Author: John Glaser

Commentators across the spectrum support Obama’s recent executive order allowing economic sanctions to be placed on Putin’s “inner circle.” The fact that hardly anybody opposes this is instructive.

To put it simply: sanctions don’t work. The well known political scientist Robert Pape years ago examined 115 cases of economic sanctions over almost 80 years and found (p. 99) only 5 that could be considered a success (that is, the targeted nation changed policy in the desired direction of the imposer nation).

In the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Cockburn criticizes the “wholly mistaken belief that [sanctioning] makes the targets do what we want.” Cockburn delves into an eloquent and persuasive debunking of the near-universal belief that harsh economic sanctions on Iran “brought them to the table” and pressured them to make concessions. Former U.S. Ambassador to Iran William Miller described that narrative as “total nonsense.”

I’ve written about this several times myself. To make a long story short: (1) Iran made an even better offer back in 2003, before the worst of the sanctions (and it was rejected by the U.S.); (2) once the sanctions began in earnest, Iran became even more defiant. In 2003, Iran had 164 centrifuges operating and no 20% enriched uranium. After a decade of escalating sanctions, in 2013 Iran had 19,000 centrifuges and a sizable stockpile of 20% uranium. If that’s success, I’d hate to see failure.

A good example of the mindless enthusiasm for sanctions appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post. “Putin won’t back down, or be kicked out, until credible threats to his power create a split among his elites and advisers,” Garry Kasparov wrote in advocating harsh sanctions on Putin’s inner circle. “Right now they have no incentive to bet against him. Putin protects them and their assets while the free world they enjoy living in has made no moves that would force them to choose between their riches and Putin.”

Does Kasparov really believe Putin’s lifelong friends and sycophants who have been enriched by sticking close to the president of Russia’s profoundly corrupt economic system will suddenly decide to oppose Putin’s foreign policy and initiate some kind of silent coup just because Obama targets them with sanctions? This is a fantasy. More likely, as we see from history, Putin and his inner circle will dig in their heels, become more defiantly committed to their cause, and find ways to retaliate.

“Sanctions have an economic impact, there’s no question about that,” the Cato Institute’s Steve Hanke said recently. “But they almost never achieve their political goals and they’re largely symbolic.”

This point about sanctions being symbolic is the important point, as I hinted above. Since they don’t actually change policy in the desired direction, sanctions really serve only one purpose: they make America seem tough. The benefit for Obama is huge in that he neutralizes right-wing criticisms that he is appeasing Russian imperialism. Sanctions are merely for domestic consumption. Aside from making Obama look tough, they serve no greater foreign policy utility.

The executive branch’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) issued a report back in December that was devastating to the Obama administration’s claims that NSA surveillance is both legal and effective in providing security. The report concluded that, in fact, the bulk collection of phone records under Section 215 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) doesn’t yield valuable intelligence and violates the rights of Americans.

The PCLOB had sought input from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to complete that report. Now, another report is in the works that may be even more devastating to the defenders of limitless NSA surveillance. The new report will focus on the PRISM program which taps into servers of internet providers and tech companies to directly spy on the content of user data. The FAA supposedly authorizes this sweeping surveillance in its Section 702.

But the ACLU is arguing that programs like PRISM are doubly illegal. In talking with the PCLOB, the ACLU is arguing not only that the NSA’s implementation of Section 702 authorities violates what the statute actually authorizes, but also that the FAA itself is illegal in that it violates the Constitution.

In testimony provided to the board in advance of today’s meeting, the ACLU argues — as it has in litigation, notably in Amnesty International USA v. Clapper and United States v. Muhtorov — that the FAA is unlawful. The statute violates the Fourth Amendment because it permits the warrantless surveillance of American’s international communications on a truly massive scale. The testimony also makes the case that the government’s implementation of the FAA — about which we’ve learned much over the past nine months — violates the text of the statute itself:

First, while the statute was intended to augment the government’s authority to collect international communications, the NSA’s targeting and minimization procedures give the government broad authority to collect purely domestic communications as well. Second, while the statute was intended to give the government authority to acquire communications to and from the government’s targets, the NSA’s procedures also permit the government to acquire communications “about” those targets. And, third, while the statute prohibits so-called “reverse targeting,” the NSA’s procedures authorize the government to conduct “backdoor” searches of communications acquired under the FAA using selectors associated with particular, known Americans. Thus, even if the statute itself is lawful, the NSA’s implementation of it is not.

