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. 

GAMESMEN, GO HOME

These days, it seems too many people have come to believe, as Shakespeare almost put it, “All the world's a game, And all the men and women merely players.”

Here are 2 deadly serious examples of what I mean.

Let the NSA spy indiscriminately on us, and we’ll try and beat them at their own game.

“From Silicon Valley to the South Pacific,” the Associated Press reported this week, “counterattacks to revelations of widespread National Security Agency surveillance are taking shape, from a surge of new encrypted email programs to technology that sprinkles the Internet with red flag terms to confuse would-be snoops.”

http://www.abqjournal.com/280684/news/counterattacks-growing-against-nsa-spying.html

In a way, this report also plays a popular news media game, the “trend” story, in which a few micro-scale fragments of the real world are inflated into a global movement. 

Here is some of the evidence cited by the AP to show a digital world enflamed:

--- “[Encryption] Developer Jeff Lyon in Santa Clara, Calif., said that 2,000 users have installed [his Flagger service] to date.”

--- “Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, a free encryption service was being loaded about 600 times a day in the month before Snowden’s revelations broke. Two months later, that had more than doubled to 1,380, according to a running tally maintained by programmer Kristian Fiskerstrand.”

--- “Berlin-based email provider Posteo claims to have seen a 150 percent surge in paid subscribers due to the “Snowden effect,” to 25,000 in the past four months.”

WOWIE ZOWIE!!! Add ‘em all together, and accept the advocates’ figures as accurate, and you get about 100,000 new encryptors out of, what, a billion users of the global internet.

But wait, AP says, there’s more: “CryptoParties are springing up around the world as well. They are small gatherings where hosts teach attendees, who bring their digital devices, how to download and use encrypted email and secure Internet browsers.”

That’ll show those NSA bastards!

The “trend” would be laughable were the plans of these “digital rebels” not so awful.

Flagger Boy Lyons says, “The goal here is to get a critical mass of people flooding the Internet with noise and make a statement of civil disobedience.”

While Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgens in San Francisco wants everybody to encrypt, because, he says, “Encryption loses its value as an indicator of possible malfeasance if everyone is using it.”

Absurd, absurder, reductio ad absurdum: “University of Auckland associate professor Gehan Gunasekara said he’s received ‘overwhelming support’ for his proposal to ‘lead the spooks in a merry dance,’ visiting radical websites, setting up multiple online identities and making up hypothetical ‘friends.’

“And ‘pretty soon everyone in New Zealand will have to be under surveillance,’ he said.”

Hey, schmuck!  That’s what the surveillance system is set up to do, and if you think you and all your friends have the budget to out-run the spooks, good luck to you. 

Increasing the scale of data-mining is as much of a challenge to the security services as a hard, straight fastball down the middle is to a big league hitter.  And what’s the virtue of camouflaging serious encryption with fun’n’games versions?

The point here is not to stir the hornets’ nest, make ‘em mad, make ‘em even more hyperactive.  It is the opposite, to encourage, and if necessary, force the NSA, GCHQ and whatever the hell New Zealand calls its spook service,--  which is already part of the NSA-led “Mighty Five” intelligence collaborative -- to calm down, be more selective and more rational in their surveillance collection, collation and analysis.

And making that happen is not an Effing game, any more than is legitimate national security surveillance. The NSA et al have real jobs to do, including protecting our freewheeling society from real enemies, whose plots, while far fewer than the spooks and their budgets and their tactics seem to assume, still can be truly destructive.

That their exaggerated “trend” might have dangerous real world effects is something AP left out of their story.

The gamesmanship of this new generation of Jerry Rubin-style gigabit tricksters is repellant enough, but it is literally amateur night compared to the game-playing radical-right Republicans of the House of Representatives.

To them, the functions of the US Government and its financial credibility are just tokens in a game to force their will down the throat of that African-American (and can you see them smirking at the first half of that description?) President Barack Obama.

To them, the serious consequences of default or a government AWOL, matter less than their sense of “fair play.” 

 “You can’t just demand pure capitulation,” Boehner-buddy Representative Tom Cole, (R-OK), said,   “Negotiations don’t work that way.”

