[000:00:00;00] ah, time action returns here we're going underground. coming up in the show after damning report describes u. k prime minister bars. johnson's pandemic response is one of the most important public health failures. the united kingdom has ever experienced. we speak to the man who has been tracking and tracing the government's failures from the very beginning, and from rendition and onst interrogation techniques and targeted drone assassinations to president biden's illegal deportations of haitian asylum seekers. how our war on terror tools used to terrorize americans, all of them all coming up in today's going underground. but for us, britain's own parliament disclaiming boris johnson stewardship over the corona

virus. catastrophe here represents the worst public health response in history. so is the u. k. government guilty, not just of incompetence but corruption, murder, and cover up. joining me now from livable is one of britain's most renowned public health experts. livable universities. professor john ashton. john, thanks so much for coming. that back on. is it even important? i mean, jeremy hunt, one of the chairs of the committee was implicated in ignoring a previous pandemic response of the health secretary such a java. the 1st comment after the report was really said he hadn't even read the less than a $150.00 pages a report and we have to wait for the big inquiry. that's what the government is saying, what, what's the point of his report? well, i think it's very important because basically the government has tried to kick the inquiry into the long grass and is where it was hoping really this, it would have faded from memory by the time they get round to looking at it

sometime next year. but this is a devastating report, and i think actually it's a credit to hunt this. he was chair of this because he, as you say, he did preside over a failure to act on the, in the exercise in 2016, which identified a lot of weaknesses. and it doesn't really avoid that. he brings out the major points about the lack of preparedness and the failure of non pharmaceutical interventions. you know, the lack of a lack of testing capacity. and the impact on social care with tens of thousands of deaths in occur homes because of patients being discharged comes from hospitals carrying the virus and the impact on, on specific communities. and including the appalling facts about what happened

with people with learning disabilities being given. do not resist to take notice is when they were in hospital and you know, grossly unethical. and the only positive note in the reports is about the vaccine program. and i think actually they do pull their punches on that because at the present time the u. k. is falling behind the european union countries and in vaccination, particularly the teenagers. and we do have a death rate still at the rate of a $130.00 a day about a 1000 to wait. and which is almost the highest in the, in the developed world. as ladies and in a dandy the whole, the death per capita rate in this country is one of the worst in the world. i'm so, i mean on, on your personal experience and reminders how you made it clear in march of 2020, that the government was making the failures outlined in this latest report an hour

. in fact, i mean anyone normally watching a main bbc discussion program, fiona bruce, the presenter, appeared to try and shut you up on television in that headline said things like run t left wing public health, the man talk to rubbish. that kind of thing. well, what do you think in retrospect about the fact or you were treated on say that maybe see about when you tried to raise the issues actually now coming out of the report in the past few days, i was treated calling lee. i haven't had an apology. stephen barclay, the government ministers at the treasury, it was on the sky refused to apologize. in that question time program, i've time base afterwards he had over 20 minutes of the speaking time. i had about 14, but fiona bruce kept shutting me up and bringing him back in. and i feel completely vindicated to having been an inconvenient witness at that time. and all is the

detail in this record, this week is to be found, or most of us to be found in my book, blinded by corona, which detailed the 1st 6 months of the handling of the pandemic by the british government. now, as you know, the government ministers, some of whom are abolishing some who aren't. and as you are safe, even barclay now, johnson doughty of lancaster. whatever that is, came was the 1st to come out of being sent out by the government to defend the government. and you had been saying that i don't know, they weren't looking at se, asia, they weren't looking at these things. is it group? think? is it incompetent? is it murder? what, what, what has been going on with those? and you know, it is. and so show murder. oh, so many tens of thousands of people have died in the u. k, unnecessarily. because of incompetence and arrogance. not just by the government, but by the government's advisors. remember,

