by digby
There’s been so much detailed information revealed in the Snowden documents that sometimes I find myself a little bit overwhelmed. And I miss things. Like this one from Greenwald in The Guardian back in September:
Top secret US government documents obtained by the Guardian from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden characterize even the most basic political and legal opposition to drone attacks as part of “propaganda campaigns” from America’s “adversaries”.
The entry is part of a top secret internal US government website, similar in appearance to the online Wikipedia site. According to a June interview with Snowden in Hong Kong, the only individuals empowered to write these entries are those “with top secret clearance and public key infrastructure certificates”, special access cards enabling unique access to certain parts of NSA systems. He added that the entries are “peer reviewed” and that every edit made is recorded by user.
One specific entry discusses “threats to unmanned aerial vehicles”. It lists various dangers to American drones, including “air defense threats”, “jamming of UAV sensor systems”, “terrestrial weather”, and “electronic warfare employed against the command and control system”.
But alongside those more obvious, conventional threats are what the entry describes as “propaganda campaigns that target UAV use”.
Under the title “adversary propaganda themes”, the document lists what it calls “examples of potential propaganda themes that could be employed against UAV operations”.
One such example is entitled “Nationality of Target vs. Due Process”. It states:
Attacks against American and European persons who have become violent extremists are often criticized by propagandists, arguing that lethal action against these individuals deprives them of due process.”
In the eyes of the US government, “due process” – the idea that the US government should not deprive people of life away from a battlefield without presenting evidence of guilt – is no longer a basic staple of the American political system, but rather a malicious weapon of “propagandists”. The ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, among many other groups, have made exactly that argument against the US drone targeting program (“the US government’s killings of US citizens Anwar Al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011 violated the Constitution’s fundamental guarantee against the deprivation of life without due process of law”).
Now I realize that we are all supposed to feel quite confident that unless we are Muslim, this will never be used against us, so why worry, right? (Too bad about the millions of innocent American Muslims, and Muslims around the world, but hey, waddayagonnado?) Still, the fact that the legal justification even exists to target those who are anti-drone activists as “propagandists” and, therefore, subject to terrorist surveillance programs should at the very least make you wonder how far this could go under the right circumstances. After all, we’ve had prominent Americans calling for Greenwald’s arrest and characterizing his partner as a drug mule. Imagine if there is a major terrorist attack. Do you think they won’t do it?
Update: Alan Rusbridger editor of The Guardian did a Q&A with the Washington Post today. Very interesting. It certainly makes one realize why the old boys who insisted on constitutional freedom of the press did so.