Return to Transcripts main page

Amanpour

Russia Grants Snowden Temporary Asylum; Awaiting Results of Zimbabwe's Election; A Look at the Global Economy

Aired August 01, 2013 - 15:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

HALA GORANI, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Good evening, everyone, welcome to the program. I'm Hala Gorani, filling in for Christiane Amanpour.

Ladies and gentlemen, Edward Snowden has left the building. After more than a month in transit purgatory at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, Snowden has been granted temporary political asylum in Russia for at least one year.

Snowden, of course the source of blockbuster leaks about secret surveillance programs at America's National Security Agency, the NSA, managed to slip past the media horde that has been waiting for him to leave the airport for the past 39 days. He's now ensconced in an undisclosed location.

The United States said it's, quote, "extremely disappointed by Russia's decision," and that they're even reconsidering whether to proceed with the planned summit between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.

In case you lost sight of it all, here's what Snowden actually revealed. The NSA is Hoovering up vast amounts of telephone data of American citizens. Internet companies cede the government a wide range of digital information for both foreign and domestic targets.

And yesterday we learned of the Xkeyscore program. Government analysts can search through Internet history without prior legal authorization. Snowden has succeeded in kicking off a debate on these secret practices.

In a Senate hearing yesterday, Patrick Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, challenged security officials on the effectiveness of the surveillance and claimed the government is overstating just how many terrorist plots the program's actually foiled. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY (D), VT.: We need to take an equally close look at the phone records program. If this program is not effective, it has to end. So far, I am not convinced by what I have seen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GORANI: So the debate may lead to new reforms at the NSA.

Adm. Dennis Blair was U.S. spy chief under President Obama, serving as his director of national intelligence in 2009 and 2010, when he left his post.

Thank you for being with us, Admiral.

ADM. DENNIS BLAIR, FORMER DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: Good to be here, Hala.

GORANI: What do you make of Edward Snowden now, having been granted asylum in Russia for at least a year? What's your reaction to that (inaudible) what he wanted?

BLAIR: Looks to me like it's sort of a triple play by the Russians, by President Putin himself, who clearly made the decision; by granting asylum, he plays to the xenophobic, anti-U.S. sentiment that he relies on within his regime.

By saying it's temporary, he sort of softens the blow to the United States. And meanwhile, he gives the Russian intelligence services a year to try to learn as much as they can about our intelligence system.

GORANI: You don't think there was any value in the information that Edward Snowden disclosed to the U.S. public? Did they not have a right to know that their government was spying potentially on them when they were aboard or in communications they might have with foreigners outside of the country?

BLAIR: Well, I think a few things in your summary at the top of this (inaudible) a little bit overstated. Hoovering is not a word I would for the court-ordered, court permissioned collection of information, which then stays in the database, which can only be accessed under separate permissions and free access to U.S. Internet companies is not what I would use to describe --

(CROSSTALK)

GORANI: What would you use?

BLAIR: I would use court authorized access to specific threat-based information.

GORANI: But what about this Xkeyscore program? We learned about that yesterday through another "Guardian" article and presumably the source of that was Edward Snowden, that essentially the lines are blurred between U.S. and foreign targets when it comes to the collection of digital information on phone records, Internet records, and that essentially you don't need a warrant with that inaccurate?

(CROSSTALK)

BLAIR: That's inaccurate. The lines are not blurred. They're very - - they're very clear and to collect foreign information, it does not require authorization to collect information, either, about U.S. citizens or to compel a U.S. company, an Internet service provider, to provide information that takes a court order.

GORANI: It's blurred in the sense that if a U.S. --

BLAIR: No, it's not blurred.

GORANI: -- national is conversing with somebody outside of the United States, that could essentially fall outside --

BLAIR: No.

GORANI: -- of the --

BLAIR: That falls inside it.

GORANI: All right.

BLAIR: It's a U.S. person on the phone call or on the communication that requires --

GORANI: So you need a -- you need essentially a warrant from FISA, the court. But that's also a secret court. I mean, nobody can actually oversee or have any access to how those decisions are being made. Is that correct?

