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Show: MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY Date: December 5, 2015 Guest: Malcolm Nance, Katharine Rhodes Henderson, Yolanda Pierce, Eugene O`Donnell, Russell Brandom, Ronal Serpas, Jonathan Metzl, Linda Sarsour,
MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY, MSNBC ANCHOR: This morning, my question, what qualifies as accountability? Plus, the Secretary of Defense tells Congress we`re at war. And the good news that you may have missed this week. But first, the latest on the shootings in San Bernardino.
Good morning. I`m Melissa Harris-Perry. We want to bring you the latest this morning on the shooting Wednesday in San Bernardino, California, that left 14 people dead and 21 more wounded. This morning, the Islamic State or ISIS said in a radio broadcast that two of its followers carried out the attacks, according to Reuters. Now, the terrorist organization did not claim that it directed the attack. And U.S. officials say there`s no evidence that they did so.
The attackers, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, were killed Wednesday in a shootout with police, hours after they opened fire during office holiday party. Yesterday, the FBI assistant director in Los Angeles who is leading the investigation there announced that the FBI is now investigating the shooting as an act of terror.
DAVID BOWDICH, FBI LOS ANGELES: As of today, based on the information and the facts as we know them, we are now investigating these horrific acts as an act of terrorism.
HARRIS-PERRY: The director of the FBI, James Comey, elaborated on on the possible terror connections in the case.
JAMES COMEY, FBI DIRECTOR: The investigation so far has developed indications of radicalization by the killers and of a potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations. So far, we have no indication that these killers are part of an organized larger group or form part of a cell. There`s no indication that they are part of a network.
HARRIS-PERRY: Comey also said the suspects, a married couple, had not been on the FBI`s radar as potential threats before the attack. Law enforcement sources told NBC News that one of the suspects, Malik, posted an oath of allegiance on the Islamic State on Facebook just before the shooting.
Joining us now for the very latest is NBC`s Chris Jansing. Chris, where is the investigation at this point?
CHRIS JANSING, NBC CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think this is a very hard focus on the electronic evidence. One of the things we heard yesterday, Melissa, from Director Comey is they have a large volume of it. Cell phones and computers, but also that the couple tried to destroy them. Two of those cell phones were found smashed and in a nearby garbage can. And so, they have flown those to Quantico, Virginia. The FBI has highly sophisticated labs including the operational technology division that has a number of subunits. And that is their complete area of expertise. Each of them who are focused on retrieving evidence from these kinds of situations. It`s not uncommon in any kind of investigation that someone tries to destroy anything that might be part of a digital footprint. They also have something called the computer analysis lab. Then there they will look very specifically at what can they extract. Were there photos on there that might provide some clues? GPS coordinates obviously could be very important to where they may have traveled. Does that lead them either to people or places where they got some of the equipment that we know now was now inside their home that looked like a virtual bomb factory.
Any kind of records that would give them an indication of how this came together. All of it leading to the one big question that they just don`t have an answer to, which is motive. This is a couple that seemed to be leading essentially a double life. We haven`t found anyone who seems to have any inclination to suggest that they were in any way unhappy, in any way could have been radicalized or were doing anything but living the American dream here. And yesterday, when I talked to the husband`s sister, she clearly was in a state of shock, talking about a couple who was celebrating the fact that they had a 6-month-old baby, how he would play with that baby for hours at a time. And then you also have these questions about the disconnect between what they clearly did in this building behind me and what happened in the days leading up to it. There was a scare yesterday at a local UPS facility because there was a package addressed to them. It turned out that there were clothes in it that they had ordered online. Do you order clothes online if you are planning to commit a terrorist attack like this? A lot of things that just don`t make sense. One of the ways that the director put it, a lot of evidence in this case that doesn`t quite make sense. And so, they really are just in the early stages of this. But hundreds of investigators literally all around the world, Melissa, who are looking into this motive and what really happened here.
HARRIS-PERRY: Thank you, to Chris Jansing in San Bernardino, California.
It took about 48 hours after Wednesday`s shooting for the FBI to declare that it is investigating the shooting of an act of terrorism. Authorities previously were unsure, saying the shooting may have been a terror-related or could have been motivated by something more mundane, namely a workplace dispute. One of the shooters Syed Farook, had for years worked with the county health department. It was the department holiday party where Farook and his wife Malik opened fire and killed 14 people. But as the investigation continued, the FBI increasingly suspected terrorism.
BOWDICH: There`s a number of pieces of evidence that has essentially pushed us off the cliff to say we`re now investigating this as an act of terrorism.
HARRIS-PERRY: Joining me now is Malcolm Nance, executive director of the Terror Assymetrics Project and author of the upcoming back, "Defeating ISIS: Who They Are, How They Fight and What They Believe." Malcolm, obviously, we heard from Chris there that there`s confusion here. That there seem to be things that don`t add up. You`ve been doing this work for a long time. What are you seeing?
MALCOLM NANCE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ASSYMETRICS PROJECT: There are many things about this story that don`t add up. Let`s walk it back to the initial attack. If these people were radicalized, and clearly they were in some way, shape or form, they had tactical equipment, they had very long high caliber weapons. They had a bomb laboratory and bomb factory inside their garage. They went to this party, they carried out this massacre. Which would make you ask initial question, those of us media, intelligence, community - why wouldn`t they have gone to a bigger target, a better target? Why would they have such a personally focused target? So that`s question number one. Question number two is most people who do this sort of thing, they will carry out an attack and they generally won`t leave a six-month-old baby behind. We`ve seen it in Nigeria, Boca Haram, they killed their family before attacks in order to meet them in heaven soon afterwards. I`ve seen it in Iraq, people actually use their baby as a bomb. But we`ve never seen one where they just hand the baby off to the mother, say, I`m going out to the doctor, and then carry out at terrorist attack. So, it`s a hybrid. It`s almost a combination between a workplace violence incident, which may have precipitated and stopped a much larger terrorist attack on a more popular or a more strategic target in the area.
HARRIS-PERRY: I want to talk about something else in the context of all of this. So, we`ve also heard there from Chris Jansing that hundreds of investigators are looking at evidence all around the world. You know, the big thing that happened on air yesterday, though, was that dozens of members of the American media including some of my colleagues here at MSNBC, went into the home where this couple was living after apparently the FBI had already been through. Walked through. There was like a live feed of us watching these things. And I guess I am wondering in a moment like that for me, both whether or not there`s any sense that there would be valuable evidence that media would uncover, but also really importantly to me, I keep hearing this language of radicalization.
NANCE: Right.
HARRIS-PERRY: And I found those images very hard to watch. Very distressing and disturbing about who we are. And I`m wondering whether or not those images also then become troubling images for the rest of the world.
NANCE: Well, they could actually become troubling images if - it depends on the media team of ISIS who are very, very good at exploiting propaganda. Believe me, we have not yet seen the ISIS video that will come out in the next few days where they probably will take claim for this attack and show how their lives of these people afterwards were ripped apart in a raptor- line fashion by the news media. I mean you watched them going through the baby crib. You watched them checking the pampers. Granted, the news media, sort of its own intelligence collection organization and you wanted to know something that other people didn`t know. And it generally wasn`t going to be left behind, but perhaps this could have been handled better.
HARRIS-PERRY: I want to also ask you about something that the president said. Let`s take a quick lift into what he said about preventing this ideology from taking hold.
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: And even as we work to prevent attacks, all of us, government, law enforcement, communities, faith leaders, need to work together to prevent people from falling victim to these hateful ideologies.
HARRIS-PERRY: What do you make of this language of hateful ideologies? When we`re not quite sure yet what the motivations are?
NANCE: Well, I think the president speaking in a much grander sense, you know. In terms of he, of course, is the person who is briefed of every aspect of this. There are intelligence factors here which may not have filtered their way down at the law enforcement, which may have been briefed to him from a national security level using national assets. So, things that we may not know about are happening in Syria, he may have on his desk. The ideology here clearly played itself out, manifested itself in the way that they carried out the attack.
Also, we see indicators of the ideology in the way that they carved out their family and abandoned their family. And that`s a core ideological factor. Part of dogma of al Qaeda and ISIS ideology, which is Hijra, leave your family behind and emigrate either mentally or physically to the place where jihadists operate. So I think that the president himself understands that. To do something, you have to call upon the community to at least give you any indicator, but this ideology works without indications in many, many circumstances because, of course, they`re not Islamic, they leave Islam behind. And that`s the painful part is the Muslim community in the United States and around the world are going to suffer for that.
HARRIS-PERRY: That`s a critical point, it feels like to me. Because I think the way that we often talk about in discourse, is as though this is an out-birth of Islam as opposed to a rejection of Islam.
NANCE: No, this is a cult. Islam has had five different cults in its history. In 644, you have the Hoaredj (ph), and then in the 11th century you have the Karamites (ph). And then you have the Madis (ph) os Sudan. And then Oteibi who seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. And those survivors went into al Qaeda. And this ideology is so un-Islamic. It`s anti-Islamic. They consider the Muslim world their victim base.
HARRIS-PERRY: Malcolm Nance is going to be back with us later in the program. Up next, the surging business of guns made right here on the USA.
HARRIS-PERRY: This year, many Americans chose not to do substantial holiday shopping on Thanksgiving weekend. Retail spending dropped 11 percent over the Thanksgiving weekend. Sales at retail stores on Black Friday were down by $1.2 billion. The two key factors, more people shopping online and more stores offering their so-called Black Friday deals actually over the course of several days.
