Jake Tapper of CNN raised eyebrows recently by claiming that “the American people, honestly, want security over freedom.”
That would seem to be a big departure from the ideals of, say, Benjamin Franklin, who wrote that“those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
And is Tapper’s claim even true? Do the American people prioritize security over freedom? The most recent evidence doesn’t support Tapper’s claim.
The recent revelations about internet surveillance by the National Security Agency have created a “level of uncertainty or concern” among Cisco System’s customers internationally, says CFO Frank Calderone — and that has contributed to sliding demand for Cisco’s products.
Last quarter, new orders fell 12 percent in the developing world, with orders in Brazil down 25 percent and Russia down 30 percent. The governments of both Brazil and Russia have expressed serious concern over the revelations about NSA surveillance programs leaked by Edward Snowden. And Cisco isn’t alone — IBM’s sales have also fallen on similar concerns.
First, I want to congratulate the NSA-leaker Edward Snowden for his courage and the great service he has done to Americans and to the world in exposing the NSA’s PRISM surveillance programs. The man must have balls the size of basketballs, although perhaps letting the world know his location — in Hong Kong, territory controlled by the People’s Republic of China, another nation that runs its own share of online surveillance programs — was unwise.
Some critics like the New York Times’ David Brooks say that what Snowden did was wrong, and that he showed a lack of respect for authority. It is certainly true that we live in an age where distrust of authority and the state has become commonplace. But perhaps that is only fair — after all, it is just ten years since the Iraq war, a war for which David Brooks was a cheerleader, wasted trillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, and hundreds of thousands of lives chasing after so-called weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. If my state goes about wasting my money and thousands and thousands of lives on destroying foreign lands chasing after non-existent weapons of mass destruction, I am prone to distrust the state. Had the security services’ claims been subjected to proper scrutiny, it is possible that the disaster of Iraq could have been averted. Snowden is opening the surveillance and intelligence agencies that brought us the Iraq war — and that have now brought us PRISM — to proper public scrutiny.
In a democratic society, this is critical. These mass surveillance programs have been implemented without any real public discussion, precisely because they have been enacted in secret. This means that there has been no public discussion of goals, evidence, effectiveness and procedure.
We don’t know how effective or ineffective these programs are, because they have been concocted, enacted and analysed secretly. The security services have, in the interests of “national security” been empowered to enact the policies of their choice with limited governmental oversight, and certainly no public oversight. Their implicit hypothesis — that mass surveillance can prevent or reduce terrorism — has not as far as I can tell been subjected to serious academic scrutiny, at least publicly. This is not a scientific approach to policy — it is a knee-jerk approach to policy. In science, you collect data, release your findings and let others review your data, not claim a finding, secretly enact policies based on that finding, and hide any data.
We know that PRISM did not stop the Boston Bombings, or Sandy Hook, or the Aurora massacre. So perhaps it is the case that mass surveillance programs are ineffective against terrorists, particularly lone wolves who may exist outside of traditional social networks. Agencies have many questions to answer. Are there not more effective methods to preventing terrorism than dragnet surveillance? On what scientific basis have agencies enacted their current policies? Would Geiger counters not be more effective than surveillance dragnets in preventing nuclear terrorism? Where is the data to show that mass surveillance is or can be effective?
The bigger question, though, is whether the agencies involved considered the constitutional implications of their actions. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution states:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This empowers agencies to search and seize only with a warrant that particularly describes the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. A dragnet like PRISM would seem to obliterate any such protections. Did the NSA and those who empowered them to undertake surveillance consider PRISM to be constitutional? If so, why? Although only a slim majority of Americans are against monitoring everyone’s electronic communications for the purposes of preventing terrorism, the Constitution is very clear about the conditions necessary in order to seize evidence.
Ultimately, the essence of national security are the legal and constitutional frameworks upon which civilised countries are based. By shredding constitutional protections through unaccountable and secretive mass surveillance programs, governments may be giving up the national security that they claim to be seeking to save. Only with transparency and daylight can society properly assess which measures are effective and acceptable to public safety and public liberty, and implement them in an accountable way.
