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The Bergdahl Chronicles: Murky Is as Murky Does |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 June 2014 15:25 |
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Pierce writes: "The end of the day yesterday was enlivened by the news that several of the soldiers currently calumnizing Bowe Bergdahl were being prepped for the job by several ratfckers of the Republican kind, including a famous Twitter commando who once was tasked with keeping John Bolton's meds on schedule."
Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. (photo: AP/IntelCenter)
The Bergdahl Chronicles: Murky Is as Murky Does
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
04 June 14
SEE ALSO: Can Bowe Bergdahl Be Tied to 6 Lost Lives? Facts Are Murky
 he end of the day yesterday was enlivened by the news that several of the soldiers currently calumnizing Bowe Bergdahl were being prepped for the job by several ratfckers of the Republican kind, including a famous Twitter commando who once was tasked with keeping John Bolton's meds on schedule. One of the most serious charges levelled was that several American soldiers died in the search for Bergdahl who, it was said, had deserted his post. CNN also has jumped on this narrative with both of Jake Tapper's feet. Of course, the former consideration is shadowed in history by the fairy tale of Jessica Lynch, the lies occasioned by the death of Pat Tillman, aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds, balsa wood attack escadrilles, the bullshit about babies being ripped from incubators in Kuwait, and yellow rain. The fact is that the propaganda industry simply has become better at doing its job than the elite news business is. In situarions like this, truth, because it is complicated and it runs in many directions at once, simply never catches up with the narrative.
But a review of casualty reports and contemporaneous military logs from the Afghanistan war shows that the facts surrounding the eight deaths are far murkier than definitive - even as critics of Sergeant Bergdahl contend that every American combat death in Paktika Province in the months after he disappeared, from July to September 2009, was his fault. All across Afghanistan, that period was a time of ferocious fighting. President Obama had decided to send a surge of additional troops to improve security, but they had not yet arrived. In Paktika, the eight deaths during that period were up from five in the same three months the previous year. Across Afghanistan, 122 Americans died in that period, up from 58 in 2008.
Of course, the facts are unclear. This was a war conducted in a place that once was considered the very ends of the Earth and hasn't changed very much. It was a war conducted amid tribal groups that had been killing each other for centuries for reasons lost to history. It would be a damn miracle if everything about these events wasn't unclear.
Facts are often obscured in the fog of the battlefield, witnesses have incomplete vantage points and the events are five years in the past now. But an archive of military reports logging significant activities in America's war in Afghanistan offers a contemporaneous written record of events in Paktika that summer. The archive was made public by Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for the leak.
And isn't that ironic as hell? In the battle with the propaganda industry, one way that the news business can make it a fair fight is through the work of leakers and whistleblowers. Just sayin'.
Separately, context supplied by the leaked logs complicates claims that insurgents attacked the outpost because of the hunt. Insurgents had been shooting at the outpost with escalating intensity in the preceding months. A June 24 log described a mortar attack inside its perimeter and cited intelligence that insurgents were planning a "complex ambush" of the outpost. And a log recounting the July 4 attack said it confirmed "recent reporting regarding Mullah Sangeen's desire to conduct a spectacular attack" against the outpost. The log did not mention the hunt for Sergeant Bergdahl. Still, one soldier from Sergeant Bergdahl's battalion said that response time after the attack had been slow, and argued the issue was not if the outpost was going to be attacked, but rather when insurgents chose to attack it.
The important thing to remember as the ratfcker's clients continue to appear on TV is that what they are saying about Bergdahl's disappearance and its aftermath is purely opinion. It is informed opinion. It is opinion worthy of respect, but it is opinion nonetheless, and it will remain that way until such time as an official investigation determines as closely as it can what actually happened. And, to paraphrase Wilt Chamberlain, opinions are like Fox News Contributors. Everybody's got one.
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The Top 5 Claims That Defenders of the NSA Have to Stop Making to Remain Credible |
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Wednesday, 04 June 2014 15:17 |
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Excerpt: "If you hear any one of these in the future, you can tell yourself straight up: 'this person isn't credible,' and look elsewhere for current information about the NSA spying. And if these are still in your talking points (you know who you are) it's time to retire them if you want to remain credible. And next time, the talking points should stand the test of time."
(photo: Kai Pfaffenbach /Reuters)
The Top 5 Claims That Defenders of the NSA Have to Stop Making to Remain Credible
By Cindy Cohn, Nadia Kayyali, Electronic Frontier Foundation
04 June 14
 ver the past year, as the Snowden revelations have rolled out, the government and its apologists have developed a set of talking points about mass spying that the public has now heard over and over again. From the President, to Hilary Clinton to Rep. Mike Rogers, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and many others, the arguments are often eerily similar.
