Category: News

It’s rare that I write about good news. But the editorial from yesterday’s New York Times is really good news.

Entitled “Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower,” the Times editorial board praises and defends Snowden’s decision to leak information about the NSA and argue he deserves some kind of clemency or pardon.

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home…

…The shrill brigade of his critics say Mr. Snowden has done profound damage to intelligence operations of the United States, but none has presented the slightest proof that his disclosures really hurt the nation’s security. Many of the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight, as the presidential panel recommended.

When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government.

To help make their point, the Times lists the following bullet points as evidence of the value of Snowden’s leaks:

• The N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its authority, thousands of times per year, according to the agency’s own internal auditor.
• The agency broke into the communications links of major data centers around the world, allowing it to spy on hundreds of millions of user accounts and infuriating the Internet companies that own the centers. Many of those companies are now scrambling to install systems that the N.S.A. cannot yet penetrate.
• The N.S.A. systematically undermined the basic encryption systems of the Internet, making it impossible to know if sensitive banking or medical data is truly private, damaging businesses that depended on this trust.
• His leaks revealed that James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress when testifying in March that the N.S.A. was not collecting data on millions of Americans. (There has been no discussion of punishment for that lie.)
• The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rebuked the N.S.A. for repeatedly providing misleading information about its surveillance practices, according to a ruling made public because of the Snowden documents. One of the practices violated the Constitution, according to the chief judge of the court.
• A federal district judge ruled earlier this month that the phone-records-collection program probably violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. He called the program “almost Orwellian” and said there was no evidence that it stopped any imminent act of terror.

So why is this good news? I think it’s an important sign of where general attitudes in the country are when even the New York Times – usually (but not always) an outlet that upholds the government’s legitimacy and the status quo – defends a dissident whistleblower who is essentially Public Enemy Number 1. I would not necessarily have expected the Times to come down on the side of Snowden like it did and that is encouraging.

Continue reading “Views On Snowden: Are the Times A-Changin’?”

Much has been made recently of the apparent tension between the U.S. and its longtime ally, Saudi Arabia. The thinking essentially goes like this: Washington hasn’t sufficiently bowed to Saudi interests on issues like post-Mubarak Egypt, the Syrian civil war, and the diplomatic opening with Iran. The Saudis would have preferred the Obama administration to crush the Egyptian revolution at the outset, intervene in the Syrian civil war to unseat Bashar al-Assad, and to resist a diplomatic opening with Iran, none of which happened.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Britain wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Saudi Arabia Will Go It Alone,” which seemed to reiterate the sentiment expressed by Saudi intelligence chief Bandar bin Sultan back in October when he talked of shifting away from the alliance with the U.S.

At Reuters, Ian Bremmer gives some details on the apparent strain in the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

First, America’s track record in the Middle East in recent years has sowed distrust. The relationship began to deteriorate with the United States’ initial response to the Arab Spring, where its perceived pro-democratic stance stood at odds with the Saudi ruling elite. After Washington stood behind the elections that installed a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt and then spoke out against the Egyptian army’s attempt to remove President Mohammad Morsi, the Saudi royals were left to wonder where Washington would stand if similar unrest broke out on their soil.

Second, while the oil trade has historically aligned U.S.-Saudi interests, the unconventional energy breakthrough in North America is calling this into question. The United States and Canada are utilizing hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques, leading to a surge in domestic energy production. That development leaves America significantly less dependent on oil from the Middle East, and contributes to the U.S.’ shifting interests and increasing disengagement in the region. Not only does Saudi Arabia lose influence in Washington — many of the top American executives in the oil industry were their best conduits — but it also puts the Saudis on the wrong end of this long-term trend toward increasing global energy supply.

To say that oil is an integral part of Saudi Arabia’s economy is a gross understatement. Oil still accounts for 45 percent of Saudi GDP, 80 percent of budget revenue, and 90 percent of exports. In the months ahead, new oil supply is expected to outstrip new demand, largely on the back of improvements in output in Iraq and Libya. By the end of the first quarter of 2014, Saudi Arabia will likely have to reduce production to keep prices stable. And the trend toward more supply doesn’t take into account the potential for a comprehensive Iranian nuclear deal that would begin to ease sanctions and allow more Iranian crude to reach global markets.

Continue reading “Poor Saudi Arabia Unhappy With US Foreign Policy”

Almost 100 years ago, nearly 100,000 men on the Western Front in Europe stopped fighting the Great War for a while. Some stopped for a few days, some — especially those who began the truce on Boxing Day or later — lasted until the start of 1915. In some places, this friendliness only stopped because the higher-ups got nervous. Some battalions were moved from the front lines with little warning, ostensibly because they had fraternized with the enemy. With the war only a few months old, but not, as had been promised, “over by Christmas” hundreds of thousands of men tried, briefly, to make that so. Had they succeeded, the world might be incomprehensibly different than it is today. It’s likely the second world war would never have been fought. So different would country borders, human lives, and events have been, that it’s sort of pointless to think about it. But it’s difficult not to.

