When CIA and NSA Workers Blow the Whistle, Congress Plays Deaf

By Patrick G. Eddington, The Intercept

27 October 16

 

o the committees that oversee the vast U.S. spying apparatus take intelligence community whistleblowers seriously? Do they earnestly investigate reports of waste, fraud, abuse, professional negligence, or crimes against the Constitution reported by employees or contractors working for agencies like the CIA or NSA? For the last 20 years, the answer has been a resounding “no.”

My own experience in 1995-96 is illustrative. Over a two-year period working with my wife, Robin (who was a CIA detailee to a Senate committee at the time), we discovered that, contrary to the public statements by then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell and other senior George H. W. Bush administration officials (including CIA Director John Deutch), American troops had in fact been exposed to chemical agents during and after the 1991 war with Saddam Hussein. While the Senate Banking Committee under then-Chairman Don Riegle, D-Mich., was trying to uncover the truth of this, officials at the Pentagon and CIA were working to bury it.

At the CIA, I objected internally — and was immediately placed under investigation by the CIA’s Office of Security. That became clear just days after we delivered the first of our several internal briefings to increasingly senior officials at the CIA and other intelligence agencies. In February 1995, I received a phone call from CIA Security asking whether I’d had any contacts with the media. I had not, but I had mentioned to CIA officials we’d met with that I knew that the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” was working on a piece about the Gulf War chemical cover-up. This call would not be the last I’d receive from CIA Security about the matter, nor the only action the agency would take against us.

In the spring of 1995, a former manager of Robin’s discreetly pulled her aside and said that CIA Security agents were asking questions about us, talking to every single person with or for whom either of us had worked. I seemed to be the special focus of their attention, and the last question they asked our friends, colleagues, and former managers was, “Do you believe Pat Eddington would allow his conscience to override the secrecy agreement he signed?”

The agency didn’t care about helping to find out why hundreds of thousands of American Desert Storm veterans were ill. All it cared about was whether I’d keep my mouth shut about what the secret documents and reports in its databases had to say about the potential or actual chemical exposures to our troops.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I began working on what would become a book about our experience: “Gassed in the Gulf.” The agency tried to block publication of the book and attempted to reclassify hundreds of previously declassified Department of Defense and CIA intelligence reports that helped us make our case. After I filed a lawsuit, the agency yielded. We left and became whistleblowers, our story a front-page sensation just days before the 1996 presidential election. Within six months, the CIA was forced to admit that it had indeed been withholding data on such chemical exposures, which were a possible cause of the post-war illnesses that would ultimately affect about one-third of the nearly 700,000 U.S. troops who served in Kuwait and Iraq. None of the CIA or Pentagon officials who perpetrated the cover-up were fired or prosecuted.

Around this time, a small, dedicated group of NSA employees was trying to solve another national security problem: how to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop successfully in the age of the internet.

Led by NSA crypto-mathematician Bill Binney, the team developed an ingenious technical program called ThinThread, which allowed the NSA to process incoming surveillance information but segregate and discard the communications of innocent Americans. The program was innovative, cheap, and badly needed. But just months before the 9/11 attacks, then-NSA Director Michael Hayden rejected ThinThread in favor of an untested, expensive alternative called Trailblazer, offered by a Washington, D.C.-based defense contractor. It became a pricey boondoggle that never produced a single piece of intelligence.

Enraged that a program they believed could have prevented the 9/11 attacks had been jettisoned, Binney and his colleagues privately approached the House Intelligence Committee. When that failed to produce results, they issued a formal complaint to the Defense Department’s inspector general.

The subsequent investigation validated the allegations of the NSA ThinThread team. But in spite of this vindication, all who had filed the complaint were subsequently investigated by the FBI on bogus charges of leaking classified information. The episode is now the subject of an Office of Special Counsel whistleblower reprisal investigation, involving former NSA senior manager and ThinThread proponent Tom Drake. I have read the Defense Department inspector general report, which is still almost completely classified, and filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking its declassification. The Pentagon has stonewalled my request for more than a year and a half.

