Month: October 2013

When the State Department revoked Edward Snowden’s passport four months ago, the move was a reprisal from a surveillance-and-warfare state that operates largely in the shadows. Top officials in Washington were furious. Snowden had suddenly exposed what couldn’t stand the light of day, blowing the cover of the world’s Biggest Brother.

Cancelation of the passport wasn’t just an effort to prevent the whistleblower from getting to a country that might grant political asylum. It was also a declaration that the U.S. government can nullify the right to travel just as surely as it can nullify the right to privacy.

"Although I am convicted of nothing," Snowden said in a July 1 statement after a week at a Moscow airport terminal, the U.S. government "has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum."

Since 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has affirmed with clarity: "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." The only other words of Article 14 specify an exception that clearly doesn’t apply to Snowden: "This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

The extent of the U.S. government’s scorn for this principle can be gauged by the lengths it has gone to prevent Snowden from gaining political asylum. It was a measure of desperation – and contempt for international law – that Washington got allied governments of France, Spain, Portugal and Italy to deny airspace to the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales in early July, forcing the aircraft to land for a search on the chance that it was carrying Snowden from Moscow to political asylum in Bolivia.

Although Snowden was able to stay in Russia, revocation of his U.S. passport has been a crucial weapon to prevent him from crossing an international border for any reason other than to come home to prison in the United States.

Continue reading “Why Snowden’s Passport Matters”

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced an interesting Constitutional amendment this week:

‘Section 1. Congress shall make no law applicable to a citizen of the United States that is not equally applicable to Congress.

‘Section 2. Congress shall make no law applicable to a citizen of the United States that is not equally applicable to the executive branch of Government, including the President, Vice President, ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and all other officers of the United States, including those provided for under this Constitution and by law, and inferior officers to the President established by law.

‘Section 3. Congress shall make no law applicable to a citizen of the United States that is not equally applicable to judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, including the Chief Justice, and judges of such inferior courts as Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

I view this as a superficial attempt to simultaneously throw red meat to Paul’s libertarian and populist Tea Party followers. First of all, the proposed amendment is unlikely to be successful, given the notorious difficulty of passing Constitutional amendments, which require two-thirds of both houses of Congress and then ratification by at least three-fourths of the states (or, 38 out of 50).

And secondly, while it may sound nice to say that not even the government will be above the law, that is the system we’re already supposed to have, yet it is largely a farce. Even if this actually became an amendment, it would be mostly symbolic.

The government is constantly breaking the law and taking actions that are clearly illegal for ordinary citizens to take.

To take just one example, the Supreme Court in 2010 decided that “material support” laws Congress passed to criminalize aiding terrorist groups includes “Advocacy performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization.” Yet this didn’t seem to apply to scores of current and former U.S. politicians that advocated for and got paid to speak on behalf of the Iranian dissident group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which was on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations until September 2012.

Here’s what former Governor Ed Rendell told journalist Daniel Denvir when confronted about his illegal support for MEK:

“If you indict me, I hope you know, you have to indict 67 other Americans who did the same thing, including seven generals … [who] served in Iraq. You’d have to indict James Jones, President Obama’s first NSC chief adviser, you’d have to indict former Attorney General [Michael] Mukasey, former FBI Director Louis Freeh … the whole kit and caboodle.” That caboodle is voluminous and high-powered, including Tom Ridge, UN Ambassador John Bolton, Rudolph Giuliani and Howard Dean, among others.

Or, take an example straight from the Executive Branch. In September, President Obama unilaterally waived the ban on supplying lethal aid to terrorist groups “to clear the way for the U.S. to provide military assistance to ‘vetted’ opposition groups fighting Syrian dictator Bashar Assad,” the Washington Examiner reported. If Presidents can simply waive laws they know they’ll soon be in violation of, an amendment like Paul’s is worthless.

Or what about the NSA’s lawlessness under the Executive Branch? Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee and has access to classified information about the NSA’s surveillance practices, said this month that even with the overly broad statutory powers granted to the NSA, “the rules have been broken, and the rules have been broken a lot.”

A recently declassified FISC ruling found that the NSA “frequently and systematically violated” statutory laws governing how intelligence agents can search databases of Americans’ telephone communications and that NSA analysts deliberately misled judges about their surveillance activities in order to get court approval.

Going back a little further, President Bush flagrantly violated the law when he secretly authorized the NSA to perform warrantless surveillance on phone calls, including American communications.

I could go on and on (torture, indefinite detention, war crimes, etc. etc.)

If Paul wants laws to be applied equally, why haven’t I heard him call for indictments against the Obama and Bush administrations, not to mention the leadership of the NSA?

Probably because this is for political show. The truth is, being in the Executive Branch or in Congress is basically a get out of jail free card. If Joe Schmoe steals $50 out of the cash register of his local convenient store, he’ll be in big trouble. If the U.S. government supports terrorism, wages illegal war, and systematically violates the Fourth Amendment in complete secrecy…no problem.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, two George Washington University professors note the strange inability of “the U.S. establishment” to substantiate their claims that leakers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning pose an enormous threat to national security.

The reason the establishment hasn’t been able to back that up is because there is a “deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose [that] is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it.”

The inability to get away with our own hypocrisy and double standards presents a dire threat to U.S. hegemony, write Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore:

Hypocrisy is central to Washington’s soft power — its ability to get other countries to accept the legitimacy of its actions — yet few Americans appreciate its role. Liberals tend to believe that other countries cooperate with the United States because American ideals are attractive and the U.S.-led international system is fair. Realists may be more cynical, yet if they think about Washington’s hypocrisy at all, they consider it irrelevant. For them, it is Washington’s cold, hard power, not its ideals, that encourages other countries to partner with the United States.

