Senior Obama officials tell the US Senate: the 'war', in limitless form, will continue for 'at least' another decade - or two

Last October, senior Obama officials anonymously unveiled to the Washington Post their newly minted "disposition matrix", a complex computer system that will be used to determine how a terrorist suspect will be "disposed of": indefinite detention, prosecution in a real court, assassination-by-CIA-drones, etc. Their rationale for why this was needed now, a full 12 years after the 9/11 attack:

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this "war" - the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) - should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired's Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US's national security editor) described the most significant exchange:

"Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, 'At least 10 to 20 years.' . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today - atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America's Thirty Years War."

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the "war on terror" will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week's big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of "endless war". Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war - justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism - that is the single greatest cause of that threat.

In January, former Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson delivered a highly-touted speech suggesting that the war on terror will eventually end; he advocated that outcome, arguing:

'War' must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the 'new normal.'"

In response, I wrote that the "war on terror" cannot and will not end on its own for two reasons: (1) it is designed by its very terms to be permanent, incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US (the operational definition of "terrorism"), and (2) the nation's most powerful political and economic factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation. Whatever else is true, it is now beyond doubt that ending this war is the last thing on the mind of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and those who work at the highest levels of his administration. Is there any way they can make that clearer beyond declaring that it will continue for "at least" another 10-20 years?

The genius of America's endless war machine is that, learning from the unplesantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America's innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates.

Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan. Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world's largest employer and continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?

Then there are the threats to Americans' security. Having their government spend decades proudly touting itself as "A Nation at War" and bringing horrific violence to the world is certain to prompt more and more people to want to attack Americans, as the US government itself claims took place just recently in Boston (and as clearly took place multiple other times over the last several years).

And then there's the most intangible yet most significant cost: each year of endless war that passes further normalizes the endless rights erosions justified in its name. The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture.

Each year that passes, millions of young Americans come of age having spent their entire lives, literally, with these powers and this climate fixed in place: to them, there is nothing radical or aberrational about any of it. The post-9/11 era is all they have been trained to know. That is how a state of permanent war not only devastates its foreign targets but also degrades the population of the nation that prosecutes it.

This war will end only once Americans realize the vast and multi-faceted costs they are bearing so that the nation's political elites can be empowered and its oligarchs can further prosper. But Washington clearly has no fear that such realizations are imminent. They are moving in the other direction: aggressively planning how to further entrench and expand this war.

One might think that if there is to be a debate over the 12-year-old AUMF, it would be about repealing it. Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who heroically cast the only vote against it when it was originally enacted by presciently warning of how abused it would be, has been advocating its repeal for some time now in favor of using reasonable security measures to defend against such threats and standard law enforcement measures to punish them (which have proven far more effective than military solutions). But just as happened in 2001, neither she nor her warnings are deemed sufficiently Serious even to consider, let alone embrace.

Instead, the Washington AUMF "debate" recognizes only two positions: (1) Congress should codify expanded powers for the administration to fight a wider war beyond what the 2001 AUMF provides (that's the argument recently made by the supreme war-cheerleaders-from-a-safe-distance at the Washington Post editorial page and their favorite war-justifying think tank theorists, and the one being made by many Senators from both parties), or (2) the administration does not need any expanded authority because it is already free to wage a global war with very few limits under the warped "interpretation" of the AUMF which both the Bush and Obama DOJs have successfully persuaded courts to accept (that's the Obama administration's position). In other words, the shared premise is that the US government must continue to wage unlimited, permanent war, and the only debate is whether that should happen under a new law or the old one.

Just to convey a sense for how degraded is this Washington "debate": Obama officials at yesterday's Senate hearing repeatedly insisted that this "war" is already one without geographical limits and without any real conceptual constraints. The AUMF's war power, they said, "stretches from Boston to the [tribal areas of Pakistan]" and can be used "anywhere around the world, including inside Syria, where the rebel Nusra Front recently allied itself with al-Qaida's Iraq affiliate, or even what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called 'boots on the ground in Congo'". The acting general counsel of the Pentagon said it even "authorized war against al-Qaida's associated forces in Mali, Libya and Syria". Newly elected independent Sen. Angus King of Maine said after listening to how the Obama administration interprets its war powers under the AUMF:

This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I've been to since I've been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today."

Former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, who testified at the hearing, summarized what was said after it was over: Obama officials argued that "they had domestic authority to use force in Mali, Syria, Libya, and Congo, against Islamist terrorist threats there"; that "they were actively considering emerging threats and stated that it was possible they would need to return to Congress for new authorities against those threats but did not at present need new authorities"; that "the conflict authorized by the AUMF was not nearly over"; and that "several members of the Committee were surprised by the breadth of DOD's interpretation of the AUMF." Conveying the dark irony of America's war machine, seemingly lifted right out of the Cold War era film Dr. Strangelove, Goldsmith added:

Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made."

Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.

In response to that, the only real movement in Congress is to think about how to enact a new law to expand the authorization even further. But it's a worthless and illusory debate, affecting nothing other than the pretexts and symbols used to justify what will, in all cases, be a permanent and limitless war. The Washington AUMF debate is about nothing other than whether more fig leafs are needed to make it all pretty and legal.

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence - Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class - clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it. That will continue unless and until Americans begin to realize just what a mammoth price they're paying for this ongoing splurge of war spending and endless aggression.

