Month: January 2014

The NSA’s bulk collection of every American’s telephone call records is illegal, according to the federal government’s independent review panel, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

The NSA’s interprets Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the F.B.I. to obtain business records deemed “relevant” to an investigation, as granting it the authority to collect the call records of all Americans and hold them for years for querying. The Oversight Board says no dice.

New York Times:

An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.

…The program “lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value,” the report said. “As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program.”

It’s hard to get any clearer than that, but it’s worth remembering that this review panel isn’t alone. This comes on the heels of the ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon that the phone metadata program is “almost certainly” unconstitutional.

A ruling from the FISA court in 2011 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.

There is also bipartisan agreement in Congress that the NSA has systematically violated the law. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the author of the Patriot Act, including its Section 2015, has said from the beginning that the NSA’s bulk metadata collection program exceeds the authority of the law. 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 in October 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.”

“We welcome the board’s report, and we agree with is principal conclusions,” the ACLU said in a statement. “The NSA’s call-records dragnet is illegal and ineffective and presents a serious threat to civil liberties.”

Sorry to ask such a 5th grade Social Studies question, but…what is it that’s supposed to happen when people violate the law? I can’t seem to remember.

Update: On Twitter, Scott Horton provides the answer to this question…

.@jwcglaser According to the FISA Act, 5 years in the penitentiary and $10,000 per count. http://t.co/wgqe7LvDwN

— Scott Horton (@scotthortonshow) January 23, 2014

The Geneva II talks on the Syrian civil war in Switzerland started today. In the lead up to the conference, the media focus, unfortunately, had been on which parts of the Syrian opposition would attend and whether or not Iran, the Assad regime’s close ally, would attend (the U.S. pressured the UN to uninvite Iran at the last minute for not accepting the Geneva Communique).

And today, the media focused on two developments: (1) Secretary of State John Kerry’s hardline rhetoric about the Syrian regime’s crimes and how Assad cannot be a part of any transition government, and (2) the tense back-and-forth between UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem, the latter being nothing more than a disagreement over how much time the foreign minister should have to speak.

From where I’m sitting, the real story of the Geneva II conference was all but ignored. It was summed up by Ban Ki-Moon in a press conference following the talks when he said, “all of the countries who have been providing arms to either side must stop and encourage them to engage in political dialogue.”

This opinion, which Moon has repeatedly expressed, echoes that of countless other experts. Back in 2012, UN rights chief Navi Pillay condemned the continued flow of weapons from foreign powers to both sides in the Syrian conflict. “The ongoing provision of arms to the Syrian government and to its opponents feeds additional violence,” she said in the text of remarks made to the Security Council.

James Dobbins, director of the RAND a former US assistant secretary of state told NPR recently, “the external environment in which sides are providing arms to both of the contending parties—all of that suggests that the situation’s going to continue to deteriorate.”

When both sides to a civil war are emboldened by their foreign benefactors, neither feels vulnerable enough to compromise. This virtually ensures perpetual stalemate.

“A continuous supply of weapons to both sides—whether from Russia, Iran or the Gulf States—only maintains the parties’ perception that fighting is a better option than negotiating,” Dr. Florence Gaub, a researcher at the NATO Defense College, wrote at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last year. “This explains why, in terms of statistical probability, an external supply of weapons lengthens a civil war.”

The U.S. has grown more and more trepidatious about the Syrian opposition. Some rebels are getting training and weapons from the U.S., but it is by no means significant (many U.S. officials have even said an Assad victory would be better than al-Qaeda-linked rebels grabbing hold the reins of state). But U.S. allies, particularly in the Arab Gulf states, do continue to aid extremist militants in Syria. Iran and Russia, wary of U.S. (or U.S.-allied) gains in Syria, continue to fully back the Assad regime. Some political will, and a minimal amount of honesty (which we didn’t get from Kerry), could put a stop to this and help mitigate the conflict considerably.

Today at Al Jazeera America I argue that the U.S. should stop occupying South Korea, not only because they don’t belong there but because the highly militarized alliance between the U.S. and South Korea doesn’t actually weaken North Korea, but helps sustain the regime by incentivizing China to continue to prop up Pyongyang.

At Medium.com, Robert Beckhusen reports on the latest round of U.S.-South Korean military exercises and reveals for the first time that U.S. special operations forces are training for guerrilla war in North Korea and practicing how to grow an “indigenous resistance organization” inside North Korea.

Every year, the U.S. and South Korea team up for one of the world’s largest military exercises. Thousands of troops backed by fighter aircraft, strategic bombers and Navy warships plan for the worst.

But America’s elite Special Operations Forces are also involved—planning for the day when they might be the first ones tasked with stepping across the DMZ.

The training is a less publicized element of the Pentagon’s exercises in South Korea, which are emphasized as defensive in nature. But for three days in April 2013, American commandos carried out simulated North Korea missions during Balance Knife 13-1—part of the much larger Foal Eagle exercise—near Iksan and Damyang, South Korea.

