Senators call on White House to end bulk collection of Americans’ phone records

Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden write: President Obama recently welcomed a public debate about how to protect both national security and privacy rights in the context of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance activities. Congress should not squander this opportunity to have an open, transparent discussion about the limits of executive power and the surveillance of Americans. We believe that, when presented with all the facts, most Americans would agree with us that the White House should end the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records and instead obtain this information directly from phone companies, using regular court orders based on individual suspicion.

We have had concerns about domestic surveillance authorities for several years. Through our oversight work on the Senate intelligence committee, we have become convinced that the government needs to scale back overly intrusive surveillance activities to better protect Americans’ constitutional privacy rights and that this can be done while protecting U.S. national security. We have not been able to fully engage the public on these issues because the executive branch insisted on keeping its interpretation of the law secret. Although we would have preferred that this discussion had been sparked by a more transparent executive branch, rather than by unauthorized leaks, we welcome an open debate about the federal government’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.

Our view of this program is shaped by our experience with the NSA’s bulk e-mail records collection program. Concerned about this program’s impact on Americans’ civil liberties and privacy rights, we spent a significant portion of 2011 pressing intelligence officials to provide evidence of its usefulness. They were not able to do so, and it was shut down that year. This experience demonstrated to us that intelligence agencies’ assessments of the effectiveness of particular collection programs are not always accurate, and it led us to be skeptical of claims about the value of collecting bulk phone records. [Continue reading…]

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NSA faces backlash over collecting phone data

The Los Angeles Times reports: A reporter recently asked the National Security Agency’s chief a blunt question: Why can’t he come up with a better example of a terrorism plot foiled through the bulk collection of U.S. phone records?

In the weeks since Edward Snowden disclosed that the NSA had been collecting and storing the calling histories of nearly every American, NSA Director Keith Alexander and other U.S. officials have cited only one case as having been discovered exclusively by searching those records: some San Diego men who sent $8,500 to Al Qaeda-linked militants in Somalia.

Although intelligence officials and the White House continue to defend the mass data collection, support has clearly eroded among the public and in Congress. A coalition of libertarians on the right and civil liberties advocates on the left came six votes short of passing an amendment in the House last week to curtail bulk collection of phone records, but no one believes that will be the last word.

Even Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the House and Senate intelligence committee leaders who have defended the NSA’s collection of phone records since the program was disclosed, are among those who concede that changes would probably be needed.

“We will work to find additional privacy protections with this program,” Rogers said during House debate over the amendment.

The shift in public opinion about the government’s data collection efforts is clear. A Pew Research Center survey released Friday asked Americans whether they were more concerned that government programs to combat terrorism were going too far and endangering civil liberties or that they were not going far enough and leaving the country unprotected. For the first time since Pew began asking that question in 2004, more Americans, 47%, said their greater concern was the threat to civil liberties, compared with 35% who worried the programs don’t go far enough to protect the country.

As recently as 2010, only a third of Americans said they worried the government’s anti-terrorism efforts went too far. [Continue reading…]

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German president says whistleblowers like Snowden merit respect

Reuters reports: Germany’s president, who helped expose the workings of East Germany’s dreaded Stasi secret police, said whistleblowers like U.S. fugitive Edward Snowden deserved respect for defending freedom.

Weighing in on a debate that could influence September’s federal election, President Joachim Gauck struck a very different tone from that of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has assured Washington that Berlin would not shelter Snowden.

Gauck, who has little power but great moral authority, said people who work for the state were entitled to act according to their conscience, as institutions sometimes depart from the law.

“This will normally only be put right if information is made public. Whoever draws the public’s attention to it and acts out of conscience deserves respect,” he told Friday’s Passauer Neue Presse newspaper.

