Military witness in Manning trial: No harm to U.S. from leaked files on Gitmo detainees

The Associated Press reports: Secret threat assessments of Guantanamo Bay detainees that Pfc. Bradley Manning gave to WikiLeaks did not harm national security, a former chief prosecutor at the U.S. detention facility in Cuba testified Tuesday.

Retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis described the briefs as summaries of investigative and intelligence reports meant to be seen by senior military and executive branch officials. They included information about the detainees’ known or suspected terrorist ties but the briefs were often inaccurate, he said.

“You don’t know if what you’re looking at is right or wrong or overstated or understated,” he said.

Manning is charged with aiding the enemy and other offenses for leaking hundreds of thousands of battlefield records, State Department diplomatic cables, other classified documents and several battlefield videos to WikiLeaks.

Manning has acknowledged sending nearly 800 classified Gitmo detainee assessment briefs to the anti-secrecy group in March 2010. WikiLeaks published most of the documents on its website starting in April 2011. Five of the leaked documents are the basis of an espionage charge, and all underlie a theft charge.

Davis said four of the men named in the briefs had been released from Guantanamo at least four years before Manning leaked them. The fifth is on a list to be transferred out, Davis said.

He said the still-classified assessments contain little information that hasn’t been publicly revealed, including in the 2006 movie “The Road to Guantanamo” and the 2007 book, “The Guantanamo Files.”

And he said an enemy would learn nothing of value by reading them.

“If they’re trying to gain some kind of strategic tactical advantage, the detainee assessment brief is not the place to get it,” Davis said.

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Obama’s plan to predict future leakers unproven, unlikely to work

McClatchy reports: In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

Obama mandated the program in an October 2011 executive order after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from a classified computer network and gave them to WikiLeaks, the anti-government secrecy group. The order covers virtually every federal department and agency, including the Peace Corps, the Department of Education and others not directly involved in national security.

Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.” [Continue reading…]

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Interview with NSA expert James Bamford

John McMurtrie: In “The Shadow Factory,” you wrote that the NSA’s watch list — “of people, both American and foreign, thought to pose a danger to the country” — once had only 20 names on it, then rose to “an astonishing half a million.” Do you know what the figure is now?

James Bamford: The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list, known as TIDE, now contains about 875,000 names.

Q: PRISM has reportedly given the NSA access to exabytes of confidential data. To give readers some perspective, roughly how much information is contained in an exabyte? How many books could fit in one?

A: An exabyte is about 960,767,920,505,705 pages of text or about 4,803,839,602,528 books containing 200 pages.

Q: Privacy concerns aside, one of the problems with collecting all this data, you have written, is that “the NSA is akin to Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word understood.” What does the NSA need to do to make practical use of this data?

A: The problem is the bigger you build the haystack, the harder it is to find the needle. Thus, despite all this collection, the NSA missed the Boston bombing, the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber. And most, if not all, of the “successes” they point to could have been discovered using much less invasive surveillance. [Continue reading…]

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Snowden’s ‘flight of liberty’ campaign to be launched

USA Today reports: WikiLeaks says NSA leaker Edward Snowden has not yet formally accepted asylum in Venezuela, quashing a brief but tantalizing tip from a Russian lawmaker that Snowden had decided where he plans to go from Moscow.

WikiLeaks, which has provided logistical help for Snowden since he fled the United States, issued its statement in a tweet.

It was responding to an earlier tweet in Russian sent — then quickly deleted — by Alexei Pushkov, the head of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee.

Later Tuesday, WikiLeaks issued a cryptic tweet stating that on Wednesday “the first phase of Edward Snowden’s ‘Flight of Liberty’ campaign will be launched. Follow for further details.”

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How the separation of powers between the executive branch and the judiciary has been broken by the FISA court

The Associated Press reports: A former federal judge who served on a secret court overseeing the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programs denied Tuesday that the judges act as “rubber stamps.” But James Robertson said the system is flawed because of its failure to allow legal adversaries to question the government’s actions.

“Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case,” Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, said during a hearing of the federal oversight board directed by President Barack Obama to scrutinize government spying.