But as we approach the one year anniversary, it’s time to call out the key claims that have been thoroughly debunked and insist that the NSA apologists retire them.
So if you hear any one of these in the future, you can tell yourself straight up: “this person isn’t credible,” and look elsewhere for current information about the NSA spying. And if these are still in your talking points (you know who you are) it’s time to retire them if you want to remain credible. And next time, the talking points should stand the test of time.
1. The NSA has Stopped 54 Terrorist Attacks with Mass Spying
The discredited claim
NSA defenders have thrown out many claims about how NSA surveillance has protected us from terrorists, including repeatedly declaring that it has thwarted 54 plots. Rep. Mike Rogers says it often. Only weeks after the first Snowden leak, US President Barack Obama claimed: “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted” because of the NSA’s spy powers. Former NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander also repeatedly claimed that those programs thwarted 54 different attacks.
Others, including former Vice President Dick Cheney have claimed that had the bulk spying programs in place, the government could have stopped the 9/11 bombings, specifically noting that the government needed the program to locate Khalid al Mihdhar, a hijacker who was living in San Diego.
Why it’s not credible:
These claims have been thoroughly debunked. First, the claim that the information stopped 54 terrorist plots fell completely apart. In dramatic Congressional testimony, Sen. Leahy forced a formal retraction from NSA Director Alexander in October, 2013:
"Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S.?" Leahy said at the hearing. "Would you agree with that, yes or no?"
"Yes," Alexander replied, without elaborating.
But that didn’t stop the apologists. We keep hearing the“54 plots” line to this day.
As for 9/11, sadly, the same is true. The government did not need additional mass collection capabilities, like the mass phone records programs, to find al Mihdhar in San Diego. As ProPublica noted, quoting Bob Graham, the former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee:
U.S. intelligence agencies knew the identity of the hijacker in question, Saudi national Khalid al Mihdhar, long before 9/11 and had the ability find him, but they failed to do so.
"There were plenty of opportunities without having to rely on this metadata system for the FBI and intelligence agencies to have located Mihdhar," says former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who extensively investigated 9/11 as chairman of the Senate’s intelligence committee.
Moreover, Peter Bergen and a team at the New America Foundation dug into the government’s claims about plots in America, including studying over 225 individuals recruited by al Qaeda and similar groups in the United States and charged with terrorism, and concluded:
Our review of the government’s claims about the role that NSA "bulk" surveillance of phone and email communications records has had in keeping the United States safe from terrorism shows that these claims are overblown and even misleading...
When backed into a corner, the government’s apologists cite the capture of Zazi, the so-called New York subway bomber. However, in that case, the Associated Press reported that the government could have easily stopped the plot without the NSA program, under authorities that comply with the Constitution. Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have been saying this for a long time.
Both of the President’s hand-picked advisors on mass surveillance concur about the telephone records collection. The President’s Review Board issued a report in which it stated “the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks,” The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) also issued a report in which it stated, “we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which [bulk collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act] made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.”
And in an amicus brief in EFF’s case First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. the NSA case, Sens. Ron Wyden, Mark Udall, and Martin Heinrich stated that, while the administration has claimed that bulk collection is necessary to prevent terrorism, they “have reviewed the bulk-collection program extensively, and none of the claims appears to hold up to scrutiny.”
Even former top NSA official John Inglis admitted that the phone records program has not stopped any terrorist attacks aimed at the US and at most, helped catch one guy who shipped about $8,000 to a Somalian group that the US has designated as a terrorist group but that has never even remotely been involved in any attacks aimed at the US.
2. Just collecting call detail records isn’t a big deal.
The discredited claim
The argument goes like this: Metadata can’t be privacy invasive, isn’t very useful and therefore its collection isn’t dangerous—so the Constitution shouldn’t protect it. Even the President said, “what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content”—as if that means there is no privacy protection for this information.
Why it’s not credible:
As former director of the NSA and CIA Michael Hayden recently admitted: “We kill people based on metadata.” And former NSA General Counsel Stu Baker said: “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”
In fact, a Stanford study this year demonstrated exactly what you can reconstruct using metadata: “We were able to infer medical conditions, firearm ownership, and more, using solely phone metadata.” Metadata can show what your religion is, if you went to get an abortion, and other incredibly private details of your life.