A senseless sentiment amped-up by Tea Party Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN), who whined: "We’re not going to be disrespected.  We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

Stutzman seems to think that, like his 8 year old daughter, he should get a “self-esteem” trophy for having played the game and lost.

Not in the real world.  In the world, you need both votes and brains to win. 

Unless, like Congressman Cole, you can tell the Washington Post that losing on Obamacare, losing on the shutdown, losing on default, is really a win, because it “forces” President Obama to do what he’s been asking to do for months now, use the normal legislative process to carve out changes in Federal taxing and spending.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/all-eyes-on-us-stock-markets-as-debt-deadline-draws-closer/2013/10/14/4a2a9992-34be-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story_1.html

“Any agreement, Cole told the Post, that creates a process to litigate broader budget issues would achieve an important GOP goal. ‘If you’re able to do that and you’re able to get some savings out of the entitlement portion of the budget, those aren’t Republican defeats. They are Republican victories.’”

Cole and Boehner are free to say that, but Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) knows better.  What the GOP will get out of their months of Provocation Theater will be, he says, “a tough vote.”

As the Post put it, “The misguided assault on the health-care law had diverted attention from more meaningful efforts to overhaul the tax code and rein in spending on Medicare and Social Security, he said. And now time has run out for achieving those goals.

“’Let’s just spell out what’s happened:’ Cole said, ‘We’ve basically blown the last two months with some of our members and a lot of the House focused on a shiny object that was never going to happen.’”

But, of course, the game isn’t over yet.  Bloodied, beaten, disgraced before an American voting public which has rarely polled so strongly their disapproval of the Republican Party, the GOP can’t wait to do it all over again.  For the next round of negotiations, their booby prize, they are clinging to their shameful tactic: they will once again hold the functions of the government and its full faith and credit hostage against new dates, in January and February 2014.

Let us say it one more time, civilly and quietly, in hopes that some Republicans might understand: a functioning government which pays its debts on time is something Americans want to believe in, not play with.

 

BITTERNESS AND BACK-BITING: BUSH AND CHENEY IN THE NY TIMES

A voice from beyond the political grave, the voice of the now 5-years-former Vice President of the United States scrapes like a hacksaw on sheet metal across Washington and New York and everywhere the NY Times Sunday Magazine is read.

Dick Cheney’s voice is full of bitterness; and his bile has found the perfect duct in Times Chief Washington Correspondent Peter Baker.

Cheney uses his channel back to the news spotlight to try to even the score with the man who gave him more power than he (or any other Vice President) ever had, and – here’s what must be most unforgivable – came to regret it: President George W. Bush. 

Of course, Baker is more than Cheney’s mouthpiece; he often sings harmony to the VP’s lead in portraying the former President.  Consider the lead paragraph with which Baker begins his story.

“In the final days of his presidency, George W. Bush sat behind his desk in the Oval Office, chewing gum and staring into the distance as two White House lawyers briefed him on the possible last-minute pardon of Lewis Libby.”

“Chewing gum and staring into the distance?”  The first picture presented of Mr. Bush seems selected to exemplify the stereotype of the under-brained, “tuned out” President that still dogs his reputation.  Throughout this piece (which is adapted from Baker’s upcoming book, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House) Bush is portrayed as a mental and moral molehill compared to Mt. Cheney (notwithstanding a few

half-hearted attempts Baker makes to moderate the image). 

“Even in the early days, when a young, untested president relied on the advice of his seasoned No. 2,” Baker writes, “Cheney was hardly the puppeteer that critics imagined.”

Then Baker cites some witnesses who defend Bush.  Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff calls George W. “the alpha dog” of the White House, and Cheney’s “close friend,” former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, says, “[Cheney] never did anything in his time serving George W. that George W. didn’t either sanction or approve of.” 

Isn’t that great?  Boy, if ever a denial of dominance actually confirmed the charge:  Simpson essentially says, everything Cheney proposed, Bush said OK.

Until he didn’t, until the second half of George W. Bush’s second term, when the President turned away from his Vice President as decisively and symbolically as he could, by firing Cheney’s one-time mentor, the man who had gotten him his first White House job, his virtual alter ego, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.  Cheney told Baker directly, this was one decision about which he was informed, not consulted. “It wasn’t open for discussion by the time he came to me.”

