Author Archives: Paul Woodward

David Cameron had advance warning of Miranda detention

The Guardian reports: David Cameron has been drawn into the controversy over the treatment of David Miranda after Downing Street confirmed that the prime minister was given advanced notice that police planned to detain the partner of Glenn Greenwald at Heathrow airport.

As the Home Office launched an aggressive offensive to justify the detention of Miranda, No 10 said the prime minister was informed of the planned police action.

A Downing Street source said: “We were kept abreast in the usual way. We do not direct police investigations.”

The confirmation from Downing Street, which follows a statement from the White House that it was given a “heads-up” about the detention of Miranda, came shortly after the Home Office suggested that Greenwald’s partner possessed “highly sensitive stolen information that would help terrorism”.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The government and the police have a duty to protect the public and our national security. If the police believe that an individual is in possession of highly sensitive stolen information that would help terrorism, then they should act and the law provides them with a framework to do that. Those who oppose this sort of action need to think about what they are condoning. This is an ongoing police inquiry so will not comment on the specifics.”

In the duplicitous manner that seems to have become second-nature to government officials in this era, we are being told in a roundabout way that opposing Miranda’s detention is somehow supporting terrorism — think about what you are condoning, the British official ominously suggests.

It is the official himself who needs to think about what we are condoning.

To support Edward Snowden and those who have helped disseminate the information which he leaked, is to support an idea that rests at the foundation of representational democracy: that the preeminent responsibility of public officials is to represent the interests of the public. When the interests of the state conflict with those of the people, real democrats stand up for the people.

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U.S. and allies were near a deal for peaceful end to Egypt crisis

The Washington Post reports: Two weeks before the bloody crackdown in Cairo, the Obama administration, working with European and Persian Gulf allies, believed it was close to a deal to have Islamist supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi disband street encampments in return for a pledge of nonviolence from Egypt’s interim authorities.

But the military-backed government rejected the deal and ordered its security forces to break up the protests, a decision that has resulted in hundreds of deaths and street clashes that continued Friday in the capital.

The agreement nearly brokered two weeks ago sought statements of restraint from both sides and an inquiry into competing claims of violence and mistreatment, said Bernardino León, the European Union’s envoy for Egypt. That was supposed to be a prelude to talks between the Muslim Brotherhood and the government.

Former Egyptian vice president Mohamed ElBaradei appeared to back the deal but could not convince Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the head of the military, León said. ElBaradei resigned after violence erupted.

What this report neglects to make clear, is that the agreement referred to by León had already been accepted by the Muslim Brotherhood.

General Sisi, most likely with the full support of the military, was the primary obstacle to a path that would avoided this week’s massacre.

It’s also noteworthy that just a week ago, Israel’s former prime minister and defense minister, Ehud Barak, appeared on CNN, saying: “the whole world should support Sisi.” With an expression of support like that from an Israeli leader who is more closely aligned with the Obama administration than anyone in the current Israeli government, it’s hard not to wonder whether Sisi felt that any criticism he might later provoke from Washington would be of little consequence.

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America’s role in the violence in Egypt

I imagine a lot of Americans upon seeing news reports about the eruption of violence in Egypt will respond with a mixture of shock, dismay, and resignation. “This is what happens in the Middle East” — the observation that pretends to be an explanation, as though people across the region kill each other as a pastime.

And then there will be those who take note of the fact that Egypt’s security services are using Caterpillar bulldozers and Humvees — all paid for with U.S. tax dollars.

But the real enabling force behind the killing is an idea — an idea that ever since 9/11 to varying degrees most Americans have subscribed to: the idea of a war on terrorism.

Ever since that phrase was coined and popularized, it has served as currency for every dictator who wants to justify ruthless repression. And now in Egypt it serves as popular ideology as much of the population think the police and the army are now just doing their job, slaughtering members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the hundreds.

The New York Times reports: A man who sold eggs said the army had waited too long to attack the Islamists. An accountant said the police had stormed the protests with an efficiency he had not seen in years.

In the working-class neighborhood of Imbaba on Thursday, a teacher, Mohamed Abdul Hafez, said the hundreds of Islamists who died the day before mattered little to him. “It’s about the security of the country,” Mr. Hafez said.

Egypt seemed more divided than ever after a brutal day of violence here that left hundreds of people dead. Supporters of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, mourned those killed, vowed revenge, planned their next moves. Many other Egyptians, though, directed their ire at the protesters who had camped out in the streets for weeks. For them, what occurred made sense.

“It was necessary,” Akmal William, standing in his auto-detailing shop on Talaat Harb Street, said of the raid by soldiers and police officers. “They had to be strict.”

Witnesses described a disproportionate, ruthless attack. Condemnations came from human rights advocates, a few Egyptian political figures, and from abroad. But many Egyptians viewed things differently, focusing on what they said were continuing threats from Mr. Morsi’s supporters, who were frequently referred to as terrorists. In their view, the army was the only force standing in the Islamists’ way.

Between the parallel realities, others were torn between the claims of the security forces of violent demonstrators who threatened the country — a view parroted by the state news media — and what they heard from Islamist friends about how the battle on the streets had unfolded on Wednesday morning.