For the last week or so, a few newspapers and magazines — mostly British — have published pieces on the famous, seemingly mythic, but quite true Christmas Truce. Either in celebration of its 99th year, or in a banal effort to update it for modern, troubled times, or just as an excuse for a soccer game,  people still remember it because it’s a powerful,  almost-cinematic story. But they don’t remember it the way we remember “the troops” as an abstract, vaguely positive concept. They don’t remember it as something that could be more than a nice Christmas story.

The brilliant film The Americanization of Emily doesn’t simply satirize war, but it also critiques the way we remember it — through memorials, parades, and war widows who wring their hands. It’s much harder and arguably crueler to go after the well-intentioned mourning the dead like that. But it has a larger purpose. We are told that the soldiers fight for us and for our freedom. They even fight for those of us who are ungrateful. Like Jesus dying for heathens who weren’t interested in his sacrifice, we are guilt-tripped by slogans, flags, and bumper stickers into assuming — at least initially — that a conflict is good by virtue of American participation in it.

And though nobody should condemn individuals mourning, the mass mourning for troops is what must end. When one soldier or another dies in Afghanistan, I didn’t lose a loved one. The only one who lost a loved one is the friends and family of that one soldier. And they may have participated in the war in miniscule. They may have joined up because of limited economic opportunity. They definitely may have meant well and caused relatively little harm. But that is not heroism. And at least for the politicians, war must stop being forgivable simply because you expressed noble virtues when you began it. And thoughtlessly supporting the troops is a nasty, sneaky crack through which more and more forgiveness and moral relativism sneaks through until it doesn’t matter what happened because America means well.

What does that have to do with the truce, now winding down 99 years ago across Western Europe? The men who truced had seen six months of war and thought, that’ll about do. They traded buttons and baubles from their uniforms. They played soccer. They shook hands. Next year, a grand soccer game will be held in Ypres, Belgium, in honor of the truce and where it first began. Hopefully the sports won’t be all that is celebrated.

Every Christmas Eve I toast the truce with some kind of semi-appropriate alcohol — whisky, scotch, or gin. I anachronistically read the war poems of Wilfred Owen and his mentor Siegfried Sassoon. Those two Brits hadn’t yet joined up, but their bitter, antiwar poems fit with the mood. I have no reason to feel the sense of ownership for the truce that I do. My country hadn’t even joined the fight. I have only the faintest knowledge of a great great uncle or two who was in the war somewhere. But if the American fighting men (and women) are supposed to be fighting for us, no matter the conflict or the cause or their actions, why can’t I pick the truce instead? Why can’t I have a piece of it, and a piece of Raoul Wallenberg, and a piece of all the draft dodgers, from the ones who burned their draft cards in protest, to the ones who quietly slinked away to Canada? Why can’t we have holidays and parades for them, those real people who chose to do something besides take the war that was offered them? And why can’t we forget the hazy, pillowy-soft repetition that says the Spanish American War is the Great War, is World War II, is Vietnam, is Iraq. And as long as you joined up, you’re a hero? Because we don’t want to tell grieving families that the war their loved one died in was a mistake? What’s the cost of that mass politeness? Well, it’s Iraqi car bombs that are blurbs, not front page news. And it’s the war in Afghanistan becoming staggeringly unpopular 12 years too late. But maybe, finally,  it’s also how America didn’t go into Syria, even though for a few stomach-twisting weeks, it felt inevitable. It always feels that way.

Wars, once they began, seem like they will never end. But once in a while, a few — or a few thousand men — try to stop them. And there are still soldiers who willingly sign up for war, then turn against it. Support those troops. Remember those troops.

The CIA and JSOC are engaged in a covert war in Colombia that involves intelligence cooperation and help in carrying out an assassination campaign against domestic rebels with U.S.-provided “smart bombs,” according to an investigative report from the Washington Post‘s Dana Priest.

“The secret assistance, which also includes substantial eavesdropping help from the National Security Agency, is funded through a multibillion-dollar black budget [that] is not a part of the public $9 billion package of mostly U.S. military aid,” Priest writes.

Barring a last-minute frantic call from the White House, CBS’s “Face the Nation” will interview whistleblowers Thomas Drake (ex-senior executive at the National Security Agency) and Jesselyn Radack (ex-ethics adviser at the Justice Department). Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA and CIA and now is a chief NSA defender on CNN and Fox News, will also be interviewed this Sunday.

