Laurie Anderson explains the (non-)solution to our problems: only an expert can do it. This is one song that addresses Oprah, Iraq, torture, and Wall Street financial crimes, while being kick-ass msuically. The version below is live, but the version on the album, Homeland, is even more terrific.
The studio version is available on iTunes for those who like her work.
It seems that whenever Americans feel insecure the first actions are to jettison long held Constitutional protections that were created only by revolution and bloodshed. The latest such action, of course, was what happened after the 9/11 attacks, 10 years ago next week.
David Shipler, writing in The American Prospect, outlines chapter and verse of this sad time for the US Constitution. The entire article is worth a read. The litany of civil liberties abuses is long and should be sufficient to illuminate the very real risks to freedom that fear has generated even in the US.
Here is an excerpt:
… the Patriot Act of 2001 emasculated an array of privacy statutes that had been enacted in the last quarter of the 20th century. In 2008, Congress further amended one of those laws, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to legalize the extensive surveillance that Bush had clandestinely authorized during the weeks following the attacks. At the time, while legislators and civil-liberties groups were arguing over the Patriot Act’s changes to FISA, Bush was evading FISA by ordering the National Security Agency to monitor Internet and phone communications without judicial oversight. Bush’s program sparked outrage in Congress when The New York Times reported it in 2005, but in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, Congress “gave the government even broader authority to intercept international communications” than the president had given himself, according to a joint report by the inspectors general of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice and Defense departments, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The inspectors general did not credit the program with many successes. While it “had value in some counterterrorism investigations,” they found, “it generally played a limited role in the FBI’s overall counterterrorism efforts.” Most officials interviewed for the report “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the monitoring had contributed to counterterrorism. A senior CIA official told the investigators that the surveillance “was rarely the sole basis for an intelligence success, but that it frequently played a supporting role.” Other CIA officials discounted the intelligence as “vague or without context.”
Read this. It provides a nice summary of the six times that Americans gutted their Constitution wrongfully. The first five largely have been corrected. The sixth time remains an open question.
Excerpt:
The Patriot Act, amending those privacy statutes, passed overwhelmingly with little debate six weeks after the attacks. It broadened FISA, which regulates domestic intelligence gathering through a secret court that issues clandestine warrants that don’t require probable cause and particularity, as the Fourth Amendment demands. The law originally authorized this shadow system exclusively to collect intelligence, but the Patriot Act frees investigators to use it for criminal cases as well.
Even that permissive FISA system wasn’t permissive enough for President Bush, who secretly ordered the NSA to intercept Americans’ communications by phone and Internet. The suspicionless sweeps, effectively legalized by Congress in 2008, continue.
Further, by expanding administrative subpoenas known as national security letters (NSLs), the Patriot Act shot holes through three laws that had guarded the privacy of Americans’ credit, banking and communications records. Without suspicion of a crime and with no judicial oversight, NSLs can now be issued by the head of any FBI field office to librarians, Internet providers and financial institutions, among others. Each of the 50,000 NSLs being served annually comes with a lifetime gag order.
One measure that could change the country if fully implemented is the executive branch’s power to subject civilians to military trial. Under the Military Commissions Act, passed in 2006 and revised in 2009, the president may unilaterally designate anyone an enemy combatant—even inside the United States—and try non-citizens before military officers, with no judicial involvement except on appeal. Applied only to Guantanamo detainees so far, this mechanism has no geographical restrictions. Nothing in the law prevents its employment in Alabama as well as Afghanistan.
These six deviations show that rights cannot rely on officials’ benevolence. They rely on an ingenious constitutional system that has pulled us back from our periodic wanderings. Let’s hope it does this time, and soon, before counterterrorism’s shortcuts through our rights become the new normal.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) says that the Patriot Act that we all think we know about is bad. But even worse is the secret Patriot Act.
Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.
“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden tells Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”
The true victory achieved by Al Qaeada is the transformation of the US government into an all-seeing police state. And we are doing it to ourselves out of irrational fear.
Full story here.
Update: Further information from the New York Times.
Related articles
I just watched the film “Inside Job” (link to trailer) that dissects the causes of the “great recession” we are still suffering from. It is the most cogent and understandable explanation of a very complex set of issues I have seen yet. The film won a 2011 Academy Award for best documentary. Now out on Blue Ray and DVD. Watch it.
Update: And it looks like the Federal and New York regulators and prosecutors are finally getting serious about all this.
Jane Mayer, writing the current issue of The New Yorker, tells an amazing story about a former NSA employee who is charged under the Espionage Act for blowing the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse inside the NSA. The article also describes the scope and illegality of the country’s warrantless wiretap program against Americans. I strongly recommend you read the entire article.
In December, 2005, the N.S.A.’s culture of secrecy was breached by a stunning leak. [The accused man was not involved in the story.] The Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that the N.S.A. was running a warrantless wiretapping program inside the United States. The paper’s editors had held onto the scoop for more than a year, weighing the propriety of publishing it. According to Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, President Bush pleaded with the paper’s editors to not publish the story; Keller told New York that “the basic message was: You’ll have blood on your hands.” After the paper defied the Administration, Bush called the leak “a shameful act.” At his command, federal agents launched a criminal investigation to identify the paper’s source.