In Imbaba, a neighborhood that seems to catch all the nation’s political currents in its congested alleyways, many people regretted the bloodshed. But they asserted that the alternative was worse. The Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Morsi’s political party, was holding back the country with endless sit-ins and protests, many said. And the longer the army waited to act, the weaker Egypt seemed to them.

That conviction only grew stronger amid reports about Islamist violence, including the storming of a government building in Giza early Thursday. Mr. William, a Coptic Christian, was preoccupied by a spate of attacks on churches and Christian homes across the country, a spasm of collective scapegoating by some of Mr. Morsi’s supporters.

“They won’t go easily,” he said, adding that churches “are still being burned.”

Some people seemed to buy the relentless propaganda of the state news media, saying they had come to realize that the Brotherhood was actually the mysterious “third party” blamed by successive Egyptian leaders for all manner of evil deeds. At least one man just seemed anxious to heap praise on the country’s leaders, irrespective of their actions, as if Egypt were still frozen in its authoritarian past.

Others had arrived at their own conclusions, and explained in detail why the government had been forced to act against Mr. Morsi and his supporters, regardless of the consequences.

“I don’t like conspiracy theories,” said Ahmed Mustafa, 37, an accountant who sat in a cafe. “I’m against violence. I gave my vote to Morsi, and he disappointed me. They did things their way, and it was a false way.”

The authorities acted responsibly on Wednesday, he said, moving during daylight, so that “everything was obvious,” rather than under the cover of darkness.

“We delegated them to fight terrorism,” he said of the military. “And the Brotherhood wanted to show themselves as victims.” [Continue reading…]

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Analysing the latest evidence of crimes by the NSA as it spies on Americans

The lead in the Washington Post’s latest revelations on the NSA says: “The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.”

If that’s the heart of the story, they left out one crucial detail: the audit only covers the NSA’s activities in the Washington DC area! A few thousand “incidents” of the NSA spying on Americans in the nation’s capital may mean hundreds of thousands of such “incidents” across the country.

In June, NSA director Keith Alexander said that the agency had determined which files Snowden took. It follows therefore, that administration officials would not subsequently make statements which could later be falsified by information yet to be leaked — unless of course Alexander’s claim turned out to be bogus.

Government officials spend half their lives coming up with variations on these two assertions: we know what’s going on, and, we’ve got everything under control. Most of the time, neither of those claims are true.

In a series of posts, TechDirt digs into the Post’s report and accompanying documents.

Mike Masnick: Throughout the whole ordeal with the NSA leaks, the one line that we kept hearing from defenders of the program was that not only were these programs legal, no one had showed any abuse by the NSA. That is, even if this program was collecting data on everyone, the NSA had those important tools in place to block it from being abused. At last week’s press conference, this was a key point made by President Obama. NSA boss Keith Alexander insisted that there was no abuse, while Rep. Mike Rogers, the NSA’s prime defender and head of the House Intelligence Committee, similarly insisted that there was no abuse by the NSA. As we noted, that seemed hard to believe, given past revelations of clear abuse.

And… the latest report from the Washington Post based on leaked documents shows that an audit of the NSA’s activities shows it broke privacy rules, mostly to spy on Americans, thousands of times per year:

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by law and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

The audit info comes from Ed Snowden’s leaks, so it seems rather incredible that President Obama, Keith Alexander and Mike Rogers didn’t seem to realize that this audit would eventually come to light, showing that they were flat out 100% lying to the American public.

The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.

The NSA’s response to all of this is almost comical:

“We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.

Well, of course! That’s the point that we’ve made over and over and over again here in response to these claims of “no abuse.” The NSA is made up of humans. And when you give humans the power to spy on just about anyone there will always be some abuse. This is why it’s important to limit the collection of information, not promise to stop the abuses. You need to make such abuses much more difficult in the first place. [Continue reading…]

Mike Masnick: It’s already been shown that the Congressional oversight is a joke, because of obstruction by the Intelligence Committee. And now we know that the “oversight” from the courts was similarly a joke. The chief judge of FISC, Reggie Walton, who has reacted angrily in the past to the claims of FISC being a “rubber stamp”, has now admitted that the FISC really can’t check on what the NSA is doing and relies on what they tell him to make sure that they’re not breaking the law.

“The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court,” its chief, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, said in a written statement to The Washington Post. “The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”

That’s not quite true. You see, with “any other court” when it comes to “enforcing compliance” things aren’t all hidden away from everyone, so there is scrutiny to make sure that there’s compliance. Not here. [Continue reading…]

Mike Masnick: Gellman reveals an a somewhat wacky presentation slide, complete with a palm tree graphic and with the somewhat folksy title:

Lesson 4: So you got a U.S. Person Information?

And then explains what to do about it. They’re pretty clear that if you’re directly targeting a US person that’s a problem (and it is, because that’s illegal). If it’s considered “inadvertent” then you also have to stop, write up an incident report and notify people. That sounds reasonable. But… then there’s the “incidental” section. Here, incidental is described as:

You targeted a legitimate foreign entity and acquired information/communications to/from/about a U.S. Person in your results.

That doesn’t seem particularly “incidental” to me. But, here’s the kicker. While with all the other forms of collection the NSA is told to stop, when it’s “incidental” they’re told:

This does not constitute a USSID SP008 violation, so it does not have to be reported in the IG quarterly.

