Month: October 2013

Jay Stanley over at the ACLU blog posts an illustrative table that gets to the heart of the NSA controversies these days. As he makes note, when defenders of the NSA’s surveillance state are confronted with allegations of unlawfulness, overreach, or scandal as a result of Edward Snowden’s leaks, they like to emphasize their deep commitment to “keeping the country safe.”

Critics of the NSA programs, on the other hand, don’t buy it. We think the NSA isn’t so much looking out for the country as it is looking out for itself. And we praise Edward Snowden as a hero, instead of a maligning him as a traitor.

Stanley lays out the two paradigms of belief:

1. Top priority: protecting the nation. Our national security establishment—from the president to the heads of the three-letter agencies to the mid-level officials who make the gears turn—are focused on nothing but trying to protect the nation from harm. While occasional abuses by individual “bad apples” may take place, overall these institutions respect the Constitution and the rule of law and are just doing what they must to protect the nation.
2. Top priority: protecting themselves. Our national security establishment, while full of well-intentioned people trying their best to protect the nation, should primarily be understood as a giant bureaucratic entity governed by a dynamic that is bigger than the sum of these parts, and as primarily concerned with expanding its own powers and domain and defending its reputation.

Below is the table, which seems to prove paradigm 2 is correct. As Stanley puts it:

The evidence seems clear: national security is the justification for our security establishment’s existence and powers, but self-preservation, defense of prerogatives and reputation, and expansion of powers is truly mission number one. In fact, as I argued recently, the most useful way to think about the national security state is as a gigantic beast with impulses that need to be carefully controlled. Naïve understandings of our security agencies will lead to inadequate checks and balances. Reforms aimed at reining in these out-of-control agencies must be predicated on a sophisticated understanding of their true character.

Click continue to see the table…

Continue reading “The Surveillance State Is ‘A Gigantic Beast’ That Values Self-Preservation, Not National Security”

The actual details of the NSA’s expansive surveillance programs are infuriating enough on their own. Civil libertarians and ordinary Americans are and should be angry at the NSA’s disrespect for the law, the Fourth Amendment, and privacy rights in general.

It’s interesting to juxtapose this anger and frustration felt throughout the population with the anger and frustration now being felt by the intelligence community. They are really angry. They hate having their secrets exposed. They hate increased scrutiny. They hate that the journalists to whom Edward Snowden leaked continue to publish details they want desperately to be kept secret.

But the intelligence community is angry for another reason, too. And while it pains me to say it…I think I agree with them

In addition to the lawlessness and tyranny of the NSA’s spying activities, it makes my blood boil that President Obama is trying to wiggle out of all responsibility for this. I never thought I’d share a contention with DNI James Clapper or Gen. Keith Alexander. But I share this one.

From the beginning of the Snowden disclosures, officials at the NSA have been unsatisfied with the extent of President Obama’s defense of these spying programs. They have felt they’ve been left out to dry as far as the public defense of these programs.

In the latest example, NSA is attracting nation-wide and world-wide criticism for its spying on allied countries and their leaders, namely Germany, France, Spain, Mexico, and others. The White House came out and said they didn’t even know this was going on. In this LA Times article, unnamed U.S. intelligence officials are calling bullshit.

The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping.

The U.S. benefit from the war in Iraq was that we eliminated the potential for al-Qaeda to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein, according to Dick Cheney…weapons he did not have to begin with.

“…That was the threat after 9/11 and when we took down Saddam Hussein we eliminated Iraq as a potential source of that.”

Cheney is delusional. He must know that the doctrine of war that says a nation can attack another to “eliminate” a “potential source” of danger is the same doctrine of war that the Nazis were prosecuted for after WWII.

Frankly, most contemporary analogies to Hitler or the Nazis are hyperbolic and irrational. But here it is all too appropriate. Cheney has openly argued for the legitimacy of Nazi war crime rationales on national television.

Beyond that, Cheney commits the crime of defying basic logic. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (something I’ve argued Cheney and Bush knew at the time), so the preventive attack from the U.S. could not have eliminated that threat because it didn’t exist.