This graph shows everything we need to know about the geopolitical reality of Predator Drones (coming soon to the skies of America to hunt down fugitives?).
The American public loves drone strikes:
The American public does not approve of the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. But for everyone else, it’s open season.
But everyone else — most particularly and significantly, the countries in the Muslim world — largely hates and resents drone strikes.
And it is the Muslim world that produces the radicalised extremists who commit acts like 9/11, 7/7, the Madrid bombings, and the Bali bombings. With this outpouring of contempt for America’s drone strikes, many analysts are coming to believe that Obama’s drone policy is now effectively a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda, the Taliban and similar groups:
Indeed, evidence is beginning to coalesce to suggest exactly this. PressTV recently noted:
The expanding drone war in Yemen, which often kills civilians, does in fact cause blowback and help al-Qaeda recruitment – as attested to by numerous Yemen experts, investigative reporting on the ground, polling, testimony from Yemen activists, and the actual fact that recent bungled terrorist attacks aimed at the U.S. have cited such drone attacks as motivating factors.
After another September drone strike that killed 13 civilians, a local Yemeni activist told CNN, “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of al-Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake. This part of Yemen takes revenge very seriously.”
“Our entire village is angry at the government and the Americans,” a Yemeni villager named Mohammed told the Post. “If the Americans are responsible, I would have no choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting America.”
Many in the U.S. intelligence community also believe the drone war is contributing to the al-Qaeda presence in Yemen. Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA’s counter-terrorism center and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan, told The Guardian in June that he is “very concerned about the creation of a larger terrorist safe haven in Yemen.”
“We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield,” he said regarding drones in Yemen.
Iona Craig reports that civilian casualties from drone strikes “have emboldened al-Qaeda” and cites the reaction to the 2009 U.S. cruise missile attack on the village of al-Majala in Yemen that killed more than 40 civilians (including 21 children):
That one bombing radicalized the entire area,” Abdul Gh ani al-Iryani, a Yemeni political analyst, said. “All the men and boys from those families and tribes will have joined [al-Qaeda] to fight.
And al-Qaeda’s presence and support in Yemen has grown, not shrunk since the start of the targeted killing program:
Meanwhile Yemen Central Security Force commander Brig. Gen. Yahya Saleh, nephew of ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh, told Abdul-Ahad that al-Qaeda has more followers, money, guns and territory then they did a year and a half ago.
All at a time when Yemen is facing a “catastrophic” food crisis, with at least 267,000 children facing life-threatening levels of malnutrition. Hunger has doubled since 2009, and the number of displaced civilians is about 500,000 and rising.
As U.S. drones drop bombs on south Yemen villages and AQAP provides displaced civilians with “free electricity, food and water,” tribes in the area are becoming increasingly sympathetic to AQAP.
Let’s be intellectually honest. If a country engages in a military program that carries out strikes that kill hundreds of civilians — many of whom having no connection whatever with terrorism or radicalism — that country is going to become increasingly hated. People in the countries targeted — those who may have lost friends, or family members — are going to plot revenge, and take revenge. That’s just how war works. It infuriates. It radicalises. It instils hatred.
The reality of Obama’s drone program is to create new generations of America-hating radicalised individuals, who may well go on to be the next Osama bin Laden, the next Ayman al-Zawahiri, the next Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The reality for Obama’s drone program is that it is sowing the seeds for the next 9/11 — just as American intervention in the middle east sowed the seeds for the last, as Osama bin Laden readily admitted.
Warren Buffett wants to give Jamie Dimon a job:
On the Charlie Rose show [last month], Buffett was asked what kind of message it would send if President Obama picked Jamie Dimon or another Wall Street banker to succeed Timothy Geithner, who has expressed a desire to leave the post after Obama’s first term.
“I think he’d be terrific,” said Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, about Dimon. “If we did run into problems in markets, I think he’d actually be the best person you could have in the job.”