Note that the IG report is the one that was revealed, listing all of the abuses. Yet, here they seem to be indicating that these “incidental” collections of information (and note that it’s not just “metadata” here, but full “communications” as well) aren’t a real problem. [Continue reading…]

Mike Masnick: One of the documents released with the report, via Ed Snowden, shows that NSA agents were directly told to give their overseers as little information as possible. The document explains to agents the process for justifying why they were requesting targeting (i.e., a more detailed look concerning an individual or group — not just at that person’s communications, but potentially anyone even remotely connected to them), and makes it clear that they are to give the bare minimum necessary to fulfill their reporting requirements, but not even the slightest bit beyond that. In fact, they’re told to give a single short sentence, and to make sure it includes no “extraneous information.”

The basic premise of this process is to memorialize why you the analyst have requested targeting. This rationale will be provided to our external FISA Amendment Act (FAA) overseers, the Department of Justice and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, for all FAA targeting.

While we do want to provide our FAA overseers with the information they need, we DO NOT want to give them any extraneous information…. This rationale can be no longer than one short sentence.

[….] Your rationale MUST NOT contain any additional information including: probable cause-like information (i.e., proof of your analytic judgment), how you came to your analytic conclusions, any RAGTIME information, classification marking or selector information.

The document goes on to list a variety of “example” rationale sentences, all pretty short and sweet, which basically demonstrate to NSA agents how to remove any pertinent information for oversight, while still giving a “reason” for targeting someone. It’s a lesson in stripping out information and, as the Washington Post notes, replacing it with “generic” info that will pass muster with the folks supposedly in charge of oversight. As an aside, while parts of them are redacted, there are a few “fake” names given, including “Mohammad Badguy” and “Muhammad Fake Name.” No profiling there. [Continue reading…]

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Is this Egypt’s Intifada?

Michael Hirsh writes: As the Egyptian military consolidates control by murdering pro-Muslim Brotherhood protesters and declaring a state of emergency, we may be witnessing the most dangerous potential for Arab radicalization since the two Palestinian intifadas. Despite the resignation Wednesday of Mohamed ElBaradei, the vice president, in opposition to the Egyptian junta’s action, the discomfiting fact is that most of Egypt’s liberal “democrats”–along with the United States–have never looked more hypocritical. If the bloody crackdown is allowed to continue while the U.S. and West do nothing, the actions of the Egyptian military could de-legitimize democratic change in the Arab world for a generation or more.

And for Washington, a dream that began with the neoconservative push to turn Iraq into a “model democracy” after the 2003 invasion–the somewhat naïve Western hope that the Arab nations would catch up with the rest of the world–may already be dead. Worse, the loss of moderate Islamist alternatives, and the failure of democracy, could supply al-Qaida with its biggest recruiting campaign since 9/11.

The images in Egypt are excruciating to behold, both in a literal and philosophical sense. In what appeared to be more of a direct military assault than a police-style crowd-clearing exercise, Egyptian forces reportedly killed nearly 150 people, most of them supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi who were engaged in nothing more offensive than a series of sit-ins. Suddenly, in one awful day, the exercise of the democratic rights and ideals that are so dear to America’s self-image–and which have formed the heart of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War–were rendered all but irrelevant to many Arabs, especially because of Washington’s mild response. Apart from a few dissenters such as ElBaradei, the once-inspiring secularists who massed in Tahrir Square to oust Hosni Mubarak have now repudiated those democratic rights and values by continuing to support the bloody crackdown. And while the Obama administration issued a rote condemnation, the lack of any more dramatic response continues to fritter away what little moral authority America has left. [Continue reading…]

As commentators warn about the dangers of rising “radicalization” across the Middle East, we should never forget that in many respects this is the legacy of the war on terrorism. Which is to say, ever since the United States government elevated “terrorism” into a global threat supposedly greater than any other, authoritarian rulers have been given free license to act with relative impunity in crushing their political opponents by casting them as terrorists.

The radicalization of the Muslim Brotherhood may well be the principal objective of the Egyptian military as it pursues its current crackdown. Rather than wanting to clear the streets of protesters, it wants the protesters to become increasingly violent and as the violence escalates, the military will claim it is justified in escalating its own use of force.

The real extremism that is always at play is one that has no unique geographic, religious, or ideological locus; it is the belief that there is no alternative than a fight to destroy one’s enemy.

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Obama backtracks on promise to create ‘independent’ panel of ‘outsiders’ to review surveillance programs

Remember, it was just five days ago that President Obama promised to form “a high level group of outside experts” — an “independent group” — whose job would be to review the intelligence communities surveillance programs.

An indication that Obama has yet again been willfully attempting to mislead the American people was immediately evident in the fact that neither his memorandum instigating the creation of this panel, nor DNI Clapper’s follow-up, made any reference whatsoever to the composition of this group — no reference to its independence or that its members would genuinely be outsiders.

Having received a barrage of criticism for giving serial-liar Clapper the job of leading this panel, the White House has now reversed itself. Yet when it comes to following through on the promise that the panel will be independent, either Obama will have to retract his initial memo, or — more likely — he will soon issue some weasel words on the reason a group of intelligence insiders are the best qualified people to sit on the review panel.