we had an advisor deputy chief medical officer saying that am testing didn't matter in the u. k. it was only a matter of the developing countries and that mask wearing would make it worse as social distance thing was not taken seriously. you know, the one meters to me says the academic advisors you said was okay to go ahead with the athletic home address matches and fields. and the child knew festival. people were only at the sporting events for a short time. you and to which climate there are, where if you ever meet with our scientific, i mean obviously using the same evidence and come to different conclusions. is that just the nature of scientific inquiry, or are these advisors allied to some people? call it a class war? this corona virus response, or they at to allied to big pharma. you mentioned jenny harris. of course, baroness dido harding, marriage atoria and p head of an h. s. improvement. now,

she seems to have disappeared from view and we had tens of billions more than the justice department budget, more than the home of his budget. more than that scientific research budget spent on tracking traits. what was going on and what should happen to these people? well, if you said her, well, it is a so social murder, by negligence, incompetence, and arrogance. but the corruption of the issue of vast contracts, but billions of pounds to friends, to cronies, to people who've been met in the pub. and this kind of thing, you know, i'm sorry, but democracy in this country is under threat when we have a government that behaves in this reckless fashion with, with public trust. will you say democracy when you talk about the success of the vaccine program and some people have made it clear that actually that's a legacy of socialist 90. 48 government in terms of any just planning that still

retains a some of what it was meant to be in the, in the forty's, even after all the privatization over the years are estrada said, you know, the reason why we got vaccination so good in this country and so well are, well we've done, it's greed and capitalism. he then and that was to back benches. he then kind of withdrew it. and then people said it was just a joke. what, what did you make of the fact that day he joked about the reason or vaccination rated certainly in the early stages was in it, the envy of the world was green capitalism. well, you know that competitiveness that is very important when it's tempered with social goals, seems to have been and bent in this last 12 months in different ways. and you remember late the jingoism, the nationalistic thing about being the 1st to vaccinate, even though it meant we finished up buying large quantities. alaska is anika vaccine,

which turned out not to be suitable for the younger age groups. and actually we were short of defies of vaccine for quite a long time, which meant we weren't able to roll out the vaccine to the younger age groups as fast as we might have done. and so even though we got off to a head start due to the efforts of the scientists at different universities and medical schools, we've actually thrown us away and we fallen behind the other european countries. i was, i say the death rate is still running at about a 1000 a week despite the vaccination program. if you add up the people who still haven't had to vaccines and particularly the teenagers and the children where we haven't even discussed vaccinating primary school, it's yes, there is still about 35 percent of the u. k. population. this has not had to vaccines taking a total population approach. that means the vaccine, the virus can continue to circulate. and we may yet guess another nasty

variance of the virus turning up within hours of the report being released. and they just digital was tweeting that they're tracking trace app had gone down in some way. what would you say to any of the consultants who got some of this 37000000000 pounds a tracking trace budget watching this program? i mean is, did they just, did they take the money in good faith or was it blood money? it is good money. i don't know whether they can look at themselves in the mirror and you know, some of these people have become, well, see beyond your wildest dreams, almost overnight, in the last 12 months, on the back of the worst pandemic for a 100 years. how they can live with themselves. i just don't know. now, you've alluded to the sewing down a vaccination among certain demographics. what are the dangers this winter? are we going to face locked out?

i hope we don't have the lock down, but it's a possibility that they're most likely scenario this winter is that the national health service is going to be under massive pressure. and they will be backing up with patients into the community. sick people having to be cur home because there isn't as for them and they on a chest. and you know, it said that the n h s didn't fall over last year. but actually, there are millions of people who have not had the treatment that they needed to have over the last 18 months because the hospital service had to be diverted to the cove. it and many people will die because they didn't get that cancer treatment in time. so in the since the n h s did fall over because the n h s didn't have the resilience. and after a long standing issue of not having invested properly in the community and in public health and in home care and in general practice. and that distortion goes