Related matters

Although I'm no fan of mindless partisan hackery, one must acknowledge, if one is to be honest, that sometimes it produces high comedy of the type few other afflictions are capable of producing.

On a related note: when Attorney General Eric Holder spoke about the DOJ's subpoeans for AP's phone records - purportedly issued in order to find the source for AP's story about a successfully thwarted terror attack from Yemen - he made this claim about the leak they were investigating: "if not the most serious, it is within the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen." But yesterday, the Washington Post reported that CIA officials gave the go-ahead to AP to report the story, based in part on the fact that the administration itself planned to make a formal announcement boasting of their success in thwarting the plot. Meanwhile, the invaluable Marcy Wheeler today makes a strong case that the Obama administration engaged in a fear-mongering campaign over this plot that they knew at the time was false - all for the purpose of justifying the president's newly announced "signature drone strikes" in Yemen.

The key lesson from all of this should have been learned long ago: nothing is less reliable than unchecked claims from political officials that their secret conduct is justified by National Security Threats and the desire to Keep Us Safe.

• US constitution and civil liberties

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The controversies over the IRS and especially the AP phone records appear to have long-lasting effects

Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ's attack on AP's news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record on civil liberties, transparency, press freedoms, and a whole variety of other issues on which he based his first campaign. The first two paragraphs of this Washington Post article from yesterday, expressed in tones of recent epiphany, made me laugh audibly:

"President Obama, a former constitutional law lecturer who came to office pledging renewed respect for civil liberties, is today running an administration at odds with his résumé and preelection promises.

"The Justice Department's collection of journalists' phone records and the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups have challenged Obama's credibility as a champion of civil liberties - and as a president who would heal the country from damage done by his predecessor."

You don't say! The Washington Post's breaking news here is only about four years late. Back in mid-2010, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, speaking about Obama's civil liberties record at a progressive conference, put it this way: "I'm disgusted with this president." In the spirit of optimism, one can adopt a "better-late-than-never" outlook regarding this newfound media awakening.

As a result of the last week, there is an undeniable and quite substantial sea change in how the establishment media is thinking and speaking about Obama. The ultimate purveyors of Beltway media conventional wisdom (CW), Politico's Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, published an article yesterday headlined "DC turns on Obama", writing that "the town is turning on President Obama - and this is very bad news for this White House" and "reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration." The Washington Post's political reporter, Dan Balz, another CW bellwether, wrote that these controversies "reflect questions about the administration that predate the revelations of the past few days". About the AP story, Balz wrote that "no one can recall anything as far-reaching as what the Justice Department apparently did in secretly gathering information about the work of AP journalists."

This morning, the New York Times' public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote about the AP story and the broader War on Whistleblowers, and said that Obama's presidency is "turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and of unprecedented attacks on a free press." She added:

This isn't just about press rights. It's about the right of citizens to know what their government is doing. In an atmosphere of secrecy and punishment – despite the hollow promises of transparency - that's getting harder every day."

The New York Times itself editorialized today that "the Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible justification" for its "spying on the AP"; the NYT editors also quoted a letter from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to Attorney General Holder stating that the AP spying "calls into question the very integrity" of the administration's policy toward the press. The New Yorker this morning published an article by its general counsel, Lynn Oberlander, denouncing the DOJ's conduct as "cowardly"; she wrote: "Even beyond the outrageous and overreaching action against the journalists, this is a blatant attempt to avoid the oversight function of the courts." Former New York Times general counsel James Goodale, who represented the paper during its Pentagon Papers fight with the Nixon administration, said in an interview yesterday that Obama is worse than Nixon when it comes to press freedoms.

Those are all media venues generally sympathetic to and supportive of Obama. But this anger has infected even the most Obama-loyal circles. Journalist Jonathan Alter, who has literally written books using what he touts as his "unmatched access" that are paens to Obama's greatness and Goodness, yesterday demanded: "Obama should simply apologize to the AP and its reporters. It's the least he can do to show he still believes in the First Amendment." Even at MSNBC, its most influential host, Rachel Maddow, broadcast a 20-minute segment vehemently condemning the Obama DOJ on the AP matter that featured an interview with an AP lawyer and used Nixon's attacks on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg as the historical context. Maddow then broadcast another segment on the IRS' targeting of right-wing groups in which she correctly pointed out that there is no evidence of Obama's personal role in that targeting but that it will create serious problems for his administration. Even Harry Reid - the Senate's top Democrat - denounced the DOJ's actions as "inexcusable", saying "there is no way to justify this."

There are two significant points to make from these events. First, it is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are. For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as "cruel and inhuman".

But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration's true character. That is redolent of how the general public reacted with rage over privacy invasions only when new TSA airport searches targeted not just Muslims but themselves: what they perceive as "regular Americans". Or how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman - once the most vocal defender of Bush's vast warrantless eavesdropping programs - suddenly began sounding like a shrill and outraged privacy advocate once it was revealed that her own conversations with Aipac representatives were recorded by the government.

Leave to the side how morally grotesque it is to oppose rights assaults only when they affect you. The pragmatic point is that it is vital to oppose such assaults in the first instance no matter who is targeted because such assaults, when unopposed, become institutionalized. Once that happens, they are impossible to stop when - as inevitably occurs - they expand beyond the group originally targeted. We should have been seeing this type of media outrage over the last four years as the Obama administration targeted non-media groups with these kinds of abuses (to say nothing of the conduct of the Bush administration before that). It shouldn't take an attack on media outlets for them to start caring this much.

