Category: Domestic Surveillance

Our 4th Branch of Government

Everyone knows our government has 3 branches; the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial. That’s basic high school civics. But, it’s no longer true. The US government now seems to have a 4th branch: The national security apparatus, which has unfathomable power and reach.

From Tom Engelhard: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

New efforts at “reforms” will, at best, only modestly impede the powers of this [security] state within a state. Generally speaking, its powers and prerogatives remain beyond constraint by our judicial branch of government. It is deferred to with remarkable frequency by the executive branch and, with the rarest of exceptions, it has been supported handsomely with much obeisance and few doubts by Congress.

The national security apparatus is unelected. After last week’s mea culpa by Mr. Obama, apparently it has also moved beyond our Constitutional rules of checks and balances. You may recall that a report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) on the CIA’s Rendition/Detention/Interrogation (RDI) program, was held up by the CIA. Along the way, we learned that the CIA was improperly spying on the SSCI.

In March, CIA Director John Brennan said spying on the Senate was outside the realm of possibility, claiming:

As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s — that’s just beyond the — you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.

Now we learn they did exactly that. The CIA Inspector General has found that:

CIA employees improperly accessed computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to compile a report on the agency’s now defunct detention and interrogation program,

On August 1st, the administration defended the CIA and Brennan’s actions. But Brennan DID obstruct the investigation, he leveled false charges at the Senate Intelligence Committee staff, filed those charges with Department of Justice, and then oversaw the process of redacting the damning CIA report.

From the Booman Tribune:

By any normal standard, John Brennan would be prosecuted for his actions. But he is being protected by the administration. I don’t think this is best explained by the idea that Brennan is doing a good job in other respects. He’s a major embarrassment to the administration and protecting him makes them look extremely bad. From the very beginning of his administration, I think President Obama has simply been afraid to take on the Intelligence Community.

And remember Mr. Obama’s rationale:

…we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values. I understand why it happened…there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. And, you know, it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots…

He has clearly taken a side and it’s not that of transparency, or the Constitution. Or, do we live in a country where the President works at the direction of the head of the CIA?

Alternative Obama: If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a dozen times, look forward, because if you look backward you’re going to learn from history and then how are we ever going to continue weakening your Constitution?

Alternative Alternative Obama: John Brennan has a gun to my head. Keeps reminding me of how much my Presidency looks like that of JFK. Worries about my safety…

That might explain his lack of political courage, but, political courage is exactly what is required if we are to get off the self-destructive path this country is walking. Sadly, we aren’t seeing that. Too many are scared that they might lose their jobs if the boss saw their political action. Too many are flummoxed by how easily Congress can be co-opted by money. Too many in our media are giving right-wing politicians a pass because it’s clear that they won’t change.

There’s no excuse for the people who tortured or, who lied to Congress, even if they were under ‘enormous pressure’. They knew the difference between right and wrong. And the fact that John Kiriakou is in prison for revealing that the US tortured, while Cofer Black, David Addington, John Yoo, John Brennan and Jose Rodriquez, all of whom played a role in the torture program roam free, shows that our political elite’s ethics are upside-down.

Holding individuals, particularly direct actors (like torturers) and advisers who engineered the torture program accountable before the law would not destroy the effectiveness of the CIA or the security state. Those who violated the law should be prosecuted. But those who did not violate the law should be free to conduct operations on behalf of the US. They shouldn’t be made to feel that they are weakened or wronged.

In response to the related question that often arises: “What? Do you want the CIA to be looking over its shoulder or consulting a lawyer every time it needs to get something done? The answer is: “Of course”.

We should expect nothing less than that from every elected official from the President down to local mayors, police chiefs and commissioners. Particularly from those who have the statutory authority to harm others.

It is difficult to imagine today that what sounded like poetry at the first Obama inauguration is now mockery. Sadly, it’s not about unfulfilled expectations of more hopeful things; we understand the political dynamic at work in Washington. It is that among his “achievements” has been the further weakening of our constitutional rights through his compliant treatment of the emergent 4th branch of government.

 

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 3, 2014

For those on vacation, or without access to the Interwebs, here is a summation of this week’s wrong:
• The Senate couldn’t pass a bill to impose taxes on companies that move overseas
• The House didn’t vote on Mr. Boehner’s immigration bill because Sen. Ted Cruz blocked it
• We brokered a 72-hour cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that lasted 90 minutes
• The Times of Israel took down a blog post that made a case for genocide
• Mr. Obama admitted that we torture

That’s not a lot of humor to work with, but here are the best. Congress hurries to not finish their work:

COW DoNothing

 

Ted Cruz driving baby Boehner:

COW Cruz

 

Genocide of Palestinians is contemplated in the Times of Israel:

Genocide

Yochanan Gordon framed his premise as “a question for all the humanitarians out there”:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people. If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?