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Where the NSA will soon store all the data on everyone

At Forbes, Kashmir Hill writes: For the last two months, we’ve been bombarded with stories about the spying information-collection practices of the NSA thanks to documents leaked by the agency’s most regretted contract employee, Edward Snowden. The degree of forced exposure has gotten to the point that once secret information gathered for the agency — whose acronym is jokingly said to stand for “No Such Agency” and “Never Say Anything” — was the subject of a press release on Friday; the Office of National Intelligence announced that it got the legal sign-off for a fresh batch of “telephony metadata in bulk” from companies such as Verizon and AT&T – despite continuing controversy over that including the call records of millions of Americans who are non-terrorists and non-criminal suspects.

The NSA will soon cut the ribbon on a facility in Utah built to help house and process data collected from telephone and Internet companies, satellites, fiber-optic cables and anywhere else it can plant listening devices. An NSA spokesperson says the center will be up and running by the “end of the fiscal year,” i.e., the end of September. Much has been written about just how much data that facility might hold, with estimates ranging from “yottabytes” (in Wired) to “5 zettabytes” (on NPR), a.k.a. words that you probably can’t pronounce that translate to “a lot.” A guide from Cisco explains that a yottabyte = 1,000 zettabytes = 1,000,000 exabytes = 1 billion pettabytes = 1 trillion terabytes. For some sense of scale, you would need just 400 terabytes to hold all of the books ever written in any language. Dana Priest at the Washington Post decided to go with a simpler, non-technical approximation, saying the million-square-foot facility will store “oceans of bulk data.” [Continue reading…]

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NSA surveillance program has had compliance problems, intelligence official says

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration’s top intelligence official acknowledged Friday that there have been “a number of compliance problems” in the government program that has collected phone data on millions of Americans.

James Clapper, director of national intelligence, also said the government had not collected any other bulk data on Americans using its authority under the USA Patriot Act beyond the phone information and Internet data gathered under a separate program that was canceled in 2011.

Clapper made the statements in a four-page letter responding to a series of questions posed to him last month by a bipartisan group of 26 senators.

The lawmakers, accusing the Obama administration of making misleading statements in the past regarding the records it was collecting with the permission of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, had asked Clapper to list any “violations of the court orders permitting this bulk collection, or of the rules governing access to these records.” [Continue reading…]

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Americans increasingly wonder: Was Afghanistan even worth it?

National Journal reports: Twelve years of war is a long time—not just for the troops fighting, but also for the American public watching the final stages of the U.S. drawdown. And it looks as if this war fatigue is translating in the polls.

Americans are now questioning the very motivation for going to war in the first place.

Now, only 28 percent of Americans think the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Friday. Following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans, by and large, were united in wanting to track down the people responsible (as high as 90 percent in 2002). But after 2,000 deaths in America’s longest war, 67 percent of Americans don’t think it was worth it.

This poll, conducted July 18-21, represents an 11-point drop since March. During that time, countless headlines about Afghanistan have been marked with the unmistakable tension between the U.S. and Afghan governments.

The sentiments of the American public are also apparent in responses to a question asking whether U.S. fighting in Afghanistan has contributed to the long-term security of the United States; 50 percent of Americans don’t think it has. Only 17 percent think it’s contributed a great deal, while another 26 percent think it has helped somewhat. [Continue reading…]

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The sky darkens for American journalism

Chase Madar writes: Bradley Manning released hundreds of thousands of government documents and files to Wikileaks, most famous among them the unclassified video Wikileaks dubbed, “Collateral Murder”, a harrowing gun-sight view of an Apache helicopter slaughtering a couple of armed men and a much larger group of civilians on a Baghdad street in July, 2007.

The court-martial of Pfc. Manning, finally underway over three years after his arrest, is likely to cause a great deal of collateral destruction in its own right. In this case the victim will be American journalism.

The most serious of the charges against Manning is the capital offense of “aiding the enemy.” (Team Obama has made it clear it won’t seek the death penalty, but a life sentence is possible.) The enemy that the prosecution has in mind is not Wikileaks or the global public but Al Qaeda; because this group had access to the internet, the logic goes, they could read Manning’s disclosures just like everyone else.