The Times story shocked the country. Democrats, including then Senator Obama, denounced the program as illegal and demanded congressional hearings. A FISA court judge resigned in protest. In March, 2006, Mark Klein, a retired A.T. & T. employee, gave a sworn statement to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was filing a lawsuit against the company, describing a secret room in San Francisco where powerful Narus computers appeared to be sorting and copying all of the telecom’s Internet traffic—both foreign and domestic. A high-capacity fibre-optic cable seemed to be forwarding this data to a centralized location, which, Klein surmised, was N.S.A. headquarters. Soon, USA Today reported that A.T. & T., Verizon, and BellSouth had secretly opened their electronic records to the government, in violation of communications laws. Legal experts said that each instance of spying without a warrant was a serious crime, and that there appeared to be hundreds of thousands of infractions.
President Bush and Administration officials assured the American public that the surveillance program was legal, although new legislation was eventually required to bring it more in line with the law. They insisted that the traditional method of getting warrants was too slow for the urgent threats posed by international terrorism. And they implied that the only domestic surveillance taking place involved tapping phone calls in which one speaker was outside the U.S.
Drake [the accused former employee] says of Bush Administration officials, “They were lying through their teeth. They had chosen to go an illegal route, and it wasn’t because they had no other choice.” He also believed that the Administration was covering up the full extent of the program. “The phone calls were the tip of the iceberg. The really sensitive stuff was the data mining.” He says, “I was faced with a crisis of conscience. What do I do—remain silent, and complicit, or go to the press?”
Drake faces 35 years in prison if convicted. Yet, the masterminds of an illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying program have gone unprosecuted.
Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps [see the first related link below], is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.”
Related articles
This is a subject I know something about. I was a student at the DIA interrogation school i[n] 1969. I worked as an interrogator/debriefer for three years after that working for the DIA. One of the first things we discussed was torture – and yes water boarding is torture. We were reminded that torture is against both US and international law. We were reminded that we executed Japanese who had water boarded Americans. More importantly we were instructed that torture is ineffective. When you torture people they tell you what they think you want to hear – anything they think you want to hear. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You may get some good intelligence from torture but you are going to get a lot more bad intelligence which will both send us down the wrong road and endanger US troops and agents. Torture has historically been used to get false confessions – you can ask John McCain about that.
There has been lots of talk but no evidence that torture contributed to the death of Osama bin Laden. There is no evidence that torture has contributed to any worth while intelligence.
For civil libertarians, the legacy of bin Laden is most troubling because it shows how the greatest injuries from terror are often self-inflicted. Bin Laden’s twisted notion of success was not the bringing down of two buildings in New York or the partial destruction of the Pentagon. It was how the response to those attacks by the United States resulted in our abandonment of core principles and values in the “war on terror.” Many of the most lasting impacts of this ill-defined war were felt domestically, not internationally.
Starting with George W. Bush, the 9/11 attacks were used to justify the creation of a massive counterterrorism system with growing personnel and budgets designed to find terrorists in the heartland. Laws were rewritten to prevent citizens from challenging searches and expanding surveillance of citizens. Leaders from both parties acquiesced as the Bush administration launched programs of warrantless surveillance, sweeping arrests of Muslim citizens and the creation of a torture program.
What has been most chilling is that the elimination of Saddam and now bin Laden has little impact on this system, which seems to continue like a perpetual motion machine of surveillance and searches. While President Dwight D. Eisenhower once warned Americans of the power of the military-industrial complex, we now have a counterterrorism system that employs tens of thousands, spends tens of billions of dollars each year and is increasingly unchecked in its operations.
– Jonathan Turley, George Washington University law professor, from his column today in USA Today. You must read the entire piece.
… there can be no doubt that justice for the families of the 9/11 victims was agonizingly delayed because the Bush team took a megalomaniacal detour to Baghdad.
A pigheaded Donald Rumsfeld, overly obsessed with a light footprint, didn’t have the forces needed at Tora Bora to capture Osama after the invasion of Afghanistan. To justify the switch to Saddam and the redeployment of troops to Iraq, W. and his circle stopped mentioning Osama’s name and downplayed his importance. When the White House ceases to concentrate on something, so does the C.I.A.
Several Bush administration officials, including the despicable John Yoo who authored legal memoranda authorizing torture, are claiming that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” aka torture implemented by the Bush administration is responsible for the killing of bin Laden. This is not true.
As reported in today’s New York Times:
… a closer look at prisoner interrogations suggests that the harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier and exposing his hide-out. One detainee who apparently was subjected to some tough treatment provided a crucial description of the courier, according to current and former officials briefed on the interrogations. But two prisoners who underwent some of the harshest treatment — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times — repeatedly misled their interrogators about the courier’s identity.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, John Yoo claims:
Sunday’s success also vindicates the Bush administration, whose intelligence architecture marked the path to bin Laden’s door. According to current and former administration officials, CIA interrogators gathered the initial information that ultimately led to bin Laden’s death. The United States located al Qaeda’s leader by learning the identity of a trusted courier from the tough interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi.