Buffett added that Dimon would have the confidence of world leaders if he were appointed to the Treasury post.
Warren Buffett is one of America’s biggest bailout beneficiaries, having profited hugely from buying into firms whose assets were subsequently bailed out. Shortly after the crisis began in 2008, Warren Buffett loaned money to, and bought options from, Goldman Sachs, seemingly with the knowledge the bailout of AIG — a counterparty to which Goldman had massive, massive exposure — would take place.
Dimon as Treasury Secretary would intend more of the same. Dimon and Buffett and others like them believe in having their cake and eating it. They seem to believe that the U.S. taxpayer should provide a liquidity lifeline to their fragile and risky too-big-to-fail businesses, but without at the same time demanding any regulatory oversight to prevent too-big-to-fail banks from acting irresponsibly.
The Financial Times noted in 2011:
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, launched a broadside against financial regulation on Wednesday, warning that new capital rules could be “the nail in our coffin for big American banks”.
Regulators are negotiating international capital standards for the biggest banks but Mr Dimon said setting the new requirements too high, or allowing overseas banks to calculate their asset base differently, could disadvantage US banks and was already stifling economic growth.
If you want to set it so high that no big bank ever goes bankrupt … I think that would greatly diminish growth,” he told a US Chamber of Commerce conference. Too large a disparity in capital requirements between Europe and the US would mean “you’re pretty much putting the nail in our coffin for big American banks,” he said.
What this really amounts to is a lack of skin in the game. Big banks can gamble and speculate without remorse and without risk — if they win they keep the proceeds, and if they lose the taxpayer will pick up the pieces. This destroys the market mechanism, and any hope of self-regulation. Were lessons learned from 2008? If the antics of Corzine, Kweku Adoboli and the London Whale — just three big financial blowups in the last year — are any guide, big finance is acting just as irresponsibly and self-destructively as before the crisis.
Buffett and Dimon surely have in mind more cronyism, bailouts and free lunches, but the reality of the next four years and beyond may be very different indeed.
While it is impossible to predict exactly when the next crisis will emerge, the current slump in capital goods orders, the intractable debt overhang, and the general trend of ditching the dollar as a reserve currency do not look good. As one of the architects (both practically and ideologically) of the current mess, Dimon as Treasury Secretary would at least get all the blowback and blame when the bubblecovery finally implodes into a currency or supply chain crisis that cannot be bailed out through liquidity injections.
A beautiful cartoon that exposes the absurdity of the Petraeus saga:
A radical idea: instead of carrying out assassinations based on secret kill lists, perhaps the Federal government could start obeying the Constitution, and start issuing arrest warrants or extradition requests for individuals suspected of criminal activity so that they can be tried by a court of law in front of a jury of their peers. We used to call this strange and antiquated notion due process.
The decision to use flying death robots — or as they are known in common speech “drones” — to indiscriminately assassinate terrorism suspects (and their families and neighbours) has already created a new swelling of anger against America in the nations where suspected terrorists have been targeted. As Obama himself recently put it, “there’s no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.” Presumably, this includes Pakistan, and Yemen, and Libya and Somalia, and other nations where American drone missiles have rained down on citizens?
And one day, other nations — like China, which is rapidly putting drones into the skies — might choose to use flying death robots to assassinate their own suspected terrorists on American soil. Would the American government have any grounds to complain?
A 19-year old man was arrested yesterday for the supposed crime of burning a Remembrance Poppy and posting a picture of the incident on Facebook.
A teenager arrested on Remembrance Sunday on suspicion of posting a picture of a burning poppy on Facebook is being questioned by police.
The 19-year-old was held after the image of a poppy being set ablaze by a lighter was reportedly posted online with the caption: “How about that you squadey cunts”.
Police said the man, from Canterbury, Kent, was detained on suspicion of an offence under the Malicious Communications Act after officers were contacted at about 4pm on Sunday.