BLAIR: Well, it -- I think it strikes a balance between the need for secrecy. You can't have -- you can't have all of the proceedings of a court dealing with intelligence information published the way you can other courts. It helps our enemies and doesn't inform our friends.

GORANI: And what about those who say, look, how many terrorist plots were actually foiled, thanks to this widespeaking -- widesweeping, widespread surveillance program?

BLAIR: The answer is about 50. And the one I'd point to, (inaudible) Najibullah Zazi, intended to do in the New York subway system what the bombers did in the London subway system a few years before. The key of piece of information in stopping that and identifying him -- from him came through the business records FISA program.

GORANI: I think what some of the critics are saying is, look, we're not asking the United States government to disclose operational intelligence here. But as U.S. citizens, we are allowed to know what the government is doing to us, how the government is spying on us. And that program should be at least a topic of public debate.

Do you not agree?

BLAIR: I agree with that completely. I think we can do a much better job of talking in general terms and conceptual terms about this program without revealing the operational details, which are what really help our enemies.

GORANI: But had Edward Snowden essentially not leaked this information to a reporter, we never would have heard of this program.

BLAIR: That's right and that's wrong. I think that the -- I think that both the administration and the intelligence (inaudible) officials, of which I was one -- and I will say that I attempted to take some of the mystery out of it without taking the secrets out of it, which I think is the right way to (inaudible).

GORANI: While you were director of national intelligence?

BLAIR: Yes.

GORANI: How did you go about trying to do that?

BLAIR: Well, I tried to give a number of major speeches about things. And there are lots of other things: covert action, the things that are going on in the intelligence business are so sensational when they come out as leaks. But yet when you take a step back from them and see what they're trying to do, which is protect American people and interests, they're pretty justifiable.

GORANI: And you were President Obama's first director of national intelligence. Was he 100 percent OK with this program, this NSA program?

BLAIR: Well, I'd say he was on balance OK. But all this had -- if we could -- if we could protect Americans without any of these measures that look at (inaudible), we -- it would be great. But we haven't figured out a way to do that. So we have to strike a balance.

GORANI: What is "on balance OK"? What does that mean? I mean, that you had some reservations therefore?

BLAIR: Well, there are actually two sets of -- two sets of safeguards on this one.

Number one is going to the -- going to the database originally requires this -- a FISA court. But then let's say we learn a phone number that seems to be making multiple calls to a terrorist overseas. Then a second set of steps goes to the FBI to find out whose phone number is that. They then have to go and convince a judge in order to do it.

So it's a double court procedure that has to be done. And I think that's pretty good.

GORANI: And that -- but when you read -- and I'm sure you saw "The Guardian" reporting on the other program, the Xkeyscore, is it inaccurate to say that some of this data intelligence gathering can be done without a warrant, that it can just be done by an analyst sitting at a computer terminal essentially? Is that inaccurate?

BLAIR: I think you need (inaudible) collection and analysis. What programs like Xkeystroke (sic) are (inaudible) to do is to analyze information that's already been collected and look for connections.

So the information that an analyst can use a program like that to search has been legally collected, is available in databases. So there's a distinction between collecting it and then trying to find connections which lead to security.

GORANI: And was this a topic of discussion at the White House when you were director of national intelligence with the president?

BLAIR: Right. When we first -- when we first came in, we looked at the programs and the big change that had been made was originally many of these programs had done -- been done by executive order, something that most of us in the new administration completely disagreed with. They should be authorized by Congress; they should be supervised by a court.

And when that was done, which was about 2008, then we were satisfied that there was a good procedure to protect civil rights and privacy.

GORANI: So the way the program operates now, in your opinion, is essentially fair to Americans? It doesn't invade on anyone's privacy, in your opinion? (Inaudible)?

BLAIR: I think the way it's operating now, I am all in favor of additional safeguards that people can think of. I mean, we put in a number that we thought were -- felt were good. If somebody has some additional ones, that would be -- that would be fine.

