Barack Obama, during an interview with Charlie Savage on December 20, 2007: “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
Joe Biden, during a television interview in 2007: “The president has no constitutional authority … to take this nation to war … unless we’re attacked or unless there is proof we are about to be attacked. And if he does, if he does, I would move to impeach him.”
Robert Fisk: “If Barack Obama decides to attack the Syrian regime, he has ensured – for the very first time in history – that the United States will be on the same side as al-Qa’ida.”
A Syrian Army officer: “We have more than 8,000 suicide martyrs within the Syrian army, ready to carry out martyrdom operations at any moment to stop the Americans and the British. I myself am ready to blow myself up against US aircraft carriers to stop them attacking Syria and its people.”
An anonymous senior Hezbollah source: “A large-scale Western strike on Syria will plunge Lebanon virtually and immediately into the inferno of a war with Israel.”
General Mohammad Ali Jafari, chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards: (an attack on Syria) “means the immediate destruction of Israel.”
Israeli President Shimon Peres: “Israel is not and has not been involved in the civil war in Syria, but if they try to hurt us, we will respond with full force.”
Retired U.S. General James Mattis: “We have no moral obligation to do the impossible and harm our children’s future because we think we just have to do something.”
Category: Terra Terra Terra!
One round for the flying public
This is a glimmer of sanity:
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A federal judge ruled that people placed on the U.S. government’s no-fly list have a constitutionally protected interest in traveling by air, and the right to due process when it’s denied.
U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown of Portland, in an opinion released late Wednesday, rejected the government’s assertion that people on the no-fly list can travel by other means, and that being on the list does not deprive them of their liberty. She said it ignores “the realities of our modern world.”
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of 13 people on the no-fly list. The plaintiffs want to be removed from the list or told why their names appear.
“This decision is a critically important step towards vindicating the due process rights of Americans on the no-fly list,” said Nusrat Choudhury, the ACLU lawyer representing the plaintiffs. “For the first time, a federal court has recognized that when the government bans Americans from flying and smears them as suspected terrorists, it deprives them of constitutionally protected liberties, and they must have a fair process to clear their names.”
Brown’s decision, however, is only a partial one. She asked the government for more information about its redress procedure to help her determine whether it satisfied due process requirements for the plaintiffs.
Fallows on bombing Syria: Just don’t do it
By the time you read this, it may have already happened. James Fallows looks at all the current arguments for bombing Syria and comes down on the side of not doing it:
For 20 years now we have seen this pattern:
- Something terrible happens somewhere — and what is happening in Syria is not just terrible but atrocious in the literal meaning of that term.
- Americans naturally feel we must “do something.”
- The easiest something to do involves bombers, drones, and cruise missiles, all of which are promised to be precise and to keep our forces and people at a safe remove from the battle zone.
- In the absence of a draft, with no threat that taxes will go up to cover war costs, and with the reality that modern presidents are hamstrung in domestic policy but have enormous latitude in national security, the normal democratic checks on waging war don’t work.
- We “do something,” with bombs and drones, and then deal with blowback and consequences “no one could have foreseen.”
For instance, someone with whom I usually agree, Eugene Robinson of the Post,writes today: “History says don’t do it. Most Americans say don’t do it. But President Obama has to punish Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s homicidal regime with a military strike — and hope that history and the people are wrong.”
On where such “hope” might lead, I give you Spinney once more, with a numbered list of his own:
Consider the last twenty years: What has been achieved by
(1)using cruise missiles to bomb a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan and
(2) an obstacle course in Afghanistan, or
(3) the endless attacks on air defense sites in the Iraqi no fly zone in the 1990s, or
(4) the bombing campaigns of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars; and now
(5) Obama’s evergrowing drone campaign in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and god knows where else?
Continue reading “Fallows on bombing Syria: Just don’t do it”
WTF?
B at Moon Over Alabama:
Alexei Pushkov, chair of the Russian Federation State Duma’s international affairs committee, saying what I think:
“To us, it looks as though [George W.] Bush, [Dick] Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld never left the White House. […] It’s basically the same policy, as if US leaders had learned nothing and forgotten nothing in the past decade. They want to topple foreign leaders they regard as adversaries, without even making the most basic calculations of the consequences. An intervention in Syria will only enlarge the area of instability in the Middle East and expand the scope of terrorist activity. I am at a complete loss to understand what the US thinks it is doing.“
Feature, not a bug
Of course they’re passing along information to the DEA and everyone else. The question is, can we get more than a handful of politicians to stand up to oppose it?
(Reuters) – Eight Democratic senators and congressmen have asked Attorney General Eric Holder to answer questions about a Reuters report that the National Security Agency supplies the Drug Enforcement Administration with intelligence information used to make non-terrorism cases against American citizens.
The August report revealed that a secretive DEA unit passes the NSA information to agents in the field, including those from the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI and Homeland Security, with instructions to never disclose the original source, even in court. In most cases, the NSA tips involve drugs, money laundering and organized crime, not terrorism.
Five Democrats in the Senate and three senior Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee submitted questions to Holder about the NSA-DEA relationship, joining two prominent Republicans who have expressed concerns. The matter will be discussed during classified briefings scheduled for September, Republican and Democratic aides said.
