Total Information Awareness and the NSA

Shane Harris writes: A decade ago, a Pentagon research project called “Total Information Awareness” sparked a mass panic because of its seemingly Orwellian interest in categorizing and mining every aspect of our digital lives. It was “the supersnoop’s dream,” declared William Safire of the New York Times, a “computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, [combined with] every piece of information that government has about you….”

If this sounds reminiscent of the current uproar over NSA surveillance, you’re paying attention. That’s because the NSA monitoring tools are very similar to — and, in many cases are directly based on — the technology that Total Information Awareness (TIA) tried to use.

The story of that convergence starts on the morning of Feb. 2, 2002, when retired Admiral John Poindexter drove to the headquarters of the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and sat down with the agency’s deputy director, an NSA veteran named Bill Black. Poindexter, a former White House national security adviser, was now running the TIA program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the organization that tackles some of the hardest engineering and technology challenges in the Pentagon. Poindexter thought TIA was an innovative new way to stop terrorist attacks, and he wanted the NSA to help him test it.

The idea, he explained to Black, was to give U.S. intelligence analysts access to the vast universe of electronic information stored in private databases that might be useful for detecting the next plot. Data such as phone call records, emails, and Internet searches. Poindexter wanted to build what he called a “system of systems” that would access all this raw information, sort and analyze it, and hopefully find indications of terrorist plotting.

The NSA was the biggest collector of electronic data in the government, and Poindexter thought the NSA would be a natural partner in his endeavor. But what he didn’t know was that under secret orders from President George W. Bush, the NSA was already building its own version of Total Information Awareness. Fewer than 100 people at the NSA knew that for the past few months, the agency had been monitoring the phone calls and other electronic communications of Americans, and that it was obtaining copies of domestic phone call records and looking at them for potential clues about terrorist attacks.

Poindexter left Ft. Meade that day with no firm commitment from Black that the NSA would assist in his research. And TIA didn’t last long. Although Poindexter’s work wasn’t classified, the press soon caught wind of his grand data-mining ambitions, and Poindexter was held up as the poster boy for intrusive government surveillance. “I think it’s fair to say that in the country’s history there has never been proposed a program with something this far reaching in terms of surveillance capacity,” said Sen. Ron Wyden at the time. “And my sense is that the country just does not want to unleash a bunch of virtual bloodhounds to go sniffing into the medical, financial and travel records of law-abiding Americans.”

TIA was officially shut down in 2003, and Poindexter left the government. But this wasn’t the end of his grand vision.

In a secret negotiation, members of Congress, some of whom had been among Poindexter’s critics, reached an agreement to keep TIA research going, and to fund it from the classified portion of the military budget, the so-called “black budget.” TIA’s research components were given new cover names, and the program was moved under the control of the very agency that Poindexter had originally wanted to help him — the NSA. There, Poindexter’s ideas were incorporated into NSA’s surveillance activities, the latest glimpses of which we have seen in the past two weeks. [Continue reading…]

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FBI admits to using drones over U.S. soil

Salon: FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted to Congress Wednesday that drones are already being used over U.S. soil. While the use of surveillance drones domestically — both by local and federal law enforcement agencies — has been long anticipated and ushered in by a lobby with a powerful congressional caucus of supporters, Mueller’s admissions highlighted the lack of legislation currently in place to govern the use drone technology at home.

Mueller told a hearing that the FBI had used drones to aid its investigations in a “very, very minimal way, very seldom… Our footprint is very small, and we have very few and of limited use, and we’re exploring not only the use but also the necessary guidelines for that use,” he said.

Mueller’s acknowledgment is only the latest in a series of disclosures about the domestic use of drones. In 2010, it was revealed — and has since become common knowledge — that Border Patrol surveils both Canadian and Mexican borders with unmanned aircraft.

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Anti-Muslim death-ray plot still in R&D as feds nab suspects

Albany Times Union reports: An industrial mechanic with General Electric Co., who is also allegedly a member of the Ku Klux Klan, designed a deadly mobile radiation device that he intended to sell to Jewish groups or a southern branch of the Ku Klux Klan, according to a federal complaint unsealed Wednesday in Albany.