National security council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden says:

“The members require security clearances and access to classified information so they need to be administratively connected to the government, and the DNI’s office is the right place to provide that. The review process and findings will be the group’s.”

The panel is being directed to deliver its report within 60 days of its establishment, no later than December 15. That’s 122 days away and at this point, no one has even been selected to sit on the panel.

It typically takes an applicant 87 days to receive a security clearance to work at the NSA. Even if the process for panel members is expedited, the NSA will vigorously object to corners being cut since panel members will be looking at the most sensitive information that the government possesses.

If Obama really wanted this to be an independent review, he wouldn’t have set a December 15 deadline. The time frame looks like an exercise in pure cynicism. Superficially it creates the appearance of a desire to deal with this issue swiftly — for it not to become mired in bureaucratic inertia. But since — due to the deadline — the panel members will most likely all already have security clearances before being selected, irrespective of whether they have been employed by the federal government, they will be insiders.

I guess by President Obama’s definition, former NSA chief Gen Michael Hayden would fit the description of an “outsider.”

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White House backtracks on Clapper’s role in surveillance review

“I can confirm we are not backtracking on what the president announced,” said national security council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden when explaining how the White House is backtracking on the role DNI Clapper will have in “establishing” a panel reviewing NSA surveillance.

It turns out that when President Obama wrote, “I am directing you to establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies,” he meant things like, find a room, make sure there are enough chairs, take lunch orders — that kind of thing. As a self-confessed liar, Clapper is not being given the role of leading the meetings or choosing the panel members — though no doubt he’ll be able to eavesdrop on the conversation.

Hayden:

“As we announced on Friday, the review group will be made up of independent, outside experts. The DNI’s role is one of facilitation, and the group is not under the direction of or led by the DNI.

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Egypt’s rulers declare ‘one month’ state of emergency

Is this the sign that Egypt’s experiment with democracy is well and truly over?

Al Jazeera reports: A state of emergency has been declared across Egypt, as security forces and supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi continue to clash around the country.

The announcement on Wednesday came amid a deadly crackdown by security forces on two pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo.

The health ministry said at least 149 people had been killed in clashes around the country, but some members of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood said the death toll was much higher.

Is the United States about to take any punitive measures against Egypt’s military rulers? Not likely. President Obama is “monitoring what’s happening” — translation: he has no intention of taking any action.

The Wall Street Journal reports: The White House once again called for “restraint” in Egypt and said the administration opposes the state-of-emergency law and continues to review U.S. aid to the country.

“The United States strongly condemns the use of violence against protesters in Egypt,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Wednesday. “The violence will only make it more difficult to move Egypt forward.”

Mr. Earnest said the U.S. will hold the interim government accountable for its promise to speed up the transition to a democratic government. Senior U.S. officials are in touch with their counterparts in Egypt, he said.

“The world is watching what’s happening in Cairo,” Mr. Earnest said, adding that U.S. officials are still trying to determine the specifics of events.

President Barack Obama, on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, was briefed Wednesday morning on developments by National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

“He is closely monitoring what’s happening,” Mr. Earnest said.

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Obama’s vision of good governance: that which warrants no scrutiny

In recent days Barack Obama has made it clear how he views his job — and that of the whole United States government. It’s effectiveness hinges on public trust, which is to say, if government is doing its job, ordinary Americans can forget about it and get on with their lives, confident that those who have been entrusted to govern can do so even if we don’t know what they are doing. Transparency is necessary only in so far as it serves to dissipate mistrust.

The information leaked by Edward Snowden has had the effect of diminishing trust in government and so the solution to that problem is anything that will elevate trust. Obama however can’t even acknowledge that trust has been severely undermined — most notably by the habit that he and his top officials have of lying — and so he now talks about the need to “maintain the public trust.”

In Obama’s memorandum initiating a review of U.S. surveillance programs and in DNI Clapper’s follow-up, not a single word is mentioned on the issues of civil liberties and the right to privacy.

Obama might as well have said: “We’re going to do whatever it takes for you folks to stop worrying yourselves and let us carry on with our work, uninterrupted. After all, it’s summertime. Shouldn’t you be out enjoying the sun?”

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War and the death of personal responsibility

Hiroshima, August, 1945

The testimony of those who have fought in war is filled with accounts about gruesome acts that few individuals could ever have imagined engaging in or witnessing in any other circumstances. War opens up dark realms that don’t even enter the nightmares of those who have never been there. The more horrific the event, the more haunting the memory — or at least, so one might expect.

Sixty-eight years after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Greg Mitchell looks back at the experiences of some of those who were involved.

Never before, nor subsequently, has there been an act of genocide in human history where so many people have been slaughtered in such a brief span of time.

At 8.15 am, local time, on August 6, 1945, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets unleashed the greatest force of human destruction ever devised, while piloting an aircraft to which the personal touch had been added: his mother’s name — the Enola Gay.

Forty years after the event, Mitchell spoke to Tibbets and they talked about his experience. But prior to that conversation, Mitchell visited Hiroshima.

While spending a month in Japan on a grant in 1984, I met a man named Akihiro Takahashi. He was one of the many child victims of the atomic attack, but unlike most of them, he survived (though with horrific burns and other injuries), and grew up to become a director of the memorial museum in Hiroshima.