Now, it`s too soon to tell, but maybe this is the beginning of the end of the tradition of a single day of massive spike in sales to feed our frenzy of consumerism. Black Friday is just not the day for shopping it once was. Unless you`re in the market for a gun. If you are shopping for a gun, well, apparently Black Friday was the day for you. Even as a shooting rampage played out at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic, the "New York Times" reports that the FBI was busy processing about 2 firearm background checks per second.
All told, "The Times" reports that, quote, "the agency ran a record 185,345 background checks on Friday." About five percent more than the number processed through the national instant criminal background check system on that same day in 2014.
Throughout the year, month after month after month has seen a record number of background checks for gun purchases. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, gun manufacturing is up, way up. A report released earlier this year, showed gun manufacturing in America started climbing in 2009. The first year President Obama was in office. And by 2013, had doubled. 10,884,792. That`s how many guns were made in the United States in 2013. The last year for which we have data. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, companies in the United States that manufacture, distribute and sell firearms, ammunition and hunting equipment employ as many as 128,794 people in the country. And generate an additional 133,850 jobs in supplier and incilary industries. The NSSF puts the total economic impact of making and selling guns, ammunition and hunting equipment at 42.9 billion. Billion. With a "b." in 2014. And the gunmakers - well let`s just look. Smith & Wesson, and it`s more than half a billion dollars in sales last year. Smith & Wesson`s stock price is up 93 percent this year. And in its latest conference call, the company said the reason for strong sales is simple, high demand.
Shooting after shooting. Body after body. The inaction is staggering. And the polling shows us that America is near evenly split between those who say it`s more important to control gun ownership versus those who prioritize the protection of gun rights. And we think that the political divide on the issue or the power of the NRA and it`s $250 million annual operating budget leads to this lack of political will among our elected leaders to enact meaningful gun reform. Maybe. Maybe. Or may just maybe the economic impact of $42.9 billion thanks to the manufacturing and sale of guns and ammunition in America is playing part in that politics too.
HARRIS-PERRY: In the immediate aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings, before we really knew much of anything about the victims or the suspects involved, we knew we`d hear one sentiment repeatedly. One that we`ve come to expect in the wake of every national tragedy. An offering of thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families. Politicians and others took to social media and to the airwaves to say essentially the same thing, even if the words were different.
It`s a common reaction in the time of grief and tragedy. But this time, there was also a sense that thoughts and prayers may not be enough. Headlines like this one from "The Huffington Post." "Another Mass Shooting. Another Deluge of Tweeted Prayers." As the suspects` motive was still under investigation, some lawmakers focused on the suspects` most deadly weapons. Guns. Noting that prayer in the absence of meaningful gun policy change is insufficient. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut where 20 children were shot and killed in Newtown in 2012, tweeted this message, "Your thoughts should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your prayers should be for forgiveness if you do nothing again." And "The New York Daily News" put it even more bluntly with the cover reading, "God Is Not Fixing This."
As we learn more about the suspects` motives in this shooting, it appears many are re-examining the role of prayer in our response. Joining me now, the Reverend Doctor Katharine Rhodes Henderson, President of Auburn Theological Seminary. And Yolanda Pierce, associate professor of religion and literature at Princeton Theological Seminary. I want to ask you a little bit, in part because of the work of Auburn is about our public discourse about religion.
REV. DR. KATHARINE RHODES HENDERSON, PRESIDENT AUBURN SEMINARY: Right.
HARRIS-PERRY: So when we tweet prayers, when we say I`m praying for you, what are we saying, what is the content of that?
RHODES HENDERSON: I think that what we`re saying is, that we`re aligning ourselves, that we are putting ourselves in the space with those who are suffering and we`re also acknowledging that that`s not just humans who are doing this, but God is grieved and we believe that God suffers with all of those in this case, those who have lost family members in these shootings.
So it`s aligning us with the will of God. It`s aligning us with all of those other people who are grieving and with those who are suffering. I think that the recent conversation that you`re referring to about prayer is very important, because I think that what the public was reacting to, was the sense that prayer alone can be shallow, that it didn`t ring true, and there were some of us after Charleston, for example, who picked up this hash tag "prophetic grief." Not pathetic grief ...
HARRIS-PERRY: Right.
RHODES HENDERSON: Where you`re not going to do anything and not just empathetic grief, which is compassion, which is very important. But prophetic grief where you are actually committed to doing something.
HARRIS-PERRY: So, part of what I find fascinating, about what Anabel what has now been called prayer shaming in response to the kind of prayers offered, is this idea that they are somehow divided, that there`s either praying or there`s doing something as opposed to kind of a rich social movement tradition, in which both things were happening at the same time.
YOLANDA PIERCE, ASSOC. PROF. PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY: Right. And I think that`s the important piece to like really focus on. People don`t know what to say when people are hurting and grieving. And so, prayers and thoughts is sort of what they immediately say. I think the critique is when your prayers and thoughts are contradictory to your actions, right, so I am praying that there won`t be any more gun violence, even as I am actually doing something that is the opposite, promoting more gun violence, right? And so, how do we deal with the hypocrisy. And then also, I think, people are tired of like saying, well, we`re waiting on something supernatural to happen. We could end gun violence if we wanted to. We could end poverty if we wanted to. We as humans have the tools at our disposal to end these things that grieve us so. And so, many people are objecting to this notion that, well, what are we waiting for, right? If we`re only seeing prayers and thoughts when we have the capacity to make a difference right now.
HARRIS-PERRY: Let me ask about one other aspect of the politics of this prayer question. So prayer, multiple times a day and often publicly is a pillar of Islam. It is one of the ways that Islam is kind of an identifiable public practice, right, is this notion of multiple times a day of prayer. And yet, somehow this - so maybe I`m reading this wrong. I want to check me if I`m wrong on this. I keep feeling like when we say, I`m praying, that we think we`re praying to some kind of God that is anti- Muslim, that is counter-Islamic, and that we consistently will see Muslims in prayer as somehow dangerous, threatening, as opposed to prayerful and secret practice.
RHODES HENDERSON: I think that I mean in my tradition we say pray without ceasing and prayer is always in season, so our prayer actually connects us, I think to all of those other people, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and others in the world who are also praying. And I was in a cab last night and my cab driver was a Muslim and I was tweeting away and he wanted to really engage me in a conversation, a conversation about prayer, a conversation about his grief, my grief. And his love of America, my love of America. And I think that sort of through our conversation about prayer, we figured out what our shared values were. And I think that, you know, he was demonstrating that it`s our connections with each other that are in the end that are love, shall we say, for each other, in the end, will be the only thing that will save us.
HARRIS-PERRY: Yeah. I`m going to stop you here only because I know you`re going to be back with us. We are going to actually talk more through this. I want to say thank you to the Reverend Doctor Katharine Henderson, Yolanda Pierce is, in fact, sticking around. We have so much more on this this morning, on the San Bernardino shooting, but up next, we`re actually going to go to Chicago. And to the shooting of Laquan McDonald. And what we mean when we say accountability.
HARRIS-PERRY: The question of accountability has hounded Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel since the video showing the police shooting death of Laquan McDonald prompted a demand for answers about why it took 13 months and a court order to force the city of Chicago to release the footage. And bring charges against the officer who shot McDonald 16 times. When asked about the delay and his decision up until a week ago not to watch the video despite having previously been aware of its contents, Mayor Emanuel said this.
RAHM EMANUEL, MAYOR OF CHICAGO: We have a practice not unique to Chicago that you don`t do anything as it relates to material evidence that would hamper, hinder, compromise an investigation. I don`t look at material in a criminal investigation, any of them. And if I had looked at that video, your question before over the next several months is why do you get to see it and nobody else does? So, I would see it when everybody else would see it.
HARRIS-PERRY: The mayor gave that response to his critics in a Tuesday press conference where he announced that he requested the resignation of Chicago police super-intendant Gary McCarthy. Now, McCarthy`s removal was a partial victory for activists who have demanded the resignation of McCarthy, Mayor Emanuel and Cook County State Attorney Anita Alvarez. And it was also a partial response to the call for accountability. Not just from individuals responsible for the police, but from the institution that they represent. Mayor Emanuel addressed some of those concerns with the announcement of a police accountability taskforce. And the expanded use of body cameras. But as "The Chicago Tribune" pointed out this week, Emanuel`s narrative comes against a backdrop of decades worth of Chicago police torture and wrongful conviction cases, corruption and slap- ineffectual oversight practices in shootings and other excessive force actions by officers.
Time and again, the police department has quickly cleared officers of allegations only to have civil litigation later reveal video and other evidence that painted a much darker picture of police misconduct.
It is an indictment that implicates not only individual policies and people, but the entire culture of policing in Chicago. And given the last year in which Chicago, Ferguson, Baltimore and so many other cities have stood as a testament to the consequences of what kind of culture and what kind of meaningful accountability can there be in these circumstances.
Joining me now is Russell Brandom, who is reporter for "The Verge", Yolanda Pierce, associate professor of African American religion and literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, Dorian Warren, MSNBC contributor, and host of "Nerding Out" on MSNBC shift. And from Chicago is Eugene O`Donnell, professor of law and police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former officer with the NYPD.
