MANAGING SURVEILLANCE: TOUGH CALLS, CLOSE CALLS, NECESSARY CALLS

Charlie Savage’s NY Times preview of the scathing review given the NSA’s surveillance program by the federal Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is focused, quite properly, on the questions the Congressionally-created Board raises about the legality, even the Constitutionality of the whole program.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/us/politics/watchdog-report-says-nsa-program-is-illegal-and-should-end.html?hp

A majority says, in a 238 page report that was released today, that the NSA’s reading of what Section 215 of the Patriot Act authorizes is completely wrong, and that the NSA’s actions taken under their self-generated power abuse the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution. 

“David Medine, the board’s chairman and a former Federal Trade Commission official in the Clinton administration; Patricia M. Wald, a retired federal appeals court judge named to the bench by President Jimmy Carter; and James X. Dempsey, a civil liberties advocate who specializes in technology issues,” Savage reports, want the open-ended surveillance of Americans’ “private” lives ended.  “But the other two members — Rachel L. Brand and Elisebeth Collins Cook, both of whom were Justice Department lawyers in the George W. Bush administration — rejected the finding that the program was illegal,” and want the it continued.

That important disagreement aside, the Times says, all 5 members agreed to 10 surveillance reforms that they want implemented immediately.

“Some of those recommendations,” Savage says, “dovetailed with the steps Mr. Obama announced last week, including limiting analysts’ access to the call records of people no further than two links removed from a suspect, instead of three, and creating a panel of outside lawyers to serve as public advocates in major cases involving secret surveillance programs.

“Other recommendations — like deleting data faster — were not mentioned in the president’s speech. And all members of the board expressed privacy concerns about requiring phone companies to retain call records longer than they normally would, which might be necessary to meet Mr. Obama’s stated goal of finding a way to preserve the program’s ability without having the government collect the bulk data.”

Pardon me, but what nonsense the Obama less-than-a-proposal is!  The tracking technology which has radically reduced any rational expectation of privacy should be kept intact, the President says.  OK by me, you can’t abolish knowledge.  But it is inexcusable that the President leaves the heart of the matter, governance, managing the deep-reaching surveillance technology, the limits placed on tracking, on recorded-keeping, on access, and the oversight to enforce the limits, to be figured out sometime in the future by somebody else.  Even worse are his choices for those somebodies:  the flip-flopping record-breaking persecutor of journalists and whistleblowers, Attorney General Eric Holder, or the Liar, to his Congressional and Judicial monitors, Director of National Intelligence Gen. James Clapper. Oy!  Or as my Grandma would have said, “Feh.”

Hey, Mr. President, what? are you tired or something?  Those decisions are for you.

Obama’s big problem – and it’s a whopper – is, too many Americans simply don’t trust his judgment.  That’s bad enough, but the President makes it worse by claiming that a mistrust that is personal to him extends to the American Government.

That institutional mistrust is real, and is another awful problem, assiduously cultivated, not just by a blame-shedding President, but by selfish 0.1%ers like the Koch brothers, who want government undermined like speeders want the highway patrol off the roads or rotten bond-selling financiers want to practice their manipulations without regulation. 

Rather than  fight for his citizens’ trust by making choices and sticking by them, the President coddles the mistrusters by suggesting, the data about them the government ordered gathered, to which it demands the option of immediate access, will be more private if the phone company or some newly created private company actually keeps it.

First off, if the data is there, and the government has the right to call it in when it says it must, what difference does it make where it puts the nozzle of its vacuum cleaner?  Typically, this whole discussion is a distraction, Obama’s “solution,” a diversion.

It is, at bottom, just more “contracting out” another vital government responsibility.  That worked really well for healthcare.gov, didn’t it, and in Iraq and Afghanistan? 

There, poorly-paid soldiers learned their Army didn’t trust them with their generals’ security, preferring to hire much-better-paid private contractors.  Even several of the generals I talked with understood this undermined troop morale and cohesion. 

Also in Iraq,  I saw State Department efforts at public outreach destroyed by their security contractor cowboys and bullies.  Blackwater got rich; Iraqis got bruised or worse, and America got a black eye.

Sometimes, both soldiers and diplomats were needed to rescue contractors who hadn’t bothered to co-ordinate their missions -- or even their schedules -- with either the military or civilian chain of command.  And then there was the persistent corruption on the civilian side, between USG-selected American contractors and local sub-contractors -- literally a billion dollar business.

In building the healthcare websites, contractors consistently failed to meet standards or deadlines, then swept problems under the rug, until opening day left their lax overseers humiliated when nothing worked right.  Had the work been done within the government, by people who knew they would have to live with the results, not move on to their next assignment as soon as their contract ran out, more alarms would have been sounded, louder and earlier.

