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It would seem the CIA has gone back into their archives, blown the dust off the Phoenix Program, and put it into play again as the “Drone War.” The similarities with the Drone War are readily evident to anyone old enough to know of the Phoenix Program. For those who aren’t old enough or who have forgotten, the Phoenix Program is usually referred to as an assassination program and was the subject of investigation by the Senate’s “Church Committee.” Indisputably, thousands of South Vietnamese civilians were killed under this CIA directed program.

Phoenix was far more than a mere assassination program , however. It was a Counter-Insurgency, COIN, program, using the tactic of counter-terrorism, including assassination, against the insurgent’s so-called infrastructure. This was the Vietnamese civilian population in which the insurgent, the Viet Cong guerilla, operated and from some of whom they drew their support. To the U.S., these civilians were the Viet Cong Infrastructure, the VCI. And the VCI was the target to be terrorized by any means necessary in the hope that they would turn against the Viet Cong. The VCI would have included the families, close and extended kinship groups, of alleged active Viet Cong combatants, fellow villagers, and other Vietnamese civilians who were not actively opposed to the Viet Cong. Some of this “support” was voluntary and some coerced. As the Phoenix Program went on, with its assassinations, torture practices, and “disappearances,” more support became voluntary as Vietnamese peasants turned against the U.S. and the South Vietnamese government as a result of the program. An error in identification of a victim was irrelevant to those in control of the program, the CIA, as it still served the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, which was the true purpose of the program.

For the Viet Cong, this was a classic example of achieving the guerilla’s goal of having a civilian population turn against a government by a government’s own harsh over-reaction to the guerilla threat. Today, a guerilla and the people whom they are amongst are deemed “terrorists” if they find themselves on the wrong side of a domestic conflict that the U.S. has taken a side in, such as Yemen. As we saw in Libya, and see in Syria, these guerillas can become instant U.S. allies who must be supported, if, or when, the U.S. makes policy changes. But unless those U.S. policy changes occur, these groups remain part of the global terrorist network of “associated forces” with al Qaeda, in the eyes of CIA and military officials, and targeted with drones. From the relatively large number of civilian victims of drone attacks as claimed by residents of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the political party, Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), this Drone Program has all the hallmarks of the Phoenix Program.

The 29-year-old former NSA contractor and source of the Guardian's NSA files coverage will – with the help of Glenn Greenwald – take your questions today on why he revealed the NSA's top-secret surveillance of US citizens, the international storm that has ensued, and the uncertain future he now faces. Ask him anything.

I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the "consent of the governed" is meaningless.

I was debriefed by Glenn and his peers over a number of days, and not all of those conversations were recorded. The statement I made about earnings was that $200,000 was my "career high" salary. I had to take pay cuts in the course of pursuing specific work. Booz was not the most I've been paid.

Current and former FBI officials have launched a media counter-offensive to engage head to head with the Clinton media machine and to throw off the shackles the Loretta Lynch Justice Department has used to stymie their multiple investigations into the Clinton pay-to-play network. Over the past weekend, former FBI Assistant Director and current CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Tom Fuentes told viewers that “the FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation.” He said he had received this information from “senior officials” at the FBI, “several of them, in and out of the Bureau.” (See video clip from CNN below.) That information was further supported by an in-depth article last evening in the Wall Street Journal by Devlin Barrett. According to Barrett, the “probe of the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the charity.” Barrett’s article suggests that the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, has attempted to circumvent the investigation. The new revelations lead to the appearance of wrongdoing on the part of U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch for secretly meeting with Bill Clinton on her plane on the tarmac of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on the evening of June 28 of this year. Not only was Bill Clinton’s wife under an FBI investigation at the time over her use of a private email server in the basement of her New York home over which Top Secret material was transmitted while she was Secretary of State but his own charitable foundation was also under investigation, a fact that was unknown at the time to the public and the media.

The reports leaking out of the FBI over the weekend came on the heels of FBI Director James Comey sending a letter to members of Congress on Friday acknowledging that the investigation into the Hillary Clinton email server was not closed as he had previously testified to Congress, but had been reopened as a result of “pertinent” emails turning up. According to multiple media sources, those emails were found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide, Huma Abedin. Weiner was forced to resign from Congress in 2011 over a sexting scandal with more sexting scandals to follow. Early this month, on October 3, the FBI raided Weiner’s apartment in New York with a search warrant in hand and seized multiple electronic devices. At least one of those devices had been used by both Weiner and Abedin to send email messages. The search warrant had been obtained following a detailed report that had appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper in the U.K. in September, showing sordid, sexual emails that Weiner had allegedly sent to a 15-year old girl in North Carolina. According to the content of the published emails, Weiner was aware that the girl was underage. While examining the hard drive of a laptop seized from Weiner, the FBI found metadata showing that thousands of the emails were exchanged between the private server located in Hillary Clinton’s basement in Chappaqua, New York. Since the FBI had only a search warrant to examine emails and documents related to the Weiner matter, it was not able to read the other emails but simply tallied up the metadata linked to the private server in Chappaqua to show how many potentially new emails might be in the trove on the laptop. (It is also possible that the FBI agents could have used a program to compare subject headings against those emails previously turned over by Abedin to make their case that Abedin had perjured herself when she testified to them that she had turned over all of her work-related emails from her time as Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations when Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State.)

The FBI officials briefed FBI Director James Comey last Thursday on the new trove of emails and he went public with his letter to Congress the next day – leading the Clinton camp to immediately launch a media assault on his motives. As if all of this wasn’t enough for the public to digest over the weekend, yesterday morning James Kallstrom, the former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York Division and 25-year veteran of the FBI, went on the John Catsimatidis radio program to call the Clintons a “crime family.” (You can hear the full program here.) Kallstrom’s comments were further amplified when the New York Daily News reported on his criticisms that the FBI had been hamstrung from conducting a real investigation. The Daily News quoted Kallstrom from the radio program as follows: “ ‘This investigation was never a real investigation, they never had grand jury empaneled…This investigation was without the ability to serve subpoenas, serve search warrants, and obtain evidence … It was just ludicrous.’ ” On Wednesday of last week, just two days before FBI Director Comey issued his public letter to Congress, WikiLeaks released a devastating memo from Douglas Band, at the time a key figure at the Clinton Foundation and President of his own corporate consulting firm, Teneo. The memo was rife with suggestions of pay-to-play and personal enrichment schemes at the Clinton Foundation. The same day, Washington Post reporters Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger reported the story, including the following details:

This week’s Senate report on the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods is neither the first nor the worst time the agency has run afoul of its congressional overseers. Four decades ago, a series of hearings on Capitol Hill helped reveal that the CIA-run Phoenix Program in South Vietnam, working in concert with the U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries, had “neutralized” -- killed, detained or recruited -- as many as 80,000 people suspected of being members of the Communist Vietcong and used gang rape, beatings and electric shock as well as waterboarding to interrogate prisoners. Then in 1975 and 1976, a Senate panel took a broader look into the dark side of the Central Intelligence Agency and found that the nation’s spies seemed to have few limits, with covert activities that included plotting to assassinate foreign leaders, domestic spying and LSD experiments on unwitting subjects.

The Church committee, the investigative panel named for Democratic chairman Frank Church of Idaho, published 14 reports on CIA activities, including efforts to kill leaders in Cuba, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic and Vietnam; a secret program to open Americans’ mail; and a mind-control program called MKULTRA

It led to creation of the current congressional intelligence committees to guard against CIA abuses and resulted in an executive order by Republican President Gerald Ford banning assassinations of foreign leaders.