Month: January 2014

A worst case scenario is unfolding in Syria, and Palestinian refugees, particularly in the Yarmouk refugee camp, are paying a heavy price for Syria’s cruelest war. They are starving, although there can be no justification, nor logistical explanation for why they are dying from hunger.

Spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Chris Gunness, told AFP that "at least five Palestinian refugees in the besieged refugee camp of Yarmouk have died because of malnutrition, bringing the total number of reported cases to 15," since Sept. 2013. Other estimates, especially those reported by local residents, say the number is significantly higher.

The camp, which is located south of Damascus, had once housed nearly 250,000 Palestinians that included 150,000 officially registered refugees. Three years of a brutal war later, Yarmouk is now nothing but ruins, and houses only around 18,000 residents who couldn’t escape to Lebanon, Jordan or elsewhere.

Reporting for the BBC from Damascus, Lyse Doucet quoted aid officials: "Aid officials in Damascus recently told me ‘the gates of Yarmouk were slammed shut in July’ and almost no aid has been allowed to enter since then."

A minor Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – the General Command, has tried to control Yarmouk on behalf of the Syrian government, an act that the refugees rejected. There has been a semi-consensus among Palestinians that they should not be embroiled in Syria’s war. However, the warring parties – the Syrian government, the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other Islamic groups – desperately tried to use every card in their disposal to weaken the other parties. The result has been devastating and is taking place at the expense of innocent refugees.

Aside from the 1,500 reportedly killed Palestinians and thousands more wounded, the majority of the refugees are once again on the run, although in more perilous circumstances. According to a statement by UNRWA on Dec. 17, "of the 540,000 Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA in Syria, about 270,000 are displaced in the country, and an estimated 80,000 have fled. 51,000 have reached Lebanon, 11,000 have identified themselves in Jordan, 5,000 are in Egypt, and smaller numbers have reached Gaza, Turkey and farther afield."

Continue reading “Starving Refugees: How We Disowned Palestinians in Syria”

The list of civil wars, government crackdowns, and pesky militant safe-havens that interventionists demand the United States meddle in seems endless. There is no corner of the Earth that doesn’t call for some measure of U.S. intervention, apparently.

The latest call for intervention is coming from G. Pascal Zachary writing at The Atlantic in a piece unabashedly titled “Post-Colonialism: Why the U.S. Should Help Govern South Sudan.”

There has been some violence in South Sudan in recent months that has taken the lives of about 1,000 people, according to Zachary. The remedy? Zachary calls on the U.S. to “send in more peacekeepers,” “hammer out a power-sharing agreement between the warring parties,” and, mostly boldly, to take over the country by way of establishing “trusteeship” (propping up the government and taking away some of its sovereignty).

What exactly is going on the South Sudan and demands another U.S. intervention? Zachary explains that “the near-civil war in South Sudan stem[s] from that old African bugaboo: tribal enmity.” In other words, none of our business.

Government troops loyal to President Salva Kiir, who hails from the country’s largest ethnic group, the Dinka, are vying for power and greater representation with rebels supporting the dismissed Vice President Riek Machar, who belongs to the second-largest ethnic group, the Nuer. But South Sudan’s disorder cannot be pinned entirely on ethnic differences, just as the solution to the crisis must involve more than persuading the Dinka and Nuer to form a “national unity” government that ostensibly transcends tribal divisions.

Can you imagine a situation less relevant to us or to any government outside South Sudan?

For many national commentators and political sages, the bar for U.S. intervention is so low that relatively minor tribal infighting in a teensy-tiny, far-off country that has absolutely nothing to do with America or Americans is something that warrants launching another military and political nation-building campaign that Zachary cutely describes as “post-colonialist.”

As with almost all arguments for U.S. intervention, there isn’t the slightest consideration of the extremely likely possibility that things will go horribly wrong once Washington’s principals are at the helm. Two things are taken for granted: (1) the U.S. has legitimacy to intervene, and (2) everything will go swimmingly once it does.

DC wonks are giddy at the political drama sure to unfold with Bob Woodward’s review in the Washington Post of Robert Gates’s new memoir to be published this month. The controversy is predictably focused on a few quotes in which Gates describes Obama as petty and political and expresses “outright contempt for Vice President Joe Biden and many of Obama’s top aides,” as Woodward puts it.

Other than the “he said, she said” and the political name-calling that everyone seems to eat up like America eats up reality TV, there was one quote from Gates’s forthcoming book that really stood out to me. Gates referenced Obama’s “determination that the White House tightly control every aspect of national security policy and even operations,” and that “his White House was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.”

I’m not surprised. See here for another similarity I’ve noticed between the Obama and Nixon administrations.