3. There Have Been No Abuses of Power
The discredited claim
President Obama stated in an interview that “there are no allegations, and I am very confident —knowing the NSA and how they operate — that purposefully somebody is out there trying to abuse this program…” And General Alexander stated in a speech that “We get all these allegations of [abuses of power] but when people check... they find zero times that that's happened. And that's no bullshit. Those are facts.”
Why it’s not credible:
We already have evidence of abuses of power. We know that NSA analysts were using their surveillance powers to track their ex-wives and husbands, and other love interests. They even had a name for it, LOVEINT. The FISA court has also cited the NSA for violating or ignoring court orders for years at a time. And those are just self-reported abuses – the only oversight that occurs is that the NSA investigates itself and reports on the honor system to Congress or the FISC about what it finds. A real independent investigation might reveal even more. Unfortunately, until we get something like a new Church Committee, we are unlikely to see such details.
4. Invading Privacy is Okay Because It’s Done to Prevent Terrorist Attacks
The discredited claim
We keep hearing the same thing: Surveillance is a “critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats.” When we reform the NSA, it must be done in a way that “protect[s] the operational capability of a critical counterterrorism tool.” The implication is that the stopping terrorist attacks is the government’s only goal.
Why it’s not credible:
We know that NSA surveillance is not used just for stopping terrorists and it’s not even just used for national security.
The Intercept recently revealed leaks detailing the NSA’s role in the “war on drugs,”—in particular, a 2004 memo detailing how the NSA has redefined narcotics trafficking as a national security issue. We also know that the NSA feeds data to the DEA, where it ends up playing a part in ordinary law enforcement investigations. And internationally, the NSA engages in economic espionage and diplomatic spying, something detailed in Glenn Greenwald’s recent book No Place to Hide.
5. There’s Plenty of Oversight From Congress, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and Agency Watchdogs
The discredited claim
We’ve repeatedly heard from the President and from NSA defenders like Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Mike Rogers that Congress knows all about NSA spying. Right after the first Snowden leak, President Obama said: “your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed on exactly what we’re doing.” We’ve also heard that a court has approved these programs, so we shouldn’t be concerned.
Why it’s not credible:
EFF and others have long documented that Congress has an incredibly hard time getting information about NSA spying. And it’s not just Congress. We learned a few months ago that the Department of Defense's deputy Inspector General, in charge of Intelligence and Special Program Assessments, was not aware of the call detail collection program.
What’s more, the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is completely incomparable to an ordinary adversarial court. It makes decisions in a vacuum, and it doesn’t always have complete information, much less a second adversarial voice or technical help. Its chief judge has said that it’s not equipped to conduct oversight. EFF recently had to tell the court that its Jewel v. NSA case even existed – the government had apparently decided that it didn’t have to. We also know that the FISC isn’t much of a block, since in 11 years “the court has denied just 10 applications, and modified several dozen, while approving more than 15,000.”
So why are we giving up our rights?
It's time for NSA and its supporters to admit what we all know is true: what is at stake in this debate is the simple ability for any of us—in the US or around the world—to be able to use the Internet without fear of surveillance. They continue to be willing to overstate their case in order to scare us into allowing them to continue to “collect it all.” But the American people are getting wise and the media are increasingly double-checking their claims. As a result, more Americans than ever now say that the NSA has gone too far and those tired old stories are starting to wear thin.
That’s why it’s time to tell Congress that these excuses won’t work anymore. Right now, Congress is considering legislation that could be a first step to reining in NSA mass spying. But there’s a contentious political battle taking place on Capitol Hill, with NSA defenders pushing a weaker version of the reform bill while civil liberties groups campaign for powerful reform. Please add your voice and call on the Senate to pass real NSA reform.
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Wednesday, 04 June 2014 15:14 |
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Davidson writes: "Want to be more sure that the people now at Guantánamo stay prisoners for an extended period of time? Then convict them of something; give them a sentence."
(photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Bowe Bergdahl and the Guantánamo Paradox
By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker
04 June 14
SEE ALSO: Forget the 'Taliban Five' – Obama's Real Chance Is to Free Gitmo's Cleared 78
 s it better, at Guantánamo, to be bad—even to be, as Senator John McCain said, of the five prisoners traded for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl this weekend, “the hardest of the hardcore”? Being, say, a Taliban leader means that you are important to someone who might have a way to bargain you out of there. That doesn’t seem to be true of the seventy-eight prisoners still at Guantánamo—more than half the present total of a hundred and forty-nine—who have been cleared for release, and are sitting there still. They are not the ones who were taken away by Qatari diplomats on Saturday. That is not an indictment of the deal itself, though there are questions enough about it. But the Bergdahl case, and the dismay with which it’s been greeted, is as good an illustration as any that we’ve had in a while of why Guantánamo does not make sense.
