overwhelmingly oppose the death penalty

And so it stands to reason that if they had known about it,

They never would have allowed it.

This is the most sophisticated

So-called clean way of bumping people off.

I became sort of obsessed with this notion that a man

Who is a constitutional lawyer by training,

Who won the Nobel peace prize, is presiding over a...

An attempt to legitimize

And some would say, legalize assassination

As a central component of us policy.

I'll make our government open and transparent,

So that anyone can ensure

That our business is the people's business.

Just as Louis Brandeis once said,

"sunlight is the greatest disinfectant."

Who would have thought that we'd get a president

Who is a charismatic, perhaps...

Probably one of the smartest presidents,

If not the smartest president in us history,

With a great background in social justice causes

Who would preside over more prosecutions of whistle blowers

As spies than all previous administrations combined,

Who would expand the drone program

And try to legitimize the assassination program?

When Obama was elected,

He pledged that his administration

Was going to be the most transparent in history.

No more secrecy.

That's the commitment I make to you as president.

No more secrecy.

You know, we'll work with sources

Or with documents that we've obtained,

And then you, you know, you try to hunt down

The publicly available record on these things

And I mean, an incredible amount of stuff

Is sort of hidden in plain sight

If you dig far enough.

That's all of what I.F. Stone was doing.

I guess what's different is that, you know,

Part of what we do is try to cultivate sources

And talk to people who are directly knowledgeable

About various operations in the military

Or the CIA or the NSA and then, you know,

Then you start going down a rabbit hole.

I mean, I've often said that I thought

That I.F. Stone is the first blogger,

Even though he existed before bloggers existed,

But in my view, he really encapsulated

What became the new media ethos,

Which is the idea of working as independently as possible

From all of the power factions and centers

On which you're reporting,

And what we've built here, in terms of our new media outlet,

Is very much, I think, based on the ethos that he pioneered.

Ooh, do you feel the breeze from the subway?

Isn't it delicious?

I got to meet I.F. Stone

In the mid '80s in Washington, do.

I wanted to put out my own weekly moore's weekly,

And I just wanted to go and talk to him about it.

It was just an amazing afternoon

That I got to have with him

To really, kind of, pick his brain

And tell him, you know, what I wanted to do

And he gave me, you know, good advice.

Advice I kind of already knew, because I'd read him, you know.

His... his great motto

Of all governments are run by liars

And nothing they say should be believed,

And he said... he said to me,

But I would expand that now

To governments, corporations,

You know, it's not just the... the government.

It's this... that... anybody in power.

You must start, as a journalist,

With the assumption that they are lying to you.

Now, some of them may not be lying,

But it's their duty to prove to you,

The journalist, that they're not lying.

Through high school, I read I.F. Stone's weekly.

One of the things I learned was that

Humor isn't just about telling jokes

Or just about funny ha-ha.

Humor can be the most piercing of political weapons.

I'm... I'm stunned that more people actually don't use humor

Because it's so powerful,

And one of the great things that you learn about humor

And good ridicule when in politics

Is that it's very hard to respond to it.

The FAA has taken the action

To close all of the airports in the United States.

Thousands of travelers were stranded.

Among them, Ricky martin,

Due to appear at tonight's Latin Grammy awards.

Not even Ricky martin could fly.

But really, who wanted to fly?

No one.

Except the Bin Ladens.

♪ We got to get out of this place ♪

♪ If it's the last thing we ever do ♪

That whole idea of how I found that thing

On the FBI and the bush administration

Allowing the bin Ladens to fly out the day after 9/11,

That is directly from I.F. Stone.

He said to me, he said,

"when you pick up the paper, you go to page 17 first."

Don't read the front page.

Skip the front page, go to page 17.

'Cause that's where the truth is.

And it's gonna be really small.

It might be in a little two paragraph story,

Or it'll be buried in paragraph 78,

But that's where they're putting it,

And they know what they're doing.

"So, you just go right there."

Yeah.

What I saw and learned

From reading I.F. Stone's weekly

Was about an agenda

That was not determined

By conventional wisdom.

To me, that's the real enemy of great reporting

Is conventional wisdom.

- Mrs. Hamblin? - Yes.

Hi, we're from the Washington post.

I'm Carl Bernstein, this is bob Woodward.

A friend of the committee said that we could contact you.

I brought no ideological baggage.

Whatever my background was to Watergate,

I brought a reportorial sense to it,

Partly because I thought,

"how could the president of the united sates

Be involved in something this dumb?"

At the beginning.

Conventional wisdom is the enemy of good reporting

And I think Izzy understood that.

I understood that from the get-go.

Can I help you in some way?

Yeah, I'm Carl Bernstein, I've been waiting here

- Since nine in the morning. - Would you wait outside?

I've been waiting out since this morning.

Go ahead and finish your call.

Wait outside, please, will you?

No, no, no, no, no.

I'm the reporter from the Washington post.

We talked on the telephone yesterday,

And you told me to come on down here and I'm here.

Okay, yeah, I got the press here.

Watergate is an unusual instance, and I mean,

At first people didn't believe the stories we were writing,

Including most of our colleagues in the press in Washington.

Watergate is an unusual instance

In which the right things happened.

Bernstein got another source.

The guy at justice confirmed.

If there's any doubt, we can run it tomorrow.

You don't have to, the story's solid, we're sure of it.

