Anatomy of an al Qaeda ‘conference call’

Ken Silverstein writes: Two years ago, following the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, a number of journalists wrote dramatic accounts of the Al Qaeda leader’s last moments. One such story, co-authored by Eli Lake in the Washington Times, cited Obama administration officials and an unnamed military source, described how bin Laden had “reached for a weapon to try to defend himself” during the intense firefight at his compound, and then “was shot by Navy SEALs after trying to use a woman reputed to be his wife as a human shield.”

It was exciting stuff, but it turned out to have been fictitious propaganda concocted by U.S. authorities to destroy bin Laden’s image in the eyes of his followers. Based on what we know now, the SEALs met virtually no resistance at the compound, there was no firefight, bin Laden didn’t use a woman as a human shield, and he was unarmed.

The White House blamed the misleading early reports on the “fog of war,” but as Will Saletan pointed out in Slate, “A fog of war creates confusion, not a consistent story like the one about the human shield. The reason U.S. officials bought and sold this story is that it fit their larger indictment of Bin Laden. It reinforced the shameful picture of him hiding in a mansion while sending others to fight and die. It made him look like a coward.”

Eli Lake

Many reporters uncritically rushed the government’s account into print. For Lake, though, it fit a career pattern of credulously planting dubious stories from sources with strong political agendas.

Which brings us to the news story that Lake and Josh Rogin broke for the Daily Beast last week, in which they reported that the “crucial intercept that prompted the U.S. government to close embassies in 22 countries was a conference call between al Qaeda’s senior leaders and representatives of several of the group’s affiliates throughout the region.” The story said that among the “more than 20 operatives” on the call was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who the piece claimed was managing a global organization with affiliates in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Other Al Qaeda participants involved in the call reportedly represented affiliates operating in Iraq, the Islamic Maghreb, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Sinai Peninsula, and Uzbekistan.

The sources for the story were three U.S. officials “familiar with the intelligence.” “This was like a meeting of the Legion of Doom,” one told Lake and Rogin. “All you need to do is look at that list of places we shut down to get a sense of who was on the phone call.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama still reluctant to confront reality in Egypt

Romesh Ratnesar writes: President Obama’s statement this morning condemning yesterday’s blood bath in Egypt signaled that American patience with the country’s military rulers is running out. But it’s unlikely to cool the febrile atmosphere on Egypt’s streets or forestall continued crackdowns by the government against its Islamist opponents. The headline from Obama’s brief appearance was the announcement that the U.S. is canceling a joint military exercise with the Egyptian military, planned for next month. “While we want to sustain our relationship with Egypt, our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” Obama said.

Obama said the White House is considering “further steps that we may take as necessary with respect to the U.S.-Egyptian relationship.” That was a highly oblique reference to the $1.3 billion in aid the U.S. provides Egypt, much of which goes to the military. Although numerous observers have called for the U.S. to suspend that aid until the army turns power over to a legitimate civilian government, Obama didn’t go anywhere near that far. Nor did he call for the release of the imprisoned former President Mohammed Morsi, or for the prosecution of individuals involved in carrying out abuses during yesterday’s massacre, or indicate that the U.S. would seek any kind of action in the United Nations Security Council.

That’s because the administration is boxed in by its insistence in recent weeks that the military’s overthrow of the freely elected Morsi was actually a step toward restoring democracy. Obama again tried to make that case today, arguing that Morsi’s government “was not inclusive” and suggesting that after his ouster, “there remained a chance for reconciliation and an opportunity to pursue a democratic path.” But yesterday’s events make abundantly clear that democracy and military rule are irreconcilable. Sooner rather than later, President Obama will have to choose to support one or the other.

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As hundreds die in Egypt’s military crackdown, Obama plays golf

The New York Times reports: The death toll from Egypt’s bloody crackdown on supporters of the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi, soared beyond 500 across the land on Thursday with more than 3,700 people injured, the Health Ministry said, in a further sign of the extent and the ferocity of Wednesday’s scorched-earth assault by security forces to raze two pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo.

