Category: The Regime

Leahy backs NSA clampdown

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Maybe this will get some traction:

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the powerful chairman of the chamber’s Judiciary Committee, on Tuesday strongly endorsed a series of sweeping restrictions on U.S. surveillance programs — from ending the bulk collection of Americans’ phone call logs to creating new oversight mechanisms to keep the National Security Agency in check.

In a speech at Georgetown University Law Center, the Vermont Democrat said the government “has not made its case” that the ability to collect Americans’ phone records en masse under the PATRIOT Act is “an effective counterterrorism tool, especially in light of the intrusion on Americans’ privacy rights.”

As the senator criticized the program, authorized under Section 215, he also pledged to explore “possible structural changes” to the secret court that reviews government surveillance requests. And Leahy said he planned to work with his Republican colleagues in the House to rein in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs the NSA’s ability to tap Internet communications as it scours for foreign terror suspects.

Leahy’s speech Tuesday marks his committee’s return to the thorny, complex surveillance debate, sparked by contractor Edward Snowden. Even as Snowden’s leaks continued to make headlines, lawmakers disengaged as they turned their attention to Syria and the debt ceiling.

Twice in one day, but…

~ susie

What Pierce said:

The problem is not isolationism, which is not a real policy, anyway. (It’s a pose.) The problem is not that America withdraws from the world. The problem is solipsism. It is that the people in the country are told, over and over again, that they live in a society so exceptional that the immutable rules of history and power apply elsewhere, but not here. One of the most bizarre reactions to the attacks of September 11, 2001 came when the president said that “we” had all thought that the oceans kept us safe. If “we” thought that, we were idiots. Most of us grew up with thousands of Russian ICBM’s aimed at us. Most of us lived through the events of October, 1962 in which it looked very much like those missiles would be launched, and that the Atlantic tides were unlikely to bring any of them down. Oceans keep you safe? Really? Ask the Aztecs. I don’t think anyone really felt that way. But what we did do was affect shock that what could happen overseas could happen here. That’s because we withdrew in our capacities as citizens from the making not only of military policy, but also of diplomatic policy as well. Politics don’t stop at the water’s edge. They just look like they do. Self-government doesn’t stop there.

We need to know what our government is doing in regard to these events, and not just in its capacity to “keep us safe.” There’s more going on here than the possible threat to American shopping malls. We need to know what our government’s policies are, and what the effects of those policies are, in the places in the world we otherwise ignore. The shredding of the foreign bureaus by most of our major media outlets was a bean-counting disgrace when it began that has become a calamity now. (The triumph of the Internet mitigates this somewhat, but when most of the cultural, political and institutional forces in your society seem to be singing from the same hymnal as regards to how little we should care about those places in the world, then it’s hard to bestir people to go on-line to see what’s happening in Mali these days.)

The shrinking of foreign-policy debate into a Procrustean with-us-or-against-us-war-on-terra context does us no good service. Certainly, there’s a debate to be had about our military posture overseas, and how we deal with the very real monsters who perpetrate these acts, and whether or not how we deal with them does more harm than good. But there’s also a debate to be had about using places like Africa, and the people who live there, as merely disposable raw materials in the soulless machine that is global capitalism. There’s a debate to be had about the other forms of imperial adventurism — cultural, financial, moral. And we can’t have that debate unless events like what’s happening in Kenya now cease to come as such a surprise to us, and unless we recognize that “How Does This Affect Me?” is not the ultimate question under discussion here as the mall goes up in flames.

We didn’t lose our innocence on September 11. We lost our immunity. We should not pretend otherwise.

Oops

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Trust us!

The accident happened when a B-52 bomber got into trouble, having embarked from Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro for a routine flight along the East Coast. As it went into a tailspin, the hydrogen bombs it was carrying became separated. One fell into a field near Faro, North Carolina, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree; the other plummeted into a meadow off Big Daddy’s Road.

Jones found that of the four safety mechanisms in the Faro bomb, designed to prevent unintended detonation, three failed to operate properly. When the bomb hit the ground, a firing signal was sent to the nuclear core of the device, and it was only that final, highly vulnerable switch that averted calamity. “The MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52,” Jones concludes.

The document was uncovered by Schlosser as part of his research into his new book on the nuclear arms race, Command and Control. Using freedom of information, he discovered that at least 700 “significant” accidents and incidents involving 1,250 nuclear weapons were recorded between 1950 and 1968 alone.

