The Wages of Cluelessness Is Death

Published on Wednesday, June 12, 2013 by TomDispatch.com

 

How Dystopian Secrecy Contributes to Clueless Wars

Bradley Manning has done more for U.S. security than SEAL Team 6

by Chase Madar

 

The prosecution of Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ source inside the U.S. Army, will be pulling out all the stops when it calls to the stand a member of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden.  The SEAL (in partial disguise, as his identity is secret) is expected to tell the military judge that classified documents leaked by Manning to WikiLeaks were found


 
(Image via Bradley Manning Support Network)


on bin Laden’s laptop.  That will, in turn, be offered as proof not that bin Laden had internet access like two billion other earthlings, but that Manning has “aided the enemy,” a capital offense.

Think of it as courtroom cartoon theater: the heroic slayer of the jihadi super-villain testifying against the ultimate bad soldier, a five-foot-two-inch gay man facing 22 charges in military court and accused of the biggest security breach in U.S. history.

But let’s be clear on one thing: Manning, the young Army intelligence analyst who leaked thousands of public documents and passed them on to WikiLeaks, has done far more for U.S. national security than SEAL Team 6.

The assassination of Osama bin Laden, the spiritual (but not operational) leader of al-Qaeda, was a fist-pumping moment of triumphalism for a lot of Americans, as the Saudi fanatic had come to incarnate not just al-Qaeda but all national security threats.  This was true despite the fact that, since 9/11, al-Qaeda has been able to do remarkably little harm to the United States or to the West in general.  (The deadliest attack in a Western nation since 9/11, the 2004 Atocha bombing in Madrid, was not committed by bin Laden’s organization, though white-shoe foreign policy magazines and think tanks routinely get this wrong, “al-Qaeda” being such a handy/sloppy metonym for all terrorism.)

Al-Qaeda remains a simmering menace, but as an organization hardly the greatest threat to the United States.  In fact, if you measure national security in blood and money, as many of us still do, by far the greatest threat to the United States over the past dozen years has been our own clueless foreign policy.

The Wages of Cluelessness Is Death

Look at the numbers.  The attacks of September 11, 2001, killed 3,000 people, a large-scale atrocity by any definition.  Still, roughly double that number of American military personnel have been killed in Washington’s invasion and occupation of Iraq and its no-end-in-sight war in Afghanistan.  Add in private military contractors who have died in both war zones, along with recently discharged veterans who have committed suicide, and the figure triples.  The number of seriously wounded in both wars is cautiously estimated at 50,000.   And if you dare to add in as well the number of Iraqis, Afghans, and foreign coalition personnel killed in both wars, the death toll reaches at least a hundred 9/11s and probably more.

Did these people die to make America safer?  Don’t insult our intelligence.  Virtually no one thinks the Iraq War has made the U.S. more secure, though many believe the war created new threats.  After all, the Iraq we liberated is now in danger of collapsing into another bitter, bloody civil war, is a close ally of Iran, and sells the preponderance of its oil to China.  Over the years, the drain on the U.S. treasury for all of this will be at least several trillion dollars.  As for Afghanistan, after the disruption of al-Qaeda camps, accomplished 10 years ago, it is difficult to see how the ongoing pacification campaign there and the CIA drone war across the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas have enhanced the security of the U.S. in any significant way.  Both wars of occupation were ghastly strategic choices that have killed hundreds of thousands, wounded many more, sent millions into exile, and destabilized what Washington, in good times, used to call “the arc of instability.”

Why have our strategic choices been so disastrous?  In large part because they have been militantly clueless.  Starved of important information, both the media and public opinion were putty in the hands the Bush administration and its neocon followers as they dreamt up and then put into action their geopolitical fantasies.  It has since become fashion for politicians who supported the war to blame the Iraq debacle on “bad intelligence.” But as former CIA analyst Paul Pillar reminds us, the carefully cherry-picked “Intel” about Saddam Hussein’s WMD program was really never the issue.  After all, the CIA’s classified intelligence estimate on Iraq argued that, even if that country’s ruler Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction (which he didn’t), he would never use them and was therefore not a threat.

Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2003, was one of the few people with access to that CIA report who bothered to take the time to read it.  Initially keen on the idea of invading Iraq, he changed his mind and voted against the invasion.

What if the entire nation had had access to that highly classified document?  What if bloggers, veterans' groups, clergy, journalists, educators, and other opinion leaders had been able to see the full intelligence estimate, not just the morsels cherry-picked by Cheney and his mates?  Even then, of course, there was enough information around to convince millions of people across the globe of the folly of such an invasion, but what if some insider had really laid out the whole truth, not just the cherry-picked pseudofacts in those months and the games being played by other insiders to fool Congress and the American people into a war of choice and design in the Middle East?  As we now know, whatever potentially helpful information there was remained conveniently beyond our sight until a military and humanitarian disaster was unleashed.

Any private-sector employee who screwed up this badly would be fired on the spot, or at the very least put under full-scale supervision.  And this was the gift of Bradley Manning: thanks to his trove of declassified documents our incompetent foreign policy elites finally have the supervision they manifestly need.

Not surprisingly, foreign policy elites don’t much enjoy being supervised.  Like orthopedic surgeons, police departments, and every other professional group under the sun, the military brass and their junior partners in the diplomatic corps feel deeply that they should be exempt from public oversight.  Every volley of revealed documents from WikiLeaks has stimulated the same outraged response from that crew: near-total secrecy is essential to the delicate arts of diplomacy and war.

Let us humor our foreign policy elites (who have feelings too), despite their abysmal 10-year resumé of charred rubble and mangled limbs.  There may be a time and a place for secrecy, even duplicity, in statecraft.  But history shows that a heavy blood-price is often attached to diplomats saying one thing in public and meaning something else in private. In the late 1940s, for instance, the United States publicly declared that the Korean peninsula was not viewed by Washington as a vital interest, emboldening the North to invade the South and begin the Korean War.  Our government infamously escalated the Vietnam War behind a smokescreen of official secrecy, distortion, and lies.  Saddam Hussein rolled into Kuwait after U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie told the Ba’athist strongman that he could do what he pleased on his southern border and still bask in the good graces of Washington. This is not a record of success.

