Month: July 2013

Bradley Manning got nailed today by a military judge for exposing the truth. The folks who committed war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq have almost all walked scot-free. The folks who made the policies that led to the abuses have never faced federal charges. Dreamworks has a movie on Wikileaks that will be coming out this Fall. This is as good a day as any to view the trailer….

And this is also a good day to revive the WikiLeaks Know-Nothing Pledge poster from Tom Blanton, the mastermind of The Project for a New American Revolution.

Tom has other top notch libertarian-themed political art work at his Flickr page here.

I have met a number of Washingtonians who have proudly informed me that, because they have a security clearance,  they have avoided reading any of the documents that WikiLeaks disclosed.  They wear their ignorance like a badge of honor.

UPDATE: Tom Blanton notes: “The Wikileaks Pledge manifested itself in Snowden’s case as the Glenn Greenwald Blockade when the military blocked the Guardian website [where Greenwald reported the leaked documents] from their servers.”
[[ On Twitter @jimbovard ]]

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie recently trashed Sen. Rand Paul, and other members of the more freedom-friendly corner of the GOP (like Rep. Justin Amash and his noble effort to reign in the NSA). Christie, sounding like Rudy Giuliani circa 2007, said that pro-privacy folks like Paul need to stop all their dangerous libertarianish thoughts because it’s offensive to 9/11 victims and it endangers us all. Christie also spoke approvingly of both Bush and Obama’s security efforts. Terrorism, to the Gov., is still such a big threat that it justifies certain scary-sounding, privacy-violating programs. And he’s not alone in believing that nonsense.

It is nonsense. But what if it were true? What if terrorism was as big a threat as security hawks claim, and that we could — at least — believe that the NSA is working to protect the American people from being killed? What if the FBI was actually stopping more threats than it was inciting? And what if they and other law enforcement hadn’t failed to stop planned attacks from the Boston Bombing to 9/11? What if secret courts, secret laws, and secret interpretations really could be trusted because they’re “legal”? And what if the NSA only searched through the metadata of millions of Americans when they were really, really, looking for something serious? They need the haystack to find the needle, but maybe they really have no interest in a few million innocent needles?

Even if this narrative about national security and the level of threat presented by terrorism were true — and of course it isn’t — powerful people simply do not keep these serious violations of privacy under glass until the most dire emergency. Consider, for a moment, the drug war’s history in the decline of the Fourth Amendment.

In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs and tested the waters with a DC bill that made no-knock raids legal on private homes. Some years later, Ronald Reagan stepped up that war, and unlike Nixon, most of the powers that Reagan claimed — and the Supreme Court frequently confirmed — were not ever taken away. The cop, court, and Constitutional drug war mess needs more detail than there is space here (check out Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop, as well as Antiwar’s interview with him for more of that history) but  really, once upon a time, when terrorism wasn’t keeping the paranoid up at night, a bunch of people decided that enemy number one was drugs. And no violation was too serious, no quarter was to be given in this fight. Sound familiar?

The effects of that decision to go to “war” can now be seen in the prison-industrial complex, militarized police and their mission creep, and our comatose Fourth Amendment.

Here are just a few figures: in 2012 87 percent of state and federal law enforcement wiretaps were over narcotics, with stats from the past decade showing similar numbers. “Sneak and peak” warrants — legalized by the PATRIOT Act — between 2009 and 2010 were used for narcotics investigations 76 percent of the time. And what is the NYPD’s contentious “stop and frisk” policy if not a massive violation of the privacy of (mostly black and Hispanic) New Yorkers?

Previously at Antiwar I critiqued libertarian John Stossel’s bizarre refusal to admit that the NSA spying is dangerous. But Stossel did indeed have a point within the madness –the drug war started it. Not only are terror-fighting tools used to investigate drug crimes much of the time, but many privacy protections were already chipped away by the drug war decades before 9/11.

Recently Rand Paul pestered the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for clarification about their use of domestic drones. The FBI responded with a few details including that drones have been used for “eight criminal cases and two national security cases” since 2006.  The most notable thing mentioned in their report is that the FBI did not see fit to get a search warrant for their drone use, since the targets of their investigations didn’t have an expectation of privacy. This isn’t particularly surprising, more a depressing confirmation of what we would already have suspected.