I want to start with you, Eugene. Just to ask the very simple question of whether or not it makes a difference in a department who the police chief is or whether or not the chief is kind of far enough away that they don`t actually impact the culture of what happens on the ground.
EUGENE O`DONNELL, PROF., JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE: Well, these are political failures. All this. Always, these are political failures. That`s where the start is. And political people like to point out, down and around, but don`t want to be held accountable themselves almost invariably. It looks, the more you look in Chicago, the more it looks like they need a nap commission like you had in New York in the early 1970s. They had systemic corruption. They assumed that 80 percent of the people wanted to be good, 10 percent of the people were good and 10 percent of the people were bad and you had to actually liberate the agency for the good people. You had to rearrange the whole organization. And it was muscular. It was - and it may have to be for the whole criminal justice system. It has to be people that are credible and are strong and are willing to go where they have to go.
And where it`s - and ultimately, because what we`re talking about is ending wrongdoing. We need to do that of course, we also in Chicago urgently have to create right doing. A culture of right doing in their police department. So, they need to really be aggressive. A federal overseer is a piece, but it`s only a tiny piece. There needs to be a radical reform.
HARRIS-PERRY: Stick with me, because Dorian, I want to ask you the question of whether or not it is even conceivable to have radical reform while the same mayor is in.
DORIAN WARREN, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: No. And the mayor has to go. The state attorney has to go, Anita Alvarez, and frankly, I think we need to start asking some questions about the city council which voted on the $5 million settlement to the McDonald family.
HARRIS-PERRY: Apparently without seeing the video.
WARREN: Apparently without seeing the video. Maybe some did, maybe some didn`t. Maybe some actually read through it. Maybe some didn`t. That goes to the incompetence of the entire city council and particularly the black caucus. I need to be very clear about this. We need to ask questions of all of those political leaders in that city, from the mayor on down. They all need to go. And we need some viable reformers. There is a question, we were talking before.
HARRIS-PERRY: So who`s ...
WARREN: Right, and who?
HARRIS-PERRY: Is it - does Garcia show up and change this.
WARREN: But the final thing in terms of - in terms of Rahm Emanuel, when you are opposing the inspector general of the city, when you are going to court to fight against having the inspector general, who is one formal mechanism of accountability, from seeing public documents, that I s- that`s the level of corruption at the highest levels. The lack of transparency, the lack of accountability.
HARRIS-PERRY: Are those documents public? And so, this is - you know, you have this great piece that have all of us kind of debating this in part because I`m thinking, all right, that`s the police, that`s people, my tax dollars, whatever they got, that`s actually my stuff, right, from the perspective of folks who are living in a city. And so, why in the world would it take 13 months? And then your piece helps me understand, oh no, but police either says, we bought it out of the budget, that`s ours.
RUSSELL BRANDOM, REPORTER, THE VERGE: Yeah, I mean that`s the thing. I think in some sense, you know, it`s public so they can`t get rid of the video. That`s the part of it that worked. But once it`s in the system, that`s very much under police control the same way, you know, I think they see something, you know, if it`s in the evidence locker, something like that, you know, there very - when they are buying these systems, which - and these are all systems that are bought and paid for by, you know, that`s coming out of the police budget. They want to buy a system that will give them control of the video.
HARRIS-PERRY: And so, in part, and Yolanda, this for me is the challenge, you know, body cameras have been part of what Black Lives Matter, other activists have been asking for in part because it does feel like once we see the video, as we did in the McDonald case, it can change our - but on the other hand, I also wonder, doesn`t this create more surveillance? Like the very fact that police want them makes me a little nervous this is going to create police accountability.
PIERCE: Well, it`s a couple of things. One is that the surveillance is always pointed at the people who are supposed to be the potential criminals, the potential trespassers. And who`s watching the watchers? And I mean that`s the question I think people are talking about. So, on one hand, these body cams which has given us evidence that we otherwise would not have had and has disrupted the narrative that we got from police officers about these particular cases that`s so crucial, but it`s pointed outward.
So, people are asking the question, who`s pointing certain cameras inward so that we can see when the violation is actually happening among law enforcement? So we see this with the missing minutes, right, the missing footage. If we did not have other footage that showed us that in fact, a video was, in fact, missing these minutes, how would we have ever known that? So body cams are not enough. And I think Black Lives Matter activists and other grassroots groups have always said that, it`s simply not enough.
HARRIS-PERRY: And your point about who`s watching is so important. Because the answer is supposed to be the state - the answer is supposed to be that independent media are meant to be able to have a sense of -- that we are supposed to in part to be able to hold these organizations accountable. You see the tribune and saying this in part about Emanuel, but then I wonder about the ways, in which people wonder if we are even accountable, right, whether or not we can make those - those right - we`ll talk much more about all of that when we come back.
HARRIS-PERRY: So, of Chicago next week may feel familiar with the city expected to allow the release of another dash cam video showing another police officer shooting and killing of another African-American man. This video like the footage of the Laquan McDonald shooting is also more than a year old. And the family of 25-year-old Ronald Johnson III has been fighting for the release of the video since he was shot and killed on October 12, 2014, just eight days before the Laquan McDonald shooting. At the time of the incident, a spokesman for the fraternal order of police said that Officer George Fernandez shot Johnson after he turned toward him while holding a gun. But Johnson`s mother, Dorothy Holmes, says she has watched the video and in a Tuesday press conference she talked about what she saw and her decision to turn down a settlement offer that she says was proposed to her by the city.
DOROTHY HOLMES, MOTHER OF RONALD JOHNSON: He didn`t have a gun in his hand. Because I also seen the video. I looked at the video twice. My main concern is, my son life didn`t have a price tag. And if whatever money recover can get this man convicted that murdered my son, then they keep. Because it`s still dirty money. It is not going to bring him back. It`s not going to make me happy. I don`t want it.
HARRIS-PERRY: Miss Holmes was joined at the press conference by her attorney who discussed the family`s motivations for pursuing the release of the video.
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER, RONALD JOHNSON FAMILY ATTORNEY: Taxpayers have paid for those dash cams. They have paid for those cars. And what the city has done is taken that video, taken the important evidence in this case, and denied the public from seeing it. The public has the right to see it. And that`s one of the reasons we`re here.
HARRIS-PERRY: OK, so I got so many different things on this. Let me just real quick come to you, Dorian, on what we were talking about before, which is what can sometimes feel like an unholy alliance between media and these reportings. So the police say, such and such and such and such and such, and then media, we report on it. The police said such and such and such. And here`s a mother who`s incredibly compelling saying, no, I saw it and that`s not what I saw. We often take kind of what of the police report is as though it just is what happened.
WARREN: Never again, at least in the city of Chicago, and probably most other cities. We can add Minneapolis, Baltimore. Let`s keep adding to the list. No longer can we take a police report for granted as the truth. Because let`s be very clear. They lied on the police reports. And but for independent journalists, not even from "The Tribune" or "Sun Times," let`s be clear about that too, independent journalists who probably are going to be blacklisted for this, but for them doing the flier request to get access to the autopsy report and the video cam from the dashboard, we wouldn`t have known that the police lied and everybody all the way up to Rahm Emanuel knew about this.
HARRIS-PERRY: Right. And so, here we are again. This young man shot eight days before Laquan McDonald. Again, you know, all of these months passed. We still don`t have the video. Will video save us? I mean we were talking in the break, the Burger King was the hero of the Laquan McDonald case. Is video enough to bring about accountability and justice?
BRANDOM: I mean I think we have seen video, it just hasn`t been police video. Right? It`s been - standard video. That`s what we saw with Walter Scott. What we saw with Eric Garner. And that`s why I mean I think, you know, if you want to hold police accountable with video, the answer isn`t, you know, lobbying for buying body cameras, it`s protecting the rights of citizens to film the police. Because that`s - you know, then we don`t have to have this year long legal case. We don`t have to be playing political football over who deserves ...
HARRIS-PERRY: Right, because if it`s on my cell phone.
BRANDOM: Yeah, it`s my video, we`re releasing it, that`s it.
PIERCE: So, what makes me frustrated about this, is the way in which we position grieving hurting people as the people who are responsible for bringing justice. I was watching the clip of Ronald Johnson`s mother. And I`m near tears.
HARRIS-PERRY: Yes.
PIERCE: She has to take on the responsibility of making sure that justice can be done. And that`s what`s unfair. That`s what should challenge us. We were talking earlier about prayer, right, that`s where we have to say it`s enough. It should not be the responsibility of a mother who has just lost her child to have to pursue this to the ends of the earth, whether it`s through the body cam or whether it`s through bystander video. Where is justice for her and why is it on her grieving body?
HARRIS-PERRY: I thought about this so often when all of us, of course, fell for the vice president when he talked about the grief that he had and how difficult it was to think about running for office. And while feeling that, I also have thought about all of the mothers who have lost children and yet immediately found themselves, not public people before that, suddenly basically having to run political campaigns in order to just get justice for their kid. Eugene, let me come to you on this as well, because you talked about not only stopping wrongdoing, but beginning right doing. And it feels to me like part of what Yolanda was saying there is, it ought to be police officers who are most interested in the question of justice, who are most interested in being sure that when they are policing that when they are engaging that they are, in fact, protecting and serving. So, why isn`t it the police who are saying let`s find these videos and let`s look at them and let`s investigate?
