Ron's View

[Tom Tomorrow, May 7, 2012 at Daily Kos]

Yesterday, at CNN’s blog, prominent mainstream journalist and commentator Fareed Zakaria did what mainstream journalists so rarely do: speak truth about our ever growing national security state:

While we will leave the battlefields of the greater Middle East, we are firmly committed to the war on terror at home. What do I mean by that? Well, look at the expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end.
So we continue to stand in absurd airport lines. We continue to turn down the visa applications of hundreds of thousands of tourists, businessmen, artists and performers who simply want to visit America and spend money here, and become ambassadors of good will for this country. We continue to treat even those visitors who arrive with visas as hostile aliens – checking, searching and deporting people at will. We continue to place new procedures and rules to monitor everything that comes in and out of the country, making doing business in America less attractive and more burdensome than in most Western countries.

We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.

I become increasingly convinced that President Obama’s greatest long-term impact on our country is his legitimation of policies on war, surveillance, and privacy that once seemed the aberrant acts of a rogue administration. Rather than winding them down as he disengaged from Iraq and Afghanistan, he has woven them into the fabric of our government.

At least he exercises his powers wisely and with discretion.

Change We Can Believe In: Bug Splat

I’ve written what may seem to be more than my share of posts on US drone warfare, including one a week ago. Then again, can there be too many? Here we are, waging undeclared war around the world, killing people without warrant based on the argument that they are on the battlefield (this being an easy argument to make when you claim that the whole world is a battlefield). We can thank the Bush administration for this claim, but Obama and his enablers in the Justice Department have eagerly stuck by it. Obama won’t release full details on drone warfare or its legal justification on the grounds that that would jeopardize our security. So we continue down the path of lawlessness, making it the norm and ensuring that our security is indeed jeopardized. Some change!

But I’m no expert. For more, Michael Hastings’ article The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret in the current Rolling Stone is essential reading. Here’s a passage from early in the article:

During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military conducted only a handful of drone missions. Today, the Pentagon deploys a fleet of 19,000 drones, relying on them for classified missions that once belonged exclusively to Special Forces units or covert operatives on the ground. American drones have been sent to spy on or kill targets in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Libya. Drones routinely patrol the Mexican border, and they provided aerial surveillance over Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In his first three years, Obama has unleashed 268 covert drone strikes, five times the total George W. Bush ordered during his eight years in office. All told, drones have been used to kill more than 3,000 people designated as terrorists, including at least four U.S. citizens. In the process, according to human rights groups, they have also claimed the lives of more than 800 civilians. Obama’s drone program, in fact, amounts to the largest unmanned aerial offensive ever conducted in military history; never have so few killed so many by remote control.

And another:

For a new generation of young guns, the experience of piloting a drone is not unlike the video games they grew up on. Unlike traditional pilots, who physically fly their payloads to a target, drone operators kill at the touch of a button, without ever leaving their base – a remove that only serves to further desensitize the taking of human life. (The military slang for a man killed by a drone strike is “bug splat,” since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.) As drone pilot Lt. Col. Matt Martin recounts in his book Predator, operating a drone is “almost like playing the computer game Civilization” – something straight out of “a sci-fi novel.” After one mission, in which he navigated a drone to target a technical college being occupied by insurgents in Iraq, Martin felt “electrified” and “adrenalized,” exulting that “we had shot the technical college full of holes, destroying large portions of it and killing only God knew how many people.”

Only later did the reality of what he had done sink in. “I had yet to realize the horror,” Martin recalls.

This is the warfare that Obama has embraced.

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki

Our “secret” drone war in Yemen is a continuing puzzle, and worse. Last October, I wrote about the drone killing the week before of Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995. I followed up two months ago with the report of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism on drone killings of civilians in Pakistan and a month ago regarding Attorney General Holder’s defense of drone killings of US citizens, as reported by Charlie Savage in the NYT, “if officials deem them to be operational leaders of Al Qaeda who are planning attacks on the United States and if capturing them alive is not feasible.”

I am returning to the subject in this post in order to draw your attention to Michelle Shephard’s piece in the Toronto Star yesterday (hat tip: emptywheel) on Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. It is essential reading.

At one point, Shephard recalls Leon Panetta’s statement about drones in 2009, when he was the CIA director, that “these operations have been very effective because they have been very precise in terms of the targeting and it involved a minimum of collateral damage.” Shephard’s reporting adds to the evidence that Abdulrahman was not an operational leader of Al Qaeda planning attacks on the US who could not be captured alive. In fact, he was by all evidence just a kid.