“The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy,” he said. “We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here’s one that very nearly did.”

‘Most of my hate mail comes from liberals’

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Jeremy Scahill:

Jeremy Scahill, an investigative foreign correspondent whose first documentary, “Dirty Wars,” opens Friday, writes for The Nation and achieved his biggest success with “Blackwater,” a best-selling book critiquing security contractors hired by the George W. Bush administration. Neither of which keeps him from being labeled a right-wing stooge by detractors.

“Most of my hate mail nowadays comes from liberals, not conservatives,” he said.

This is because Mr. Scahill has also been an outspoken critic of President Obama. Specifically, he disapproves of what he describes as the administration’s efforts to “normalize and legitimize” targeted assassinations — drone-executed and otherwise — Special Operations raids and other covert military practices that blur the battle lines of the war on terrorism.

“Dirty Wars” is his latest salvo. In the film (his book with the same title came out in April), Mr. Scahill investigates several American strikes that killed civilians with no apparent ties to terrorist groups, beginning with a February 2010 raid in the village of Khatabeh, Afghanistan, that killed several members of a family. An Afghan police chief and three women were among the dead. (The United States first denied and then acknowledged its role in the deaths.)

Along the way Mr. Scahill suggests that such acts are radicalizing Muslims both obscure — a man in Khatabeh talks about wanting to become a suicide bomber — and well-known, like the American cleric-turned-Qaeda firebrand Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by drones in September 2011. “We are encouraging a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Mr. Scahill said. “We are making more new enemies than we are killing actual terrorists.”

Mr. Scahill, 38, has been a frequent talking head on cable news shows and recently was awarded a $150,000 Windham Campbell literary prize. The film stands to raise his profile as it mixes disturbing events in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia with Mr. Scahill’s raw emotional responses.

He said he had resisted a prominent on-camera role, but allowed that the approach humanizes the film and builds credibility with viewers by being transparent about the imperfect art of journalism. Intense but friendly in conversation, with striking blue eyes, Mr. Scahill talked to Jeremy Egner about how making the film altered him. These are excerpts from the interview.

Q. How did this project begin?

A. There was this war within the war in Afghanistan. There was the conventional war — the Marines in Helmand Province — and then you had these night raids. But I didn’t know much about it. We started filming aftermaths of night raids and interviewing people.

How did it evolve?

I was going to be more of a tour guide to this archipelago of undeclared wars. As we started talking about how we wanted to tell the story, we realized we didn’t really have a story. We had four or five ministories, but we weren’t really doing an effective job of connecting them. David [Riker, the co-writer] said: “You’re burying a big part of the story, which is that this film has really changed you as a person. You’re not some dispassionate observer.”

How were you changed by it?

I feel gutted as a person, to be really honest. When you do this kind of work you run from one story to the next and you try not to let anything catch up with you. Once we started doing this as a more personal journey, it was like a floodgate opened of all of the horrifying stuff that I’ve seen and the stories I’ve absorbed. I was forced to confront things that I don’t think I wanted to.
[…]

What do you hope viewers take away from this?

I don’t have any illusions about Congress changing things, but I have faith in people. If we debate about this in our society, Congress will be forced to do something about it. If we embrace assassination as a central component of our foreign policy and continue with the mentality that we can kill our way to victory — or worse, kill our way to peace — then we’re whistling past the graveyard.

Summers’ end (exit Iago)

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

“Look, it’s Larry Summers,” said the swamp rabbit, pointing at an oil slick on the wetlands that surrounds my shotgun shack in Tinicum. “I think he’s heading north, maybe back to Harvard.”

“No way,” I said. “He gambled away a big chunk of Harvard’s endowment.”

We’d just read that Summers will not be nominated to head the Federal Reserve Board. One less malignant hustler using a powerful post to undermine the quality of life of Americans who aren’t rich. I can’t think of a better possible story out of Washington, D.C. Maybe if Summers had been knocked on his ass by someone who lost a home to one of the banks he helped bail out during the economic crisis he helped cause.