The device was intended to be a truck-mounted radiation particle weapon that could be remotely controlled and capable of silently aiming a lethal beam of radioactivity at its human targets. The concept was that victims would eventually die from radiation sickness.

Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, of Galway, is accused in a federal complaint of developing “a radiation emitting device that could be placed in the back of a van to covertly emit ionizing radiation strong enough to bring about radiation sickness or death against Crawford’s enemies,” states the complaint attributed to an FBI agent.

Eric J. Feight, 54, of Hudson, also is identified as a co-conspirator and listed in the complaint as Crawford’s acquaintance. Feight works for an electronics company in Columbia County. He is accused in a federal complaint of agreeing to help Crawford construct the electronic controls for the device.

Crawford never actually obtained a radiation source and the device was not fully constructed, officials said. During the past year, the complaint indicates he was dealing with an undercover FBI agent pretending to be a supplier of radiation equipment, such as x-ray tubes used in construction projects or medical devices. At one point, the undercover agent sent an email to Crawford showing different x-ray systems that could be supplied.

The investigation broke open in April 2012 when Crawford allegedly went into an Albany-area synagogue and “asked to speak with a person who might be willing to help him with a type of technology that could be used by Israel to defeat its enemies, specifically, by killing Israel’s enemies while they slept,” the complaint says. He referred to Muslims and enemies of the United States as “medical waste,” according to court records. [Continue reading…]

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Privacy and democracy

To listen to Barack Obama or Dick Cheney, one would think that privacy is a reward that democracy only delivers reliably in fair weather, and that it is something most vigorously claimed as a right by those who don’t face the challenge of defending “freedom.”

These rugged statesmen, whose perspective — unlike that of the average citizen — is shaped by a much more expansive and intimate view of the ever-present threats to America, recognize that — as Obama put it recently — we can’t have 100 percent security and also 100 percent privacy. With respect to our private communications, it’s better to be read than dead.

The first responsibility of the United States government is to keep Americans safe, we are told again and again — as though democracy was a system of national defense and not, as this country’s founders defined it, government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Nevertheless, democracy’s defining attribute is not in fact its ability to protect people but instead that it treats all individuals equally as citizens and not subjects in an exercise of self governance. The operation of democracy hinges on respect for the individual’s autonomy; not protection of the individual’s life.

The way in which privacy functions as a foundation of democracy is through self definition. Through her or his own idiosyncratic definition of personal boundaries, the individual determines the scope of their own sovereign space — a space which others generally only enter by consent.

When the state violates this space, it is violating the individual’s right to self-determination, and when this is done in the name of national security, the freedom of the individual has been reduced to being a reward granted and measured by the state, rather than being the basis through which the state derives its authority.

There is an inherent tension between self-defined privacy and state-defined privacy. Whereas the state can only construct its definitions within the strictures of law, which are never specific to time and place, the individual constructs perpetually moving boundaries of privacy and the issue is never where exactly such boundaries are placed but simply whether passage across them is consensual.

If, for instance, the threshold is the front door, it’s not the boundary itself that determines how we define privacy. We might have no problem with a neighbor dropping in, yet refuse to allow the FBI to do likewise. And the neighbor welcomed at 7pm would become an intruder at 3am.

So, when the president or the head of the NSA assures us that the government is not listening to our phone conversations or reading our email, that’s besides the point. The point is that they have been gathering personal information about the social networks and daily lives of every single American without our permission. Whether the government, acting in secret, first seeks permission from a secret court, is also besides the point, since the power being exercised by that court was not knowingly granted by the people.

The problem is, in America and other democracies, affiliations with “the people” easily get trumped by those with “our people.” Whether Americans feel their privacy has been violated by government surveillance programs often depends on whether they voted for the ruling administration. To a degree, Democrats are more likely to feel their personal privacy has been violated by Bush rather than Obama and vice-versa for Republicans.

Even after the revelations about what is without doubt the most extensive surveillance program in human history, 39 percent of Americans are apparently oblivious about the fact that the government is compiling data on everyone.

