Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits Who Empowered ISIS

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

15 November 15

 

histleblowers are always accused of helping America’s enemies (top Nixon aides accused Daniel Ellsberg of being a Soviet spy and causing the deaths of Americans with his leak); it’s just the tactical playbook that’s automatically used. So it’s of course unsurprising that ever since Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing enabled newspapers around the world to report on secretly implemented programs of mass surveillance, he has been accused by “officials” and their various media allies of Helping The Terrorists™.

Still, I was a bit surprised just by how quickly and blatantly — how shamelessly — some of them jumped to exploit the emotions prompted by the carnage in France to blame Snowden: doing so literally as the bodies still lay on the streets of Paris. At first, the tawdry exploiters were the likes of crazed ex-intelligence officials (former CIA chief James Woolsey, who once said Snowden “should be hanged by his neck until he is dead” and now has deep ties to private NSA contractors, along with Iran–obsessed Robert Baer); former Bush/Cheney apparatchiks (ex-White House spokesperson and current Fox personality Dana Perino); right-wing polemicists fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism; and obscure Fox News comedians (Perino’s co-host). So it was worth ignoring save for the occasional Twitter retort.

But now we’ve entered the inevitable “U.S. Officials Say” stage of the “reporting” on the Paris attack – i.e. journalists mindlessly and uncritically repeat whatever U.S. officials whisper in their ear about what happened. So now credible news sites are regurgitating the claim that the Paris Terrorists were enabled by Snowden leaks — based on no evidence or specific proof of any kind, needless to say, but just the unverified, obviously self-serving assertions of government officials. But much of the U.S. media loves to repeat rather than scrutinize what government officials tell them to say. So now this accusation has become widespread and is thus worth examining with just some of the actual evidence.

One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, The Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to plot, so western governments were able to track their plotting and disrupt at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise to the victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, 2008 in Mumbai, and April, 2013 at the Boston Marathon. How did the multiple perpetrators of those well-coordinated attacks — all of which were carried out prior to Snowden’s June, 2013 revelations — hide their communications from detection?

This is a glaring case where propagandists can’t keep their stories straight. The implicit premise of this accusation is that The Terrorists didn’t know to avoid telephones or how to use effective encryption until Snowden came along and told them. Yet we’ve been warned for years and years before Snowden that The Terrorists are so diabolical and sophisticated that they engage in all sorts of complex techniques to evade electronic surveillance.

By itself, the glorious mythology of How the U.S. Tracked Osama bin Laden should make anyone embarrassed to make these claims. After all, the central premise of that storyline is that bin Laden only used trusted couriers to communicate because Al Qaeda knew for decades to avoid electronic means of communication because the U.S. and others could spy on those communications. Remember all that? Zero Dark Thirty and the “harsh but effective” interrogation of bin Laden’s “official messenger”?

Any terrorist capable of tying his own shoe — let alone carrying out a significant attack — has known for decades that speaking on open telephone and internet lines was to be avoided due to U.S. surveillance. As one Twitter commentator put it yesterday when mocking this new It’s-Snowden’s-Fault game: “Dude, the drug dealers from the Wire knew not to use cell phones.”

The Snowden revelations weren’t significant because they told The Terrorists their communications were being monitored; everyone — especially The Terrorists – has known that forever. The revelations were significant because they told the world that the NSA and its allies were collecting everyone else’s internet communications and activities.

The evidence proving this – that The Terrorists have been successfully using sophisticated encryption and other surveillance-avoidance methods for many years prior to Snowden — is so overwhelming that nobody should be willing to claim otherwise with a straight face. As but one of countless examples, here’s a USA Today article from February, 2001 — more than 12 years before anyone knew the name “Edward Snowden” — warning that Al Qaeda was able to “outfox law enforcement” by hiding its communications behind sophisticated internet encryption:

The Christian Science Monitor similarly reported on February 1, 2001, that “the head of the US National Security Agency has publicly complained that Al Qaeda’s sophisticated use of the Internet and encryption techniques have defied Western eavesdropping attempts.”