His grandfather, Nasser al Awlaki, a Fulbright scholar, former agricultural minister and prominent figure in Yemen, said Abdulrahman had nothing to do with his father since he had gone into hiding in 2009.

Nasser al Awlaki has never apologized for his son’s radical views, but said he had also worked hard to insulate his grandchildren from the controversy. He attempted, he said, to give them a “normal life.”

…

It later emerged, but was not widely reported, that the strike did not kill its purported target, AQAP’s media chief, Egyptian Ibrahim al Bana.

The U.S. administration has refused comment.

It is unclear whether Abdulrahman was the target or if the U.S. had bad information and was going after Bana, or someone else. Either way, Awlaki said he wants answers.

So do the student demonstrators who forced former president Ali Abdullah Saleh from power, many of whom knew Abdulrahman. They carried posters in Change Square with his picture last year and the words: “The Assassination of Childhood.”

“We just don’t know why they did that,” Awlaki said of the U.S. strike. “Is it because Abdulrahman was there? It’s very possible, but I cannot claim with certainty what happened. Is it a blunder on their side?

“They cannot claim he’s collateral damage.”

Drones and U.S. directed missions have killed hundreds in Yemen in the past four years, some hitting AQAP targets, many more striking civilians.

The Obama administration, of course, continues to refuse comment. National security and all that.

The killing of Abdulrahman, his father and American citizen Samir Khan, the editor of AQAP’s English-language online magazine who was also killed in the September strike, offers an opportunity to challenge the drone program in American courts. The American Civil Liberties Union has led this fight for information, but has had little success.

“When we file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, the CIA’s response is that the drone program is a state secret, that confirming its existence would jeopardize national security,” said ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer.

“And yet,” noted Jaffer, “The CIA, or administration more generally, routinely discloses information to the public, to the press, that is meant to make people feel comfortable, that the program is closely supervised, effective, necessary.”

The law doesn’t apply when it comes to our never-ending wars, especially our secret wars.

Change We Can Believe In: Expanding the Security State

Good news: our government has expanded its powers to spy on us. On Thursday, Attorney General Holder signed new guidelines for the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). As Charlie Savage explained in the Friday NYT,

The guidelines will lengthen to five years — from 180 days — the amount of time the center can retain private information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are tied to terrorism, intelligence officials said. The guidelines are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and “data mining them” using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat.

[snip]

They set up three tracks by which the center could retrieve information gathered by another agency: by doing a limited search itself for certain data, by asking another agency to perform such a search, or — in cases whether neither was sufficient — by replicating the database and analyzing the information itself.

The new guidelines keep that structure in place, but put greater emphasis on the third track, while also relaxing restrictions on how long data on Americans who have no known tie to terrorism may be stored. The old guidelines said data on innocent Americans must be deleted promptly, which the agency interpreted to mean if no tie to terrorism was detected within 180 days.

The new guidelines are intended to allow the center to hold on to information about Americans for up to five years, although the agencies that collected the information — and can negotiate about how it will be used — may place a shorter life span on it.

To understand the meaning of this, let’s turn to the blogger emptywheel, who read through the guidelines and provided a preliminary analysis in a post on Friday. Her analysis is short. I recommend reading it in full. Her main theme is that the guidelines “allow the NCTC to obtain information on US persons, dump it into their datamining, and then ultimately pass it on. In this, I’ll show how, by magic of cynical bureaucracy, the government is about to turn non-terrorist data into terrorist data.”

Emptywheel takes us through some key passages, describing how the document “blathers on about how NCTC also has the responsibility to request information and pass it on. This is the legal language they’re going to translate to mean the opposite of what it says.” She highlights the following passage from the guidelines –

NCTC’s analytic and integration efforts … at times require it to access and review datasets that are identified as including non-terrorism information in order to identify and obtain “terrorism information,” as defined in section 1016 of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004, as amended. “Non-terrorism information” for purposes of these Guidelines includes information pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorism, as well as information maintained by other executive departments and agencies that has not been identified as “terrorism information” as defined by IRTPA. [emptywheel's emphasis]

– and identifies the sleight of hand:

Note that bolded section is not a citation from existing law. It is, instead, NCTC turning NCTC’s authority to sometimes get domestic terrorism information into authority to get any dataset maintained by any executive agency that NCTC believes might include some information that might be terrorism information.

