Don't Blame Edward Snowden for the Paris Attacks

By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker

21 November 15

oon after John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took the stage on Wednesday, at the annual conference of the Overseas Security Advisory Council, in Washington, D.C., he suggested that members of the audience might be aware of certain remarks he’d made in the aftermath of ISIS’s assault on Paris last Friday. But he also thought that they might have figured him wrong: “I invite you to look at what I said as opposed to what has been unfortunately misrepresented in some quarters, by my friends in the fourth estate.”

What had been reported was that Brennan had blamed Edward Snowden, at least in part, for the terrorist attack in Paris. What he said came in response to Josh Rogin, of Bloomberg View, who, on Monday, at a forum held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, had asked about the blame for the attack. It was, of course, “primarily at the feet of the terrorists,” but nonetheless Rogin asked, “How was this allowed to happen? . . . What went wrong?” Brennan replied, “In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally, to find these terrorists much more challenging.” It is hard to tell the difference between that sentiment and the headline assessment that he had blamed Snowden—Brennan was not being particularly coy in his reference to “unauthorized disclosures.” As the Times wrote in an editorial, on Wednesday, “What he calls ‘hand-wringing’ was the sustained national outrage following the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, that the agency was using provisions of the Patriot Act to secretly collect information on millions of Americans’ phone records.” James Woolsey, Brennan’s predecessor, was even more intemperate after the Paris attacks, saying that Snowden had “blood on his hands.” On Thursday, Woolsey added that Snowden should be “hanged.”

And, at the OSAC conference, Brennan was just as ready to point to Paris in order to attack Snowden. He used, as an opening, the plight of Syrian refugees. When the moderator asked him about the debate over whether it would be safe for America to let in refugees—in the context of the shameful statements that Ted Cruz and others have made in recent days—Brennan noted that “we are a country that prides itself on its tradition of welcoming people from around the world,” and that we have “to make sure that we are able to look at individuals who are coming into this country.” (Of course, we do: Syrian refugees currently undergo a vetting process that can take two years, which is one reason that we’ve admitted fewer than two thousand of them since their country’s civil war began.) But, as Brennan went on, it became harder to tell whether he was talking about the vetting of refugees or the monitoring of communities and private communications in this country. There has to be a “balance between individual rights and civil liberties and what is the appropriate role for government in that domain”—digital communications—“to protect its citizenry.” Otherwise, “we’re going to face a world of hurt in the future.”

A reporter from the Guardian then asked Brennan, “What impact do you think Edward Snowden’s revelations had on everything you just talked about and that debate on privacy?” Brennan’s answer was, again, unmistakable. “I think any unauthorized disclosures that are made by individuals who have dishonored the oath of office, that they raised their hand and attested to, undermines this nation’s security,” Brennan said. He was interrupted by applause, then added, “And heroizing such individuals I find to be unfathomable as far as what it is that this country needs to be able to do, again in order to keep itself safe.”

Perhaps it would help Brennan to fathom the unfathomable if he remembers that, before the Snowden revelations, James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, raised his hand and, in a Senate hearing, gave false testimony about whether the N.S.A. collected information on Americans. (The Times also pointed to false statements that Brennan made in connection with the Senate Report on Torture and civilian deaths from drone strikes.) Or he might read the opinion by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals declaring the phone-records program illegal, or the opinion from the D.C. Circuit, issued just two weeks ago, that it also likely violated the Constitution. He might try to explain why intelligence agencies chose broad searches that could, as one judge noted, drag in and mark as suspicious anyone who had called someone who called someone who called to order from the same pizza place as someone who had caught the N.S.A.’s eye, when it had legal options, like individualized warrants, available to it. In terms of the mass collection of phone records, in particular, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which was convened by the Administration after the revelations, found that the program wasn’t even effective, writing in its report, “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.” It also found that the program broke the law. This assessment makes it a particularly “disgraceful low,” as the Times put it, for Brennan to connect Snowden to the deaths of more than a hundred and twenty people in Paris. Since Snowden, the program has been modified, but only slightly, and in ways that may actually increase its efficiency by making it more targeted and excluding more of the noise of ordinary communications—large bureaucracies, which the N.S.A. has become, do not tend to make judicious choices in the absence of scrutiny.

