Category: News

The NSA admitted in Congressional testimony this week that they were deliberately “collect[ing] data about ordinary Americans’ cellphone locations,” in a test program that lasted from 2010 to 2011.

Collecting data about the cellphone locations of ordinary Americans. The NSA targeted ordinary Americans. This is quite a departure from what the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has repeatedly insisted, that data about ordinary Americans may get inadvertently swept up in the process of targeting terrorists or foreigners.

In an interview after his testimony, NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander told the Washington Post that they discontinued the program because “we couldn’t find…operational value out of it.”

Did you get that? They didn’t shut down the program because it, say, violated the privacy rights of American citizens. They didn’t do it out of conscience. No, they shut it down because it wasn’t as useful as they thought it would be.

But Alexander wants you to know, as he said in testimony, “This may be something that may be a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now…”

Well, I feel better.

After all that has been revealed since Edward Snowden’s heroic leaks, Americans have little reason to be surprised about each new NSA revelation, no matter how much more egregious it makes the previous one seem. But this confession comes just days after another NSA program, also begun in 2010, was revealed. In this program, which is still ongoing, the NSA “has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information,” as reported by James Risen and Laura Poitras in the New York Times.  

The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.

N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing.

This program still exists, so I suppose it proved “valuable” in spying on Americans.

The proportions of the NSA’s unconstitutional domestic surveillance apparatus are wider and grander than almost anybody conceived prior to these disclosures. And yet, the “real story,” as Sen. Ron Wyden put it, is still being hidden from us.

“After years of stonewalling on whether the government has ever tracked or planned to track the location of law abiding Americans through their cellphones, once again, the intelligence leadership has decided to leave most of the real story secret — even when the truth would not compromise national security,” Wyden said in a statement on Wednesday.

In addition to being able to track the geographic location of any “ordinary American,” the NSA is grabbing 75% of all Internet traffic, the Wall Street Journal reported in August, including in some cases “the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S.” Former NSA analyst Russell Tice put it this way: the NSA is “collecting everything.”

What is the Obama administration’s official line on the NSA scandal as of this date? Just as he said on Jay Leno back in August: “There is no spying on Americans.”

The U.S. has been declaring victory in Colombia for several years now, citing successes in clamping down on the drug trade. But it’s clear the international drug war has failed miserably.

The Clinton administration launched a foreign policy initiative to choke off the export of cocaine from Colombia by encouraging the Colombian government to militarize its policing of the drug trade and giving them all the money, weapons, and training they needed to do so. The support has kept up, with almost $4 billion in aid being sent since 2007.

It wasn’t long before abuses became rampant. Right-wing paramilitary groups with close ties to the U.S.-backed government rampage throughout the country with impunity thanks to an accommodative police force. These para-military groups “regularly commit massacres, killings, forced displacement, rape, and extortion, and create a threatening atmosphere in the communities they control” often targeting “human rights defenders, trade unionists, victims of the paramilitaries who are seeking justice, and community members who do not follow their orders,” according to Human Rights Watch. Tactics of the government also became increasingly abusive with widespread illegal spying practices by Colombia’s intelligence agencies grabbing headlines in recent years.

But forget about the ugly consequences of U.S. aid and militarization. Even on it’s own terms, Washington’s drug war in Colombia has failed. While coca production has indeed decreased dramatically, the drug production has merely shifted to neighboring countries.

Ted Galen Carpenter at the Cato Institute explains:

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime announced last week that the production of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine, has shifted away from Colombia toward Peru.  Observers of the war on drugs are not surprised by that development. During the early and mid-1990s, drug warriors hailed the decline of coca production in Peru and neighboring Bolivia, thanks to a crackdown that Washington heavily funded through aid programs to Lima and La Paz, as a great victory in the crusade against illegal drugs.  They ignored the inconvenient fact that cultivation and production had merely moved from Peru and Bolivia into Colombia–and to a lesser extent into nearby countries such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Brazil.