O`DONNELL: Which is so important. As the conversation that gets polarized. People are most interested in hearing about right now, again, I want to hear what the cops have to say, the good cops who are out there, for the right reasons, what they feel their job is about, what it looks like and the community, what the community wants. And I think there will be surprises in that conversation. But no question, this whole -- the issue with these body cameras, ultimately political people love these body cameras. Police chiefs even love these body cameras. It takes systemic failures and shortcomings and problems and it pushes them down on the lowest possible level.
HARRIS-PERRY: Yes.
O`DONNELL: In this Laquan case. None of the cops there had a taser. Now, I`m not a big fan of tasers, but I`m a big fan of saving life. How is it that nobody had a taser there?
HARRIS-PERRY: Yes.
O`DONNELL: There is very large questions that need to be raised. In a gotcha culture, not only is bad in terms of ultimately we`re just trying to penalize the police. You`re losing lives.
HARRIS-PERRY: Yes.
O`DONNELL: You have two dead people. It`s too late now. We need to be doing systemic proactive reforming.
HARRIS-PERRY: I actually really want to underline that. Because I think that that`s not a small point. That it becomes overwhelmingly easy to look at the person who is the shooter, right, I mean not that there isn`t responsibility there. But the ways, in which we have all of these incentives that then create these bad acts kind of at the lowest level, but often not walking back up the chain and saying where do these incentives come from, what kind of messages are people getting and quite honestly, this idea of like good officers, but still part of a culture who, like where you just don`t speak against your boss, right, or you don`t speak against the blue coat.
DONNELL: Well, I mean there should be accountability, but we also have to remember, what you were talking about earlier in the show, seven people are shot in Chicago every single day on average. If you did a shooting map of this city and many other cities in America for five or ten years, you can`t see the city. The city is covered with dots. I believe it`s 5,000. Several. It`s - pardon me, it`s 10,000, 12,000 shootings in five years. 10,000 shootings since this mayor took office. How do these kids, how do these children for the most part, young adults, how are they able to access firearms? How are firearms so readily available?
HARRIS-PERRY: Thank you to Eugene O`Donnell, in Chicago, you`ve raised deeply important questions for us. The issues of the actions of police and who`s responsible. We`re going to talk to somebody who was responsible for a police department, as soon as we come back.
EMANUEL: I want to have somebody that will meet the needs of both the public safety, help, obviously, in this issue of both changing the culture, putting in place the building blocks to restore the confidence and trust that we are seeing - we want to see in the city of Chicago. And have a record of in a police department of invigorating the type of not only commitment to a - but the type of commitment I want to see to make the changes necessary. Not only to lead the department, but to lead the changes in the department to get the results we want.
HARRIS-PERRY: It was Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday, discussing the responsibilities of the next person to hold the position of police superintendent in Chicago. Joining me now is someone who have had firsthand experience of doing that job in another big city. Ronal Serpas is the former New Orleans` police superintendent and now criminal justice professor at Loyola University.
I want to point out that you and the recently fired police chief of Chicago share the unique experience of having been chiefs, going to a troubled city, leading the force and then resigning after a controversial public shooting.
And so, I`m wondering, what you can tell our viewers about what that experience is like.
RONAL SERPAS: You know, being a chief in the large city, and thank you for having me, Melissa. Being a chief in the large city has a lot of complications. I think we can all agree there are a lot of issues going around in Chicago and other cities.
I think police chiefs who are willing to go to another community and take on the challenges of being an outsider, also bring with them a certain time calendar of their term of office. Many people are going to resist change, they are going to resist it heavily. Labor organizations, civil service commissions and rules, state legislative processes, so when a guy like Gary or myself, or Chuck Ramsey or Bill Bratton takes on a large city coming in from the outside, we know we are going to have a lot of resistance, but we are going to be there to make as many differences as we can when we are there.
HARRIS-PERRY: So, Chief Serpas, you are talking about the kind of the timeline. You actually resigned as chief of the New Orleans police just four days after it became clear that an officer-involved shooting of a man during a traffic stop hadn`t been disclosed to the public. And yet, you are actually now leading - and one of the leading voices of the 21st century policing reform effort.
Should this public be concerned about that?
SERPAS: I think what the public recognizes, that we are going to try to get it right every day, that we have many people who work for us, who sometimes get it right, and sometimes mistakes are made. And when a mistakes is made, you`ve got to stand upfront really quickly and say, a mistake was made, which is what we did. What we are leading now, is 130 - 150 law enforcement leaders who are saying, we know counter intuitive as it may see, we know that we can reduce arrest and we can reduce incarceration at the same time. And we have plenty of evidence and stories to show it. We absolutely believe that we need to find alternatives to arrest, deal with mandatory minimum reforms, deal with changing laws to keep up with current days and continue to build our support in relationships with the communities and I`m very proud to be working with the Brandon Center to do this.
HARRIS-PERRY: So, obviously, there is a great deal of conversation right now in Chicago about the mayor. And the idea that the police chief goes with the mayor is still there.
And so, I`d like to ask you. I know that you came in initially in New Orleans, had a positive relationship with Mayor Landrieu, but on your way out, it was made clear, that you had been asking for more resources, that you`d wanted more money, more funds for the police and that those hadn`t been forthcoming, even as requests from the mayor.
And so, can you talk to me a little bit about what it means to be a police chief and the mayor. Who should be held accountable in these circumstances?
SERPAS: You know, I was blessed with the opportunity. I worked for a governor, and I worked for three different mayors. Mayor Landrieu was the last elected leader I worked for. And in every one of those governments, or governments who actually going broke, believe it or not, at the same time, from 2001 forward, that was my job, and I took my job very seriously to express what I thought I needed, just like a football coach went to the owner. I need these players in these positions in this field. Every police chief is going to make those requests, and every police chief is going to, you know, argue hard for their department. Mayors have to make different decisions, and I certainly respected and understood I was part of a team, and I still think that I was part of a team, but at the end of the day, I`m convinced that we needed to hire more, and we needed to hire more frequently, and we needed to maintain educational achievement requirements for hire. I think that`s what`s going on around the country. We have to hire all the time to get these officers and fill these billets.
HARRIS-PERRY: Thank you to Ronal Serpas in New Orleans, and here in New York, thank you to Russell Brandom and Dorian Warren. Yolanda Pierce is going to be back with us in the next hour. At the top of the hour, we have the latest on the investigations of the San Bernardino shooting as well as understanding what it means when our secretary of defense says, that we are a nation at war.
HARRIS-PERRY: Good morning. I`m Melissa Harris-Perry.
And we begin this hour with the latest details on the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which the FBI is now investigating as an act of terrorism.
"Reuters" is reporting that ISIS said in an online radio broadcast that followers of the group carried out the attacks that killed 14 people.
The FBI says there`s no evidence that the attack was directed by ISIS. But officials say one of the suspects, Tashfeen Malik, pledged allegiance to ISIS in a Facebook post in about the same time she and her husband Syed Farook launched their attack.
In his weekly address released this morning, President Obama had this to say about the investigation.
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It`s important to let the investigators do their jobs. We need to know all the facts. At my direction, federal law enforcement is helping in every way that they can. We`re going to get to the bottom of this. It is entirely possible that these two attackers were radicalized to commit this attack of terror. It would underscore a threat we`ve been focused on for years, the danger of people succumbing to violent extremist ideologies.
HARRIS-PERRY: Joining us now for the very latest from San Bernardino, California, is NBC`s Chris Jansing.
Chris, what kind of evidence are investigators focusing on right now?
JANSING: Well, one of the key questions, Melissa, was, where did this come from? Was this a lone wolf kind of attack? Were they self-radicalized or were they in touch with other people?
We said this morning, again, that there was some confirmation that right before this attack took place or almost simultaneously, the wife of this couple posted online that there was -- that she was connected -- not connected to but she pledged allegiance to ISIS.
Well, now our partners at Flashpoint are saying to us, ISIS is clearly saying we did not direct this attack -- very important distinction between directing an attack and inspiring an attack. They seem to be trying to send the message that this was, indeed, a self-radicalization situation.
Much of the evidence that the FBI is looking at right now has to do with electronics. They have a large volume of it, but also the couple tried to destroy it. We heard from FBI Director Comey yesterday about how critical this evidence is. Much of it has already been flown back to Quantico where the FBI has a number of labs, sub units, that do nothing but look at this kind of electronic evidence.
Two cell phones in particular that were smashed and thrown into the garbage cannot far from their home. They`ll try to retrieve whatever information they can get off of those. At least one computer hard drive that was taken from their home.
What are they looking for? Well, among other things, they`ll be looking at what kind of records there might be. Where did they get, for example, much of this bomb making material? They had a virtual bomb making factory inside that suburban home. Photos, is there anything that can tell them about location? In particular, with the cell phones, the GPS, where did they travel to? Would that give them indication of where they bought some of this stuff or who they might have met?
And then as Director Comey said yesterday, there`s a lot of evidence that just doesn`t make sense and much of that is personal, the 6-month-old child. The family that seemed to be living the American dream. Why would you just walk away from all that?
Yesterday, there was a scare at a local UPS facility and it turned out this package addressed to them was just some clothes they had ordered online. Why would you order clothes online if you knew you were going to mount an attack?
So, a lot of evidence that they are looking at but so far the key question that is hanging out there is what was their motive? And that answer is elusive right now -- Melissa.
HARRIS-PERRY: Thank you to NBC`s Chris Jansing in San Bernardino, California.