After 9/11, we were constantly told about how wily and advanced The Terrorists were when it came to hiding their communications from us. One scary graphic from the November, 2001 issue of Network World laid it out this way:

All the way back in the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration exploited the fears prompted by Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City attack to demand backdoor access to all internet communications. This is what then-FBI Director Louis Freeh told the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, 1997 — almost 20 years ago:

The looming spectre of the widespread use of robust, virtually uncrackable encryption is one of the most difficult problems confronting law enforcement as the next century approaches. At stake are some of our most valuable and reliable investigative techniques, and the public safety of our citizens. We believe that unless a balanced approach to encryption is adopted that includes a viable key management infrastructure, the ability of law enforcement to investigate and sometimes prevent the most serious crimes and terrorism will be severely impaired. Our national security will also be jeopardized. 

How dumb do they think people are to count on them forgetting all of this, and to believe now that The Terrorists only learned to avoid telephones and use encryption once Snowden came along? Ironically, the Snowden archive itself is full of documents from NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, expressing deep concern that they cannot penetrate the communications of Terrorists because of how sophisticated their surveillance-avoidance methods are (obviously, those documents pre-date Snowden’s public disclosures).

As but one example, the GCHQ files contain what the agency calls a “Jihadist Handbook” of security measures, dated 2003, that instructs terror operatives in the use of sophisticated surveillance-avoidance techniques that — as we noted when we first reported it — are very similar to what GCHQ still tells its own operatives to use:

In light of all this, how can “officials” and their media stenographers persist in trying to convince people of such a blatant, easily disproven falsehood: namely, that Terrorists learned to hide their communications from Snowden’s revelations? They do it because of how many benefits there are from swindling people to believe this.

To begin with, U.S officials are eager here to demonize far more than just Snowden. They want to demonize encryption generally as well as any companies that offer it. Indeed, as these media accounts show, they’ve been trying for two decades to equate the use of encryption – anything that keeps them out of people’s private online communications – with aiding and abetting The Terrorists. It’s not just Snowden but also their own long-time Surveillance State partners — particular Apple and Google — who are now being depicted as Terrorist-Lovers for enabling people to have privacy on the internet through encryption products.

As I documented last November, the key tactic of American and British officials is to wage a P.R. war against Silicon Valley companies who offer encryption by accusing them of Helping The Terrorists. Last September, FBI Director James Comey actually said: “What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law,” while The New York Times gave anonymity in that article to a security official to link the new iPhone 6 to terrorism. The head of GCHQ called Apple and Google “the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals” as part of what The New York Times called “a campaign by intelligence services in Britain and the United States against pressure to rein in their digital surveillance after disclosures by the American former contractor Edward J. Snowden.”

Then there’s the blame-shifting benefit. For most major terror attacks, the perpetrators were either known to western security agencies or they had ample reason to watch them. All three perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo massacre “were known to French authorities,” as was the thwarted train attacker in July and at least one of the Paris attackers. These agencies receive billions and billions of dollars every year and radical powers, all in the name of surveilling Bad People and stopping attacks.

So when they fail in their ostensible duty, and people die because of that failure, it’s a natural instinct to blame others: don’t look to us; it’s Snowden’s fault, or the fault of Apple, or the fault of journalists, or the fault of encryption designers, or anyone’s fault other than ours. If you’re a security agency after a successful Terror attack, you want everyone looking elsewhere, finding all sorts of culprits other than those responsible for stopping such attacks.

Above all, there’s the desperation to prevent people from asking how and why ISIS was able to spring up seemingly out of nowhere and be so powerful, able to blow up a Russian passenger plane, a market in Beirut, and the streets of Paris in a single week. That’s the one question western officials are most desperate not to be asked, so directing people’s ire to Edward Snowden and Apple is beneficial in the extreme.

The origins of ISIS are not even in dispute. The Washington Post put it simply: “almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes.” Even Tony Blair – Tony Blair – admits that there’d be no ISIS without the invasion of Iraq: “‘I think there are elements of truth in that,’ he said when asked whether the Iraq invasion had been the ‘principal cause’ of the rise of ISIS.” As The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy put it in August:

By destroying the Iraqi state and setting off reverberations across the region that, ultimately, led to a civil war in Syria, the 2003 invasion created the conditions in which a movement like ISIS could thrive. And, by turning public opinion in the United States and other Western countries against anything that even suggests a prolonged military involvement in the Middle East, the war effectively precluded the possibility of a large-scale multinational effort to smash the self-styled caliphate.