Umm, wasn’t that the excuse Nazis gave the world about Jews, Gypsies, and Homosexuals?

And Mr. Netanyahu told the White House not to force a truce with Palestinian militants on Israel. He apparently advised the Obama administration “not to ever second guess me again” on the matter.

So, it looks increasingly like we need a 3-State solution:

COW Ceasefire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In yesterday’s speech, President Obama said “We tortured some folks” and that “we shouldn’t be too sanctimonious”. The President:

It is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those folks had… A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots…That needs to be understood and accepted. We have to as a country take responsibility for that so hopefully we don’t do it again in the future.

Apparently, some people didn’t agree:

What would cause Mr. Obama to make this “apology” for torture? Has he lost touch, or is he living in a bubble of intelligence advisers that he can’t or won’t fire?

This is reminiscent of the way that J. Edgar Hoover controlled (or intimidated) presidents in what we used to think was another age. Who, or what, is making this president say such crap, and not take what are to most of us, obvious actions?

 

 

 

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The Steady Erosion of Due Process Rights

Do the incarcerated lose the right to email privacy when they are institutionalized? Last week, the NYT reported on a case where prosecutors were reading the email correspondence between a prisoner and his lawyers. But this wasn’t a case at GITMO, it was at a federal prison in Brooklyn, NY.

The extortion case against Thomas DiFiore, a reputed boss in the Bonanno crime family, encompassed thousands of pages of evidence, but even as he was sending daily emails to his lawyers:

…federal prosecutors informed Mr. DiFiore last month that they would be reading the emails sent to his lawyers from jail, potentially using his own words against him.

The Times says that federal prosecutors around the country have begun reading prisoners’ emails to their lawyers. The issue has spurred court battles over whether inmates have a right to confidential email communications with their lawyers — a question on which federal judges have been divided.

All defendants using the federal prison email system, Trulincs, have to read and accept a notice that communications are monitored. So prosecutors point out that defendants are forewarned. Defense lawyers say the government is overstepping its authority and taking away a necessary tool for an adequate defense. Prosecutors say there are other ways for defense lawyers to communicate with clients; defense lawyers say the other methods are very inefficient.

In Brooklyn and across the country, the issue is being decided case by case.

The Times reports on a case In Georgia, in which a man named Jared Wheat used Trulincs email to work on ads for a banned weight-loss product. The FTC used the emails as part of a successful contempt case, arguing he violated a permanent injunction barring him from making unsubstantiated weight-loss claims.

Mr. Wheat’s lawyers said the trade commission’s request for the emails was illegal. Federal regulations allow mail sent to prisons to be marked as privileged:

…and email, particularly in the 21st century, has effectively replaced US Postal Service mail for most communications, and this court should not treat it differently than traditional mail.

But judge Charles A. Pannell Jr. of the US District Court in Atlanta, ruled in 2012 that by using Trulincs, Mr. Wheat “consented to the monitoring and thus had no reasonable expectation of privacy.”

That’s like saying that by using the space in prison for in-person meetings with lawyers, the prisoner “consents” to eavesdropping. A prisoner has a right to communicate with his lawyer, and the burden should be on the prison to see that the right to the confidentiality is preserved through each avenue of communication provided by the prison as much as it is through other avenues.

In the DiFiore case, his lawyer, Steve Zissou, tried to persuade a judge to stop prosecutors from monitoring his client’s emails:

Regardless of whether such communications qualify for protection under the attorney-client privilege, the government’s decision to read our communications with our client is entirely inappropriate.

The judge overseeing that case, Allyne R. Ross, ruled last Thursday that the government was allowed to review the emails. She wrote:

The government’s policy does not ‘unreasonably interfere’ with Mr. DiFiore’s ability to consult his counsel.

In the case of another Brooklyn-based prisoner, Syed Imran Ahmed, a surgeon accused of Medicare fraud who is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the decision went another way. In Dr. Ahmed’s case, the judge, Dora L. Irizarry, ruled against the government last month, barring it “from looking at any of the attorney-client emails, period.”

She seemed to take particular offense at an argument by a prosecutor, F. Turner Buford, who suggested that prosecutors merely wanted to avoid the expense and hassle of having to separate attorney-client emails from other emails sent via Trulincs. The government was not otherwise interested in the contents of those messages, he said. From Judge Irizarry:

That’s hogwash…You’re going to tell me you don’t want to know what your adversary’s strategy is? What kind of a litigator are you then? Give me a break.

Communications between lawyer and client should be privileged no matter the form of communication. It is disturbing to see Americans asleep at the wheel as our civil liberties over the past decade have eroded with little resistance.

So, the crux of the matter is that if the law is denied to some, we are all at risk.

