Month: October 2013

Yesterday I attended a great conference at the Cato Institute on the NSA’s surveillance programs. I wrote a short piece on it at The Washington Times that you can check out here.

One thing I didn’t include in the piece, because I couldn’t write fast enough to get the direct quotes, was the incredible anecdote the libertarian-leaning Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) told about how Congress gets the proverbial stiff arm from the executive branch and intelligence community. They have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves for evading transparency, even in classified sessions with members of Congress.

Watch the whole speech here.

Back when the Egyptian military ousted the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamad Morsi, the Obama administration deflected calls to cut off aid, as is required by law in the event of a military coup. And as the months passed and the military regime imposed emergency law, censored the media, and marginalized opposition political parties, President Obama steadfastly refused to cut off U.S. support for tyranny in Egypt.

Now, I don’t know what prompted the president to finally cut of some of the military aid to Egypt (the White House said resumption of aid is “pending credible progress toward an inclusive, democratically elected civilian government”), but I know his most vocal detractors in Congress are full of you-know-what.

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) made headlines yesterday when he spoke out against his own party’s leader and criticized Obama for partially halting aid.

“I am disappointed that the Administration is planning to partially suspend military aid to Egypt,” Engel said. “During this fragile period we should be rebuilding partnerships in Egypt that enhance our bilateral relationship, not undermining them.”

Beyond being saddened by not “enhancing our bilateral relationship” with a brutal military regime, what is upsetting Rep. Engel so much? He elaborates:

“I am also frustrated that the Administration has not adequately consulted with Congress regarding U.S. policy towards Egypt.  I urge the Administration to work together with Congress and Egypt’s leadership to better address the serious security and economic challenges Egypt currently faces.”

That, ladies and gentleman, is what we like to call…bullshit. Engel couldn’t care less about the president’s lack of consultation with Congress on Libya, the drone war, covert special operations raids all over the world, or any of the other issues unconstitutionally holed up solely in the executive branch.

So why is Engel so perturbed? A quick look at his top campaign contributors is revealing: Engel’s fifth highest contributions come from what opensecrets.org calls “Pro-Israel” groups (not to mention defense corporations, too). Engel is a strong supporter of Israel, having advocated recognizing Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel, and he is in the “Israel Allies” Caucus in Congress.

Of course Engel wants the question of aid to Egypt left to Congress, because he knows Congress would vote to keep it flowing. As John Hudson at Foreign Policy wrote yesterday, “efforts to suspend aid in Congress by libertarian Republicans have failed in the face of bipartisan opposition by congressional leaders and lobbying efforts by the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).”

The U.S. supports all kinds of nasty dictators in the Middle East for all sorts of geo-political reasons. But aid to Egypt lost much of its realpolitik value when Mubarak was ousted. Keeping it flowing would be almost solely for Israel’s sake. And those crying about Obama’s partial suspension of Egypt aid should just be honest about that.

It must be strange to be Chelsea Manning. The former Army Private (previously known as Bradley Manning) did a very decisive thing by leaking thousands of documents to Wikileaks. In spite of some initial suggestions that she did this in some apolitical — possibly mentally ill — fashion (Ann Coulter’s particularly asshole-ish summation was that Manning leaked while in a bad gay snit), it eventually became clear that agree or not, Manning had leaked for some very clearly principled reasons. Turns out she was damned articulate even.

But this decisive action turned into (relatively) passive captivity the moment she was arrested in 2010. It was mostly left to other activist to take up the banner and turn Manning from a whistleblower to the subject of various activist campaigns; well-intentioned and heroic campaigns, but that turnaround may well be frustrating to someone with only a limited ability to communicate her views for the past several years.

And today — two months after she was sentenced to 35 years in prison — Manning delivered her first official statement (besides announcement of her gender identity) since her sentencing. The content of the letter might bewilder some. Within it Manning clarified that she didn’t leak for any kind of explicitly pacifistic reasons. And she definitely wasn’t “overwhelmed” to have the 2013 Sean MacBride peace award accepted on her behalf last month by Ann Wright, a peace activist and retired Army Colonel.