But I can also tell you, from having watched this program, that intelligence officers just have it stamped on their foreheads that you don't spy on Americans without --

(CROSSTALK)

GORANI: (Inaudible) Americans to trust them essentially?

BLAIR: Well --

GORANI: Blindly (inaudible)?

BLAIR: No, you're asking them to trust Congress. You're asking them to trust a FISA court. You're asking them to trust the Department of Justice. You're asking them to trust the intelligence community.

So there are quite a number of people there who have to say yes on this program. And then, you know, we're not -- we're not -- we're not fascists who go into government service. We're Americans.

GORANI: Well, it's certainly more on the open now.

Adm. Dennis Blair, thank you very much for joining us on the program today.

BLAIR: Nice to be here, Hala.

GORANI: Turning now to a story we have covered extensively this week, Wednesday's hotly contested presidential election in Zimbabwe, where voters are anxiously awaiting the results. It was a tightly fought race with many asking at the poll could finally mark the end of President Robert Mugabe's 33 years in power.

But hopes the vote might produce a decisive result are fast fading today. The country's election commission hasn't released official numbers yet. But Mugabe's camp is already claiming a landslide victory. Mugabe's main rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, alleges widespread vote rigging and says the election is null and void.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN TSVANGIRAI, PRIME MINISTER OF ZIMBABWE: This has been a huge farce. The credibility of this election has been marred by (inaudible) legal violations which affect the legitimacy of its outcome.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GORANI: CNN's Nkepile Mabuse is monitoring events from Johannesburg and joins me live.

Tell us more about when we can expect results, Nkepile.

NKEPILE MABUSE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, the results are supposed to be released within five days of the polling stations' close, Hala. But we've been here before. We must keep in mind that Morgan Tsvangirai, the NDC leader, the opposition leader in Zimbabwe has been trying to dislodge Mugabe since 2002. That's more than a decade.

And in the lead up to this election, at his rallies, he's been saying that Robert Mugabe stole the election in 2002; he stole the election in 2008, Morgan Tsvangirai has been saying. And he's said to his supporters, he's not going to allow Robert Mugabe to steal this election.

And here we are, today, Morgan Tsvangirai saying this election is a farce; he declared it null and void. And the question really is, Hala, what are Zimbabweans going to do going forward? What is next for this troubled country, Hala?

GORANI: Yes, and that is the question, what is next, if it is once again the conclusion of those who've observed this electoral process, that there was once again vote rigging and a lack of transparency in the process.

MABUSE: Exactly. And in the lead up to this election, even regional leaders, men who have been seen in the past as being supportive of President Robert Mugabe, have come out and said that the conditions on the ground in Zimbabwe were not conducive to a free and fair election. In fact they tried to force Mugabe to postpone the election.

Of course, they failed. And questions are being asked, if it was so clear to everyone, including Morgan Tsvangirai, why did the NDC take part in this election? Why didn't they boycott it? Because it was expected that they would come out with such a statement that this election was monumental fraud, as they've called it.

Now the elections have not been officially announced by the Zimbabwe electoral commission. But I'm hearing from people on the ground that the mood in Zimbabwe moved from hope yesterday, when people were lining up to cast their ballots, to despair after Zinoviev declared victory, Hala.

GORANI: All right. Something familiar, sadly, in Zimbabwe. Thanks very much, Nkepile Mabuse in Johannesburg.

And when we come back, great expectations or grand illusion? Here's hope these days that we're seeing a real economic upturn. But when everyone is cheering because the U.S. economy has grown a mere 1.7 percent annually, just how bad are things?

And before we take a break, another look at the growing footprint of the NSA. Beyond the row of houses, you can see the agency's mammoth new facilitate in Utah, codenamed "Bumblehive." It covers 1 million square feet of not-so-secret real estate in a suburb of Salt Lake City.

When completed next month, it will have a storage capacity of metadata measured in zettabytes, a number so vast the NSA doesn't even try to define it, but jokingly called it "a lot of bytes." We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GORANI: Welcome back to the program. I'm Hala Gorani, sitting in for Christiane Amanpour.