The San Bernardino shootings came less than a week after a gunman opened fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado killing three people. And according to the database, shootingtracker.com, it was at least the 353rd mass shooting of the year. With mass shootings defined in this case as those with four or more people killed or injured. By that scale, that`s more than one a day in the United States.
But other databases using other criteria cite much lower numbers. According to "Mother Jones", San Bernardino shooting was the fourth mass shooting of the year. And despite these recent premeditated attacks, the overall number of Americans killed by gun violence is actually on the decrease. According to analysis from the Pew Research Center, the rate of homicides by firearms was cut in half between 1993 and 2013.
But the impact of these incidents is not just about the numbers. It`s also about perception. With each report about mass shooting, Americans are pushed into a cycle of fear and grief and mounting anger and frustration over our inability to make them stop.
And now, add to the mix the specter of terrorism and you can understand why the American psyche may in fact be under duress.
Joining me now are Malcolm Nance, executive director of the Terror Assymetrics Project, Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab-American Association of New York, MSNBC military analyst Jack Jacobs, and Yolanda Pierce, associate director of Princeton Theological Seminary.
And joining me now from Miami, Dr. Jonathan Metzl, director of the Center for Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, and research director of the Safe Tennessee Project, which focuses on gun violence as a public health issue.
I just want to ask you this question, how is it that fear affects, Jonathan, our individual psyche and decision-making? And is there kind of a collective aspect to that as well?
JONATHAN METZL, DIR., CTR. FOR MEDICINE, HEALTH & SOCIETY, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY: Well, I think it`s a great question. It`s a question many people are asking at the present moment. I think that partially, it`s because in the aftermath of acts of terror, there is something incredibly unpredictable in a way. We can`t predict mass shootings. And very often, we hear these shootings of, you know, this person was living the American dream as the reporter before said.
So, there`s this sense that we can`t keep our family safe, that how can we predict this if we`re not safe at movie theaters, in churches, in places of work and holiday parties? I think it`s those moments, though, it`s important to remember that even though it`s very hard to predict mass shootings in advance, that we`re here in part because of decisions we`ve made as a society.
And so, we`re not just anxious and less safe because of mass shootings, we`re also less safe because the bigger lessons of mass shootings are that it`s far easier to amass a personal arsenal and that`s legal in many ways as we`ve seen.
So, we`ve made societal decisions that made it much easier for people to get guns, to amass ammunition, to do all these factors. And the other thing is we`ve also increased, you know, weapons in seemingly safe spaces like parks and churches and bars.
So in a way, the way we think we can address our society even after we ask these hard questions is to also step back and say what are the policy decisions we can make, what do we do to get here and how can we step back and really reverse some of those policy decisions.
HARRIS-PERRY: It also, you know, it`s interesting to me, in part, you know, living in a time where there are many different ways in which gun violence enters into our lives. And yet the language of terrorism in particular, or mass shootings of strangers in public places, let me think of it that way, leads to a kind of frenzy and a set of incentives that I think actually creates all kinds of poor chooses.
I mean, I think we saw this in some of the policy making we made in a post- 9/11 world. I honestly think we saw that in part in some of the decision making by the media yesterday. A kind of frenzy that led us to not do, to not make choices we would have otherwise made.
METZL: Well, I think it`s a mistake because I think part of the issue that happens in the aftermath, and we even heard it in some of the statements before, is this shooting was driven by ideology. Therefore, it must be driven by terrorism, unlike other mass shootings. But I think it`s also important to remember that many mass shootings are driven by ideology. That distinction is a very weak one in a way.
Look at the Charleston shooting, for example. I mean, how could you possibly think that wasn`t driven by some kind of ideology.
And so, in that sense, I think there`s a bigger question about our society and really I think we`re starting to ask that now. I think this is an important conversation we`re having, which is what are the frames we put around these issues and how are they linked to broader societal stigmatization and biases in a way that helps us in a way address some of these issues.
HARRIS-PERRY: So, what, Malcolm --
NANCE: Yes.
HARRIS-PERRY: -- what are the frames that make sense? Because what I don`t want to do is say, we shouldn`t use a terrorism frame because that leads us to not being able to identify things that are meaningfully different than, for example, interpersonal violence that might lead to gun violence. On the other hand, I am really worried about what we call terrorism and what we don`t.
NANCE: Well, terrorism is clearly defined. You know, it`s an act of violence or political violence or threat thereof which impacts an audience outside of the immediate victims. And we won`t know until the FBI starts doing much deeper forensic analyst. You know, the personal motivation of the shooters themselves. We have an indicator that someone may have pledged their loyalty to ISIS. Well, then that would take it outside of the frame of what workplace violence and outside of the frame of regular violence and would bring it clearly into the definition of terrorism.
HARRIS-PERRY: But as clear as that definition is, when you say it, it sounds like, yes, of course, that makes perfect sense to me. We are the resistance to using terrorism, for example, to talk about Charleston or to talk about even the Planned Parenthood shooting, versus the willingness, Linda, to talk about it in context when, in fact, shooters are also people who are Muslims.
LINDA SARSOUR, EXEC. DIR., ARAB AMERICAN ASSOC. OF NEW YORK: I mean, it`s deja vu for me every time that perpetrators end up being Muslim. We went from immediately knowing from eyewitnesses that they were three white males, which, by the way, multiple witnesses, three medium built, white males, and let`s not even go there. And then you were talking about gun control and Think Progress went all over the Republican candidates about thoughts and prayers, not fixing the laws.
And then, all of a sudden, find out they`re Muslim -- bam, gun violence is out of the question. We start talking about terrorism. And I`m extremely disturbed. I mean, I look at "The New York Times" cover today, here you have a whole op-ed on gun control, great. Right next to it is pictures from the apartment of things that I have in my house.
HARRIS-PERRY: Yes.
SARSOUR: Like these are things that all Muslims had in their house. There`s nothing about that that tells you a story about what terrorism looks like. So, you`re telling me when my friends who are not Muslim come into my home and see a Koran or see frames on the wall with a scripture from my religion, is that supposed to tell you something? I mean, it`s absolutely outrageous.
We would never do that to anyone. We didn`t do that to Dear. We didn`t do that to Roof. I`m tired of the double standards of how we treat Muslims if they are the perpetrators.
HARRIS-PERRY: That image and then also right next to it is image of the shooter, the suspect, in the hijab. The idea that, like, OK, this is what terrorism looks like. For me, that is a difference. It is a material and meaningful difference in how we -- so, on the one hand, I want to be able to talk about what the thing is that is terrorism. On the other hand, I have to reflect that this happened only for a specific community.
PIERCE: Some people are terrorists and some people are not. Some people get branded terrorist very quickly and some people do not. Some people get searched with extra scrutiny at the airport and some people do not. I think we have to talk about the inconsistency. I think we have to talk about the double standards.
I also think we have to talk about our cultural amnesia, which is that we have a frenzy after something happens, and then it goes away and we forget. Then it happens again and we have the frenzy again.
What does it mean to have a sustained conversation in our country about gun violence, or about terrorism, or about the acts of disparity when it comes to particular racists and cultures who are under particular kind of scrutiny and not simply wait for the frenzy to happen but to have something sustained so we can actually make some changes, so it`s actually unacceptable to frame people of one religious group, as somehow inherently more terroristic than people of other religious groups.
HARRIS-PERRY: When we come back, the FBI director talks about this issue and how are we to react in the face of terror.
JAMES COMEY, FBI DIRECTOR: We know this is very unsettling for the people of the United States. What we hope you will do is not let fear become disabling but to instead try to channel it into an awareness of your surroundings, to get you to a place where you are living your life but if you see something that doesn`t make sense, you say something to somebody.
HARRIS-PERRY: That was FBI Director James Comey on Friday commenting on the terror investigation in the San Bernardino shootings and how the public should respond. It was interesting for me that he was saying, oh, you shouldn`t get sort of so worked up and afraid even though this is terrorism, especially considering what he said about police officers and YouTube earlier in the year. Let`s take a listen.
COMEY: YouTube world, our officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crimes, our officers answering 911 calls but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around especially with guns. The suggestion, the question that`s been asked of me is, are these kinds of things challenging police behavior all over the country? I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is the chill wind that is blown through law enforcement over the last year and that wind is surely changing behavior.
HARRIS-PERRY: Oh, Colonel Jack, so, I don`t know -- police officers are too afraid of YouTube to do their jobs but the rest of us are not meant to --
COL. JACK JACOBS, MSNBC MILITARY ANALYST: Yes, I doubt it. I think that was a knee-jerk response to what was at that time something of a frenzy. You know, we`re in the middle of probably the biggest revolution, distribution of information since the invention of the printing press, and I think none of us knows exactly where it`s going to go. And that`s why reactions like the director had. Immediately in the aftermath of that saying -- well, everybody`s going to be scared to do their job seemed like a good idea at the time. It seemed like it was perceptive at the time. But, obviously, in retrospect, it`s not. At least part of it`s because we don`t know the full reach of information in a way it`s changing.
But I don`t think -- I mean, I`m not a cop and I don`t know, but I spent a lot of time in combat and I wouldn`t have acted any different and you have too. I wouldn`t have acted any different if I had a camera on or I didn`t have a camera on in the middle of combat. I would go ahead and do my job.