Second, we yet again see one of the most significant aspects of the Obama legacy: the way in which it has transformed and degraded so many progressive precincts. Almost nobody is defending the DOJ's breathtaking targeting of AP, and with good reason: as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press made clear yesterday, it's unprecedented:

"In the thirty years since the Department issued guidelines governing its subpoena practice as it relates to phone records from journalists, none of us can remember an instance where such an overreaching dragnet for news gathering materials was deployed by the Department, particularly without notice to the affected reporters or an opportunity to seek judicial review."

But there are a few people excusing or outright defending the DOJ here: namely, some progressive blogs and media outlets. They are about the only ones willing to defend this sweeping attempt to get the phone records of AP journalists.

As I noted yesterday, TPM's Josh Marshall - who fancies himself an edgy insurgent against mainstream media complacency as he spends day after day defending the US government's most powerful officials - printed an anonymous email accusing AP of engineering a "smear of Justice". Worse, Media Matters this morning posted "talking points" designed to defend the DOJ in the AP matter that easily could have come directly from the White House and which sounded like Alberto Gonzales, arguing that "if the press compromised active counter-terror operations for a story that only tipped off the terrorists, that sounds like it should be investigated" and that "it was not acceptable when the Bush Administration exposed Valerie Plame working undercover to stop terrorists from attacking us. It is not acceptable when anonymous sources do it either." It also sought to blame Republicans for defeating a bill to protect journalists without mentioning that Obama, once he became president, reversed his position on such bills and helped to defeat it. Meanwhile, the only outright, spirited, unqualified defense of the DOJ's conduct toward AP that I've seen comes from a Media Matters employee and "liberal" blogger.

During the Bush years, it was conservatives who supported the Bush DOJ and Alberto Gonzales' threats against the press on national security grounds; now, defenders of such threats to press freedoms are found almost exclusively from progressive circles (similarly, many of the most vicious and vocal attacks on WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning have come from progressives).

This is such an under-appreciated but crucial aspect of the Obama legacy. Recall back in 2008 that the CIA prepared a secret report (subsequently leaked to WikiLeaks) that presciently noted that the election of Barack Obama would be the most effective way to stem the tide of antiwar sentiment in western Europe, because it would put a pleasant, happy, progressive face on those wars and thus convert large numbers of Obama supporters from war opponents into war supporters. That, of course, is exactly what happened: not just in the realm of militarism but civil liberties and a whole variety of other issues. That has had the effect of transforming what were, just a few years ago, symbols of highly contentious right-wing radicalism into harmonious bipartisan consensus. That the most vocal defenders of this unprecedented government acquisition of journalists' phone records comes from government-loyal progressives - reciting the standard slogans of National Security and Keeping Us Safe and The Terrorists - is a potent symbol indeed of this transformation.

Q-and-A

Using an excellent new Guardian tool, I'll be hosting a reader Q-and-A with readers here from 2:00 pm to 4:00 EST today. Right now, you can leave your questions and vote for the best questions, and participate starting at 2:00 pm, here.

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The claimed legal basis for these actions is unknown, but the threats they pose to a free press and the newsgathering process are clear

(updated below)

Associated Press on Monday revealed that the Department of Justice (DOJ) "secretly obtained two months of telephone records of [its] reporters and editors", denouncing it as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into the news gathering process. In a letter sent yesterday to Attorney General Eric Holder, AP's President, Gary Pruitt, detailed that the phone records cover more than 20 telephone lines used by AP journalists, including their homes, offices and cell phones. He said the phones for which the DOJ obtained records also include ones at the AP bureaus in New York City, Washington DC, Hartford, and at the House of Representatives.

Pruitt wrote that "we regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP's constitutional rights to gather and report the news." He added that while AP is "evaluating its options", he "urgently request[ed]" that the DOJ "immediately return to the AP the telephone toll records" obtained by the DOJ "and destroy all copies." AP learned of the DOJ's acquisition of these records only after the fact, and thus had no opportunity to raise legal and constitutional objections nor attempt to negotiate to narrow the scope of the records to be sought. Pruitt's letter uses some inflammatory language as it is designed to advance the AP's case and to generate public anger, but that's entirely appropriate. The phone records reveal, at a minimum, all of the telephone numbers called by those AP journalists over the course of two months.

The ACLU last night condemned the DOJ's acts as "press intimidation" and said it constitutes "an unacceptable abuse of power". The Electronic Frontier Foundation denounced it as "a terrible blow against the freedom of the press and the ability of reporters to investigate and report the news". The New York Times' Editorial Page Editor Andy Rosenthal called the DOJ's actions "outrageous" while Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said they were "shocking" and "disturbing". Even Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said: "I am very troubled by these allegations and want to hear the government's explanation."

Numerous media reports convincingly speculated that the DOJ's actions arise out of a 2012 AP article that contained leaked information about CIA activity in Yemen, and the DOJ is motivated, in part, by a desire to uncover the identity of AP's sources. That 2012 AP story revealed that the CIA was able to "thwart" a planned bombing by the al-Qaida "affiliate" in that country of a US jetliner. AP had learned of the CIA actions a week earlier but "agreed to White House and CIA requests not to publish it immediately because the sensitive intelligence operation was still under way." AP revealed little that the US government itself was not planning to reveal and that would not have been obvious once the plot was successfully thwarted, as it explained in its story: "once those concerns were allayed, the AP decided to disclose the plot Monday despite requests from the Obama administration to wait for an official announcement Tuesday."