Robertson questioned whether the secret FISA court should play the role of providing legal approval for the surveillance programs, saying the court “has turned into something like an administrative agency.”

Much of the NSA’s surveillance is overseen by the FISA court, which meets in secret and renders rulings that are classified. Some of these rulings also likely been disclosed by Edward Snowden, the NSA systems analyst who leaked significant information about the spying program. After Snowden began exposing the NSA’s operations in June, Obama instructed the board to lead a “national conversation” about the secret programs. The board has been given several secret briefings by national security officials and it plans a comprehensive inquiry and a public report on the matter.

The board’s chairman, David Medine, had told The Associated Press in advance of Tuesday’s hearing that “our primary focus will be on the programs themselves. Based on what we’ve learned so far, further questions are warranted.”

Robertson, who said he asked to join the FISA court “to see what it was up to,” had previously played a central role in national security law. Robertson was the judge who ruled against the Bush administration in the landmark Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld case, which granted inmates at the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their detentions. That ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2006. [Continue reading…]

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How cryptography is a key weapon in the fight against empire states

Julian Assange writes: The original cypherpunks were mostly Californian libertarians. I was from a different tradition but we all sought to protect individual freedom from state tyranny. Cryptography was our secret weapon. It has been forgotten how subversive this was. Cryptography was then the exclusive property of states, for use in their various wars. By writing our own software and disseminating it far and wide we liberated cryptography, democratised it and spread it through the frontiers of the new internet.

The resulting crackdown, under various “arms trafficking” laws, failed. Cryptography became standardised in web browsers and other software that people now use on a daily basis. Strong cryptography is a vital tool in fighting state oppression. That is the message in my book, Cypherpunks. But the movement for the universal availability of strong cryptography must be made to do more than this. Our future does not lie in the liberty of individuals alone.

Our work in WikiLeaks imparts a keen understanding of the dynamics of the international order and the logic of empire. During WikiLeaks’ rise we have seen evidence of small countries bullied and dominated by larger ones or infiltrated by foreign enterprise and made to act against themselves. We have seen the popular will denied expression, elections bought and sold, and the riches of countries such as Kenya stolen and auctioned off to plutocrats in London and New York. [Continue reading…]

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Morsi led Egypt to this crisis

Michael Hanna writes: Despite inheriting intractable political, economic, and social problems, when Morsy ascended to power on June 30, 2012, he had choices — and he chose factional gain, zero-sum politics, and populist demagoguery. In a system without functioning checks and balances, those choices generated increasing levels of polarization, destroying trust and crippling the state. These decisions were a reflection of his hostility to criticism and his and the Muslim Brotherhood’s denigration of the opposition’s role in Egyptian society. In the period prior to this year’s June 30 mass protests on the first anniversary of Morsy’s swearing-in, when concessions and compromise might have found an orderly way out for Egypt, Morsy instead grudgingly offered airy promises and hollow gestures.

The fateful, misguided decisions made throughout his tenure and in the run-up and aftermath of the June 30 protests have now put Egypt on the cusp of civil strife and violent conflict. An intransigent, isolated president chose to ignore reality and set the country on the course for an undeniably unfortunate military intervention into civilian politics. While Morsy and the Muslim Brotherhood will undoubtedly now assume their more familiar role as victims, significantly aided by the brutality and stupidity of a repressive Egyptian security sector, the primary responsibility for Morsy’s ouster and Egypt’s perilous state resides with the deposed president and his Brothers. None of this was inevitable.

This is not to suggest that the Brotherhood should now be ostracized, persecuted, or forced underground. The Muslim Brotherhood is an organic and deeply rooted religious, social, and political movement with a robust and resilient base. It must be a part of Egypt’s future. But its part in Egypt’s recent past has been an unmitigated disaster. [Continue reading…]

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The growing divisions among ordinary Egyptians

The New York Times reports: The doctor’s sorrow was twofold when he found his son in the back of an ambulance, waiting to be carried in to the morgue here with a bullet hole in his chest.

Not only was his youngest son among the scores of supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi who had been killed by security officers on Monday, but the doctor had spent the last months of his son’s life shouting at him about his politics.

“All the time there were fights between me, him, his mother, his brother — all about the Muslim Brotherhood,” said the doctor, Samer Assem, 59.

