Skip to content

Month: August 2013

QOTD: Ezra Klein

QOTD: Ezra Klein

by digby

On the latest NSA revelations:

[T]he report is a reminder that we don’t know what we don’t know. And a companion story today makes clear that we can’t trust that the courts providing oversight — weak as they are — know it either.

Even though this was a friendly audit produced with the cooperation of the NSA — and so, by the way, might not have uncovered systemic abuse if indeed it existed — Gellman reports that these kinds of details are “not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance.”

I haven’t seen this point made enough. Yes, it’s true that one could assume that the internal NSA audit has revealed all there is to reveal and that’s terrific proof that they are on the up and up. But we also now know that they commonly go to some length to obscure the truth when reporting to their overseers which kind of puts a kink in that argument, don’t you think? And the fact that the rubber stamp FISA court has all the power of Judge Judy when it comes to enforcing laws governing the NSA doesn’t give one a great sense of trust in the system they’ve been touting for months now as airtight and fully compliant.

The history of the United States government in this regard should have been enough for anyone to be concerned when they found out that these secret NSA programs existed. Nobody in a free society should ever be sanguine that such activity is benign. The government has enormous power over individuals and secrecy makes the temptation for abuse overwhelming.

That’s just how these things work. It is, therefore, up to the government to prove that it is not doing these things by using the elaborate legal processes that have been developed over centuries to ensure it. Skirting them with Orwellian language and Catch-22s — with the excuse they must do this in order to “protect us” from whatever the boogeyman of the day happens to be — is not acceptable. They always say they need these powers to protect us.

So no. It’s not believable that this internal NSA audit (which only covered the DC area and Ft Meade, remember) is adequate. They have no credibility. In fact, they never have credibility when it comes to this stuff. I don’t care if Jesus Christ himself were president, I still wouldn’t trust the government with such enormous secret, unaccountable power. It’s not personal. It’s just common sense.

.

Changing their story one revelation at a time

Changing their story one revelation at a time


by digby

Here’s a nice commentary from Ari Melber on how the government has changed its tune about the surveillance programs over the past couple of weeks.  (And this was before the news last night from the Washington Post about the thousands of mistakes and violations of the law.)

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It’s really foolish for any president to use the “nothing to see her, move along citizens” line when a story like this breaks. Inevitably they are going to be seen to have misled the public or were themselves misled by their underlings. Either way, it’s damaging to their credibility.

But they always do it. I suppose it’s only human to think that when you are so powerful that you can personally order the US government to kill people that you can control events like this. It’s a mistake.

.

Taxpayer paid brainwashing in 34 states! And homegrown terrorism scores a win too!

Taxpayer paid brainwashing in 34 states! And homegrown terrorism scores a win too!

by digby

I guess religious freedom requires taxpayers to fund lies now:

Well over half of the states in the country are directly funding “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs), right-wing groups that pose as nonpartisan health clinics while advocating for an anti-abortion agenda. According to NARAL Pro-Choice America, 34 states currently have policies that funnel money toward CPCs.
[…]
For example, a recent NARAL investigation found that Virginia’s Department of Health currently refers low-income women to a list of 18 CPCs where they can receive a free ultrasound before getting an abortion. But when women visit those centers, they encounter misinformation about the abortion procedure — typically, false information about abortion’s link to breast cancer and depression. The staff at Virginia’s CPCs was also documented employing emotional manipulation, like writing “Hi, Dad” on the image of an ultrasound before handing it back to a patient. In extreme cases, CPC employees have even refused to turn over the ultrasound results to women who needed to bring them to an abortion clinic.

CPCs advertise themselves as viable alternatives to other women’s health clinics, even though they don’t tend to employ medical professionals and don’t offer the full range of reproductive health services. Multiple outside investigations have caught CPCs’ lies on tape. Women who visit the right-wing “clinics” are frequently told that emergency contraception is the same thing as an abortion, birth control contains carcinogens, condoms aren’t effective at preventing STDs, abortion is extremely dangerous, and women always regret ending a pregnancy.