Those of us in the US Government’s tax, social security, HHS, immigration, military, and other federal databases? We’ve all, by bureaucratic magic, been turned into domestic terrorists.

…

So in addition to all of us in government databases–that is, all of us–being deemed domestic terrorists, the data the government keeps to track our travel, our taxes, our benefits, our identity? It just got transformed from bureaucratic data into national security intelligence.

Not exactly a surprise, but now this policy has been approved by our attorney general (and president).

I can’t resist posting Tom Tomorrow’s new cartoon (above) at Daily Kos as a follow up to my post last night on Eric Holder’s speech at Northwestern a week ago. In my post, I quoted from Scott Horton’s analysis of the speech , including comments on Holder’s use of the word ‘assassination’. Since assassinations are illegal, and the whole point of Holder’s speech was to explain why US actions are legal, he took care to point out that when the US assassinates people, we call it something else.

Haven’t we been through this before, with a president who explained that since torture is illegal and what the US does is legal, it therefore follows that when we torture people, we call it something else? And didn’t Obama and Holder object to this behavior?

Change We Can Believe In: Presidential Assassinations With No Judicial Review

I have used this series several times to make the point that President Obama, rather than reversing the Bush-Cheney administration’s assault on the rule of law, has continued and codified it, turning the illegal into the bipartisan norm. Last Monday, on behalf of Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder took the next step down this now well trodden road. In his NYT coverage, Charlie Savage wrote that Holder

asserted on Monday that it is lawful for the government to kill American citizens if officials deem them to be operational leaders of Al Qaeda who are planning attacks on the United States and if capturing them alive is not feasible.

“Given the nature of how terrorists act and where they tend to hide, it may not always be feasible to capture a United States citizen terrorist who presents an imminent threat of violent attack,” Mr. Holder said in a speech at Northwestern University’s law school. “In that case, our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force.”

While Mr. Holder is not the first administration official to address the targeted killing of citizens — the Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, did so last month at Yale Law School, for example — it was notable for the nation’s top law enforcement official to declare that it is constitutional for the government to kill citizens without any judicial review under certain circumstances. Mr. Holder’s remarks about the targeted killing of United States citizens were a centerpiece of a speech describing legal principles behind the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies.

It’s worth keeping in mind one thing Holder did not do, which was to make public the memo that David Barron and Martin Lederman, as members of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, prepared to justify the White House decision to kill US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen last September by a drone strike. As Scott Horton concludes in his analysis of Holder’s speech, “If America is truly sticking to her laws and values, then she should have no difficulty exposing her policies to public scrutiny.” And administration officials have yet to provide any explanation for the assassination two weeks later of al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman.

As for the use of the word ‘assassination’, Holder objected, arguing that such operations “are not, and the use of that loaded term is misplaced. Assassinations are unlawful killings. Here, for the reasons I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self defense against a leader of al Qaeda or an associated force who presents an imminent threat of violent attack would not be unlawful—and therefore would not violate the Executive Order banning assassination or criminal statutes.” Turning to Horton again for analysis, we learn that

Holder was referring specifically to Executive Order 13222, issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, which says, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” But as with so much U.S. national-security legislation, this order turns out to be far less than meets the eye. Simplified, the present law of EO 13222 could be summarized this way: “No one shall be assassinated—unless the president authorizes it, in which case we will refrain from calling it an assassination.”

I could go on, but it’s too discouraging. See instead the lead editorial in today’s NYT.

See also digby’s post yesterday, in a different context, on Obama and civil liberties. I’ll end with an excerpt:

I think you have to take [Obama] at his word and accept that what he’s done in this realm in the past three years was done because he believes they are “what works.” The problem is that “what works” doesn’t always comport with our values and our beliefs. (And none of this is to say that any of it necessarily “works” either, simply that the government obviously believes it does.)

That’s one of the reasons we have a constitution and a set of ideals to guide us. Solely depending on “what works” naturally leads to authoritarianism … After the policies of this first term, making respect for civil liberties and a lasting humane national security policy part of his legacy is going to be a very tough row to hoe because they reflect values of such transcendent importance. “What works” is very often the opposite of the values we supposedly hold dear — you either believe in them or you don’t. And for the last three years, it’s been the latter.

I began 2011 with a post titled Food and Law, in which I referred to e-pal Leslie’s post on her dinner with Supreme Court justice Ruth Ginsburg. Leslie had a follow-up post yesterday regarding the “perfect baguette” recipe of Ruth’s late husband Marty.