Despite the growing tally of dead, however, Muslim Brotherhood supporters of Mr. Morsi urged followers to take to the streets on Thursday, a day after the assault on the camps set off a violent backlash across Egypt and underscored the new government’s determination to crush the Islamists who dominated the free elections over the past two years.

Mohamad Fath Allah, the Health Ministry spokesman, told the official Al Ahram Web site that the toll so far stood at 525 with 3,717 injured. He said the biggest concentration of killings, numbering 202, had been in the larger of the two protest camps in Nasr City suburb, with 87 recorded in the smaller Nahda Square camp near Cairo University. A further 29 deaths were reported from the Helwan area on the outskirts of Cairo with 207 from other areas around the country. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The Obama administration on Wednesday condemned the Egyptian military’s bloody crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood protesters, but showed no signs of taking any tough steps, like suspending American aid, in response.

Secretary of State John Kerry said the violence in Cairo was “deplorable” and ran “counter to Egyptian aspirations for peace, inclusion and genuine democracy.” He said the United States strongly opposed the military’s imposition of a state of emergency, calling on all Egyptians to “take a step back.”

But Mr. Kerry announced no punitive measures, while President Obama, vacationing here on Martha’s Vineyard, had no public reaction. As his chief diplomat was speaking of a “pivotal moment for Egypt,” the president was playing golf at a private club. [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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Egypt’s experiment with democracy

Peter Hessler writes: In Egypt, the current conflict reflects the vastly different responses that groups can have to a fledgling democracy after decades of dictatorship. For the Brotherhood, this means stubbornly following what it believes to be the correct and legitimate political path, even if it alienates others and leads to disaster; for the military, it’s a matter of implementing the worst instincts of the majority. In each case, one can recognize a seed of democratic instinct, but it’s grown in twisted ways, because the political and social environment was damaged by the regimes of the past half-century.

As for average Egyptians, the last two years have taught lessons that won’t be easily forgotten. After the coup last month, I travelled to Upper Egypt, because I was curious to see how people outside the capital interpreted these events. Upper Egypt is home to about forty per cent of the country’s population, and it played an important role in the post-revolution elections, with the Brotherhood winning vast majorities in the region. But most people I talked to last month had discarded their affection for the Brotherhood. “I was very sympathetic to them,” one man told me, in the town of El-Balyana. “I was sympathetic with Morsi until they removed him. And now I’m going to be sympathetic with whoever comes next!”

“We’re just like football fans here,” an engineer named Mohamed Latif told me, in a village called El-Araba. “When somebody scores, we cheer. But it doesn’t matter. Do you really think that anything we do here matters? Why do you want to talk to us? I voted for Morsi, and I prayed for him, but he failed. I’m against what happened. We should have kept him as an honorary figure. We could have given the power to the Army and others, but left Morsi as the President in name.”

I asked him if he believed that the coup had been a mistake. “No,” he said. “He failed. I won’t vote for them again. I don’t want democracy.” He continued, “Does China have democracy? How is its economy doing? I don’t care about democracy and freedom.”

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An educated guess about how the NSA is structured

Marc Ambinder writes: Want to understand how an organism really works? Take a look at its plumbing. Figure out where the pipes fit together. That’s the approach I take to national security and that’s the spirit behind this look at the structure of one of the most important institutions in U.S. intelligence: the National Security Agency.

Some intelligence organizations, such as the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, have declassified most of their organizational charts. The NRO develops, launches and controls spy satellites; the NGA analyzes and distribute imagery. For these agencies, the plumbing matters less than what flows through the pipes, which is highly classified.

But the NSA, with its triple mission — break codes, secure data, collect signals intelligence — has not made its structure public. Even by the standards of U.S. intelligence agencies whose existence was declassified much later, the NSA’s organization chart is largely impermeable to outsiders. The best of its chroniclers, like Jeff Richelson, James Bamford, Bill Arkin and Matthew Aid, have managed to collect bits and pieces of open source data, but many senior intelligence officials who don’t work for NSA still have only a vague idea of what signals intelligence collection entails, and even fewer understand the NSA bureaucracy. The map to the NSA’s inner sanctum is generally given only to a select few members of Congress and their staff.