Looking at the stock market, you may think the economy is simply booming. For the first time ever, the S&P 500 topped 1,700 points on Thursday. The Dow Jones industrial average also hit a record high. It's one after the other for the Dow.

Stock prices are soaring but it doesn't really match the reality on the streets or for ordinary workers. Employers are hiring at a restrained pace in the United States. Growth either anemic or non-existent in many parts of Europe. Corporations, however, continue to make money. Yet there are few signs that they're investing it back into the economy.

CEOs now earn 273 times the average worker's pay. Who is benefiting from all this money being raked in by companies and what needs to be done for the market to be an accurate reflection of the economy?

Neil Irwin is my next guest. He's a columnist for "The Washington Post," and the author of "The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire."

Neil Irwin, welcome to the program.

NEIL IRWIN, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Thanks for having me.

GORANI: Everybody's cheering plus 1.7 percent GDP growth year-on- year. How bad are things if that's considered great news?

IRWIN: Yes, you know, we look around the world and the United States, we just got this report yesterday, 1.7 percent growth. And people were like that's better than we expected. That's better than the 1 percent the forecasters expected. It's better than Britain's been doing, better than Western Europe, better than Japan.

The truth is none of these places, none of the Western world, none of the industrialized nations are really seeing the kind of growth we need to see, given the depression we're coming out of and the very weak environment that we're coming out of. It would be fine if we were at full employment in all these places. Then you're kind of muddling along; it's OK. But that's not where we are.

GORANI: But so therefore we're still very much -- we're not in a depression or a recession, but we're very much slip-sliding away sideways on these economies in the Western world.

What needs to be done?

IRWIN: You know, the question is, can we get growth that's broader than that, that you mentioned, in the opening, is just coming from financial markets. That's kind of what we've seen, the central banks have been very active, but the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, they're doing all kinds of things to pump money into the global financial markets.

That's helping drive up stock prices, drive up bond prices. What it's not having is big enough impact on is the real economy. And until we see that broader growth, until we see growth coming from industries hiring from kind of broader variety of growth, we're not going to see the broad-based feeling of prosperity.

You know, not too many people actually own stock wealth, stock market wealth is overwhelmingly held by the very wealthy. As long as that's where the growth is coming from, it's not going to feel very good for most Americans or Britons or Europeans.

GORANI: But still corporations are sitting on mountains of cash and when they do end up spending that cash, they don't end up hiring as much as they should be hiring, based on their earnings or quarterly earnings that they're telling Wall Street about.

Is the attention of corporations too short termist? In other words, they want the quarterly earnings to beat the expectations; there's no long- term plan to generate growth and to hire more people.

Is that fair to say?

IRWIN: I think there's something to that. You know, we are in an age of remarkable technological advancement. You know, you can have a gigantic factory, building cars in which there's only a very small number of workers actually manning the machines.

So even as we're seeing rising demand, for example, we've gotten some very good auto sales numbers today in the United States, so lots more autos being sold. But not as many jobs being created to actually build those automobiles.

So we are seeing growth that's happening where a lot of the benefits are accruing to the owners of those machines, the shareholders, rather than the workers who would otherwise get an hourly job putting together those cars.

GORANI: And long term, that's a problem for the economy. You want a vibrant middle class, don't you, if you want long-term healthy growth?

IRWIN: Yes, I think that's true. You know, ultimately the engine of prosperity, the engine of national wealth is having a broad base of people who can earn a living and build savings and all those good things. As long as that's a very concentrated kind of plutocracy, that's not very helpful for the stability of democracy. It's not helpful for kind of having a prosperous nation in the longer term.

GORANI: And the wealth gap is widening and widening and widening. A CEO earns on average almost 300 times the wage of the lowest paid worker in his or her company.

IRWIN: Yes. And part of this has to do with kind of cultural mores and you know, what is kind of understood to be acceptable. Part of it's technological; there are these kind of winner-take-all effects that happen in the information economy where, if you come up with a slightly better widget, you get all the sales and everybody else is shut out.