I just got off the phone with him, it's gold.

Okay, we go with it.

Normally, when I get in,

Which is around this time, 1:00, 2:00, 2:30 P.M.,

I see what else the morning producer,

'cause the morning producer leaves,

Like, early afternoon around 3:00,

But he's normally, you know,

Checked out a few possible stories,

So depending on what he suggests

And he's often been in conversation with Amy,

I immediately start reaching out to people

To guess potential guests.

Yeah, I think that should be fine.

We'll just make sure to start with another segment

And then, you could be on,

Like, at 8:00, at 8:30.

Amira Hass is here, and she leaves Saturday,

So I think we should definitely have her in the studio tomorrow.

Sharif is here.

- And he has this investigation. - On Yemen, yeah.

And then, anything else that happens in the world today.

Okay, now going to pitch on the stations

To make sure they're around

So that we can continue to broadcast.

Okay, that's great, Amy, thank you.

So your son served in Iraq?

Yeah, he survived like three ambushes,

But he came out screwed up.

He's, you know, the PTSD, you know.

Here.

Well, handsome man.

Yeah.

How many life has to be destroyed?

How many family?

Stupid wars, you know, it's like...

But you feel kinda, you know, in danger.

Have you been threatened before?

There's dangers, yeah, of working there now.

But the risks we take

Are much less than what other people are doing,

So especially people who work in human rights.

They have much bigger risks and so, compared to them, you know,

You get courage when you... when you see them work.

You know, they say, you know,

We're engaged in a war on terror,

And they use the same language as they use here,

"war on terror."

But the policies just result in more terror,

So we have more terrorism now,

And more war.

I started working in journalism

Right around the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003.

- Nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you too.

It was very frustrating as a young person

Living here in new york, as an Arab,

As someone who was newly politicized

And watching this massive invasion being drummed up.

One felt like you had to scream and say, "this is wrong."

And there were these kinds of protests

And it was when I first heard democracy now!

And I first heard these kinds of voices

That I hadn't heard at all on other airwaves.

Voices of dissent, voices of opposition.

People who were not allowed on the air.

I was very much drawn to this kind of journalism.

My first day at democracy now!

Is the first day of the Iraq war, March 19th, 2003.

Reporter Nicholas Kulish who broke this story.

All that and more, coming up.

Amy Goodman has nurtured a number of journalists,

Including Sharif Abdel Kouddous.

He was a correspondent, a senior producer,

He was occasionally a co-host,

And then 2011, the uprising begins in Egypt,

The country that Sharif was born in,

And he flies to Egypt

And country is almost unrecognizable to him.

That the fear was gone and his vivid reporting

Had millions of people following his reporting.

It's just after 10:00 A.M. On Tuesday morning.

Today marks the one week anniversary

Of the popular uprising that began January 25th.

There's more people here than I have ever seen in Tahrir,

Yet in this revolt.

Today's the day that they say

They're going to get Mubarak out.

For more, we're joined by Sharif Abdel Kouddous

Who's just returned from Yemen.

He's a democracy now! Correspondent,

A fellow at the nation institute,

And he's recently written a piece for the global post called

"with us help, Saudi Arabia is obliterating Yemen."

It's the first of a two part series on Yemen.

Sharif, start off by just explaining

What you found in your weeks-long trip there.

Well, I spent most of the time

In the outhits controlled north of Yemen

And this is an area

That's been pounded relentlessly

For the past nine months with near daily air strikes.

You can't visit a city or a town in Yemen

Without seeing the destruction on the ground.

Everything has been hit from homes

To schools, restaurants, bridges, roads,

A lot of civilian infrastructure and...

And with that, of course, comes a lot of the suffering.

The Saudi bombing campaign is backed by the United States

With logistics and intelligence support,

And I think that's a fact that many Americans don't realize

That they're complicit with their tax dollars

In this conflict that has civilians

At the epicenter of its suffering.

Be very careful back there.

I will.

These are mass graves they're combing all day.

Every one is different.

Would you want your son buried that way?

Or your mom or your sister or your brother?

I mean, this isn't how you want someone you love to be buried.

So good to see you.

You too, sorry, I'm standing in the door to keep it open.

Ah, how are you guys?

I'm great, thank you.

Good, well, we could do the elevator or the stairs.

How many flights up?

Hey, Audrey, do you remember john?

Audrey, john, nice to meet you.

Thank you so much for doing the work.

Okay, john, so this is what

We end up with oftentimes.

So, you can see these are really white

Because they're sun bleached.

So, this person was out for a long period of time,

And they also sustained quite a bit of carnivore damage,

But you can see this is an individual

Who has 206 bones at a minimum in their body,

And we have three.

And there's no way you will ever identify this person.

Well, we have taken a DNA sample

And this was actually analyzed

At the central identification lab

Through the joint armed forces.

It could be if we can match this DNA sample to a family.

I have no doubt that if 200 poodles were mis-buried,

Everybody would be up in arms.

We'd probably change some sort of poodle law

To make sure that these were buried properly.

The fact that these were 200 human migrants,

Mostly Latin American,

Is the reason that nothing has been done.

It's the sole reason that nothing has been done.

These people don't count.

For the most part, they're considered to be criminal.

They're here to rob your jobs,

They're here to ruin our economy.

Donald trump would like to build a wall to separate us from them.