back many decades with our infatuation with hospitals rather than building up the health services from the grassroots, from the neighborhood and community. yeah, something interesting, right at the beginning the excel center is previously used for selling arms to countries were staffed by soldiers to think there was an idea that we should put into the public imagination. the idea of militarization will save us rather than the health service. well, you know, the new agency that's replaced public health, england at the so called security health security agency. they've got power, military uniforms. what, why would that be? i wonder, but i think it must be based on the american public health service where they were military uniforms on friday. and just very briefly, barbara johnson can't depend on the nurses,

the poor to is the lowest paid in the n h s. despite the de facto pay card issued by the government to come through this with all the pressures you outlined. i worked on a friday in liverpool vaccinating with a fantastic group of nurses who were drawn from all parts of the national health service in liverpool. many of them were working on intensive care over the last year, dealing with dying patients from cove it. they are an amazing group of nurses, amazing group of health workers, and they will, they will turn out into their last breath if they, if they need to. they are amazing people, but that many of our staff are exhausted. many of them are suffering from post traumatic stress because of the things they've seen and been through over the last 18 months. and you know, we are risking at the breakdown of this of our house service because of our neglect of the health and safety, a well being of our own staff professor john ashton,

thank you. after the break land of the free or kingdom of the president is american democracy, one of the nearly 1000000 victims of the war on terror. all this, i'm all coming up in part 2 of going underground. ah. join me every thursday on the alex salmon. sure. and i'll be speaking together for the world politics sport business. i'm sure business. i'll see you then. mm hm. it's been decade since the fall of spain's fascist regime. but old wound still haven't healed or anything going on. because on the coming out to you or michael freedom. okay. give me support for calling me. in the past with

thousands of newborn babies were torn from their mothers and given away and forced adoption really bottom on are you with my own global illness to this day? mother still search for grown children, while adults look in hope for their birth parents. and welcome back to day moscow hosts international jokes on afghanistan in the aftermath of nato's defeat, after the international criminal court, new british job judge cancelled investigations into alleged u. s. war crimes the to does the i. c, c's decision to de, prioritize, war crimes, give caught launch to washington breaking international law. joining me now is professor karen greenberg, also of new book, subtle tools, the dismantling of american democracy from the war on terror to donald trump. professor karen greenberg, thanks for coming on going underground, given the extraordinary rendition and water boarding drones strikes,

we saw joe biden's drone strike killing 7 of cob, over the afghan withdrawal. subtlety isn't the 1st thing that comes to mind. what are these subtle tools in the title? of your new book. okay. yes that's, that's one of the things they're not, some things are not so settled. but my idea is that all the policies that you've mentioned, whether it's drone tag renditions, to torture, et cetera were what we saw. but always just as important, if not more important, was how they were done. and the tools that were used to create these policies until the united states recognizes these tools and addresses those. we are still vulnerable to the kinds of excesses from laws and norms that we encountered and suffered in the wake of the task at $911.00. because some might say that way before 911. these tools were being used in this fascination strikes. i don't know che guevara, that assassination. these things happened all the time. why, after 911,

did they even need to have some structural basis in which they could attack people, individual nations, in the way that we've seen since 911. because because so much of what had been done often in the covert beer and within, you know, agencies that were had, those kinds of powers were broadened across government. so one of the subtle tools i talk about is, and perhaps to your point to lead, settle with secrecy, the way in which secrecy was used in the war on terror too. and yes, it had been used before in the vietnam war, for example. and many other times to do things in the name of the american people that they did not know about reached new levels in terms of its implementation. it's, it's implementation, but it's also it's made into law. the department of justice declared illegal. the use of enhance the care engagement techniques, which war torture. so the,

the use of secrecy as, as a parent emetic shift in terms of how frequently, how often and how broadly across the government it was used is a different level than what happened before. so it's not a brand new tool, it was just a tool that, that many more were agreed to use given the trauma of 911 and use the phrase in on the interrogation. one of your 1st subtle jewels is the degradation of language. i don't suppose langley is full of people reading, dairy, and french post structuralist. why is the degradation of language so important as a tool used by the united states? move joshua, complicate to me. this is the most interesting of all the tools, perhaps, and is one that feeds the other tools that i mentioned. the abuse of language and in particular, the use of language is in precise, is what allowed 4 major transformations within the culture of governance.