At the same time, there's a sense that what should governments do to try and ensure that there's broad-based prosperity that all the benefits of advancement don't go to the very (inaudible) --

(CROSSTALK)

GORANI: And what should they --

IRWIN: -- 1 percent, the top (inaudible).

GORANI: -- what should they do here in the United States, when you say the government should do and should not do.

Half the time, you get accusations from depending on which side of the aisle the person sits on, accusations that perhaps you're being too European and socialist and the government should have nothing to do with it and (inaudible) come from the private sector and innovation.

What is the solution?

IRWIN: Well, I think this is the crux of the U.S. political debate right now. Just this week, President Obama's been out there with his own - - his own vision of what building a prosperous middle class would look like, and that involves a lot of worker training things.

That's a lot of money for infrastructure, things that would create these construction jobs, the kinds of jobs that middle income people can have. You know, the Republican vision is more of a let's have low taxes and this will all take care of itself.

GORANI: But I mean, what type of jobs would -- should the United States be trying to create? You know, construction worker jobs, textile jobs, all those industries, for instance, in the manufacturing sector that have gone abroad?

Or should it try to look at new innovation and investing in education and investing in the type of sectors that would lead to the creation of a new industry to be the engine of growth once again?

IRWIN: You know, some of all these. You know, there's -- there is room in education to make sure that American workers are prepared for this global economy. Increasingly, technology is getting better and better at doing the rote jobs, the things that -- not just manufacturing, but also things that used to be clerk jobs, filing, anything like that.

So technology's getting better at that. Question is, can we educate the American workforce to do these higher order thinking, the kinds of skills that are really going to have a role in a modern economy?

GORANI: Now you look at the developing world in countries like China, where a bad year is 6 percent to 7 percent annual growth. And the United States and Europe, where a good year is 1.7 percent or 2 percent growth, which is not enough to create as many as jobs as it would take to truly reduce the unemployment rate.

So is it the -- really the decline now of Western economies? Are we now going to see, going forward, developing countries take over?

IRWIN: I don't know. You know, China, Brazil, these emerging powers, these emerging nations, they have some challenges of their own. Pivoting from the manufacturing driven low wage cost, low labor cost competitive model they've been following, that's sort of run its course.

And eventually they have to figure out how to compete with the U.S. and Europe and these higher order, very sophisticated machinery, airplanes, computers, it's more sophisticated things if they're going to have a standard of living and wealth on the order of the U.S. or Japan or Western Europe.

I think they had the chance to get there, but I think they're further away that some of the -- the fact that China has a very large population makes them seem bigger than they are on per capita terms.

GORANI: Right, on per capita terms, certainly not. But you certainly have there a country that the West is having to deal with, dealing with already economically.

Neil Irwin, thank you so much, of "The Washington Post," the author of "The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire." Thanks very much for being on CNN.

IRWIN: Thanks so much.

GORANI: And after a break, it's the story that shocked the world and promised to change America's gun culture forever, the shooting deaths of 20 children and their six teachers in Newtown, Connecticut. But eight months later, imagine where guns have never been more in demand? That's when we come back.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

GORANI: A final thought tonight: remember Newtown? Back in December, the small Connecticut town was the scene of unspeakable horror when a heavily armed gunman shot and killed 20 little school children and six of their teachers.

At the time, many people assumed it would be the tipping point in America's gun control debate. But nearly eight months later, imagine a world where the demand for gun permits has never been higher, in of all places, Newtown itself.

According to "The Wall Street Journal," applications for pistol permits, a requirement to own rifles and shotguns as well as handguns, have increased sharply since the shooting. In fact, as of last week, more than 200 people in Newtown have received permits this year compared to 171 issued for all of 2012.

And while Newtown remains a worldwide rallying cry for gun sanity, within its own scarred and scared city limits, some residents appear to be arming themselves in record numbers.

That's it for tonight's program. Meantime, you can always contact us at our website, amanpour.com, or find me on Twitter @halagorani. Thank you for watching and goodbye from New York.

END