The military’s early-morning assault that left at least 54 people dead might have been expected to unite Egyptians in grief and anger. Instead, Egypt’s bloodiest day in more than two years of unrest appeared to intensify the scarring arguments about who should be ruling the country and who is responsible for its plunge into turmoil.

Egyptians who not long ago were protesting side by side, even members of the same family, now rely on different sources of information, offer widely divergent accounts of what caused Monday’s carnage and argue that they are the true defenders of the revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Rival camps both claim that the United States is offering concrete support to their opponents.

This week, the son of the powerhouse cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi publicly criticized his father for declaring his support for Mr. Morsi and calling on Egyptians to do the same.

“Beloved Father,” Abdul Rahman Yusuf al-Qaradawi wrote, calling Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood “men greedy to seize power at any cost.”

The ruptures have marked Cairo’s geography, with pro- and anti-Morsi camps occupying different squares and intersections, blocking traffic, erecting tents and rigging up loudspeakers to blast their messages.

Tahrir Square, the emotional center of the anti-Mubarak uprising and home to protests against the country’s rulers ever since, feels different from the way it did even a week ago, transformed from a place where people celebrated their collective power against the authorities to a wellspring of sympathy for the military. The anger directed at the ousted Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood was unabated by the killings on Monday.

Young men searching people entering the square gave visitors red cards reading, “Game over.” Stickers were distributed that read, “No to Terrorism,” a direct swipe at the Islamists. On the edges of the square, protesters warned about foreigners. [Continue reading…]

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Yesterday’s deadly rampage in Cairo

Evan Hill writes: It was around 3:30 a.m. in Cairo on Monday morning and time for fajr, the first of the day’s five Muslim prayers. In an hour and a half, the sun would rise. Now, it was still dark. On a wide boulevard running in front of the heavily guarded gates of the Republican Guard club, a few hundred protesters were entering the fourth day of a sit-in demanding the reinstatement of ousted President Mohamed Morsy. They had been waiting, sleeping in sparse shade through the hot days, believing their president was held inside the compound. On Monday morning, they formed into lines, their backs turned to the soldiers guarding the gate, and began to pray.

Less than two thousand feet away, in a high-rise apartment on the other side of the sprawling club, Salah and his family awoke. They prepared for fajr. Then they heard gunshots.

Salah rushed to the window, turned on his phone and began to film. The shots cracked through the pre-dawn darkness, followed by more — a rapid series of single blasts that sounded like they came from rifles. There was distant and incoherent shouting. Something that look liked black smoke drifted upward, and then more shots. Down below, inside the club, Salah watched soldiers throw on flak jackets, jump into vehicles and drive toward the commotion.

“There is no God but God,” he muttered in trepidation.

On the streets in front of the club, something terrible was happening. How it began, too, is shrouded in darkness. But how it ended was clear: at least 51 dead protesters, a dead soldier and a dead policeman. It was the worst act of state violence since the 2011 uprising, a “massacre” that threatened to push the huge but temporarily defeated Muslim Brotherhood even further from reconciliation with a new government they view as completely illegitimate. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia pleased with Morsi’s fall

Madawi Al-Rasheed writes: Hours after the Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, was deposed, the Saudi regime hurried to congratulate newly appointed interim president Adly Mansour. The Saudis must have felt comfortable with the quick downfall of a political Islamist party that found itself in power after several decades in the opposition.

It is ironic that a regime that prides itself on ruling according to divine law fears most the rise of Islamism to power. It must be said that like most Western governments, Saudi Arabia was more than confortable coexisting with the Egyptian military dictatorship under deposed President Hosni Mubarak. But when a democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood president was sworn into office in 2012, Riyadh was alarmed. Saudi Arabia had always had a troubled relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood version of Islamism, its organizational capacity and its increasingly accepted message that combined Islam with an eagerness to engage with the democratic process.

