“One of the underlying themes in these reports is a combination of amnesia and hypocrisy, and the report gives very little taste of context of the times,” says Mike about the Senate’s report on the CIA’s post-911 interrogation practices. Watch Mike and NBC News foreign correspondent Richard Engel discuss the report in more detail on Morning Joe on MSNBC.
“Who would not go extra lengths if they were faced with another 9-11? I don’t know what my decision would have been had I’d been there,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) tells Mike and the Morning Joe team in response to whether he thinks the CIA’s interrogation practices as detailed in the Senate report can be considered torture. Hear his full comments here.
“What surprised me most was just how unprepared the CIA was for the job it was given of interrogating these suspects,” says The Washington Post’s David Ignatius in conversation with Mike and the Morning Joe team about the damming allegations in the Senate’s CIA torture report and President Bush’s questionable awareness of interrogation practices. Hear his comments here.
“No, legally not!” says Gen. Michael Hayden (Ret.), former NSA and CIA director, in response to Mike’s question on whether post-911 CIA interrogation techniques were torture. “I refer you to [President Bush’s] autobiography in which he says he personally approved the waterboarding,” Gen. Hayden adds in answer to allegations that President Bush was not aware of the interrogation methods employed. Only on Morning Joe.
The Morning Joe team discusses Mike’s recent article for The Daily Beast, “The Wildly Peaceful, Human, Almost Boring, Ultimately Great New York City Protests for Eric Garner.” Hear more of Mike’s first-hand experience here.
Fresh off his Major League Soccer Cup victory, soccer star Robbie Rogers drops by Morning Joe to talk about his recently released memoir “Coming Out to Play” and becoming an unintended but proud role model for gay athletes. Hear his interview here. Only on MSNBC.
Mike on Morning Joe today responds to President Barack Obama’s approval ratings, which is currently below forty percent. “Don’t you get the sense that a big part of [Obama] doesn’t care (about the approval ratings)? asks Mike. Hear the rest of Mike’s reaction here. On MSNBC.
“[The CIA] knew they were doing something they shouldn’t be doing,” Sen. Angus King (I-ME) tells Mike in response to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s recent report on the CIA’s interrogation practices. On MSNBC.
In regard to Sec. of State John Kerry’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and authorizing the use of military force against ISIS, Mike asks Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA): “How do you declare war on an ideology?” Hear Sen. Kaine’s answer on Morning Joe.
The story of a mother, her son, the police who protected them, and the peaceful protest that brought them all together.
Alice Domingues came through the big crowd gathered last Wednesday night at New York City’s Columbus Circle, a container of Starbuck’s hot chocolate in her right hand as she held her son Micah’s hand even more firmly with her left. Earlier in the evening they took the train from the Bronx in order to see the Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, but were unable to get through police barricades set up at West 50th street, so they walked up Sixth Avenue in order to catch another train home.
“I can’t believe this,” she was saying, her voice hard to hear above the crowd noise.
“The marchers?” she was asked.
“No,” she said. “How much they charge in that place for hot chocolate.”
Alice wore a black nylon rain jacket that looked as if it was ill prepared to deal with the coming chill. She was young, perhaps in her mid twenties and clearly lives in that state of limbo created by the country’s inability to deal with the issue of immigration. Micah is 10 years old and he had a coat geared to the season, a Patagonia winter jacket with a hood.
“Like the hot chocolate, ” his mother said, laughing. “Expensive.”
She and her son had braved the madness within the Starbucks at the corner of Broadway and 60th as she bought a hot chocolate for the boy. She decided on the spur of the moment to join about 500 strangers who were marching north on the broad boulevard, their each step a statement of outrage over the refusal of a Staten Island grand jury to indict a New York City police officer in the sidewalk death of Eric Garner.
He died in July after being grabbed around the throat by a cop and wrestled to ground where the breath flew out of him. He was pinned to the cement for his refusal to go along with an arrest for selling loose cigarettes. The entire scene was caught on tape with a cell phone.
Now, mother and son started to walk. The crowd around them was as diverse as you will find: old, young, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, loud, proud, peaceful and oddly inviting. The reason they were in the street—attracting others to join—was that the grand jury’s act was thought to be so offensive to both common sense and eyesight.
A company of police officers surrounded the floating protesters. They were both in front of and behind the parade of people, making sure the marchers were safe from traffic, blocking off intersections as the peaceful legions proceeded toward Lincoln Center, posing no threat to anyone as they gave voice to a municipal outrage that would soon swell well beyond the borders of New York’s boroughs.
Ironically, the cops moving in the same wave were just as inclusive as the protesters: young, middle-aged, white, black, Asian and Hispanic, their every step non-threatening, their eyes non judgmental.
The New York City police department is more representative of the city it serves than most law firms, university faculties and media companies. According to the latest numbers, the membership of the NYPD is 47 percent white, 17 percent black, 29 percent Hispanic and percent Asian. Within the department there are officers who can speak or understand more than 60 foreign languages. Despite the actions of a flawed few, it is arguably the finest professional police force in the world.
Of course, the big difference between us and them, the eternal divide really, is that police have the power to use three simple words that separate them from any of us: “You’re under arrest.”