That phenomenon is known as the “balloon” or “push down, pop up” effect.  Strenuous efforts to dampen the supply of illicit drugs in one locale simply cause traffickers to move their production to other locations where the pressure is weaker for the moment.  When Washington and Bogotá launched Plan Colombia in 2000, the multi-billion-dollar, multi-year program to attack the coca industry in that country, cultivation and production gradually began to shift back to Peru and Bolivia.  The latest UN report confirms that trend.  As Ricardo Soberón, the former heard of Peru’s drug policy office, put it: “The carousel has come full circle.”  Adam Isacson, an expert on Latin American drug issues with the Washington Office on Latin America, noted that the new map of coca production “looks an awful lot like the old” map from the early 1990s.

So, what have we to show for the billions of dollars and countless lives ruined in the drug war in Colombia? Nothing. We’re back to square one, proving yet again that military tactics will not diminish the demand for drugs and that prohibitionist policies – on the domestic front and the international – simply don’t work.

The U.S. continues to militarize the drug war in Latin America, however. Our DEA agents, for example, are running all around Honduras, training security forces and killing people occasionally. U.S. economic and military aid continues to flow to abusive governments in the region, much of it contingent on how much those governments militarize their domestic police functions and crack down on the drug trade. Signs of improvement, unsurprisingly, are not forthcoming.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's words were entered as testimony at the European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee in Brussels on Monday.

Jesselyn Radack of the US Government Accountability Project (GAP) and a former whistleblower and ethics adviser to the US Department of Justice, read Snowden's statement into the record.

Ms. Radack came to prominence after she revealed that the FBI had committed what she said was a breach of ethics in its interrogation of John Walker Lindh, who was captured during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and dubbed the “American Taliban.”

* * *

I thank the European Parliament and the LIBE Committee for taking up the challenge of mass surveillance. The surveillance of whole populations, rather than individuals, threatens to be the greatest human rights challenge of our time. The success of economies in developed nations relies increasingly on their creative output, and if that success is to continue, we must remember that creativity is the product of curiosity, which in turn is the product of privacy.

A culture of secrecy has denied our societies the opportunity to determine the appropriate balance between the human right of privacy and the governmental interest in investigation. These are not decisions that should be made for a people, but only by the people after full, informed, and fearless debate. Yet public debate is not possible without public knowledge, and in my country, the cost for one in my position of returning public knowledge to public hands has been persecution and exile. If we are to enjoy such debates in the future, we cannot rely upon individual sacrifice. We must create better channels for people of conscience to inform not only trusted agents of government, but independent representatives of the public outside of government.

When I began my work, it was with the sole intention of making possible the debate we see occurring here in this body and in many other bodies around the world. Today we see legislative bodies forming new committees, calling for investigations, and proposing new solutions for modern problems. We see emboldened courts that are no longer afraid to consider critical questions of national security. We see brave executives remembering that if a public is prevented from knowing how they are being governed, the necessary result is that they are no longer self-governing. And we see the public reclaiming an equal seat at the table of government. The work of a generation is beginning here, with your hearings, and you have the full measure of my gratitude and support.

Thanks to Common Dreams for this post.

World attention has moved to the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, but the evidence on the Aug. 21 attack near Damascus remains hidden and in dispute, causing a group of former U.S. intelligence professionals to ask Moscow and Washington to present what they have.

Memorandum to: Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
From: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

We applaud your moves toward a peaceful resolution of the Syria crisis that will lead to the destruction of all chemical stockpiles possessed by the Syrian Government.

At the same time, we strongly believe the world has the right to know the truth about the chemical attack near Damascus. We note that both sides continue to claim possession of compelling evidence regarding the true perpetrators of this crime.

We therefore call upon Russia and the United States to release all the intelligence and corroborative information related to the 21 August chemical attack so that the international community can make a judgment regarding what is actually known and not known.

We the undersigned — former intelligence, military and federal law enforcement officers who have collectively dedicated, cumulatively, hundreds of years to making the American people more secure — hereby register our dismay at the continued withholding of this vital evidence.