This, perhaps more than any other number, speaks about the condition of democracy in America: that the actions of the government not only take place outside the awareness of most citizens, but that a very large minority evince little interest in what their government is doing.

This is government of the people, for the people, so that the people can turn their attention elsewhere.

Where government was intended to reflect the will of the people, it now operates less through popular consent than acquiescence.

Mass surveillance might be of highly questionable value and equally questionable legal legitimacy and yet it will continue with little effective restraint if it only meets weak resistance.

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If your name is Ahmed or Fatima, you live in fear of NSA surveillance

Anna Lekas Miller writes: One of the most common responses from the 66% of American citizens in favor of the NSA’s data-collection programs is, “I have nothing to hide, so why should I have anything to fear?”

But what if you have nothing to hide but are targeted as a suspect nevertheless?

By that I mean, what if your name is Ahmed, Jihad, Anwar or Abdulrahman? Fatima, Rania, Rasha or Shaima? What if some of your phone calls – which the NSA is tracking with particular interest – are made to loved ones in Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon or Palestine? What if the language you speak on these phone calls is not English, but Arabic, Urdu or Farsi, not because it is a special jihadist code, but because it is your native language that you still speak in your home.

In other words, what if you are one of America’s 1.9 million Arab-Americans or 2.8 million Muslim-Americans? [Continue reading…]

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Every time the FBI investigates itself, it discovers it’s innocent

The New York Times reports: After contradictory stories emerged about an F.B.I. agent’s killing last month of a Chechen man in Orlando, Fla., who was being questioned over ties to the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, the bureau reassured the public that it would clear up the murky episode.

“The F.B.I. takes very seriously any shooting incidents involving our agents, and as such we have an effective, time-tested process for addressing them internally,” a bureau spokesman said.

But if such internal investigations are time-tested, their outcomes are also predictable: from 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 “subjects” and wounded about 80 others — and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The last two years have followed the same pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said that since 2011, there had been no findings of improper intentional shootings.

In most of the shootings, the F.B.I.’s internal investigation was the only official inquiry. In the Orlando case, for example, there have been conflicting accounts about basic facts like whether the Chechen man, Ibragim Todashev, attacked an agent with a knife, was unarmed or was brandishing a metal pole. But Orlando homicide detectives are not independently investigating what happened. [Continue reading…]

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Taliban step toward Afghan peace talks is hailed by U.S.

The New York Times reports: The Taliban signaled a breakthrough in efforts to start Afghan peace negotiations on Tuesday, announcing the opening of a political office in Qatar and a new readiness to talk with American and Afghan officials, who said in turn that they would travel to meet insurgent negotiators there within days.

If the talks begin, they will be a significant step in peace efforts that have been locked in an impasse for nearly 18 months, after the Taliban walked out and accused the United States of negotiating in bad faith. American officials have long pushed for such talks, believing them crucial to stabilizing Afghanistan after the 2014 Western military withdrawal.

But the Taliban may have other goals in moving ahead. Their language made clear that they sought to be dealt with as a legitimate political force with a long-term role to play beyond the insurgency. In that sense, in addition to aiding in talks, the actual opening of their office in Qatar — nearly a year and a half after initial plans to open it were announced and then soon after suspended — could be seen as a signal that the Taliban’s ultimate aim is recognition as an alternative to the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.

By agreeing to negotiations, the Taliban can “come out in the open, engage the rest of the region as legitimate actors, and it will be very difficult to prevent that when we recognize the office and are talking to the office,” said Vali Nasr, a former State Department official who is the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

The United States, already heading toward its military exit, has little to offer beyond prisoner exchanges, and the Taliban are “not trying to help our strategy,” Mr. Nasr warned. “They’re basically trying to put in place their own strategy.”

The Taliban overture coincided with an important symbolic moment in the American withdrawal: the formal announcement on Tuesday of a complete security handover from American troops to Afghan forces across the country. That shift had already become obvious in recent months as the Afghan forces had tangibly taken the lead — and as the Taliban had responded by increasing the tempo of attacks against them.