Brennan didn’t mention a particular leak that would have made a difference in Paris, beyond implying that there were things the public did not know or was not expert enough to remark upon. The argument, insofar as he and others have articulated it, seems to be that terrorists are becoming more cautious and more interested in encryption—something that was already true—and that Americans regard their own intelligence agencies as less trustworthy. But Snowden’s revelations would not have had that effect if he hadn’t also revealed breaches of trust. One of his most important discoveries was that the N.S.A. had crafted a body of classified legal findings to justify broader surveillance, often by interpreting words in real laws—like “target,” “incidental,” “relevant,” “minimize,” and even “terrorist”—in ways that were far from their dictionary meanings and at times, frankly, absurd. In other words, Snowden revealed the existence of secret laws, which are something a free country is not supposed to have.

Brennan’s rhetoric was also clearly directed at an ongoing fight between the government and the tech companies, about whether there should be a limit on private encryption capabilities. The government wants to be able to read everything if it needs to; private companies point out that being asked to make systems more vulnerable creates its own security risks, quite apart from the civil-liberties hazards: if the government can get in more easily, so can hackers who want to steal the private passwords of, say, a power-plant manager, or a C.I.A. director. This is an important debate. The problem that Snowden exposed is that the government took the authority it had to do one thing and then used it to do much broader things. That has a cost in trust that comes due the next time the government asks for more powers. The way to address that distrust is to recognize that the behavior was bad, and that the public, Congress, and the courts do have something to say—and that the intelligence community will listen. There has to be good faith on both sides, and there has to be informed consent.

Intelligence agencies have an extraordinarily difficult job, and in some ways it is unfair that, as Josh Rogin’s question to Brennan suggests, the impulse, when some terrorists shoot up a concert hall, is to ask why those agencies failed. But the claim that everything would have been better if only the public had never learned that the N.S.A. was breaking the law, and if it had been allowed to keep doing so, is not a serious argument worthy of a mature democracy. The rush to blame Snowden suggests that Brennan and his colleagues have not learned the correct lesson from his revelations. If they have been in any way disempowered, the responsibility lies with them, for breaking the rules, not with the person who caught them doing it—who saw something and said something.

The Left and Right Must Stop the Establishment's Perpetual War Machine

By Sam Husseini, CounterPunch

21 November 15

n the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, some of us tried to raise questions of U.S. foreign policy. I got my mic cut on O’Reilly’s show. Others got far worse — a friend basically felt he had to move out of his neighborhood he was so reviled for criticizing the U.S.’s militarism. Oh, yeah, and hundreds of thousands of people got killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

The root causes of the 9/11 attacks were hardly discussed — unless it was people deriding Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell for blaming gay folks.

Now, there’s no meaningful peace movement. Partly as a result of that, we’re not having a serious discussion we should be about foreign policy after the Paris attacks: How U.S. — and Western — foreign policy manifests hatred and all that brings.

One might have thought that would be possible — the target of this attack was not the U.S., though it could be the next target. But that should give us some breathing room as well as a measure of urgency to think things through.

The major policy debate now is about Syrian refugees.

This is part of a political pattern: The two party establishment agrees on a series of issues and those issues are largely ignored. (Perpetual war.)

Then, there’s something they disagree on and that’s vociferously debated. (Refugees.)

Problem is, sometimes what they agree on (perpetual war) is what causes the other issue (refugees).

Right now, both the Democratic and Republican establishments both agree on a course of perpetual war. There’s virtually no remorse about having pushed for regime change in Syria and Libya and that leading to enormous human suffering that we’re mostly blind to.

When the Obama administration made an overt push for war in Syria in 2013, the left and right united and stopped it.

But ISIS threats gave the Obama administration the pretext it so seemed to desire to have a sustained bombing campaign, with thousands of strikes in Syria and Iraq the last year and a half — which is largely ignored such that now “critics” of U.S. policy suggest that the U.S. bomb Syria, as if it hasn’t been — and that could be the actual problem.