And there were other changes.  Cheney was replaced as “the last person in the room,” by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, which Baker represents as more than a new direction for on policy, but a step down from competence to comfort. 

Cheney told Baker, he and the President “were never quite friends.”  Their relationship was all business.  Whereas, Baker reports, “No one in the White House had the relationship with Bush that Rice had.  She worked out with him, talked sports with him, dined with him and Laura in the residence and spent weekends with them at Camp David.”

Relying on Rice produced a lot of changes in policy and in the Bush Administration’s basic approach to the rest of the world.  “We had broken a lot of china,” Rice told Baker, "and I don’t think that is how the vice president saw it. I think he would have liked to have kept breaking china.”

After 2006, Cheney’s unilateralism, both globally where Rice as in charge, and domestically where she wasn’t, was overtaken by diplomacy and negotiation.  Secret CIA prisons were closed, and torture techniques like waterboarding were abandoned, and the rules for military tribunals and warrantless eavesdropping were modified.  Baker says Cheney saw every one of these Bush decisions “as a sellout of the principles they once shared,” in other words, not just political adjustments, but moral failures.

This, after things had been going so well, Baker writes, when Bush and Cheney were a team.  “Bush put him on the ticket in 2000 to balance his own inexperience. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the choice seemed prescient. Cheney’s calm hand in the bunker that day and in the war cabinet in the weeks that followed gave Bush confidence.”

Hmm, Barton Gellman’s picture of Cheney on 9/11 is of a man in a panic because, willfully ignorant of the intelligence on the limited resources of Al Qaeda, he assumed that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would soon, perhaps that very day, be followed by many more.  This mis-overestimation was to resonate throughout the ginormous Global War on Terror.

But let’s go back to Baker’s theme of Cheney as Bush’s “confidence man (in a good way.)”

Baker asserts, after 9/11, Bush and Cheney together “confidently steered America through its most traumatic years since Vietnam.” 

Yes, they sure did confidently and falsely accuse Saddam Houssein of plotting to attack America, and, equally falsely, of collaborating with Al Qaeda on the 9/11 attacks.  Bush and Cheney confidently wasted billions of dollars and thousands of American (and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi) lives in an ill-planned war to save the country from Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.  Then, they confidently erected that multi-billion dollar boondoggle, the Department of Homeland Security, to ward off future terror attacks.  (So far at least, it is the pre-existing counter-terrorist agencies that have done that.) And finally, their confident assessment that the US was in such imminent peril led them to authorize the NSA surveillance system which quickly broke its mandate to spy only on suspected foreign threats and not on American telephone, snail mail and email activities.

A pretense to strategic, tactical and moral superiority may have conferred confidence, but did their confidence make Bush and Cheney effective leaders of America?  The historic record on their domestic and foreign policies suggests otherwise.

Cheney remains emphatically confident, Baker reports, that Bush’s decision against a pardon for the Vice President’s chief of staff and man of all errands, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was also a sign of moral inferiority.

Typically, Bush seems to have seen the case more simply.

“’Do you think he did it?’ Bush asked,” reports Baker of the President’s crucial consultation with White House lawyers on the Libby case.

“’Yeah,’ one of the lawyers said. ‘I think he did it.’”

Everyone agrees that Libby misinformed federal officials who were investigating the leaking to the news media of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, after her husband denounced the White House for twisting the evidence to make a case for invading Iraq.  Even Libby admitted he gave investigators a bum steer on how and when and with whom he discussed Plame’s secret (and distinguished) career, but he did so only after 9 witnesses had told on him.  He said it was just a lapse of memory.

Bush’s legal advisors would have none of it.  Baker reports, “Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, and his deputy, William Burck, pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby’s lawyers had raised in his defense. Their conclusion was that the jury had ample reason to find Libby guilty.”

Bush had already seen to it that Libby, guilty or not, would never go to jail.  He commuted his 2 and a half year sentence; but when it came to a pardon, he said no.

Why?  Well for one thing, Baker points out, pardons are usually reserved for people who have served at least 5 years in prison and have repented their crimes.  But when Fielding and Burke asked Libby if he was ready to repent, he blew them off, saying, according to Baker, “I am innocent. I did not do this.”

