Month: September 2013

Norms!


by digby

While we argue about upholding international norms, it appears that we’re establishing some interesting new ones.  In the case of aggressive cyber warfare, it is “we can do whatever we want”:

U.S. intelligence services carried out 231 offensive cyber-operations in 2011, the leading edge of a clandestine campaign that embraces the Internet as a theater of spying, sabotage and war, according to top-secret documents obtained by The Washington Post.

That disclosure, in a classified intelligence budget provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, provides new evidence that the Obama administration’s growing ranks of cyberwarriors infiltrate and disrupt foreign computer networks.

Additionally, under an extensive effort code-named GENIE, U.S. computer specialists break into foreign networks so that they can be put under surreptitious U.S. control. Budget documents say the $652 million project has placed “covert implants,” sophisticated malware transmitted from far away, in computers, routers and firewalls on tens of thousands of machines every year, with plans to expand those numbers into the millions.

The documents provided by Snowden and interviews with former U.S. officials describe a campaign of computer intrusions that is far broader and more aggressive than previously understood. The Obama administration treats all such cyber-operations as clandestine and declines to acknowledge them.

The scope and scale of offensive operations represent an evolution in policy, which in the past sought to preserve an international norm against acts of aggression in cyberspace, in part because U.S. economic and military power depend so heavily on computers.

“The policy debate has moved so that offensive options are more prominent now,” said former deputy defense secretary William J. Lynn III, who has not seen the budget document and was speaking generally. “I think there’s more of a case made now that offensive cyberoptions can be an important element in deterring certain adversaries.”

I find this very troubling. Obviously the whole world is hacking away and it makes sense for the government to be developing defensive capabilities to protect vital US infrastructure. But this is something very different.  It has way too few controls, non-existent oversight and is happening without  even the slightest debate among experts much less the public.  The minute they start talking about offensive operations being a “deterrent”, citizens need to wake up.  There lies danger.

By the way, that icky Glenn Greenwald isn’t reporting this. It’s Barton Gelman of the Washington Post. I eagerly await calls from other journalists for his arrest.

Another WMD story from a long, long time ago

by digby

Greg Mitchell takes a look back in history and reports something I did not know before:

On September 2, 1945, Australian war reporter Wilfred Burchett left Tokyo by train, intent on reaching distant Hiroshima before any of his journalistic colleagues, who were banned from taking such a trip by the American occupation chief, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Burchett, who had written dispatches glorifying the firebombing of Japanese cities, was just looking for a scoop. The following morning he encountered what he would describe as a “death-stricken alien planet.” He noticed a dank, sulfurous smell as he was taken directly to one of the few hospitals left standing. Its director felt certain that radiation sickness, far from being merely “propaganda” as the United States was claiming, was very real. One in five patients was developing purple skin bruises, white cell counts had plunged for many, some were also losing their hair or simply expiring without any known injuries.

The reporter pulled out his typewriter and, sitting on a chunk of rubble near the hypocenter of the blast, composed his historic article, detailing the new disease, and commenting, “I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.”

This part of the story is, by now, pretty well known. What happened next is not: the real beginning of the decades of suppression I detail in my new book and ebook, Atomic Cover-Up.

As Burchett was finishing his story, a group of journalists arrived on an Air Force plane, with a censor in tow. Included were the celebrated Bill Lawrence of the New York Times and Homer Bigart of the New York Herald-Tribune. Burchett told them to forget about the rubble, “the story is in the hospitals.”

They were not happy to find Burchett already there and with a finished article. He asked them to carry the story back to Tokyo and transmit it to his paper. They refused. Burchett managed to transmit his story to a colleague in Tokyo, who sneaked it past the censors, and it ran on September 5 on the front page of the London Daily Express, under the headline: the atomic plague.

Articles written by the American reporters who had landed in Hiroshima gave no evidence that they had visited the hospitals. Yet Lawrence, years later in his memoirs, revealed, “We talked with dying Japanese in the hospitals.” Were those stories censored by MacArthur’s people? Lawrence also disclosed that MacArthur was “hopping mad” about the press junket and cut off supplies of gasoline to planes that might make another journo trip possible. Then he ordered all American reporters out of Tokyo to a closely watched enclave in Yokohama.