It is really a bit sad that some Republicans believe that they will take credit for torture in order to get a bit of credit for bin Laden’s slaying. Keep in mind that career prosecutors in the Department of Justice concluded that, in drafting the memos supporting terrorism, Yoo used flawed legal reasoning. And whatever small value torture may have produced is not the worth the cost of the erosion of our traditional values of decency and humanity. And note, below, that even Donald Rumsfeld confirms that waterboarding did not lead to bin Laden.
Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.
– Charles Krauthammer, explaining in 2003, after our invasion of Iraq, that we would certainly find WMD there. We are still waiting, so I assume the credibility problem is confirmed.
… and leaving a war is very difficult. This principal is well stated by Peggy Noonan in an essay in today’s Wall Street Journal.
In Afghanistan, America cannot leave because it is the 9/11 place, the place that helped 9/11 to happen. America cannot leave because, as the iconic Time cover had it, the Taliban will cut off women’s noses and brutalize them in other ways. America cannot leave because al Qaeda will return, fill the vacuum left by our departure, and create a new terror state. America cannot leave because of turbulent, dangerous Pakistan. America cannot leave because from the day we arrived, we invested blood and treasure, and it cannot have been in vain. America can never leave because American troops always bring their kindness and constructiveness with them, and their rule of law. Innocent people will be defenseless without them.
There are always a million facts and forces arrayed against the idea of America leaving. So America has to watch where it goes.
In the troubled future we are entering, America must be prudent as never before, know and respect its own interests and limits as never before. It must be careful of the lives of its soldiers. It must be careful, even, of its purse, which is something we haven’t always worried about, but must now, and not only because of the crash and the deficits. What if what just happened in Japan had happened on the San Andreas fault? What if it were a broken American nuclear reactor? You have to keep some wealth and force in reserve, you can’t just assume you’ll always be lucky.
Talk to the hand...
Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, Known and Unknown, has received a number of terrible reviews.
But one such review that must really hurt is Peggy Noonan’s review in today’s Wall Street Journal. The entire review is worth a read.
Excerpt:
You’d expect such a book (all right—you’d hope) to be reflective, to be self-questioning and questioning of others, and to grapple with the ruin of U.S. foreign policy circa 2001-08. He was secretary of defense until 2006, in the innermost councils. He heard all the conversations. He was in on the decisions. You’d expect him to explain the overall, overarching strategic thinking that guided them. Since some of those decisions are in the process of turning out badly, and since he obviously loves his country, you’d expect him to critique and correct certain mindsets and assumptions so that later generations will learn. When he doesn’t do this, when he merely asserts, defends and quotes his memos, you feel overwhelmed, again, by the terrible thought that there was no overall, overarching strategic thinking. There were only second-rate minds busily, consequentially at work.
Second-rateness marks the book, which is an extended effort at blame deflection. Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t ignore the generals, he listened to them too much. Not enough troops in Iraq? That would be Gen. Tommy Franks. Turkey’s refusal to allow U.S. troop movements? Secretary of State Colin Powell. America’s failure to find weapons of mass destruction? “Obviously the focus on WMD to the exclusion of almost all else was a public relations error.” Yes, I’d say so. He warned early on in a memo he quotes that the administration was putting too much emphasis on WMD. But put it in context: “Recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning.”
There is an interesting story in the Times this morning about a man named Dennis Montgomery. He apparently developed software that he claimed could detect and stop the next Al Qaeda attack on the US and the US paid him more than $20 Million.
But the technology was an elaborate fraud.
The software he patented — which he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines — prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003.
The software led to dead ends in connection with a 2006 terrorism plot in Britain. And they were used by counterterrorism officials to respond to a bogus Somali terrorism plot on the day of President Obama’s inauguration, according to previously undisclosed documents.
***
In December 2003, Mr. Montgomery reported alarming news: hidden in the crawl bars broadcast by Al Jazeera, someone had planted information about specific American-bound flights from Britain, France and Mexico that were hijacking targets.
C.I.A. officials rushed the information to Mr. Bush, who ordered those flights to be turned around or grounded before they could enter American airspace.
“The intelligence people were telling us this was real and credible, and we had to do something to act on it,” recalled Asa Hutchinson, who oversaw federal aviation safety at the time. Senior administration officials even talked about shooting down planes identified as targets because they feared that supposed hijackers would use the planes to attack the United States, according to a former senior intelligence official who was at a meeting where the idea was discussed. The official later called the idea of firing on the planes “crazy.”
When claims have been brought regarding the technology the Federal government has deployed a “state secrets” privilege in an attempt to keep the fraud a secret.
Do recall that President Obama has pledged to limit the use of the state secrets privilege to substantively important matters, as highlighted by Glenn Greenwald back in in 2009 and as shown in this excerpt from his campaign website
Once again, the current Administration fails to implement the “change we can believe in” and it rolls out the state secrets privilege not to protect security-related secrets, but rather to cover up governmental incompetence.