A significant part of the public defense of the NSA’s spying apparatus is that there have been no deliberate violations of the law. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in August, for example, that critics have “never identified an instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes.” In December, President Obama insisted “There had [sic] not been evidence and there continues not to be evidence that the particular program had been abused in how it was used.” NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander claimed that “no one has wilfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacy.”

Continue reading “ACLU: NSA’s PRISM Program is Doubly Illegal”

There are 54 different countries on Earth that the U.S. is legally obligated to militarily protect and defend if they get into their own conflicts. Below is the State Department’s list of them (via Micah Zenko):

NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY

A treaty signed April 4, 1949, by which the Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all; and each of them will assist the attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.

PARTIES: United States, Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom

AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

A Treaty signed September 1, 1951, whereby each of the parties recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States , Australia, New Zealand

PHILIPPINE TREATY (BILATERAL)

A treaty signed August 30, 1951, by which the parties recognize that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and each party agrees that it will act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States, Philippines

SOUTHEAST ASIA TREATY

A treaty signed September 8, 1954, whereby each party recognizes that aggression by means of armed attack in the treaty area against any of the Parties would endanger its own peace and safety and each will in that event act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States , Australia, France, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand, and the United Kingdom

JAPANESE TREATY (BILATERAL)

A treaty signed January 19, 1960, whereby each party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes. The treaty replaced the security treaty signed September 8, 1951.

PARTIES: United States, Japan

REPUBLIC OF KOREA TREATY (BILATERAL)

A treaty signed October 1, 1953, whereby each party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and that each Party would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States, Korea

RIO TREATY

A treaty signed September 2, 1947, which provides that an armed attack against any American State shall be considered as an attack against all the American States and each one undertakes to assist in meeting the attack.

PARTIES: United States, Argentina, Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad & Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela

This illustrates rather well the sheer magnitude of U.S. commitments around the world. It’s worth remembering, too, as Nima Shirazi noted, that not every state that Washington commits itself to militarily is listed here (Israel is conspicuous for its absence). So, U.S. military commitments go beyond even this lengthy list.

Why? Politicians will tell you this is about defending freedom and democracy (right…). Policy wonks will rattle off old chestnuts about global security and international cooperation. More accurately, this helps institutionalize U.S. hegemony (that is, unrivaled power over all other states in the system).

This doesn’t merely demonstrate how taxpayer money and resources go to the defense of other countries. It illustrates the pervasive conviction in Washington that there are few, if any, spots on the planet that aren’t vital U.S. interests that require military interventionism. America’s mandate is limitless, it would seem.

If you quickly survey the media coverage and political rhetoric surrounding the Ukraine crisis, you find there is nothing easier than to condemn Russia for its opportunistic and illegal incursions into Ukraine’s sovereign territory of Crimea. And this is correct: it is very easy to see these acts as unfair and unlawful. Russian troops, deceitfully hiding identifying marks, occupied Ukrainian police and military posts and basically took control of the territory before pushing for a referendum. That the referendum was strongly in favor of Russia is a separate issue. (If the U.S. did what Russia did, non-interventionists here would no doubt condemn it.)

Since it’s so easy to condemn these Russian moves, Americans, quick to take their government’s side, have whitewashed the very real problems with the new U.S./Western-backed regime in Kiev.

It hasn’t been a complete whitewash. You can find honest acknowledgement in the mainstream. In Foreign Policy, for example, Andrew Foxall and Oren Kessler write, “The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kiev’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists.”