In the interests of transparency and in an effort to establish a basis for continued public exploration of the world of intelligence, I’ve cobbled together a rough and incomplete but still rather comprehensive organizational chart of the agency’s operational, analytical, research and technology directorates. With only a few exceptions, the information does not come from inside sources. It builds on the work of the researchers mentioned above and it represents the culmination of a lot of time spent cross-checking government documents and LinkedIn profiles, job postings and agency announcements. [Continue reading…]

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Intelligence committee urged to explain if they withheld crucial NSA document

The Guardian reports: The leadership of the House intelligence committee is under growing pressure to explain whether it withheld surveillance information from members of Congress before a key vote to renew the Patriot Act.

A Republican congressman and government ethics watchdogs are demanding that the powerful panel’s chairman, Mike Rogers of Michigan, responds to charges that the panel’s leadership failed to share a document prepared by the justice department and intelligence community.

The document was explicitly created to inform non-committee members about bulk collection of Americans’ phone records ahead of the vote in 2011. Michigan Republican Justin Amash alleged that the committee kept it from non-committee members – the majority of the House.

Now Morgan Griffith, a Republican who represents Virginia’s ninth district, is calling for answers. “I certainly think leadership needs to figure out what’s going on. We’re trying to get information so we can do our jobs as congressmen,” he told the Guardian. “If we’re not able to get that information, it’s inappropriate.”

“Obviously, this is of concern,” he added.

Griffith has been been critical of the committee for blocking attempts by non-members to obtain information about classified programs. On August 4, the Guardian published a series of letters he had written to the committee requesting more details, all of which had gone unanswered.

The accusations broaden the focus of the surveillance controversy from the National Security Agency to one of the congressional committees charged with exercising oversight of it – and the panel’s closeness to the NSA it is supposed to oversee. [Continue reading…]

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The NSA is commandeering the Internet

Bruce Schneier writes: It turns out that the NSA’s domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we’ve learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it’s easier that way.

I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight.

Do you remember those old spy movies, when the higher ups in government decide that the mission is more important than the spy’s life? It’s going to be the same way with you. You might think that your friendly relationship with the government means that they’re going to protect you, but they won’t. The NSA doesn’t care about you or your customers, and will burn you the moment it’s convenient to do so.

We’re already starting to see that. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others are pleading with the government to allow them to explain details of what information they provided in response to National Security Letters and other government demands. They’ve lost the trust of their customers, and explaining what they do — and don’t do — is how to get it back. The government has refused; they don’t care. [Continue reading…]

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Press suckered by anti-Google group’s bogus claim that Gmail users can’t expect privacy

TechDirt: Okay, so as a bunch of folks have been sending over today, there’s been a bit of a furor over a press release pushed out by Consumer Watchdog, a hilariously ridiculous group that has decided that Google is 100% pure evil. The “story” claims that Google has admitted in court that there is no expectation of privacy over Gmail. This is not actually true — but we’ll get to that. This story is a bit complex because the claims in most of the news coverage about this are simply wrong — but I still think Google made a big mistake in making this particular filing. So, first, let’s explain why the coverage is completely bogus trumped up bullshit from Consumer Watchdog, and then we’ll explain why Google still shouldn’t have made this filing.

First off, you may recall Consumer Watchdog from previous stunts such as a putting together a hilariously misleading and almost 100% factually inaccurate video portrayal of Eric Schmidt, which was all really part of an effort to sell more copies of its founder’s book (something the group flat out admitted to us in an email). They’re not a consumer watchdog site — they’re a group that makes completely hogwash claims to try to generate attention on a campaign to attack Google.

The press release from Consumer Watchdog fits along its typical approach to these things: take something totally out of context, put some hysterical and inaccurate phrasing around it, dump an attention-grabbing headline on it and send it off to the press. In this case, it claimed that Google had said in a court filing that you have no expectation of privacy with Gmail. [Continue reading…]

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Libya is rich but bankrupt

Fayruz Abdulhadi writes: Libya has been an especially difficult place to live over the past few weeks. With a string of high profile assassinations, a jailbreak, and a series of sometimes thwarted car bomb attacks, there is plenty for Libyans to be exasperated by. Yet amidst the lawlessness of recent weeks, nothing has frustrated the Libyan streets more than the daily power outages, sometimes running up to an excruciating 16 hours at a time.