Manning’s letter said that she considers herself first and foremost a “transparency activist.” “I don’t consider myself a ‘pacifist,’ ‘anti-war,’ or (especially) a ‘conscientious objector.’ “Now – I accept that there may be ‘peaceful’ or ‘anti-war’ implications to my actions – but this is purely based on your [Wright’s] subjective interpretation of the primary source documents released in 2010-11.”

Neither Wright — who apologized for misinterpreting Manning’s wishes — nor the International Peace Bureau were alone in perhaps overstating Manning’s peacenik bonafides. It’s difficult not to see the release of hundreds of thousands of documents, including detailed war logs on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, as furthering the cause of peace and antiwar activism. But Manning’s stressing of the transparency angle of her actions is not new. In February, when she plead guilty to some of the crimes for which she was later convicted, Charlie Savage of The New York Times wrote:

Pfc. Bradley Manning on Thursday confessed in open court to providing vast archives of military and diplomatic files to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, saying that he released the information to help enlighten the public about “what happens and why it happens” and to “spark a debate about foreign policy.”

Appearing before a military judge for more than an hour, Private Manning read a statement recounting how he joined the military, became an intelligence analyst in Iraq, decided that certain files should become known to the American public to prompt a wider debate about foreign policy, downloaded them from a secure computer network and then ultimately uploaded them to WikiLeaks.

Later in the piece, Savage describes Manning’s dislike of many aspects of the war in Iraq while seeing them in-country, but the idea of the public’s right to know reads as the most fundamental motivation — even when what the public doesn’t know is war crimes, torture, and other dirty-dealings.

Manning also wrote in her statement today that “I believe it is also perfectly reasonable to subjectively interpret these documents and come to the opposite opinion and say ‘hey, look at these documents, they clearly justify this war’ (or diplomatic discussion, or detention of an individual).” That’s a bit of a stretch. But there is a type of hawk who will at least rhetorically admit that war ain’t pretty, but will then brush off critiques of it based on such “emotional” pleas as, say, a bunch of dead civilians. So, not having combed though all 700,000 documents Manning leaked, perhaps she is not entirely wrong there.

Fundamentally, we may disagree on the interpretation of Manning’s actions, but she definitely knows her own motivations, opinions, and feelings best. She doesn’t need to be the antiwar martyr now suffering for our sins. It would be great if she went full-on libertarian peacenik tomorrow, but she helped show us what war looks like. And she has proven how harshly the government will come down on anyone who dares to tell its secrets. She wrote today, ” I feel that the public cannot decide what actions and policies are or are not justified if they don’t even know the most rudimentary details about them and their effects.” That’s a hell of a start. And it may prove a better avenue to stopping wars than most.

Additionally, in respect to whispers that Manning might get the Nobel Peace Prize (she was nominated with 258 other individuals) — well, that would be a pleasant turnaround, considering that historical choices for that dubious honor include Barack Obama, Henry Kissinger, and Woodrow Wilson. But if Manning’s document leak says nothing inherently antiwar, winning the Nobel Peace Price would say even less. She definitely deserves better that that insult.

Fun fact: NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ metadata doesn’t fight terrorism. A shocker, I know.

Remember a few months ago when it was revealed that the NSA collected the metadata of hundreds of millions of Americans in bulk, and in order to justify this exposed program, the NSA said it had helped prevent at least 54 terrorist plots?

Well, earlier this month the NSA admitted that was a lie. As the Washington Times reported:

Pressed by the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at an oversight hearing, Gen. Keith B. Alexander admitted that the number of terrorist plots foiled by the NSA’s huge database of every phone call made in or to America was only one or perhaps two — far smaller than the 54 originally claimed by the administration.