But, the Times’ Savage, like me, buries the lead, the big question: is the super-charged surveillance worth the trouble?  It sounds to me like his answer is no.  “The report also scrutinizes in detail a handful of investigations in which the program was used, finding “no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”

If Big Data can’t see around corners, can’t prevent terrorist attacks, who needs it?

My answer?  We do.

It is true, all the surveillance in the world (which the NSA virtually has) can’t and usually doesn’t pre-empt what Don Rumsfeld brilliantly called, “unknown unknowns.”  There are too many grievances, too many weapons, too many opportunities.  Bad shit will happen.

But, if terrorism cannot be prevented, the costs of practicing it can be raised, and the NSA surveillance system should assist in that.  Even when it doesn’t prevent terrorism every “this time,” it can radically reduce the number of “next times.”

It’s no accident Al Qaeda followed 9/11/01 with literally years without a significant strike.  The World Trade Center and Washington attacks cost the group almost 2 dozen operatives, some with years of training and indoctrination behind them.  Each of the terrorists left behind a history, a trail of connections and associations, people who were taken off the board or driven into hiding and relative ineffectuality, because intelligence services could retrospectively identify them. 

And this was during the technological dark ages; today we’re in the renaissance of the digital dark arts, where the metadata of the multitudes can be scanned much more efficiently.

It will still be a difficult job, making sure that only relevant metadata gets collated for the right reasons, but it can be done.  And only government, not some designated private contractor, can be held responsible to do it right.

You would rather trust Google or the Phone Company?  Not me.

But even done right, no miracles should be expected.  No one consistently predicts the future.  Better understanding of the past, however, can change the future. The networking reconstructions the surveillance system can yield after a terrorist attack can defeat others still short of execution.

There was some good news in the Privacy Board’s report.  In its meticulous examination of NSA surveillance activities, the Board unanimously agreed, it found not a single case of misbehavior, of anyone’s privacy being gratuitously penetrated, not a scintilla of evidence that any snooper was cavalier about citizens’ prerogatives.  This is, of course, no more a guarantee of future behavior than the massive nature of the information-gathering inevitably predicts future misbehavior.

Let’s assume Barack Obama knows all of this, all the pluses and minuses, all the likely limits on success, not just the potential catastrophes of failure, the real risks and realistic expectations from NSA surveillance.  Isn’t it past time he talked honestly to us about where lines of conduct should be drawn?  Isn’t this his mandated Presidential role, what his predecessor called being “the Decider?”   

It is a tough job, but somebody does have to do it. 

NSA REVELATIONS: MORE OF THE SAME, MUCH MORE

The latest revelations about NSA/GCHQ spying seem, literally, more of the same.  The numbers go up, “thousands of targets,” and so do the levels of folly and indiscrimination.  The NY Times says,

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/world/nsa-dragnet-included-allies-aid-groups-and-business-elite.html?hp

 

“Secret documents reveal more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years, including the office of an Israeli prime minister, heads of international aid organizations, foreign energy companies and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.”

The list of targets published by the Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/20/gchq-targeted-aid-agencies-german-government-eu-commissioner

includes: “senior European Union officials, foreign leaders including African heads of state and sometimes their family members, directors of United Nations and other relief programs, and officials overseeing oil and finance ministries, according to the documents. In addition to Israel, some targets involved close allies like France and Germany.”

At this point the Times reporters James Glanz and Andrew W. Lehren pause for a moment and gather a joint “straight face,” and use it to deliver this: the NSA/GCHQ to-surveil lists “also include people suspected of being terrorists or militants.”

Let me do better than just italics to highlight this.  Let me repeat:  in addition to officials of Doctors without Borders, the EU anti-trust agency, and the African economic organization ECOWAS, our security services also tracked actual potential threats to someone’s security: “people suspected of being terrorists or militants.”

How reassuring.

Less reassuring was the revelation that one of the email accounts tapped by GCHQ (likely on assignment from the NSA) was “the email address was used for correspondence with [then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s] office, which he said staff members often handled. He added that it was unlikely that any secrets could have been compromised.

“This was an unimpressive target,” Mr. Olmert said.

Unless the Times/Guardian/Spiegel missed something, the snoopers were plugged into the wrong circuit, the G rated email account.  I suspect bureaucratic buffoonery: some intel  jobsworth was tasked to set up a tap on Olmert. And he did. Incompetently and ineffectively.  But if anyone up chain asked him about the Olmert account, he could answer truthfully, “We’re on it. It’s working like a charm.”  Turning up nothing.