This is simply dangerous, absurd and Orwellian.
It is just the latest in a succession of police actions against individuals deemed to have caused offence: mocking a collapsed footballer on Twitter; hoping that British service personnel would “die and go to hell”; wearing a T-shirt that celebrated the death of two police officers; making sick jokes on Facebook about a missing child. Each time the police have arrested people for nothing more than expressing an unpopular, outrageous or offensive opinion.
Britain is setting a precedent for trampling all over free speech in the interest of enforcing public morality. Mussolini would be proud.
The point of free speech is not to protect popular speech. It is to protect us from becoming a society where the expression of unpopular, offensive and distasteful ideas is criminalised. That is the surest guard against totalitarian tendencies.
This new incident is particularly bizarre. Children are taught in school that Britain fought the Second World War to defeat fascism. They are taught that the deaths of British soldiers commemorated on Remembrance Sunday were for the cause of freedom, to defeat fascism, to defeat totalitarianism. And now we arrest people merely for making offensive comments and burning symbols?
Are we turning into the thing that we once fought?
What has happened to free speech?
What has happened to Britain?
It took ten years, but finally Theresa May, the British Home Secretary, has denied the United States’ extradition request for Gary McKinnon, the British hacker who broke into the Pentagon and NASA.
This was an absurd case from the start, and it is awful that McKinnon, who essentially did nothing wrong other than exploit incompetence — the systems he entered had blank passwords — had to live for ten years with the shadow of spending sixty or seventy years in a Federal Supermax.
McKinnon was searching for evidence of exotic energy and flying-saucer technology, and believes he found evidence of the latter, describing seeing images of a cigar-shaped craft:
Recently declassified documents corroborate that the United States Air Force was working on supersonic flying-saucer-type craft in the 1950s:
The aircraft, which had the code name Project 1794, was developed by the USAF and Avro Canada in the 1950s. One declassified memo, which seems to be the conclusion of initial research and prototyping, says that Project 1794 is a flying saucer capable of “between Mach 3 and Mach 4,” (2,300-3,000 mph) a service ceiling of over 100,000 feet (30,500m), and a range of around 1,000 nautical miles (1,150mi, 1850km).
Whatever the truth behind McKinnon’s claims, it is encouraging that Britain has finally stood up for its sovereignty and refused the United States’ extradition request. Britain is — at least in theory — an independent country, and not merely a corner of the America empire and there is absolutely no reason beyond dogged loyalty that the British government should be cowed into complying with American demands. America’s neoconservative policy elite have already dragged Britain into multiple stupid and awful invasions and occupations of the middle east, costing billions of pounds and thousands of lives, jeopardising Britain’s national security, and making Britain into a prime target for international terrorism. Rejecting this extradition request is a good first step toward restoring British integrity.
I expected to spend quite some time writing about the Obama administration’s successful appeal against Katherine Forrest’s historic gutting of the indefinite detention provision of the NDAA. Yet I can add very little to Glenn Greenwald’s summation:
In May, something extremely rare happened: a federal court applied the US constitution to impose some limits on the powers of the president. That happened when federal district court judge Katherine Forrest of the southern district of New York, an Obama appointee, preliminarily barred enforcement of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the statute enacted by Congress in December 2011 with broad bipartisan support and signed into law by President Obama (after he had threatened to veto it).
That 2011 law expressly grants the president the power to indefinitely detain in military custody not only accused terrorists, but also their supporters, all without charges or trial. It does so by empowering the president to indefinitely detain not only al-Qaida members, but also members of so-called “associated forces”, as well as anyone found to “substantially support” such forces – whatever those terms might mean. I wrote about that decision and the background to this case when it was issued.
What made Judge Forrest’s ruling particularly remarkable is that the lawsuit was brought by eight journalists and activists, such as former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, and Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who argued that their work, which involves interactions with accused terrorists, could subject them to indefinite detention under the law’s broad and vague authority, even for US citizens on US soil. The court agreed, noting that the plaintiffs presented “evidence of concrete – non-hypothetical – ways in which the presence of the legislation has already impacted those expressive and associational activities”. The court was particularly disturbed by the Obama DOJ’s adamant refusal to say, in response to being asked multiple times, that the law could not be used to indefinitely detain the plaintiffs due to their journalistic and political activities.