Takahashi showed me personal letters to and from Tibbets, which had led to a remarkable meeting between the two elderly men in Washington, D.C. At that recent meeting, Takahashi expressed forgiveness, admitted Japan’s aggression and cruelty in the war, and then pressed Tibbets to acknowledge that the indiscriminate bombing of civilians was always wrong.

But the pilot (who had not met one of the Japanese survivors previously) was non-committal in his response, while volunteering that wars were a very bad idea in the nuclear age. Takahashi swore he saw a tear in the corner of one of Tibbets’ eyes.

So, on May 6, 1985, I called Tibbets at his office at Executive Jet Aviation in Columbus, Ohio, and in surprisingly short order, he got on the horn. He confirmed the meeting with Takahashi (he agreed to do that only out of “courtesy”) and most of the details, but scoffed at the notion of shedding any tears over the bombing. That was, in fact, “bullshit.”

“I’ve got a standard answer on that,” he informed me, referring to guilt. “I felt nothing about it. I’m sorry for Takahashi and the others who got burned up down there, but I felt sorry for those who died at Pearl Harbor, too…. People get mad when I say this but — it was as impersonal as could be. There wasn’t anything personal as far as I’m concerned, so I had no personal part in it.

“It wasn’t my decision to make morally, one way or another. I did what I was told — I didn’t invent the bomb, I just dropped the damn thing. It was a success, and that’s where I’ve left it. I can assure you that I sleep just as peacefully as anybody can sleep.” When August 6 rolled around each year “sometimes people have to tell me. To me it’s just another day.”

One of the other aircraft on the mission to bomb Hiroshima, at the time unnamed, was later named Necessary Evil — a response presumably to what had become the conventional wisdom: that as horrific as the use of nuclear weapons had been, their use had been necessary as the means to bring to an end the Second World War. The lives lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented even greater loss of life, had the war dragged on — so the argument goes.

But as Ward Wilson has persuasively argued, it was not the nuclear destruction of two of its cities that led Japan to surrender; it was instead the Soviet Union’s decision to invade.

The Soviet invasion invalidated the military’s decisive battle strategy, just as it invalidated the diplomatic strategy. At a single stroke, all of Japan’s options evaporated. The Soviet invasion was strategically decisive — it foreclosed both of Japan’s options — while the bombing of Hiroshima (which foreclosed neither) was not.

For many of those involved, war, seemingly driven by necessity, closes off the faculty of choice and where there is no sense of choice, there is little sense of responsibility.

Those who look back and question their own actions are implicitly considering the possibility that they could have acted otherwise.

Though it’s often said that truth is the first casualty of war, what keeps the war machine in perpetual motion is the conviction: we have no choice.

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Snowden initiates review of U.S. surveillance operations — Obama takes credit

“I called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before Mr. Snowden made these leaks,” President Obama claimed today in a press conference at the White House.

Oh really? Was this in a classified memo? Was it going to be a secret review whose findings would never be made public?

And if Obama was already working on this issue, how come it wasn’t until after the first leaks that for the very first time he sat down with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board?

If this board now has an essential role in the review Obama has just proposed, there is no evidence whatsoever that he attached much significance to the board’s operations prior to the leaks. As Government Executive reported this week:

The little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created in 2007 on a 9/11 Commission recommendation, was limping along for years with no appointees or staff leadership. All that changed with this summer’s revelations of domestic surveillance of Americans’ telephone activity by the National Security Agency.

The board — an independent agency that consists of four part-time members and a full-time chair who advise the president and Congress on the balance between security and privacy — this month will finally welcome its first executive director, attorney Sharon Bradford Franklin. That’s after it took more than two years for President Obama to nominate and for the Senate to approve the board members — Chairman David Medine was just confirmed in May.

Board members were not briefed on the NSA’s surveillance operations until June 19, two weeks after the first leaks had been published by The Guardian.

Obama now claims that the new review could have proceeded in a more orderly fashion in the absence of the media attention that has been generated, thanks to the leaks.

As far as this president is concerned, that government which governs best is the one whose operations we know least about and care even less about.

(The following clip from Obama’s news conference is preceded by a 30-second commercial.)

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NSA closes security loophole. Employees must now use pigeon post instead of email

David Sanger, the NSA’s representative at the New York Times, recently reported that in order to prevent the emergence of another Snowden, the agency is imposing a “two-man rule” on system administrators, or what one might call a peer-policing policy so that these guys don’t do anything naughty when left to their own devices. A logical implication of that policy would be that this duplication of roles would mean that the agency would need to hire more system administrators.

Reuters now reports:

The National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information.

Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the U.S. spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security.

Automated? Seriously? If what system administrators do can be automated, why are there system administrators? Or are they like manual typesetters resisting the implementation of electronic typesetting? Or has the NSA always employed about ten times as many systems administrators as it needed?

Yes, my Onion-style headline is made up, but the real one — “NSA to cut system administrators by 90 percent to limit data access” — makes about as much sense. It’s like the Air Force saying it can now fire most of its maintenance workers because it’s started operating aircraft that can fix themselves.

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Obama: ‘The odds of people dying in a terrorist attack obviously are still a lot lower than in a car accident, unfortunately.’ Unfortunately?