If the White House, or some other NSA “client” within government wanted to know what Olmert was up to, a search of Israel’s hard-charging news media, print, radio, TV and internet, almost certainly would have provided better information, at a much lower cost, measured in dollars or national dignity.

Probably the first question any spy should ask him or herself about a possible penetration for information is, “Can I get away with it?”

Probably the most frightening thing about all the secret surveillances Edward J. Snowden has publicized is, the NSA brass actually believed they could “get away with them, all of them.”

Somehow, as they burrowed deeper down intercept alley, the intelligence executive was blind to a world of change (as their analogs were so amazingly deaf to the rumble of impending collapse of the Soviet Union.)  DNI James Clapper and NSA Director Keith Alexander acted as if the universality of smartphones, digital recorders, and computers were no significant threat to data-security, and existence of a 24/7 digital livestream of global communication meant that stolen info could be instantaneously re-distributed to a worldwide public

Remember, these latest revelations cover the period 2008-2011, by which time institutional dreams of secure secrecy should have been thoroughly discredited.   In 2005 and 2006 James Risen had published in his book State of War, and in the NY Times, well-sourced stories on a secret CIA cyberwar against Iran, and the NSA’s warrantless surveillance of American telephone communications.  Barton Gellman, in 2007 and 2008, had outed the super-secret White House Group on Iraq, and in the Washington Post and his political biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, Angler, the NSA’s massive data-mining of digital communications. 

I guess the professional judgment of Clapper and Alexander was, “That can’t happen again.”

How would Angela Merkel ever find out, we’re tapping her cellphone?

It’s called risk-assessment, and it’s probably the most basic job in national security.  If you can’t manage the first, you shouldn’t be allowed to attempt the second.  So, beyond the imperative to fire the 2 retired Generals because they both lied to Congress and systematically misled their legal monitors on the FISA Court, (yeah, I know, too late to fire Alexander.  He’s already resigned.) how about firing them for their obvious and avoidable misjudgments of risk and reality that, for very little return in important intelligence, has subjected the United States to international hostility, mistrust, contempt and humiliation?

Whatever the risk, what was the expected reward from collecting and transcribing the conversations of ECOWAS’ Mohamed Ibn Chambas, which included, the Times reports, “’Am glad yr day was satisfying,’ Mr. Chambas texted one acquaintance” The Times reported.

“’I spent my whole day travelling ... Had to go from Abidjan to Accra to catch a flt to Monrovia ... The usual saga of intra afr.’ Later he recommended a book, “A Colonial History of Northern Ghana,” to the same person. ‘Interesting and informative,’ Mr. Chambas texted.”  This is an intellgience mission that seems stupid from top to bottom, beginning to end.  Chambas is even mis-identified by his snooper as “Dr. Chambers.”

The same Congress that has cut food stamps and unemployment insurance, that won’t build highways or repair bridges writes a blank check to the national security services to exemplify the idea of “a bureaucracy run amok.”

Challenged about the apparent surveillance on the EU’s anti-trust ball-buster of Intel and Microsoft, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines actually gave a coherent and intelligent answer: “The intelligence community’s efforts to understand economic systems and policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security.”

Me, I buy that, we probably do want to know what the top economic movers and shakers around the world are thinking and saying.  But I’m no better than agnostic on whether that’s what the tap on Joaquín Almunia, vice president of the European Commission was really about, helping government make  better economic policies.  I suspect it could have been about helping US companies cut a better deal with the Euro-folk, a more diffuse national benefit.

At least the cost of this revelation will be borne by the security bumblers and their White House enablers.  Sr. Almunia may now, righteously, be doubly suspicious of the American Government and American IT firms, and doubly harsh in his treatment of them.  But the news that UN relief agencies, even NGOs like Medecins du Monde, have also been penetrated, their notes and observations swept into the NSA’s data files, will hurt the organizations, hamper their ability to do good around the world, perhaps even put their refugee rescuers and volunteer doctors and nurses in mortal danger.

In the case of Almunia, and of the human rights and social service workers, what they see and say may well be worth knowing.  But not at any price; and all these cases, the consequences that were risked should have forestalled any secret sweeping.

In addition to being an historically grave offense against privacy, the decade-long NSA etc surveillance campaign has been an offense against competence, judgment, discipline and common sense.

This clown show started under President George W. Bush, but it hasn’t dropped a stitch (or a seltzer bottle) since Barack Obama took over the White House.  With his characteristic mysterious mixture of diffidence (or is it laziness) and passivity (or is it cowardice?) he has permitted, nay encouraged, the most dysfunctional departments of his government to keep on doin’ their thing.