The legality of the DOJ's actions is impossible to assess because it is not even known what legal authority it claims nor the legal process it invoked to obtain these records. Particularly in the post-9/11 era, the DOJ's power to obtain phone records is, as I've detailed many times, dangerously broad. It often has the power to obtain those records without the person's knowledge (as happened here) and for a wildly broad scope of time (as also happened here). There are numerous instruments that have been vested in the DOJ to obtain phone records, many of which do not require court approval, including administrative subpoenas and "national security letters" (issued without judicial review); indeed, the Obama DOJ has previously claimed it has the power to obtain journalists' phone records without subpoeans using NSLs, and in its relentless pursuit to learn the identity of the source for one of New York Times' James Risen's stories, the Obama DOJ has actually claimed that journalists have no shield protections whatsoever in the national security context. It's also quite possible that they obtained the records through a Grand Jury subpoena, as part of yet another criminal investigation to uncover and punish leakers.

None of those processes for obtaining these invasive records requires a demonstration of probable cause or anything close to it. Instead, the DOJ must simply assert that the records "relate to" a pending investigation: a standard so broad that virtually every DOJ desire will fulfill it. Even if a court were involved in the acquisition of these records - and that's unlikely here - it typically does little more than act as rubber-stamping functionary, just as it does when secretly approving the DOJ's requests for FISA warrants. This is what is reaped from continuously vesting the US government with greater and greater surveillance powers in the name of Terrorism and other fears.

There has long been concern about the DOJ's snooping into the communications which journalists have with their sources precisely because the DOJ's power to obtain phone data and other sensitive records in secret is now so sweeping. Attempts to enact legislation to protect journalists from this type of concealed investigative intrusion into their source communications have been defeated in part due to the DOJ's insistence that it exercises this power responsibly and only in the most extreme cases.

Indeed, the DOJ has adopted its own binding regulations that impose constraints on its ability to obtain the phone records of journalists. Those regulations require that "all reasonable attempts should be made to obtain information from alternative sources" before subpoeans are issued; that "negotiations with the media shall be pursued in all cases in which a subpoena to a member of the news media is contemplated" unless the DOJ determines that such negotiations would "pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation in connection with which the records are sought"; and that "no subpoena may be issued . . . for the telephone toll records of any member of the news media without the express authorization of the Attorney General". The White House has denied involvement in the acquisition of AP's phone records, but presumably, Attorney General Eric Holder personally approved (Esquire's Charles Pierce, in calling for the resignation of Holder, expresses skepticism about White House denials, but I'm neutral at this point on that specific question).

What makes the DOJ's actions so stunning here is its breadth. It's the opposite of a narrowly tailored and limited scope. It's a massive, sweeping, boundless invasion which enables the US government to learn the identity of every person whom multiple AP journalists and editors have called for a two-month period. Some of the AP journalists involved in the Yemen/CIA story and whose phone records were presumably obtained - including Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo - are among the nation's best and most serious investigative journalists; those two won the Pulitzer Prize last year for their superb work exposing the NYPD's surveillance program aimed at American Muslim communities. For the DOJ to obtain all of their phone records and those of their editors for a period of two months is just staggering.

It's the very opposite of what the DOJ has long claimed its guidelines protect. EFF details how the DOJ's actions "violated its own regulations for subpoenas to the news media." AP's Pruitt explained:

He added:

The key point is that all of this takes place in the ongoing War on Whistleblowers waged by the Obama administration. If you talk to any real investigative journalist, they will tell you that an unprecedented climate of fear has emerged in which their sources are petrified to talk to them. That the Obama administration has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined has already severely chilled the news gathering process. Imagine what message this latest behavior sends to journalists and their sources: that at any moment, the phone records of even the nation's most establishment journalists can be secretly obtained by the DOJ, which has no compunction about doing so even in the most extreme and invasive manner.

The all-too-familiar axis that has enabled massive civil liberties assaults by the Obama administration - blindly partisan progressive media outlets and particularly obsequious self-styled neutral journalists - instantly sprung into action here and wasted no time jumping to the defense of the US government. TPM's Josh Marshall, while saying "there's still a very live question of whether this was a prudent action on the part of the DOJ", actually published an anonymous letter depicting the Obama DOJ as the victim here, saying AP "seeks to smear Justice" (in the annals of lowly journalistic behavior, printing anonymous emails defending the US government's surveillance actions and attacking targeted journalists is way down in the sewer, but that's the government-defending Josh Marshall in the Age of Obama). Similarly: before most people had even learned of the story, Think Progress purported to explain "Why The Department Of Justice Is Going After The Associated Press' Records" and, of course, offered the most benign and generous interpretation possible: they only did it to find out who is responsible for an "unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information", quoting CIA Director John Brennan (offering instant "explainers" for even the most dubious of Obama administration actions is its typical tactic).

Some progressives actually tried to blame Republicans for the Obama DOJ's conduct because the GOP largely voted against the codification of some added protections for journalists from DOJ record-gathering in a proposed "shield law". But Obama, who supported those protections when he was in the Senate, "reversed course" when he was president - that could easily be the motto of his presidency - and it was his opposition that helped kill that bill.

