Month: October 2013

Perpetual NSA cheerleader Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday arguing that if we had had the NSA spying program prior to the 9/11 attacks, “we would have detected the impending attack that killed 3,000 Americans.” Therefore, systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment as a matter of policy is justified.

Well, I’m sold!

Feinstein’s primary piece of evidence for this argument is that NSA Director Keith Alexander says so. The problem is that NSA Director Alexander says a lot of things that aren’t true. Back in June, he claimed that NSA’s bulk collection of call records and Internet activity disrupted 54 “terror plots.” Early this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee got Alexander to admit that this claim was wrong and misleading.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) said the NSA dragnet call data program, which is what most people are up in arms about, “played little or no role” in the disruption of these terrorist plots.

So far, there is only one case that government has cited to justify the vast surveillance both at home and abroad. And no, it by no means foiled a second 9/11. The case is that of Basaaly Moalin, a Somali immigrant who was living in San Diego when he decided to send al-Shabab $8,500. Somehow, the surveillance programs narrowed the search for Moalin, who could have easily been caught through more traditional law enforcement procedures.

As Yochai Benkler explained at the Guardian, “this single successful prosecution, under a vague criminal statute, which stopped a few thousand dollars from reaching one side in a local conflict in the Horn of Africa, is the sole success story for the NSA bulk domestic surveillance program.” If you ask me, this doesn’t count as an argument in favor of these NSA programs.

The Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez writes today that Feinstein’s argument “is simply an attempt to exploit the tragedy of 9/11 to deflect criticism of massive domestic surveillance that would not have been any use in preventing that attack.”

I think it’s safe to say Dianne Feinstein is engaging in hyperbole…or, to put it less generously, dishonesty. The NSA is under more scrutiny now than it has ever been, and they can’t come up with a single example of its utility (never mind legality). The failure to come up with evidence of the programs’ utility itself provides the answer to the question: NSA surveillance doesn’t keep Americans safe from terrorists, period.

The cynic in me tried to temper the thrill I felt when the early chapter of U.S.-Iran rapprochement reached its apex last month with the historic phone call between President Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. The leadership of these two belligerents finally seemed to simultaneously entertain peaceful resolution to their disputes. Today, Iran presented a proposal for a deal on its nuclear program to the P5+1, which was reportedly well-received.

But much of the political establishment in Washington, particularly the Republican Party, is dead set against détente. And their strategy for sabotaging the talks is simple: insist on making absurd demands everyone knows Iran would never accept, and then play it up to Iranian intransigence.

The case in point is Marco Rubio’s Op-Ed in today’s USA Today, in which he insists that “the bottom line in any negotiations should be clear: the only way sanctions on Iran will be lifted or suspended is if they agree to completely abandon any capability for enrichment or reprocessing.”

In Foreign Policy, Colin Kahl and Alireza Nader warn against this line of thinking, in which “hawks in Israel and Washington…

…have cautioned the Obama administration against acquiescing to an agreement that allows Iran to continue any domestic uranium enrichment, even at low levels suitable only for civilian nuclear power and under stringent international supervision. In his Oct. 1 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that only a complete dismantling of Iran’s enrichment program could prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. This position has been echoed by conservative think tanks in Washington and by numerous voices on Capitol Hill. Their collective mantra: “a bad deal is worse than no deal.”

In other words, Iran must surrender its internationally recognized right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes and obey arbitrary U.S. demands or else face continued economic sanctions and threats of war. It is hard to fathom how infantile one has to be to really believe détente can happen via total surrender on one side and zero concessions on the other. But that’s what hawks demand.

This tough-guy routine the GOP insists upon is devoid of any utility because “if talks fail because the United States insists on a maximalist position, Khamenei and other Iranian hardliners will likely interpret it as definitive proof that Washington’s real goal is regime change rather than a nuclear accord,” Kahl and Nader explain.

Indeed, how could they reach any other conclusion? As I wrote recently at Al Jazeera, Iran has good reason to believe the main U.S. goal is regime change. Not only does this remove any incentive to make a deal, but it signifies to the Iranians that obtaining a nuclear deterrent is the only means of ensuring their survival in the face of preventive (read: criminal) war by the U.S.

Update: See Michael Crowley at Time on “Four Good Reasons Iran Doesn’t Trust America.”

I’ve had a couple of days to reflect after arriving back from Moscow where my whistleblower colleagues Coleen Rowley, Jesselyn Radack, Tom Drake and I formally presented former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with the annual Sam Adams Associates award for integrity in intelligence.

The thought that companioned me the entire time was the constant admonition of my Irish grandmother: “Show me your company, and I’ll tell you who you are!” I cannot remember ever feeling so honored as I did by the company I kept over the past week.

That includes, of course, Snowden himself, WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison (and “remotely” Julian Assange) who, together with Russian civil rights lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, helped arrange the visit, and – last but not least – the 3,000 Internet transparency/privacy activists at OHM2013 near Amsterdam, whom Tom, Jesselyn, Coleen and I addressed in early August and who decided to crowd-source our travel. (See: “In the Whistleblower Chalet” by Silkie Carlo)

As representatives of Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, we were in Moscow last Wednesday not only to honor Snowden with the award for integrity, but also to remind him (and ourselves) that we all stand on the shoulders of patriots who have gone before and pointed the way.

