The One Percent Doctrine lives
by digby
Here’s a nice piece on Snowden and the NSA revelations from Jacob Heilbrun in which he offers one of the better critiques of the administration’s response to the situation:
The Obama administration has gone into overdrive to attempt to capture Snowden, promising Moscow that Snowden would neither be tortured nor subjected to the death penalty if he is returned. But in the wake of the treatment of Bradley Manning, who was apparently subjected to prolonged isolation and other maltreatment, those promises are necessary but hardly sufficient. America’s track record when it comes to dealing with dissent—for that is what Snowden represents—is a parlous one, from the incarceration of Eugene Debs during World War I to the latest batch of whistleblowers. So Moscow has blown a giant raspberry at President Obama.
The problem is really of his own making. The appropriate response to Snowden would have been to promise him immunity from prosecution and allow him to return to America, where he could have testified to Congress. From a practical standpoint, the administration would have been better off with Snowden in America rather than back in Russia, where he can dribble out embarrassing information. Everything that Snowden has said appears to be accurate. The latest revelation concerns a computer program called XKeyscore that is one more step towards the omnicompetent state. It permits government officials to snoop wherever and whenever they please, to trawl through your internet activities, chats, emails, and so on. The indispensable James Bamford, writing in the New York Review of Books, reports that “with the arrival of the Obama administration, the NSA’s powers continued to expand at the same time that administration officials and the NSA continued to deceive the American public on the extent of the spying.”
So far, Snowden is on a roll. The Washington Post notes today that “Obama administration officials faced deepening political skepticism Wednesday about a far-reaching counterterrorism program that collects millions of Americans’ phone records, even as they released newly declassified documents in an attempt to spotlight privacy safeguards.” Indeed they do. Apart from the privacy questions, there is also the one of practicality, as Senate Judiciary Committee head Patrick Leahy made abundatly clear in questioning NSA officials yesterday. How effective are these programs? Do they testify more to bureaucratic aggrandizement than common sense? What confidence does anyone have that the NSA is able to use this massive amount of information in a clear and coherent fashion that promotes American national security? Little of this would be occurring absent Snowden’s release of documents about the NSA’s activities. Instead, the Obama administration would continue stealthily to assemble information about the activities of American citizens.
That sounds right to me. But, it also seems fairly obvious that having Snowden testify openly before congress is hardly something they would like to see happen. Indeed I’ve wondered from the beginning if the administration even really wanted Snowden to come back and face a public trial in which this story would remain on the front burner for a very long time. I can’t help but think they might prefer to let this fade into the sunset. After all, with much of the media now wallowing in Cold War nostalgia and portraying Snowden as the modern equivalent of Philip Agee (which is totally absurd) the government may be better off than if he came back to the US as what many people would see as a political prisoner cause célèbre. This may be the US government’s choice as much as the Russian’s.
Still, what Heilbrun suggests was actually the right thing to do. Not that that is particularly relevant in this situation.
I do think he nails the most important questions:
How effective are these programs? Do they testify more to bureaucratic aggrandizement than common sense? What confidence does anyone have that the NSA is able to use this massive amount of information in a clear and coherent fashion that promotes American national security
I would say that the evidence so far is that this is a matter of boys and their toys — and a cadre of spooks in the government who’ve managed to convince everyone that they need unlimited capacity and a very long leash. It’s basically the logical result of Dick Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine:
If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.
That idea, that even a 1% probability means we must respond as if it’s certainty, has permeated our government’s terrorism policy. And it’s crazy.
That quote comes from Ron Suskind’s book of the same name in which he:
…makes a distinction between two groups engaged in the fight against terrorism: “the notables”, those who talk to us about the threat of terrorism (Bush, Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, et al.), and “the invisibles”, those who are fighting terrorists (the CIA analysts, the FBI agents and all the other foot soldiers)
The foot soldiers are still there. They’re always there.
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