governance in the united states. so for example, the authorization for the use of military force from 2001 which really was about the use of troops in afghanistan. when did not name an enemy did not have a time limit, did not name or refer to the end hostilities, and did not have a geographical limit. this is encountered distinction to prior authorization to the use of force and prior declarations of war in u. s. history and what that enabled that in precision, in language that refusal to the specific did was to enable the united states and each successive president to use the authorization in countries around the world. if he, if, basically with the idea that this was related somehow to terrorism, and even though we've pulled out of afghanistan now the 2001 authorization that authorized that invasion and the sending of troops afghanistan still persists. so

it is a tool that president do not want to get rid of even joe biden, who has shown his intention and desire to really bring to an end of this period of the war on terror that was started with the attacks of $911.00. now we know that when mike bombay was said, non hostile or hostile, non state intelligence agency referring to wiki leaks. subsequently, we've now heard about cia plaza, kidnap julian assad, gum bottles in london. people involved in the songs case and people certainly what journalists said, why didn't we realize that he was actually giving a sort of code in his press conference. you talk about the way enemy belligerence mean, and i mean, competence of the biden administration or they, they changed the obama administration change some of the terms of the bush administration. so obama came into office, very cognizant of the of the kind of excess is that those spoke is about. and from

the very beginning he tried to address secrecy. he tried to make rock of procedures go back to sort of respecting a normal vetting of issues. and potential policies and to clarify some of the language. however, even the best intentions under obama went awry in this particular respect. in part because it was some of these were useful tools, secrecy being one of them. but also, and also language, the devastation of language as you referred to earlier. assassination, you know, these persisted as, as a way of redefining assassination during the drone killer and chief, i mean, is it the road to hell, paved with good intentions? if you think that the drawn strikes and so they just became very, very useful tools that nobody had wanted to give up on. and my point of the book is that leaving them on the table is what gave you extra powers to donald

trump, who was somebody who from the beginning made it clear, he did not respect process. he saw how process getting away. he did not respect norms. he was willing to push aside laws when it suited him, and so let me just give some examples. and 1st of all, see took secrecy to new levels, levels that hadn't existed even in the early days of the war on terror. he refused to have notes taken at some very significant in meetings. as john bolton report, he refused to have documents created to begin with not just notes on meetings, but elsewhere. for example, at the border where the separation of families was not documented. and so we uniting families knew we knew what our hard challenge it was going. i mean, you stop, stop for a 2nd. i have in this book it's very clear how you explain on 911 legislation and degradation of language. all these other tools are then somehow brought home to your southern board. yeah, exactly. there's so much that goes on in terms of immigration policy and the

southern border that are the tools that we use one and i just and taking secrecy to new levels by destroying. and so there is an evidence there that listen, it happened in the past. it happened in a number of cases in the warren care, but here it became an over policy. that was, it was part of a pattern. and so other things at the board that were also interesting, you want to talk about the degradation of language, the intention of the decision to criminalize of these over stays. and to criminalize in undocumented status meant the ratio of the distinction between criminal and non criminal immigrants. or migrants, and so that was a way in which language was again degraded. there was no legal distinction and you could be deported if you were a visa over stay or if you had committed a criminal act. i mean, is, is by the actually not using subtle tools because overseas, what he's illegally devoted 4000 nations in violation of the actual un refugee

convention. whereas trump was trying to do things by the law or using subtle tools . i don't think you were trying to do things by the law. i think trump was saying, look, i can do this, i'm president and president after the war on terror. have gotten away with an awful lot and i'm just going to take it one step further in the ways i want to in the ways i want to do it, for example, and not having a distinction between the white house and the apartment of justice when it comes to biden, and i can talk about this last one in particular. i think he recognizes very clearly what some of these tools are. that doesn't mean he's gonna be able to fix things entirely. i think the southern border is well, why? why do i mean anyone watching the tv of the scenes on this other border by the us history on this? and then we saw these horrific scenes on the southern border and it's much worse, isn't it? yeah, the scenes on the southern border, this is the biggest challenge for president by bigger than afghanistan, bigger than