So what’s wrong with diplomats doing more of their business in the daylight -- a very old idea not cooked up at Julian Assange’s kitchen table five years ago?  Check out the mainstream political science literature on international relations and you’ll find rigorous, respectable, borderline-boring studies touting the virtues of relative transparency in statecraft -- as, for example, in making the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe such a durable peace deal.  On the other hand, when nation-states get coy about their commitments to other states or to their own citizenry, violent disaster is often in the offing.

Dystopian Secrecy

Foreign policy elites regularly swear that the WikiLeaks example, if allowed to stand, puts us on a perilous path towards “total transparency.” Wrong again. In fact, without the help of WikiLeaks and others, there is no question that the U.S. national security state, as the most recent phone and Internet revelations indicate, is moving towards something remarkably like total state secrecy.  The classification of documents has gone through the roof.  Washington classified a staggering 92 million public records in 2011, up from 77 million the year before and from 14 million in 2003.  (By way of comparison, the various troves of documents Manning leaked add up to less than 1% of what Washington classifies annually -- not exactly the definition of “total transparency”.)

Meanwhile, the declassification of ancient secrets within the national security state moves at a near-geological tempo.  The National Security Agency, for example, only finished declassifying documents from the Madison presidency (1809-1817) in 2011. No less indicative of Washington’s course, the prosecution of governmental whistleblowers in the Obama years has burned with a particularly vindictive fury, fueled by both political parties and Congress as well as the White House.

Our government secrecy fetishists invest their security clearances (held by an elite coterie of 4.8 million people) and the information security (InfoSec) regime they continue to elaborate with all sorts of protective powers over life and limb.  But what gets people killed, no matter how much our pols and pundits strain to deny it, aren’t InfoSec breaches or media leaks, but foolish and clueless strategic choices. Putting the blame on leaks is a nice way to pass the buck, but at the risk of stating the obvious, what has killed 1,605 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan since 2009 is the war in Afghanistan -- not Bradley Manning or any of the other five leakers whom Obama has prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917.  Leaks and whistleblowers should not be made scapegoats for bad strategic choices, which would have been a whole lot less bad had they been informed by all the relevant facts.

Pardon my utopian extremism, but knowing what your government is doing really isn’t such a bad thing and it has to do with aiding the (American) public, not the enemy.  Knowing what your government is doing is not some special privilege that the government generously bestows on us when we’re good and obedient citizens, it’s an obligation that goes to the heart of the matter in a free country.  After all, it should be ordinary citizens like us who make the ultimate decision about whether war X is worth fighting or not, worth escalating or not, worth ending or not.

When such momentous public decisions are made and the public doesn’t have -- isn’t allowed to have -- a clue, you end up in a fantasy land of aggressive actions that, over the past dozen years, have gotten hundreds of thousands killed and left us in a far more dangerous world. These are the wages of dystopian government secrecy.

Despite endless panic and hysteria on the subject from both major parties, the White House, and Congress, leaks have been good for us.  They’re how we came to learn much about the Vietnam War, much about the Watergate scandal, and most recently, far more about state surveillance of our phone calls and email.  Bradley Manning’s leaks in particular have already yielded real, tangible benefits, most vividly their small but significant role in sparking the rebellion that ejected a dictator in Tunisia and the way they indirectly expedited our military exit from Iraq.  Manning’s leaked reports of U.S. atrocities in Iraq, displayed in newspapers globally, made it politically impossible for the Iraqi authorities to perpetuate domestic legal immunity for America troops, Washington’s bedrock condition for a much-desired continuing presence there.  If it weren’t for Manning’s leaks, the U.S. might still be in Iraq, killing and being killed for no legitimate reason, and that is the very opposite of national security.

Knowledge is Not Evil

Thanks to Bradley Manning, our disaster-prone elites have gotten a dose of the adult supervision they so clearly require.  Instead of charging him with aiding the enemy, the Obama administration ought to send him a get-out-of-jail-free card and a basket of fruit.  If we’re going to stop the self-inflicted wars that continue to hemorrhage blood and money, we need to get a clue, fast.  Should we ever bother to learn from the uncensored truth of our foreign policy failures, which have destroyed so many more lives than the late bin Laden could ever have hoped, we at least stand a chance of not repeating them.

I am not trying to soft-pedal or sanitize Manning’s magnificent act of civil disobedience.  The young private humiliated the U.S. Army by displaying for all to see their complete lack of real information security. Manning has revealed the diplomatic corps to be hard at work shilling for garment manufacturers in Haiti, for Big Pharma in Europe, and under signed orders from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to collect biometric data and credit card numbers from their foreign counterparts.  Most important, Manning brought us face to face with two disastrous wars, forcing Americans to share a burden of knowledge previously shouldered only by our soldiers, whom we love to call heroes from a very safe distance.

Did Manning violate provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice?  He certainly did, and a crushing sentence of possibly decades in military prison is surely on its way. Military law is marvelously elastic when it comes to rape and sexual assault and perfectly easygoing about the slaughter of foreign civilians, but it puts on a stern face for the unspeakable act of declassifying documents. But the young private’s act of civil defiance was in fact a first step in reversing the pathologies that have made our foreign policy a string of self-inflicted homicidal disasters. By letting us in on more than a half million “secrets,” Bradley Manning has done far more for American national security than SEAL Team 6 ever did.

© 2013 Chase Madar

Chase Madar, a TomDispatch regular and author of a new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning (OR Books), is a lawyer in New York.