These five prisoners, known to be Taliban commanders and officials, were ones the Obama Administration had said should be held indefinitely, because they posed a threat. However, it was not prepared to charge them with any crime. One thing that the angry response to the trade revealed is that the implicit definition of “indefinite,” in many quarters, was “forever.” But indefinite means indefinite; when you have what, despite the frippery of various review boards, are essentially extrajudicial imprisonments based on the judgment of the executive, you might have people who get out a lot sooner than one would expect, too. Want to be more sure that the people now at Guantánamo stay prisoners for an extended period of time? Then convict them of something; give them a sentence.
Similarly, Guantánamo’s advocates have long dismissed legal (and moral) doubts by repeating the word “war,” arguing that these are battlefield prisoners. But prisoners of war get released when conflicts end. The main affiliation of these prisoners is the Taliban, not Al Qaeda, and their fight is the war in Afghanistan, which is winding down. (John Bellinger makes this point in a post at Lawfare.) They also get exchanged. One can’t have it both ways: there are laws associated with prisoners of war, too. The phrase “P.O.W.” is not just shorthand hand for “don’t have to go to court.”
Congress had passed a law saying that if the Secretary of Defense wanted to transfer or release a prisoner, it had to be notified thirty days ahead of time. The Obama Administration seems to be arguing, alternately, that it sort of did, and that it didn’t have to. Susan Rice, the national-security adviser, argued on CNN, that there were general briefings “when we had past potential to have this kind of arrangement.” And it doesn’t sound like many congressional Republicans do count that. (Mike Rogers said that he remembered some briefing in 2011, but said it was one that he and his colleagues didn’t like.) Secretary Hagel, over the weekend, said that Bergdahl’s declining health made a time lapse impractical. President Obama’s signing statement on the bill said that it might be unconstitutional if it kept him from acting “swiftly in conducting negotiations with foreign countries,” and, indeed, there is something constitutionally odd about a law designed to keep a specific list of people—some of whom, it can’t be said often enough, have been found not to be threats—imprisoned without trial. But Obama should not get a pass on this. He has, in general, dealt with congressional attempts to keep him from closing Guantánamo, such as restrictions on spending certain funds to move prisoners, with a sort of learned helplessness, as if all his good will had faced an impassable wall. He has not tried to find the everyday limits of the various restrictions, or challenged them, substantively, in less hectic circumstances. Bergdahl has been a prisoner for years. What else, by that standard, might count as an emergency?
The very worst of the worst at Guantánamo, if one had to pick, would likely be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other four September 11th conspirators. They are not likely to be traded soon. But they have been granted something that lesser prisoners don’t get: an actual legal proceeding against them, albeit in a military tribunal. At the moment, only those five and one other do, though there are about two dozen more the Obama Administration says it would like to try at some point. (The Miami Herald has a good rundown of the numbers.) Of all the prisoners who have passed through, only eight have ever been convicted. Uncertainty is a punishment, too. So is the lack of any narrative in one’s life.
The reaction to the trade has been complicated by the views of Bergdahl himself. Michael Hastings, in a piece he wrote for Rolling Stone before he died, reported that Bergdahl walked away from his unit, perhaps out of a sense of disillusionment. In the past few days, with his safety no longer in question, there have been more details about that, and more anger. On Tuesday morning, General Martin Dempsey wrote, on his Facebook page, “In response to those of you interested in my personal judgments about the recovery of SGT Bowe Bergdahl, the questions about this particular soldier’s conduct are separate from our effort to recover ANY U.S. service member in enemy captivity. This was likely the last, best opportunity to free him. As for the circumstances of his capture, when he is able to provide them, we’ll learn the facts. Like any American, he is innocent until proven guilty.” That is a fair statement, but the whole story has been caught in a whirl of feeling about how you recognize and react to a hero or a deserter, and the sacrifices asked of our soldiers. (Some of his former colleagues have said in recent days that troops were endangered and lives were lost in the search for Bergdahl, an issue which, the Times notes this morning, is not so simple to sort out.) Why did six of our troops die in Paktika in the period after Bergdahl went missing there? Where does the answer to that begin?
Those emotions are understandably hard to put aside in weighing the equation—five prisoners for Bergdahl. The question, for many, of whether any Guantánamo prisoners should be traded for an American has been muddled with that of whether this American was worth it. But the confusion is amplified because Guantánamo itself is governed by emotion rather than principle or procedure. We look at the prisoners who we never plan to charge with any crime and defer to our fear and anger. What can we trade, now, to be released from them?