The government has offered explanations, from overconsumption in the summer months to lack of maintenance, a legacy underinvestment in the network, and even sabotage by Qaddafi loyalists. This may be post-Revolution Libya, but given the country’s vast riches, a lack of electricity is a problem that seems especially hard to explain away.

The country boasts some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves, substantial capabilities for natural gas production, $168 billion in foreign assets and an enviable 2000 km-plus stretch of coast on the Mediterranean. For all these assets, Libya (pop. 6.4 million) also has a relatively small number of mouths to feed. In other parts of the world, the combination of small population and ample natural resources has generally proven a surefire formula for success. Why does Libya fail to follow suit?

During Qaddafi’s reign, at the very least it was clear why infrastructure and public services were lacking: the Colonel and his cronies were visibly enriching themselves on the back of oil exports, leaving little of the country’s bounty for the average Mohammed to enjoy. Now that the Qaddafi family and their business associates are gone, however, the lack of public investment is more puzzling. In a nascent democracy, it is also far less tolerable.

Truth be told, conditions for ordinary Libyans have not improved in the two years since the Revolution. The hospitals are “unfit for human beings,” in the Health Minister’s own words. The schools are decrepit. Sewage spills pungently into the once-pristine Mediterranean shoreline. Even an internet connection is a serendipitous occurrence. For Libyans and observers alike, it is not immediately obvious why Libya should be in such dire straits.

Incompetence and widespread corruption top the list of popular explanations for the country’s current condition. Both are, to some extent, true. Emerging from dictatorship, public servants are equal parts unskilled and corruptible. But the reality is that even a competent and fully transparent government would find governing today’s Libya an impossible task. The reason is simple: despite its apparent wealth, Libya is broke. [Continue reading…]

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Muslim Brotherhood had accepted U.S.-EU-led political plan, but Egypt’s rulers chose violence

Reuters reports: Western allies warned Egypt’s military leaders right up to the last minute against using force to crush protest sit-ins by supporters of the ousted Islamist president Mohamed Mursi, arguing they could ill afford the political and economic damage.

A violent end to a six-week standoff between Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood and the armed forces that toppled Egypt’s first freely elected president seemed likely once the new authorities declared last week that foreign mediation had failed.

But the United States and the European Union continued to send coordinated messages to army commander General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Interim Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei during the four-day Eid al-Fitr Muslim holiday that ended on Sunday, pleading for a negotiated settlement, Western diplomats said.

“We had a political plan that was on the table, that had been accepted by the other side (the Muslim Brotherhood),” said EU envoy Bernardino Leon, who co-led the mediation effort with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns.

“They could have taken this option. So all that has happened today was unnecessary,” Leon told Reuters in a telephone interview. The last plea was conveyed to the Egyptian authorities on Tuesday, hours before the crackdown was unleashed. [Continue reading…]

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Statement by Julian Assange on Bradley Manning

Statement by Julian Assange on behalf of WikiLeaks:

Today Bradley Manning reportedly made a statement of remorse in a sentencing hearing at Fort Meade, Maryland. Manning’s statement comes towards the end of a court martial trial pursued with unprecedented prosecutorial zeal.

Since his arrest, Mr. Manning has been an emblem of courage and endurance in the face of adversity. He has resisted extraordinary pressure. He has been held in solitary confinement, stripped naked and subjected to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment by the United States government. His constitutional right to a speedy trial has been ignored. He has sat for three years in pretrial detention, while the government assembled 141 witnesses and withheld thousands of documents from his lawyers.

The government has denied him the right to conduct a basic whistleblower defense. It overcharged him until he faced over a century in prison and barred all but a handful of his witnesses. He was denied the right at trial to argue that no harm was caused by his alleged actions. His defence team was pre-emptively banned from describing his intent or showing that his actions harmed no one.