As noted by The Verge, the Supreme Court ruled in Florida v. Riley (1989) — a drug war case! — that a warrant wasn’t necessary when the police wanted to use a helicopter to hover 400 feet above a suspect’s property. If the Fourth Amendment has withered in the face of the cops’ need to catch those damn weed growers, it’s difficult not to feel frightened at the prospect of cheap, quiet, drones in the thousands creeping into our airspace; technology getting ahead of any lingering protections the Fourth Amendment still offers. And there is no doubt that the same people now defending the NSA, wiretapping, and anything else done in the name of keeping us safe from big bad terrorists will not say a word when drones become the next tool in fighting the lunatic war on drugs.

Angela gave a concise explanation of the Antiwar.com lawsuit against the FBI to RT America this afternoon:

Robert Golan-Vilella at The National Interest notes that the government has a long list of dangerous enemies threatening America, all of whom fit under the language of the 2001 AUMF. But…that list is classified.

A number of senators have pledged in recent months to update the 2001 AUMF, written to authorize the use of force against those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, on the grounds that it’s too broad and serves as a blank check to wage unlimited war against whatever groups of terrorists the government can haphazardly claim qualify.

At a Senate hearing in May, writes Golan-Vilella, “Senator Carl Levin asked the administration to provide the committee with an ‘existing list of groups that are affiliated with al Qaeda’ and to let the committee know when changes are made to the list, and the witnesses promised to do so.”

And now, according to former Bush administration legal adviser Jack Goldsmith, the Defense Department has provided that list to Levin. But it’s secret, so Levin can’t make it public – presumably the purpose behind his request.

Back in May, I laid out the reasons the government wants to keep the AUMF intact:

First, the 2001 AUMF was a wet dream for the Masters of War in Washington who yearn for the day when any and all constraints on their actions in the realm of “national security” would evaporate. It carries with it immense, unchecked power that they are wont to preserve.

Second, in order to continue to carry out their Imperial Grand Strategy, they need to perpetuate a bogeyman. Without a monster to destroy, the public is much less apt to grant the state carte blanche to make war at will and keep it secret.

In an interview last year, former Secretary of State Colin Powell lamented, in a moment of candor, the fall of the Soviet Union. He described, admittedly with some irony, how apparently remorseful he and others in the military establishment were that America “lost our best enemy.” He said it was “one of the biggest challenges” he “ever faced” when the Cold War ended. That is, when we became much safer as opposed to when we might have faced a new enemy.

Absent the pretext of the Soviet threat, the thinking goes, how will we justify the expanding military and national security state? Powell says of the trumped up Soviet “threat” in no uncertain terms, “we’ve got a good thing going here.” The system – the “whole structure,” as he calls it, far from aiming to eliminate threats, “depended on there being a Soviet Union that might attack us.”

I believe these all still stand. But it is doubly Orwellian that even the names of the groups that allegedly pose a threat to us are classified. It makes the government’s eagerness to perpetuate false bogeymen all the more transparent.

One of the predictable consequences of Obama’s Asia-Pivot is that, by boosting support to all of China’s U.S.-allied neighbors, those countries are emboldened to stand up to China as an enemy and China is likewise emboldened to counter the onslaught. Needless to say, this makes conflict more likely.

The Washington Post:

China’s most daring adversary in Southeast Asia is, by many measurements, ill-suited for a fight. The Philippines has a military budget one-fortieth the size of Beijing’s, and its navy cruises through contested waters in 1970s hand-me-downs from the South Vietnamese.

From that short-handed position, the Philippines has set off on a risky mission to do what no nation in the region has managed to do: thwart China in its drive to control the vast waters around it.

So, tiny little Philippines is angling for a fight with China despite a military budget one-fortieth the size of Beijing’s. Are we surprised?

Throughout 2012, the U.S. increased its military and economic support for the Philippines government while at the same time expanding the American military presence in the country. This at a time when the Obama administration publicly pledges to support any U.S. ally that is threatened by China and vocally chastises Beijing for subtly staking claims to contested maritime territories. Undoubtedly, Manila got the right message.

But the militaristic response to 21st century China was not obvious to all Filipinos. “Analysts say the Philippines’ strategy, in standing up to Asia’s powerhouse, is just as likely to backfire as succeed,” the Post continues. “But it provides a crucial test case as smaller countries debate whether to deal with China as a much-needed economic partner, a dangerous maritime aggressor, or both.”

And there is the rub. Conceivably, China and its neighbors could be getting along great through further economic trade and interdependence. The same goes for the U.S.-China relationship, but Washington has instead aimed to turn peaceful economic exchange into a casus belli – and encouraged its smaller Asian allies to do the same.

Related: See my recent piece in The Washington Times, The Asia Pivot: Making an Enemy of China.