Meanwhile, CNN's Wolf Blitzer, showing off the tough adversarial journalistic spirit for which he's so rightly celebrated, actually went on the air and said this:

Although if you look it from the other side, if there was a serious leak about an al-Qaida operation or whatever, they're trying to find out who may be leaking this information to the news media, do they occasionally have the right to secretly monitor our phone calls?"

Can you imagine what it's like to be an Obama official and - in the wake of these revelations - sit back and watch one of the nation's most celebrated journalists instantly suggest that the perhaps the US government should be monitoring his phone calls with his sources? Or watch progressives who spent the Bush years shrieking and convulsing at every story of secret Bush surveillance actions instantly attempt to justify what you've done before you've even done so yourself? And can you imagine the personality attributes that cause someone to read a story about a massive intrusion into journalists' communications with their sources and have your first instinct be to attack the targeted journalists and defend the US government?

That is why this is permitted to happen. During the Bush years, there were several similar reports of DOJ acquisition of journalists' phone records: I'll wager anything that not a single progressive site or prominent Democrat ever defended any of that or offered neutral "explainers" to provide justifying rationale. And it's hard to express how lame the justifying rationale is. The Obama administration does not mind leaks of classified national security information; to the contrary, they love such leaks and are the most prolific exploiters of them. What they dislike are leaks that they don't approve and/or which don't glorify the president. Their unprecedented attacks on whistleblowers ensures that only the White House but nobody else can disclose classified information to the public, which is another way of saying that they seek to seize the ultimate propaganda model whereby the president and he alone controls the flow of information to the public. That's what their very selective and self-serving war on leaks achieves.

It is true, as Kevin Drum suggests, that the DOJ has been obtaining phone records for quite some time in this manner, and that the angry reactions to this story are accounted for by the fact that, in this case, the targets are establishment journalists rather than marginalized Muslims or dissident groups. But there are unique dangers from having the government intrude into journalists' communications with their sources, which is what happens when they obtain their phone records in such a sweeping manner. At this point, leaks from government sources are the primary way we learn about what the government does, and the more that process is targeted and the more those involved are intimidated, the less it will happen. That, of course, is the point.

Despite how stunning the breadth of this invasion is, none of it is really surprising. But it does underscore just how extreme of a climate of fear has been deliberately imposed by the Obama administration on the news gathering process. As the New Yorker's Jane Mayer told whistleblower advocate Jesselyn Radack last year:

"When our sources are prosecuted, the news-gathering process is criminalized, so it's incumbent upon all journalists to speak up."

What the Obama DOJ is doing in all of these cases is not just an attack on investigative journalists and their sources, though it is that. It is, first and foremost, an attack on you: specifically on your ability to know what government officials are doing in the dark.

Q-and-A

Using a great new tool developed by the Guardian, I'll be hosting a Q-and-A session tomorrow in this column, from 2:00 to 4:00 pm EST, to discuss this story and others I've written about over the past few weeks. You can leave your questions here.

In a very timely development, the filmmaker Robert Greenwald (no relation) is about to release his outstanding documentary "War on Whistleblowers", detailing the Obama administration's targeting of whistleblowers. I'm briefly interviewed for it, as are numerous investigative journalists, news executives, and others. The trailer can be seen here:

UPDATE

Holder today said that he recused himself from the AP investigation early on, citing the fact that he himself had been interviewed by the FBI about the leaks. As a result, he said, it was the Deputy Attorney General, James Cole, who signed off on the acquisition of the AP phone records.

Meanwhile, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press wrote a scathing letter to Holder today about these actions, explaining:

"In the thirty years since the Department issued guidelines governing its subpoena practice as it relates to phone records from journalists, none of us can remember an instance where such an overreaching dragnet for news gathering materials was deployed by the Department, particularly without notice to the affected reporters or an opportunity to seek judicial review.

"The scope of this action calls into question the very integrity of Department of Justice policies toward the press and its ability to balance, on its own, its police powers against the First Amendment rights of the news media and the public's interest in reporting on all manner of government conduct, including matters touching on national security which lie at the heart of this case."

As for Holder, he - needless to say - claimed that this investigation was necessary for "national security"; AP's president responds to that assertion here.

• Surveillance
• Eric Holder
• US constitution and civil liberties

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The HBO host has become a leading advocate of the view that Islam is uniquely violent and threatening. Does that hold up under critical scrutiny?

Last night I was on Bill Maher's HBO show "Real Time". There have always been numerous views of Maher's with which I agree. But he has become one of the most vocal and extreme advocates of the view that - while religion generally should be criticized - Islam is a uniquely threatening and destructive force and that Muslims are uniquely oppressive and violent, and that mentality has infected many of his policy views (see here and here for some comprehensive background; just two weeks ago, he had a fairly typical outburst on this topic). When I was scheduled to do the show, I was hoping that the opportunity would arise to debate these views (or that I could create the opportunity), and last night it did.

The resulting exchange, which was somewhat contentious and sustained for a show like this, can be seen on the recorder below. The segment begins at the 4:45 mark and our specific exchange begins a couple of minutes after that (the first segment on this video is a debate on whether Benghazi is now a "scandal" in light of newly released documents). Our exchange ends up, I believe, capturing the crux of this debate - which is essentially similar to the one I had recently with Sam Harris and friends - rather well:

You can watch just the last two minutes or so - the heart of the matter - with this clip:

• Islam
• Egypt
• Libya

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Debates over Israel and activism in defense of transparency and journalism heat up this week

I'm traveling rather extensively this week - the last week of travel I have for quite some time, thankfully - so here are several brief items worthy of note:

(1) As the Guardian was the first to report, the physicist Stephen Hawking withdrew from "a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians." The resulting attacks on Hawking were instant and predictable.