They're marginalized and they're vilified,

So if they die and are thrown into a hole in the ground,

Good riddance.

Para ti.

¿Como Te llamas?

- Carlos. - Carlos.

Soy Reportero.

My father really believed in the importance of a free press.

He once told me, "if something goes wrong with the government",

A free press will ferret it out,

And it will get fixed.

But if something goes wrong with the free press,

"The country will go straight to hell."

This is the typewriter on which

My father typed with two fingers.

So, how long was he using this typewriter?

Well, as long as I can remember, really.

It's a... it's amazing that he would type with two fingers.

So, he never... he never learned how to type with...

He wasn't very mechanical.

In fact, our cars kept breaking down

Because he never changed the oil.

I.F. Stone was both an investigator and a writer

With sarcasm and wit and humor in his work,

And today's I.F. Stones,

A lot of them don't come to that level of writing,

Except when you think of Matt Taibbi.

The media has spent decades turning the news

Into a consumer business

That's basically indistinguishable

From selling cheeseburgers or video games.

You want bigger margins,

You just cram the product full

Of more fat and sugar and violence

And you wait for your obese, over-stimulated consumer

To come waddling forth.

Breaking news right now, just coming into the ABC...

The death toll has risen even higher today.

We start with celebrities behaving badly.

Squealing, like, panda lovers all over the planet

Riveted as this mama bear delivers a cub, and then...

People can vape without...

As his hover booster board burst into...

Congresswoman, let me interrupt you just for a moment,

We've got some breaking news out of Miami.

Stand by, if you will.

Right now, in Miami, Justin Bieber has been arrested

On a number of charges that...

What we call right wing and liberal media in this country

Are really just two different strategies

Of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism.

There's nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births

Delivering to thickening couch potatoes

In ever briefer blasts of 40, 30, 20 seconds.

The world's most powerful investment bank

Is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,

Relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything

That smells like money.

And the funny part about that is, of course,

Vampire squids don't have blood funnels,

So we had a fact checking issue with that, and it was...

But I thought that was part of what made that funny

Was that, you know, it was a nonsensical image, right.

You know, you had this thing that was

At once terrifying, and ridiculous.

I thought that summed up what the bank was all about.

In news from Iraq, at least 16 people were killed Thursday

In clashes between us troops and Shia militias in Baghdad.

The dead included a photographer for the Reuters news agency,

And his driver.

They apparently came under fire from a us helicopter.

In December, democracy now! Traveled

To the Calais refugee camp.

The largest refugee camp in France,

About two hours north of Paris.

Six to seven thousand people are living there,

Camped out in makeshift tents.

Occasionally people stop to talk,

But we've been warned over and over

That people don't want their faces shown.

They're afraid.

They're afraid of being targeted here

And they're afraid their families

Will be targeted at home.

Were there drone strikes...

Yes, there were drone attacks.

They are always killing innocent people in the villages.

Civilians become very angry and they join the group of Taliban.

So, what do you think the us should be doing now?

You know, us is just increasing the war.

Actually, us don't want to finish the war.

It's their game.

It's the game of...

George W. Bush, Obama.

They don't care about the people who are dying there.

President Obama said the war is ending in Afghanistan.

Do you see it ending?

Until Americans leave Afghanistan,

It will be not ending.

Never.

The map of this camp,

It's a map of where refugees are from.

Most of these countries have been bombed

By the United States.

Syria, Afghanistan,

Iraq, Sudan.

I didn't think about it, but that is true.

What's very important to explain

And what's systematically lacking

In all the accounts that I had come across

In the mainstream media,

Why is this happening?

Why are these people where they are?

Why are they suffering the most inhumane conditions,

The most abject degradation,

And of course, it's very important to have empathy

And solidarity for the suffering of these people,

But we can't think that the suffering

Has fallen out of the sky,

And they're just particularly benighted

Because they happen to have been the subject of that, right.

There are policies that have been enacted.

There are decisions that have been made.

There are bombs that have been dropped.

As a consequence of which, these millions of people

Are destitute in the way that they are,

And we have to allow them to tell that story.

Do you think the Russian, Syrian, french,

British bombing of Syria will save it?

No, no, no.

It's not the solution.

You can't protect someone by killing someone else.

In international waters, in the gulf of tonkin,

Destroyers of the United States navy

Are assigned routine patrols from time to time.

Sunday, August the 2nd, 1964,

The destroyer, Maddox, was on such a patrol.

Shortly after noon, the calm of the day is broken

As general quarters sound.

In a deliberate and unprovoked action,

Three north Vietnam pt boats unleash a torpedo attack

Against the Maddox.

A classic example of I.F. Stone's ability

To ferret out something when no one else was doing it

Was the gulf of tonkin excuse for going into Vietnam.

Three weeks after we had the so-called attack

By the north Vietnamese, Izzy read all the after reports,

And he said, "where... where's the debris if we had been hit?"

Why isn't there more being talked about?"

And he said there were all kinds of excuses

Why this little, tiny country would go against

The largest fleet in the world,

Except the fact that it might have been provoked.

All of the media was just following it right into war,

As was congress, and I keep thinking

If the mainstream media had followed Izzy,

We might not have had that ten year disaster.

We hadn't been able to get it through our heads

That this is a political war.

All you have to ask yourself is

Why is it that here are Vietnamese

On one side, on our side,

And here are the same Vietnamese on the other side.