Moreover, al-Qaeda didn’t have a presence in Iraq to speak of prior to the U.S. invasion, which caused jihadists to flood the country. The threat the U.S. faced from al-Qaeda was magnified immeasurably as a result of the U.S. attack, not the other way around. Indeed, the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq are still fighting the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Baghdad and have expanded to Syria where there is a real risk of their gaining control over territory and military resources.

Trillions of dollars, thousands of dead Americans, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and millions upon millions of lives ripped apart…mostly because of the delusions dancing around in this sorry old man’s head.

[h/t Scott Horton]

Rafiq ur Rahman – a teacher at a primary school in North Waziristan, Pakistan – appeared at a briefing called by Representative Alan Grayson (FL-09), along with his children Nabila and Zubair, who were both injured in a drone attack in October 2012, Robert Greenwald, president of Brave New Foundation, and Jennifer Gibson, staff attorney with Reprieve. This event marked the first opportunity for Congress to hear from drone victim survivors.

Watch a video of the hearing here.

In U.S. foreign policy, there are bogeymen and allies. Bogeymen are evil tyrants who oppose freedom. Allies are stable international partners. What one realizes (once they stop watching cable news) is that whether the U.S. considers you a bogeyman or an ally is entirely independent of how those regimes treat their own people.

Here’s a tweet from CFR’s Micah Zenko, based on data from Amnesty International:

Global executions, 2012
China: 1000+
Iran: 314
Iraq: 129
Saudi Arabia: 79
US: 43
Yemen: 28+
Sudan: 19+
Afghan: 14
(http://t.co/wg5RKGQTs3)

— Micah Zenko (@MicahZenko) October 27, 2013

Granted, state executions is merely one measure of tyranny, but as you can see, there is a mix of bogeymen and allies on this list. Washington consistently cites China’s human rights abuses and I can’t tell you how many times neo-cons have made note of the Iranian regime’s penchant for executions to justify taking a hard-line against the Islamic Republic. But we rarely, if ever, hear that U.S. allies Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan – all supported with American tax dollars – also make the top of this list.

You’ll note too of course that the U.S. makes an honored appearance on this list. What great company to have in some of the worst despotisms in the world.

For more on a related issue of disgrace for the U.S., see Anthony Gregory’s piece on America’s prisons.

David Adesnik over at the hawkish conservative think tank AEI asks, “why has the isolationism of Ron Paul and his admirers taken such a sharp turn toward amoral realism?”

I cannot, for the life of me, yet again explain to a right wing hawk the difference between isolationism and non-interventionism, so we’ll leave that to the side.

Adesnik’s question comes from a rather out-of-context quote pulled from a speech Ron Paul gave in 1976. In criticizing the brutality of the Chinese regime at a time when the political elite in the Nixon administration were praising Beijing in a famously “realist” diplomatic move to drive a wedge between it and Moscow, Ron Paul did utter the following, quoted by Adesnik:

It is foolish to believe that the Chinese people do not have the same yearning for freedom that we have…We are asked to be ‘realists’ and overlook [Communist abuses]…This is a foolish and shortsighted policy that simply repeats America’s past error of treating all of our enemies’ enemies as our friends. This policy has probably done more to destroy our credibility as a champion of freedom in the world than any other thing.

Americans pride themselves for having broken with the balance-of-power politics of Europe and establishing a foreign policy that not only upholds American interests, but is moral as well.

This, Adesnik argues, is very different from the Ron Paul of 2013 and even “sound[s] more like George W. Bush.” Adesnik is confusing the “[rhetorically] compassionate conservatism” of Bush’s neo-con foreign policy with Ron Paul’s effort to expose the fact that the U.S. is happy to ally with and support horrible dictatorships while maintaining propaganda about America’s devotion to freedom and democracy.

What Paul said right after the quote pulled from Adesnik is most important and reveals there has been no appreciable change in Ron Paul’s foreign policy views since then:

It is unfortunate that our foreign policy has been so mismanaged that the American people now seem to equate a moral foreign policy with an interventionist foreign policy.The two are not at all synonymous. A condemnation of Communist tyranny ought not to imply the threat of U.S. intervention. Nor should it imply support for every petty dictatorship in the world that pays lip service to anticommunism.

America must remain forthright in a universal opposition to tyranny.

Continue reading “Nice Try, But Ron Paul’s Foreign Policy Views Haven’t Changed”