…This system needs the lubricating oil of hypocrisy to keep its gears turning. To ensure that the world order continues to be seen as legitimate, U.S. officials must regularly promote and claim fealty to its core liberal principles; the United States cannot impose its hegemony through force alone. But as the recent leaks have shown, Washington is also unable to consistently abide by the values that it trumpets. This disconnect creates the risk that other states might decide that the U.S.-led order is fundamentally illegitimate.

Of course, the United States has gotten away with hypocrisy for some time now. It has long preached the virtues of nuclear nonproliferation, for example, and has coerced some states into abandoning their atomic ambitions. At the same time, it tacitly accepted Israel’s nuclearization and, in 2004, signed a formal deal affirming India’s right to civilian nuclear energy despite its having flouted the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by acquiring nuclear weapons. In a similar vein, Washington talks a good game on democracy, yet it stood by as the Egyptian military overthrew an elected government in July, refusing to call a coup a coup. Then there’s the “war on terror”: Washington pushes foreign governments hard on human rights but claims sweeping exceptions for its own behavior when it feels its safety is threatened.

The reason the United States has until now suffered few consequences for such hypocrisy is that other states have a strong interest in turning a blind eye. Given how much they benefit from the global public goods Washington provides, they have little interest in calling the hegemon on its bad behavior. Public criticism risks pushing the U.S. government toward self-interested positions that would undermine the larger world order. Moreover, the United States can punish those who point out the inconsistency in its actions by downgrading trade relations or through other forms of direct retaliation. Allies thus usually air their concerns in private. Adversaries may point fingers, but few can convincingly occupy the moral high ground. Complaints by China and Russia hardly inspire admiration for their purer policies.

The ease with which the United States has been able to act inconsistently has bred complacency among its leaders. Since few countries ever point out the nakedness of U.S. hypocrisy, and since those that do can usually be ignored, American politicians have become desensitized to their country’s double standards. But thanks to Manning and Snowden, such double standards are getting harder and harder to ignore.

So, while not even the most vicious government agent has been able to substantiate any claims of an actual threat to Americans’ safety resulting from the Manning and Snowden disclosures, it is certainly true that their leaks have weakened Washington’s ability to act in ways that are contrary to self-serving propaganda about freedom, democracy, and the rule of law.

And that is the kind of threat that power hates the most.

The Pentagon’s inspector general found defense contractor Boeing deliberately overcharged for military equipment four times in the past five years, according to Bloomberg News.

In 2008, for example, Boeing charged an extra $16.6 million on a $4.4 billion CH-47F Chinook Helicopter contract by invoicing new and updated parts while “primarily install[ing] used parts instead.”

This past June, Boeing got paid “$13.7 million more than it should have for spare parts, including $2,286 a piece for an aluminum ‘bearing sleeve’ that should have cost $10.”

“A May 2011 audit found about $13 million of overcharges on $23 million of orders from a Texas army depot,” Bloomberg adds. “That report said Boeing charged $644.75 for a plastic motor gear used on Chinook helicopters, which another Pentagon agency purchased for $12.51.”

The latest July audit found that Boeing charged $2.6 million for 142 Chinook engine transmission housings that the Pentagon didn’t even need.

The Army, Bridget Serchak, a spokeswoman for the inspector general, told Bloomberg, paid Boeing for parts “that were proposed but never installed,” and “is paying for additional parts that they do not need and may not use.”

This is a regular feature of the military industrial complex, as the infamous Reagan-era story of the $400 hammer the Pentagon paid for illustrates. In any other environment, if a company charged you $2,286 for something that you could get elsewhere for $10, that company would either go out of business or quickly slash its prices. But in this system, there is no downward pressure on prices, and the defense corporations have a hold on the politicians, so there won’t be anything done about this egregious profligacy.

As I wrote last week, even when there aren’t deliberate overcharges, the Pentagon is often forced to pay for weapons and equipment that military leaders say they don’t want or need.

And we’re all supposed to believe the defense budgets have been cut too much.

Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have published reports on the Obama administration’s drone war, saying it may amount to war crimes. This comes just days after the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions submitted a study of its own on the drone war to the UN General Assembly.

According to the Human Rights Watch report, not only does the drone war violate international law, but it boosts local support for al Qaeda. Here’s some of the press release:

United States targeted airstrikes against alleged terrorists in Yemen have killed civilians in violation of international law, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The strikes, often using armed drones, are creating a public backlash that undermines US efforts against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The 102-page report, “‘Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda’: The Civilian Cost of US Targeted Killings in Yemen,”examines six US targeted killings in Yemen, one from 2009 and the rest from 2012-2013. Two of the attacks killed civilians indiscriminately in clear violation of the laws of war; the others may have targeted people who were not legitimate military objectives or caused disproportionate civilian deaths.

“The US says it is taking all possible precautions during targeted killings, but it has unlawfully killed civilians and struck questionable military targets in Yemen,” said Letta Tayler, senior terrorism and counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch and the author of the report. “Yemenis told us that these strikes make them fear the US as much as they fear Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

They also provide a video:

Amnesty’s report is called “Will I Be Next?” on account of an 8-year old Pakistani girl who watched her grandmother get torn to shreds in a drone strike as she was picking vegetables. “I wasn’t scared of drones before,” the young girl said, “but now when they fly overhead I wonder, will I be next?”

Much of the Amnesty report focuses on the terrorizing nature of the constant hovering of armed drones overhead and the effect that is having on the civilian population. It echoes a study from the Stanford and NYU schools of law last year, which found, “Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.”

Here’s a video from RT covering the Amnesty report:

Notably, Amnesty calls on U.S. authorities to “Bring those responsible for unlawful drone strikes to justice in public and fair trials…”

Are we taking bets on how likely that is to happen?