And on one side, they have very little in the way of arms.

They have no air force, no napalm, no big boom-boom,

And they really fight magnificently.

And on our side, you have five times as many troops,

All that equipment, all that firepower, all that artillery,

And they're not worth a damn.

A lot of people protested I.F. Stone's being on,

Because can you imagine he had the nerve

To say things against our war policy?

Well, it was bold at the time

When we were suffering with all kinds of things.

Assassinations, and the Vietnam war,

A subject on which stone was quite brilliant,

And how we got into it

And how we were probably never gonna get out of it

The way we were going and it was...

Took guts to say those things.

The extreme right and the hate mail writers

Were always ready to go.

Ask any solider back from Vietnam, he'll agree with me.

I don't mean to say there aren't brave men among them,

And some good troops, but on the whole,

The men on one side are fighting

And the men on the other side don't care and are deserting.

Why is this?

Why, because the men on the other side

Feel they're fighting for freedom.

They're fighting for freedom from...

From domination by the white man, and by the westerner.

I.F. Stone would be debunking the official fictions

As soon as government was spewing them.

Whether it was during the Joe McCarthy era,

Or all of the lies about Vietnam.

You could read Izzy stone within a week,

And he was debunking these fictions.

We need to know what governments do.

We need to know what's real,

And we need to know what's bullshit.

And that's the biggest problem,

And Izzy was great

At saying, "hey, I checked."

This is bullshit."

Just as Izzy wrote and published I.F. Stone's weekly

Out of his home with his wife,

Esther, managing the accounts,

Tom Engelhardt with his blog, Tomdispatch. Com,

Is another example of how a journalist

Working from a small office at home

Can reach a very wide audience

With independent reporting and analysis.

On how I started Tomdispatch,

You'd have to go back to literally to 9/11,

And our news began to constrict, you know,

In a way I hadn't seen, even at the height of the cold war,

As far as I was concerned.

And I suddenly realized that out there,

There was another kind of news.

I started obsessively gathering this stuff,

And then, and writing little comments,

And my little comments became a kind of commentary

And then this was the miracle of the internet,

People started jumping on.

People started writing me and saying, "can I be on your list?"

I didn't even really know I had a list,

And suddenly, I had a list of 400 people

Including journalists and I mean, Susan Sontag wrote me,

I mean, out of the blue.

I didn't know Susan Sontag.

I'm now almost 71.

I'm plunged into, I was from the beginning,

Plunged into a world of much younger people.

I had no idea what I was doing,

But I had been working as a book editor

With great writers for years.

Chalmers Johnson, all sorts of people.

And I started asking them once this thing started,

I started asking them if they wanted to, you know,

Write and it was like this kind of communal activity,

And it's turned from that thing that it was into what it is now,

Which is my little intros and then a piece.

I mean, it could be by me or by any one of a...

I think a pretty striking set of writers.

The establishment reporters, without a doubt,

Know a lot of things I don't know,

But a lot of what they know isn't true.

He was a fantastic journalist and the...

As he himself pointed out,

The greatest contribution to his career

Was his being excluded.

He didn't have, as he pointed out,

He didn't have to waste his time

Going to press conferences 'cause he wasn't invited,

So he didn't have to hear all the deceit and the lies

And so he didn't have to waste his time repeating them.

He could just go straight to the documents,

To the historical record, see what's happening,

And he did it brilliantly.

Going in the white house and going

And asking questions of the press secretary,

It's a job that some people have to do.

It's not often that you develop new information from doing that,

And it just becomes a battle of spins.

I do remember going once

And Ari Fleischer was press secretary

And he kept, just saying the same thing.

"No, it's true, it's true."

I go, "but this report just came out from wherever"

And it says that actually that didn't happen."

And he goes, "no, but it did happen."

And I really felt like I was talking to a guy who was saying,

"the sky is green."

And I would say, "no, no, no, actually, the sky is blue."

He goes, "no, no, the sky is green."

And you can only do that so much, and people, you know,

Who are on that side will say, damn it is!

We ask each nation on the security council

To weigh the merits that make a decision about war and peace,

And if anybody thinks that there are nations, like Mexico,

Whose vote could be bought on the basis of a trade issue

Or something else like that, I think you're giving...

Do a grave injustice to the independence

And the judgment of the leaders of other nations.

Think about the implications what you're saying.

You're saying that the leaders of other nations are buy-able

And that is not an acceptable proposition.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everybody.

What concerns does the president have

About the possibility that Donald trump could someday

Be the us commander in chief?

The president has confidence

That if Mr. Trump is the republican nominee,

He will not win the general election.

It's kind of a, you know, a bit of a kabuki,

Theatrical production each day, and so he's here facing,

I don't know how many reporters, 70...

70 reporters or so,

Who really want to drive him off message,

And so he has to come out and seem more or less

To be answering questions without saying anything

That's gonna make news.

What is the president hearing from us allies

And those who participate in us military operations

Alongside Americans?

I'm not gonna be able to share any secret details

Of conversations that the president has had

With other world leaders,

But there are global consequences for arguments

That are made by domestic politicians.

But I think, you know,

The white house should recognize that the media,

Which represents the public to some degree, you know,

Has the right to ask questions

And that sometimes they have to answer things

That aren't really, maybe,

What they most are interested in talking about that day.