Basically they are harassing pregnant women and girls who have already decided they are not in a position to go through pregnancy and childbirth (as is their constitutional and basic human right.) And the government is helping them do it. Mostly it’s just the young, poor and uneducated ones though. The privileged will find places to go that treat them with respect. Most of the women funneled to these brainwashing centers will be unpersuaded as well, since they know instinctively when they’re being fed a pile of nonsense. Others, however, especially the younger ones, will be traumatized and misinformed and possible persuaded to be parents when they are not capable of doing so.

Oh, and not that it needs to be pointed out again, but the people who want the government fo fund these “crisis centers” tend to be the same people who refuse to let the government help support the children that are produced. They don’t care if either the mother or the child lives or dies once the child emerges from the womb.

Meanwhile, the anti-abortion rights zealots won another big one the other day. They’re now free to threaten and harass doctors as much as they want to:

An abortion opponent’s letter to a Wichita doctor saying someone might place an explosive under her car is constitutionally protected speech and not a “true threat” under existing law, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten summarily found in favor of Angel Dillard in the 2011 civil lawsuit brought by the Justice Department under a law aimed at protecting access to abortion services. The 25-page decision handed down comes after a flurry of sealed filings seeking summary judgment.

The judge wrote that the government supplied no evidence that actual violence against Dr. Mila Means was likely or imminent.

“It was a great victory for the First Amendment,” said her attorney, Don McKinney. “Obviously, we agree with the opinion. I appreciate the court held the U.S. Department of Justice accountable to the law and the evidence.”

He portrayed his client’s reaction to the ruling as “joy,” noting she had been deposed for eight or nine hours by the government.

“It was a long, difficult case,” McKinney said. “The government was very energetic and all the government lawyers worked very hard.”

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in an emailed statement that it is reviewing the court’s order and evaluating its options.

“The right of doctors to deliver lawful reproductive health services free from threats of violence is protected by federal law,” the department said.

The government sued Dillard under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) after the Valley Center woman wrote Means a letter in January 2011 when Means was training to offer abortion services at her Wichita clinic. At the time, no doctor was doing abortions in Wichita in the wake of Dr. George Tiller’s murder by an abortion opponent.

Dillard wrote in her letter that thousands of people from across the nation were scrutinizing Means’ background and would know “your habits and routines.”

“They know where you shop, who your friends are, what you drive, where you live,” the letter said. “You will be checking under your car every day because maybe today is the day someone places an explosive under it.”

The judge noted in his decision that Dillard sent the letter openly with her return address on it.

Dillard had testified in her deposition that “I did what the Lord asked me to do. He impressed upon me that I needed to write the letter and I did.”

Let’s turn this around a little bit, shall we? What if a young American Muslim sent a letter with exactly the same wording to a US government official saying: “you will be checking under your car every day because maybe today is the day someone places an explosive under it?” Is that free speech too? Or is only ok for anti-abortion terrorists to make such threats?

If so, it’s kind of odd because there aren’t a whole lot of homegrown terrorist groups that have made good on their death threats over the years, but the anti-abortion movement is one that has quite an impressive body count.

Not that any of this matters really. The threats worked:

The judge also rejected the government’s request for a permanent injunction prohibiting Dillard from again contacting Means. He was persuaded by the defense argument that she would have no reason to do so since Means no longer has any plans to offer abortion services in Kansas.

The court also noted the government’s argument that Dillard had refrained from contacting Means while the lawsuit was pending.

“If the glare of publicity and the prospect of additional government legal action are sufficient by themselves to prevent further communications by Dillard, they would remain even in the absence of separate injunction relief,” the judge wrote. “That is, the government effectively concedes that Dillard is a rational person, at least in sensing the folly of additional communications with Dr. Means.”

In other words, because the threats succeeded in stopping the legal act the terrorist opposed, there was no reason to pursue this any further. Also, since the terrorist is rational rather than crazy, there’s no reason to fear that her threats were real. Good to know.

We talk a lot about progress in this country and are proud of having overcome some of our deepest injustices by acknowledging the basic human rights of everyone. But anyone who thinks that once acknowledged it’s then impossible to lose should take a look at what’s happening to women’s fundamental rights, right now, in state legislatures and courtrooms all over this country.

.