Then there’s the related question of how ISIS has become so well-armed and powerful. There are many causes, but a leading one is the role played by the U.S. and its “allies in the region” (i.e., Gulf tyrannies) in arming them, unwittingly or (in the case of its “allies in the region”) otherwise, by dumping weapons and money into the region with little regard to where they go (even U.S. officials openly acknowledge that their own allies have funded ISIS). But the U.S.’s own once-secret documents strongly suggest U.S. complicity as well, albeit inadvertent, in the rise of ISIS, as powerfully demonstrated by this extraordinary 4-minute clip of Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan with Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency:

Given all this, is there any mystery why “U.S. officials” and the military-intelligence regime, let alone Iraq War-advocating hacks like Jim Woolsey and Dana Perino, are desperate to shift blame away from themselves for ISIS and terror attacks and onto Edward Snowden, journalism about surveillance, or encryption-providing tech companies? Wouldn’t you if you were them? Imagine simultaneously devoting all your efforts to depicting ISIS as the Greatest and Most Evil Threat Ever, while knowing the vital role you played in its genesis and growth.

The clear, overwhelming evidence – compiled above – demonstrates how much deceit their blame-shifting accusations require. But the more important point of inquiry is to ask why they are so eager to ensure that everyone but themselves receives scrutiny for what is happening. The answer to that question is equally clear, and disturbing in the extreme.

The Right's Anti-Minimum Wage Arguments Have Pretty Much Stayed the Same for 80 Years

By Branko Marcetic, InTheseTimes

15 November 15

 

ver the past year, the campaign to raise the minimum wage has been steadily accumulating prominence, political allies and, most importantly, successes. Not surprisingly, it has also occasioned a pushback from conservative politicians and columnists who view its increase as a misguided, self-defeating folly. 

The main points of the conservative argument against raising the minimum wage tend to be as follows: Increasing it would lead businesses to either raise prices or fire workers (or both) in order to deal with a spiraling cost of labor. This means that while some workers would be lifted out of poverty, many would lose their jobs, plunging them into greater financial straits, while all consumers would lose out from paying more for goods and services. This would ironically hit young, inexperienced and low-skill workers the hardest, as they have the least bargaining power and are typically the first to be fired. It is therefore better to let the market take its course and allow businesses to gradually raise their wages of their own accord. 

In fact, on Tuesday, several Republican presidential candidates made some of these very arguments, kicking off the latest GOP debate by stating their opposition to the Fight for 15 movement. Ben Carson claimed that, as a black youth, he would never have been hired as a lab assistant "if someone had to pay me a large amount of money." Similarly, Marco Rubio protested that, "if you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine." He instead proposed helping wages to rise "naturally" by putting forward pro-business proposals that would assumedly trickle down to workers. 

While considering these doom-and-gloom predictions, it’s useful to recall the debate that took place nearly 80 years ago, when Franklin Roosevelt first tried to establish a national minimum wage in the United States, as part of the New Deal. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which was introduced to Congress in 1937, aimed to eliminate sweatshop conditions by establishing a minimum wage, a maximum work week, and outlawing child labor. It also initially suggested a five-member board that could raise wages and shorten working hours on a case-by-case basis. During June 1937, Congress held three hearings inviting public comment on the proposed law. 

The FLSA as proposed wasn’t perfect. Like other New Deal legislation, it excluded farm workers as a matter of political expediency, as a large share of agricultural laborers were African Americans in the south, and Roosevelt needed the support of southern congressmen to get it and future laws passed. Not only that, but as one of the law’s proponents said in the hearings regarding the figure of 40 cents an hour that was being discussed at the time (around $6.60 in 2015 dollars): “it would be a calamity if such a wage minimum as that referred to should in any way be construed as a living wage.” Still, though inadequate, the bill’s supporters saw it as a worthy first step. 

The bill’s critics also saw it as a first step, although for them it was decidedly in the wrong direction. While some were solely outraged at the idea of an unelected board of men being given what they saw as dictatorial power over businesses, many were against the very concept of a minimum wage—even one as meager as that proposed. Their objections and predictions will sound very familiar to anyone following the minimum wage debate today. Here’s John E. Edgerton, President of the Southern States Industrial Council, an organization representing southern businesses:

we confess our failure to understand how it is possible to improve the conditions of the underpaid of the overworked by a statute whose inevitable effect will be to increase greatly the cost of production, thus an inescapable advance in prices.