Saudi Arabia hosted Arab Muslim Brotherhood exiles during the repression of the 1950 and 1960s. They came not only from Egypt but also from Syria, Iraq and other Arab countries where they had been prosecuted. Brotherhood cadres played a pivotal role in Saudi educational institutions and later the transnational organizations set up by King Faisal to counter the spread of Arab nationalism and leftist movements. Saudis used the exiled Islamists as tools to weaken such movements and undermine their credibility, while emphasizing their un-Islamic character. During the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s, Saudis used the worldwide networks established by the Brotherhood to inflame the imagination of its youth and channel aid and weapons. Yet Saudi Arabia never allowed the Brotherhood to establish branches there as they did in other Arab countries and in the West. [Continue reading…]

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How the Israel lobby manipulated Kissinger

Eric Grynaviski, at George Washington University, has been digging into the recently released Foreign Relations of the United States volume on the 1973 war. It shows how the lobby works at the highest levels of government.

Early in the war, Nixon had authorized an airlift to resupply Israeli forces, but there was a delay in getting the flights organized because charters were difficult to find. On October 12-13, around midnight, [Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Simcha] Dinitz comes to Kissinger to tell him that Israel cannot conduct an offensive because of a lack of weapons: he needs to start the airlift. Kissinger picks up the phone while Dinitz contines:

So help me, there will be a mutiny here if there are no planes. The Jewish community, and many friends, and the labor movement and the press. I’ve been making no comment. I can’t do it. I have no right, not historical right; we are dealing with the destiny of the people. (461)

Kissinger waves Dinitz silent because he is talking to Schlesinger, the Secretary of Defense and he wants to keep Dinitz presence secret from Schlesinger. After chewing out Schlesiner, even claiming at one point he was intentionally slowing the resupply operation, Kissinger hangs up the phone telling Dinitz:

Kissinger: [hangs up, turns to Dinitz]: They’ll give you ten C–130’s immediately, and will load them with ammunition. And probably fly them with American pilots.

I am not aware, at least in the context of the Nixon administration, of another case where an ambassador listens as one cabinet member chews out another in the presence of a foreign ambassador, especially after a direct political threat.

Interestingly, Kissinger did not believe the resupply was important. Talking to Schlesinger the next day, Kissinger says:

JS: Okay,. Well they simply cannot be that short of ammo, Henry. It is impossible that they didn’t know what their supply was—and suddenly they’ve run out of it.

K: Look, they have obviously screwed up every offensive they’ve conducted. And they are not about to take responsibility themselves. I have no doubt whatever that they are blaming us for their own failures.

JS: Right. (468)

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U.S. considers withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan by end of 2014

The New York Times reports: Increasingly frustrated by his dealings with President Hamid Karzai, President Obama is giving serious consideration to speeding up the withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan and to a “zero option” that would leave no American troops there after next year, according to American and European officials.

Mr. Obama is committed to ending America’s military involvement in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, and Obama administration officials have been negotiating with Afghan officials about leaving a small “residual force” behind. But his relationship with Mr. Karzai has been slowly unraveling, and reached a new low after an effort last month by the United States to begin peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar.

Mr. Karzai promptly repudiated the talks and ended negotiations with the United States over the long-term security deal that is needed to keep American forces in Afghanistan after 2014.

A videoconference between Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai designed to defuse the tensions ended badly, according to both American and Afghan officials with knowledge of it. Mr. Karzai, according to those sources, accused the United States of trying to negotiate a separate peace with both the Taliban and their backers in Pakistan, leaving Afghanistan’s fragile government exposed to its enemies.

Mr. Karzai had made similar accusations in the past. But those comments were delivered to Afghans — not to Mr. Obama, who responded by pointing out the American lives that have been lost propping up Mr. Karzai’s government, the officials said.