HARRIS-PERRY: I want to come to you Jonathan, because in a moment like this, you know, there can be an effort to either link the shooters in San Bernardino to a broader set of cultural religious, you know, community questions by trying to make this argument about ISIS or one can just say, oh, there`s individuals who are deranged, crazy. We should think of them as individuals with mental illnesses.
You know, honestly, I`m not sure which one I find more troubling as a kind of sort of stereotype. So, talk to me about how we should think about kind of individual mental state versus these narratives about broader connections.
METZL: Well, let me just say, first of all, we live in a very scary time. I mean, it does seem like there`s a repetitive death cycle on the news. Shootings are happening all the time. We live in an era of great uncertainty. And it does almost feel like, you know, who`s in control, who`s going to keep us safe.
And so, in an that sense, there`s a disseminated sense of anxiety, and it makes sense, especially given these events, why gun violence and issues like this are presented as the FBI director was saying, kind of beware, observe external threats.
But again, I think it`s important to note that if you look at trends in gun violence in the United States, that you`re far more likely to get shot by a relative, a neighbor, a sister, you know, a domestic violence kind of thing. We also have 20,000 gun suicides a year in the United States. You`re in danger of yourself in a particular way.
So, in a sense, externalizing this threat, which is I think again on one hand understandable, kind of effaces the real threat of gun violence which is that gun violence very often happens in social networks. And so, I agree with the comment before, which is we need to have a sustained -- a sustained conversation in this country about the broader implications, not just of gun violence but of the increasing kind of militazation (ph) of our society, because I do think that`s contributing to a sense of anxiety.
HARRIS-PERRY: You know, we`re talking earlier also, Linda, about surveillance, when we`re talking about policing, but when I also hear the FBI director say, be aware of your surroundings that if you see something threatening, I have to say, in this moment, you look threatening, because what we have done on the front page is to put someone who looks like you on it and I certainly know something about sort of living in that world where on any living day, Malcolm is what looks threatening in the world, right?
And so, I wonder about making a piece of advice that what we should do in order to keep ourselves safe is to look around us and look at who looks suspicious, when we know that there`s so much implicit bias in that.
SARSOUR: Absolutely. I mean, right now, I`m watching American Muslims, particularly young American Muslims, who are also shocked and mourning, you know, loss of life. We mourn loss of life every day. We just came out of Paris recently. We came out of Beirut. We came out of Kenya and Nigeria and every day, you know, we`re experiencing these things.
And here are American Muslims telling each other, here are five self- defense, you know, tactics that you should learn. Woman in hijab, don`t take your hijab off but maybe you could wear a hat, or maybe you could tie it to the back. Don`t stand too close on the train platform. Wait until the train gets there and stops until you get on the train.
I mean, this is the things that we`re telling each other, that we don`t trust our fellow Americans, that they can look at us as fellow Americans, as fellow New Yorkers, that we are just as horrified as anybody else on these shootings. As a matter of fact, one of the women who was shot in San Bernardino was a Muslim social worker.
HARRIS-PERRY: Yes.
SARSOUR: These terrorists when they do this, I don`t care what -- look, terrorists are all kinds of people for me.
HARRIS-PERRY: Yes.
SARSOUR: They don`t care who they`re shooting. I mean, we talked about ISIS and we talked about this with you before. The largest group of victims of ISIS are Muslims. No one wants to talk about that. Here are young people born and raised in this country who are fearful and don`t feel like they belong in a country that has Muslim lineage from the days of its founding and it breaks my heart every day, my children included.
HARRIS-PERRY: Malcolm, I have more for you on this but they`ll make me take a commercial. But I actually want to ask you, because we know profiling actually leads to a bunch of bad outcomes in local policing. And so, I`m also wondering about what it keeps us from doing well when we talk about counterterrorism as well.
Thank you, Jonathan Metzl in Miami, Florida. Enjoy the nice weather down there.
And up next, we are at war. That is what the United States secretary of defense told our Congress this week.
HARRIS-PERRY: This week, the U.S. raised the stakes in its fight against ISIS. Defense Secretary Ash Carter told a House hearing the Pentagon will expand into the special operations force in Iraq to fight Islamic state militants in Iraq and Syria.
ASHTON CARTER, DEFENSE SECRETARY: We`re at war. We`re using the might of the finest fighting force the world has ever known. These special operators will, over time, be able to conduct raids, free hostages, gather intelligence, and capture ISIL leaders.
HARRIS-PERRY: The new deployment will build upon the 3,500 troops already in Iraq and is being called, quote, "a specialized expeditionary targeting force". The raids it will be able to conduct will target Islamic State militants, what the Pentagon calls, quote, "high value target". Secretary Carter did not say how many new troops will be sent to Iraq but defense officials told NBC News the new standing force would comprise of 250 special operation forces that would conduct ground combat raids against is targets in both Iraq and Syria.
This change in strategy marks a deepening involvement for the U.S. military and at a time when some critics are pushing President Obama to go further, Republican Senator McCain who is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said in a written statement Secretary Carter`s announcement is quote a belated step forward.
So, Jack, I don`t know quite what to do with the war language because --
JACOBS: Ignore it, I think --
HARRIS-PERRY: Yes, it feels odd when we think about what this particular engagement is. War always sounds like we`re fighting a nation state which is not what`s happening here.
JACOBS: Well, it also sounds like it`s putting people in uniform and having them go out there and fight the bad guys to kill or capture them as we do in the infantry and then hold on to the terrain as long as necessary in order to reinstitute the government and all the rest of that stuff. But that`s not what we`re doing at all.
There are two things about that, all that. The first is we`re focusing on equipment that is bombs rather than people. That usually doesn`t work. Unless you`re going to use strategic weapons, which are nuclear weapons which we`re not going to use. Tactical weapons don`t work. Even over a long period of time.
We firebombed Dresden. We firebombed Tokyo. We firebombed Hamburg. We killed more people with firebomb in the Second World War than we killed with nuclear weapons. The Nazis bombed London. None of that, none of the conventional weapons did anything at all. I`m not arguing to use nuclear weapons because we`re not going to do it, it doesn`t make any sense.
But the real point is the only purpose for these weapons is to make it easy for people on the ground to seize and hold the terrain. Now, that`s not going to be us. That`s going to be people -- it should be people from the region who have a stake in what really happens here.
But so far, we haven`t been able to motivate them to do that. That requires -- that`s going to require diplomacy and not bombs.
HARRIS-PERRY: So when you say -- when you make that point about bombs, I feel like that is largely lost on ordinary folks. You know, you go to war, you bomb some stuff, people are like, please stop bombing, and then they, you know, sort of give in --
JACOBS: And then a miracle happens.
HARRIS-PERRY: But that is not what we`re facing here, right? When you hear the kind of public discourse around this, or even the statements from Ash Carter there, all we`re doing, the kind of counterterrorism that is necessary.
NANCE: Well, in the capacity that we have right now, the president`s strategic policy has been to contain ISIS. And the way they`ve been doing that is through, you know, interdiction of their combat capacity on the ground. That`s bombing tanks that were seized by the Iraqi army, artillery pieces, things like that, only in very strategic points. Seventy-five percent of the aircraft that go out on sorties come back without dropping their ordnance, that`s because what they don`t have is they don`t have terminal ground attack controllers, people putting eyes on to the target. And then a force that will move in once they`ve displaced some sort of military obstacle in the way.
So, you can sit and bomb Raqqa all day. It`s very satisfying, you know, we want ISIS to understand that we have the capacity to reach them. But as the colonel said, they`re not going to surrender because of a strategic bombing campaign. So, this task force is going to be linking up with ground force and doing unconventional, real special operations. But until we displace and break ISIS` line of communication.
JACOBS: Let me throw one further thing out there real quick, one of the objectives is to make it impossible for them to fund anything because we`re knocking out all their oil revenue. But, you know, attacks like the ones that took place in California and -- cost like 20 grand --
HARRIS-PERRY: So, here`s what I find interesting, to connect those, we don`t know yet whether or not ISIS and the California shooters, but there at least seems to be some sense from the California shooters they have some sympathies with the question of ISIS.
We are, I presume, going to bomb suburban homes in California. We are not I presume going to bomb suburban areas in Paris. Is this just a fundamental misunderstanding of how our kind of bombing action impacts the sentiments of people who watch what we are doing internationally?
NANCE: I think we`ve learned a lot since 9/11 to know that, you know, and certainly since the invasion of Iraq, which is a phenomenal mistake, that going in and conducting these massive ground combat operations just creates organizations like al Qaeda in Iraq which is now called ISIS. Not one of those people existed before the day we invaded that country.
So, now, we`re dealing with guys who have carved out their own nation states of Sunni radicals. You know, the United States needs to understand the only way to defeat this, and I know, I`ve been a ground combatant in these wars, you can kill a man, but you can`t kill his ideas.
And we have to go after what I call counter-ideological operations and warfare. We must expose and destroy the ideological cultism that is anti- Islamic, that is virulent anti-Islamic in ISIS`s ideology. They have bizarre traits. They say there`s seven pillars of Islam, not five.
HARRIS-PERRY: Right.
NANCE: They are a cult. Until we in the Muslim world engage that to the point where no one will deal with them, we`re going to be dropping bombs.
HARRIS-PERRY: Up next, the new report on ISIS-related arrests here in the United States.
OBAMA: We know that ISIL and other terrorist groups are actively encouraging people around the world and in our country to commit terrible acts of violence, oftentimes as lone wolf actors. And even as we work to prevent attacks, all of us, government, law enforcement, communities, faith leaders, need to work together to prevent people from falling victim to these hateful ideologies.