Yet since at least 2009, even top American generals maintained that a permanent peace could not be won on the battlefield, and American diplomats have engaged in nearly three years of holding secret meetings and working through diplomatic back channels to lay the groundwork for talks to begin. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon shoots down Kerry’s Syria airstrike plan

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: Twenty years ago, in a debate over the war in Bosnia, Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, issued a challenge to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. Albright wanted the U.S. to confront an aggressive Serbia; Powell and the Pentagon were hesitant. Albright grew frustrated: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Albright asked. Powell later said that he thought Albright was going to give him an aneurysm.

Flash-forward to this past Wednesday. At a principals meeting in the White House situation room, Secretary of State John Kerry began arguing, vociferously, for immediate U.S. airstrikes against airfields under the control of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime — specifically, those fields it has used to launch chemical weapons raids against rebel forces.

It was at this point that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the usually mild-mannered Army General Martin Dempsey, spoke up, loudly. According to several sources, Dempsey threw a series of brushback pitches at Kerry, demanding to know just exactly what the post-strike plan would be and pointing out that the State Department didn’t fully grasp the complexity of such an operation.

Dempsey informed Kerry that the Air Force could not simply drop a few bombs, or fire a few missiles, at targets inside Syria: To be safe, the U.S. would have to neutralize Syria’s integrated air-defense system, an operation that would require 700 or more sorties. At a time when the U.S. military is exhausted, and when sequestration is ripping into the Pentagon budget, Dempsey is said to have argued that a demand by the State Department for precipitous military action in a murky civil war wasn’t welcome. [Continue reading…]

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The adventures of a Libyan weapons dealer in Syria

Reuters reports: Abdul Basit Haroun says he is behind some of the biggest shipments of weapons from Libya to Syria, which he delivers on chartered flights to neighboring countries and then smuggles over the border.

After fleeing Libya in his 20s, Haroun established himself as a property developer in Manchester. After about two decades in the British city, he returned to Libya in 2011 to fight in the revolution, where he became a prominent rebel commander.

He says he sends aid and weapons to help Syrians achieve the freedom he fought for during the Libyan revolution.

The first consignment of weapons was smuggled into Syria aboard a Libyan ship delivering aid last year, Haroun says, but now containers of arms are flown “above board” into neighboring countries on chartered flights.

In the months since Haroun began his work, arming the rebels has moved up the international agenda, with Saudi Arabia equipping them with missiles, and Washington also planning to send weapons to the men fighting President Bashar al-Assad.

Haroun spoke to Reuters over coffee and homemade cake late at night at his villa on the outskirts of Benghazi, the eastern city that began the uprising that deposed Muammar Gaddafi.

His son, a young man who spoke English with a Manchester accent, offered help with weapon prices and other details.

Haroun was upset the West had not intervened in Syria, as it did in Libya and said the opportunity to avert a larger war had been missed.

“Even when the war in Syria ends, there will be another war in region; Sunni against Shia. At the beginning, there was just Assad to bring down … now Hezbollah, Iran are involved.”

A Reuters reporter was taken to an undisclosed location in Benghazi to see a container of weapons being prepared for delivery to Syria. It was stacked with boxes of ammunition, rocket launchers and various types of light and medium weapons. [Continue reading…]

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Erdoğan is fighting the last war

Joost Lagendijk writes: Erdoğan’s rise to power is inextricably connected with changes in Turkey’s society and economy in the 1980s and 1990s that challenged the old power structures and created new spaces for conservative businessmen, media and politicians. The self-made man from Kasımpaşa is the most successful among a new generation of pious Muslims who went into politics, especially after he realized that, in order to reach his goals, he had to moderate his policies and rhetoric. Still, since he became Istanbul mayor in the 1990s, his battle has been with the old elite and their representatives in politics and society, knowing that he could count on the support of the downtrodden and marginalized plus the growing middle classes and new business elites who shared his social conservatism and economic liberalism. His sympathies have always been with like-minded companies that rose with him and not with the old and established ones like the Koç family.

That struggle has made him the most successful politician since Atatürk and brought Turkey a lot of gains that are often overlooked these days. The country has become more prosperous since the AKP came to power, nobody even considers calling the army to intervene and we have never been closer to a solution for the Kurdish problem. But, apparently, at the back of Erdoğan’s mind there was always the fear that, one day, the old elites will try to strike back at him and his party because, deep down, they can’t stand being ruled by a so-called Black Turk that does not respect their views or lifestyles.