The government does not have to prove Manning’s conscious intent to help Al Qaeda, but must only meet the squishier standard of proving the defendant had “specific knowledge” that the terrorists might benefit from his cache of documents.

If this charge sticks, it will be a serious blow to American journalism, as it puts all kinds of confidential informants at risk of being capital cases. A soldier in Afghanistan who blogs about the lack of armoured vehicles – a common and very public complaint from the ranks in the Iraq War – could be prosecuted for tipping off the Taliban. [Continue reading…]

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Bradley Manning’s ‘sole purpose was to make a difference’, lawyer insists

The Guardian reports: The lawyer representing the WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning has asked the judge presiding over the soldier’s court martial to decide between two stark portrayals of the accused – the prosecution’s depiction of him as a traitor and seeker of notoriety, and the defence’s account that he was motivated by a desire to make a difference in the world and save lives.

Over four hours of intense closing arguments at Fort Meade in Maryland, David Coombs set up a moral and legal clash of characterisations, between the Manning that he laid out for the court, and the callous and fame-obsessed Manning sketched on Thursday by the US government. “What is the truth?” the lawyer asked Colonel Denise Lind, the presiding judge who must now decide between the two accounts to reach her verdict.

“Is Manning somebody who is a traitor with no loyalty to this country or the flag, who wanted to download as much information as possible for his employer WikiLeaks? Or is he a young, naive, well-intentioned soldier who has his humanist belief central to his decisions and whose sole purpose was to make a difference.”

Coombs answered his own rhetorical question by arguing that all the evidence presented to the trial over the past seven weeks pointed in one direction. “All the forensics prove that he had a good motive: to spark reforms, to spark change, to make a difference. He did not have a general evil intent.” [Continue reading…]

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Life as a U.S. drone operator: ‘it’s like playing a video game for four years’

The Guardian reports: “It is a lot like playing a video game,” admits a former Predator drone operator matter-of-factly to the artist Omer Fast. “But playing the same video game four years straight on the same level.” His bombs kill real people though and, he admits, often not the people he is aiming at.

The remarkable insight into the working life of one of the most modern of military operatives is provided in a 30-minute film which will show at the Imperial War Museum in London from Monday, the first in a new programme of exhibitions under the title IWM Contemporary.

The project is something of a departure for the museum in one way, although it has been commissioning and showing artists since the first world war. “The idea behind this strand is to present a consistent offer,” said Sara Bevan, a curator in the art department. “So people do identify us with contemporary art because it sometimes does get a bit lost.” It will also allow the gallery to perhaps be more provocative and more reactive to contemporary events.

The work by Fast, an Israel-born artist who lives and works in Berlin, is called 5,000 Feet is the Best, which takes its name from the optimum flight altitude of a Predator drone. [Continue reading…]

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From Tahrir Square to Tiananmen Square

Sarah Carr writes: Every time I go to the Rab3a sit-in I think that it would be an almost impossible task to clear the people crammed into it; surely not even the Interior Ministry and armed forces would want to take on that task, not because they are concerned about loss of life but because of the logistical difficulty, and the political fallout internationally (the July 26 protests demonstrated that the anti-terrorism crowd seem to care about what the international community thinks).

So I did some cursory reading (Wikipedia, what else) on how Tiananmen Square was cleared of the pro-democracy protesters on June 4 1989 and so far there have been close parallels between the events that led up to that clearing, and events in Egypt. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The bloodied and mangled bodies of more than a dozen supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi lined the floors of an improvised hospital in eastern Cairo on Saturday after a night of clashes between security forces and demonstrators calling for Morsi’s reinstatement left at least 46 people dead and hundreds wounded, according to the Ministry of Health.

Medics at a field hospital embedded in a pro-Morsi sit-in in eastern Cairo said they had received 37 bodies and treated hundreds of wounded in rooms that were crowded Saturday with wailing relatives and strewn with battered equipment and bloodied sheets.