Another dispatch from police state America, by @DavidOAtkins

Another dispatch from police state America

by David Atkins

This seems reasonable:

Two weeks ago, two Florida deputies shot 15 rounds at a 60-year-old unarmed Florida man who was looking for his cigarettes in his mother’s car, parked in his own driveway. Two of those bullets hit him in his left leg, which was shattered. Roy Howard Middleton says he was compliant when the cops told him to turn around. He says that as he was turning around to face deputies with his hands raised, they opened fire. (He believed his neighbors were playing a practical joke on him). The two deputies said they were responding to a 911 call about a car thief and that Middleton turned and “lunged” at them with a shiny object in his hand. Middleton is black. The two sheriff’s deputies are white.

Sheriff David Morgan of Escambia County hastily took to the airwaves to explain that “the tragedy of this is the noncompliance to the directions of law enforcement officers,” and that Middleton was “both a suspect and a victim.” The two deputies were placed on administrative leave pending an investigation by the State Attorney’s Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Sheriff Morgan was quick to clarify for CNN that the officers followed the correct protocols. “Right now we are comfortable from a training perspective that our officers did follow standard protocols. I believe the standard we use and train to is a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, which is a reasonable test.” Morgan went on to note that “[t]his is a common occurrence. We live in a very violent society.” Presumably the irony was unintentional.

Some folks have different definitions of what it means to serve and protect.

.

Just because they lie constantly doesn’t mean we can’t trust them

Just because they lie constantly doesn’t mean we can’t trust them

by digby

Not quite “comfortable” yet with “trusting the professionals” to ensure there are “checks and balances” that make these secret surveillance programs no big deal? This won’t help:

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.

The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.

Mistakes do happen. What’s important here is the fact that apparently they routinely do not report these mistakes to the higher authorities such as the DNI and the FISA court in anything resembling a timely fashion. And there were deliberate violations that were withheld from the overseers. That’s a problem.

Also too, this:

In dozens of cases, NSA personnel made careless use of the agency’s extraordinary powers, according to individual auditing reports. One team of analysts in Hawaii, for example, asked a system called DISHFIRE to find any communications that mentioned both the Swedish manufacturer Ericsson and “radio” or “radar” — a query that could just as easily have collected on people in the United States as on their Pakistani military target.

The NSA uses the term “incidental” when it sweeps up the records of an American while targeting a foreigner or a U.S. person who is believed to be involved in terrorism. Official guidelines for NSA personnel say that kind of incident, pervasive under current practices, “does not constitute a . . . violation” and “does not have to be reported” to the NSA inspector general for inclusion in quarterly reports to Congress. Once added to its databases, absent other restrictions, the communications of Americans may be searched freely.

In one required tutorial, NSA collectors and analysts are taught to fill out oversight forms without giving “extraneous information” to “our FAA overseers.” FAA is a reference to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which granted broad new authorities to the NSA in exchange for regular audits from the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and periodic reports to Congress and the surveillance court.

Using real-world examples, the “Target Analyst Rationale Instructions” explain how NSA employees should strip out details and substitute generic descriptions of the evidence and analysis behind their targeting choices.

“I realize you can read those words a certain way,” said the high-ranking NSA official who spoke with White House authority, but the instructions were not intended to withhold information from auditors. “Think of a book of individual recipes,” he said. Each target “has a short, concise description,” but that is “not a substitute for the full recipe that follows, which our overseers also have access to.”

Sure, that makes sense. If someone gives you a recipe that says flour, salt and water are used to make bread, there’s really no need for them to mention the yeast. It’s not their fault if the bread doesn’t rise. It’s your fault for failing to research if it required any other ingredients.

Oh, and by the way:

The May 2012 audit, intended for the agency’s top leaders, counts only incidents at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other ­facilities in the Washington area. Three government officials, speak­ing on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.

Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel all that “comfortable.”

Meanwhile, if anyone thinks the FISA Court is, as President Obama described it, “empowered to look over our shoulder at the executive branch to make sure that these programs aren’t being abused,” think again:

The leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government’s vast spying programs said that its ability do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans.

The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy. Without taking drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of the government’s assertions that the violations its staff members report are unintentional mistakes.

Hey, we’ve got to trust these professionals. And the fact that they lie repeatedly and without any compunction should make us trust them more, I guess.