Covert Conflicts, Decried In 'Dirty Wars'

by Ella Taylor

June 06, 2013 5:00 PM

 

 

 

 

 After the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the soldiers of the paramilitary force JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) who carried out the operation were lionized as national heroes.

They earned more ambivalent treatment in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty. And according to Dirty Wars, a documentary based on a book by investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, their shadowy outfit has pretty much taken over America's global war on terrorism — and in flagrantly unconstitutional ways, he claims.

Founded in 1980, JSOC has deployed its crack units to carry out night raids, drone strikes and targeted assassinations, while also outsourcing some of its work to warlords in Africa, Asia and the Middle East — in wars declared and undeclared. Worse, in Scahill's view, they do this without oversight, and with the tacit and/or active collaboration of NATO, the White House, Congress and the U.S. military's top brass.

Scahill, who covers national security for the left-leaning Nation magazine and who has also written a book about the controversial security firm Blackwater, stumbled on JSOC while digging into the murders of an American-trained police commander and several members of his family — two were pregnant women — in the city of Gardez in Afghanistan. From there he worked his way through Iraq, Yemen and Somalia, documenting evidence of undercover JSOC operations to root out al-Qaida terrorists.

The film details Scahill's efforts to bring all this to the attention of Congress, the Army and the media, efforts that met with stonewalling, denials or dismissals of civilian casualties as "collateral damage."

Perhaps fearing that Dirty Wars would get lost in the flood of documentaries probing American involvement in foreign wars since the invasion of Iraq, Scahill and director Rick Rowley upped the ante by casting their story as a real-life thriller, complete with an ill-considered sidebar detailing the effect of his experiences on Scahill's psyche.

They've jazzed up their verite footage with a grainy shooting style and a plaintive score from the Kronos Quartet. They brought in fiction screenwriter David Riker (La Ciudad, The Girl) to pep up Scahill's narration, which is laden with clipped three-word sentences and flights of poetic rhetoric. ("Our car felt thin-skinned and fragile," he tells us while on an excursion into a terrorist stronghold.)

The action is heavily larded with stagey shots of Scahill shopping lethargically at a supermarket back home in Brooklyn, where life had come to seem "too ordinary"; listening gravely to victims' relatives; holding hands with a Yemeni tribesman who's showing him around a devastated strike site littered with signs of an American military presence. Returning to Yemen at the end, he wonders whether he's come for more data, or to apologize on behalf of his country.

Scarred he may be, but as a journalist Scahill is surely the messenger, not the subject, and the attention he receives in Dirty Wars distracts us from the bigger picture he paints. The film's larger argument is that, invited or not, America increasingly fights its global wars (in an estimated 75 countries, many of which, like Yemen, are not officially at war) in secret and without checks or balances. This, Scahill argues, has created a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict without end, in which no country is off-limits.

Given the recent revelations about secret American drone strikes, Dirty Wars is certainly timely. Scahill's trump card is the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American cleric who left the United States for Yemen, where he became a hugely influential jihadist mouthpiece for violent attacks against the United States. The first American citizen to be placed on a kill list by President Obama, Awlaki was killed in a drone strike in 2011, as was his 16-year-old son a few weeks later.

This last is appalling, and Awlaki's son was probably — though not certainly, given that Scahill takes family testimony on trust, while presuming that American authorities must be lying or fudging the truth — an unwarranted casualty.

But Scahill goes on to argue, far more controversially, that the late cleric's militancy was a direct result of American overkill and hostility toward Islam. Indeed, as we watch footage of Scahill and surviving relatives gazing sadly at home movies of the family, Awlaki comes close to being portrayed as an innocent victim.

Scahill is right to focus on the price American security efforts have cost in human rights — and human life. Yet there are difficult questions hovering just outside the frame of Dirty Wars. Short of pacifism, and given that there is no such thing as a truly clean war, what would count as an "acceptable" level of collateral damage?

And in an age when terrorist cells and wild-card loners with grudges strike fear in one corner of the world, then vanish only to pop up in another, what might count as morally acceptable counterterrorism?

 

PRISM scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to servers

PRISM scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to servers

Silicon Valley executives insist they did not know of secret PRISM program that grants access to emails and search history

• Dominic Rushe and James Ball in New York
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 19.48 EDT

• US national security

 

 

Executives at several of the tech firms said they had never heard of PRISM until they were contacted by the Guardian

 

Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants' servers.
The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on "legally-compelled collection" but operates with the "assistance of communications providers in the US."

Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM.

However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency.

The top-secret NSA briefing presentation set out details of the PRISM program, which it said granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more. The presentation the listed dates when document collection began for each company, and said PRISM enabled "direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple".

Senior officials with knowledge of the situation within the tech giants admitted to being confused by the NSA revelations, and said if such data collection was taking place, it was without companies' knowledge.
An Apple spokesman said: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," he said.

Joe Sullivan, Facebook's chief security officer, said it did not provide government organisation with direct access to Facebook servers. "When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinise any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law."

A Google spokesman also said it did not provide officials with access to its servers. "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'backdoor' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data."

Microsoft said it only turned over data when served with a court order: "We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it."

A Yahoo spokesman said: "Yahoo! takes users' privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network.
Within the tech companies, and talking on off the record, executives said they had never even heard of PRISM until contacted by the Guardian. Executives said that they were regularly contacted by law officials and responded to all subpoenas but they denied ever having heard of a scheme like PRISM, an information programme internal the documents state has been running since 2007.

Executives said they were "confused" by the claims in the NSA document. "We operate under what we are required to do by law," said one. "We receive requests for information all the time. Say about a potential terrorist threat or after the Boston bombing. But we have systems in place for that." The executive claimed, as did others, that the most senior figures in their organisation had never heard of PRISM or any scheme like it.

The chief executive of transparency NGO Index on Censorship, Kirsty Hughes, remarked on Twitter that the contradiction seemed to leave two options: "Back door or front?" she posted.