Ukraine is home to Svoboda, arguably Europe’s most influential far-right movement today…Party leader Oleh Tyahnybok is on record complaining that his country is controlled by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia,” while his deputy derided the Ukrainian-born film star Mila Kunis as a “dirty Jewess.” In Svoboda’s eyes, gays are perverts and black people unfit to represent the nation at Eurovision, lest viewers come away thinking Ukraine issomewhere besides Uganda.

Svoboda began life in the mid-90s as the Social-National Party (a name deliberately redolent of the National Socialist Party, better known as Nazis), with its logo the fascistWolfsangel. In 2004, the party gave itself an unobjectionable new name (Svoboda means “Freedom”) and canned the Nazi imagery, and in the subsequent decade has seen its star swiftly rise.

Today, Svoboda holds a larger chunk of its nation’s ministries (nearly a quarter, including the prized defense portfolio) than any other far-right party on the continent. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister represents Svoboda (the smaller, even more extreme “Right Sector” coalition fills thedeputy National Security Council chair), as does the prosecutor general and the deputy chair of parliament — where the party is the fourth-largest. And Svoboda’s fresh faces are scarcely different from the old: one of its freshmen members of parliament is the founder of the “Joseph Goebbels Political Research Centre” and has hailed the Holocaust as a “bright period” in human history.

The new government in Ukraine, as the FP report notes, is chalk full of Svoboda members. The video below depicts Svoboda MPs and their lackeys attacking the head of Ukraine’s state TV company and demanding he resign. It looks like a scene of mafia bullying from a Martin Scorsese film.

Despite this, U.S. commentary largely hails the democracy that has come to Ukraine post-Yanukovych. Writing in The National Interest, professor of political science at Colorado College David Hendrickson explains that “The big problem with this narrative is that the United States and its western and Ukrainian allies did in fact do something very wrong.”

They broke a vital democratic norm—to wit, that in democracies the transfer of power occurs as a result and in the aftermath of elections or, in extremis, impeachments. There is simply no consciousness in the West that the revolution was brought about by illegal means. Yet it most emphatically was so. Power was seized, not transferred. In this tit for tat contest with Russia, we have focused exclusively on the tit; we have just as resolutely ignored the tat that preceded it.

Now, I’m all for people tearing down their own oppressive governments. But when U.S. policy starts to side with unscrupulous right-wing factions in some other country that has nothing to do with us, it’s a big problem. U.S. policy is anti-Russia. It is Russia’s geo-political designs in its traditional sphere of influence in eastern Europe that Washington opposes. Translated into policy, as always, this manifests into unacceptable, nefarious, interventionist meddling. It needs to stop.

After the killing of Osama bin Laden, Pakistan vehemently denied any knowledge that the most wanted terrorist operative in the world had lived in a protected compound in Abbottabad just a few short miles from Pakistan’s military academy. Nobody really believed them. Senior U.S. officials would, when asked by the press, give the Pakistani government a verbal licking, but only in vague terms that declined to confirm what seemed obvious to everyone: that Pakistan did know of bin Laden’s hideout there.

New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, who spent more than a decade reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan has pretty well confirmed that Pakistan not only knew of bin Laden’s presence, but actively protected him. More than that, the U.S. government knows they knew, and the Pakistanis know they know they knew.

Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior United States official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha’s or one about him in the days after the raid. “He knew of Osama’s whereabouts, yes,” the Pakistani official told me. The official was surprised to learn this and said the Americans were even more so. Pasha had been an energetic opponent of the Taliban and an open and cooperative counterpart for the Americans at the ISI. “Pasha was always their blue-eyed boy,” the official said. But in the weeks and months after the raid, Pasha and the ISI press office strenuously denied that they had any knowledge of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.