“These allegations raise serious concerns that gaps in the policy and law are allowing overreach by the federal government’s intelligence gathering apparatus,” wrote the senators – Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Tom Udall of New Mexico, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
Well, you see, it’s a little bigger than that
So in two weeks, we go from the NSA spying on two percent of internet traffic to 75 percent? Will anyone bet on 100?
And, here we go again. This time, it’s the WSJ journal with the scoop on NSA surveillance, and how the defenders of the NSA have been lying to us. Despite claims that the NSA was really only focused on foreign communications, the WSJ is reporting that it actually covers 75% of US internet traffic:
The National Security Agency—which possesses only limited legal authority to spy on U.S. citizens—has built a surveillance network that covers more Americans’ Internet communications than officials have publicly disclosed, current and former officials say.
The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology, these people say.
Basically, they’re just revealing more details about the things that whistleblower Mark Klein revealed years ago: that the NSA has deals with the major telcos which scoop up a huge amount of internet traffic.
The programs, code-named Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew, among others, filter and gather information at major telecommunications companies. Blarney, for instance, was established with AT&T Inc., former officials say. AT&T declined to comment.
This filtering takes place at more than a dozen locations at major Internet junctions in the U.S., officials say.
The WSJ report is wrong on one account, though. It claims that people believed that the NSA’s filtering actually happened “where undersea or other foreign cables enter the country” but that’s not true. Mark Klein made it clear that the NSA had machines directly on AT&T’s property.
And, of course, it will come as no surprise that these programs that work directly with telcos to tap into full internet traffic aren’t just about metadata:
…this set of programs shows the NSA has the capability to track almost anything that happens online, so long as it is covered by a broad court order.
[….] Inevitably, officials say, some U.S. Internet communications are scanned and intercepted, including both “metadata” about communications, such as the “to” and “from” lines in an email, and the contents of the communications themselves.
This also shouldn’t be a surprise. For all the talk of “metadata” it was always clear that the surveillance defenders were talking about this program only, which was the Patriot Act Section 215 “business records” program. But other programs, such as these listed above, were clearly about actual content as well.
Perspective
From Ted Rall:
‘The NSA is commandeering the internet’
Bruce Schneier in the Atlantic:
It turns out that the NSA’s domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we’ve learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it’s easier that way.
I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight.
Do you remember those old spy movies, when the higher ups in government decide that the mission is more important than the spy’s life? It’s going to be the same way with you. You might think that your friendly relationship with the government means that they’re going to protect you, but they won’t. The NSA doesn’t care about you or your customers, and will burn you the moment it’s convenient to do so.
We’re already starting to see that. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others are pleading with the government to allow them to explain details of what information they provided in response to National Security Letters and other government demands. They’ve lost the trust of their customers, and explaining what they do — and don’t do — is how to get it back. The government has refused; they don’t care.
It will be the same with you. There are lots more high-tech companies who have cooperated with the government. Most of those company names are somewhere in the thousands of documents that Edward Snowden took with him, and sooner or later they’ll be released to the public. The NSA probably told you that your cooperation would forever remain secret, but they’re sloppy. They’ll put your company name on presentations delivered to thousands of people: government employees, contractors, probably even foreign nationals. If Snowden doesn’t have a copy, the next whistleblower will.
This is why you have to fight. When it becomes public that the NSA has been hoovering up all of your users’ communications and personal files, what’s going to save you in the eyes of those users is whether or not you fought. Fighting will cost you money in the short term, but capitulating will cost you more in the long term.
Speaking truth to stupid
Avendon has so much great stuff today, I can’t pick one. Go read it all.
Former NSA chief: We’ll seize more powers if there’s another attack
Michael Hayden is a hack for security theater, and he makes big money in this line of work. So we should listen to him very, very carefully:
WASHINGTON — Former National Security Agency chief Gen. Michael Hayden hinted Sunday at how the NSA’s eavesdropping and data collection program is likely to evolve over time. Critics of the project have warned that by building the capacity to track the electronic communications of all American citizens, the government will inevitably be tempted to employ every tool it has at its disposal and scuttle whatever constitutional safeguards stand in the way. Not to do so eventually would in fact be more surprising, goes the argument.
In an appearance on CBS’ “Face The Nation,” Hayden — also the former head of the CIA — unintentionally opened a window into just how that evolution will likely unfold.
Asked by host Bob Schieffer about the president’s proposal for a civil liberties advocate to argue on behalf of the Constitution in the secret court that oversees the NSA, Hayden said that such a setup would be inappropriate for fast-moving investigations. But he did float a hypothetical scenario in which such a safeguard might be appropriate: After an attack, he said, the NSA would want to use the vast store of information it has been collecting in more aggressive ways.
Hayden said that in general he was opposed to a civil liberties advocate’s involvement in the process, and warned that slowing it down would lead to criticism.
“When you’re looking in your rearview mirror after the next successful attack, this runs the danger of looking like bureaucratic layering,” he said. “And, so, you need to be careful about how many processes you put in there even though I freely admit, you don’t get to do this at all unless the American people feel comfortable about it.”
Continue reading “Former NSA chief: We’ll seize more powers if there’s another attack”