a number of other issues. and they haven't been able to sort it out yet. they have not, you know, they've tried everything and tried in the camps. they've tried, you know, was it with democrats, you're saying they have good intentions, but they are unable to get what they want. when it's republicans, you're saying, when is the support piece? it's a piece of scholarship, but i mean, you seem to be ready by a grad. things are worse. trump than ever invaded any other countries. i think it's a continuum and i think that the presidency since 911 has suffered tremendously in terms of checks and balances in the presidency, has been empowered in ways that certainly the founding fathers didn't have in mind . and that, and prior periods in american history has been pushed back against both, you know, for republicans and democrats. i think all the presidents now are in this era where the presidency,

that congressional restraints on the presidency and judicial restraint on the presidency. our at an all time low. and that change dramatically after the war on terror in part because of the, the, the subtle tools and the courts allowing imprecise language rather than insisting on precise language as well. law is based on congress not doing its duty in terms of demanding that transparency rather than secrecy and demanding its role in oversight of different agencies that had to do with national security. and that this re definition of the presidency based on the subtle tools, had led to a period which i will call the 21st century democrats and republicans alike of accountability. that is a road to an unhealthy continuing and maybe institutionalizing in ways we can't fix an unhealthy democracy. so for example, when you have, when you have a president, when you have presidents that authorize the use of torture and, and,

and a number of people that write the law, rewrite the law, help implemented, etc. and there is no accounting for it. and a report that is written by the senate is kept basically under wraps and some copies of it destroyed that is not accountability. and so i think these are the tools that allow on accountability to have an imprecise language, bureaucratic dysfunction in a way that bleeds the distinctions between different departments, for example, department of justice and department of homeland security to speak to your southern border issue. so it is not just a democrat and republican thing, it really has to do with changes in the culture of governance. and well, i do think that obama and biden have expressed verbally. i want to fix this, as opposed to donald trump saying, you know, not wanting to fix it. let me say that president bush, at the end of his presidency, there were things he wanted to. one of them was he wanted to close one tunnel which

was outside the law outside of norms and which relied on many of the subtle tools. and he was very clear that he released more than 500 individuals on panama. and he publicly said that he would like to seek one time a post. so it's not a blanket, you know, good, bad, or indifferent. but my issue is the transformation of the presidency. and i think everybody who, who has that office should be mindful of what these tools are and, and it's very hard to give up. power is particularly when some of them are secret, particularly when there's a precedent for using them, or whether or not it's been better to the courts or congress. and so, you know, my issue is the culture of governance and not, and i'm, yes, i would like to think that president biden will be able to dispense with some of these tools, but it's early in the presidency. so we will say, professor garen greenback, thank you for subtle tools is out now that's of sure, we'll be back on sunday and you can talk to my social media and let us know if you

think washington's warrant tara continues to vote a ah . is there now a dual system of justice many think so for example, a former senior f b i of issue lied repeatedly to his bosses, but now is exonerated. but a former head of the national security council did not lie to be f, b i and his life was destroyed. where is the justice in that the world is driven by dreams shaped banks. concur. some of those

with dares sinks we dare to ask ah, patients in the u. k. are reportedly having to wait up to 50 hours for a bed and accidents and emergency wards. that's is the pandemic puts fresh pressure on hospitals. every step of the way that mismanaged the crisis aside from the vaccine roll re personnel to any faith in the current government. german police war and the countries border with poland is at risk of collapse amid rising flows of migrants crossing into the e. u. from bellow roofs, brussels is not moving to tackle the influx, though still relying on sanctions and refusing to even talk to him in u. s. social media giant facebook has to shell out millions of dollars in