It turns out that Marty Ginsburg was an excellent cook. Leslie was able to get Marty to reveal his baguette recipe over the phone, and she wrote it down for him to verify, which he did. That recipe, as then recorded by Leslie, was kept private at his request, but it has now appeared in Chef Supreme: Martin Ginsburg, a book of Marty’s recipes assembled by other Supreme Court spouses. The book is published by the Supreme Court Historical Society and available at the Supreme Court gift shop.

Leslie has more about the Ginsburg baguettes in a post from three summers ago, where she describes them as “crunchy-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside … like the ones you get in France.” Indeed, she considers them “the best baguettes I have ever had outside of France.”

NPR featured the book in a piece a month ago with famed Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, from whom we learn that

The idea for the cookbook, Chef Supreme: Martin Ginsburg, came from Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Justice Samuel Alito. It hit her the day after Marty Ginsburg’s memorial service in 2010.

“One of my first conversations with Marty, in the fall of 2006, was about food and nourishment, and how satisfying an expression of love that it was for him,” she recalls. “And that, in part, led to the idea that we should put the cookbook together.”

The other Supreme spouses quickly agreed. They had often teamed up with Marty Ginsburg to provide the food for the monthly spouse lunches. But none of them had any idea what a large undertaking the cookbook would be.

First, a word about Marty Ginsburg’s love affair with cooking. It began, strangely enough, when he was in the army at Fort Sill, Okla., with his new bride, the young Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Neither of the Ginsburgs knew much about cooking then, but one of their wedding gifts was The Escoffier Cookbook, the bible of French cooking. And so Marty, a chemistry major, began at page one and worked his way through the entire volume. As he observed in a speech in 1996, there was method to his madness then and later.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve. This seemed to me comprehensible; my mother was a fairly terrible cook also. Out of self-preservation, I decided I had better learn to cook because Ruth, to quote her precisely, was expelled from the kitchen by her food-loving children nearly a quarter-century ago.”

[From http://schoolworkhelper.net/2010/12/the-law-and-the-covenant-moses/]

In an op-ed piece this weekend in the Washington Post, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley offers “10 reasons the US is no longer the land of the free.” It’s a handy list. You should read his article for the details. I’ll content myself with the list itself:

Each year at the Passover Seder, we read the list of the ten plagues God visited on Egypt to persuade Pharaoh to free the Israelites. As I read Turley’s article, I wonder why the Bush and Obama administrations have seen fit to visit these on us.

Change We Can Believe In: Indefinite Detention

It’s almost two weeks since I promised a Change You Can Believe In post in which Obama “trample[s] on civil rights by signing into law the right to detain US citizens indefinitely.” The only problem is, he waited until today to sign the military spending bill, so I had to delay my post.

As I have said in many posts, and others have said better, through his eager and unexpected continuation of Bush administration civil rights violations and his further willingness to enshrine them in law, Obama has succeeded in turning what once appeared to be the mad acts of a group of zealots into bipartisan procedure. From an ACLU press release:

President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA, but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill.

“President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. … Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today.”

See also a lengthy post today by Glenn Greenwald that, some ways down, gives an overview of Obama’s policies. Here’s an excerpt. (The original has many embedded links that I have not taken the time to reproduce.)

The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Would I rather have seen McCain elected? No, of course not. But that’s not the point. The point is, Obama has been a surprise and a disappointment in so many policy areas, areas where it seems we are powerless to effect change. I don’t doubt for a moment that Hillary Clinton would have supported or implemented essentially the same policies. The only candidate daring to suggest alternative ways of thinking — and he has his own problems — is Ron Paul. What to make of Paul’s candidacy? (This is the starting point of Greenwald’s post.) I sure don’t see myself voting for him, and I find many of his positions disturbing. But I am thankful that at least one candidate is questioning the bipartisan consensus laid out in the passage above.

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the signing of the PATRIOT Act. The graphic above (hat tip: emptywheel), courtesy of the ACLU, is as good a representation as any of the act’s assault on privacy.

Just five months ago, President Change-We-Can-Believe-In signed a four-year extension of the act.

The provisions were due to expire at midnight Thursday [May 26] without an extension. President Obama is attending a summit in France, but the bill was signed by autopen with his authorization moments before the deadline, the White House said.

“I think it is an important tool for us to continue dealing with an ongoing terrorist threat,” Obama said Friday, after a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Obama’s unwillingness to turn back from the Bush-Cheney national security police state all but ensures its long-term continuation.