Honestly, humans do make errors. That’s frankly one of the reasons the government should not be empowered to do this kind of dragnet surveillance. But it’s more than that. These documents show quite clearly that they deliberately evade the oversight that’s in place and are using Orwellian language to obfuscate their true intentions. If that doesn’t make people skeptical of their integrity then obviously they can do no wrong and we should just redact the 4th Amendment from the Constitution because it’s no longer necessary.

This was what President Obama said when this story first broke:

We have a system in which some information is classified, and we have a system of checks and balances to make sure that it’s not abused. And if, in fact, this information ends up just being dumped out willy-nilly without regard to risks to the program, risks to the people involved, in some cases on other leaks, risks to personnel in very dangerous situations, then it’s very hard for us to be as effective in — in protecting the American people.

That’s not to suggest that, you know, you just say, trust me, we’re doing the right thing, we know who the bad guys are. And the reason that’s not how it works is because we’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight. And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

But my observation is, is that the people who are involved in America’s national security, they take this work very seriously. They cherish our Constitution. The last thing they’d be doing is taking programs like this to listen to somebody’s phone calls.

And by the way, with respect to my concerns about privacy issues, I will leave this office at some point, sometime in the last — next 3 1/2 years, and after that, I will be a private citizen. And I suspect that, you know, on — on a list of people who might be targeted, you know, so that somebody could read their emails or — or listen to their phone calls, I’d probably be pretty high on that list. So it’s not as if I don’t have a personal interest in making sure my privacy is protected.

But I know that the people who are involved in these programs — they operate like professionals. And these things are very narrowly circumscribed. They’re very focused. And in the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential, you know — you know, program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance.

We’re looking at new details all the time. And they are not reassuring. This program is clearly dangerous and it certainly violates the spirit, and probably the letter, of the 4th Amendment.

And I have yet to see one person make a reasonable case as to why all this could possibly be necessary. It’s ridiculous on its face.

Update: Difi, our fearless overseer:

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who did not receive a copy of the 2012 audit [showing thousands of violations] until The Post asked her staff about it, said in a statement late Thursday that the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”

Fergawdsakes.

.

Horror in Cairo

Horror in Cairo

by digby

Good God

In a Cairo mosque lie the charred and mutilated bodies of more than 200 Egyptians, apparently uncounted and unacknowledged by the state after security forces crushed Islamist protest camps.

Helpers at the Al-Iman mosque accused the government of ignoring the rows of corpses, laid out in white shrouds to await collection by relatives in a charnel house that looked like the aftermath of a battle from World War One.

Medics pushed burning incense sticks into blocks of ice covering the bodies and sprayed air freshener to cover up the overpowering stench of decay. A cry of “Allahu akbar” (God is Greatest) echoed through a loudspeaker at the back of the mosque.

Those working there said the bodies are not included in the official Health Ministry tally, which they said proved that far more people died on Wednesday than the 525 recorded by the state countrywide when the military-backed government moved against the Muslim Brotherhood of deposed president Mohamed Mursi.

“The ministry won’t acknowledge them, the police won’t acknowledge them,” said Wafaa Hefny, a professor of English literature at Al-Azhar University, who was helping medics at the mosque in northeast Cairo.

A Reuters reporter saw 228 bodies in Al-Iman mosque alone. An exact count was difficult because some were being moved and loaded into coffins for removal. Medics said their count had reached 259.

Some men pulled back the shrouds to reveal the corpses, some charred and with smashed skulls, others riddled with bullet holes in their heads and chests. Women knelt and wept beside some bodies while two men embraced each other and cried by another.

Protesters’ tent cities were set ablaze on Wednesday after the security forces moved in, apparently accounting for the charred state of some of the bodies.

Medics at the scene said the bodies had been moved straight to the mosque from a protest camp nearby. Heba Morayef, Egypt director at Human Rights Watch, said she had counted 235 bodies. “This indicates the toll will be higher,” she added.

Typically, Health Ministry casualty tolls include only bodies that have passed through hospitals, indicating the rows of dead at the mosque are uncounted in any official figures.

It’s not known if that number is included in the 638 confirmed dead and 4,000 wounded yesterday.

