Kelley Beaucar Vlahos - Antiwar.com Blog

FISA grants warrant for dragnet of domestic calls — what’s next?

UPDATE: ‘What’s next?’ Less than 24 hours later and we can answer that question. It’s called total content awareness, or PRISM, reported tonight by The Washington Post.

“I’m just an average man, with an average life. I work from nine to five; hey hell, I pay the price. All I want is to be left alone in my average home; But why do I always feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone, and I always feel like somebody’s watching me.” — Kennedy William ‘Rockwell’ Gordy.

Writer and constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald has an explosive scoop out today: the super secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court granted the FBI a warrant that amounts to a virtual dragnet on all Verizon customers’ calls between the U.S and foreign countries (Correction: and all calls “wholly within the United States” ) from April 25 to July 19. This means tens of millions of calls will or have been tracked by the government.

Why the court granted this warrant is not explained in the document, found here. Someone leaked the warrant to Greenwald who called Verizon, FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA), which is handling all the data, and was unable to get further comment. Verizon, as noted in the warrant is gagged from talking about the order at all.

The dragnet will record the following things: all “metadata” of calls made from the U.S to foreign countries — on a “daily, ongoing basis” for the duration of the order — which includes “session identifying information.” These are the originating and terminating numbers on the calls. Metadata also includes telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, the time-stamp duration of each call, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) numbers, and “comprehensive communication routing information.”

Metadata does not include the names of the customers, addresses or billing records. All that would require individual warrants, noted Greenwald.

So far.

The FBI/NSA’s broad surveillance of domestic calls is unprecedented (that we know of) under the Obama Administration, but not entirely surprising. The ability to do all of this apparently falls under the Patriot Act [50 USC section 1861] or the “business records” provision of the legislation, passed by Congress in the wake of 9/11 (or at least this is the FBI’s apparent interpretation of it). The Patriot Act, the gift that keeps on taking.

Civil libertarians have warned from the beginning that these Patriot Act measures would eventually intrude on the privacy of ordinary Americans, but those voices were dismissed as paranoid and unpatriotic. Then the revelations of 2005 came: The Bush Administration had authorized the warrantless surveillance of Americans communicating with foreigners. As far as we know it never stopped, but the activity was codified in so called FISA “reforms” in 2008. President Barack Obama, then U.S Senator, signed off on that FISA bill and never looked back.

According to FISA, the Department of Justice filed 1,879 requests for searches in 2012 — 1,789 of them for electronic surveillance — a 6.7 percent increase over 2011. None of those warrants were denied. Some 15,229 requests for “national security letters,” which allow the government to snoop into American financial records under the Patriot Act were granted during the same year.

But what Greenwald is reporting is a entire step away from individual FISA warrants — it’s really elaborate data mining effort in which the FBI is looking for patterns and clues among the call information (much like the NSA’s secret data mining program under the Bush Administration). Agents will likely drill down further with new warrants (or not) when something among the ostensibly disparate numbers and codes draws their attention.

As Greenwald notes, “it is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.”

For years, groups like the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and individual lawmakers have warned that both the Bush and Obama administrations were abusing the Patriot Act and using their own interpretations, secretly, to spy on Americans. Each year, new revelations emerge to indicate they are doing just that. We have whistleblowers contending that they saw it happening up close and personal. Yet America continues to shrug as if to say, I’m not doing anything wrong, why should I care?

Next time you pick up the phone, let that thought comfort you, if you can.

Civ Worker on Afghanistan: “I’d give it 18 months before all hell breaks loose”

Afghanistan_june3 — Site of a suicide attack that killed 10 children in Afghanistan this week Credit : AP

I received a sad missive from a friend who has been working in Kabul as a civilian teacher on behalf of the U.S aid effort on and off for the last 11 years. A staunch believer in the inevitable triumph of democracy over the Taliban and Afghanistan’s brutal warlordism, her hope, it would seem, is running out.

“I think we have got another 18 months here, maybe less before all hell breaks loose frankly,” she wrote. “And then if all of Kabul is blown up again in internecine conflict, what did we spend billions on?”

It’s a question that I think most people who spent the better part of the last decade thinking and talking and speculating about Afghanistan are clearly avoiding these days. It’s a practical question and it’s an existential one, too. It’s symbolic: after Iraq, Afghanistan was supposed to be the war in which America had a pure mission. Instead it is where America found its superpower status was a Potemkin Village.