The majority who say that they “have nothing to hide” do not understand this. They do not understand that for democracy to be worth its salt, it must defend the rights of everyone, in particular, those with whom we disagree, those who live differently from us, or who think differently from the majority.

America as we know it can easily survive without everyone having access to assault rifles, but it cannot survive without everyone having access to due process.

As go our due process rights, so will go our democracy.

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Did 9/11 Change Everything?

“He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend.” –Hubert Selby Jr.

The Wrongologist has changed the blog’s “Quotes We Like” sidebar to add the quote above.  The quote is from Selby’s Requiem for a Dream. He also wrote Last Exit To Brooklyn. These are two gritty American novels of their time and place. Exit was published in 1964 and presents a view of 1950’s Brooklyn NY. Requiem was published in 1978. Both were made into movies. Selby died in 2004.

In a Salon article in 2000, Selby is quoted about Requiem:

The dream I’m referring to in the book, of course, is the great American dream: prosperity, property, prestige, etc. And the fact that it’ll kill you dead. Striving for it is a disaster. Attaining it is a killer. It takes many forms, and the results are not happy. It’s not a feel-good thing

Selby continues:

‘Requiem’ is about the cancer of that dream…Of course, there are a lot of people who are successful who work very hard. They’re not all George W. Bush. But the point is they’re misguided. That’s not what life is about. We believe, probably more than anywhere, that life is getting all this material stuff. It’s a case of misguided ambition and desire

We can take this further. Today, America doesn’t know what is defeating it. America senses that it can’t cope, that there are things happening that are beyond our control or comprehension:
• We can no longer solve our domestic problems
• We are powerless to deal with the Malaysian airline disaster in Ukraine
• We can’t resolve the tri-partite struggle in Iraq
• We can no longer restrain Israel in its non-proportional response to Hamas
• We are no longer on the same side as our long-term Middle East allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt
• We can’t figure out a non-military response for China’s initiatives throughout Asia

In fact, we no longer have a non-military response to any foreign problem. The power strategies that we employed throughout the 1950’s, continuing down to the end of the Soviet Union no longer work. Back then, we played chess, moving pieces across the board. We used whichever proxies or allies were at hand, we overthrew elected governments, thereby violating our own ideology. We supported and installed dictatorial governments. We promised freedom and prosperity, while helping to deliver hegemony, based on our military intervention, or the threat of it.

Today, we have no answers, only posturing from all of our leaders. We have become the kind of people who criticize, not the kind of people who can solve problems.

We are no longer king-makers in the third world, the neo-conservative approach of use of military power cannot stand in the face of asymmetric warfare and the devastating superiority of IEDs to up-armored military vehicles.

From Ian Welsh:

Deny the fruits of western ideology to those who reach for them, and of course they will turn against you. Pervert them even within your own countries by undermining your own democratic principles and by concentrating wealth and income in the hands of a few, while impoverishing the many; make it clear that modern neo-liberal capitalism doesn’t spread prosperity to even the core nations, and you have set up one of the preconditions of not just hegemonic collapse, but of internal collapse of a civilization

And here is Welsh’s money quote:

People who do not believe in the genuine goodness of what they are fighting for, hardly fight for it at all

That is what we see in Iraq. More importantly, that is what we see in America. Today, no one believes in the genuine goodness of what they are fighting for, be they job-hunting Millennials, unreconstructed 1960’s liberals, or today’s money-grubbing Republican and Democrat politicians.

When you no longer know how to solve problems, you turn to what is easy. You buy the next shiny object, you live through the lives of the rich and famous. Snark and incivility replace facts and discussion.

There was a display in the 9/11 Museum that showed a piece of debris about 3’ high by 6’ wide and 12’ long. It was rusty and seemed to be sedimentary in nature, visibly comprised of metal, concrete, and wires. It is actually part of 5 floors of the Trade Center, compressed by weight and softened by intense heat. Nothing of the desks, computers, phones and people are distinguishable in this artifact. The Museum calls it a “composite”. It brings home the destructive power of the falling towers on 9/11:

WTC Collapsed floor

Photo is from before the “composite” went on display

After the Towers’ fall, the news media said that 9/11 changed everything, and we believed it. But changes to our view of the world, and its view of us, had started long before that. We stopped learning about geopolitics in the 1960’s, substituting false analogies and military aid to local strongmen for true knowledge of how to change the world.

Since then, we have been compressed by the heat and weight of events we cannot understand. If you think about it, our decline after 9/11 came because we panicked, spent all of our money on pointless wars, and gave up our core values in the name of an illusion of safety, and pure vengeance.

So, yes, America doesn’t know what is defeating it. America senses that there are things happening that are beyond its control or comprehension.

But these things are knowable, and fixable. Hopefully, by Americans.

 

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 20, 2014

“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.” ― Edward R. Murrow

Your aspiring blogger visited the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan yesterday. It was very moving and quite crowded. A striking thing was remembering how uniform the reactions of other countries were. They all felt badly for America, many offered help.

Our citizens were very united, showing sympathy for the families of the people lost on that day, working together to search for possible survivors, supporting George Bush in his attack on Iraq.

We are paying a huge price around the world for invading Iraq and Afghanistan. We no longer have the sympathy of the world, many nations no longer trust us, and quite a few have become our enemy. Our overreaction to 9/11 here at home, from the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to the Patriot Act, to the rampant excesses of the NSA, to the financial disaster of going to war while we cut taxes, have left us divided at home. Our foreign policy is reactive, while we have no domestic policy.

The Museum is displaying a brick from Osama bin-Laden’s Abbottabad compound:

Brick

Makes you wonder what ELSE they brought back from the mission. In other news, nobody likes Dick Cheney’s bloviating about the Middle East:

COW Darth

The Malaysian Airliner disaster hurts the world, just like 9/11 did:

COW Airplane

Keeping score in the Israel – Palestinian war:

COW Israel 3

What are we learning this time?

COW Israel2 There were domestic issues to think about, like Obama’s transparency:

COW Transparent

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Are We the People Becoming “We the Enemy”?

What’s Wrong Today:

“Either you are with us, or you are with the people.” That could be a quote from some government spy involved in domestic surveillance in the not-too-distant future.

In 1975, Sen. Frank Church, (D-ID) chaired the Senate committee that investigated illegal intelligence gathering activities by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In theory, prior to 9/11, only the FBI was able to conduct domestic surveillance.

Today, we know about the NSA’s role in domestic spying. In the post-9/11 world, the NSA has made all the new rules. The new rules it brought into existence are simple enough: Whoever you are and wherever you live, you are a potential target. No one is exempt from surveillance.

But the NSA is not alone.

The Pentagon is looking into how to deal with civil unrest in the US. Launched in 2008, the Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) Minerva Research Initiative partners with universities to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.

The Guardian reports that last year, the Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine ‘Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?’ The report conflates peaceful activists with “supporters of political violence”, who it sees as different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on “armed militancy” themselves. In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.

The Guardian also said that independent scholars are critical of the US government’s efforts to militarize social science in the service of war. In May 2008, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) wrote to the US government noting that the Pentagon lacks “the kind of infrastructure for evaluating anthropological [and other social science] research” in a way that involves “rigorous, balanced and objective peer review”. The AAA called for such research to be managed instead by civilian agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Dr. David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin’s University in Washington DC, has previously exposed how the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System (HTS) program, which was designed to embed social scientists in military field operations, routinely conducted training scenarios set in regions within the United States. Price reported that the HTS training scenarios “adapted COIN (counterinsurgency) for Afghanistan/Iraq” to domestic situations:

…in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective, as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order

Price identified a war game aimed at environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant in Missouri. Some of the protesters were members of the Sierra Club. War game participants were tasked to “identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers‘.” Next, they identified the rest of the population who could be the target of propaganda operations designed to move their “Center of Gravity” towards a set of viewpoints which were the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.
Should we be viewing Minerva as a prime example of military ideology? Clearly, security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists.

Here’s more: There is a lawsuit against alleged domestic US military spying, called Panagacos vs. Towery, in the US District Court in Tacoma, WA. It was filed against the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and local law enforcement agencies in 2010, after it was discovered that an activist called “John Jacob” was actually Army intelligence agent John J. Towery from nearby Fort Lewis. Towery spied on and infiltrated the antiwar group Port Militarization Resistance (PMR), which blocked military shipments en route to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. It also accuses the cities of Olympia and Tacoma of coordinating with the US military to violate the First and Fourth Amendment rights of activists.

So, our military is engaged in domestic COINTELPRO (COunter INtelligence PROgrams). This also happened during the Vietnam War years. Back then, the CIA’s COINTELPRO used “boots on the ground” to neutralize the millions of anti-Vietnam War activists. Martin Luther King, Jr. was under 24/7 surveillance by the 111th Military Intelligence Group, in 1968.

Maybe we need to be paranoid, since republics can fall when they are undermined by their military establishment. Today, US has a mixture of extreme religiosity, ideological conflict in a polarized society, and a militarist culture in which soldiers (now called “warriors””) are worshiped.

This is a toxic brew. Fusion Centers, NSA spying, militarized police forces, criminalization of poverty, erosion of free speech, and now, war gaming against the American public, these are the actions of a fearful American power elite. We have a huge gap between the rich and poor, many areas are deeply racist, the last civil war still rankles with the descendants of some of the losers, and many citizens are armed to the teeth.

Think about this quote from Frederick Douglass:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

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