Despite these obstacles, Mr. Manning and his defense team have fought at every step. Last month, he was eventually convicted of charges carrying up to 90 years of prison time. The US government admitted that his actions did not physically harm a single person, and he was acquitted of “aiding the enemy.” His convictions solely relate to his alleged decision to inform the public of war crimes and systematic injustice.

But Mr. Manning’s options have run out. The only currency this military court will take is Bradley Manning’s humiliation. In light of this, Mr. Manning’s forced decision to apologise to the US government in the hope of shaving a decade or more off his sentence must be regarded with compassion and understanding.

Mr. Manning’s apology is a statement extorted from him under the overbearing weight of the United States military justice system. It took three years and millions of dollars to extract two minutes of tactical remorse from this brave soldier.

Bradley Manning’s apology was extracted by force, but in a just court the US government would be apologizing to Bradley Manning. As over 100,000 signatories of his Nobel Peace Prize nomination attest, Bradley Manning has changed the world for the better. He remains a symbol of courage and humanitarian resistance.

Mr. Manning’s apology shows that as far as his sentencing is concerned there are still decades to play for. Public pressure on Bradley Manning’s military court must intensify in these final days before the sentencing decision against him is made.

WikiLeaks continues to support Bradley Manning, and will continue to campaign for his unconditional release.

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Time for the U.S. to suspend its ties with Egypt

Marc Lynch writes: With blood in Egypt’s streets and a return to a state of emergency, it’s time for Washington to stop pretending. Its efforts to maintain its lines of communication with the Egyptian military, quietly mediate the crisis, and help lay the groundwork for some new, democratic political process have utterly failed. Egypt’s new military regime, and a sizable and vocal portion of the Egyptian population, have made it very clear that they just want the United States to leave it alone. For once, Washington should give them their wish. As long as Egypt remains on its current path, the Obama administration should suspend all aid, keep the embassy in Cairo closed, and refrain from treating the military regime as a legitimate government.

These steps won’t matter very much in the short term. Cairo has made it very clear that it doesn’t care what Washington thinks and the Gulf states will happily replace whatever cash stops flowing from U.S. coffers. Anti-American incitement will continue, along with the state of emergency, violence and polarization, the stripping away of the fig leaf of civilian government, and the disaster brewing in the Sinai. It won’t affect Secretary of State John Kerry’s Israel-Palestine peace talks and the Camp David accords will be fine, too; Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi can’t manage his own streets, and it’s unlikely he wants to mess with Israel right now.

The hard truth is that the United States has no real influence to lose right now anyway, and immediate impact isn’t the point. Taking a (much belated) stand is the only way for the United States to regain any credibility — with Cairo, with the region, and with its own tattered democratic rhetoric. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt: It only gets worse from here

As the latest reports indicate that more than 278 people have been killed in violence across Egypt today, Issandr El Amrani looks at the wider picture:

You could ask a thousand questions about the violence that has shaken Egypt, from why police decided to move now against Islamist sit-ins and with such brutality after making so much of its careful planning in the last week, to whether the attacks on churches and Christians more generally that erupted in reaction are part of a pre-planned reaction or the uncontrollable sectarian direction political tensions take in moments of crisis. But the question that really bothers me is whether this escalation is planned to create a situation that will inevitably trigger more violence – that this is the desired goal.

The fundamental flaw of the July 3 coup, and the reason those demonstrators that came out on June 30 against the Morsi administration were wrong to welcome it, is that it was based on an illusion. That illusion, at least among the liberal camp which is getting so much flak these days, was that even a partial return of the old army-led order could offer a chance to reboot the transition that took such a wrong turn after the fall of Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011. This camp believed that gradual reform, even of a much less ambitious nature than they desired in 2011, would be more likely to come by accommodating the old order than by allowing what they perceived as an arrangement between the military and the Islamists to continue. Better to focus on fixing the country, notably its economy, and preventing Morsi from sinking it altogether, and take the risk that part of the old order could come back.