Contrary to depictions of bin Laden being holed up in this compound hiding from the world, he went about freely: “Bin Laden traveled in plain sight, his convoys always knowingly waved through any security checkpoints.” And here’s the real whammy:

In trying to prove that the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I struggled for more than two years to piece together something other than circumstantial evidence and suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge. Only one man, a former ISI chief and retired general, Ziauddin Butt, told me that he thought Musharraf had arranged to hide Bin Laden in Abbottabad. But he had no proof and, under pressure, claimed in the Pakistani press that he’d been misunderstood. Finally, on a winter evening in 2012, I got the confirmation I was looking for. According to one inside source, the ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle Bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: Bin Laden. I was sitting at an outdoor cafe when I learned this, and I remember gasping, though quietly so as not to draw attention. (Two former senior American officials later told me that the information was consistent with their own conclusions.) This was what Afghans knew, and Taliban fighters had told me, but finally someone on the inside was admitting it. The desk was wholly deniable by virtually everyone at the ISI — such is how supersecret intelligence units operate — but the top military bosses knew about it, I was told.

Gall criticizes Washington’s “failure to fully understand and actively confront Pakistan on its support and export of terrorism.” That’s clearly true, and not just on the bin Laden thing, but the fact that Pakistan supports militant groups the U.S. has been fighting against in Afghanistan for 12 years. But more than failing to confront Pakistan on these issues, the U.S. sends billions of dollars to Islamabad every year. The U.S. pays them as they hold and protect the guy who masterminded the 9/11 attacks; protects them by playing dumb when asked about their collusion.

According to former CIA intelligence officer and Antiwar.com contributor Phil Giraldi, Pakistan may have even been implicated in the 9/11 attacks, or at least had foreknowledge of them. There are 28-pages in the 9/11 Commission Report regarding Saudi Arabia’s connections to the 9/11 hijackers that remain classified, at the request of our own government.

“A true accounting of what took place is long overdue and, one might add, it should not stop with the Saudis,” Giraldi writes. “Some of the hijackers spent considerable time in Pakistan prior to 9/11 and it is unlikely that the Pakistani Intelligence Service (ISI) would have missed their presence or the opportunity to recruit them as sources.”

So really: how demented is U.S. foreign policy that it pays, arms, and diplomatically protects extremist regimes which support militants who wish to attack the U.S.? What’s going on?

[h/t emptywheel]

Over at PolicyMic, Eileen Shim cites a recent report from Reporters Without Borders that names the U.S. in its annual “Enemies of the Internet” list:

Reporters Without Borders did not name entire governments on its list, but rather focused on the individual agencies that censor the Internet. Last year’s revelations regarding the National Security Agency (NSA)’s spying schemes have landed the U.S. on the list for the first time.NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks regarding the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have also introduced the U.K. agency to the list for the same reasons.

“The NSA and GCHQ have spied on the communications of millions of citizens including many journalists. They have knowingly introduced security flaws into devices and software used to transmit requests on the Internet. And they have hacked into the very heart of the Internet using programmes such as the NSA’s Quantam Insert and GCHQ’s Tempora. The Internet was a collective resource that the NSA and GCHQ turned into a weapon in the service of special interests, in the process flouting freedom of information, freedom of expression and the right to privacy,” the report said.

It added that the NSA and GCHQ’s surveillance operations were all the more troubling because they were located in “democracies that have traditionally claimed to respect fundamental freedoms”; because these tactics have been so effective for the U.S. and the U.K., “they will be used and indeed are already being used by authoritarians countries such as Iran, China, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to justify their own violations of freedom of information.”

Here’s the map illustrating the “Enemies” list (on their site, it is interactive):

The United States also made headlines upon the release of Reporters Without Borders’ other well-known list, the World Press Freedom Index, because it slipped 13 places in the ranking to 46.

The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any laws that abridge “the freedom of  speech, or of the press.” The Fourth Amendment commands that the people’s right to privacy “against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” and that no warrants to rifle through our shit shall issue without probably cause of specificity. Meanwhile, the government is virtually criminalizing journalism at the margins and using the Internet to destroy our privacy.

How much longer can Americans repeat their masturbatory mantras about “the land of the free” when our government’s rankings for critical things like press and Internet freedoms continue to plummet?