“There is no evidence that [bulk] phone records collection helped to thwart dozens or even several terrorist plots,” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and committee chairman, told Gen. Alexander of the 54 cases that administration officials — including the general himself — have cited as the fruit of the NSA’s domestic snooping.

“These weren’t all plots and they weren’t all foiled,” he said.

This raises the question of how the NSA and the Obama administration can justify the surveillance program if they can’t point to cases where it was instrumental in protecting Americans from terrorists.

At the Guardian, Yochai Benkler explains that “all public evidence suggests that, from its inception in 2001 to this day, bulk collection has never made more than a marginal contribution to securing Americans from terrorism, despite its costs.”

Out of the 54 plots the NSA originally claimed were foiled, they only stuck with one case under pressure from Congress: the case of “Basaaly Moalin.” Benkler fills us in:

So, who is Moalin, on whose fate the NSA places the entire burden of justifying its metadata collection program? Did his capture foil a second 9/11?

A cabby from San Diego, Moalin had immigrated as a teenager from Somalia. In February, he was convicted of providing material assistance to a terrorist organization: he had transferred $8,500 to al-Shabaab in Somalia.

After the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, few would argue that al-Shabaab is not a terrorist organization. But al-Shabaab is involved in a local war, and is not invested in attacking the US homeland. The indictment against Moalin explicitly stated that al-Shabaab’s enemies were the present Somali government and “its Ethiopian and African Union supporters”. Perhaps, it makes sense for prosecutors to pursue Somali Americans for doing essentially what some Irish Americans did to help the IRA; perhaps not. But 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.

At the hearing, perhaps trying to bolster Alexander’s feeble defense of the program’s effectiveness, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper complained that “plots foiled” should not be the metric. He said:

“There’s another metric I would use; let’s call it the ‘peace of mind metric’. In the case of the Boston Marathon bomber, we were able to use these tools to determine whether there was, or was not, a subsequent plot in NYC.”

Clapper actually used the clearest example that his program offers Americans little real security – its failure to pick up the Tsarnaev brothers before they attacked – as a way of persuading us that we should use an amorphous and unmeasurable “peace of mind” metric; peace of mind we should gain from knowing that the same system that failed to detect the Boston bombers also detected no bombers in New York.

Beyond the NSA’s admission this month that they deliberately misled the public about the program’s effectiveness, Benkler points to other important evidence, like the declassified FISA court opinion in which Judge Walton considered the three, count ’em three, FBI cases in which bulk metadata collection was useful and wrote that this achievement “does not seem particularly significant.” He also cites “the consensus report authored by the five inspectors general of the Departments of Defense and Justice and the CIA, NSA, and Office of DNI,” which was not favorable. The DOJ wrote the utility of metadata was “limited” and the CIA all but declared the metadata useless and irrelevant.

Every few months, the NSA coerces private companies into giving private information on the communications of every single American. This infringement on our liberty and privacy, we’ve been told, is a necessary “balance” with security. But the government can’t point to a single reasonable case in which this grave violation of the Fourth Amendment made any American safer.

Senators  Wyden, Udall, Paul, and Blumenthal are reportedly writing up legislation that would prohibit bulk collection of metadata. Let’s hope the fact-less fear-mongering doesn’t doesn’t derail it.

The Cato Institute will hold a conference on NSA Surveillance tomorrow (Wednesday, 10/9). Registration is still available, send an email to events@cato.org. The conference runs from 10am to 4:30pm (Eastern time). The schedule and other details are posted here.

The conference will be streamed live.

Keynote speakers: Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence; Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI); Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI). Panelists include: Siobhan Gorman, Wall Street Journal; Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian; Barton Gellman, Washington Post; Charlie Savage, New York Times; Jameel Jaffer, ACLU; Laura Donohue, Georgetown University Law Center; David Lieber, Google; Jim Burrows, Silent Circle; Bruce Schneier, Security Expert; Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies, Cato Institute; and Julian Sanchez, Research Fellow, Cato Institute.