For President Bush, denying Scooter Libby a pardon was about process and the law.  Baker reports, the President’s top political advisor Ed Gillespie told Cheney straight out, “The lawyers are not making the case for it.  We’ll be asked, ‘Did the lawyers recommend it?’ And if the lawyers didn’t, it’s going to be hard to justify for the president.”

Baker says, “To Cheney, this was the final proof that Bush had lost his will. The president had been buffeted by critics for so long that he would not stand up for what was right.”

The Vice President, who always considered himself principled above politics, if not above democracy itself, spat out his famous moral judgment to the President:   “You are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.” 

“The comment stung,” Bush wrote in his memoirs. “In eight years, I had never seen Dick like this, or even close to this. I worried that the friendship we had built was about to be severely strained, at best.”

Of course, there was a strain on the other side, Bush’s moral judgment on why Libby had misspoken.  Baker quotes the President: “I think he still thinks he was protecting Cheney.” the president said.

As with Alan Simpson’s denial that Cheney dominated Bush in their first term, 2 statements Baker offers in the Veep’s defense may cut deeper the other way.

First there is this from Cheney’s friend Bernie Seebaum: “The man did what he was expected to do, and then he got in trouble for it. Nobody came to his rescue.”

And this blast from Cheney himself in an interview with Baker: “’[Scooter Libby] came to serve. He worked for me before at the Pentagon. He had done yeoman duty for us.’ The conviction was a deep scar, Cheney said. ‘He has to live with that stigma for the rest of his life. That was wrong, and the president had it within his power to fix it, and he chose not to.’”

In his analysis offered to Baker, Cheney again asserts that Bush’s decision showed moral weakness: “I am sure it meant some criticism of him, but it was a huge disappointment for me.”

But wait a minute.  Who, as Seebaum put it, “expected” Libby to out Valerie Plame?  Who, in Cheney’s words, was Libby there “to serve?”  

Bush says it: “I think he still thinks he was protecting Cheney.” And Baker does draw the obvious conclusion: “If that was the case, then Cheney was seeking forgiveness for the man who had sacrificed himself on his behalf.”

Who could have saved Scooter Libby from conviction, from the “stigma he would carry for the rest of his life,” as Cheney put it?  Dick Cheney, of course.  All he had to say, from the moment the investigators put Libby under oath was, “Hey, guys, you’ve got the wrong man.  Libby works for me.  And if you want to prosecute the Vice President of the United States for showing that sanctimonious son-of-bitch Joe Wilson, there a price to be paid for shooting off your mouth, bring it on! 

“Did I say that?  Or was it my other mouth at another time?  Anyway, you get the idea, stop pickin’ on the small fry, and take this big fish on, if you dare.”  

But this great promulgator and profiteer of warfare who never spent a day in the military, this vehement enthusiast for extreme interrogation who never lay down on a waterboard, this self-admiring, dress-up Darth Vader was not about to point a serious moral finger at himself.  And he still isn’t.

No wonder, in the emotional image with which Baker chooses to end his Times piece, it is revealed that Bush’s Presidential Library contains almost no memorabilia of Cheney.  Contempt can be a two-way street.

And in this case, retrospective bitterness by omission seems morally more gracious than bitterness noisily committed.

 

  

SYRIA: TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

In the run-up to the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq, we heard a lot of talk about secret intelligence that, it was claimed, verified every justification of combat offered by the President, the Vice President, the Secretaries of Defense and State and the National Security Advisor.  Information of the sort to make NSA Condoleezza Rice believe in the “threat” of Saddam Hussein’s “mushroom shaped cloud,” that convinced Colin Powell there were “mobile chemical weapons labs,” -- secret information that could be announced but not detailed, and certainly not shared with ordinary citizens.

The classified military intelligence that lent sincerity to Donald Rumsfeld’s promises of a short, decisive, cheap,  small force war; the confidential “defector information” used by Dick Cheney and his own secret intelligence operation to sell their assertions of a Saddam-Al Qaeda- 9/11 connection, had to stay secret, we were told, to protect our the secret services’ abilities to know so much.