Did Obama mean ‘fortunately’ and misspeak when he said ‘unfortunately’?

No.

If he was really wanting to underline the fact that car accidents pose a vastly greater threat to Americans than does terrorism, then he would be acknowledging that this administration and its predecessor have got their priorities wrong — that is, if they truly believe it’s their job to keep Americans safe.

So, he wasn’t celebrating the fact that terrorism poses a minimal risk to the average American.

Neither, presumably, was he saying that it’s unfortunate that terrorists aren’t doing a better job at killing people.

All he could have been implying was while it’s unfortunate that lots of people get killed in car accidents, there’s not much the government can do to reduce that risk. The resources of the U.S. government (provided by U.S. taxpayers) are much better being dedicated to minimizing what is already statistically a virtually non-existent risk posed by the threat of terrorism.

In the pathology of Washington-speak which marches in lock-step with the interests of the Military-Technology Complex, this is what it means to keep things in perspective.

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“Something big” — a big attack, a big leak, or major panic?


U.S. officials stunned

Al Qaeda chief Ayman al Zawahiri and Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), were discussing “something big,” sources say. It’s rare for veteran al Qaeda leaders to break operational security by openly discussing possible plots, and the interception stunned U.S. officials. (CBS News)

Al Qaeda is pushing our buttons

Anthony Shaffer, a former military intelligence officer who now works with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, said this might just be “Al Qaeda pushing our buttons” to see how the U.S. responds.

“It’s a test in my judgment,” he told FoxNews.com. “I think this is a trial balloon by Al Qaeda to see how we would react.” (Fox News)

No smoking gun

“The threat picture is based on a broad range of reporting, there is no smoking gun in this threat picture,” a U.S. official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

U.S. officials said there was still no information about a specific target or location of a potential attack, but the threat to Western interests had not diminished.

It’s safe in Baghdad

Rattled lawmakers in both parties applauded President Obama’s decision to shutter two dozen U.S. diplomatic posts across the Middle East and North Africa this weekend, calling the threat of a fresh terrorist attack credible, specific and the most alarming in years.

The State Department extended the closure of 19 embassies, consulates and smaller diplomatic posts through Saturday “out of an abundance of caution,” spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a written statement Sunday. Several other posts, including embassies in Kabul and Baghdad, will reopen Monday. (Washington Post)

Americans flee from Yemen

After days of alarms and embassy lockdowns, the United States and Britain on Tuesday stepped up security precautions in Yemen, with Washington ordering “nonemergency” government personnel to leave and the Foreign Office in London saying it has withdrawn its diplomatic staff in the capital of Sana “due to increased security concerns.”

The United States also urged its citizens living in Yemen to depart immediately. Neither the American nor British authorities said how many employees were affected by the decision to withdraw personnel. (New York Times)

U.S. playing into the hands of Al Qaeda

A suspected U.S. drone strike in Yemen — the fourth reported in the last 10 days — killed four alleged Al Qaeda members Tuesday, as the U.S. and British governments evacuated their embassies because of intelligence suggesting a possible terrorist attack.

A drone-launched missile struck a vehicle in Marib province, east of the Yemeni capital, Sana, killing the four militants, according to the Yemen Post, a privately-owned English language newspaper. A second strike targeted a “militant hideout,” the paper said, citing local security officials.

But the attacks did not hit any of the 25 suspected terrorists named on a list released Monday by the Yemeni government, according to a Yemeni official who was not authorized to be quoted.

The Yemeni government is “deeply disappointed in the U.S. decision to evacuate embassy staff,” the official said. “It plays into the hands of Al Qaeda, and it’s going to hurt our economy.” (Los Angeles Times)

U.S. spreads panic in Yemen

Adam Baron, a freelance journalist in Sanaa [the capital of Yemen], described the mood in the city: “This morning a manned intelligence aircraft circled around Sanaa for roughly two to three hours. It caused a state of alarm and panic amongst residents because it’s something that just doesn’t really happen.”

“This is a threat that’s always present… But due to these intercepted communications, there’s this belief that something could be coming soon.” (BBC News)

So what can we deduce from all of this?

1. In spite of the massive U.S. intelligence apparatus, Ayman al Zawahiri is able to have his communications intercepted without giving away his location. In other words, al Qaeda is able to outwit the NSA. So much for the value of their capacity to track the communications of all U.S. citizens.

2. In the estimation of the State Department, in spite of the fact that Iraq just had its highest monthly death toll in five years, Baghdad is one of the safest cities in the Middle East. Who knew?

3. At a time when the Obama administration clearly has an interest in hyping terrorist threats and promoting the idea that leaks from Edward Snowden made America less safe, there are leaks currently coming out of the administration that indisputably have the highest level of classification and whose disclosure poses a real national security threat. Are we to suppose that there is another Snowden out there, but this time someone willing to take an even greater risk of being tried for treason? I doubt it very much.

Much, much, more likely, these are leaks that were authorized by President Obama himself, the leaker-in-chief who can declassify whatever he wants.

Coming from anywhere else it would be treason, but coming from the Oval Office, it’s business as usual.

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Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post

Given the political complexion of the Washington Post, one could argue that any change in ownership would be an improvement — unless of course it had been bought by Rupert Murdoch.