TIME

NewsFeed

Nation

PRISM by the Numbers: A Guide to the Government’s Secret Internet Data-Mining Program

By Victor Luckerson

 

 

June 06, 2013

Patrick Semansky / AP

The National Security Administration campus is seen in Fort Meade, Md., June 6, 2013.

One day after The Guardian revealed that the U.S. government has been secretly collecting call log data from millions of Verizon customers, The Washington Post reported Thursday that the government’s monitoring of American’s data goes much, much deeper. The FBI and the National Security Agency are mining the servers of the country’s biggest technology companies for the purpose of hunting spies and terrorists. The program, code-named PRISM, is massive in scope and involves web services that many Americans use every day.

To make all this shadowy surveillance easier to digest, here are the relevant data points about the massive data collection:

(MORE: 7 Things to Know About the Government’s Secret Database of Telephone Data)

9

The number of tech companies involved in the PRISM program. Here’s a list, from an NSA slideshow, including the date when monitoring began:

• Microsoft (September 2007)
• Yahoo (March 2008)
• Google (January 2009)
• Facebook (June 2009)
• PalTalk (December 2009)
• YouTube (September 2010)
• Skype (February 2011)
• AOL (March 2011)
• Apple (October 2012)

So far Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo have flatly denied that they provide the government backdoor access to their services, according to a variety of news sources. Twitter, which says it has been particularly vigilant in protecting user data from government agencies, is notably absent from the list. Dropbox is next in line to be added to PRISM, according to the Post.

10

The number of different types of data that are collected through PRISM. E-mails, instant messages, videos, photos, stored data (likely items stored on cloud services like Google Drive), voice chats, file transfers, video conferences, log-in times, and social network profile details have all been monitored by the government. Through PRISM NSA officials can even conduct live surveillance of someone doing a Google search, according to the Post.

(MORE: The NSA Snooping Scoop: Behind the Guardian‘s Risky Plans for Global Expansion)

$20 million

The annual cost of PRISM, according to NSA documents obtained by the Post

2007

The year PRISM was established. The Post describes an “exponential growth” in the program since President Obama took office. The government has snooped on other forms of communication in recent years as well. On Thursday, Senator Dianne Feinstein confirmed that the NSA phone log database has been in place for at least seven years.

1,477

The number of times PRISM data was cited in 2012 as part of President Obama’s daily briefing, a high-level intelligence presentation given to the president, the vice president and select cabinet members. According to the Post, at least 1 in 7 intelligence reports from the NSA make use of PRISM data.

51%

Confidence level intelligence officials are supposed to have of a target’s “foreignness” to make use of PRISM data. The massive database is aimed at surveilling spies and foreign terrorists, not Americans. However, large amounts of American user data is also picked up as officials hunt for threats. The NSA describes this as “incidental.”

MORE: Verizon, Telephony Metadata, the National Security Agency and You

Victor Luckerson @VLuck

Victor Luckerson is a reporter-producer for Time.com covering business and money.

His Target Is Assassinations

Snapshot | Jeremy Scahill

His Target Is Assassinations

Excerpt: 'Dirty Wars': The documentary by Jeremy Scahill and Richard Rowley investigates covert American military operations.

By JEREMY EGNER

Published: June 6, 2013

Jeremy Scahill, an investigative foreign correspondent whose first documentary, “Dirty Wars,” opens Friday, writes for The Nation and achieved his biggest success with “Blackwater,” a best-selling book critiquing security contractors hired by the George W. Bush administration. Neither of which keeps him from being labeled a right-wing stooge by detractors. 

Enlarge This Image

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Jeremy Scahill 

“Most of my hate mail nowadays comes from liberals, not conservatives,” he said. 

This is because Mr. Scahill has also been an outspoken critic of President Obama. Specifically, he disapproves of what he describes as the administration’s efforts to “normalize and legitimize” targeted assassinations — drone-executed and otherwise — Special Operations raids and other covert military practices that blur the battle lines of the war on terrorism. 

“Dirty Wars” is his latest salvo. In the film (his book with the same title came out in April), Mr. Scahill investigates several American strikes that killed civilians with no apparent ties to terrorist groups, beginning with a February 2010 raid in the village of Khatabeh, Afghanistan, that killed several members of a family. An Afghan police chief and three women were among the dead. (The United States first denied and then acknowledged its role in the deaths.) 

Along the way Mr. Scahill suggests that such acts are radicalizing Muslims both obscure — a man in Khatabeh talks about wanting to become a suicide bomber — and well-known, like the American cleric-turned-Qaeda firebrand Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by drones in September 2011. “We are encouraging a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Mr. Scahill said. “We are making more new enemies than we are killing actual terrorists.” 

Mr. Scahill, 38, has been a frequent talking head on cable news shows and recently was awarded a $150,000 Windham Campbell literary prize. The film stands to raise his profile as it mixes disturbing events in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia with Mr. Scahill’s raw emotional responses. 

He said he had resisted a prominent on-camera role, but allowed that the approach humanizes the film and builds credibility with viewers by being transparent about the imperfect art of journalism. Intense but friendly in conversation, with striking blue eyes, Mr. Scahill talked to Jeremy Egner about how making the film altered him. These are excerpts from the interview. 

Q. How did this project begin?

 

A. There was this war within the war in Afghanistan. There was the conventional war — the Marines in Helmand Province — and then you had these night raids. But I didn’t know much about it. We started filming aftermaths of night raids and interviewing people. 

How did it evolve?

 

I was going to be more of a tour guide to this archipelago of undeclared wars. As we started talking about how we wanted to tell the story, we realized we didn’t really have a story. We had four or five ministories, but we weren’t really doing an effective job of connecting them. David [Riker, the co-writer] said: “You’re burying a big part of the story, which is that this film has really changed you as a person. You’re not some dispassionate observer.” 