Now, 6 months after the Snowden revelations hit the fan, Obama is admitting there’s a problem.  Appallingly, it is clear from his remarks at his December 20 News Conference, the problem he sees is not an ongoing privacy problem, or competence problem, but a theoretical issue far in the future: “I have confidence in the fact that the NSA is not engaging in domestic surveillance or snooping around, but I also recognize that as technologies change and people can start running algorithms and programs that map out all the information that we're downloading on a daily basis into our telephones and our computers that we may have to refine this further to give people more confidence.”

That for Barack Obama is the real problem here, a public relations problem.

The President says, “What [is clear] from the public debate, people are concerned about the prospect, the possibility of abuse. And I think that's what the judge in the district court suggested. And although his opinion obviously differs from rulings on the FISA Court, we're taking those into account.”

Uhhh, can we hold it right there?  (1) Judge Richard Leon didn’t just worry about some as yet undocumented potential for abuse, he declared unconstitutional the present, on-going, broadscale, warrantless imposition of government surveillance on the private lives of American citizens who are suspected of crimes, and have had no direct contact with suspected terrorists.  And (2) those previous “rulings on the FISA Court,” were all predicated on now-corrected misinformation, lying claims that the DNI and NSA and the other agencies under FISA supervision were obeying the law in their actions and in their filings to the court. 

Thus, those FISA Court “rulings” are completely invalid.

I hope Mr. Obama also takes that “into account.”  But more likely his scheme is to calm down the rubes and keep doing what he and his security team have been doing since the day he took office (and to be fair, many years before).  As he himself said at the news conference, “it is clear that whatever benefits the configuration of this particular program may have, may be outweighed by the concerns that people have on its potential abuse. And if that's the case, there may be another way of skinning the cat.”

That’s not cat skin, sir, that’s my privacy.

 

 

 

UPDATED!! HERSH CHOPS DOWN A CHERRY (PICKING) TREE

Sy Hersh has done it again, published a devastating report on what he calls the manipulation of intelligence by the Obama Administration to support its short-lived plan to intervene militarily in Syria and to delude Congress and the American public on real and dangerous question of who might have used, and who might still retain CW capability there.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

The piece, published by the London Review of Books (a.k.a. LRB) on December 8, was called to my attention by stalwart reader Tobe Berkovitz of the Boston University School of Communications (and my revered brother-in-law).

In his report, Hersh, citing sources within America’s military and intelligence communities, makes at least 5 important assertions.

1)     That military forces loyal to President Bashar-all Assad are not the only ones in Syria capable of manufacturing the lethal chemical weapon Sarin, and arming munitions with it.

2)     That President Obama cherry-picked the intel to create a falsely air-tight public case against Assad.

3)     That Obama and his representatives misled the American news media into thinking the Administration had real-time evidence that tied Assad’s forces to the war crime, rather than deductive assumptions based on back-tracking communications intercepts which could, at best, suggest rather than prove the Administration’s case.

4)     That, even after Administration sources corrected this mis-impression (in response to angry charges from Syrian rebel allies that the US had stood by and watched the build-up to the chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians), major organs, including specifically the Washington Post, continued to sell the Administration’s “rock-solid” case against Assad.

5)     That the net-net of Obama’s eventual policy, to collaborate with the Russians and, later the UN, to disarm the Syrian government forces of their chemical weapons, could be to leave the Al-Nusra Front, allegedly closely allied with Al Qaeda, as the only sarin-capable forces in the Syrian war zone.

 

Below are some crucial citations from Hersh’s piece, but I urge you to real the whole, scathing report.

1)  “Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin.…  [B]y late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus, including Eastern Ghouta,” [the area from which the sarin attack is believed to have come.]

2) “[I]n recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote. …  The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.”

3)  “A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. … A keyword or two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant conversations. ‘What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies started with an event – the use of sarin – and reached to find chatter that might relate,’ the former official said. ‘This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.’ The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.”

4)  “A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to the complaints. A statement  to the Associated Press said that the intelligence behind the earlier administration assertions was not known at the time of the attack, but recovered only subsequently: ‘Let’s be clear, the United States did not watch, in real time, as this horrible attack took place. ... But since the American press corps had their story, the retraction received scant attention. On 31 August the Washington Post, relying on the government assessment, had vividly reported on its front page that American intelligence was able to record ‘each step’ of the Syrian army attack in real time, ‘from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials’. It did not publish the AP corrective, and the White House maintained control of the narrative.”

5)  “While the Syrian regime continues the process of eliminating its chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad’s stockpile of precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients that can create sarin, a strategic weapon that would be unlike any other in the war zone.”