Saturday’s violence erupted hours after Egypt’s interior minister and interim president warned that a nearly month-long sit-in by Morsi’s supporters and others “blocking” roads and bridges would soon be broken up.

“These sit-ins will be ended soon, within the limits of the law,” Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim told the al-Hayat television station.

“We cannot accept this security chaos, and the road blocking and the bridge blocking,” interim president Adly Mansour said in a separate call to the station. “We can’t accept the attacks on public property. The state has to enforce its sovereignty.” He urged Morsi’s supporters to “go back to your homes,” adding that if they did, “no one will pursue you.”

On Friday, millions of Egyptians took to the streets, heeding a call by the nation’s military chief to support the security forces’ “mandate” to confront violence and “terrorism” — words that rights groups and Morsi’s supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood interpreted as signaling an imminent crackdown.
[…]
Grief and shock mingled with outrage in the chaotic rooms of the makeshift hospital at the Brotherhood-led protest camp in eastern Cairo on Saturday.

“Tell everyone in the village he is a martyr,” one man sobbed into a cellphone while waiting to take the body of his brother from a room that had been converted into a morgue.

Doctors and witnesses said the wounded began streaming in around 11 p.m. on Friday, as separate groups of protesters on a nearby highway and outside Cairo’s al-Azhar University came under attack.

At first, most of the victims were suffered from the suffocating effects of tear gas, then later, birdshot wounds, doctors said. By 4 a.m., a flood of people with gunshot wounds arrived, as security forces and plainclothes “thugs” clashed with pro-Morsi demonstrators on roads leading to the protest camp, witnesses and doctors said. Many victims were afraid to go to official hospitals because they feared arrest, doctors said.

Mohamed Elatfy, an emergency room doctor who practices in Britain but was visiting family in Egypt, said he hurried to help after he saw an appeal for doctors at the field hospital while watching al-Jazeera late at night.

At the time of Morsi’s ouster, he said, he was “totally against the regime.”

“It was a failing regime,” he said. But Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the chief of the armed forces, “is calling for a civil war,” he said. “And to be honest, I can’t understand why some Egyptians are calling for a bloodbath. I was watching the marches yesterday, and I was in shock.”

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Civil society coups are bad for democracy

Omar Encarnación writes: To understand the swift and dramatic demise of Egypt’s first democratically elected leader and what it might portend for the country’s future, it helps to take a broad comparative perspective. The manner in which the country’s military deposed President Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, is by no means an isolated case. In fact, it fits rather perfectly within the model of a civil society coup, a concept I first described in a 2002 World Policy Journal essay that explained the brief removal from power of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez by a coalition of business, labor, and civic groups. Other scholars have subsequently applied the idea to other coups, such as those in the Philippines in 2001, in Ecuador in 2002, in Thailand in 2006, and in Honduras in 2009. All of these cases show that civil society coups are not the fix for democracy that they purport to be, which looks to be true in Egypt as well.

Endemic to new democracies, civil society coups entail the removal from power of an elected leader through sustained protest, usually with the aid of the military. Indeed, it is the partnership between civil society and the military — not usually known for acting in concert — that distinguishes a civil society coup from an ordinary one. More often than not, those behind the coup justify it by claiming that they intend to rescue democracy, which is paradoxical since they are, in fact, uprooting it. This is Tocqueville’s civil society gone rogue; rather than working patiently and discreetly toward improving the quality of democracy, it turns angry and restless and plots for sudden and radical political change.

In my original essay on Chávez’s removal from office, I identified three preconditions for a civil society coup. The first is the rise to power of a leader whose commitment to democracy is at best suspect. The second is a political apparatus that fails to meet public expectations about economic growth and stability, usually because of its corruption, incompetence, and neglect of the country’s basic needs. The third is the emergence of civil society actors — trade unions, religious associations, and civic groups — rather than formally organized political forces, which have either disintegrated or which never fully developed in the first place, as the main opposition to the government. The combined result of these conditions is the emergence of an adversarial relationship between an invigorated civil society and a delegitimized political system against a background of widespread societal discontent and the collapse of the rule of law. Under such conditions, disputes and political crises are solved on the streets rather than in the legislature.