How were you changed by it?

 

I feel gutted as a person, to be really honest. When you do this kind of work you run from one story to the next and you try not to let anything catch up with you. Once we started doing this as a more personal journey, it was like a floodgate opened of all of the horrifying stuff that I’ve seen and the stories I’ve absorbed. I was forced to confront things that I don’t think I wanted to. 

Many of the images are pretty ghastly.

 

We tried to blur them as much as we could, in some cases, but I think people should see the aftermath. 

What do you hope viewers take away from this?

 

I don’t have any illusions about Congress changing things, but I have faith in people. If we debate about this in our society, Congress will be forced to do something about it. If we embrace assassination as a central component of our foreign policy and continue with the mentality that we can kill our way to victory — or worse, kill our way to peace — then we’re whistling past the graveyard.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 9, 2013, on page AR2 of the New York edition with the headline: His Target Is Assassinations .

Three Democratic Myths Used to Demean the Paul Filibuster

Published on Sunday, March 10, 2013 by The Guardian

Three Democratic Myths Used to Demean the Paul Filibuster

The progressive 'empathy gap', a strain of liberal authoritarianism, and a distortion of Holder's letter are invoked to defend Obama

by Glenn Greenwald

 

Comencing immediately upon the 9/11 attack, the US government under two successive administrations has spent 12 straight years inventing and implementing new theories of government power in the name of Terrorism.
Literally every year since 9/11 has ushered in increased authorities of exactly the type Americans are inculcated to believe only exist in those Other, Non-Free societies: ubiquitous surveillance, impenetrable secrecy, and the power to imprison and even kill without charges or due process. Even as the 9/11 attack recedes into the distant past, the US government still finds ways continuously to increase its powers in the name of Terrorism while virtually never relinquishing any of the power it acquires. So inexorable has this process been that the Obama administration has already exercised the power to target even its own citizens for execution far from any battlefield, and the process has now arrived at its inevitable destination: does this due-process-free execution power extend to US soil as well?


 

This video frame grab provided by Senate Television shows Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. speaking on the floor of the Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 6, 2013. Photograph: AP

All of this has taken place with very little public backlash: especially over the last four years. Worse, it has prompted almost no institutional resistance from the structures designed to check executive abuses: courts, the media, and Congress. Last week's 13-hour filibuster of John Brennan's confirmation as CIA director by GOP Sen. Rand Paul was one of the first - and, from the perspective of media attention, easily among the most effective -Congressional efforts to dramatize and oppose just how radical these Terrorism-justified powers have become. For the first time since the 9/11 attack, even lowly cable news shows were forced - by the Paul filibuster - to extensively discuss the government's extremist theories of power and to debate the need for checks and limits.

All of this put Democrats - who spent eight years flamboyantly pretending to be champions of due process and opponents of mass secrecy and executive power abuses - in a very uncomfortable position. The politician who took such a unique stand in defense of these principles was not merely a Republican but a leading member of its dreaded Tea Party wing, while the actor most responsible for the extremist theories of power being protested was their own beloved leader and his political party.

Some Democrats, to their credit, publicly supported Paul, including Sen. Ron Wyden, who went to the Senate floor to assist the filibuster. Sens. Jeff Merkley, Pat Leahy and (independent) Bernie Sanders all voted against Brennan's confirmation, citing many of the same concerns raised by Paul. Some prominent progressive commentators praised Paul's filibuster as well: on CNN, Van Jones - while vowing that "I love this president" - said "Sen. Rand Paul was a hero for civil liberties" and that "liberals and progressives should be ashamed."

But most Democratic Senators ran away as fast as possible from having anything to do with the debate: see here for the pitifully hilarious excuses they offered for not supporting the filibuster while claiming to support Paul's general cause. All of those Democratic Senators other than Merkley and Leahy (and Sanders) voted to confirm the torture-advocating, secrecy-loving, drone-embracing Brennan as CIA chief.

Meanwhile, a large bulk of the Democratic and liberal commentariat - led, as usual, by the highly-paid DNC spokesmen called "MSNBC hosts" and echoed, as usual, by various liberal blogs, which still amusingly fancy themselves as edgy and insurgent checks on political power rather than faithful servants to it - degraded all of the weighty issues raised by this episode by processing it through their stunted, trivial prism of partisan loyalty. They thus dutifully devoted themselves to reading from the only script they know: Democrats Good, GOP Bad.

To accomplish that, most avoided full-throated defenses of drones and the power of the president to secretly order US citizens executed without due process or transparency. They prefer to ignore the fact that the politician they most deeply admire is a devoted defender of those policies. After stumbling around for a few days in search of a tactic to convert this episode into an attack on the GOP and distract from Obama's extremism, they collectively settled on personalizing the conflict by focusing on Rand Paul's flaws as a person and a politician and, in particular, mocking his concerns as "paranoia" (that attack was echoed, among others, by the war-cheering Washington Post editorial page).

Just as conservatives feared non-existent black helicopters in the 1990s, they chortled, now conservatives are hiding under their bed thinking that Obama will kill their neighbors or themselves with drones while they relax at a barbeque in their backyard. In this they echoed Bush followers, who constantly mocked objections to Bush/Cheney executive power abuses as nothing but paranoia.
Besides, they claim, Attorney General Eric Holder has now made crystal clear that Obama lacks the authority to target US citizens on US soil for execution by drone, so all of Paul's concerns are nothing more than wild conspiracies.
The reality is that Paul was doing nothing more than voicing concerns that have long been voiced by leading civil liberties groups such as the ACLU. Indeed, the ACLU lavishly praised Paul, saying that "as a result of Sen. Paul's historic filibuster, civil liberties got two wins". In particular, said the ACLU, "Americans learned about the breathtakingly broad claims of executive authority undergirding the Obama administration's vast killing program."