I was one of a chorus of writers who thanked Katherine Forrest for her intervention:
These new powers have nothing to with combatting terrorism. If the government has no evidence that can stand up in a court of law it has no business detaining anyone. No, this new power grab has an entirely different target — like the plaintiffs in this case: writers, investigative journalists, bloggers, philosophers, dissidents, human rights activists, libertarians, free-thinkers, tax protestors, critics of fractional-reserve banking, whistleblowers — people like Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Jennifer Bolen, and Birgitta Jonsdottir. People like Congressman Justin Amash and Congressman Adam Smith who tried to amend indefinite detention out of the bill. People like me — and to some degree, if you are reading this, people like you.
The fact that the Obama administration could not give assurances about those who simply criticise U.S. foreign policy indicates very strongly that this power grab is about shutting-up and frightening critics of the U.S. government and the Obama administration.
But — for now — §1021 of the NDAA, that implement of fascism, has been struck down and thrown out as “facially unconstitutional” as well as having a “chilling impact on First Amendment rights”.
We should thankful for this brave judge’s actions, and for the plaintiffs actions in standing up to tyranny, and vigilant against future incursions.
On the other hand, every politician involved in writing, legislating and authorising this hideous unconstitutional law should be reminded of the words of the Declaration of Independence — it is the right of the people to alter or abolish any government that becomes destructive to liberty.
And last week, Katherine Forrest demolished the Obama administrations protestations once again:
Last week, Judge Forrest made her preliminary ruling permanent, issuing a 112-page decision explaining it. Noting that the plaintiffs “testified credibly to having an actual and reasonable fear that their activities will subject them to indefinite military detention”, she emphasized how dangerous this new law is given the extremely broad discretion it vests in the president to order people detained in military custody with no charges:
The court also brushed aside the Obama DOJ’s prime argument, echoing the theories of John Yoo: namely, that courts have no business “interfering” in the president’s conduct of war. After acknowledging that the president is entitled to deference in the national security realm, Judge Forrest dispensed with the Obama DOJ’s claim with this vital observation: one that should be unnecessary but, in the 9/11 era, is all too commonly ignored:
In other words: while the president is entitled to deference in his conduct of war, he’s not entitled to wield the power to order people, including American citizens, indefinitely imprisoned in military detention. Regardless of how he claims he intends to exercise this power, the mere act of vesting it in him so chills the exercise of first amendment and other protected rights that the constitution can have no meaning if courts permit it to stand.
Yet the Obama administration, it seems, does not like the Constitution:
In response to this ruling, the Obama administration not only filed an immediate appeal, but they filed an emergency motion asking the appeals court to lift the injunction pending the appeal. Obama lawyers wrote a breathless attack on the court’s ruling, denouncing it as “vastly troubling” and claiming that it “threatens tangible and dangerous consequences in the conduct of an active military conflict” and “threatens irreparable harm to national security”.
While the Bush and Obama DOJs have long absurdly interpreted the 2001 AUMF to apply to this broader range, and while some courts have accepted that interpretation, the law itself vested no such power. The NDAA did. That is why civil liberties groups such as the ACLU denounced Obama’s signing of it so vociferously, and it is why the Obama DOJ is so horrified, obviously, by the prospect that it will be invalidated: precisely because it so drastically expands their detention power. Both the court’s ruling and the Obama DOJ’s reaction to that ruling prove that the NDAA does indeed provide the president with significantly enhanced authority of indefinite detention.
Greenwald draws a brilliant and frightening parallel:
On the very same day that the Obama DOJ fights vigorously in US courts for the right to imprison people without charges, the Afghan government fights just as vigorously for basic due process.