All of these conditions materialized in Egypt. [Continue reading…]

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Rouhani’s 2003 role in halting Iran’s nuclear program

François Nicoullaud, France’s ambassador to Tehran from 2001 to 2005, writes: As Hassan Rouhani prepares to become the next president of the Iranian Islamic Republic, it is worth recalling the leading role he played as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in late 2003, when the clandestine program run by the Revolutionary Guards to produce a nuclear weapon was halted.

The halt in the weaponization program — as distinct from the program for uranium enrichment, power production and civilian research — was acknowledged in November 2007 by American intelligence services in their National Intelligence Estimate, and confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency in November 2011 in a report from the director general, who wrote: “work on the AMAD Plan [i.e. the undeclared nuclear weaponization program] was stopped rather abruptly pursuant to a ‘halt order’ instruction issued in late 2003 by senior Iranian officials.”

Based on conversations that I had at the time, as French ambassador to Tehran, with high Iranian officials close to the matter, I firmly believe that Rouhani was the main actor in the process. Of course, Iranians could not admit to a foreigner that such a program ever existed, and I cannot name the officials I spoke to. But two conversations in particular remain vivid in my mind.

The first one took place a little after Rouhani became Iran’s top nuclear negotiator in October 2003 and had reached an agreement about the suspension of Iranian sensitive enrichment activities with the German, British and French foreign ministers during their joint visit to Tehran. [Continue reading…]

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Profiting off war: A look into the world of Israeli arms dealing

Eilat Maoz writes (translated from Hebrew by Guy Eliav and edited by Ami Asher): A laboratory is a site where scientists conduct experiments under controlled conditions – a space where large-scale phenomena such as hurricanes are miniaturized and tiny objects such as microbes are magnified to observe complex processes and learn how to control them. A laboratory is where the world is divided into predictable phenomena and observable objects. Where knowledge is created and later disseminated, making the world better understandable and better organized, through the lens of the knowledge we have accumulated about it.

Yotam Feldman’s new film, “The Lab,” introduces us to the men who made the Occupied Palestinian Territories the largest and most advanced weapon-testing laboratory: arms dealers and developers, defense experts and industry leaders. Despite the urge to compare it to other Israeli documentaries which have recently exposed the secret lives of the people running the occupation (such as “The Law in These Parts” and “The Gatekeepers”), “The Lab” is above all a film about knowledge. Security knowledge created in the flexible zone between two dimensions separated by a very blurred line: the military and the market.

On the first plot level, “The Lab” follows Naomi Klein’s claim that the main reason for Israel’s economic prosperity at a time of political instability and global crisis lies not in its outstanding human capital that enables it to smoothly escape the negative economic repercussions, but rather the continuation of regional conflicts. In The Shock Doctrine, she shows that most of Israel’s economic growth can be attributed to the huge defense industry, which has become Israel’s main export industry, particularly following 9/11 (In 2012, Israel was ranked the world’s sixth largest arms exporter). She also claims that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not only the world’s largest open-air prisons, but also the world’s largest test-labs, where “Palestinians are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.” [Continue reading…]

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The paradigm shift: How Snowden succeeded in changing the mindset that got us into war

On January 31, 2008, in a Democratic primary presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama when speaking about the war in Iraq, made one of the most memorable and seemingly significant statements of the campaign:

I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.

Many of those of us who found Obama’s promises of hope and change too vague and superficial to mean much, took his declaration on ending the mindset that got us into war as a bold repudiation of the Bush-Cheney era — an important signal that he understood the primary effect of U.S. national security policy, post 9/11, had been to generate a culture of fear inside America.