Because of speaking commitments he could not break, Pentagon Papers truth-teller Dan Ellsberg, whom Henry Kissinger called “the most dangerous man in America” and who in 1971 was vilified as acidly as Ed Snowden is being vilified now, could be with us only in spirit. He did send along with us for Ed the video of the award-winning documentary that uses Kissinger’s epithet as its title, together with Dan’s book Secrets, in which he had inscribed a very thoughtful note.

Ellsberg’s note thanked Snowden for his adroit – and already partially successful – attempt to thwart what Snowden has called “turnkey tyranny,” that is the terrifying prospect of a surveillance-driven government tyranny ready to go with the simple turn of a key.

Continue reading “Edward Snowden’s Brave Integrity”

How much does Barack Obama love the defense corporations?

Of course, we know what candidate and President Obama says about the influence of lobbyists in Washington. “I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over,” he said in 2007. “They will not run my White House.”

“We must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists,” he said in his State of the Union address in 2012.

Anyone paying attention, even the most zealous partisan, knows Obama’s White House has been run with the influence of lobbyists from the beginning, in the energy sector, the financial sector, the health insurance and pharmacy sectors, on and on. But President Obama is now making another major concession to defense corporations (an industry whose CEOs the Obama White House loves to meet with).

“The defense industry has long pushed for a loosening of the U.S. export controls,” reports ProPublica’s Cora Currier in a piece entitled “In Big Win for Defense Industry, Obama Rolls Back Limits on Arms Exports.” Obama will loosen the restrictions on exports of arms and military equipment, moving much of the oversight away from the legal controls at the State Department and over to the Commerce Department.

Under the new system, whole categories of equipment encompassing tens of thousands of items will move to the Commerce Department, where they will be under more“flexible” controls. Final rules have been issued for six of 19 categories of equipment and more will roll out in the coming months. Some military equipment, such as fighter jets, drones, and other systems and parts, will stay under the State Department’s tighter oversight.

Commerce will do interagency human rights reviews before allowing exports, but only as a matter of policy, whereas in the State Department it is required by law.

The U.S. makes up about 80 percent of the global arms trade (up from 37 percent in 1990), a status quo that helps prop up brutal dictators throughout the Middle East, fuels civil wars in places like Congo, and heightens tensions between competing states in the Asia-Pacific region.

No wonder rent-seeking corporations like Lockheed Martin, Textron, and Honeywell are, as Currier reports, just some of “the companies that recently lobbied on the issue” of export controls. They manufacture products that are being sent over to the more “flexible” Commerce Department, like transport planes, helicopters, and military technology.

As far as I can tell, loosening the restrictions on the Pentagon’s welfare queens in the defense industry doesn’t serve some pressing strategic need. It seems this is merely a bow to the military-industrial complex, which is desperate to make some extra cash amid talk of budget cuts. And the Obama administration was more than happy to oblige.

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie weighed in on a government shutdown debate hosted at the New York Times called “What Federal Spending Are We Better Off Without?” Here’s an important passage:

The U.S. accounts for 40 percent of global expenditures on military might and, in real dollars, our defense spending rose nearly 80 percent between 2001 and 2012. As the shutdown entered its second week, The Dayton Daily News reported that the Pentagon is sending half a billion dollars’ worth of “nearly new” cargo planes to a storage facility in Arizona, where they will join $35 billion worth of other unnecessary aircraft and vehicles.

This is one of the most illustrative features of the general corruption in Washington and kudos to Gillespie for bringing it into the pages of the New York Times. Unsustainable entitlement programs are eating up a greater and greater piece of the budgetary pie, threatening the viability of overall fiscal viability into the future. And in this context, politicians continue to allocate billions of taxpayer dollars for Pentagon programs that, often times, even the top military brass say are superfluous.

This summer, the armed services committees in both the House and Senate rejected Defense Department requests to shutter military installations in the United States that the Pentagon says it doesn’t want or need. The infamous F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, to take another example, costs almost $400 billion and is the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons program in history. Military officials have told Congress for years to scrap it, but it has all fallen on deaf ears.

In April, Gen. Raymond Odierno told The Associated Press that a $436 million program to build updated versions of 70-ton Abrams tanks is unnecessary.  “If we had our choice, we would use that money in a different way,” he said.

“The Army,” Gen. William Phillips told a House subcommittee “is buying more [Abrams tanks] than it actually needs at this point.”

That’s when politicians from Ohio, where the Abrams tanks are built, went haywire. Rep. Jim Jordan insisted the tanks are necessary for the defense of the country, despite what Pentagon officials say.

“Look,” said Jordan, the plant that builds the tanks “is in the 4th Congressional District and my job is to represent the 4th Congressional District.” Um, by robbing taxpayers blind?

The government is spending into oblivion, saddling an entire generation with an enormous burden of unfunded liabilities, all so they can secure continued support from corporate welfarists like Lockheed Martin. What’s worse is that this kind of corruption and profiteering occurs in sectors well beyond the military industrial complex, as wealthy farm companies, Wall Street financiers, and corporate giants like General Electric know full well.

And yet, as Gillespie points out, we’re supposed to believe “there’s no more cuts to make.”