Remember: the US, we’re frequently told, is in Afghanistan to bring democracy to the Afghan people and to teach them about freedom. But the Afghan government is refusing the US demand to imprison people without charges on the ground that such lawless detention violates their conceptions of basic freedom. Maybe Afghanistan should invade the US in order to teach Americans about freedom.
This development should be deeply troubling for all Americans, and all of us who believe that the values of the American revolution — freedom of speech, liberty, representation, due process — should be a light unto the world.
The first rule of Fight Club?
You don’t talk about Fight Club.
Obama isn’t a member of Fight Club; he’s a member of Drone Club — which targets individuals in foreign lands, including American citizens and their families, for extrajudicial assassination by drone. And the first rule of Drone Club?
You don’t talk about it.
Apple has for the third time this month rejected an iPhone app which alerts the user to a drone attack and to the number of people killed. Drones+ enables those concerned to track the strikes to their handset.
This is no doubt an uncomfortable prospect for the US authorities, whose use of drones extends to Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, where no war has been declared. Such drone strikes have killed more than 3,300 people in Pakistan alone since 2004, according to reports by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Now we don’t know who made this decision, whether Apple thinks that citizens knowing of drone strikes is a national security risk, or whether Apple were leaned on by the CIA, NSA or Pentagon — though given that Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other Presidents combined, the latter wouldn’t be entirely unsurprising. Nonetheless, whatever the truth this is a very disturbing development — after all, how can we rightly judge the administration’s foreign and national security policy without having up to date facts?
Obama claims that the drone strikes are conducted on a very rigorous basis:
1 “It has to be a target that is authorised by our laws.”
2 “It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative.”
3 “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”
4 “We’ve got to make sure that in whatever operations we conduct, we are very careful about avoiding civilian casualties.”
5 “That while there is a legal justification for us to try and stop [American citizens] from carrying out plots … they are subject to the protections of the Constitution and due process.”
At least two of those five points appear to be half-truths at best. In both Yemen and Pakistan, the CIA is allowed to launch a strike based on the target’s “signature” — that is, whether he appears to look and act like a terrorist. As senior U.S. officials have repeatedly confirmed, intelligence analysts don’t even have to know the target’s name, let alone whether he’s planning to attack the U.S. In some cases, merely being a military-aged male at the wrong place at the wrong time is enough to justify your death.
Micah Zenko adds:
What I found most striking was his claim that legitimate targets are a ‘threat that is serious and not speculative,’ and engaged in ‘some operational plot against the United States. The claim that the 3,000+ people killed in roughly 375 nonbattlefield targeted killings were all engaged in actual operational plots against the U.S. defies any understanding of the scope of what America has been doing for the past ten years.
Of course, just as worrying as the actual policy is the fact that the public widely approves of it.
The sharpest edges of President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, including the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists abroad and keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, have broad public support, including from the left wing of the Democratic Party.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to close the brig in Cuba and to change national security policies he criticized as inconsistent with U.S. law and values, has little to fear politically for failing to live up to all of those promises.
The survey shows that 70 percent of respondents approve of Obama’s decision to keep open the prison at Guantanamo Bay. He pledged during his first week in office to close the prison within a year, but he has not done so.
Obama has also relied on armed drones far more than Bush did, and he has expanded their use beyond America’s defined war zones. The Post-ABC News poll found that 83 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s drone policy, which administration officials refuse to discuss, citing security concerns.
83%? It was George Lucas’ Princess Amidala who noted that freedom usually dies to thunderous applause.
Extrajudicial punishments are by their nature unlawful, since they bypass the due process of the legal jurisdiction in which they occur. Extrajudicial killings often target leading political, trade union, dissident, religious, and social figures and may be carried out by the state government or other state authorities like the armed forces and police.
I’d like to see Obama answering as to whether his sanctioning of extrajudicial killing resides within the rule of law.
Ben Swann wanted to know the same thing, but Obama wasn’t answering:
You don’t talk about Drone Club.
azizonomics 