After taking office, not only did Obama fail to follow through on his commitment to change this mindset, but through the expansion of America’s drone war, widening the war on terrorism, sharply increasing the use of the Patriot Act in order to conduct mass surveillance inside America, and by starting an unprecedented war on whistle-blowers, this president has done more to expand state power and secrecy than any of his predecessors.

If George W. Bush was preoccupied with presenting the tough posture of a national security president, the change Obama has brought is to dispense with the posturing and instead focus on the expansion of the national security infrastructure.

The only significant challenge he has faced showed up unexpectedly in the form of a 29 year-old whistle-blower.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, for the first time since 9/11, Americans have refused to be silenced by government fear-mongers. They no longer accept the assertion that the need to “combat terrorism” is a national imperative that trumps all others.

As the czars of the national security establishment once again pull out the terrorism card in the hope that they can stifle debate and deflect tough questions, they are discovering for the first time in over a decade that their prized asset has suddenly lost much of its value.

While the media’s attention has often focused more on Snowden than the information he leaked, this focus is what has given the story such longevity — for better or worse, people have more interest in stories about people than they do in the analysis of policy. That NSA surveillance has become a focus of public concern, is not in spite of the extent to which this became a story about one individual, but on the contrary, because the issue could be embodied. (Obama apologists who profess an interest in civil liberties should take note.)

Ultimately this isn’t a story about Edward Snowden, yet it wouldn’t have become a story about issues that affect everyone without it first being a story about him.

Duncan Campbell is a veteran investigative journalist who began unearthing evidence of the NSA’s mass surveillance operations decades before most people had even heard the name, “National Security Agency,” let alone had any understanding of the scope of its operations. Campbell is unequivocal in describing Snowden as a hero who has done a public service in the interests of protecting civil liberties across the world.

The Associated Press reports: After 9/11, there were no shades of gray. There are plenty now.

The vigorous debate over the collection of millions of Americans’ phone records, underlined by a narrow House vote upholding the practice, buried any notion that it’s out of line, even unpatriotic, to challenge the national security efforts of the government.

Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, joined in common cause against the Obama administration’s aggressive surveillance, falling just short Wednesday night against a similarly jumbled and determined coalition of leaders and lawmakers who supported it.

It’s not every day you see Republican Speaker John Boehner and Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi facing off together against their own parties’ colleagues — with an assist from Rep. Michele Bachmann, no less — to help give President Barack Obama what he wanted. But that’s what it took to overcome efforts to restrict the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush warned the world “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” period, and those few politicians who objected to anything the U.S. wanted to do for its national security looked like oddballs.

That remarkable political consensus cracked in the bog of the Iraq war, and argument returned, but the government has had little trouble holding on to its extraordinary counterterrorism tools.

What’s changed?

The passage of time, for one thing, and the absence of another attack on the scale of 9/11. Americans have also discovered, through Edward Snowden’s leaks, that surveillance doesn’t start at the water’s edge or stop with terrorist plotters in the homeland, but sweeps in the phone records of ordinary people indiscriminately.

Even in the frightening aftermath of 9/11, when large majorities told pollsters they were ready to trade in some personal protections for greater security, any effort to monitor phone calls or emails of average people was considered a step too far. In a Pew Research Center survey the week after the terrorist attacks, 70 percent said no to that.

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona says memories of those days have faded and the political climate has changed.

“The stuff we went through last year about detainees we never would have gone through in 2002,” he said Thursday. He was referring to the debate in Congress for two years straight over the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects, even U.S. citizens captured within the nation’s borders.

The closeness of the House surveillance vote “says there’s great and widespread concern about the extent of the NSA’s activities,” McCain said, “and that’s why we need hearings in Congress.” This, from a supporter of the NSA surveillance.

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Who are we at war with? That’s classified

By Cora Currier, ProPublica, July 26, 2013

In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”

So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded 2013 but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that revealing such a list could cause “serious damage to national security.”

“Because elements that might be considered 2018associated forces’ can build credibility by being listed as such by the United States, we have classified the list,” said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory. “We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks.”