The Washington think tank club has been pretty quiet. the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), which is like that one cheerleader who refuses to give up the spirit even when the team on the field is getting clobbered to death, recently released this report, aptly entitled “Toward a Successful Outcome in Afghanistan,” led by former commander of U.S forces in Afghanistan Gen. John Allen, Michele Flournoy and Michael O’Hanlon, based on a recent fact finding mission. This likely means the report is how the military that courted these three Washington insiders inside the country wants us to think about Afghanistan: forever on the verge of democracy, and only if we hold out for longer, the 2014 elections go off right, women get integrated into the system, our European allies kick in more money and trainers, the Afghan military can perform without us, etc., will things go off as planned. Where they ever got that poll saying Hamid Karzai enjoys 60 to 70 percent approval ratings is beyond us.

Frankly, if what they say is true, that the Afghan Army is now leading 85 percent of its security missions and responsible for 87 percent of the population’s security — 312 out of 400 districts countrywide — then that is a good thing, at least American blood and treasure counts for something. But it would be good to get an independent assessment. After 11 years of the Pentagon spin machine at work, forgive us for wanting a second opinion. Plus, one of the key recommendations to jump out of the CNAS report is to leave behind a “bridging force” of “several thousand” beyond the already reported “enduring force” (estimated 8,000- to 12,000 NATO troops) for “two to three years after 2014… to help the Afghans finish building their air force, their special operations forces and certain other enablers in medical realms, in counter-IED capability and in intelligence collection.” So what really goes on over there we can’t say with any conviction.

We do know, outside of the Beltway Bubble, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to smile at (even if, as CNAS suggests, the “good news” is not getting through the Western media). The headlines just aren’t good. I opened the paper yesterday to one blaring the worst of tragedies: “Suicide blast kills 10 Afghan children,” plus, the subhead noted, two NATO troops and an Afghan police officer. The children had just been dismissed from school for lunch and were in the way of an attack on a coalition convoy. At the same time, a land mine claimed the lives of seven Afghan civilians – four women, two children and their driver – after driving home from a day of collecting fire wood in the Hills.

This week, the Red Cross was forced to scale back its own operations after a brazen attack in which a staffer was killed, as well two other people and an Afghan guard, at their headquarters in Jalalabad. Other international staff members had to be rescued as the attackers went on a rampage, according to reports.

Meanwhile, the Army announced Tuesday that two U.S soldiers, ages 20 and 23, were killed by an IED while serving in Tsamkani, Afghanistan. While tens of thousands of their counterparts will be coming home from college this month, they’ll be coming home in a box. That brings the total to 2,235 U. S killed since the war began.

They say America is war-weary and it is. For good reason. There seems to be no good answers. Leaving the country to the Taliban seems to be a cruel way to go – we are already hearing that the number of attacks on girls’ schools is increasing. And did you hear more women in Afghanistan are in prison for “moral crimes” now than at any point since the Taliban was kicked out of Kabul 11 years ago? The old warlords are eager to re-impose their own brutal control, too. Yet leaving U.S Special Forces in the country to shadow local Afghan security forces in counter-terror operations seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Protests again erupted in Wardak this week with charges that U.S Special Forces played a hand in disappearing and torturing local young men to death, a charge flatly denied by American officials.

There are pockets of hope, however. The front page of The Washington Post Monday featured Farhad Akbari, 33, who in revenge of the death of his mother by the Taliban, has raised a local vigilante force to keep them out of Kolangar, “a quiet farming region” in Logar province. This local milita has kicked the Taliban out of a number of local hamlets and it doesn’t work with the Americans, which might be their secret.

Of course, the Americans don’t believe so much in small crusades, do they? My aforementioned friend felt she was part of something much bigger and to hear her angst about the failure of the endeavor is a blow. I’ll take her view from Kabul over the think tankers every time.

Bradley Manning Trial Day 2

The court martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning on charges that could land the celebrated Army whistleblower in prison for life, enters Day Two at the Fort Meade courtroom in Maryland on Tuesday.

Check in with Kevin Gosztola and Alexa O’Brien, who are both covering the proceedings, for regular updates and commentary.

According to Gosztola, here and here from Day 1 of the trial, it is clear that the government will be painting Manning as an arrogant, small man who “dumped” a load of classified info on the Internet, despite being trained on the consequences of allowing such information to get into the wrong hands.

Gosztola describes the Army’s opening salvo:

[Military prosecutor Capt. Joe Morrow] declared, “This is not a case about a government official” making discreet disclosures. It is a case about a soldier who “literally dumped” information on the Internet “into the hands of the enemy.” It is a case about “what happens when arrogance meets access to information.”