Jeff Bezos has the aura of a technology visionary, but once anyone is anointed a visionary of any kind at least half that status derives from the projections of blind believers.

At last year’s Kindle announcement, Bezos seemed like he was constantly on the brink of spontaneously combusting, as though the molecules of his body were vibrating at a slightly faster speed than most people’s. This is partly a matter of charisma, but it is mostly, it seems, a consequence of the intensity of his belief.

If you want to retain that vision of Bezos about to catch fire, make sure you don’t watch the video. In this case, seeing is not believing — at least for the inveterate skeptic writing this post. Maybe that’s because I’m not a faithful member of the church of technology.

Still, $250 million is a reasonably large wad of cash even if that’s only 1% of Bezos’ net worth, so I expect he’s thought a great deal about what he wants to do with the newspaper. Here’s some evidence that he may turn out to be agent of creative change in the news business. Jason Fried writes:

Jeff Bezos stopped by our office yesterday and spent about 90 minutes with us talking product strategy. Before he left, he spent about 45 minutes taking general Q&A from everyone at the office.

During one of his answers, he shared an enlightened observation about people who are “right a lot”.

He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

Bezos is identified as a libertarian and they do of course come in all political stripes. Still, if there was one element of libertarianism one would expect to see across the political spectrum, it is the defense of free speech. On that score, Amazon seems to have failed miserably when in 2010 they acquiesced to pressure from Congressional staffers:

Early this week, after hacker attacks on its site, Wikileaks moved its operation, including all those diplomatic cables, to the greener pastures of Amazon.com’s cloud servers. But today, it was down again and mid-afternoon we found out the reason: Amazon had axed Wikileaks from its servers.

The announcement came from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Lieberman said in a statement that Amazon’s “decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material.”

Committee staff had seen news reports yesterday that Wikileaks was being hosted on Amazon’s servers, a committee spokeswoman told TPM. The service, we should note, is self-serve; as with services like YouTube, the company does not screen or pre-approve the content posted on its servers.

Staffers then, according to the spokeswoman, Leslie Phillips, called Amazon to ask about it, and left questions with a press secretary including, “Are there plans to take the site down?”

Amazon called them back this morning to say they had kicked Wikileaks off, Phillips said. Amazon said the site had violated unspecified terms of use.

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How does the NSA work the press?

It’s not unusual to come across a report in the New York Times that reeks of government oversight — a report that should have some kind of reader health warning such as: “The U.S. government approves this message.”

For instance, on Saturday under the headline, “Other Agencies Clamor for Data N.S.A. Compiles,” Eric Lichtblau and Michael S Schmidt reported:

The National Security Agency’s dominant role as the nation’s spy warehouse has spurred frequent tensions and turf fights with other federal intelligence agencies that want to use its surveillance tools for their own investigations, officials say.

Agencies working to curb drug trafficking, cyberattacks, money laundering, counterfeiting and even copyright infringement complain that their attempts to exploit the security agency’s vast resources have often been turned down because their own investigations are not considered a high enough priority, current and former government officials say.

Intelligence officials say they have been careful to limit the use of the security agency’s troves of data and eavesdropping spyware for fear they could be misused in ways that violate Americans’ privacy rights.

This is clearly such a self-serving narrative for the NSA, one has to wonder: who initiated the report? The New York Times or the NSA?

My first response when reading this was to simply think: spare me the bullshit about the choir boys who run the NSA.

Rather than post a clip here and bother explaining why it stank, it seemed better ignored.

But then an exclusive report from Reuters appeared — a report revealing that in blatant disregard for the United States Constitution, the NSA does indeed provide law enforcement agencies with intelligence intercepts.

That the Reuters report would come out within hours of the New York Times report could be a stunning coincidence, but if you believe that you probably also believe that NSA chief Keith Alexander and DNI James Clapper would never lie.

That government officials spoon-feed stories to press stenographers is not exactly news. However, the “coincidence” of these two reports does suggest an additional and more disturbing explanation about how the NSA is able to play the media: through surveillance of journalists as they are gathering information for news reports.

Why would the NSA not regard reporting about the NSA as raising national security concerns? Indeed, what better way could there be of tracking down leakers than by keeping a close eye on the relatively small number of journalists who are likely to be contacted by any would-be whistle-blower?

When trust has already been broken, it’s no good for presidents or other government officials to reassure the public that the NSA would not spy on journalists. Good faith has already been fully spent. The only way of repairing the damage is through utter transparency.

Reuters reports: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

“It is one thing to create special rules for national security,” Gertner said. “Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”

The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.

Today, much of the SOD’s work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.

“Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function,” a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use “normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD.”

A spokesman with the Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA, declined to comment.

But two senior DEA officials defended the program, and said trying to “recreate” an investigative trail is not only legal but a technique that is used almost daily.

A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said.

After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as “parallel construction.”

The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. “Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day,” one official said. “It’s decades old, a bedrock concept.”

A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.

“It’s just like laundering money – you work it backwards to make it clean,” said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.

Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using “parallel construction” may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.

“That’s outrageous,” said Tampa attorney James Felman, a vice chairman of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association. “It strikes me as indefensible.”

Lawrence Lustberg, a New Jersey defense lawyer, said any systematic government effort to conceal the circumstances under which cases begin “would not only be alarming but pretty blatantly unconstitutional.”