That’s not all …

There’s only one country in the history of the world that has used nuclear weapons. (I’m not arguing the merits here, although I’ve had my consciousness raised on this recently.) So it’s important not to get too sanctimonious when trying to create and maintain international norms against war crimes. That’s not to say that the US has no standing to do it. It’s been a leader in developing the few warfare taboos we have developed in the modern world (although it’s broken them too) and gets credit for doing that even as it maintains a vast global military empire. But our leaders shouldn’t do things like compare Assad to Hitler for using unconventional weapons, as our Secretary of State did today. It just invites scrutiny of our own imperfect history. (And some of those imperfections are pretty recent.)

I just ordered Mitchell’s e-book called ATOMIC COVER-UP.  Sounds like the perfect breezy beach read.

Gallows humor

by digby

And to think people insist the US still has credibility it needs to preserve:

Syrians keeping their sense of humor in the NYT pic.twitter.com/1mlE3CK2eD
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) September 1, 2013

Not to mention “prestige.”

These zealots believe that 10 year old girls should be forced to give birth

by digby

Katha Pollit tells the story of a brave doctor who performed abortions in Kansas — and the anti-abortion fanatics who destroyed her:

You would not think … that a convicted clinic bomber would have a lot of traction with a state medical board. In Kansas, however, Cheryl Sullenger was able to set in motion a case against Dr. Tiller’s former colleague, Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus, that in 2012 took away her license to practice medicine, and has driven her to the brink of financial ruin, and may well stick her with the entire cost of the proceedings against her—a whopping $92,672—should she lose her appeal. Was Sullenger a patient of Dr. Neuhaus who had been injured? The parent or spouse of one? No. She is a senior policy adviser to Operation Rescue who served two years in prison for trying to blow up a clinic in California in 1987, and whose phone number was found in the car of Dr. Tiller’s assassin, Scott Roeder. In Kansas, you see, anyone can bring a case against any doctor, and the anti-choice movement takes full advantage of that legal quirk. And so it came about that the clinic bomber drove a compassionate, caring doctor out of medicine and into near-bankruptcy.

This is a tragic story of a woman run out of the medical profession for performing an abortion on a 10 year old girl. Evidently the forced childbirth sadists on the medical board were unpersuaded that it was medically necessary. A 10 year old girl! If you have ever doubted that these people care about fetuses far more than they care about people who are already born, this should put that to rest.

Meanwhile, Pollit reports that Neuhaus has been driven to bankruptcy:

When I caught up with Dr. Neuhaus by phone, she was driving twenty miles to her mother’s house to do laundry: her washing machine had broken down and she couldn’t afford the repair bill. Between the mortgage and the health insurance required for her son’s Type 1 diabetes, there’s no money for basic maintenance on the isolated farmhouse she shares with her husband, Mike Caddell, and son in Nortonville. To top it off, her car needs $1,000 worth of repairs, so she has had to borrow her mother’s. We talked about the stress that abortion providers are under in Kansas: at one time, Dr. Neuhaus wore a bulletproof vest and carried a gun.

“Sometimes I think I have PTSD,” she said with a laugh. “At the core, I’m a fighter—but I’ve been injured, too.” Still, she forges on: having earned a master’s in public health, she is now working as a researcher at the University of Kansas. One way or another, Dr. Neuhaus will be taking care of people’s health needs. But she won’t be involved in abortions, she says. Even if she gets back her license, Operation Rescue has driven yet another provider from the field.

Their job is done. They must be so proud.  I wonder that by their own beliefs,  they are going to hell?

Pollit and others are collecting money to help:

Donate online at Indiegogo.com/projects/dr-neuhaus,, or mail checks made out to Ann K. Neuhaus to me at The Nation and I will forward them. You won’t be helping just one person; you will be sending a message of support to every provider. If we let good, brave physicians be destroyed by the Cheryl Sullengers and the Phill Klines, who will do the difficult, dangerous but necessary work of abortion care?

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QOTD: CEO or King?

by digby

Punishing #Syria for using chemical weapons isn’t declaring war. Shouldn’t require Congressional approval. POTUS is our CEO.
— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) August 31, 2013

If that’s the case, the people are the board of directors and they get a say through their duly elected representatives.

If you ever wanted to see the CEO God complex in action, there you have it. It’s not so much that he compared the president of the United States to some business functionary, it’s that thinks running a company is the same as running a country. I guess these guys really do believe that the nation should be run like a business. Well, except it’s not allowed to have revenue or produce anything (but weapons.) But other than that it’s exactly the same.