A footnote:  Seymour Hersh’s report in length and style strongly resembles past reports published by The New Yorker.  So far, I haven’t heard back from Hersh as to whether this article had been offered to the New Yorker before its publication by LRB.  I hope to be able to update you on this issue.

UPDATE:  Eliot Higgins, on the Foreign Policy magazine website, offers a refutation of (one part of) Seymour Hersh’s report, that the munitions used against civilians could have been made and launched, not by President Assad’s military, but rebel forces, most-likely the Al Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra Front.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/12/09/sy_hershs_chemical_misfire#sthash.XL8Zj7ty.xt8pYKWy.dpbs

Most of Higgins’ evidence is culled from YouTube videos, and raises a lot of good questions, although his challenge to MIT expert Ted Postol seems pretty labored to me.

“Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Hersh that the Volcano is "something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop" -- in other words, a weapon the rebels could make. Postol also stated that various organizations' flight path analysis of the Aug. 21 Volcanoes, which put the point of origin of the munitions at a Syrian military base more than nine kilometers away from the impact locations, were "totally nuts." Postol's analysis, Hersh wrote, had "demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was 'unlikely' to be more than two kilometres." 

All of this is presented as an argument that perhaps the Syrian government wasn't responsible for the Aug. 21 sarin attack, despite the claims of U.S. President Barack Obama's administration. But during my ongoing discussions with Postol's colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, Lloyd has told me he believes the evidence collected so far would suggest the Volcano has a range of at least 2 to 2.5 kilometers. It's worth noting that some examples of the larger Volcano rocket have been recorded with a basic nose cone, which increase the range of the munition by more than one kilometer.”

 

But, if I’m remembering correctly, the Administration’s analysis claimed the sarin-filled missile had been fired by Syrian troops based 9 km away.

More troubling is Higgins’ expert’s argument that Al-Nusra lacks the capability to build weapons of the sort used in Eastern Ghouta.

“I asked chemical weapons specialist Dan Kaszeta for his opinion on that. He compared the possibility of Jabhat al-Nusra using chemical weapons to another terrorist attack involving sarin: the 1996 gassing of the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

‘The 1994 to 1996 Japanese experience tells us that even a very large and sophisticated effort comprising many millions of dollars, a dedicated large facility, and a lot of skilled labor results only in liters of sarin, not tons,’ Kaszeta said. ‘Even if the Aug. 21 attack is limited to the eight Volcano rockets that we seem to be talking about, we're looking at an industrial effort two orders of magnitude larger than the Aum Shinrikyo effort. This is a nontrivial and very costly undertaking, and I highly doubt whether any of the possible nonstate actors involved here have the factory to have produced it. Where is this factory? Where is the waste stream? Where are the dozens of skilled people -- not just one al Qaeda member -- needed to produce this amount of material?’"

 

It does make one want to ask Sy’s sources what made them confident that Jihadist rebel groups were sarin-capable.

But, as I noted earlier, Higgins, whose piece is headlined “St Hershe’s Chemical Misfire,” concentrates on the ballistics question, real and important, but just a fraction of a report that concentrates on the Obama Administration’s alleged “manipulation” of intelligence.  Of that, Higgins says only this, in his closing paragraph: “Hersh rightly expresses concern about the way in which the U.S. government's narrative of the Aug. 21 was built.”

“Rightly,” indeed.  Hersh says the Administration cherry-picked its evidence, misdescribed its methodology, and may well have misjudged the whole situation.  Video clips of various missiles, valuable as they are, are only part of the evidence for part of the story.

And thanks to David Isenberg for pointing me to the FP report.

 

 

 

 

TODAY IN WASHINGTON: 2 WAYS TO HIDE FACTS

Profiles in courage (Craven Division).

The NY Times reported today on the utterances of one John A. Boehner.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/us/politics/boehner-rules-out-push-on-immigration.html?hp&_r=0

He was confronted, the Times aid, at his daily Capitol Hill breakfast stop, Pete’s Diner, by 2 teenaged students, brought to this country illegally by their parents when they were young children, who asked for his help in passing comprehensive immigration reform, Boehner told them, “I’m trying to find some way to get this thing done. It’s, uh, as you know, not easy, not going to be an easy path forward. But I’ve made it clear since the day after the election it’s time to get this done.”

Later, that same day, Boehner must have re-checked the time, because he told reporters asking about the Senate-passed immigration reform legislation:

 

“’The idea that we’re going to take up a 1,300-page bill that no one had ever read, which is what the Senate did, is not going to happen in the House,’ he said. ‘And frankly, I’ll make clear we have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill.’”