Every falsehood used to convince the American people we needed to go to war with Iraq was credited to a “we can’t tell you” source.

We all now know that sources the Administration found credible had, in many cases, been previously discredited by respected professionals in other national security services, or disputed by other equally, -- hoo-boy – “credible” long-time expatriate sources, most of them wannabe Big Shots in the New  -- “Thank you, Uncle Sam!!” – Iraq. 

A story credited “foreign intelligence services” about Nigerian yellow-cake for Iraqi nuclear weapons was demolished by an experienced, American diplomat sent to Africa to evaluate it.  For revealing that this secret intelligence was wrong, the investigating diplomat Joe Wilson saw his wife’s stellar intelligence career destroyed by Dick Cheney’s closest aide, Scooter Libby. 

Not only was a highly skilled secret source of US intelligence exposed, secret American intelligence methods could now be deduced by anyone who reconstructed Valerie Plame’s overseas career.  Especially shocking, coming from people who conistently claimed the reason they couldn’t let citizens in on secrets was that they had “to protect sources and methods.”

The Big Secret, of course was that we had no useful sources in Iraq, and our chief intelligence methodology was to accept every sleazeball’s bullshit (if it would help take us to war.)

It is now more than 10 years later.  A “populist” Democrat President has replaced a conservative Republican, and he is trying to convince us to go to something everyone else but him calls “war,” in Syria.

Why must we do this?  The brutal dictator President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad has ordered up a consummate war crime, gassing human beings, and his military has carried out his order and killed some 1400 people.  This act crosses “the world’s” moral “red line,” President Obama declares, and demands “limited and tailored” punishment only the US military can impose.

The logic is clear and simple.  But how do we know the premise is true?  The Administration’s answer is: we have secret intelligence that proves it.  Dana Milbank in his brilliant column in the Wednesday Washington Post skewers Obama’s war-sellers’ addiction to secrecy. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-on-syria-whos-got-a-secret/2013/09/04/9cc5b360-15a8-11e3-a2ec-b47e45e6f8ef_story.html

Milbank notes it is their unwillingness to cite detailed evidence which, perhaps fatally, prevents the Knights of the Obama Table from making a plausible case to an already skeptical public, that this war is a good, or at least, a necessary not-war. 

And most of all, Milbank identifies the central lunacy of the claim, once again, that playing “trust us” protects sources and methods.  Edward Snowden and months of detailed coverage of his revelations have given virtually everyone in the world who cares a clear picture of what our spy services can do, and how they do it. 

Can we actually listen in on conversations among Assad’s co-conspirators?  Is a pig’s tail pork? 

Might our satellites show us Syrian military manoeuvers, even the movement of chemical munitions from warehouse to warehouse and then to the front lines?  Having heard of an ursine visit to my neighbor’s field, I am sure bears do shit in our woods.

As with everything in the ongoing global war over personal privacy and institutional surveillance, most reasonable people would agree, the snooping powers are capable of knowing almost everything. 

Unfortunately, the evidence so far suggests, it is the use of those info-gathering capabilities that cannot be trusted.

Inevitably, it seems, the American Surveillance Machine gathers too much, with too little careful selectivity, and far too little discipline about complying with legal limits (or democratic oversight.)  Often, the Obama security services’ judgments about what is important, much less about what is threatening, or who demands punishment, seem deeply flawed.  Sometimes these judgments seem more about politics than national security, more about self- than nation-protection.  

This is why the law says the FISA Court must hear applications before approving surveillance, and why it is such a serious crime (yes, dammit, crime!) when applications presented to the FISA Judges contain falsehoods or distortions or when surveillance is done without any reference to the FISA process. 

“Protecting” citizens from Gen. Clapper’s record is as wrong and futile as “protecting sources and methods” of his NSA, and all the "Other Government Agencies."   It’s too late, Dudes.  People know.

Which is why people want to know, for sure, what is the intelligence, what kind of sources make you so sure you’re right that America should green-light military violence?

Nothing less than pretty full disclosure is going to gain popular support.  Without it, the whole thing is going to be “your war,” Mr. President, a pretty lonely, pretty weak position for the leader of American democracy to be in.