HARRIS-PERRY: That was President Obama this morning. One day after authorities revealed that Tashfeen Malik, one of the shooters who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in the Facebook post. The FBI is investigating the shooting as an act of terror. The agency has not made any firm conclusions but the case underscores concerns about homegrown terror.
Since 2014, 71 individuals linked to ISIS have been charged in the U.S. for terrorism-related activities and 56 have been arrested in 2015 alone, which is a record number of terrorism-related arrests for any year since 9/11. That`s according to a new study by George Washington University made public this week. The study ISIS in America reports that those charged -- of those charged, the average age is 26, 86 percent are male, the vast majority of those arrested are U.S. citizens, and 27 percent were involved in plots to carry out attacks in U.S. soil.
The FBI has stated ISIS-related investigations are active in all states but 21 states have at least one arrest within their border. The highest number of cases in New York followed by Minnesota.
So, I read the report because I feel like that`s what you do, and you find out that new report has told us new things and I am deeply distressed by the idea that this would constitute social scientific evidence that we would then make, for example, policing and counterterrorism decisions on. And you and I were remarking in the break, Yolanda, that just looking through the images of it and these kind of Facebook pictures and Twitter posts -- heck, you know, they look like brothers and cousins and friends and --
PIERCE: They look like my cousin Tyrone.
So, I think that -- this is what I was going to say before the break, I think we so desperately want things to be -- this is a bad guy and we`re the good guy. We want it to be clear cut. We don`t want there to be shades of gray. If we identify a group of people as the bad guys, then we can bomb them or we can wage war.
We don`t know what to do with the messiness of all this.
HARRIS-PERRY: Yes.
PIERCE: We don`t also know what to do if conventional weapons of, quote/unquote, "warfare" simply do not work.
HARRIS-PERRY: But I feel like we do know. I think that`s part of it. That this moment, the San Bernardino moment, connects us and makes us think, OK, now we are personally under attack by this thing that is ISIS. You know, Dylann Roof, Charleston church, nine people killed. Transwomen killed in 2015, likely as a result of their identities, 22 of them.
The number of shooting victims in Chicago this year, although not all of them died, 2,777. The number of Sikhs killed in a temple in Oak Creek in Wisconsin, six people, and need I point out the police in this country have shot and killed more than 1,000 people today. And we don`t think we should go to war with any of those people.
SARSOUR: I just want to -- Melissa, you know, terrorism or acts of terrorism or even ISIS sympathizers, it`s not an epidemic in the Muslim community. I mean, the fact we`re sitting here and making it sound like an every day occurrence, we are 7 million to 10 million Muslims in this country.
HARRIS-PERRY: But 71 individuals have been arrested.
SARSOUR: Seventy-one whole individual. And the fact we have, again, distracted from the issue. These two people or three bought legal weapons. Either they bought them or someone else bought them. They`re buying tactical weapons. No one thinks that`s the problem here. How did these people?
And then this idea of, like, countering violent extremism in this country continues to be directed exactly at Muslims as if there`s no other community in this country that engages in extremism. We`ve seen studies and studies from the New America Foundation and others that more people have been killed by white supremacist groups than by quote "jihadists" or whatever they want to call them.
HARRIS-PERRY: Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the few who are saying terrorist groups in America, what they are mostly talking about is right wing extremism.
SARSOUR: But now, it`s terrorism so we just have to go focus and be very narrow focused. There`s no silver bullet profile to any of these. They could be doctors, they could be Middle America, they could be poor, they could be black, they could be converts. I mean, there is no special -- like, if this person is like this, this is how it is.
And if we are really engaging in, quote, "unwarranted surveillance", which I believe our government is against Muslims, how did you not catch Mr. Syed Farouk buying tactical weapons and having all this ammunition? If that not raise a flag, and it`s why we need gun control in this country, why we need background checks.
But, of course, the Republicans don`t want them. But they will vote for a war against --
HARRIS-PERRY: I`ll tell you, it`s not the Republicans don`t want, Democrats don`t want it. This one may be bipartisan in kind of lack of action. That said, this is something that I was bringing up earlier. When you say, OK, how did we miss them? One of the things we know is it leads to poor law enforcement. And I wonder if this is also true even on the international scale.
NANCE: Well, it is. Let me pitch in on that. I wrote a book 14 years ago called "The Terrorist Recognition Handbook". I was bringing three decades at that time of intelligence collection experience to law enforcement. And the first thing I said, that`s known within the intelligence community, those were active practitioners, we are color neutral. We are race and ethnic neutral,
Terrorists will identify themselves through the manifestation of their activities, all right, and then once they cross a certain line, you`re a terrorist. If you act in a political way and you have a political message and you need to do that impact beyond the immediate victims, you cross and you get the "T" word branded on to you.
Unfortunately, that hasn`t filtered into the media, and it hasn`t filtered into law enforcement, you know, at the same level that the U.S. intelligence community does. So, we need to understand ISIS can be anyone anywhere any time, who claims that they`re ISIS. And the overwhelming preponderance of people who were carrying out these acts in the United States and the West are not Muslims, OK. Military age Muslim is almost a profile to get caught if you`re actually going to carry out a terrorist act.
HARRIS-PERRY: I want to pause and when we come back, I want to talk a little bit about things that make us feel like this is different, unusual, hard to understand, when we talk about the San Bernardino shootings, and there`s one aspect in particular I want us to dig into.
HARRIS-PERRY: I want to come back now again, this information we`re learning about the attackers in the San Bernardino shooting. Yesterday, we heard from lawyers representing members of Syed Farouk`s family.
MOHAMMAD ABUERSHAID, ATTORNEY FOR SYED FAROOK`S FAMILY: Would go over to the house, they wouldn`t all be together in the room. The women would sit with the women and the men would sit with the men. But that is very traditional way of acting. It wasn`t anything that was different.
HARRIS-PERRY: So, I think we`re hearing a lot now and a lot of anxiety around particularly the idea, two things, the family piece. So, the idea that one of the attackers is a woman and that there was a 6-month-old child. And I wanted to just come back to some of what you said in the first hour, Malcolm, that this anxiety around -- or this sort of shock around this idea that these are family folks who, you know, order something on Amazon and then have acted in this way.
NANCE: OK. Well, let`s take a projection here. Let`s make a leap. Let`s assume based on the evidence that we have right now that they have -- that she has actually radicalized. She did swear a bayat, she swore a loyalty oath to ISIS and her husband went along with that.
Obviously, the evidence shows that, bomb factory, lots of weapons. Obviously, she knew how to handle weapons. She had a run and gun battle with police. So, we take that into account.
And we have to understand -- now, how is it the family don`t know anything about that? All right. It`s quite simple. If they have radicalized, they bought into the concept of hegira, which is this ISIS/al Qaeda/cultist belief harkening back to the Prophet Muhammad leaving Mecca. They call this immigration where they leave mentally or physically the land of the infidel.
And you can either stay where you are and do that, right in your backyard or right in your bomb factory, and your family has to be isolated and cut away from you.
So, they still could meet with their family and never let them know what`s going on. And thinking -- well, I`m going to abandon you to this fate. But the child is a very, very strange thing. I have never in my entire career seen one where a child was abandoned to go do a suicide mission.
I`ve seen them use children as the bomb. I`ve seen them kill their family. We`ve seen husband and wife teams go out as dual suicide bombers. But this very thought they would carry out, adopt this ideology and then abandon their child into the land of the infidels is quite strange.
HARRIS-PERRY: So, Malcolm, one of the things I find fascinating in talking to you in this moment, as opposed to some of what we hear, and, Colonel Jack, I want to come back to the point you made, which is this idea that, you know, we can bomb everything but as we engage either domestically or internationally -- we`re going to have to have information. We`re going to have to be able to have conversations across different, we`re going to have to engage diplomacy.
I keep wondering if, in fact, our best tools for generating a different safer world is one where we actually learn multiple religious traditions, where we actually learn multiple languages where we actually aren`t sort of -- one of the ways to push back is to know more. So that we can engage more intelligently as we see the things in the world.
JACOBS: Well, our intelligence sorely lacking. We can go back several decades and realize every administration going back a long way has been complicit in reducing our ability to get timely human intelligence from places we need to get intelligence and then converting that into finished intelligence on which we can act. We`re terrible at it. We`re just now playing catch up after decades and decades of completely eliminating our capability to do so. So, we need to get better intelligence. We need to do it very, very soon.
PIERCE: But I would say more than better intelligence, better intelligence, but cultural, religious understanding, interfaith conversation. One of our favorite poets, Elizabeth Alexander, what if the mightiest word is love, right? What if the answer is not war and bombs but cultural understanding, religious understanding, sustained conversation? What if we stopped pretending? The Muslims are praying, what does it mean?
When almost every faith has prayer rituals, right, what would happen if we actually did that and that`s our fine line of defense? Our education is our first line of defense. That`s how we deploy our resources and our money.
HARRIS-PERRY: Right. So, that`s exactly -- so on the one hand, yes, this question of intelligence. But the idea of actually becoming more intelligent about the world we live in, because it does seem that part of what`s happening here is we`re constantly behaving in ways that are based in ignorance and fear.
SARSOUR: Absolutely. When people look at someone like me, they think I`m an anomaly. This is what Muslim women are. We are educated. We are mothers, but we`re also workers. We`re the backbones of our communities.