Military coups are never democratic and are rarely benign, no matter how much people may try to pretend otherwise. This one has turned out to be horrible. And the future ramifications are almost certainly going to be very bad indeed.

More here on the scope of yesterday’s horror. It was a very bad day.

And this piece by Mark Lynch is very much worth reading on this subject.

.

Will they vote to impeach? by @DavidOAtkins

Will they vote to impeach?

by David Atkins

House Republicans already look set to double down on the Gingrich strategy of the 1990s. Why not throw impeachment into the mix?

GOP Rep. Blake Farenthold (Texas) said House Republicans have enough votes to impeach President Obama, but warned the effort to remove him from office would be unsuccessful and could damage the country.

“If we were to impeach the president tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it,” Farenthold said at an Aug. 10 town-hall meeting.

No, if they don’t vote to impeach it isn’t because they’re afraid it would damage the country. They’re afraid it will kill Republican chances in the next several elections.

They’re right, of course–but that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to help themselves upon the next remotely semi-legitimate excuse.

.

Reagan’s Bay of Benghazi

Reagan’s Bay of Benghazi

by digby

It is amazing how they right has been able to hide this little bit of history:

When news broke that William Clark, a longtime aide to Ronald Reagan, had recently passed away, several conservative media outlets quickly posted tributes to the man. Touted as the “most important and influential presidential confidante” in nearly a century, Clark was warmly remembered as a “a great treasure to the nation” and an “inspiration.”
[…]
But here’s what’s interesting about Clark’s recently lauded resume when viewed against the right wing’s permanent Benghazi name calling: Clark served as Reagan’s national security advisor between 1982 and 1983. On April 18, 1983, Islamic terrorists attacked the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Sixty-three people were killed, including 17 Americans, eight of whom worked for the CIA.

Five months later local terrorists struck again. During a lengthy air assault from nearby artillerymen, two Marines stationed at the Beirut airport were killed. Then on October 23, just days after Clark stepped down as national security advisor to become Secretary of the Interior, the Marines’ Beirut barracks cratered after a 5-ton truck driven by a suicide bomber and carrying the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of TNT exploded outside; 241 Americans were killed, marking the deadliest single attacks on U.S. citizens overseas since World War II.

Reagan had sent 1,800 Marines to Beirut as part of a larger peacekeeping mission following the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s withdrawal from the country. But national security experts, including some members of Reagan’s administration, warned that the Marines were vulnerable to attack.

In the aftermath, Col. Timothy J. Geraghty, the commander of the Marines in Beirut, said, “It didn’t take a military expert to realize that our troops had been placed in an indefensible situation.” Conservative columnist William Safire referred to the Beirut debacle as Reagan’s “Bay of Pigs.”

Conservatives have casually smeared numerous Obama officials over Benghazi for the last eleven months, yet the embassy attacks surrounding Clark’s tenure as Reagan’s national security adviser apparently did not blemish his long public career.

Despite the chronic terror attacks on a U.S. embassy and related facilities– three separate assaults that claimed nearly 270 American lives in the span of just six months in 1983 — Judge Clark is to be remembered as a patriot. But Obama officials are supposedly guilty of the unforgivable, treasonous crime of Benghazi.

And after all that happened, what did St Ronnie, slayer of international communists everywhere do? He order the US to “cut ‘n run.” And they’re naming every airport and highway they can find after him.

Just shows to go you: your supporters write your legacy.

Lieberman, we hardly knew ye

Lieberman, we hardly knew ye

by digby

Villagers rejoice

Liberals and TV producers are already salivating over the thought of outspoken Cory Booker becoming the junior senator from New Jersey.

But if he agrees to become the go-to counter voice against camera-friendly Republicans like Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz — an opportunity Elizabeth Warren passed up to avoid violating the unwritten rule that a freshman should neither be seen or heard — some warn that his Senate career could be doomed.
[…]
“Nonetheless, most agree Booker will quickly take up the role of party
spokesman. “I think he will become a voice that the national party will utilize.A young urban mayor who tries to reach across the aisle — that will be a value to moving the party’s agenda forward,” said former New Jersey Democratic State Committee Chairman and Assemblyman John Wisniewski.

Eventhulibrul Cory Booker agrees …

.