But almost without exception, progressives who defend Obama's Terrorism policies steadfastly ignore the fact that they are embracing policies that are vehemently denounced by the ACLU. That's because they like to tell themselves that only Big, Bad Republicans attack the ACLU - such as when George H.W. Bush tried to marginalize Michael Dukakis in 1988 by linking him to that group - so they ignore the ACLU and instead pretend that only right-wing figures like Rand Paul are concerned about these matters. It's remarkable indeed how frequently, in the Age of Obama, standard partisan Democrats embrace exactly the policies identified by the ACLU as the most menacing. Such Obama-defending progressives also wilfully ignore just how much they now sound like Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, and George Bush when ridiculing concerns about due process for accused Terrorists:

Bush in his 2004 Convention speech mocking John Kerry: "After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers";
Rove in 2005 mocking liberals: "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments";
Palin in her 2008 RNC Convention speech mocking Obama: "Al Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights".

Find any defender of Obama's claimed power to assassinate accused Terrorists without due process and that is exactly what you will hear. That's why it is no surprise that the conservatives whom Democrats claim most to loathe - from Dick Cheney to John Yoo to Lindsey Graham to Peter King - have been so outspoken in their defense of Obama's actions in this area (and so critical of Paul): because the premises needed to justify Obama's policies are the very ones they so controversially pioneered.

In sum, virtually all of the claims made by these progressive commentators in opposition to Paul's filibuster are false. Moreover, last week's Senate drama, and the reaction to it by various factions, reveals several critical points about how US militarism and the secrecy that enables it are sustained. I was traveling last week on a speaking tour and thus watched all of it unfold without writing about it, so I want to highlight three key points from all of this, centered around myths propagated by Democrats to demean Paul's filibuster and the concerns raised by it:

(1) Progressives and their "empathy gap"

The US government's continuous killing, due-process-free imprisonment, and other rights abuses under the War on Terror banner has affected one group far more than any other: Muslims and, increasingly, American Muslims. Politically, this has been the key fact enabling this to endure. Put simply, if you're not Muslim, it's very easy to dismiss, minimize or mock these issues because you can easily tell yourself that they don't affect you or your family and therefore there is no reason to care. And since the vast, vast majority of Democratic politicians and progressive media commentators are not Muslim, one continuously sees this mentality shaping reaction to these issues.

Yesterday, the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole, in an interview with Mother Jones, said the key fact about US drone killings is that what "we're facing here is an empathy gap". He added:

"Killing a bunch of people in Sudan and Yemen and Pakistan, it's like, 'Who cares - we don't know them.' But the current discussion is framed as 'When can the President kill an American citizen?' Now in my mind, killing a non-American citizen without due process is just as criminal as killing an American citizen without due process - but whatever gets us to the table to discuss this thing, we're going to take it."

Writing in Salon, the South-Asian-American philosophy professor Falguni Sheth blasted Democrats and progressives for leaving it to Rand Paul to protest "the White House's radical expansion of executive power". She noted: "rather than challenge a Democratic administration in defense of constitutional principles that all citizens should insist be guaranteed, Democrats embraced party tribalism." She argues in particular that as Democrats attack Paul on the grounds of his support for racist policies, they support or acquiesce to all of these War on Terror policies that have an obvious racial - and racist - component, in light of the very specific types of individuals who are imprisoned, and whose children are killed by drones, and whose rights are systematically abridged.

The reason this question matters so much - can the President target US citizens for assassination without due process on US soil? - is because it demonstrates just how radical the Obama administration's theories of executive power are.
Some progressives are unintentionally candid about their self-interest leading them to dismiss these issues on the ground that it doesn't affect people like themselves. "I can think of lots of things that might frighten me, but having a drone attack me in my bed tonight is not one of them", declared one white progressive at a large liberal blog in the course of attacking Paul's filibuster. Of course that's not a concern of hers: she's not in the groups who are so targeted, so therefore the issues are irrelevant to her. Other writers at large progressive blogs have similarly admitted that they care little about "civil liberties and a less bellicose foreign policy" because they instead are "primarily interested in the well-being of the American middle-class": ie, themselves. And, of course, the same is true of all the MSNBC hosts mocking Paul as paranoid: they are not the kind of people affected by the kinds of concerns they aggressively deride in order to defend their leader.

When you combine what Teju Cole describes as this selfish "empathy gap" among progressives with the authoritarian strain in American liberalism that worships political power and reveres political institutions (especially when their party controls them), it's unsurprising that they are so callous and dismissive of these issues (I'm not talking about those who pay little attention to these issues - there are lots of significant issues and one can only pay attention to a finite number - but rather those who affirmatively dismiss their significance or rationalize these policies). As Amy Goodman wrote in the Guardian: "Senator Paul's outrage with the president's claimed right to kill US citizens is entirely appropriate. That there is not more outrage at the thousands killed around the globe is shameful … and dangerous."

For a political faction that loves to depict itself as the champions of "empathy", and which reflexively accuses others of having their political beliefs shaped by self-interest, this is an ironic fact indeed. It's also the central dynamic driving the politics of these issues: the US government and media collaborate to keep the victims of these abuses largely invisible, so we rarely have to confront them, and on those rare occasions when we do, we can easily tell ourselves (false though the assurance is) that these abuses do not affect us and our families and it's therefore only "paranoia" that can explain why someone might care so much about them.

(2) Whether domestic assassinations are imminent is irrelevant to the debate

The primary means of mocking Paul's concerns was to deride the notion that Obama is about to unleash drone attacks and death squads on US soil aimed at Americans. But nobody, including Paul, suggested that was the case. To focus on that attack is an absurd strawman, a deliberate distraction from the real issues, a total irrelevancy. That's true for two primary reasons.