Morrow added that Manning’s training repeatedly had warned him of the “enemies’ use of the Internet writ large.” He had conducted research that warned him of the “enemies’ use of WikiLeaks.” He knew the dangers of “unauthorized disclosure to an organization like WikiLeaks and he ignored that evidence.”

Manning violated superior officers and engaged in an act to the “aid of our adversaries.” He used his military training to “gain notoriety.” He “knew the consequences of his actions and disregarded that for self-interest…(clip)

Manning, the military prosecutor argued, knew there was a “great value to our adversaries and in particular our enemies.”

Most interestingly — though not surprising — it appears the government will spend the next 12 weeks trying to convince the jury that not only was Manning fully cognizant that his actions would “aid the enemy” — the “enemy” being al Qaeda — but that he conspired with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to do it.

The leitmotif in this ongoing tragedy is that the government is looking for a way to finally prosecute Assange, who is living under Ecuadoran asylum in that country’s embassy in London. WikiLeaks in currently under investigation by the U.S Justice Department. Many believe the government is trying to prove that Assange helped Manning obtain, store and release the documents, which would make him a co-conspirator rather than merely the recipient of more than 700,000 classified U.S documents. Manning has adamantly denied this co-conspiracy scenario, but has admitted handing the files to WikiLeaks after being turned down by major American newspapers. WikiLeaks has neither confirmed nor denied it got the documents from Manning.

The government argued that a “pressassociation” account on Jabber was used by WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange himself and seemingly suggested that Manning had been “enlisted” to “help” WikiLeaks obtain copies of documents on the “Most Wanted” list (something the defense heavily disputed prior to Morrow’s opening argument).

Though no proof has been presented that Assange was actually using the “pressassociation” account, the government appears prepared to go forward and argue this as fact during the trial.

Also, the government claimed that chat logs showed Manning had “enlisted Assange’s help in figuring out a way to browse” the secret network with information “anonymously.” The government also suggested that Manning had helped WikiLeaks edit the “Collateral Murder” video.

The government’s argument went witness by witness and through each set of documents chronologically detailing all that the government plans to show over the course of the trial. It was a broad overview of what can be expected.

For their part, Manning’s defense posed the 25-year-old Manning as naive yet determined to do the right thing, according to Gosztola’s reporting. It was his experience in Iraq — which has been well documented as Manning’s initiation into civilian killing, U.S-condoned torture, the dehumanizing ritual of watching Collateral Murder-like videos over and over in the intelligence centers for which he worked:

[Defense attorney David] Coombs described Manning as “not the typical soldier.” He had custom dog tags that said on the back “Humanist,” a “religious belief he ascribed to and those values are placing humans first, placing value on human life.” …(clip)

Coombs said Manning struggled not only with his obligation and duty to people but also with an internal struggle. This led him to decide he “needed to do something to make a difference in the world. He needed to do something to help improve what he was seeing .”

He began to select info that he believed “the public should hear and should see.” As Coombs said, “If public,” it would “make the world a better place.” And he specifically selected documents he believed could not be used “against the United States” and “could not be used” to the advantage of a foreign nation.

Manning has already pled guilty to 10 lesser charges, but the government in its infinite zeal to make an example of the young man, is going for the one that brings with it the life sentence — aiding the enemy. It will call 141 witnesses for the prosecution, many testifying behind closed doors. In a statement, Assange suggested it was nothing more than a kangaroo court:

This is not justice; never could this be justice. The verdict was ordained long ago. Its function is not to determine questions such as guilt or innocence, or truth or falsehood. It is a public relations exercise, designed to provide the government with an alibi for posterity. It is a show of wasteful vengeance; a theatrical warning to people of conscience.

Conspiracy to commit journalism.

Surprise! Washington Post Sides With Hawks Over New War Powers

It’s always amusing when one hears talk about The Washington Post being part of the liberal mainstream media conspiracy. The 136-year-old newspaper, known for its breaking of “Watergate” and subsequent downfall of President Richard N. Nixon in the 1970’s, is hardly “liberal,” nor “progressive” today, but straight down-the-middle establishment, and its editorial page baldly hawkish. There are zillions of examples, and today’s endorsement of new presidential powers to execute an ongoing global war on terror, is no exception.