Now, Democratic Party politicos are talking about the humanity of Syrian refugees and ideals of the U.S. as a sanctuary. And Republican politicos are talking about alleged security concerns from letting refugees in. While I think we should let far more than a mere 10,000 refugees, which is what the Obama administration is talking about, I don’t think that’s the issue we really need to be talking about now.

The real issue is that the Democratic Party has participated in perpetual war policies that are leading to Syrians becoming refugees. The real issue is that the Republican Party has participated in perpetual war policies that are leading to greater insecurity for people in the U.S.

The issue of the refugees, while obvious real to real people is being seized on because it’s a wedge issue to keep the Democratic base and the Republican base shouting at each other rather than to examine the underlying issue: Perpetual war and the current set of U.S. colonial allies in the Mideast.

It’s the nightmare of the establishment that the left and right wake up to the fact that they are manipulated by the Democratic Party and Republican Party establishments.

A major issue is that the public is prone to scapegoating the vulnerable, like Syrian refugees, when no other cause of the problem is highlighted. There are obvious causes for the problems coming from the Mideast. But there’s a silence of conspiracy about them. At the top of the list is is the U.S. government’s backing of the authoritarian Saudi regime that has fostered Wahabism, a twisted from of Islam used by al-Qaeda and ISIS.

But even the most progressive Democrats are silent on this. Just this week, Barbara Lee — possibly the most left wing member of Congress — was asked on “Democracy Now” about U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia. She didn’t contemn it.

Bernie Sanders talks about refugees; he can bring a lump to every throat in the hall while talking about economic inequality in the U.S. But his solution for ISIS is to get the Saudis to “get their hands dirty.” Sorry, Bernie, but the Saudis hands are dirty enough as it is. They fostered jihadis like ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria and are now bombing Yemen, ripping human beings apart.

So, at the CBS debate the day after the Paris attacks, Sanders didn’t even want to talk about foreign policy. It was tragic really. He could have laid into U.S. foreign policy, he could have said that by arming the Saudis we’ve fostered problems, it would have jolted the campaign and the public could have been engaged in foreign policy in a meaningful way.

But he didn’t.

The most he could do is criticize the invasion of Iraq, which is valid — no one who voted for the Iraq war is qualified for any title other than inmate — but 13 years later, totally inadequate. Whatever you have to say about economy (and even here I think Sanders could be better) will ultimately be trumped by the fact that you can’t articulate a path out of perpetual war. If you don’t show you’ve got a path out of perpetual war, the people will pick someone who they figure knows how to do perpetual war.

But someone is going to have to break with the backing of autocratic regimes and perpetual war, because I’ve got news for you: Perpetual war is going to cost you a lot. The Vietnam War helped undermine the war on poverty — Martin Luther King called it a “demonic suction tube.” Perpetual war is going to make you lose your soul. Perpetual war will make you an accomplice to murder many times over. Perpetual war will mean generations more of Muslim youth driven to madness against the U.S. Perpetual war is going to potentially lead to nuclear war. Perpetual war will mean an even more militarized police force. Perpetual war will likely mean more of a repressive state. Perpetual war will mean you can’t march against climate change — or anything else. Perpetual war will mean that refugees and other folks get treated like trash. Perpetual war means your kid can’t get a job in much of anything other than the military. Perpetual war means soldiers with PTSD coming home and beating the crap out of their wives and traumatizing their children. Perpetual war will mean at every public venue you’ve got to go through security so that you can scratch yourself without court approval.

There’s a hunger out there for another course.

Fact is, the Republican candidates leading in the polls are those — at least in public persona, whatever their faults may be — that are furthest away from the foreign policy establishment.

There was a group called Come Home America that aimed to bring the left and right together against Empire.

Part of the reason that didn’t take off is that elections are movement killers. People constantly being pushed — especially in election years — to focus on symptoms of policies gone wrong, like the Syrian refugees, without looking at the elephant in the room: Perpetual War, brought to you by the Democratic and Republican Parties and which ruined the refugees’ lives — and will ruin many more unless the left and right join to stop it.