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FOCUS | A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7646"><span class="small">Noam Chomsky, AlterNet</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 June 2014 11:08 |
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Chomsky writes: "In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency."
Prof. Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist and activist. (photo: Va Shiva)
A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination
By Noam Chomsky, AlterNet
04 June 14
A White House lawyer seems determined to demolish our civil liberties.
n the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.
The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, "No Place to Hide."
The documents unveil a remarkable project to expose to state scrutiny vital information about every person who falls within the grasp of the colossus - in principle, every person linked to the modern electronic society.
Nothing so ambitious was imagined by the dystopian prophets of grim totalitarian worlds ahead.
It is of no slight import that the project is being executed in one of the freest countries in the world, and in radical violation of the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, which protects citizens from "unreasonable searches and seizures," and guarantees the privacy of their "persons, houses, papers and effects."
Much as government lawyers may try, there is no way to reconcile these principles with the assault on the population revealed in the Snowden documents.
It is also well to remember that defense of the fundamental right to privacy helped to spark the American Revolution. In the 18th century, the tyrant was the British government, which claimed the right to intrude freely into the homes and personal lives of American colonists. Today it is American citizens' own government that abrogates to itself this authority.
Britain retains the stance that drove the colonists to rebellion, though on a more restricted scale, as power has shifted in world affairs. The British government has called on the NSA "to analyse and retain any British citizens' mobile phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses, swept up by its dragnet," The Guardian reports, working from documents provided by Snowden.
British citizens (like other international customers) will also doubtless be pleased to learn that the NSA routinely receives or intercepts routers, servers and other computer network devices exported from the United States so that it can implant surveillance tools, as Greenwald reports in his book.
As the colossus fulfills its visions, in principle every keystroke might be sent to President Obama's huge and expanding databases in Utah.
In other ways too, the constitutional lawyer in the White House seems determined to demolish the foundations of our civil liberties. The principle of the presumption of innocence, which dates back to Magna Carta 800 years ago, has long been dismissed to oblivion.
Recently The New York Times reported the "anguish" of a federal judge who had to decide whether to allow the force-feeding of a Syrian prisoner who is on a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment.
No "anguish" was expressed over the fact that he has been held without trial for 12 years in Guantanamo, one of many victims of the leader of the Free World, who claims the right to hold prisoners without charges and to subject them to torture.
These exposures lead us to inquire into state policy more generally and the factors that drive it. The received standard version is that the primary goal of policy is security and defense against enemies.
The doctrine at once suggests a few questions: security for whom, and defense against which enemies? The answers are highlighted dramatically by the Snowden revelations.
Policy must assure the security of state authority and concentrations of domestic power, defending them from a frightening enemy: the domestic population, which can become a great danger if not controlled.
It has long been understood that information about the enemy makes a critical contribution to controlling it. In that regard, Obama has a series of distinguished predecessors, though his contributions have reached unprecedented levels, as we have learned from the work of Snowden, Greenwald and a few others.
To defend state power and private economic power from the domestic enemy, those two entities must be concealed - while in sharp contrast, the enemy must be fully exposed to state authority.
The principle was lucidly explained by the policy intellectual Samuel P. Huntington, who instructed us that "Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate."
Huntington added a crucial illustration. In his words, "you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine" at the outset of the Cold War.
Huntington's insight into state power and policy was both accurate and prescient. As he wrote these words in 1981, the Reagan administration was launching its war on terror - which quickly became a murderous and brutal terrorist war, primarily in Central America, but extending well beyond to southern Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
From that day forward, in order to carry out violence and subversion abroad, or repression and violation of fundamental rights at home, state power has regularly sought to create the misimpression that it is terrorists that we are fighting, though there are other options: drug lords, mad mullahs seeking nuclear weapons, and other ogres said to be seeking to attack and destroy us.
Throughout, the basic principle remains: Power must not be exposed to the sunlight. Edward Snowden has become the most wanted criminal in the world for failing to comprehend this essential maxim.
In brief, there must be complete transparency for the population, but none for the powers that must defend themselves from this fearsome internal enemy.
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y new book, State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald, tells the story of a Soviet defector who returned to the United States and how he was closely watched over the final four years of his life. I examine the plans to kill Castro during this era; the operations surrounding the Cuban consulate in Mexico City in 1963; and how things went haywire when Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City two months before the Kennedy assassination.