It’s not an abstract question: U.S. drone strikes and other actions frequently target “associated forces,” as has been the case with dozens of strikes against an Al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen.

During the May hearing, Michael Sheehan, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, said he was “not sure there is a list per se.” Describing terrorist groups as “murky” and “shifting,” he said, “it would be difficult for the Congress to get involved in trying to track the designation of which are the affiliate forces” of Al Qaeda.

Sheehan said that by the Pentagon’s standard, “sympathy is not enough2026. it has to be an organized group and that group has to be in co-belligerent status with Al Qaeda operating against the United States.”

The White House tied Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and “elements” of Al Shabaab in Somalia to Al Qaeda in a recent report to Congress on military actions. But the report also included a classified annex.

Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law who served as a legal counsel during the Bush administration and has written on this question at length, told ProPublica that the Pentagon’s reasoning for keeping the affiliates secret seems weak. “If the organizations are 2018inflated’ enough to be targeted with military force, why cannot they be mentioned publicly?” Goldsmith said. He added that there is “a countervailing very important interest in the public knowing who the government is fighting against in its name.”

The law underpinning the U.S. war against Al Qaeda is known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, and it was passed one week after the 9/11 attacks. It doesn’t actually include the words “associated forces,” though courts and Congress have endorsed the phrase.

As we explained earlier this year, the emergence of new or more loosely-aligned terrorist groups has legal scholars wondering how effectively the U.S. will be able to “shoehorn” them into the AUMF. During the May hearing, many lawmakers expressed concern about the Pentagon’s capacious reading of the law. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., described it as a “carte blanche.”

Obama, in his May speech, said he looked forward “to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate.” But he didn’t give a timeframe. On Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., introduced an amendment that would sunset the law at the end of 2014, to coincide with the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was voted down the same day, 185 to 236.

The AUMF isn’t the only thing the government relies on to take military action. In speeches and interviews Obama administration officials also bring up the president’s constitutional power to defend the country, even without congressional authorization. 


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How Nancy Pelosi saved the NSA surveillance program

Foreign Policy: The obituary of Rep. Justin Amash’s amendment to claw back the sweeping powers of the National Security Agency has largely been written as a victory for the White House and NSA chief Keith Alexander, who lobbied the Hill aggressively in the days and hours ahead of Wednesday’s shockingly close vote. But Hill sources say most of the credit for the amendment’s defeat goes to someone else: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It’s an odd turn, considering that Pelosi has been, on many occasions, a vocal surveillance critic.

Ahead of the razor-thin 205-217 vote, which would have severely limited the NSA’s ability to collect data on Americans’ telephone records if passed, Pelosi privately and aggressively lobbied wayward Democrats to torpedo the amendment, a Democratic committee aid with knowledge of the deliberations tells The Cable.

“Pelosi had meetings and made a plea to vote against the amendment and that had a much bigger effect on swing Democratic votes against the amendment than anything Alexander had to say,” said the source, keeping in mind concerted White House efforts to influence Congress by Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “Had Pelosi not been as forceful as she had been, it’s unlikely there would’ve been more Democrats for the amendment.”

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New bill would require FISA to hear opposing views in spy cases

The Associated Press reports: The secretive court that weighs whether to let the U.S. spy on terror and espionage suspects would have to hear from lawyers arguing against doing so under a new plan introduced Thursday on the heels of Congress’ rejection of sharp limits on government surveillance.

The new plan by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., would force the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to hear both sides of classified cases. The court, which isn’t open to the public, currently hears only from Justice Department attorneys when it considers approving applications to seize Internet and phone records from private companies. The government uses those records to target foreign suspects in terror and spy cases.

The surveillance court has been under rare scrutiny and criticism after National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden revealed in June two classified programs that aim to thwart terror attacks but that critics say invade privacy rights. The court approved one of the programs, letting the government sweep up millions of Americans’ telephone records each day.

Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said allowing a court debate would give “the benefit of an adversarial process and hearing conflicting views.”

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