Lustberg and others said the government’s use of the SOD program skirts established court procedures by which judges privately examine sensitive information, such as an informant’s identity or classified evidence, to determine whether the information is relevant to the defense.

“You can’t game the system,” said former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer Jr. “You can’t create this subterfuge. These are drug crimes, not national security cases. If you don’t draw the line here, where do you draw it?”

Some lawyers say there can be legitimate reasons for not revealing sources. Robert Spelke, a former prosecutor who spent seven years as a senior DEA lawyer, said some sources are classified. But he also said there are few reasons why unclassified evidence should be concealed at trial.

“It’s a balancing act, and they’ve doing it this way for years,” Spelke said. “Do I think it’s a good way to do it? No, because now that I’m a defense lawyer, I see how difficult it is to challenge.”

One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept. [Continue reading…]

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Decoding NSA newspeak

At Slate, Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman do an excellent job of translating NSA newspeak into meaningful English.

I do have one gripe though — and this is something endemic in mainstream news reporting: everyone is terrified of using the words lie and lying.

Hardly anyone dare unequivocally articulate what everyone knows to be an indisputable fact: that DNI James Clapper lied to Congress when he responded to a question about the NSA collecting any type of data on millions of Americans by answering: “No, sir,” to Senator Wyden.

One doesn’t require the powers of telepathy or need to have taken a deposition from a priest to whom Clapper might have confessed, to know that he was lying.

We now know without doubt that Clapper misled Congress and he later said: “My response was clearly erroneous”. But to say that the content of his statement was erroneous and that he misled Congress, sidesteps the issue of intention. It essentially says that without additional information, we are incapable of determining whether it was Clapper’s intention to mislead Congress — if we knew that was his intention, then we could without hesitation say he was lying.

Yet, who can be in any doubt that as Director of National Intelligence and thus responsible for oversight of the NSA, Clapper would have been fully aware of FISA court orders requiring Verizon and others to provide the NSA with metadata on all its customers? Clapper knew what Wyden knew and that when Wyden said “any type of data at all” he had crafted his question precisely to include metadata. And thus Clapper uttered a bald-headed lie and committed perjury, a crime for which he could be imprisoned for up to five years — that is, if anyone in Congress cared about upholding the law.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has been harshly criticized for having misled Congress earlier this year about the scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities. The criticism is entirely justified. An equally insidious threat to the integrity of our national debate, however, comes not from officials’ outright lies but from the language they use to tell the truth. When it comes to discussing government surveillance, U.S. intelligence officials have been using a vocabulary of misdirection — a language that allows them to say one thing while meaning quite another. The assignment of unconventional meanings to conventional words allows officials to imply that the NSA’s activities are narrow and closely supervised, though neither of those things is true. What follows is a lexicon for decoding the true meaning of what NSA officials say. [Continue reading…]

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The occupation mustn’t be called a ‘wound’ but Netanyahu still welcomes American Band-Aids

Press TV reports: Iran’s president-elect, Hassan Rohani, says the occupation of Palestine is an “old wound” on the body of the Muslim world.

“After all, in our region, there’s been a wound for years on the body of the Muslim world under the shadow of the occupation of the holy land of Palestine and the beloved [city of] al-Quds,” Rohani stated at a rally in the Iranian capital, Tehran, held to mark International Quds Day.

The New York Times reports: At least three Iranian news agencies appeared to misquote him as saying: the “Zionist regime is a sore which must be removed.” Later in the day they posted corrections.

Mr. Rouhani, who has sought to portray himself as a moderate, did not use the most inflammatory anti-Israeli invective sometimes heard from other Iranian leaders, most notably Mr. Rouhani’s predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called Israel a cancerous tumor, a virus and an aberration that should be expunged from history.

Nevertheless, the initial news agency translation of Mr. Rouhani’s comments from the state television videotape infuriated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He has previously described Mr. Rouhani as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” whose surprising June 14 election victory was unlikely to change Iran’s policies, particularly regarding what Israel views as an Iranian determination to become a nuclear weapons power.

“Rouhani’s true face has been revealed earlier than expected,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement. “Even if they will now rush to deny his remarks, this is what the man thinks and this is the plan of the Iranian regime. These remarks by President Rouhani must rouse the world from the illusion that part of it has been caught up in since the Iranian elections.

“The president there has changed, but the goal of the regime has not: to achieve nuclear weapons in order to threaten Israel, the Middle East and the peace and security of the entire world. A country that threatens the destruction of the state of Israel must not be allowed to possess weapons of mass destruction.”

When told later that the original translation had been wrong, and that the videotape showed Mr. Rouhani had in fact not referred directly to Israel or said anything about removing the “sore,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office was unmoved and seemingly uninterested in nuance. “We stand by what we say,” said his spokesman, Mark Regev. “The remarks attributed to him we think, we are sure, that represents his true outlook.”

Tumors have to be removed, but wounds can heal.

Is healing an image that offends Netanyahu? Probably, because for as long as Israel has enemies it will feel justified in retaining its position as the Middle East’s sole nuclear power and also its Qualitative Military Edge as the region’s super-power.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Kerry can keep on handing out Band-Aids — just so long as no one refers to what they are covering up as a “wound.”

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