Cops can deprive people of their freedom. They are sworn to serve and protect. They work for us and they belong to, basically, a service industry, laboring in conditions that are sometimes threatening, often dangerous yet interesting. Cops, more than firefighters, EMT’s or other public safety employees, almost always get the first glance of the human condition at the worst, most lethal moments; nobody calls a cop with good news. A fire truck roars down a city street and people cheer its arrival. A cruiser shows up and eyes narrow and citizens often withdraw.
Wednesday evening and through the weekend people kept marching. The contagion spread across the country, to Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and other cities where the fact of no indictment in the death of Eric Garner was thought to be incomprehensible and absurd.
And because of who he was—a black man—and how he died—in the hands of the police—the historical scar of race relations in America once more became the obvious story. Race is the San Andreas Fault of our culture as well as our history. Its fissures are forever present and not that far beneath the surface of every day life. To deny that is to risk being labeled delusional.
White folks can talk or write forever about being black in America without coming close to grasping the sometimes ugly aspects of life for too many back adults and their children. The idea that white commentators can so glibly prattle on about being black is as preposterous as the notion that seeing Saving Private Ryan makes you a combat veteran.
Who is more likely to be eyeballed in a jewelry store? In the aisle of Dick’s Sporting Goods? Waiting in line at an ATM? Walking at night on a quiet city sidewalk? Whose 17-year-old is instructed by a mother or father to keep his or her hands in plain view if a cop pulls them over for a busted tail light?
When he died, Eric Garner was a 43-year-old guy with a lot of health issues and too little money. He held no job. Like so many of the poor, he measured his future by hours and days. How much cash did he need to make it to supper? To the weekend? Before he became a legitimate symbol of suppressed and simmering outrage, he was like so many others among the battalions of poor across this country: a product of a two-tiered education system where the poor, black and white, are too often sentenced to inferior public schools where dreams go to die.
Now, the parade of protesters had reached Lincoln Center and the Wednesday night air was cold and constant and Alice Domingues’ son Micah had finished his cup of expensive hot chocolate. The cops blocked traffic coming down Columbus on to Broadway to let the peaceful march proceed, and Alice Domingues took the boy’s hand and headed toward the subway at West 65th to go uptown to the Bronx.
“How you doin’ kid?” a young policeman asked him, smiling.
“Okay,” the boy replied.
“Merry Christmas,” the cop said to both mother and son, making sure they got through the crowd, watching as they disappeared down the subway steps and toward home.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/08/human-moments-at-the-eric-garner-protests.html
“Peter King is flat out wrong in that observation…” says Mike on Morning Joe in response to King justifying a NY policeman’s actions in the strangling of Eric Garner. Watch the clip and the Morning Joe team’s reaction here.
“The crowd was truly inclusive… they were actually an inviting crowd, and the police were terrific last night in protecting the crowd,” says Mike of his personal experience being at a protest last night in response to the decision to not indict the New York Police Officer who was shown strangling Eric Garner on video.
Mike, Willie Geist and Donnie Deutsch discuss the protests that took place last night in response to the decision to not indict the New York police officer who was shown on tape fatally strangling Eric Garner. Mike says: “Once you leave a police department like New York or Philadelphia or even Boston… police departments have to get to the point where they reflect more the community that they serve. You look at the sides of police cars and it says ‘to protect and to serve.” They work for us, and that seems to have gotten out of hand in some cities. New York City is still the finest police department in the world.”
Mike asks Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA): “Is there any possibility that the Republican dominated Congress will introduce another stimulus package to rebuild this badly battered country’s infrastructure?” Hear her response here.
Mike and Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) discuss the current state of the US and the call for change that has been more apparent in recent months amid protests and tragedy across the country. Congressman Ellison is optimistic . Hear his comments here.
Mike and the Morning Joe team discuss Dana Milbank’s Washington Post op-ed, “Obama Won Immigration Fight.” Mika Brzezinski says of the possibility of President Obama throwing out his previous executive order on immigration, “…[Republicans] could pass something that perhaps wouldn’t fly earlier. They could pass something that perhaps they really like.”
Mike on a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “A Technocrat for Defense,” which mentions the potential for President Obama to nominate Ashton Carter as Defense Secretary. Mike says of the difficulty of the job, especially in regard to the strained relationship between the US Military, the Pentagon and the White House, “Ashton Carter might be able to help out… I think he gets along with the military and I think he’s a strong enough guy.”
Mike asks David Rothkopf, author and CEO/Editor of The FP Group, about the ISIS threat, its potential parallels to 9-11 and the chronic fear in the US since the tragic 9-11 attacks: “How much of this fear is instilled in us because of what happened on September 11, and has caused somewhat of a paralysis in our approach to the 21st century?” Hear Mr. Rothkopf’s answer here.
The Morning Joe team discusses additional rape allegations against Bill Cosby. Mike says, “Clearly his career is over, all of this evidence is more than just anecdotal, and it’s a sad story for all involved…”
Mike Barnicle talks to Alexia Campbell about her recent National Journal article “How Silicon Valley Created America’s Largest Homeless Camp.” She says, “It was really surprising for me to talk to people that could have been you or me… people with college degrees who had found themselves there, the safety net had just fallen from under them and they could not get work.”