Listening to Erdoğan, I think it is obvious that he is convinced the people who went out on the streets to protest him are being manipulated by the same old forces he has been fighting his whole political life. In his perception of reality, they want to undermine and eventually destroy the new Turkey he has been building. As is every Turkish citizen, he is also prone to believe that his old foes in Turkey are being assisted by their traditional allies abroad and in the international media.

What we end up with is a mix of worn-out conspiracy theories and a political vision based on the fights of the past.

It is tragic to see the man who contributed considerably to Turkey’s journey towards a mature democracy is now stumbling somewhere halfway through because he is unable to understand that, as a result of his own policies, Turkey has changed. [Continue reading…]

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Our conflicting interests in knowing what others think

Tim Kreider writes: Recently I received an e-mail that wasn’t meant for me, but was about me. I’d been cc’d by accident. This is one of the darker hazards of electronic communication, Reason No. 697 Why the Internet Is Bad — the dreadful consequence of hitting “reply all” instead of “reply” or “forward.” The context is that I had rented a herd of goats for reasons that aren’t relevant here and had sent out a mass e-mail with photographs of the goats attached to illustrate that a) I had goats, and b) it was good. Most of the responses I received expressed appropriate admiration and envy of my goats, but the message in question was intended not as a response to me but as an aside to some of the recipient’s co-workers, sighing over the kinds of expenditures on which I was frittering away my uncomfortable income. The word “oof” was used.

I’ve often thought that the single most devastating cyberattack a diabolical and anarchic mind could design would not be on the military or financial sector but simply to simultaneously make every e-mail and text ever sent universally public. It would be like suddenly subtracting the strong nuclear force from the universe; the fabric of society would instantly evaporate, every marriage, friendship and business partnership dissolved. Civilization, which is held together by a fragile web of tactful phrasing, polite omissions and white lies, would collapse in an apocalypse of bitter recriminations and weeping, breakups and fistfights, divorces and bankruptcies, scandals and resignations, blood feuds, litigation, wholesale slaughter in the streets and lingering ill will.

This particular e-mail was, in itself, no big deal. Tone is notoriously easy to misinterpret over e-mail, and my friend’s message could have easily been read as affectionate head shaking rather than a contemptuous eye roll. It’s frankly hard to parse the word “oof” in this context. And let’s be honest — I am terrible with money, but I’ve always liked to think of this as an endearing foible. What was surprisingly wounding wasn’t that the e-mail was insulting but simply that it was unsympathetic. Hearing other people’s uncensored opinions of you is an unpleasant reminder that you’re just another person in the world, and everyone else does not always view you in the forgiving light that you hope they do, making all allowances, always on your side. There’s something existentially alarming about finding out how little room we occupy, and how little allegiance we command, in other people’s heads. [Continue reading…]

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FISA court oversight: a look inside a secret and empty process

Glenn Greenwald writes: Since we began began publishing stories about the NSA’s massive domestic spying apparatus, various NSA defenders – beginning with President Obama – have sought to assure the public that this is all done under robust judicial oversight. “When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he proclaimed on June 7 when responding to our story about the bulk collection of telephone records, adding that the program is “fully overseen” by “the Fisa court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them”. Obama told Charlie Rose last night:

“What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls … by law and by rule, and unless they … go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it’s always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause.”

The GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, told CNN that the NSA “is not listening to Americans’ phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law.” Talking points issued by the House GOP in defense of the NSA claimed that surveillance law only “allows the Government to acquire foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S.-persons (foreign, non-Americans) located outside the United States.”

The NSA’s media defenders have similarly stressed that the NSA’s eavesdropping and internet snooping requires warrants when it involves Americans. The Washington Post’s Charles Lane told his readers: “the government needs a court-issued warrant, based on probable cause, to listen in on phone calls.” The Post’s David Ignatius told Post readers that NSA internet surveillance “is overseen by judges who sit on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court” and is “lawful and controlled”. Tom Friedman told New York Times readers that before NSA analysts can invade the content of calls and emails, they “have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress.”