Whatever you think of Boehner’s political bind, what can one say about the bald-faced lie he palmed off on the students?  He sure taught them a thing or two about honesty and honor in American politics.

I mean who were these “illegals” to demand the personal respect of an honest answer?

Of course, by the end of the article, Times reporters Ashley Parker and Michael S. Schmidt had provided evidence that dishonesty through non-disclosure is no partisan thing in today’s Washington. “John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said at a confirmation hearing for Jeh C. Johnson, the nominee for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security,” the Times reported, "that the administration had refused to provide information on how it was policing the border.

"After Mr. Johnson stopped short of committing to provide the border data without consulting with homeland security officials, Mr. McCain said that he would not vote to confirm him until Mr. Johnson gave a 'yes answer' to sharing the information. 'How can we carry out our functions of oversight if we don’t get the kind of information we need to make the decisions that this committee to make?' Mr. McCain said."

 

 

HEAR, HEAR HERSH

I consider Seymour Hersh to be both a personal friend and a hero of American journalism.  His recent rant, delivered to an audience in London, and turned into an article this week in The Guardian is must-read and must-think-about material.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media

 

It has also pissed a lot of people off, including other journalist friends I love and respect, several of whom have opined somewhat grumpily, “Well, Sy has been known to lie himself,” or slightly more circumspectly, “Sy’s published some inaccurate stories without discernible sources.”

 

Really?  No cases I can readily cite of either crime.

 

Honestly, as infuriating as Sy can be with his, well-earned perhaps, superiority complex, and tendency to be dismissive of anyone else's reporting, I can't think of any serious "lying" he might have done (at least to his readers), or any cases in which I suspected his often-unnamed (usually for good reasons) sources did not exist.

I think Hersh is right that there has been a sea change in reporting between the Bush2 and Obama eras, in part because it was the habit of Bush and Cheney and their junior partners like Rumsfeld, Wolkowitz, Tenet, C Rice, et al, to string together fake-facts that confirmed their often ignorant and ideological assumptions, and then make it as hard as possible to prove them wrong, while Obama and his gang of enablers (Gibbs, Axelrod, Kerry, Clinton, S Rice, Donilon, Pannetta, Petraeus) simply dissemble and walk away, confident they and their statements will not be directly challenged by journalists.

 

The Bush team, like Reagan's before them, were supremely confident in their own stupidities, while the less ideological, less committed, more pragmatic Obamians are more aware of how much they don't know and how dangerous for them it would be politically, if everyone else found that out.

 

Sy's unfortunately undocumented rant (he's a much lazier pundit than he is a reporter) does reflect a reality of shifts in news media budgeting -- more money for stars, less for workers; more for sets or graphic redesigns, less for reporting, and editorial (ir)responsibility -- more opinion, preferably loud, mindless argument, less actual information and analysis.  Then there is the time-for-thought (and research) foreshortening that has come with the 24 hours news cycle, and on TV in particular, the abandonment of public service for private profit (whose insane growth itself has been a major displacer of old budgeting priorities).

 

The lobotomizing of public information and the public discussions which depend on it is probably the most indelible marker of America's tragic national decline since World War 2.  The news media (especially television)-applied cannula to the nation's frontal lobes has enabled the shallow thinking and unscrupulous illogic of today's hyper-partisans by denying them even the expectation, much less the necessity of factual information on which to base their opinions.

 

Challenging authority, which Sy rightly calls one of our main reportorial assignments, demands hard, time-consuming work to acquire the facts and understand and order them to make the challenging counter-argument.  No one has exemplified that meticulous scholarship than Seymour Hersh. 

 

Today's news media (1) do not hire troublemakers (like Sy) who would pick up the challenge; (2) do not encourage the people they do hire to aspire to think outside conventionality; (3) will not publish anything which might "cause trouble" for themselves, their institutions or for the powerful people with whom they socialize or aspire to; (4) do not permit the off-the-ball research necessary to get to the bottom of counter-conventional reality; (5) consider that kind of real reporting "unaffordable," just as today's political and business leaders consider any real social safety net for poor or elderly citizens to be "unaffordable."  After all, most of them either looked the other way, or actively participated when public and corporate money that could have been spent on pension and health insurance obligations was diverted into executive’s or shareholder’s bank accounts.

 

I wish Sy had bothered to structure his argument more rigorously and to buttress it with checkable facts rather than unverifiable assertions, like his claim that the story of the killing of Osama Bin Laden is "a pack of lies," but do I think he is in any way wrong in his broad-scale conclusions about today’s news business?  Sadly, I do not.