The Israeli writer Noam Sheizaf has written the best article I've read on the entire matter. He points out that the event from which Hawking withdrew is not really an academic one but rather "an annual celebration of the Israeli business, political and military elites", and he rebuts the principal attacks on Hawking. Juan Cole adds this simple point:

"Israel, which daily steals Palestinian land and resources, is like a wealthy person who insists on burglarizing his neighbor, and naturally after a while the dinner invitations in polite society drop off."

As any writer well knows, nothing guarantees more vicious, personalized, or sustained attacks than criticizing the Israeli government: it's one of the reasons so many people refrain from doing so. Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston this morning references just a few of the despicable attacks on Hawking (he notes that Israeli professor Steven Plaut wrote of the wheelchair-bound physicist: "I suggest that the people of Israel send Hawking for a free trip on the Achille Lauro!!") and calls on everyone to stand up to these sorts of bullying campaigns and smear tactics. Meanwhile, one writer tries here to depict Hawking as a hypocrite for having visited Iran and China, but that claim is quickly and thoroughly destroyed by commenters in the comment section: one of the things about the internet I love most.

(2) The US military has done its best to erect a wall of secrecy around the court-martial trial of Bradley Manning, easily one of the most important trials on whistleblowers and espionage laws in many years. This week, the military judge not only permitted numerous witnesses to testify in secret but also ordered a "dry run" of parts of the trial to be held in secret as well, a move even military prosecutors acknowledged was "unprecedented". Legal proceedings demanding greater transparency brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of several journalists and activists (including myself) have been rejected by military courts.

One of the government's petty and vindictive tactics has been its refusal to release transcripts of the hearings to the media or the broader public (even as it generates a transcript for itself). This has prevented journalists reporting on the proceedings from effectively quoting much of what was said. To rectify this transparency gap, the Freedom of the Press Foundation - the group which I helped found and on whose board I sit - this morning announced that it was launching a campaign to crowd-fund a court reporter to produce comprehensive transcripts for every day of the Manning trial, which it will then release to the public. The group estimates that between $40,000-50,000 is needed. Those interested can donate here.

As this Huffington Post article on the FPF's new campaign notes, the group has also awarded grants totaling $8,500 to two exemplary independent journalists - Alexa O'Brien and Firedoglake's Kevin Gosztola - to enable them to continue to cover every day of the proceedings (it was their coverage and criticisms that, in part, helped to pressure the NYT to finally begin covering the trial). This is one reason I am optimistic about the future of journalism and transparency: there are, as a result of internet technologies and activism, creative ways constantly being developed to produce and sustain real journalism without the suffocating constraints imposed by many large media corporations. There are media outlets that are accommodating themselves to these trends rather than resisting them, and those are the ones most likely to survive.

(3) Last week, the Obama administration announced its choice to lead the Federal Communications Commission: Tom Wheeler, who is not only a former telecom lobbyist but also a huge bundler for the Obama campaign. The New York Times Editorial Page today explains that this choice is "raising serious questions about [Obama's] 2007 pledge that corporate lobbyists would not finance his campaign or run his administration." It also notes that "given his background, it is almost certain that [Wheeler] raised money [for Obama] from people whose companies he would regulate, creating potential conflicts of interest."

Last week, President Obama named another big bundler of his, the billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, to be his Commerce Secretary; at the Nation, Rick Perlstein details just some of the interesting questions about that choice that need to be explored. At this point, the only surprising thing is that there are any more bundlers left for Obama to appoint to important administration positions.

(4) The ACLU submitted a FOIA request to obtain the Obama administration's policy on intercepting text messages sent to and from cell phones. This is the document they received - here - from the Most Transparent Administration Ever™. It's hard to believe that the DOJ isn't mischievously cackling at their own brazenly displayed contempt as they do these things.

(5) Two months ago, a federal judge struck down the Obama administration's 2012 effort to overrule the scientific findings of its own Food and Drug Administration (FDA) - which recommended that there be no age limit on who can purchase Plan B (the so-called "morning after pill") over-the-counter - and instead tried to impose arbitrary age restrictions on the ability of underage girls to purchase the product. At the time, Obama loyalists insisted that this was just a political calculation made by Obama in an election year to avoid a politically touchy issue. The self-proclaimed defender against the "War on Women" could not possibly believe in such an irrational policy on the merits, the story went. But last month, the Obama DOJ announced that it would appeal the judge's ruling in order to win permission to impose a 15-year-old age limit on who can purchase Plan B over-the-counter, making clear that they do indeed believe in the policy.

Imposing an arbitrary age limit on who can freely purchase Plan B makes absolutely no sense. Supporters of the Obama policy try to distort the debate into one about whether young adolescent girls should be encouraged to have sex, but Plan B is used only by people who have already had sex, and it's used to prevent unwanted pregnancy. The mentality that leads to restrictions on its being freely accessed is the same one that demanded that clean needles, contraceptives and other vital health products not be made available: that they "encourage" behavior that is deemed "bad". The reality is that denying access to these products does nothing more than damages people's health and enable proliferation of bad health outcomes. That's why the FDA, based on studies that Plan B has almost no side effects, recommended that it be made available for everyone on an over-the-counter basis.