First, the reason this question matters so much - can the President target US citizens for assassination without due process on US soil? - is because it demonstrates just how radical the Obama administration's theories of executive power are. Once you embrace the premises of everything they do in this area - we are a Nation at War; the entire globe is the battlefield; the president is vested with the unchecked power to use force against anyone he accuses of involvement with Terrorism - then there is no cogent, coherent way to say that the president lacks the power to assassinate even US citizens on US soil. That conclusion is the necessary, logical outcome of the premises that have been embraced. That's why it is so vital to ask that.

To see how true that is, consider the fact that a US president - with very little backlash - has already asserted this very theory on US soil. In 2002, the US arrested a US citizen (Jose Padilla) on US soil (at the O'Hare International Airport in Chicago), and then imprisoned him for the next three-and-a-half years in a military brig without charges of any kind. The theory was that the president has the power to declare anyone (including a US citizen) to be an "enemy combatant" and then punish him as such no matter where he is found (including US soil), even if they are not engaged in any violence at the time they are targeted (as was true for Padilla, who was simply walking unarmed through the airport). Once you accept this framework - that this is a War; the Globe is the Battlefield; and the Commander-in-Chief is the Decider - then the President can treat even US citizens on US soil (part of the battlefield) as "enemy combatants", and do anything he wants to them as such: imprison them without charges or order them killed.

Far from being "paranoid", this theory has already been asserted on US soil during the Bush presidency. It has been applied to US citizens by the Obama administration. It does not require "paranoia" to raise concerns about the inevitable logical outcome of these theories. Instead, it takes blind authoritarian faith in political leaders to believe that such a suggestion is so offensive and outlandish that merely to raise it is crazy. Once you embrace the US government's War on Terror framework, then there is no cogent legal argument for limiting the assassination power to foreign soil. If the Globe is a Battlefield, then that, by definition, obviously includes the US.

Second, presidents change, and so do circumstances. The belief that Barack Obama - despite his record - is too kind, too good, too magnanimous, too responsible to target US citizens for assassination on US soil is entirely irrelevant. At some point, there will be another president, even a Republican one, who will inherit the theories he embraces. Moreover, circumstances can change rapidly, so that - just as happened with 9/11 - what seems unthinkable quickly becomes not only possible but normalized.

The need to object vehemently to radical theories of power has nothing to do with a belief that the current president will exercise it in the worst possible way. The need is due to the fact that acquiescing to these powers in the first instance means that they become institutionalized - legitimized - and thus become impossible to resist once circumstances change (another Terrorist attack, a president you trust less). That's why it is always the tactic of governments that seek to abuse power to select the most marginalized and easily demonized targets in the first instance (Anwar Awlaki): because they know that once the citizenry cheers for that power on the ground that they dislike the target, the power then becomes institutionalized and impossible to resist when it expands outward, as it always does.

That's what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote: "In questions of power . . . let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." It's also what Frederick Douglass meant when he warned:

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."

Human nature means that once you vest a power in political leaders, once you acquiesce to radical theories, that power will inevitably be abused. The time to object - the only effective time - is when that power theory first takes root, not later when it is finally widespread.

(3) Holder did not disclaim the power to assassinate on US soil

Defenders of the Obama administration now insist that this entire controversy has been resolved by a letter written to Paul by Attorney General Eric Holder, in which Holder wrote: "It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: 'Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?' The answer to that question is no." Despite Paul's declaration of victory, this carefully crafted statement tells us almost nothing about the actual controversy.

As Law Professor Ryan Goodman wrote yesterday in the New York Times, "the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has acted with an overly broad definition of what it means to be engaged in combat." That phrase - "engaged in combat" - does not only include people who are engaged in violence at the time you detain or kill them. It includes a huge array of people who we would not normally think of, using common language, as being "engaged in combat".

Indeed, the whole point of the Paul filibuster was to ask whether the Obama administration believes that it has the power to target a US citizen for assassination on US soil the way it did to Anwar Awlaki in Yemen. The Awlaki assassination was justified on the ground that Awlaki was a "combatant", that he was "engaged in combat", even though he was killed not while making bombs or shooting at anyone but after he had left a cafe where he had breakfast. If the Obama administration believes that Awlaki was "engaged in combat" at the time he was killed - and it clearly does - then Holder's letter is meaningless at best, and menacing at worst, because that standard is so broad as to vest the president with exactly the power his supporters now insist he disclaimed.

The phrase "engaged in combat" has come to mean little more than: anyone the President accuses, in secrecy and with no due process, of supporting a Terrorist group. Indeed, radically broad definitions of "enemy combatant" have been at the heart of every War on Terror policy, from Guantanamo to CIA black sites to torture. As Professor Goodman wrote:

"By declining to specify what it means to be 'engaged in combat' the letter does not foreclose the possible scenario - however hypothetical - of a military drone strike, against a United States citizen, on American soil. It also raises anew questions about the standards the administration has used in deciding to use drone strikes to kill Americans suspected of terrorist involvement overseas . . .
"The Obama administration's continued refusal to do so should alarm any American concerned about the constitutional right of our citizens - no matter what evil they may or may not be engaged in - to due process under the law. For those Americans, Mr. Holder's seemingly simple but maddeningly vague letter offers no reassurance."

Indeed, as both Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller and Marcy Wheeler noted, Holder, by deleting the word "actively" from Paul's question (can you kill someone not "actively engaged in combat"?), raised more questions than he answered. As Professor Heller wrote:

"'Engaged in combat' seems like a much broader standard than 'senior operational leader'. which the recently disclosed White Paper described as a necessary condition of killing an American citizen overseas. Does that mean the President can kill an American citizen inside the US who is a lower-ranking member of al-Qaeda or an associated force? . . . .
"What does 'engaged in combat' mean? That is a particularly important question, given that Holder did not restrict killing an American inside the US to senior operational leaders and deleted 'actively' from Paul's question. Does 'engaging' require participation in planning or executing a terrorist attack? Does any kind of direct participation in hostilities qualify? Do acts short of direct participation in hostilities - such as financing terrorism or propagandizing - qualify? Is mere membership, however loosely defined by the US, enough?"