 

To Sy, I only say, as we once used to imprint at the bottom of every page, “More, More More.”

SYRIA, WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

“Well, this time we’re really mad.” That seems to be gist of the message President Obama has charged Secretary of State John Kerry with giving to the world.

After a widely suspected chemical attack on Syrian civilians earlier this summer, almost certainly on orders from their murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad, reportedly killed between 100 and 150 people, The Obama White House said we were pretty steamed, and told Assad we were finally going to start arming his enemies in response. But we did not do so.

Just as we did not do anything to Assad after 2 years of his desperate attempts to hold onto power had produced an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths and more than a million refugees.

But now, Kerry says, things are different: now we know Assad ordered what we know was a chemical weapons attack that we know has killed upwards of 1000 civilians, who like the 100,000 dead who have preceded them are disproportionately women and children.

The proof, journalists have been told, will be found in “sigint,”digital messages with traceable sources and signatures that will establish, it was Bashar and his henchmen who put the poison gas into play.

Could this be the opportunity the Securicrats have been waiting for?  Is this when the surveillance capability which I accept cannot be undone can be used to benefit American security (if it is really being threatened)?  Could just the kind of message mining the NSA says it occasionally, accidentally uses to tap the communications of Americans be used righteously, to protect the innocent (even if they are not Americans) against their oppressors (even if they have never proposed oppressing America)?

If the NSA et al can really produce evidence that will convince reasonable people that the Syrian regime has indeed broken one of the world’s most serious laws and taboos, against using chemical weapons for mass attacks against civilians, that would be an important accomplishment.  And it might even provide a proper predicate for a serious response against those responsible.

But the US Government’s “proof” had better be good. As my brilliant friend George Kenney points out today in Huffington Post: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-kenney/syria-air-strikes_b_3814293.html

"From the reporting it seems ineluctably clear that chemical weapons were used. That's a tragedy. But it remains far from clear who did it. None of the many insurgent groups are saints; to be honest, with the fighting going against the insurgency in recent months there would be far greater incentives on their side to use chemical weapons, in the hope of triggering western intervention, than there would be on the part of Syrian government forces."

But assuming, the charges against the Assad regime stand up, some hard questions still remain, like why would we respond?  To defend international law? To defend Syrian lives? Or would we be acting to defend our “credibility, “ to make good on President Obama's "red line" warnings?  As today's NY Times editorial puts it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/opinion/responding-to-syrian-atrocities.html?hp&_r=0

"Presidents should not make a habit of drawing red lines in public, but if they do, they had best follow through. Many countries (including Iran, which Mr. Obama has often said won’t be permitted to have a nuclear weapon) will be watching."

This sounds a little like Dr. Seuss' Horton Hatches the Egg raised to geo-strategic levels: "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant, and an elephant's faithful 100%."

Yes, it is a good thing for our allies and our enemies to know we are steadfast. But it is a better thing, if what we propose to do makes sense.

So what is that President Obama is considering?

Here is what the NY Times says we can expect:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/world/middleeast/syria-assad.html?hp

“a limited military operation — cruise missiles launched from American destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea at military targets in Syria.”

The Washington Post has a bit more detail,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kerry-obama-determined-to-hold-syria-accountable-for-using-chemical-weapons/2013/08/26/599450c2-0e70-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html?hpid=z1

adding that “long-range bombers” may also be used for “no more than two days “ to hit “military targets not directly related to Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.”

Like what? Well, Army Chief of Staff Martin Dempsey told Congress in June, “Potential targets include high-value regime air defense, air, ground, missile, and naval forces as well as the supporting military facilities and command nodes.”

But the Post says the attack under contemplation would be something, “far smaller and designed more to send a message than to cripple Assad’s military and change the balance of forces on the ground.”

Clearly the Times heard the same ideas with slightly different words: “not a sustained air campaign intended to topple Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, or to fundamentally alter the nature of the conflict on the ground.”

So, the American government wants the world to know that making good on the President’s word means sending a message and a punishment to President Assad, but nothing more. Take that! Take your un-toppled self and un-crippled military and carry on. Carry on with an unchanged balance of forces in an unaltered conflict and just restrict yourself to killing without chemicals, the old-fashioned ways.

Huh?

If, as Secretary Kerry said, Assad’s gassing his own people to keep power is a “moral obscenity,” then what is our killing a few of Assad’s soldiers (and almost inevitably, his people,) while keeping the arch-murderer in power and still dominating a majority of Syria’s citizens and territory?

It sounds like that’s America’s objective: to keep things as they are. Show a little might. Kill some Syrian Muslims. Intimidate some Iranian Muslims. But do not change the unrelieved awfulness of Syrian reality today.