Hello?

Oh, I wouldn't... I mean,

I thought we already went over this,

But you will not be identified as a source for anything.

Your name will not, you know, appear as, you know,

Being connected to these documents

And certainly no quotes from anything we talked about.

One of David corn's major scoops was the 47% video,

Where you had presidential candidate, mitt Romney,

Do a $50,000-a-plate dinner

Talking about how 47% of the us public were moochers.

When this comes out, thanks to David corn,

It changes the momentum of the 2012 race

Between Romney and Obama.

The president of the united states defeats mitt Romney

In this... at this time right now,

We have made this projection.

So, the president wins this battle.

When the source with the 47% video

Is looking to bring that to the public,

He didn't take it to NBC news or CBS news.

He takes it to David corn in mother Jones

Because he'd seen the investigative work

In the previous months that corn had been doing on Romney.

Okay, here's the list of the folks

Who testified at the trial,

So they're the ones we need to find.

Will do.

There's new intelligence today

Indicating Saddam Hussein has stepped up his efforts

To obtain nuclear weapons.

The latest information, us officials saying

That over the past 14 months,

They have seen Saddam Hussein trying to obtain weapons

To try and build an atomic bomb.

It was basically sort of a feedback loop.

The administration was out there

Starting to beat the drums for war in Iraq.

The new york times, anxious to be ahead of the pack,

And to get the real scoop

When they found people with...

Administration officials who were presenting evidence

That wasn't that strong,

But the new york times went with the story

And then dick Cheney cited that story to say,

"look, the new york times."

It was already coming out of the administration.

He now is trying,

Through his illicit procurement network,

To acquire the equipment he needs

To be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs.

Specifically aluminum tubes.

There's a story in the new york times this morning.

The lead up to the war in Iraq.

The particularly egregious case is the new york times,

There's no question about it, because it...

It ran stories

Contrary to the truth.

It ran stories that the sources

Had planted information

That should have been checked out and the sources were...

Were questionable to begin with

In terms of their own objectives,

So the times is a particular case

Of particularly great failing.

There's nothing like experiencing

The world's finest journalism

In its original form.

And I want to attribute the times,

I don't want to talk about, obviously,

Specific intelligence sources,

But it's now public, that in fact,

He has been seeking to acquire the kinds of tubes

That are necessary to build a centrifuge.

I remember, particularly,

Watching Cheney on meet the press.

And throwing out this stuff,

And saying to my wife, saying,

"this is bullshit.

There's something missing here."

There will always be some uncertainty

About how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons,

But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

Two days, I think it was,

Before the war was launched in March 2003.

The Washington post had a great story

And the headline was something like,

"much of the bush administration's case for war

Is inaccurate or wrong, experts say."

And it was on page a19, it was, you know, inside,

And the question that I've had since that point

Is under what definition of news

Is that not a front page story?

That experts say administration's case for war

Is wrong.

Two trumps.

- Yeah, two trumps. - And I added a line.

Yes, Lisa, this is the order,

And what's circled and not circled.

I think that on the Lloyd Blankfein one,

I would end on my tsunami analogy.

"And it's about to crash on their head."

On their heads, yes.

Okay.

I.F. Stone was onto something really smart

With the subscription business.

What a lot of people miss about that business model,

Which in general was a smart business model,

It puts your financial incentives in the right place.

If your financial incentives are to please advertisers,

You will please advertisers, right.

But in the long run, you want to incentivize yourself

To be aligned with your audience.

The way you're aligned with your audience

Is if your audience is paying you.

So, if you go in the wrong direction,

They punish you by saying, "I'm leaving"

And I'm not paying you the subscription anymore."

That was true of I.F. Stone with his newsletter,

It's true of our show

Because we have a subscription model on our website.

Now, you can't get carried away with it,

Because sometimes you have to act out of principle,

Even if it loses you subscribers.

For example, after president Obama was elected,

I began to criticize him

For some of the things that I realized, whoa,

Well, that's not a progressive position,

And that's not a progressive position.

And in the beginning we lost a lot of subscribers

'cause people said, "whoa, no, wait a minute now."

We worked hard to get president Obama elected.

"You seem like you're being disrespectful to him."

Well, there you got to stand on principle

And we survived that and then those guys came back,

And even more came back when they realized,

"oh damn, you were right."

Hillary Clinton is tired

Of the Bernie sanders camp's lies, she says.

In fact, here, let me show you.

This is when she had a run-in

With a Greenpeace activist.

Can we talk about climate change?

When people make these kinds of claims,

Which now I think have been debunked,

Actually the Washington post said three Pinocchios.

The new york times also analyzed it.

She says that, "oh no, it's debunked."

Okay, great, I'll go to the source itself

That quote, unquote, "debunked" the story.

Washington post.

So, that adds up to all the donations to Hillary Clinton,

Up to more than $4.5 million,

So they acknowledge it.

They acknowledge it, right there, right?

But it's still only two percent

Of the total contributions received by Clinton

And outside groups backing her.

Now, that's true, but think about that for a second.

Their excuse for her is, "yeah, I know",

She took four and a half million bucks from the oil guys,

But she's taking so much more from the others.

The bribes that the oil and gas companies gave her

"Are small compared to what the banks gave her."

See, not guilty.

Bernie sanders is a liar.

So, Elizabeth warren, that's an interview...

