And I think this is really the critical point that I hope everybody listening thinks about, is there is this growing movement now on the left, in Europe and in the United States, to support censorship as a solution to this kind of growing far-right movement: "Well, let's just ask and plead with Silicon Valley executives to keep fascists offline, or let's hope our government will not allow fascists to speak." And aside from the fact that I think it's incredibly counterproductive, because, generally, when you try and censor movements, you only make them stronger, the premise of this idea, as we can see in this case, is really warped. I mean, the idea that Silicon Valley executives or U.S. government officials are going to use censorship power to help and protect marginalized groups, I think, is absurd.
In almost every case when we see these entities using censorship powers, they're using them to target marginalized groups and serve the most powerful. That's why Facebook blocks Palestinians but not Israelis, because Palestinians have no power, and Israelis do. And the more we empower these entities to censor, the more we're going to be endangering marginalized groups, because, ultimately, that's who's going to end up being suppressed.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Glenn Greenwald, you had this amazing moment in the House and the Senate recently, the hearings with the heads of Google and Twitter and Facebook, where you had this demand on the part of the Republicans and the Democrats for censorship, the Democrats using the pretext of Russia, saying, "Why didn't you delete these accounts?"
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah. I mean, this idea that somehow our political salvation rests in placing into the hands of these already obscenely powerful Silicon Valley executives the further power, which they don't even want to have, to determine what political messages are allowed to be heard on the internet and which ones aren't, to determine who is allowed to communicate on the internet and who isn't, is incredibly menacing.
Just last week, Twitter promulgated a new policy, in response to exactly the kind of demands, Amy, that you were just describing. And this is their policy. They said you are no longer allowed to use Twitter to advocate or incite violence, except if you want the violence to be done by governments or military. So, you're allowed to go on Twitter now and say, "I demand that the U.S. government nuke North Korea out of existence." You're allowed to go on Twitter and say, "I want the Israeli government to incinerate every person in Gaza." But what you're not allowed to do is to go on Twitter and say, "As a Muslim, I believe that it's the responsibility of Muslims to fight back against aggression," or, "As a North Korean, I want to be able to defend against imperialism."
So, under the guise of begging Silicon Valley to save us from bad political speech, what has actually happened is that the most powerful factions are empowered to say whatever they want, and the least powerful factions are the ones who end up censored. And that's always, no matter how well intentioned it is, the result of these kind of calls for censorship.
AMY GOODMAN: And in the end of your piece, you talk about: "[W]ould Facebook ever dare censor American politicians or journalists who use social media to call for violence against America's enemies?" Answer that question, Glenn Greenwald...
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. So, if you look at, for example, Facebook's rationale for why they censored the president of the Chechen Republic, they said, "We had to do it because he was put on a list of people who were sanctioned by the U.S. government." Well, just last month, the Iranian government issued a list of sanctions that included a whole bunch of Canadian officials. The Russian government has issued lists of people who were sanctioned that includes U.S. businesspeople and U.S. officials, as well. Obviously, in a million years, Facebook would never honor the sanctions lists of the Russian government or the Iranian government and remove U.S. officials or Canadian businesspeople. It's purely one-sided. It's only serving the dictates of powerful governments.
And, you know, you can go onto Twitter or you can go onto Facebook pretty much every single day and see calls for extreme amounts of violence to be directed against Iranians, to be directed against people in Gaza or the West Bank, to be directed against people in the Muslim world. And obviously Facebook and Twitter are never going to remove that kind of incitement to violence, because that's consistent with the policy of Western governments. The only people who are going to be removed are people who are otherwise voiceless, who are opposed to Western foreign policy. And that's why it's so ill-advised, so dangerous, no matter how well intentioned, to call for Silicon Valley executives or the U.S. government to start censoring and regulating the kind of political speech we can hear and can express.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Glenn, I wanted to turn to a topic that you've written quite a bit about, the ongoing Mueller investigation over possible collusion between the Trump administration and Russia in attempting to influence the 2016 election. And you've been especially critical of how the corporate and commercial media have dealt with this issue, especially the now-debunked supposed expose' that CNN issued several months ago about an email that seemed to prove that collusion. Could you talk about that and how you're seeing this, as we're heading into 2018 and the continued development of the Mueller investigation?
GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. So, I think a couple of things are important to point out, which is that, from the beginning, I think everybody -- I certainly include myself in this and everybody that I've read and heard -- has always said that it's obviously possible that the Russian government was the primary culprit when it came to the hacking of the emails of John Podesta and the DNC. It's certainly something that the United States and the Russians do to one another and have done to one another for decades, and so nobody should put it past Putin or the Russians to have done it in this case. And it's certainly also possible that there were people in the Trump campaign who became aware after the fact that this was done and who somehow helped to decide how this information was going to be disseminated.
But I think, given the implications that this issue has, in terms, number one, of the relationship between two extremely dangerous nuclear-armed powers, which is Moscow and Washington, who, on many occasions in the past, have almost obliterated the planet through an exchange of nuclear weapons, and who are, in many places in the world, at loggerheads with one another, as well as the climate in Washington, in which any kind of interaction with Russians now becomes something that is a ground for suspicion -- what I've always said is that we have to be very careful, as journalists and as citizens, to make sure that we don't get ahead of ourselves in terms of the claims that we're making, that we have to adhere to the evidence that is available, before we decide that official claims from the CIA and the NSA and the FBI, agencies with a long history of lying and deceit and error -- before we accept them as true.
And one of the things that we've seen over the past year or year and a half is large media outlets, in case after case after case after case, acting very recklessly, publishing stories that turned out to be completely false, that needed to be retracted, that got discredited, which is the thing that then enables Donald Trump to try and encourage people not to trust the media. So, no matter your views on Russia -- and I think it's really dangerous that the U.S. and Russian relations are probably at their worst point as they've been since the fall of the Soviet Union, something that nobody should think is a good thing -- despite all the claims that Trump was going to serve the interests of the Russians, the reality is, the two countries are at great tensions.
No matter your views on that, I think that we all have an interest in making sure that our political discourse and that our media reports are grounded in reality and fact. And while Mueller, thus far, has produced four separate indictments, they all have been for either lying to the FBI or for money laundering. None of them have alleged any actual criminal collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. And so, what I have said all along, and what I still say, is that we ought to let an investigation proceed 'til the end, look at all of the evidence, and only then reach conclusions about what happened, because it's very dangerous to use supposition and speculation and all kind of guesswork to make accusations that can have really serious consequences. And I think we've seen the dangers of that over the last year.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to this issue of collusion with Russia, that was also a key focus in President Trump's recent, rare interview with reporter Michael Schmidt of The New York Times, which took place in the Grill Room of Trump's golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Near the beginning of the interview, Trump launched into a discussion about Russian collusion. The Times quotes Trump as saying, quote, "Virtually every Democrat has said there is no collusion. There is no collusion. And even these committees that have been set up, if you look at what's going on -- and in fact, what it's done is, it's really angered the base and made the base stronger. My base is stronger than it's ever been. Great congressmen, in particular, some of the congressmen have been unbelievable in pointing out what a witch hunt the whole thing is. So, I think it's been proven that there is no collusion. And by the way, I didn't deal with Russia. I won because I was a better candidate by a lot." Trump goes on to repeatedly say, throughout the interview, "There was no collusion." If you can talk about what he says, and talk about his attacks on Mueller? I mean, some say, if he would leave Mueller alone, Mueller will ultimately vindicate him.
GLENN GREENWALD: So, there's' a lot going on there. So, first of all, Trump's statement that all Democrats acknowledge there's no collusion is just a typical Trump lie. There are all kinds of Democrats -- in fact, most Democrats -- who say that they believe there was collusion. What he is right about, though, is that none of them thus far have presented evidence of collusion. And there's a point in the interview where he says he saw Dianne Feinstein last month on television admitting that there's no evidence of collusion. That's not actually what she said. But it is really instructive to go and watch Dianne Feinstein, who is the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who gets regular briefings from the CIA about the evidence. She did go on CNN last month and was asked a series of questions about whether she's seen evidence about a whole variety of theories of collusion, and she essentially said, "No, I've never seen any of that evidence." She went on CNN in May and explicitly said, after a CIA briefing, that she's not aware of any evidence of actual collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Now, you have, in this interview, Trump doing what he does, which is constantly lying about what Democrats have said, about the nature of the investigation. I think his attacks on Mueller are incredibly stupid, for the reason that you said, although, hopefully, Mueller, if he's the professional that everyone says he is, won't be affected by those attacks, he'll simply follow the evidence.
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