In today’s lead editorial, the paper came out in favor of a Lawfare.com-generated proposal to turn the Authorized Use of Military Force (AUMF) into an a la carte kill list hand-picked by the Executive Branch, “in consultation” with congress. Just think of the State Department’s list of state sponsored terrorists, only instead of sanctions and frozen assets, members of the new AUMF fraternity would be “targeted for termination,” the predator drones and U.S special forces taking the place of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin, anywhere they operate, across the globe. As I wrote in a recent Antiwar.com piece:

Here is what the current State Department list of designated terrorist organizations looks like today. The first thing that comes to mind when suggesting a similar template for the use of military force is the politics, which would be inevitable when you are inviting various levels of bureaucracy and congress to participate in designating targets. Take the recent State Department de-listing of the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), which came after an audacious public relations blitz that involved millions in shadowy money, A-list campaigners and spokespersons, and a guerilla media war. Is this the kind of theater we are to expect as new terror groups cross the radar of competing Washington interests, or will groups pop on and off with little notice (until of course, their “associates” are flattened one day by a hellfire missile from the sky)?

As John Glaser pointed out in an earlier post, the Lawfare gang is a collection of Bush-era types who are enjoying a bit of popularity with hawks on the Hill, like Sens. John McCain and Carl Levin, who also want to “update” the AUMF. Luckily, there are cooler heads at Lawfare.com who like the idea of letting the AUMF expire, and think the President’s inherent powers under Article II are enough to wage war on new enemies as they come along. That seemed to be President Obama’s gist (but with him we never know) when he suggested the AUMF would ultimately be repealed and that he “will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further.”

The Post, on the other hand, is not happy. “…there’s a danger that dropping the AUMF — as opposed to tailoring it to the new conditions Mr. Obama described — will result in less restraint on presidential power, not more,” the paper argued, relying on a brief by Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith, who said that using Article II to wage the war on terror “would be an unprecedented expansion of [presidential] authority.”

Sounds to me that it would be an exploitation of his powers rather than an expansion, since he already has the authority. Plus, other legal scholars argue that if Article II were his only authority for waging war, the Executive would be more wary of abusing it. From Georgetown’s Rosa Brooks:

With or without the 2001 AUMF, no one seriously doubts that the president has inherent constitutional authority (and international law authority) to use force when necessary to prevent imminent and grave harm to the United States. But the key concepts there are “necessary,” “imminent,” and “grave,” which means that unilateral, non-congressionally authorized uses of force should be reserved for rare and unusual circumstances — as indeed they have been, for most of U.S. history…

That doesn’t seem enough for The Post, which actually argues that despite it’s own support for closing the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, a repeal of the AUMF might “complicate the future military detention of terror suspects — such as the Obama administration’s holding of a Somali militant on a U.S. warship prior to his transfer to the civilian justice system [what? No more torturing in international waters?]

“While Mr. Obama insists that he prefers capturing to killing terror suspects, there have been few such arrests on his watch,” the paper adds. “A modifed military detention system with appropriate checks and balances could make them more possible.”

Like the Lawfare gang, The Post’s arguments for a new AUMF all depend on some transparent, effective, honest government system that does not exist. They’ve had 11 years to engage the levers of “checks and balances,” to “modify” methods and policies that don’t work. Time to face reality.

But it sounds, unlike much of America outside the Beltway Bubble, The Post is loathe to let the GWOT go, and has taken up the pretzel-logical torch of McCain and Levin and others on the Hill. They are trying to say that expiring the AUMF would be an “expansion” of powers, while creating a new one would amount to a “restriction” or “limitation” on runaway presidential authority. Good lord.

The truly scary thing is that the paper is an establishment canary that doesn’t sing unless it’s got some sense of back-up among the power elite in Washington. This will be an interesting debate to follow, for sure.

More Alleged Abu Ghraib Torturers Slipping Through Fingers of Justice?

This may ultimately come as no surprise, but yet another party connected to the torture and abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib circa 2004 may get off with little more than a slight taint on their reputation.

At this point it is part of the record in at least two official investigations including the Taguba Report and the commonly known “Fay Report,” that that the Arlington, Va.-based private contractor CACI had fielded interrogators who helped to intimidate, harass and physically assault prisoners at Abu Ghraib. That much was detailed in the official military investigations, no matter what CACI says, and everyone can access them easily enough.

But like most of the high-hats involved in the evil culture and brutal behavior we will forever associate with Abu Ghraib, CACI was never held accountable for its part (there were never any formal criminal charges brought against them). A small group of four former detainees who say CACI employees “directly” participated in their torture are trying to sue the company in civil court, but even that effort seems increasingly stacked against them. The case has already been dismissed once and is in appeals.

According to The Washington Post this morning, U.S District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee “is weighing whether a Supreme Court ruling in April (Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell),” and the failure of three plaintiffs to appear in court in the United States “should bring an end to the case.” The decision in Kiobel basically held that the Alien Tort Statute, on which much of the CACI case is being argued, only applies to conduct taking place in the U.S or on the high seas.