In a memo to President Obama, former National Security Agency insiders explain how NSA leaders botched intelligence collection and analysis before 9/11, covered up the mistakes, and violated the constitutional rights of the American people, all while wasting billions of dollars and misleading the public.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Official Washington – from Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein to NSA Director Keith Alexander to former Vice President Dick Cheney to former FBI Director Robert Mueller – has been speaking from the same set of NSA talking points acquired recently via a Freedom of Information request. It is an artful list, much of it designed to mislead. Take this one, for example:

NSA AND ITS PARTNERS MUST MAKE SURE WE CONNECT THE DOTS SO THAT THE NATION IS NEVER ATTACKED AGAIN LIKE IT WAS ON 9/11

At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 2, Senator Feinstein showed her hand when she said: “I will do everything I can to prevent this [NSA’s bulk] program from being canceled.” Declaring that 9/11 “can never be allowed to happen in the United States of America again,” Feinstein claimed that intelligence officials did not have enough information to prevent the terrorist attacks.

Mr. President, we trust you are aware that the lack-of-enough-intelligence argument is dead wrong. Feinstein’s next dubious premise – that bulk collection is needed to prevent another 9/11 – is unproven and highly unlikely (not to mention its implications for the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment).

Given the closed circle surrounding you, we are allowing for the possibility that the smell from these rotting red herrings has not yet reached you – even though your own Review Group has found, for example, that NSA’s bulk collection has thwarted exactly zero terrorist plots.

The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.

We prepared this Memorandum in an effort to ensure that you have a fuller picture as you grapple with what to do about NSA. What follows is just the tip of an iceberg of essential background information – much of it hidden until now – that goes to the core of serious issues now front and center.

The drafting process sparked lively discussion of the relative merits of your Review Group’s recommendations. We have developed very specific comments on those recommendations. We look forward to an opportunity to bring them to your attention.

Continue reading “NSA Insiders Reveal What Went Wrong”

Charles Pierce at Esquire says the new look at the 1971 burglary of FBI offices that revealed systematic abuses “says a lot about why the whole debate over what the NSA has been up to should not be wholly concerned about one’s opinion of Edward Snowden…and why any argument in support of any intelligence agency that is based on that agency’s ability to police itself, or based on the efficacy of congressional oversight, is a fairy tale to keep the children quiet at night.”

I agree. But it also presents an opportunity to talk about how much has changed since the 1970s reforms of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Leaving the NSA aside, since the revelations about their current abuses are so well known, is the landscape of domestic surveillance markedly less delinquent now than it was before the revelations of the ’70s?

I’m not so sure. Here’s a brief review of what we know.

Last month, I reported for Reason magazine on a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute at NYU School of Law, that found systematic First Amendment abuses by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) domestic spying hubs, called “fusion centers.”

Fusion centers collect and share intelligence on a mass scale about “the everyday activities of law-abiding Americans, even in the absence of reasonable suspicion,” the report said. Fusion centers often target Americans’ peaceful, political, and religious activities.

“Until 9/11, police departments had limited authority to gather information on innocent activity, such as what people say in their houses of worship or at political meetings,” the report explains. “Police could only examine this type of First Amendment-protected activity if there was a direct link to a suspected crime. But the attacks of 9/11 led law enforcement to turn this rule on its head.”

…In 2012, a Senate investigation found that fusion centers cost taxpayers billions of dollars, but disrupted no actual terrorist plots. The investigation said the intelligence gathering was “oftentimes shoddy” and “more often than not unrelated to terrorism” while “sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties.”

But fusion centers are just one small part of a much bigger story. In the summer of 2011, The Washington Post reported on “a mysterious, ongoing nationwide terrorism investigation [by the FBI] with an unusual target: prominent peace activists and politically active labor organizers.”

The apparent targets, all vocal and visible critics of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South America, deny any ties to terrorism. They say the government, using its post-9/11 focus on terrorism as a pretext, is targeting them for their political views.

They are “public non-violent activists with long, distinguished careers in public service, including teachers, union organizers and antiwar and community leaders,” said Michael Deutsch, a Chicago lawyer and part of a legal team defending those who believe they are being targeted by the investigation.

Add to this the fact that Muslim communities across the nation have been acutely spied on, intimidated, and persecuted by the FBI and DHS, as revealing Associated Press investigations have repeatedly demonstrated. More than that, as Trevor Aaronson’s new book The Terror Factory painstakingly documents, Muslims have also served as a scapegoat under an elaborate system of entrapment that targets vulnerable lowlifes with little capacity to do harm absent FBI enabling.

Surveillance powers that mirror what the NSA is now in the spotlight for exist in other parts of the government too. A little over a year ago, the Obama administration unilaterally granted new powers to The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a sweeping database housing information and surveillance records of people the government suspects have ties to terrorism.

The Wall Street Journal:

The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.

Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans “reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information” may be permanently retained.

“It is a vast expansion of the government’s surveillance authority,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Total Information Awareness appears to be reconstructing itself,” Rotenberg said, referring to the Defense Department’s post-9/11 intelligence program that was killed in 2003 because of privacy concerns.

It’s interesting to note another parallel between today’s domestic surveillance and yesterday’s: again and again, the real enemy proves to be ordinary Americans who oppose the status quo – not, as we are always told, al-Qaeda terrorists or communist spies.

This is a constant struggle and the course of history is clear, as Pierce points out. Left to their own devices, government agencies will abuse their power, exceed their statutory limits, and serially violate Americans’ constitutional protections. The only thing that ever even marginally retards this persistent encroachment is shining sunlight where the state wants darkness.