Yesterday, the Obama DOJ sought to defend its new age limitation to the federal judge, and Salon's Irin Carmon reported on some of what the judge said. In particular, he blasted the Obama DOJ for copying the policy and mindset of the Bush administration, for playing political games with health and science, for bad faith and dishonest legal arguments, for pretending to unveil a new policy favored by women's groups just two days before announcing the appeal, and then asking: "You're disadvantaging young people, African-Americans, the poor... that's the policy of the Obama administration?" It's remarkable how similar the patterns are from this administration over and over in all sorts of seemingly disparate issues.

(6) At the White House Correspondents' Dinner two weeks, ago, President Obama, referencing the trend of political officials becoming media pundits, said this:

Some of my former advisers have switched over to the dark side. For example, David Axelrod now works for MSNBC, which is a nice change of pace since MSNBC used to work for David Axelrod."

(7) This Friday night, I'll be on Bill Maher's "Real Time" show on HBO. Yesterday, along with Michael Hastings and David Sirota, I spent an hour on Cenk Uygur's "The Young Turks" show discussing a variety of interesting issues. One short segment can be seen here, while others can be seen here, here, here. Here's a video of one of those segments from below:

• Stephen Hawking

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The standard Beltway excuse to justify bad acts fails to explain the radically overbroad 2001 AUMF

Various senators are reportedly considering changes to the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) in light of how far beyond its scope US military action is now routinely deployed. That may seem like a welcome development, but as Marcy Wheeler notes, the officials involved and the "experts" on whom they're relying strongly suggest that any changes would entail expanding and broadening this authorization, not narrowing or rescinding it. One of the Senators who is pushing for changes is Democrat Dick Durbin, who said this:

None of us, not one who voted for it, could have envisioned we were voting for the longest war in American history or that we were about to give future presidents the authority to fight terrorism as far flung as Yemen and Somalia. I don't think any of us envisioned that possibility."

This is a common tactic in Washington political and media circles: whenever they do something destructive and wrong, they exonerate themselves with this "nobody-could-have-known" formulation: yes, we turned out to be horribly wrong, but nobody could have known at the time that this would happen. But almost always, not only could someone have known, and not only should someone have known, but someone - usually many people - did know. They just weren't the kind of people that those making this claim believe are worth listening to.

Immediately after the 9/11 attack, Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California knew exactly that which Durbin now says nobody "could have envisioned". She not only knew it, but she stood up on the floor of the Congress a mere three days after the 9/11 attack in order to cast the lone vote against the AUMF, citing precisely these dangers:

"[W]e must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target. We cannot repeat past mistakes.

"In 1964, Congress gave President Lyndon Johnson the power to 'take all necessary measures' to repel attacks and prevent further aggression. In so doing, this House abandoned its own constitutional responsibilities and launched our country into years of undeclared war in Vietnam.

"At this time, Senator Wayne Morse, one of the two lonely votes against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, declared, 'I believe that history will record that we have made a grave mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States. I believe that with the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake.'

"Senator Morse was correct, and I fear we make the same mistake today."

The video of a portion of Rep. Lee's obviously emotional and courageous warnings on the floor of the House, delivered on September 14, 2001 in opposition to the AUMF, is here:

In a September 23, 2001 interview with the LA Times, as controversy continued over her 434-1 lone vote, she elaborated on the rationale for her opposition even as she made clear that she did not oppose the use of any and all military force as a response to the 9/11 attack:

"I'm opposed to granting that broad power to any president. I believe Congress has got to be part of the decision-making process when we're talking about going to war against sovereign nations. This resolution, even though it was focused on the World Trade Center attack, is open-ended. It doesn't have an exit strategy; it does not have any reporting requirements. And the president already has authority to use force [internationally for 60 days without congressional approval] under the War Powers Act. So what was this about?. . .

"I agonized over this vote. We're all mourning. We're angry and frustrated. I felt that [someone] in this environment of grief needed to say let's show some restraint in our response. Let's not do anything that could escalate this madness out of control. Let's know the implications of our actions, and let's make sure that our system of checks and balances is maintained. We need to figure out a way to stamp out international terrorism and bring these perpetrators to justice without creating more loss of life. . . . We need to know where we're going and who we're going after."

In an Op-Ed she wrote for her hometown Oakland Post on September 26, she further explained her vote this way, again presciently warning of exactly the dangers that Durbin now claims nobody could have foreseen:

"Some believe this resolution was only symbolic, designed to show national resolve. But I could not ignore that it provided explicit authority, under the War Powers Resolution and the Constitution, to go to war. It was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the Sept. 11 events - anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation's long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit.

"In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk."

Lee also inspired others to speak out with the same warnings. The syndicated columnist William Raspberry, on September 25, wrote: "I don't know that Barbara Lee will ever be vindicated in the eyes of those who see her as the next thing to a traitor. I only know that a lot of people, myself included, are having second thoughts about how important, useful or relevant it is to cast the unspeakable evil unleashed on America two weeks ago in terms of war." He added: "as so often happens when some great evil disrupts our lives and threatens our sense of security, we are in danger of becoming the very thing we hate."