In this vision, a gradual transformation of the country could take place while preserving political stability through the armed forces. It would be negotiated and hard-fought, as so many democratic transitions in other parts of the world have been, but the old order would need the talent and competence of a new technocratic, and ultimately political, class to deliver and improve governance. Their hope was that the Islamists would understand that they had lost this round, and that they could be managed somehow while a new more liberal order emerged. This, in essence, was what Mohamed ElBaradei and other liberals bought into on July 3, no doubt earnestly, and what so many other outside of formal politics fervently hoped for: not the revolution radicals want, but a wiser, more tolerant, order in the country. [Continue reading…]

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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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If Obama wanted an ‘open debate’ on NSA spying, why thwart one for so long?

Jennifer Hoelzer writes: Tim Cushing made one of my favorite points of [last] week in his Tuesday post “Former NSA boss calls Snowden’s supporters internet shut-ins; equates transparency activists with al-Qaida“, when he explained that “some of the most ardent defenders of our nation’s surveillance programs” – much like proponents of overreaching cyber-legislation, like Sopa – have a habit of “belittling” their opponents as a loose confederation of basement-dwelling loners. I think it’s worth pointing out that General Hayden’s actual rhetoric is even more inflammatory than Cushing’s. Not only did the former NSA director call us “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years”, he equates transparency groups like the ACLU with al-Qaida.

I appreciated this post for two reasons.

First of all, it does a great job of illustrating a point that I’ve long made when asked for advice on communicating tech issues, which is that the online community is as diverse and varied as the larger world we live in. Of course, we are more likely to come across the marginal opinions of twentysomethings with social anxiety online because, unlike the larger world, the internet gives those twentysomethings just as much of an opportunity to be heard as a Harvard scholar, a dissident protesting for democracy or General Hayden himself.

Sure, it can be infuriating to read scathingly hostile comments written by troubled individuals who clearly didn’t take the time to read the post you spent countless hours carefully writing (not that that has ever happened to me), but isn’t one of the things that makes the internet so darn special its unwavering reminder that free speech includes speech we don’t appreciate? Of course, that’s a point that tends to get lost on folks – like General Hayden – who don’t seem to understand that equating the entirety of the online world with terrorists is a lot like posting a scathing comment to a story without reading it. You can’t expect someone to treat you or your opinion with respect – online or anywhere else – when you’re being disrespectful. And I can imagine no greater disrespect for the concepts of transparency and oversight than to equate them with the threats posed by terrorist groups like al-Qaida. [Continue reading…]

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How America is killing itself with sugar

Nature World News: A diet in which 25 percent of one’s calories come from added sugar could be just as harmful to a person’s health as being the inbred offspring of first cousins, a new study conducted by University of Utah researchers found.

The scientists chose this threshold due to the National Research Council’s formal recommendation that a person’s calories from added sugar not exceed 25 percent of their total caloric consumption. However, even this may be far too much, according to the study’s results which found female mice died at twice the normal rate and males were a quarter less likely to hold territory and reproduce when fed the diet reflective of many Americans.

“Our results provide evidence that added sugar consumed at concentrations currently considered safe exerts dramatic adverse impacts on mammalian health,” the researchers said regarding their findings published in the journal Nature Communications, adding they were careful to keep the administered levels of sugar proportionate to the amount consumed by humans through candy, beverages and baked goods. For example, the researchers stressed that the mice’s diet directly corresponded with one in which a person drinks three sodas a day “plus a perfectly healthy, no-sugar-added diet.”

According to Wayne Potts, a biology professor and the study’s senior author, the researchers placed groups of mice in room-sized pens with multiple nest boxes and allowed the mice to compete more naturally for mates and desirable territories, thereby revealing even subtle effects of the diet on mice’s behavior.

As a result, the scientists found 35 percent of females on the extra sugar diet died after 32 weeks in the mouse barns versus 17 percent of the control group. And while no difference appeared in the case of the rate of death for the male mice, those on the added-sugar diet acquired and held 26 percent fewer territories than males on the control diet and ultimately went on to produce 25 percent fewer offspring.

Such “level of health degradation is almost identical,” the researchers pointed out, to that of cousin-level inbreeding and persisted despite a lack of obesity and few metabolic symptoms. [Continue reading…]

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