Whose interests are the secrets serving?
by digby
Yesterday’s Washington Post featured a pretty ruthless analysis of the government’s ongoing dishonesty with the American people regarding these secret surveillance programs. The beginning lays out the non-denial denials and other obfuscatory behaviors toward the US congress and the press since 9/11, including George Bush’s clumsy misdirection and the cutesy interview president Obama gave to the servile Charlie Rose a couple of weeks ago.
But this was an uncharacteristically bold characterization of what’s been going on:
[T]he crumbling secrecy surrounding the programs has underscored the extent to which obscuring their dimensions had served government interests beyond the importance of the intelligence they produced.
Secret court rulings that allowed the NSA to gather phone records enabled the spy service to assemble a massive database on Americans’ phone records without public debate or the risk of political blowback.
The binding secrecy built into the PRISM program of tracking international e-mail allowed the NSA to compel powerful technology companies to comply with requests for information about their users while keeping them essentially powerless to protest.
The careful depiction of NSA programs also served diplomatic ends. Until recently, the United States had positioned itself as such an innocent victim of cyber intrusions by Russia and China that the State Department issued a secret demarche, or official diplomatic communication, in January scolding Beijing. That posture became more problematic after leaks by the former NSA contractor and acknowledged source of the NSA leaks, Edward Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong and is thought to be stuck at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow.
I haven’t seen the mainstream press willing to lay that out so blandly in a regular news analysis before. The facts are what they are — and the secrecy has clearly served the government and its corporate partners very well far beyond any intelligence gathering for which they might have been designed. And we still have no way of knowing if its served them well in other, more political, ways. Certainly, if you go back in history under both Democratic and Republican administrations, you can see that this is the sort of thing that distorted our policies and our politics for decades. I see no reason to believe that either human nature or political incentives have changed since that time.
As for the diplomatic problem, I’m afraid I think it’s nonsense. The US may have been whining that it was an innocent victim but I doubt very seriously that anyone believed them. This is a phony diplomatic game, not serious policy, and nobody should be too worried that somehow the US has lost its moral authority. It never had any when it came to spying. These are word games, not serious threats.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen if the current congress has any integrity whatsoever. The old ones were less protective of their prerogatives than we might remember, but they did follow through at times:
Clapper’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March has drawn comparisons to other cases in which U.S. intelligence officials faced, under oath, questions that to answer truthfully would require exposing a classified program.
In 1973, then-CIA Director Richard Helms denied agency involvement in CIA operations in Chile, a falsehood that led to him pleading no contest four years later to misdemeanor charges of misleading Congress.
There is no indication that lawmakers have contemplated pursuing such a course against Clapper, in part because he subsequently corrected his claim, although there is disagreement over how quickly he did so.
Clapper has to be the worst spy chief ever. He went on TV after this was revealed and pretty much admitted to lying. But there’s no indication it’s going to be a problem for him. So, there’s little reason for any of them to stop doing it.
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