The option of leaving no troops in Afghanistan after 2014 was gaining momentum before the June 27 video conference, according to the officials. But since then, the idea of a complete military exit similar to the American military pullout from Iraq has gone from being considered the worst-case scenario — and a useful negotiating tool with Mr. Karzai — to an alternative under serious consideration in Washington and Kabul. [Continue reading…]

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Morsi supporter: ‘there is no revolution and no democracy’

Sarah Carr (who is not a Morsi supporter but voted for him to keep out Ahmed Shafiq) writes: [M]y position on events pre-30 June has not been changed by events since: the Muslim Brotherhood should have been left to fail as they had not (yet) committed an act justifying Morsi’s removal by the military. The price Egypt has paid and will pay for the consequences of this decision are too high. It has created a generation of Islamists who genuinely believe that democracy does not include them. The post-30 June fallout reaffirms this belief, especially with Islamist channels and newspapers closed down as well as leaders detained and held incommunicado, apparently pursuant to an executive decision. For thirty years, Mubarak told them that due process is not for them, and a popular revolution is confirming that. It is Egyptian society that will pay the price of the grievances this causes, and the fact that, with a silenced media and no coverage from independent outlets they have been left with virtually no channels to get their voice heard.

I will not weigh in on the coup/revolution debate other than to say millions of Egyptians were on the ground demanding Morsi be removed while military jets drew hearts in the skies above them and then Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi announced that Morsi had (forcibly) buggered off. Nothing has changed. The real revolution will happen when army involvement in politics is a distant relic of history.

In any case the debate is semantic and tedious and the nomenclature will not be decided now. The only aspect of the wider argument that interests me is the notion that an elected president’s legitimacy falls when millions take to the streets. If this is a precedent, then it means shaky times ahead when the masses’ interests do not coincide with those of the army.

Zenobia Azeem writes: It may be a stretch, but after the removal of President Mohammed Morsi by a popularly instigated coup, there was a small window of time where the army and the opposition could have adopted a genuinely reconciliatory tone, since they had the upper hand in how events were going to play out. While the nature, history and general interests of the army can be blamed for preventing the army from doing so, the opposition — or at the least the “revolutionary core” of pro-democracy youth activists — could have struggled harder to push the new military and civilian leadership to begin shaping the new order on democratic values.

This is not to say that anything can appease the Muslim Brotherhood at this point and push it to reintegrate into the political system, nor to ignore the fractures in the loosely strung-together opposition.

If this is truthfully a continuation of the revolution, and not just an attack on the vilified Brotherhood, where are the continued cries demanding protection of human rights, rule of law, political freedom and political pluralism?

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Egyptian soldiers kill at least 51 Morsi supporters in Cairo massacre (corrected)

Correction: This post originally appeared with a video showing gunmen opening fire on a prayer gathering. This was not the gathering reported below but one that took place in the city of Arish, in the Egyptian Sinai peninsula.

The New York Times reports: Soldiers and police officers fired on hundreds of supporters of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s ousted Islamist president, as they prayed before dawn on Monday during a protest outside the facility where he is believed to be detained, sharply escalating the nearly week-old crisis convulsing the country and further dimming any hope for a political reconciliation.

At least 51 civilian demonstrators were killed and more than 300 were wounded, all or almost all of them by gunfire, health officials said. Dozens of witnesses said the soldiers and police officers had opened fire unprovoked, an assertion that was immediately challenged by the military authorities.

Spokesmen for the army and the police said in a news conference held to defend their use of deadly force that they were attacked first, and that two soldiers and two policemen had also been killed, although witnesses said one of the policemen was killed by a soldier’s gunfire.

It was by far the deadliest violence here since the final days of President Hosni Mubarak in January 2011 when his riot police fought their last stand against the protesters demanding his ouster.

But whereas that battle signaled the fall of a dictator, the significance of Monday’s carnage was as bitterly contested as the future of Egypt has now become since military commanders deposed Mr. Morsi last Wednesday after one year in office. [Continue reading…]

Egyptian media (Al-Ahram, Al-Masry Al-Youm, and Egypt Daily News) refer to “clashes” between the army and Morsi supporters, yet it seems clear from the video above that the deadly shots were being fired into a crowd of peaceful worshipers.

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: The Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, called on the international community and international organizations, as well as “the free people of the world,” to intervene to stop the “massacres taking place in Egypt”.

It called for “uncovering the truth about military rule so that there will not be another Syria in the region,” following clashes that broke out between supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsy on the one hand and police and army forces on the other near the Republican Guard headquarters in Salah Salem.

In an official statement on Monday, the party said, “We call on the great Egyptian people to rise against those who want to abduct their revolution with their tanks and armored vehicles even if they have to do so on the dead bodies of the people.”

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