I don't think there is even video of that.

I think it's IB times.

But we do have the panel on morning Joe and on Hannity.

And also Geraldo?

After the meeting, we had a few videos that we're doing

And to just basically get a good round... round out the stories.

Three years later, some senator says, "I never said that."

Even if you can't find it somewhere online,

I still have it.

So, I don't get rid of anything.

So, we have tons and tons of things

That I just have saved of what everyone has said ever

That we've ever done.

There's a lot, yeah.

I don't envy the guy who has to cut it all.

I could toss you a couple raw videos.

You can cut those down.

Yeah, by me, you mean Arthur, right?

Good luck with that.

- Okay, thank you. - All right, man.

I'm amused at people who claim that the governments don't lie.

Really, do you know human beings that never lie?

Let alone human beings who need to cover their ass

And protect their job?

Let alone people who need to do all that in public?

Of course, they lie!

Of course they do.

When is the last time you heard CNN say

The pentagon is lying?

Isn't it amazing that in these decades of CNN's existence,

They have never uttered that sentence.

So the pentagon has never lied, according to CNN.

Congressman, but overall, I'm a deficit hawk too.

I don't want out of control spending,

So then I assume as a deficit hawk,

You also want to cut defense spending

And you want to raise taxes on the rich, right?

Well, I think the first purpose of this government

Is to defend the nation,

And if we cut defense to the extent

That we're no longer safe,

Let me suggest to you, there's nothing that would have

A more negative impact on our economy.

Nineteen percent of the deficit

Is defense spending,

And we've spent more on defense

Than the entire rest of the world combined,

But you still think we cannot cut a nickel from there.

We need every nuke, every sub, every aircraft carrier,

Otherwise we're not gonna be able to out-nuke Iran,

Is that the logic?

When Cenk was first working at MSNBC,

I just assumed he was on cloud nine,

Because he wanted it so bad and then there was this one week

Where they flew me into new york

And I helped them produce the television show.

Right then and there, I knew it wasn't right for us,

But I didn't say anything.

I just kinda like, sat back and waited to see

If Cenk was gonna do what I thought he was gonna do.

Phil griffin, who's the head of MSNBC, pulls me into his office.

He sits me down and he says,

"Cenk, I was just in Washington,

And they're not happy with your tone."

And I sat back in my seat, like, "oh my god, it's happening."

Right, this is like a movie!

They're... they're giving me this speech.

You know, some people told me that you were dumb.

I think you're smart.

In fact, I think you're smart enough to understand

A situation when it's explained to you.

And he said, "look, I want to be clear with you about this",

So just cool it.

"Bring it down a little bit."

Now, if I felt that you had

The welfare of the state at heart,

Like I have, I'd say you were a man to watch.

So, they would say things like,

"we need you to act like a senator."

And I thought, "why?"

Why on good god's green earth

"Would you want to act like a senator?"

Does that mean I should lie more?

I should be more fake?

People don't like senators.

Congress, at that point, is at an approval rating

Floating between 7 and 11 percent.

They hate senators!

They don't have to tell an anchor

Coming into the mainstream media,

"hey, be pro-government."

Although with me, I was so thick-headed they had to.

Right.

They just don't hire that guy,

And if they make the mistake of hiring him,

They demote him or they fire him,

And then the message is clear in the building.

"Shh, we don't criticize the powers that be."

We don't criticize corporations.

We are a giant corporation.

We don't take on the establishment,

"We are the establishment."

And the guys who play ball get promotions

And everyone in the building sees them getting promotions.

So, it is an evolutionary process

By which the mainstream media gets the product that it wants.

I think what happened to Cenk Uygur at MSNBC

Illuminates the process

Leading to what Noam Chomsky calls,

"manufacturing consent."

Corporate news outlets often end up

Being more propagandistic than journalistic.

Manufactured consent makes sure that the ignorant

And meddlesome majority keeps out of things.

So, if they want...

For decades they've wanted national healthcare,

But they don't understand, so keep them out of it.

They want higher taxes on the rich,

Then you know, put them to the side.

They don't understand things.

They're opposed to wars,

It's 'cause they don't understand how important it is

For us to bomb Libya and whatever it may be.

It used to be in earlier times

That you could use force to do this,

But by the early 20th century,

Countries like England and the United States,

The more free societies,

It was recognized that force was no longer sufficient,

So you had to turn the control of attitudes and opinions.

It's quite conscious incidentally.

I think manufacturing consent

Is essentially the Rosetta stone

For understanding the hieroglyphics of the us media.

It is the case that if you go

To most media figures

And/or to media corporations and tell them that they're really...

Constrain them of things they can and can't say,

And not only will they deny it,

But they'll essentially be truthful in their denial,

In the sense that they believe that denial,

Because they don't have someone standing over their shoulder

Deleting words that they write

Or compelling them to say things they don't want to say,

But the entire system breeds a certain orthodox.

It breeds a certain kind of range of pie-ties

And if you deviate too far from them, it will reject you.

So, yes, you're perfectly free

Once you accept the...

You internally accept the principles

And you feel under no pressure in censorship.

You can say anything you want

As long as you accept the concept of objectivity.

Ninety-nine percent of the people who work in the business

Just think they're doing their jobs and they don't realize

That they're creating this kinda endless,

You know, minefield of stupidity

That it's gonna be impossible for us to all breach

When the time comes, you know.