CACI says the Kiobel ruling means the Iraqis’ case no longer has jurisdiction in the the U.S court. The plaintiffs’ attorney, Baher Azmy, who works for the Center for Constitutional Rights, says the Abu Ghraib detention center under U.S command constituted a “U.S territory,” and furthermore, argues that unlike Kiobel, this case deals directly with “an American entity” and cannot be compared.

Even more outrageous is the idea that the case might be shut down if three of the Iraqis cannot make it to court in Virginia in person. Apparently, they’ve been trying to get here, but — surprise — some sort of bureaucratic snafu is preventing them from leaving Iraq. From The Washington Post, which was covering the court proceedings, in April:

Despite having visas and airline tickets, they were not permitted to travel to the United States last month, according to the same court document.

“There is some inexplicable block by some agency in the U.S. government that’s preventing them from coming here,” said Baher Azmy, an attorney for the detainees and legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “We’re trying to expedite the process.”

But May is winding down and they still can’t come over and there seems to be no relenting from the court in its insistence that the plaintiffs cannot participate in the proceedings via video. CACI actually has the nerve to say the plaintiffs’ inability to get here is “self-inflicted” because they have “detention records” with “ample evidence of derogatory information that would disqualify them from entering the United States.”

Since we have “ample evidence” that 70 to 90 percent of the detainees at the worst U.S operated detention centers including Abu Ghraib were arrested by mistake, it is hard to take CACI’s argument seriously. In fact it’s just another slap (punch?) in the former detainees’ faces. Best remember where they came from before raising up their “detention records” against them:

In January, Engility Holdings, on behalf of its subsidiary L3 — a U.S contracting company that provided translators to the U.S military in Iraq at its detention centers — paid over $5.2 million in settlement money to 71 former detainees who accused them of conspiring to abuse and torture them at Abu Ghraib and other U.S detention centers. CACI however is holding out, and sadly from the looks of it, it may pay off.

Parents, Don’t Let Your Daughters Grow Up to Be Soldiers Pt. 2

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, The Washington Post reports this week that in addition to the escalating sexual assault problem in the the military, there have been an uncomfortable number of sex crimes, convictions and what can only be called criminal behavior at the recruiter level, too.

Turns out, in all branches, a number of guys put in the position of shepherding young people into the military turn out to be classic predators, or in some cases, highly sexed (adult!) meat heads who don’t know it’s wrong to have sex on office desks or in parked cars and exchange nude pictures with the 17-year-old high school students they’re charged with recruiting into the service. In the worst cases, male recruiters have been charged with raping and sodomizing young women and according to WaPo’s report, not all have been charged by civilian authorities, resulting in a lighter sentence for their crimes.

“The extent of the problem is hard to ascertain because the Defense Department does not keep figures on recruiters accused of sex crimes,” the paper said Monday. That’s a shocker. We know from last week’s bad news that the DoD estimates that some 26,000 sexual assaults occurred throughout the military ranks in 2012. Of them, only 3,374 were even reported, mostly because of fear of reprisals. Sadly, we’re getting a picture of how far these problems go back.

“There certainly is a power dynamic there that makes it a target-rich environment for a predator,” said Anu Bhagwati, the executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network, which has been on the forefront of the sexual assault issue.

According to the Air Force — also known as the most aggressively evangelical Christian of all the branches — it court-martialed an average of four recruiters a year for sexual misconduct or unprofessional relationships since 2008. The Air Force is currently under a massive investigation for the rape and assault of young trainees at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Also in Texas, a Air Force recruiter faces a military court next month on charges that he raped and sodomized and engaged in other crimes with 18 young women he tried to enlist over a three year period.

Of course, given the statistics — there are over 10,000 recruiters in the Army, 6,200 in the Navy, for example — the overall number of incidents may seem small. But tell that to the girls. At Fort Knox, Ky., there were 387 reported incidents (327 “substantiated”) of sexual misconduct at the recruiting level. That seems like a lot in five years.

A target-rich environment for predators. From recruitment up through the officer level, it never seems to stop. The question no one seems to want to ask is whether the military is screening for the kind of sociopathic types that go on to commit these crimes; whether the military is doing enough to combat the institutionalized misogyny that nurtures and protects this “environment” in the first place. Until it does, I suggest young women find another way to “be all they can be,” outside the military. Believe me, if the military wants to fight more wars, they will need the women — they made up some 12 percent of the ranks in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Forcing the military to change by opting out until that happens may be the only way.