 

Is this because we think, facing reality in a world and particular case of nothing but bad options, that this is all we really can accomplish?  If so, keeping that a “secret,” is another example of “old world thinking.”  Better to explain what we can and cannot do, and why, than simply to leave the globally visible results (the explosions will be seen on all-the-world’s TV, computer and tablet screens) to be interpreted unaided.

 

Our plan of action seems to be all about limiting risk, not in itself a bad thing. But if the limits, using only “stand-off” weapons, whether they be missiles, or drones, of bombers flying high (as in Kosovo and Serbia to keep pilots safe,) exacts a cost in targeting accuracy (as it did in Kosovo and Serbia,) it may not be so well received among the people on the ground or the people watching it all at home. 

The Kosovo precedent was, in a way, great for us – a war with no casualties:  none; no  American lives were lost in the campaign to free Kosovo.  But the idea of risk-free military action is a dangerous one, and to outsiders may seem both brutal and cowardly.  This is already how much of the world already perceives our military strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, America killing “because it can.”

We limit our targeting in both those places, too, and claim “good intelligence,” implied allied consent, and legal justification for everything we do, but much of the world hates us for it.

And wouldn’t you, if some foreign force meted out its brand of justice in our backyards, or even our boondocks? And wouldn’t you hate it even more if what the outsiders called justice were just geo-political posturing to protect its “word,” while changed nothing, while practically guaranteeing, of not enabling future crimes by the oppressor, and future repetitions of violent correction, further wastes of our blood and treasure?

If we choose force, death and destruction, shouldn’t it be to change something, to end, not prolong violent conflict.

Unless we cannot realistically expect to do better. 

So, tell us, if we can use our spy tech to track Assad’s messages, can we also use it to track the man himself?  If we can trace the communications of the Syrian chain of command to prove that carries out war crimes, can we not to target enough significant links in that chain to disassemble it?

Or are we just sticking to the pre-precision warfare rule of law, that killing “leaders” is unacceptable, while killing their forces and their victims is not?

Decapitation and not punishment is what needs to be done to the Assad machine if we mean to effect change.

Playing pattycake for 2 years while Syria has imploded in government-dominated violence has not worked. Quite the contrary, it has ceded the battlefield to forces that see themselves as either enemies of or betrayed by us.  Making our slaps slightly harder will not change the hearts and minds of those now fighting in Syria, nor will it save Syrian lives or stabilize Syria’s neighborhood.

But can America do that?  And if we can’t what can we do and how? If we decimate and thereby bring under control the Syrian government’s war machine (military and internal security), can we then quiet and reorganize a chaotic battleground state overrun by several different fighting forces, some of them unalterably opposed to any peace on American terms.

As Syria’s neighbor Iraq (and Libya and Yemen) eloquently demonstrate, it is much easier to create a state of war than it is to end one. And, make no mistake, after, and in part because of, our own 2 years of passive acceptance, Syria is in an advanced state of war, where every inch of ground is controlled or contested by force.

The disasters in those 3 states (and the continuing troubles in Egypt and Tunisia) show the rule of force must be ended before rule of law can start, and that almost always demands the application of greater force. We say peace, freedom and stability for Syria is our ultimate goal, but what risks will be run for that goal? Stand-off force cannot hold ground.

Almost unheard of these days in Washington, there seems to be a solid consensus, from the White House to the Congress, to the American people, that we want to keep our “commitment” completely risk-free. We do not want to get involved in Syria’s Civil War. Me neither. But, face it; nothing far short of that is likely to work.  And, even one American cruise missile means we are involved.

We may deny it, call it an isolated “punishment,” “surgical” and clean, but that’s not what the world watching the explosions is going to think. They’re going to say, the US is involved in murder, in destruction. And they are going to ask, for what? “Sending a message,” delivering a punishment, sounds a lot like, what were John Kerry’s words? Oh yes, “a moral obscenity.”

No, if we’re going to use the bullet, we’re going to have to bite the bullet. If we’re going to shoot at the beast, we have to kill the beast. If the only way to end war is to use war, we should, and then, with help from allies, with support from local participation, against some very determined foes, we must also be prepared to win the peace. Which, we should acknowledge in front,  is likely to involve a lot of time, a lot of costs, and some serious risks, including if we are honest, (even if for a limited mission over a limited period of time,) somebody’s boots on the ground.

If domestic politics, or the limits of our military strength, forbid that, the White House should say so.  Honesty about the relationship between policy and reality is something every government owes its people.   Bluster or weasel words or half-measures are not likely to work, as domestic politics, much less as foreign relations.