Congress has made no effort to investigate any of this.

Within the small, tight-knit circle of ex-intelligence community whistleblowers and the nonprofit organizations that work on their behalf, the ThinThread/Trailblazer case became infamous. By early 2013, it had come to the attention of a young NSA contractor named Edward Snowden, who had surreptitiously collected damaging proof that the NSA had taken the very technology that Binney and his team had developed and turned it inward, on the American public.

After blowing the whistle to multiple news organizations, Snowden made clear that the terrible experience of the NSA ThinThread team had led him to believe that taking his concerns to Congress would be pointless. Given the subsequent revelations by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., that they privately objected to the George W. Bush administration’s domestic spying program but did nothing to stop it, Snowden’s decision was entirely rational.

In September 2016, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., released a three-page summary of a classified 36-page “damage assessment” on Snowden’s revelations. Although it claimed that Snowden’s disclosures had “caused tremendous damage to national security,” the committee produced no evidence that the leaks had led to the death of a single American. The committee did imply that Snowden had given American secrets to the Russians — an allegation no prosecutor involved in the case has made and not contained in the Justice Department’s indictment against him.

Most outrageously, the committee claimed that laws at the time provided protection for Snowden to blow the whistle through official channels. That’s false. Legal safeguards for contractors working for the NSA and other spy agencies existed in pilot form between 2008 and 2012. When they were up for renewal in the annual Defense Department policy bill in 2013, they were rejected — by the House Intelligence Committee.

We now live in a country where the committees charged with reining in excessive domestic spying instead too often act as apologists and attack dogs for the agencies they are charged with regulating. As a result, it’s pretty clear that those intelligence agencies — and not the elected representatives of the American people — are really running the show in Washington.

Latin American Women's Problem: We Keep Getting Murdered

By Ariadna Estévez, teleSUR

27 October 16

 

Feminicide is the murder of women because of their sexuality, reproductive features, and social status or success.

t’s not been a particularly uplifting month to be a woman in Latin America, especially if you read the news.

On Oct. 8 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, 16-year-old Lucía Pérez was abducted outside her school, drugged, and brutally gang raped. Young Lucía died when her heart stopped during the sadistic violence, which included penetration by objects.

In Mexico, three transgender women, Paola (last name unknown), Alessa Flores and Itzel Durán, were killed in different parts of the country. All were sex workers, and Flores and Durán were also trans rights activists. Just weeks before, Karen Rebeca Esquivel, 19, and Adriana Hernández Sánchez, 52, were found dead in suitcases in Naucalpan, State of Mexico, the deadliest place for women in the country. Both had been raped.

On Oct. 18, a young pregnant woman was found dead on a Peruvian beach with signs of rape and the word puta (whore) written on her leg.

Horrifying but not isolated, these incidents reflect a regional reality. Several studies have shown that Latin America is the worst place in the world to be a woman.

A Gallup survey has shown that Latin American women feel they are not treated with respect and dignity. Dissatisfaction was highest in Colombia, Paraguay, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru. The study attributes these feelings to widespread sexual violence and harassment against women and children, in combination with machista culture.

Hashtag movements for women, by women

Lucía’s murder in Argentina hit a nerve with women across the entire Latin American region. On October 19, thousands of people in Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador, France, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Costa Rica joined Argentina in street protests, demanding an end to the killing of women, misogyny and sexual violence.

The massive and simultaneous demonstrations were convened by the budding social movement #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneWomanLess). It was launched in August 2015 in Argentina as a response to an increasing number of feminicides. Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Mexico soon joined.

The international demonstrations have not only made the #MiercolesNegro (#BlackWednesday) and #ParoNacionalDeMujeres (#NationalWomensStrike) regional trending topics, they are also bringing light to the issue of violence across the region.

Esposa de exdiputado, violada de en autobús #Entera2 #MiPrimerAbuso https://t.co/ZKHGq6Gj5J

— Entera2 (@Entera2mx) June 21, 2016

Here are some statistics: in Argentina, 226 women were killed in 2016; and in Peru, there were 54.