Those reporters who care more about truth

Will eventually become management problems,

And the ones who can read power,

In essence, function as courtiers,

Know how to play the game.

The veneer of objectivity, neutrality,

Impartiality, truth, and yet,

Assiduously serve,

In essence, power,

Are the ones who rise within the institution,

And that's why if you look at the top management

Of even institutions like the new york times,

They're filled with such incredible mediocrities.

They can do exactly what they want,

But they wouldn't be in that position

Unless they already accepted the framework.

I.F. Stone is a perfect example.

He's a terrific reporter, maybe one of the best,

But he didn't accept the rules, so he was out of the system.

Same with innumerable others.

Jeremy Scahill, Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman, even Matt Taibbi.

From my reporting, these are all

The autopsies that were ordered.

Is this a scientific autopsy report from...

You're laughing.

This doesn't look like a report that my students would do.

The report doesn't look like a...

That even your students would do, okay.

You know, I'm sort of getting at,

Whether or not there was some sort of a scam

With the autopsies.

All these reports are missing.

Oh, those are the missing ones, oh, okay.

So, over 30% of the autopsies ordered.

You don't even have a lab report for.

We don't even know if they were ever performed.

They were billed.

I have the canceled checks.

Oh.

I just don't have if the autopsy was performed,

What they found.

You get appointed to the board of one of these commissions,

Essentially in Texas, by being a large campaign contributor.

This is all an expose of this mass grave.

Make these people own this shit.

Make 'em own it,

Because this is what is existing in this state

And it's those people over at the capital,

But it's also people who just go about their daily lives

And let it happen.

He had to answer questions for weeks about this.

He also was pulled in by some high ranking

Local officials in the state and asked very similar questions,

So he's had time to prep.

Basically, what happened is nueces county

Was providing autopsy services for brooks county,

And they were overwhelmed with nueces county alone.

Course I wasn't around when all of this was being done,

You know, we kind of picked up after the fact, you know.

Some of them were done

During the time of your tenure here too.

Some of them were after 2007.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So, I'm just wondering

Is that the mortuary who's dumping bodies?

Actually, well, we had...

In other words, who monitors the mortuary?

They're an independent contractor,

So in other words,

You contract somebody to do it,

You pay 'em 750 bucks and they go do the job.

All we know is we're gonna pay

For four... $500, $500, $500...

And it's gonna say,

"one was Eddie Canalis, he was identified."

This gentlemen was john doe.

"The other one was another john doe."

In a case where I was not comfortable

With cause of death, DNA and...

That's the criteria where you saw something suspicious.

What if you found just bones or a skull or something?

It's... it's difficult. You can't do that.

It would be a waste of time.

You would not order an autopsy

If it was just a skull or bones.

Once the sun, 108, 107 degrees...

So, a sun bleached skull or something, no?

No, no, they wouldn't.

You don't have a problem

Until somebody makes a problem out of it.

The documents I have and the evidence I have,

I asked him directly about those things

And he lied through his teeth

Through every single one of them.

So, the way the bodies were buried, the mortuaries,

The contracts, everything, he's just...

Just bullshitting me the whole way.

In my investigation prior to speaking to him,

I have found nothing but discrepancies in the paperwork

And the documents in the way that records were kept,

And he basically, without knowing he did,

Admitted it all to me,

And I'm actually just shaking a little bit from it.

The only way I'm able to do the investigative work

Before we even bring it to a broadcast outlet,

Before we bring it to the mainstream media,

Is because I actually get paid every month

By the nation institute.

I have a monthly stipend,

An investigative stipend that allows me

To put all these pieces together

And I can spend months on a story.

I can spend a year on a story

Before I even bring it to a broadcast outlet.

If the medical examiner

Or the forensic person in brooks county examined bones,

He charged one flat fee, $1500,

And there were many bones examined.

They might as well have been an eight-year-old who wrote them.

"I saw a man lying on the ground,"

His bones were scattered.

They looked okay to me," is basically a report.

Fifteen hundred bucks.

He was judge for eight years from 2007 to 2014.

That's when all the bodies were buried.

We... we know that brooks county is under-resourced

And their record keeping isn't great,

And so let's just take that at face value for now.

I don't think it's so much that.

I think there's something going on here.

Obviously.

I think about I.F. Stone a lot and I think about his phrase,

"all governments lie."

And I also think about the fact

That most of his reporting was done

Putting his face in a stack of documents.

It wasn't flashy.

He found the fact that governments lie

Basically by what governments do.

They're bad at covering up their lies.

I can take you to where I work

And I can show you stack after stack

After stack of documents

And I find, in our own government documents,

Nothing but lies.

Nothing but misrepresentation.

Nothing but covering up the truth.

And governments do lie frequently,

And it's my job to find out when they lie.

If you don't step back and look at the bigger picture,

Fundamentally, the empire is not afraid of anyone really

That's running for office.

Whether it's the democrat or the republican that wins,

The core institutions of that necessitate

A brutal military force that backs up the sort of, you know,

Velvet-gloved hand of the free market

Is a given with every single person that runs for office

Or can get the nomination of those parties.

So, you know, even if you have someone that,

In the general election, is perceived to be,

You know, crazy.

Once they sort of start getting those briefings

From the permanent power structure,

The intelligence community,

They all step into line.