It was a high privilege for me to join Drake, Radack and FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley on a visit to Edward Snowden in Russia on Oct. 9. Never have I been in the company of persons who are such incorruptible straight-arrow patriots. Not so, sadly, Michael Hayden.

Given how these network interviews go, however, Hayden will probably be introduced as the patriot he isn’t. Here is a more fact-based introduction that I would urge the moderator, CBS’s Major Garrett, to use:

“Let me also welcome former Gen. Michael Hayden. Gen. Hayden was the first director of NSA to violate his oath to the U.S. Constitution by acquiescing in the Bush administration’s order to violate the Fourth Amendment, which, until then, had served as the ‘First Commandment’ at NSA.

“On May 8, 2006, former NSA Director Adm. Bobby Ray Inman stated publicly that what Hayden did was in clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Another former NSA director, Army Gen. William Odom, told an interviewer on Jan. 4, 2006, that Hayden ‘should have been court-martialed.’

“This sad reality was known to CBS and our mainstream media colleagues before Hayden was confirmed as CIA director on May 18, 2006, but we were successful in deep-sixing it, keeping it out of the public debate.

“We also are grateful to both the Bush and the Obama administrations for making it possible to have Gen. Hayden with us in the studio here today rather than having to speak with him via Skype from a federal prison where he assuredly belongs for his eavesdropping crimes at NSA. Hayden and the enabling giant telecoms escaped accountability via the Bush-pushed 2006 law holding all harmless for these violations of law.

“As for President Obama, had he not decided to ‘look forward and not backward’ and thus avoid prosecuting Bush administration criminals, Hayden might be locked away today for crimes against the Constitution and international law. As CIA director, he was a staunch defender of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ including waterboarding.

“Gen. Hayden also has been one of the harshest critics of Edward Snowden, hinting broadly that Snowden should be put on the President’s Kill List, a motion that was immediately seconded by House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers. So, our thanks to Presidents Bush and Obama for enabling Gen. Hayden’s presence here today, and thanks also for the rest of you for being here this morning.”

Continue reading “Sunday on ‘Face the Nation’: Gen. Michael ‘No Probable Cause’ Hayden”

Five years after the devastating Israeli war on Gaza, called ‘Operation Cast Lead,’ Israel has again bombed the densely populated open air prison strip to its south. Several Gazans have been reported injured and at least one toddler has been killed. All of the media accounts, as per usual, report the strikes as retaliatory, coming in response to rocket fire from Gaza which “landed in open fields [causing] no injuries or damages.”

Every single Israeli incursion or attack on Gaza is accompanied by the same narrative: Israel fairly responded to unprovoked Palestinian rocket fire. With Israel’s previous two attacks on Gaza, we know Israel actually broke the ceasefire, not Hamas.

Many of the press reports don’t make any mention at all of the sadistic blockade Israel has imposed on Gaza for years, which is starving Gazans of daily sustenance and is by most accounts illegal under international law.

Conditions in Gaza have become exceedingly desperate. About one third of Gaza’s arable land and 85 percent of its fishing waters are totally or partially inaccessible due to Israeli military measures, while at least two-thirds of Gazan households lack reliable access to food as a result of the blockade. Last year, the United Nations estimated that Gaza would be “unlivable” by 2020 unless the blockade is lifted. And again last month, UN officials said “Gaza is quickly becoming uninhabitable.”

Here is an editorial piece published today by the Guardian, entitled “Time to end Israel’s Gaza blockade”:

For the 1.7 million living in the tiny Gaza Strip, life has become increasingly desperate because of Israel’s continuing blockade, backed by Egypt and with no effective challenge from governments around the world. The blockade has brought electricity cuts of 16 hours a day, which means the only street lights visible at night have been those from Israel’s nearby towns. The electricity shortages have severely affected almost all essential services, including health, water, sanitation and schooling. With waste plants not operating, Palestinian children have been wading through freezing sewage to attend school. The terrible floods in Gaza brought the promise of increased electricity supplies for a few weeks, but the international community must demand that supply is constant and permanent.

…It is deplorable for us to allow this continuing collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza.

Not only does the U.S. allow this collective punishment, it actively supports it and is in part criminally responsible. But again, that is not part of the narrative Americans hear about.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said last year that the blockade bolsters extremists. “Keeping a large and dense population in unremitting poverty,” he said, “is in nobody’s interest except that of the most extreme radicals in the region.”

The bottom line: any narrative that doesn’t include Israel’s “unremitting” siege of Gaza as part of the reason errant rockets occasionally fly into empty fields in southern Israel is a narrative that is not complete.