Particularly since the Obama administration continues to conceal the legal memos defining its claimed powers - memos we would need to read to understand what it means by "engaged in combat" - the Holder letter should exacerbate concerns, not resolve them. As Digby, comparing Bush and Obama legal language on these issues, wrote yesterday about Holder's letter: "It's fair to say that these odd phrasings and very particular choices of words are not an accident and anyone with common sense can tell instantly that by being so precise, they are hiding something."

At best, Holder's letter begs the question: what do you mean when you accuse someone of being "engaged in combat"? And what are the exact limits of your power to target US citizens for execution without due process? That these questions even need to be asked underscores how urgently needed Paul's filibuster was, and how much more serious pushback is still merited. But the primary obstacle to this effort has been, and remains, that the Democrats who spent all that time parading around as champions of these political values are now at the head of the line leading the war against them.

© 2013 The Guardian

 

Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian. A former constitutional lawyer, he was until 2012 a contributing writer at Salon.  His most recent book is, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. His other books include: Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics,  A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, and How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.

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Pakistan Drone Study Finds 'Damaging And Counterproductive' Consequences From U.S. Policy

Pakistan, Video, Drone Wars, Drones, Drones Pakistan, Fata Region, Nyu Drone Study, Obama Drones, Stanford Drone Study, Waziristan, World News
 

A new report on American use of drones in Pakistan has found higher rates of civilian deaths than previously reported. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

A new study conducted by law professors at Stanford and New York University contends that the U.S. use of drones to target suspected militants in Pakistan has had a "damaging and counterproductive effect" on the country and has killed far more civilians than previously acknowledged.

The study, which was released on Tuesday, relies on some 130 interviews with civilians living in the regions of northern Pakistan where targeted drone strikes have been most frequent. Working with the activist group Reprieve, the team of professors have added to the growing body of literature that argues, contrary to Obama administration claims, that numerous civilians have been killed, and many more traumatized, by the drone strike program.

"Drones hover 24 hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles and public spaces without warning," the report said. "Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves."

Relying on data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the study's authors say that between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed in U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan since June 2004, and between 474 and 881 of them were civilians.

The heart of the Stanford and NYU report, which is titled "Living Under Drones," is a close and gripping look at three individual strikes in Pakistan's Waziristan region, including detailed interviews with 69 survivors, the study authors say.
Some of the interviews appear in a related film that was produced by the Brave New Foundation, which helped support the study, and that captured Pakistani citizens speaking about their own experiences with daily life under drone warfare.


In one incident, from June of last year, a drone operator fired between two and six missiles at a suspect car traveling across Waziristan, the study authors say. Five people were killed, all of whom were immediately declared to be "militants" by anonymous Pakistani government officials. Based on their own interviews, and the reports of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has closely reported on drone strikes in Pakistan, the authors argue that the five killed were actually civilians, including a retired taxi driver and a teenaged student.

Pointing to a recent survey that found that nearly three-fourths of Pakistanis now consider the U.S. an "enemy," the authors go on to argue that drone strikes may also be reducing the population's willingness to collaborate against terrorists.

After years of denying the existence of the drone program or avoiding answering questions about it, President Barack Obama has begun to gingerly address the subject in interviews, mainly in order to promote the rigor with which he approaches the decision to deploy drones.

But many outside experts have called into question the Obama administration's claims about the program and its effects, especially the notion, often repeated by administration officials, that no civilian deaths have been conclusively linked to U.S. drone strikes.

The Obama administration has also indicated that it considers any "military-aged males" who are killed in the vicinity of a drone-strike target to be likely militants, until proven otherwise.

In a recent essay in Foreign Policy, Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has closely examined the U.S. use of drones, argued that a claim by John Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism czar, that "the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq," was simply not believable.

"There were many public reports -- from Pakistani and Yemeni reporters and anonymous administration officials -- of civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes," Zenko wrote. "Either Brennan did not receive the same reports of civilian casualties as other administration officials did (an implausible notion), he lacks Internet access to read these anonymous comments (equally implausible because Brennan closely responds to critics of targeted killings in his following media appearances), or he was lying."

Police Departments' New Tool: Drones

Published on Friday, January 20, 2012 by Common Dreams

Police Departments' New Tool: Drones

- Common Dreams staff 

 

Drones are no longer just part of the military's arsenal of tools. Police departments across the U.S. are getting them too.

 

Honeywell, manufacturer of the RQ-16A T-Hawk spy drone, likes to say that the device fits in a backpack. (DOD) FlaglerLive reports:

With financial help from the federal government, police departments across the country are marshaling a new generation of remote-controlled airborne surveillance devices to be their eyes in the sky.

The Miami-Dade Police Department now has drones ready to use. NBC Miami reports:

The Miami-Dade Police Department finally stands ready to launch their two micro air vehicles, or MAVs, the next time a shooting standoff or hostage situation could use a bird's eye boost, more than two years after getting the drones.

"It has no weapons," said Sergeant Andrew Cohen, one of the county's 12 pilot officers. "It's just a camera, basically a flying camera."

The potential far-reaching surveillance has the ACLU sounding the need for caution:

“Our privacy laws are not strong enough to ensure that the new technology will be used responsibly and consistently with democratic values,” warns the ACLU report, Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance. “We need a system of rules to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this technology without bringing us a large step closer to a ‘surveillance society’ in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded and scrutinized by the authorities.”

RT notes:

“There can be a very lucrative market in the United States for drones in police departments who are already militarized – from tanks to assault vehicles to assault rifles, flap jackets, the helmets,” John Whitehead [a constitutional attorney from the Rutherford Institute] said. “The modern police look like the military so now they are going to be using military equipment.”

RT looks further with this video: