Month: June 2013

Killing the messengers

by digby

There’s a ton of demeaning stuff floating around about Glenn Greenwald’s lack of qualifications to be a member of the vaunted journalism profession because he’s just a “blogger”. And even though he’s written numerous books on civil liberties and railed with equal fervor against the Bush administration many members of the press that he’s set out to besmirch the reputation of Barack Obama for political reasons.

People can think what they want. But I can’t help but be reminded of an earlier story that exposed a secret program and was brutally assailed by members of the media which then systematically distorted it to the point at which the truth was no longer discernible. The original story was factual — the fun-house mirror version of it that was constructed by big-foot journalism was not.

By coincidence a new movie about this shameful episode has just started shooting. And some of the reporters involved are apparently having attacks of conscience:

Nine years after investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide, Jesse Katz, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who played a leading role in ruining the controversial journalist’s career, has publicly apologized — just weeks before shooting begins in Atlanta on Kill the Messenger, a film expected to reinstate Webb’s reputation as an award-winning journalist dragged through the mud by disdainful, competing media outlets.

Webb made history, then quickly fell from grace, with his 20,000-word 1996 investigation, “Dark Alliance,” in which the San Jose Mercury News reported that crack cocaine was being peddled in L.A.’s black ghettos to fund a CIA-backed proxy war carried out by contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Kill the Messenger is based on Webb’s 1998 book, Dark Alliance, in which he attempted to rebuild his ruined reputation, as well as my 2004 biography of Webb, Kill the Messenger, which shares the movie’s title. (I worked as a consultant on the script.)

The movie will portray Webb as a courageous reporter whose career and life were cut short when the nation’s three most powerful newspapers piled on to attack Webb and his three-part Mercury News series on the CIA’s crack-cocaine connection.

The New York Times, Washington Post and L.A. Times each obscured basic truths of Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series. But no newspaper tried harder than the L.A. Times, where editors were said to have been appalled that a distant San Jose daily had published a blockbuster about America’s most powerful spy agency and its possible role in allowing drug dealers to flood South L.A. with crack.

Much of the Times’ attack was clever misdirection, but it ruined Webb’s reputation: In particular, the L.A. Times attacked a claim that Webb never made: that the CIA had intentionally addicted African-Americans to crack.

Webb, who eventually could find only part-time work at a small weekly paper, committed suicide.

I remember this episode quite well and it was ugly. Professional jealousy, the usual insular clubbiness and the desire to use their hostility to this story to curry favor with the powerful were just some of the discreditable behaviors shown by the mainstream press as they set out to destroy the story and its author.

By the way:

Webb was vindicated by a 1998 CIA Inspector General report, which revealed that for more than a decade the agency had covered up a business relationship it had with Nicaraguan drug dealers like Blandón.

The L.A. Times, New York Times and Washington Post buried the IG’s report; under L.A. Times editor Michael Parks, the paper didn’t acknowledge its release for months.

The L.A. Times‘ smears against Webb continued after his death. After Webb committed suicide in a suburb of Sacramento in December 2004 — the same day he was to vacate his just-sold home and move in with his mother — a damning L.A. Times obituary described the coverage by the three papers as “discrediting” Webb.

Greenwald isn’t the suicidal type so I’m not worried about that. But this history should inform readers as to the ways and means of the big time press when it comes to stories by those whom they feel aren’t quite in the upper tier of respectability. They don’t consider Greenwald to be quite as loathsome as the “high school drop out” loser Edward Snowden. He is a lawyer after all. But many of them believe he’s just as worthy of disdain in his own way. He’s not a member of their club.

Update I: To be clear, I’m not referring to Rick Perlstein in this post, who is anything but a Big Foot Villager. (I hadn’t even read his piece when I wrote this.) I’m friends with both Glenn and Rick and I’m sorry to see them at odds. Rick’s point is different than the journalists I’m talking about who are questioning Greenwald’s credentials and looking for reasons to discredit his work.

Greenwald’s most rabid supporters are very difficult to deal with — I know, I’ve been in their crosshairs plenty of times myself. And Glenn is, right now, in the middle of a whirlwind, under tremendous pressure. I don’t really blame him for being prickly. I’d give anyone who is doing such important work a lot of room in that situation.

I do worry about Glenn and the Dan Rather effect that Perlstein references, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out — Glenn is not an institutional figure like Rather was.

I hope these two can come to some terms about this. Perlstein’s historical take on this stuff is invaluable and I know he admires Greenwald’s work. I admire both of them.

Maybe we all would be better served by taking Peter Maas’s advice:

One of the greatest problems in our political discourse today is the dominant focus on personalities rather than systems. While Assange and Manning have colorful backstories, who they are and what they have done (or not done) in their private lives is not the most important thing. The system of secrecy that necessitates and criminalizes their actions should be the star and the villain of a film about these issues

I blame twitter.

Update II:

Terrible news just now about another intrepid journalist — Michael Hastings who was killed in a car accident here in LA this morning. What a tragic loss for his family and the profession of journalism.

This Rolling Stone obit says it all:

Hastings’ hallmark as reporter was his refusal to cozy up to power…

Hard-charging, unabashedly opinionated, Hastings was original and at times abrasive, he had little patience for flacks and spinmeisters and will be remembered for his enthusiastic breaches of the conventions of access journalism.”

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Republican misogyny may doom them faster than racism

by David Atkins

In the constant internal GOP tug-of-war between “tone it down to appeal to sane voters” and “ramp it up for the wingnut base”, guess which side is winning?

The Republican-led House on Tuesday sought to shore up their support from conservatives with a vote on one of the most far-reaching anti-abortion bills in years.

The measure to restrict abortions to the first 20 weeks after conception will be ignored by the Democratic-controlled Senate but not necessarily by voters in next year’s GOP primaries. Supporters see it as an opportunity to make inroads against legalized abortion while Democratic opponents portrayed it as yet another instance of what they call the GOP’s war on women.

The legislation, heading for near-certain passage in the House, contravenes the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortions and invites court challenges that could eventually force the Supreme Court to reconsider that decision.

All the pundits like to talk about how racial demographics are dooming the Republican Party longterm. But the GOP’s dismal performance among women is also a huge factor. After California’s nonpartisan redistricting I now live in CA-26, one of the most contested congressional districts in the nation. In last year’s battle between Democrat (and now Congresswoman) Julia Brownley and Republican former State Senator Tony Strickland, this was by far the most effective ad:

The Republican House has taken a number of votes, including this last one, opening themselves up to another round of this all over the country.

While I have many problems with a Hillary Clinton candidacy (I would far prefer a President Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris), it would be cathartic to watch the Republican misogynistic id on full display, only to be smacked down in 2016 with a landslide victory for the female Democratic nominee as well as the retaking of the House gavel by Nancy Pelosi.

Republican misogyny may doom them faster than their racism.

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Our secret court is totally transparent

by digby

I’m sure you seen the president’s interview with Charlie Rose last night by now. If you haven’t you certainly should. I get the impression that he’s not happy with the loss of his reputation as a champion of civil liberties, but perhaps I’m reading into it.

In any case, he said a lot of interesting things that are being well parsed all over the blogosphere today. I just wanted to highlight this one little bit in this post:

Charlie Rose: Should this be transparent in some way?

Barack Obama: It is transparent. That’s why we set up the FISA court…. The whole point of my concern, before I was president — because some people say, “Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he’s, you know, Dick Cheney.” Dick Cheney sometimes says, “Yeah, you know? He took it all lock, stock, and barrel.” My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances? So, on this telephone program, you’ve got a federal court with independent federal judges overseeing the entire program. And you’ve got Congress overseeing the program, not just the intelligence committee and not just the judiciary committee — but all of Congress had available to it before the last reauthorization exactly how this program works.

The assertion that the secret FISA court is transparent is fairly mind boggling all by itself. And if this is an adequate check and balance, then I’m an Olympic ice dancer.

Obama has said that there are tradeoffs between privacy and security in an age of international terrorism. But he emphasized that the two surveillance programs exposed this month were repeatedly authorized and reviewed by Congress, with federal judges “overseeing the entire program throughout.”

Despite being overseen by judges, they are not examined in the way that a normal application for a search warrant is.

For decades, the government conducted warrantless wiretaps of people in the United States deemed to be a national security threat. But in 1978, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such warrantless searches unconstitutional, Congress passed legislation that created a special intelligence court to review government requests for warrants. The law was tweaked over the years, but the core of the court’s powers remained unchanged for decades. If the government wanted to listen in on conversations or other communications in the U.S., it had to get a warrant from the foreign intelligence court based on individualized suspicion and probable cause to believe that national security was being compromised.

After 9/11, the Bush administration circumvented that law; President Bush authorized new surveillance programs without submitting them to the foreign intelligence court. After news reports blew the lid off the administration’s dodge, Bush submitted to Congress proposed changes in the law, which were adopted in 2008. Those changes allowed the government to conduct the so-called PRISM program and monitor any and all conversations that take place between the U.S. and someone in a foreign country. No longer is there a requirement of individual targeting, observes Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU.

“It’s a very different role that the FISA court is playing now than it played five years ago,” Jaffer says. “The FISA court is just reviewing at a very programmatic level: Is the government targeting only international communications, or is it impermissibly targeting domestic ones? That’s the only question that the FISA court asks.”

In short, the FISA court is now far more removed from the specifics of targeting people for surveillance.

Former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart Baker concedes the point. “But let’s remember that the reason they lost that authority was some aggressive actions on the court to enforce what was called the wall between intelligence and law enforcement,” Baker says. “That may have cost us our best chance at catching the 9/11 hijackers … before the hijackings.”

As a result, the FISA court became “less a court than an administrative entity or ministerial clerk,” says William Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University. “They weren’t reviewing law anymore; they were simply sort of stamping papers as approved or filed.”

After 2008, Banks adds, the FISA court didn’t “have a substantive review of these directives that come down the pike.”

Either the president doesn’t understand what’s been going on with the FISA court or he’s willfully misleading the people about what it does. I think he’s pretty up the details so it’s likely the latter, but I could be wrong.

This is what’s so frustrating about this argument. The system they are all selling us as being a smashing success in catching terrorists while protecting our vital civil liberties is full of deliberate Catch-22s to prevent anyone from challenging that assertion. Indeed, the whole bizarroworld nature of this story is best illustrated by the nonsensical statement that the administration “welcomes the debate” even though they’ve gone to extreme lengths to prevent one. So extreme that they’ve been on an unprecedented crusade to shut down all leaks of the programs they now say is completely above board and within the law and which people should be perfectly happy to support. Just trust the fine professionals.

Well most of them, anyway.

This is from 2009. Ancient history of course, but perhaps of some historical interest:

A secret NSA surveillance database containing millions of intercepted foreign and domestic e-mails includes the personal correspondence of former President Bill Clinton, according to the New York Times.

An NSA intelligence analyst was apparently investigated after accessing Clinton’s personal correspondence in the database, the paper reports, though it didn’t say how many of Clinton’s e-mails were captured or when the interception occurred.

The database, codenamed Pinwale, allows NSA analysts to search through and read large volumes of e-mail messages, including correspondence to and from Americans. Pinwale is likely the end point for data sucked from internet backbones into NSA-run surveillance rooms at AT&T facilities around the country.

Those rooms were set up by the Bush administration following 9/11, and were finally legalized last year when Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act. The law gives the telecoms immunity for cooperating with the administration; it also opens the way for the NSA to lawfully spy on large groups of phone numbers and e-mail addresses in bulk, instead of having to obtain a warrant for each target.

If an American’s correspondence pops up in search results when analysts sift through the database, the analyst is allowed to read it, provided such messages account for no more than 30 percent of a search result, the paper reported.

The NSA has claimed that the over-collection was inadvertent and corrected it each time the problem was discovered. But Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey), chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, disputed this. “Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental,” he told the Times.

I’m completely confident that’s been fixed, aren’t you?

Just imagine if Edward Snowden had been the type of person who had a partisan agenda and wanted to do political mischief or wanted to sell his secrets to a foreign government for a profit instead of working with journalists to expose them. (Here’s a recent vivid example of someone who had both motivations.) I know a lot of you don’t see the difference, but there is one. And it’s big.

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Headline ‘O the Day, Wonkblog edition

by digby

Welfare reform took people off the rolls. It might have also shortened their lives.

I’ve got to ask: feature or bug?

The people in the experimental welfare-to-work group were much likelier to obtain employment, but they weren’t likely to make more total income than those in AFDC, once you take cash assistance and other forms of income AFDC recipients received into account. Of the 1,611 experiment participants in the county the study focused on, 75 died by November 2011. Of the 1,613 members of the control group, by contrast, 67 died by November 2011. That means the welfare-to-work had 16 percent higher mortality than those receiving normal cash assistance, a result that was highly statistically significant and, because of the study’s random design, can be attributed to the different welfare program. That amounts to a nine-month reduction in life expectancy between the ages of 30 and 70.

But hey, I’m sure they were comforted in their last days by their increased sense of self-esteem.

People are always going on about “trade-offs” as if the people who are doing the trading are people who have a choice. They rarely do.

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I think we all need a laugh at this point, don’t you?

by digby

Read this review of James O’Keefe’s turgid new memoir at Wonkette. A taste:

Wonkette:

Every time one of James O’Keefe’s liberal enemies comes along claiming he’s got a problem with women, our first thought is, “What are you people even talking about?”

Indeed. But it’s not just O’Keefe. Right wingers in general loooove that particular metaphor. And the more violent the better  — it’s always ram, cram, shove, force etc. They certainly don’t seem to see this act as something that’s commonly done with the consent of both parties involved. But then, that would be dirty.

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Trust the professionals. What could go wrong?

by digby

No cause for concern here:

When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi.

It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s cyberstrategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the N.S.A. and pushed the United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians.

“They are teaching everything,” one Arab official familiar with the effort said. “Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”

Yet as Booz Allen profits handsomely from its worldwide expansion, Mr. McConnell and other executives of the government contractor — which sells itself as the gold standard in protecting classified computer systems and boasts that half its 25,000 employees have Top Secret clearances — have a lot of questions to answer.

Don’t worry your pretty little heads about any of that. The professionals are taking care of everything for you. No reason not to trust them implicitly with your secrets. They would never let anything slip …

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Now they’re just getting silly

by digby

Don’t talk about fight club:

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has taken the unusual step of actively blocking a former committee aide from talking to TPM about congressional oversight of the intelligence community. At issue isn’t classified sources and methods of intelligence gathering but general information about how the committee functions — and how it should function. The committee’s refusal to allow former general counsel Vicki Divoll to disclose unclassified information to a reporter was the first and only time it has sought to block her from making public comments, based on her experience as one of its most senior aides, since she left Capitol Hill in 2003.

Read the whole thing to see just how ridiculous they’re being. Now they won’t even talk about their process for keeping secrets.

At what point does the press become truly exercised about this stuff, I wonder? I remain gobsmacked at their acquiesence to the government’s position that they must basically sit down and shut up in order to “protect the American people.”

If only somebody had some sex in all this.

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Next time grow a spine earlier

by David Atkins

Greg Sargent on the impact that Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s passing may have on the nuclear option in the Senate:

It’s being privately discussed at the highest levels of the Democratic Party: The passing of Senator Frank Lautenberg has cast doubt on the ability of Senate Democrats to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” and change the Senate rules via a simple majority.

Here’s what this means: A very plausible scenario being mulled by top Dems is that the prospects for changing the rules may rest on a tie-breaking Senate vote from Vice President (and Senate president) Joe Biden.

It’s simple math. Lautenberg’s passing means Dems now only have 54 votes in the Senate. (His temporary Republican replacement can’t be expected to back rules reform.) Aides who are tracking the vote count tell me that Senator Carl Levin (a leading opponent of the “nuke option” when it was ruled out at the beginning of the year, leading to the watered down bipartisan filibuster reform compromise) is all but certain to oppose any rules change by simple majority. Senators Patrick Leahy and Mark Pryor remain question marks. And Senator Jack Reed is a Maybe.

If Dems lose those four votes, that would bring them down to 50. And, aides note, that would mean Biden’s tie-breaking vote would be required to get back up to the 51 required for a simple Senate majority. That’s an awfully thin margin for error.

A half-witted porcupine could have predicted that Republicans would remain as intransigent in 2013 as they were in 2012. It’s not getting better, either.

Republicans have been given many chances to prove that they can make comity work in the Senate. They have failed every chance they’ve been given. The time to fix the filibuster was at the beginning of the legislative session, but if there’s any chance that Biden can be brought in to make it happen, so be it. It has long been time to act.

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Cover the secrecy beat

by digby

Since from the looks of things there aren’t a huge number of reporters who think uncovering secrets is part of their job I think Dan Froomkin’s idea may be the only way for citizens to stay informed:

[W]hat’s needed is a new beat, to cover secrecy itself.

“Too often, the press adopts a passive sort of stance, waiting for others to define the agenda. But it is possible, within the norms of journalism, for reporters and editors to define a beat and run with it,” says Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, and writes the essential Secrecy News blog.

When it comes to aggressive reporting about secrecy, Aftergood says, one story could well lead to the next. “I think by creating more channels for information to flow, the information will start to flow. News has a sort of gravitational force, that when you do stories, people will come up to you and say: ‘Well, do you know about this?’ There’s a snowballing effect waiting to happen if someone, or a bunch of someones, will take the first few catalytic steps.”

David Sobel, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for online rights, notes that secrecy comes up as an important issue in any number of beats, and in reaction to specific events, sometimes producing major headlines. But, he says, “I have long thought that transparency as a standalone issue has gotten short shrift. Independent of the specifics of any given issue, there is the overriding issue of informed democratic participation on the part of citizens,” Sobel says. “And if there’s not sufficient transparency, the public debate on any issue that arises within the government is going to be lacking.”

I would have thought that this was part of every beat, but clearly it isn’t.

Priming the 2016 upstart

by digby

This clever piece by Walter Shapiro spells out quite nicely what the next Howard Dean should do to become the upstart candidate in 2016 and capture the hearts and minds of the activists in the Party who might be looking for a change from the change:

Let me start with the year 1960. Do you know its significance beyond the Kennedy-Nixon debates? It was the last time that any presidential candidate (incumbent presidents aside) was handed the nomination rather than having to fight for it. And even in 1960 Richard Nixon had to bow and scrape before Nelson Rockefeller to head off a primary challenge.

What this means is that you have a chance no matter how daunting the polls or lopsided the potential fund-raising gap. Someone is going to be embraced by grassroots Democratic activists as the different-drummer alternative—and it could easily be you. But to be anointed THE CHALLENGER with capital letters, you have to be peddling more than the Maryland Miracle, the Colorado Comeback, the Albany Apotheosis or an uplifting personal story about how you grew up on a played-out rutabaga farm as the child of alcoholic parents.

To succeed, you have to anticipate the answer to a very tricky question: On the eve of the 2016 Iowa caucuses, what aspects of the Obama presidency will have angered, exasperated or disappointed loyal Democrats? The answer explains whom you will become—the candidate who convincingly promises to save the Democrats from Obama’s deficiencies.

It’s an interesting question and the answers he provides sounds right to me.

As Shapiro admits, if President Obama is riding high in the polls and everyone in the country is yearning for a third term, the only people who have a chance are those who were in the administration — meaning Clinton or Biden (probably.) But if there’s the usual ambivalence (or downright hostility) t the end of the second term, there is a chance for an upstart  to emerge. And they’re going to have to make a case for how they will be different. These questions are a good place to start.

(I’d add a pledge to deep-six the Chained CPI, expand Social Security and turn the word “austerity” into an epithet. But that’s just me.)

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