This has become the most common theme for those defending NSA surveillance. But these claim are highly misleading, and in some cases outright false.

Top secret documents obtained by the Guardian illustrate what the Fisa court actually does – and does not do – when purporting to engage in “oversight” over the NSA’s domestic spying. That process lacks many of the safeguards that Obama, the House GOP, and various media defenders of the NSA are trying to lead the public to believe exist. [Continue reading…]

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Google challenges U.S. gag order, citing First Amendment

The Washington Post reports: Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests the court makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it is forced to give the government.

The legal filing, which invokes the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about far-reaching National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic.

Revelations about the program, called PRISM, have opened fissures between U.S. officials and the involved companies, which have scrambled to reassure their users without violating strict rules against disclosing information that the government has classified as top-secret.

A high-profile legal showdown might help Google’s efforts to portray itself as aggressively resisting government surveillance, and a victory could bolster the company’s campaign to portray government surveillance requests as targeted narrowly and affecting only a small number of users. [Continue reading…]

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Michael Hastings dead at 33

Tim Dickinson writes: Michael Hastings, the fearless journalist whose reporting brought down the career of General Stanley McChrystal, has died in a car accident in Los Angeles, Rolling Stone has learned. He was 33.

Hastings’ unvarnished 2010 profile of McChrystal in the pages of Rolling Stone, “The Runaway General,” captured the then-supreme commander of the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan openly mocking his civilian commanders in the White House. The maelstrom sparked by its publication concluded with President Obama recalling McChrystal to Washington and the general resigning his post. “The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be met by – set by a commanding general,” Obama said, announcing McChrystal’s departure. “It undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system.”

Hastings’ hallmark as reporter was his refusal to cozy up to power. While other embedded reporters were charmed by McChrystal’s bad-boy bravado and might have excused his insubordination as a joke, Hastings was determined to expose the recklessness of a man leading what Hastings believed to be a reckless war. “Runaway General” was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, won the 2010 Polk award for magazine reporting, and was the basis for Hastings’ book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan.

For Hastings, there was no romance to America’s misbegotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He had felt the horror of war first-hand: While covering the Iraq war for Newsweek in early 2007, his then-fianceé, an aide worker, was killed in a Baghdad car bombing. Hastings memorialized that relationship in his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story.

A contributing editor to Rolling Stone, Hastings leaves behind a remarkable legacy of reporting, including an exposé of America’s drone war, an exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at his hideout in the English countryside, an investigation into the Army’s illicit use of “psychological operations” to influence sitting Senators and a profile of Taliban captive Bowe Bergdahl, “America’s Last Prisoner of War.” [Continue reading…]

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Europe must protect itself from America

Jakob Augstein writes: On Tuesday, Barack Obama is coming to Germany. But who, really, will be visiting? He is the 44th president of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. He is an intelligent lawyer. And he is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

But is he a friend? The revelations brought to us by IT expert Edward Snowden have made certain what paranoid computer geeks and left-wing conspiracy theorists have long claimed: that we are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching.

On Tuesday, the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented is coming for a visit. If Barack Obama is our friend, then we really don’t need to be terribly worried about our enemies.

It is embarrassing: Barack Obama will be arriving in Berlin for only the second time, but his visit is coming just as we are learning that the US president is a snoop on a colossal scale. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that she will speak to the president about the surveillance program run by the National Security Agency, and the Berlin Interior Ministry has sent a set of 16 questions to the US Embassy. But Obama need not be afraid. German Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich, to be sure, did say: “That’s not how you treat friends.” But he wasn’t referring to the fact that our trans-Atlantic friends were spying on us. Rather, he meant the criticism of that spying.

Friedrich’s reaction is only paradoxical on the surface and can be explained by looking at geopolitical realities. The US is, for the time being, the only global power — and as such it is the only truly sovereign state in existence. All others are dependent — either as enemies or allies. And because most prefer to be allies, politicians — Germany’s included — prefer to grin and bear it. [Continue reading…]

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