Edgerton went on to warn that raising the wage uniformly would inevitably put southern manufacturers out of business. “Are workers better off without jobs?” he asked. 
J. D. Battle of the National Coal Association saw a similar trajectory for businesses if the bill was passed: 

There is no break in the chain of cause and effect: increased hourly wages, increased cost per unit of product, a higher selling price, a falling off in demand, decreased production, and decreased employment.

As Robert Dresser of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)—an anti-union organization of assorted businesses that fought various New Deal laws—told the congressmen: “you cannot legislate a nation into prosperity.”

Just like today, 1930s conservatives warned that those at the bottom of the ladder would be hurt most by a minimum wage. Guy L. Harrington of the National Publishers’ Association warned the imposition of a minimum wage would “throw all substandard or marginal workers out of employment as a burden to society,” while Battle presented letters from two different businesses claiming low-skill workers – or “those who are not sufficiently competent to earn their pay” – would quickly lose their jobs once the law was passed. A number of those testifying, such Noel Sargent of NAM, even argued that the bill would “make the next depression worse than would otherwise be the case.”

Today, it’s also not unusual to hear conservatives warning that a hike in the minimum wage will simply lead businesses to replace flesh and blood workers with those made from metal and wire, like sushi-making machines or “burger-flipping robots” that can do the job of unskilled workers for a fraction of the cost. This was also a claim made by those opposed to the FLSA. The manager of one Louisiana lumber company claimed that while the low cost of living in the South meant employers hadn’t resorted to “labor-saving machinery” thus far, wage increases beyond a certain point would force them into doing so and “eliminating over half of [their] men.” Meanwhile, the Underwear Institute warned that this and other laws were pushing up the cost of labor which would lead to “increased use of machinery with the effect of displacing manpower.” 

Finally, a number of those testifying had near-apocalyptic visions of what the establishment of a minimum wage might mean. Harrington testified: 

What is herein stipulated has been tried many times and failed. Rome 2,000 years ago, fell because the government began fixing the prices of services and commodities …We, however, know what has always happened when governments have tried to superintend the industry of private persons. The final result has always been distress, misery, and despair.

He, like many others, argued the bill was putting the United States on the road to “the complete centralization of Federal power” and the creation of “unlimited form of government.” L. N. Bent, the Vice President of the Hercules Powder Company similarly believed government control of wages would lead to government control of prices. Expressing his resentment at the encroachment of the federal government on state affairs, Battle concluded: “South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter for far less pretext than this bill affords.”

This wouldn’t be the last the American public would hear of this rhetoric. Year after year, decade after decade, these same arguments have been trotted out by minimum wage opponents each time a wage increase has been proposed. In 1961, one hotel manager lamented that if it the wage was increased, “you will be able to buy hotels cheap.” Joseph E. Chastain, the owner of Lintz department stores, complained in 1966 that “no company our size can live under such circumstances. Undoubtedly we would have to liquidate.” The company continued to operate for another 41 years. The Chamber of Commerce warned on no less than four separate occasions from 1975 to 1989 that minimum wage rises would cost millions of jobs. More recently, in 2010, FOX News commentator John Stossel used virtually the same words as Robert Dresser did in 1937, stating that, “We cannot legislate prosperity.” You can draw a straight line from 1937 to today’s warnings of “Destroying jobs via wage diktats.”

Nor was the hyperbolc rhetoric of collapse and dictatorial takeover limited to the decade of the 1930s when it came to the minimum wage. In 1960, Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI) warned that “Federal wage-fixing” was driving the United States “closer and ever closer to the centralized authoritarian state,” while Rep. Thomas Hagedorn (R-MN) cautioned that it “strikes at a basic underpinning of our democratic system.” As late as 1997, Mark Wilson of the Heritage Foundation was suggesting that setting a legally mandated wage floor was “socialism.” 

The fact that conservatives and business owners have been making the same claims about the minimum wage for at least 80 years does not by itself automatically invalidate concerns about its increase. But it does suggest that conservative arguments should be taken with a grain of salt. Minimum wage opponents have tended to view it as the harbinger of economic doomsday since its inception, even when it was as moderate by today’s standards as the FLSA of 1938 was. The fact that the sky hasn’t fallen yet should tell us something.