The issue is one of great importance, as the United States has within recent memory gone to war based on allegations of a threat that proved to be groundless. The indictment of Syria on possibly unsubstantiated claims of war crimes could easily lead to another unnecessary armed conflict that would produce disastrous results for the entire region, and indeed the entire world.

Continue reading “Time for Proof on Syrian Chemical Weapons Attack”

Egypt’s new ruler, General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, may not realize that the bond between Egypt, Palestine and especially Gaza is beyond historic, and simply cannot be severed with border restrictions, albeit they have caused immense suffering for many Palestinians.

Gaza is being ‘collectively punished’, and is now facing economic hardship and a severe fuel shortage as a result of the Egyptian army’s destroying of underground tunnels. This is nothing particularly new. In fact, such ‘collective punishment’ has defined Gaza’s relationship to Israel for the last 65 years. Successive sieges and wars have left Gaza with deep scars, but left its people extremely strong, resilient and resourceful.

But what makes the tightening of the Israeli siege – imposed in earnest since 2007 – particularly painful is that it comes through Egypt, a country that Palestinians have always seen as the ‘mother’ of all Arab nations, and that served before the signing of the Camp David agreement in 1978-79 as the champion of just causes, especially to that of Palestine. To see Gaza mothers pleading at the Rafah border for the sake of their dying children, and thousands crammed into tiny spaces with the hope of being allowed into their universities, work places and hospitals is a sight that older generations could have never imagined. For Israel’s security to become a paramount concern for the Egyptian Arab Army, and besieged Palestinians targeted as the enemy under drummed up media and official accusations, is most disheartening, and bewildering.

This ahistorical anomaly cannot last. The bond is simply too strong to break. Moreover, to expect Palestinians to bow down to whomever rules over Egypt and to be punished if they fail to do so is a gross injustice, equal to that of Israel’s many injustices in the occupied territories.

Continue reading “People’s History of Gaza and Egypt: The Bond Cannot Be Broken”

Ask any policymaker in the White House or Congress, what’s more important than human rights? Their response: “Our government, of course.”

The Obama administration yesterday issued blanket waivers exempting three countries from a federal law banning U.S. military aid to countries that use child soldiers. Think Progress:

The Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008 (CPSA) is meant to bar the United States from providing military assistance to countries who have “governmental armed forces or government- supported armed groups, including paramilitaries, militias, or civil defense forces, that recruit and use child soldiers.” As per the Optional Protocol on the Convention of the Rights of the Child, “child soldiers” include children under 18 who have been forced into service, those under 15 who have volunteered to fight, and and those under 18 who have joined up with any force aside from an army. It also includes those who serve in a “support role such as a cook, porter, messenger, medic, guard, or sex slave.”

A national security interest waiver was built into the law, however, giving the President the authority to override the law should he deem it necessary to do so. That’s precisely what the Obama administration did on Monday, issuing blanket waivers to three countries known to use child soldiers: Yemen, Chad, and South Sudan. Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo received partial waivers as well; this means that they’ll be granted lethal aid only in support of the peacekeeping missions currently ongoing in the country.

This year, the State Department issued a list of ten countries that had been found to be using child soldiers: Burma (Myanmar), the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Of those, seven were due to receive military aid from the United States, an action which the CPSA barred — for the most part.

President Obama has refined the practice of issuing waivers to human rights laws to a high art. Last month, he issued a waiver to get around a federal ban on sending lethal aid to terrorist groups, giving him legal cover for sending weapons to Syrian rebels. With Egypt, Obama didn’t issue a waiver but vacillated and refused to comment on whether the military coup in July in fact was a military coup, thus evading a federal law prohibiting U.S. military aid to governments that are overthrown in military coups.

Michael J. Mazarr has written that “the very definition of grand strategy is holding ends and means in balance to promote the security and interests of the state.” Keep that in mind when you contemplate how Obama had the conscience to deliberately waive federal laws banning U.S. military aid to countries in which children are forced into warfare. Washington compromises rhetorical commitments to freedom and human rights “to promote the security and interests of the state.” In other words, to make the government bigger and more powerful.

Hey, anything for the government.