There`s a lot of information and misconceptions. People are OK with that. It`s acceptable. We allow media pundits. We allow presidential candidates -- I mean, the stuff that people are saying about Muslims, if they were said about any other faith, group, we would be up in arms as a country.
Forty percent of terror plots or alleged terror plots have been foiled by Muslims and information from Muslim communities. The last thing we need in this country is to push Muslims to margins of society. To then -- to actually then fuel potential radicalization and anti-American hate, because actually that`s what is feeds off of.
They`ll tell young Muslims in France, they don`t like you, you don`t belong there. This is the conditions you are in, is because of the other and otherizing. And this is what we don`t want. Our tools to combat terrorism is unity, it`s staying together. It`s looking at me in the street and saying, that`s my sister, she`s my American sister, I got her back, just like I know that she got my back. And that`s not the sentiment that we are right now.
HARRIS-PERRY: Thank you to Linda Sarsour, and also thank you to Malcolm Nance, and to Colonel Jack Jacobs, also to Yolanda Pierce.
Up next, after a hard week, we have a little bit of good news, and we`re going to lighten it up when we come back.
HARRIS-PERRY: We know that the news of the last few weeks has been especially tough. Every week for nearly a month, violence and brutality has dominated the headlines, and in Nerdland, if those of you who consume the news is anything like those of us who report on it, it might be feeling like the most.
So, we thought we would take this space for a reminder off a few things.
One, self-care is also an important part of the work, check in with your emotional well-being. If you need a break for yourself, take it.
Two, there is actually other news going on rather than everything that has been breaking everyday. It is not all bad.
So, here, for starters, a political miracle occurred in Washington this week. Thursday night, Congress reached a -- check it out -- bipartisan agreement on the $305 billion bill to fix our nation`s crumbling infrastructure. The five-year bill is the longest period in a decade that Congress has reauthorized federal transportation programs to fund roads, bridges, and rail lines.
And then there was this, a response that you may not have heard of the Syrian refugee crisis in Minnesota where refugee agencies have been so flooded with donations and offers to help that the director of one of the agencies told the "Minnesota Star Tribune" we have four to five times the number of volunteers inquiries and interests. It`s a wonderful problem to have.
And in Oklahoma this week, Montrel Adams, a student at a school for deaf children tackled a problem of his own. He was the target of bullying and he wanted to teach younger students about nonviolent conflict resolution. So he and the four people built this, a buddy bench.
The idea is that students sit on the bench when they are sad or lonely, which signals a classmates to join them on the bench to offer a word of encouragement or an invitation to play and hang out.
And lastly, just for the sheer joy of it, we leave you with this -- First Lady Michelle Obama making herself a new buddy at the national Christmas tree lighting and reading "Twas The Night Before Christmas" to a group of children with the help of Miss Piggy.
MICHELLE OBAMA, FIRST LADY: He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle. And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
MISS PIGGY: But I heard him exclaim as he flew out of sight "Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night."
OBAMA: High five, Miss Piggy. Low five.
HARRIS-PERRY: Yep, if you need to feel better, watch the FLOTUS video.
That is our show for today. Thanks to you at home for watching. I`ll see you tomorrow morning, 10:00 a.m. Eastern.
Right now, it`s time for a preview of "WEEKENDS WITH ALEX WITH".
Hi, Alex.


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You never know when the need might hit me. I need to write a annotation on a photo, add a watermark or stamp. Sounds like a simple need, but to do so has been possible through notes apps or a app per type of text I want to add. Finally, an all-in-one app that gets all my iPhone Photo notations handled. To make the app even better, the app A+ Signature is free through Feb 14th! This isn't the 'lite' version, the free offering is for the full power app.
There is a lot more tuning available through the app than I want to go into on my simple blog. Color of text/ink, sizing, placement, editing, outlines, seemingly endless list of available fonts… and more… all in this one app.

subset: commoncrawl


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Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk and Austrian author Peter Handke — two writers whose works are deeply intertwined in Europe's religious, ethnic and social fault lines — won the 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes for literature on Thursday.
The rare double announcement came after no literature prize was awarded last year due to sex-abuse allegations that tarnished the Swedish Academy, which awards the literature prize.
Yet if prize organizers hoped to get through this year's awards without controversy, they will likely be disappointed.
The Swedish Academy called Handke "one of the most influential writers in Europe" after World War II and praised his work for exploring "the periphery and the specificity of human experience" with linguistic ingenuity.
But the 76-year-old author has long faced criticism for his vigorous defense of the Serbs during the 1990s wars that devastated the Balkans as Yugoslavia disintegrated. He spoke at the 2006 funeral of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who at the time was facing war crimes charges, calling him "a rather tragic man."
Handke — who once called for the Nobel Prize to be abolished — said he was "astonished" to receive the award.
"I never thought they would choose me," Handke told reporters outside his home near Paris.
"It was very courageous by the Swedish academy, this kind of decision," he added. "These are good people."
If Handke's victory caused uncomfortable ripples, the choice of Tokarczuk was welcomed by liberal-minded authors and readers in her native Poland and beyond.
The 57-year-old novelist is one of Poland's best-known authors, known for her humanist themes and playful, subversive streak. The academy said she was chosen for works that explore the "crossing of boundaries as a form of life."
Beginning with his first novel, "The Hornets," in 1966, Handke made his name with works that combine introspection and a provocative streak. One early play was called "Offending the Audience" and featured actors insulting theatergoers.
He has written screenplays, several of them for German director Wim Wenders, who also filmed Handke's 1970 novel "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick."
He was praised by the Swedish Academy for writing powerfully about catastrophe, notably in "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams," his 1972 autobiographical novel about his mother's suicide.
But his staunch support of the Serbs during the 1990s Balkans wars has set him at odds with many other Western intellectuals.
In a 1996 essay, "Justice for Serbia," Handke accused Western news media of depicting Serbs as aggressors in the wars that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia. He denied that genocide was committed when Bosnian Serb troops massacred some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the enclave of Srebrenica in 1995, and was an opponent of NATO's airstrikes against Serbia for that country's violent crackdown in Kosovo in the late 1990s. In an interview with Serbia's state TV earlier this year Handke said those behind the bombing "don't belong to Europe and the planet Earth."
Handke's views led novelist Salman Rushdie in 1999 to call him a contender for "International Moron of the Year." Rushdie's publicist at Penguin Random House said Thursday that Rushdie stood by what he wrote in 1999.
In 2006, Handke turned down the Heinrich Heine award from the German city of Duesseldorf after his selection sparked a row among the city's politicians. His selection as winner of the International Ibsen Award for drama in 2014 also prompted protests from human rights groups.
The same year, he told the Austrian Press Agency that the Nobel Prize should be abolished because of its "false canonization" of literature.
Tokarcuzk has been attacked by Polish conservatives — and received death threats — for criticizing aspects of the country's past, including its episodes of anti-Semitism. She is also a strong critic of Poland's current right-wing government.
Her 2014 novel "The Books of Jacob" tackles the forced conversion of Polish Jews to Catholicism in the 18th century. Her book "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead" is a crime thriller with feminist and animal-rights themes that offers a sometimes unflattering depiction of small-town Polish life.
She won the Booker International Prize in 2018 for "Flights," which combines tales of modern-day travel with the story of a 17th-century anatomist who dissected his own amputated leg and the journey of composer Frederic Chopin's heart from Paris to Warsaw after his death.
Poland's Culture Minister Piotr Glinski, who said earlier this week that he has not finished any of Tokarczuk's books, tweeted his congratulations and said he now felt obliged to go back and read her books all the way through.
Polish President Andrzej Duda called it a "great day for Polish literature" on Twitter.
Tokarczuk is only the 15th woman to win the Nobel literature prize in more than a century. Of the 11 Nobels awarded so far this week, all the other laureates have been men.
Both winners will receive a full cash prize, valued this year at 9 million kronor ($918,000), a gold medal and a diploma.
The literature prize was canceled last year after an exodus of members from the exclusive Swedish Academy, which chooses the winners, following sex- abuse allegations. Jean-Claude Arnault, the husband of a former academy member, was convicted last year of two rapes in 2011.
The Nobel Foundation had warned that another group could award the literature prize if the academy didn't improve its tarnished image, but said in March it was satisfied the Swedish Academy had revamped itself and restored trust.
The 2018 and 2019 awards were chosen by the Swedish Academy's Nobel Committee, a new body made up of four academy members and five "external specialists." Nobel organizers say the committee suggests two names that then must be approved by the Swedish Academy. It's unclear whether academy members simply rubber-stamped the experts' choice.
Anders Olsson, chair of the Swedish Academy's Nobel Committee, said "we are not ready to evaluate this new process yet."
In his will, Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel designated the Swedish Academy as the institution responsible for the Nobel Prize in literature. Nobel decided the physics, chemistry and medicine prizes should be awarded in Stockholm, and the peace prize in Oslo.
The coveted Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday and the economics award on Monday.
The laureates will receive their honors at an elegant ceremony on Dec. 10 — the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896 — in Stockholm and in Oslo.q


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Lawful Evil Demon
Status: Alive
Zip is the little fire demon that is trapped in the amulet given to the Whym and Ashen by Xaos-Zhimon. He acts as a courier of messages between the adventurers and the demon lord. He can be a bit sassy at times.