Well, in journalism school,

You're taught to be objective,

And objective means

Report accurately what's going on within the beltway.

So, inside the system of power.

If you report that accurately, you're objective.

If you go outside that, you're biased.

Well, plenty of things outside

That this is a narrow concentrated power system.

One of my favorite lines from any film

Is from the film "the usual suspects."

You know, Kevin spacey, amazing as Kaiser Soze,

But at the end of the film, he says,

"the greatest trick the devil ever pulled..."

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled

Was convincing the world he didn't exist.

"Was convincing the world he didn't exist."

You know, you've got crazy people thinking

That the department of homeland security's

Gonna put them in a fema camp somewhere.

You have other people thinking

That Obama's gonna come and take their guns.

That's all a sideshow.

That's all a total sideshow.

The coup already happened

And the most brilliant part about it is

None of these people seem to realize it.

I can draw a line from I.F. Stone

Directly to what I'm doing now.

It makes me sad to think that actually,

He isn't with us and it makes me really hope that...

That the next I.F. Stone or two or three or four

Or 400 are out there now,

Who might be watching this right now, and thinking,

"you know, I can do this."

Because you can do it.

You know, you can do it.

Especially if you... again, do the work.

Do the hard work, but realize that sometimes the best stuff

Is right there in front of your nose,

And you don't even know it.

I've actually written a book you might like better.

It's nice to meet you.

Funding is the key to great investigative reporting.

That doesn't really have a time frame.

It may take you months to get a document

That may take you in many different directions and so,

For me, time is... is equal to the amount of funding,

And funding is equal to the amount of time

That I can spend on something.

I'm working on a project right now

That I've been working on for the past year

And I probably will take another year

Before it's actually broadcast.

If I were working for corporate media,

This story would never air.

It just... I'd never have that luxury

Of being able to develop a story for that length of time.

As independent journalists, I was wondering,

What do you guys think the implications are

Of our news media being reduced

To 140-character sound bites?

Twitter can play an incredible role if used properly

By journalists in debunking myths

Or misinformation.

The flip side is also true,

Which is that it can spread misinformation

Very, very quickly.

I... I think that the future is taking so much

Of what's amazing about the creativity

And innovation of young people

Who are dipping their toes into the water of journalism

And the ideas that they have, and the lack of cynicism,

And we try to meld that with old school muckraking techniques

And slow cooked journalism.

Whoever figures out how to really web those two things

Is gonna create something very special in the media landscape.

Almost my entire life as a journalist

Has been spent in poverty media.

You know, media outlets that have no money,

And we are professional beggars,

And begging can sometimes come in the form

Of asking for funds from... from a foundation

Or it can come in the form of writing a letter

To your family and friends, saying,

"I really want to go to Iraq to be a reporter.

Can you kick in 25 or 50 bucks?"

And that's actually how I financed

The first time I ever went to Iraq,

Was begging my extended family to pitch in

At $25 and $50.

He's come a long way

Since he was pretty much the original volunteer

At democracy now!

Jeremy Scahill.

The fact that I... I now have received this designation

Is a tremendous honor,

And I want to pledge to use this opportunity

To educate a new generation of young journalists

About the incredibly important work of I.F. Stone

And the legacy that he has left all of us

And the challenge that he has left us all

In a very dark time to simply be journalists.

This isn't a career, this isn't a profession.

Journalism is a way of life.

My hope is that we somehow miraculously produce

A generation of young I.F. Stones.

We need to stop keeping up with the Kardashians

And start going back and catching up on I.F. Stone.

Thank you very much.

I think he's really an inspiration in the role

That media can play in the world.

I think the media can be the greatest force

For peace on earth.

Instead it's wielded as a weapon of war,

And that has to be challenged.

I.F. Stone taught us governments lie,

All governments lie, especially in a time of war.

When the media acts as a conveyor belt for the lies,

Why it matters is because lies take lives

And we see the enormous devastation

That came from that

That we still live with today

So many years later.

That came from a media that did not challenge the lies.

Just because you're a journalist

Doesn't mean you check your humanity at the door.

This is... you don't somehow get some pass

To not care about people.

Sometimes there is only one way of seeing a story,

And sometimes the truth is just true.

There's only two types of reporters.

There's those who care,

And those who don't.

Most of 'em don't care, but if you care,

If you are as I was in El Salvador,

Or Gaza or Sarajevo,

Then you are immediately branded as political,

Because if you care,

You can't lie to cover up oppression,

Atrocity, genocide.

And I.F. Stone cared.

The Vietnam war has been a terrible defeat

For all the brand names we believe in.

For general electric and general motors and at&t.

For all the great corporations,

All the great industry that do the push buttons,

And when they... when they turn to war,

They know how to kill people en masse.

And here, down in the jungle,

Way below is this strange creature

That we can't crush.

This strange animal we can't kill.

It's time to look closely at it and see, by god,

It's a human being, and isn't that wonderful

That human beings can resist

All this murderous technology of ours?

Very briefly and in no small measure to remind ourselves,

An observation by stone

And what he thought journalism was all about.

In his words, to write the truth,

To defend the weak against the strong,

To fight for justice, to bring healing perspectives

To bear on the terrible hates and fears of mankind

In the hope of someday bringing about a world

In which man will enjoy the differences of the human garden

Instead of killing each other over them.

If you look you'll find much more.