No surprise that Barack Obama, according to The New York Times, had wanted Summers for the job but apparently didn’t choose him because of the political risks:

…But as that Oval Office meeting last year also suggests, Mr. Obama’s one concern about nominating Mr. Summers has been the potential for a Senate battle — not only from Republicans spoiling for fights, but also from Democrats who view Mr. Summers as having been too friendly toward deregulating big banks when he was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration…

“Too friendly” — how’s that for polite understatement? Summers played a key role in the repeal of Glass-Steagall. After the big banks went belly up, he saved them with taxpayers’ money, much of which should have been spent to replace millions of lost jobs, and on a large-scale foreclosure-blocking program. And now, even though he won’t head the Fed, the self-satisfied little toad is still playing Iago to Obama’s Othello.

Footnote: From a piece by Peter Beinart that explains why the Democratic Party will become even more like the GOP unless progressives fight to completely overhaul it:

From Tony Coelho, who during the Reagan years taught House Democrats to raise money from corporate lobbyists to Bill Clinton, who made Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin his chief economic adviser, to Barack Obama, who gave the job to Rubin’s former deputy and alter ego, Larry Summers, Democrats have found it easier to forge relationships with the conservative worlds of big business and high finance because they have not faced much countervailing pressure from an independent movement of the left.

Isn’t that nice

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Although somehow, not that surprising:

WASHINGTON — In the wake of the National Security Agency spying scandal, the American Civil Liberties Union shifted attention Tuesday to the FBI with a report that described the bureau as “a secret domestic intelligence agency.”

The report says that changes in law and policy since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have allowed the FBI to expand its intelligence-gathering and investigative authorities, infringe on Americans’ privacy and evade constitutional oversight.

The report lauded the FBI for protecting the United States from criminals, terrorists and hostile foreign agents, but it said the bureau also has “regularly overstepped the law, infringing on Americans’ constitutional rights while overzealously pursuing its domestic security mission.”

Titled “Unleashed and Unaccountable: The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority,” the report makes 15 recommendations for changes at the bureau. The group released it as James Comey is in his first month as FBI director, in hopes that the new leadership would respond to calls for evaluation and reform.

“The FBI’s role in our society has drastically changed over the past dozen years,” said Michael German, ACLU senior policy counsel and a former FBI agent. “It’s long past time for Congress to conduct a public examination of how they’re utilized and reform the FBI to protect Americans’ rights and protect their security.”

U.S., Russian reach agreement on Syrian weapons

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Link:

GENEVA — The United States and Russia agreed Saturday on an outline for the identification and seizure of Syrian chemical weapons and said Syria must turn over an accounting of its arsenal within a week.

The agreement will be backed by a U.N. Security Council resolution that could allow for sanctions or other consequences if Syria fails to comply, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said.

Kerry said that the first international inspection of Syrian chemical weapons will take place by November, with destruction to begin next year.

Senior administration officials had said Friday the Obama administration would not press for U.N. authorization to use force against Syria if it reneges on any agreement to give up its chemical weapons.

The Russians had made clear in talks here between Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Secretary of State John F. Kerry that the negotiations could not proceed under the threat of a U.N. resolution authorizing a military strike.

Russia also wanted assurances that a resolution would not refer Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to the International Criminal Court for possible war-crimes prosecution.

President Obama has said that the unilateral U.S. use of force against Syria for a chemical attack last month remains on the table. But consideration of that action, already under challenge by a skeptical Congress, has been put on hold pending the outcome of the Geneva talks.

The discussions here began this week following a Russian proposal Monday, quickly agreed to by Assad, to place Syria’s chemical arsenal under international control and eventually destroy it.

Isn’t that nice

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Wheee:

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet. The intelligence community calls this process “minimization”, but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.

The deal was reached in principle in March 2009, according to the undated memorandum, which lays out the ground rules for the intelligence sharing.

Weapons for Syria rebels! Whoopee!

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I’m sure this will work out just as well as it has in every other country where we’ve done it:

The CIA has begun delivering weapons to rebels in Syria, ending months of delay in lethal aid that had been promised by the Obama administration, according to U.S. officials and Syrian figures. The shipments began streaming into the country over the past two weeks, along with separate deliveries by the State Department of vehicles and other gear — a flow of material that marks a major escalation of the U.S. role in Syria’s civil war.

The arms shipments, which are limited to light weapons and other munitions that can be tracked, began arriving in Syria at a moment of heightened tensions over threats by President Obama to order missile strikes to punish the regime of Bashar al-Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons in a deadly attack near Damascus last month.