And in Mexico, 40,000 women were killed between 1985 and 2014. Here, the systemic killing of women since the mid-1980s has been so severe that it led to the coining of the word feminicide as a sociolegal term for the deliberate killing of women, and its codification as a serious crime.

Despite recent institutional and legal changes in the country, such as the establishment of a national institute for women’s issues, a protocol for feminicide investigation, legalized abortion in Mexico City, and a bill for the protection of women from gender-based violence, the problem is getting worse. More than half of the 40,000 murders (23,000) occurred between 2000 and 2014.

Indeed, as I wrote in a previous article, it seems that Mexico’s bloody war on cartels, in addition to increasing general homicide rates, has specifically made gender-based violence more common as well.

Feminicide vs femicide?

The term “femicide” was coined by American feminists Jill Radford, Diana E. Russell and Jane Caputi to mean the misogynistic murder of women by men. Femicide is the politics of killing women, the extreme-most action of a terror continuum against women.

For American feminist thinkers, then, femicide includes a wide range of physical, discursive and sexual abuse against women and girls: rape, slavery, torture, incest, harassment, mutilation, forced heterosexuality, criminalisation of abortion and contraception.

Mexican feminists have modified this framework using our specific experience. Looking at the systemic killing of women in Ciudad Juarez in the 1990s, Julia Monárrez and Marcela Lagarde suggested the more accurate concept “feminicide”, based on the notion that femicide is just a gender-specific word for homicide while feminicide refers to the killing of women based on their social or biological gender, and the characteristics attributed to that gender.

Feminicide is, then, the murder of women because of their sexuality, reproductive features, and social status or success. Building on the Juarez case, Monárrez also coined the phrase “systemic sexual feminicide” to refer to the cultural, political, legal, economic, religious and social context that allows sexual violence to be widespread and feminicide to be its culmination.

Systemic sexual feminicide in Latin America has shaped legal notions, which have now been used by international bodies such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Recent murders in Argentina, Peru and Mexico demonstrate the importance of this concept to the region.

Likewise, American feminists would place this phenomenon on the continuum of sexual terrorism, but in Latin America the systematic and sexual nature of feminicide – painfully reflected in Lucía’s case – are closer to an experience of what Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero has called “horrorism”.

In her book Horrorism, Cavarero claims that while the term “terrorism” focuses on the perpetrator’s actions (the motivations of suicide bombers, for intance), it fails to describe the victim’s horror and experience of being defenceless, which is the terrorist’s aim.

The term “horrorism”, she argues, better describes the experiences of massacre and genocide victims, because it focuses on the suffering and powerlessness of the victims.

Following Cavarero’s ideas, we may assert that women’s permanent fear of sexual violence, along with the feeling of powerlessness vis-a-vis their rapist, is closer to horror than terror. Rape followed by feminicide is sexual horrorism.

The horror continuum of sexual harassment

During the #PrimaveraVioleta demonstration against sexual violence in Mexico in April 2016, the trending topic #MiPrimerAcoso (#MyFirstHarrassment) showed that feminicide sits on a sexual violence continuum.

It begins as systematic and widespread sexual harassment at the hands of friends, relatives, neighbours, teachers, schoolmates and strangers, to girls as young as five years old. It happens on the bus, at school, while shopping, in the work place, at the park and in women’s homes. It advances to sexual touching, violent abuse, and, as we’ve seen, murder.

#MiPrimerAcoso started as the response of the Brazilian feminist organisation Think Olga to people accusing girls of making up harassment stories. It was part of the group’s 2013 campaign against the normalisation of abuse against women. With #MiPrimerAcoso, Think Olga called on women to share on Twitter and Facebook their stories of the first time they were sexually harassed.

The movement has spread across the Americas, from Argentina to Mexico and the United States (with #MyFirstAbuse), with thousands of posts showing that women and girls experience harassment from boys and men starting at six years old, and that this type of abuse is so systematic and widespread that women have learnt to live with it. They, we, see it as normal.

Well, not anymore. Latin American women are saying enough is enough, and #MiPrimerAcoso is just the beginning.