Along with the 7th and 11th ROK Special Forces Brigades, the exercise involved two American commando groups of 12 men each—Operational Detachment Alphas 1336 and 1333. Both American teams belonged to Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion of the 1st Special Forces Group.

Notably, the training dealt with how to move special operators into and out of North Korea, according to a review published in the January edition of Special Warfare, the wonky, academic journal of the Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. The scenario also dealt with how to grow an “indigenous resistance organization” inside the North.

Why? How can this possibly be in the U.S. interest? And don’t say it’s to save the North Korean people from dictatorship, because obviously Washington couldn’t care less about that.

Americans frequently see media reports of the aggressive North Korean regime carrying out this or that ostentatious military maneuver, which indeed does happen. How often do Americans hear about the incredibly ostentatious military exercise, one of the biggest in the world, that Washington carries out right in South Korea, at least in part to threaten Pyongyang? If a designated enemy state of ours was conducting training on the Mexico border designed to prepare for regime change contingencies, how would Washington react?

Robert Gates’s new memoir, which I’ve mentioned I’m making my way through, has a nice example of how dangerous entangling alliances can be. Not only does Gates write frankly about how U.S. interests are subordinated to those of our weaker allies, but he is unusually candid about the Bush administration’s use of force in the Middle East, describing it as “preventive” (which, of course, is another way of saying “war crime”).

In 2007, Israel shared intelligence with the U.S. about a nuclear enrichment facility in Syria that had some connection to the North Korean regime. Israel, according to Gates, explicitly wanted the U.S. to take military action because the reactor represented “an existential threat” to Israel. Needless to say, Israel, along with many members of the Bush administration, did not care a wit about the effect this would have on U.S. interests.

Just one of the risks, as Gates writes, was that “any overt U.S. preemptive attack will cause a firestorm in the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. Efforts to prove out case against Syria and North Korea, based on current available intelligence, will be unsuccessful or regarded with deep skepticism. U.S. military action will be seen as another rash act by a trigger-happy administration and could jeopardize our efforts in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and even with respect to missile defense in Europe. It would be seen as an effort to offset or distract from failures in Iraq.”

And those were just some of the risks. There were others associated with an Israeli-led strike and Gates advised President Bush to tell Israel not to attack. Instead, several administration officials that Gates describes as “very pro-Israel” advocated giving Israel the green light. According to Gates, “the United States was being held hostage to Israeli decision making.”

In September, Israel bombed the reactor in what administration officials nicknamed the “Tojo option – referring to the Japanese prime minister who order the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.”

Continue reading “Robert Gates on How Israel & Saudi Arabia Pressure US into Wars of Choice”

In recent months, President Obama has been pressured in the face of widespread public outrage to make two important speeches on national security. In May, he gave a lengthy talk on U.S. drone policy in which he placated public concerns by saying that America needed to get off “a perpetual wartime footing.” In January, unprecedented public focus on NSA surveillance led Obama to make another speech proposing several reforms and Obama again insisted we must “get off the open-ended war footing that we’ve maintained since 9/11.”

A simple way to get us off a permanent war footing would be to repeal the legislation that grants the president the power to wage war indefinitely against undefined enemies wherever they may exist in the world. The 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force authorizes the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” Efforts in Congress to repeal or at least amend the AUMF have gone nowhere, and “the White House has taken no public steps to roll back the AUMF,” according to Gregory Johnson at Buzzfeed.

Johnson, in a lengthy report, references two recent U.S. raids to capture suspected terrorists “in countries with which the nation was not at war.”

More than a dozen years after the Sept. 11 attacks, this is what America’s war looks like, silent strikes and shadowy raids. The Congressional Research Service, an analytical branch of the Library of Congress, recently said that it had located at least 30 similar occurrences, although the number of covert actions is likely many times higher with drones strikes and other secret operations. The remarkable has become regular.

The White House said that the operations in both Libya and Somalia drew their authority from the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, a 12-year-old piece of legislation that was drafted in the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks. At the heart of the AUMF is a single 60-word sentence, which has formed the legal foundation for nearly every counterterrorism operation the U.S. has conducted since Sept. 11, from Guantanamo Bay and drone strikes to secret renditions and SEAL raids. Everything rests on those 60 words.

Unbound by time and unlimited by geography, the sentence has been stretched and expanded over the past decade, sprouting new meanings and interpretations as two successive administrations have each attempted to keep pace with an evolving threat while simultaneously maintaining the security of the homeland. In the process, what was initially thought to authorize force against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan has now been used to justify operations in several countries across multiple continents and, at least theoretically, could allow the president — any president — to strike anywhere at anytime. What was written in a few days of fear has now come to govern years of action.

In May, Pentagon officials testified to Congress that keeping the AUMF in place is important to facilitate the ongoing “war on terrorism,” which will last “at least ten to twenty [more] years.” That is a far cry from Obama’s pledge to get us off a perpetual war footing. Like on so many other issues, Obama’s words are divorced from his actual policy.