To say that Lee was vilified for her warnings is a serious understatement. She was deluged with so many death threats that she was given around-the-clock police protection. The Washington Times printed an Op-Ed by Herbert Romerstein declaring that "Ms. Lee is a long-practicing supporter of America's enemies - from Fidel Castro on down." On NPR, Juan Williams compared her to Jerry Falwell and said they both "stand out in a nation where President Bush, who did not win the popular vote, now has the support of 82 percent of Americans." National Review approvingly cited David Horowitz's denunciation that "Barbara Lee is not an anti-war activist, she is an anti-American communist who supports America's enemies and has actively collaborated with them in their war against America." Michelle Malkin labelled her "treacherous" and also quoted Horowitz's attack. Letters to the Editor sprung up in newspapers across this country similar to this one from J. Keith Wedinger in the Columbus Dispatch:

"I simply cannot believe the gall and the absolute insensitivity of U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif.. How can she possibly be the only member of both houses of Congress to vote against the resolution allowing any and all necessary force to be used to retaliate for the horrific attacks endured by this nation?

"I hope her name is printed in big, bold letters in all California newspapers describing her vote as an near act of treason against the United States. I hope residents of her district ask for her immediate resignation."

Barbara Lee's lone vote against the 2001 AUMF - three days after the 9/11 attack - was an act of incredible and rare courage that is worth commemorating in its own right. But it was also prescient and wise, using America's past bad acts to warn of the dangers likely to be unleashed by enacting it. If Dick Durbin wants to acknowledge his gross error in voting in favor of such a blank check for presidential war-making - one that led to 12 years of war in numerous nations with no end in sight - he should do so honestly. Instead of pretending that nobody could possibly have known this would happen as a deceitful means of excusing his bad acts, he should instead acknowledge that there were people who did know and tried to warn the nation about it, but those weren't the types of voices to which he paid any attention because they weren't emanating from the Pentagon, the Brookings Institution and the columns of Tom Friedman. That is the mistake he should acknowledge and learn to rectify.

• US constitution and civil liberties

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

No universally applied principle justifies the Israeli attack on Damascus. Only self-flattering tribalism does that

On Sunday, Israel dropped massive bombs near Damascus, ones which the New York Times, quoting residents, originally reported (then evidently deleted) resulted in explosions "more massive than anything the residents of the city. . . have witnessed during more than two years of war." The Jerusalem Post this morning quoted "a senior Syrian military source" as claiming that "Israel used depleted uranium shells", though that is not confirmed. The NYT cited a "high-ranking Syrian military official" who said the bombs "struck several critical military facilities in some of the country's most tightly secured and strategic areas" and killed "dozens of elite troops stationed near the presidential palace", while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that "at least 42 soldiers were killed in the strikes, and another 100 who would usually be at the targeted sites remain unaccounted for."

Israeli defenders claim that its air attack targeted weapons provided by Iran that would have ended up in the hands of Hezbollah. Obama officials quickly told media outlets that "the administration is fully supportive of Israel's airstrikes". Indeed, Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy noted: "Keep in mind the Israelis are using weapons supplied by us." There is, needless to say, virtually no condemnation of the Israeli assault in US media or political circles. At this point, the only question is how many minutes will elapse before Congress reflexively adopts a near-unanimous or unanimous resolution effusively praising Israel for the attack and unqualifiedly endorsing all past and future attacks as well.

Because people who cheer for military action by their side like to pretend that they're something more than primitive "might-makes-right" tribalists, the claim is being hauled out that Israel's actions are justified by the "principle" that it has the right to defend itself from foreign weapons in the hands of hostile forces. But is that really a "principle" that anyone would apply consistently, as opposed to a typically concocted ad hoc claim to justify whatever the US and Israel do? Let's apply this "principle" to other cases, as several commentators on Twitter have done over the last 24 hours, beginning with this:

Here's a similar question:

Or, for that matter, if Syria this week attacks a US military base on US soil and incidentally kills some American civilians (as Nidal Hasan did), and then cites as justification the fact that the US has been aiding Syrian rebels, would any establishment US journalist or political official argue that this was remotely justified? Or what if Syria bombed Qatar or Saudi Arabia on the same ground: would any US national figure defend the bombing as well within Syria's rights given those nations' arming of its rebels?

Few things are more ludicrous than the attempt by advocates of US and Israeli militarism to pretend that they're applying anything remotely resembling "principles". Their only cognizable "principle" is rank tribalism: My Side is superior, and therefore we are entitled to do things that Our Enemies are not. In more honest moments, they admit this. As soon as Hasan tweeted his question, he was instantly attacked by a writer for the Times of Israel and the Atlantic, dutifully re-tweeted by Jeffrey Goldberg, on this ground:

One could say quite reasonably that this is the pure expression of the crux of US political discourse on such matters: they must abide by rules from which we're immune, because we're superior. So much of the pseudo-high-minded theorizing emanating from DC think thanks and US media outlets boils down to this adolescent, self-praising, tribalistic license: we have the right to do X, but they do not. Indeed, the entire debate over whether there should be a war with Iran over its nuclear enrichment activities, as Israel sits on a massive pile of nuclear weapons while refusing UN demands to permit any international inspection of it, is also a perfect expression of this mentality.

The ultimate irony is that those who advocate for the universal application of principles to all nations are usually tarred with the trite accusatory slogan of "moral relativism". But the real moral relativists are those who believe that the morality of an act is determined not by its content but by the identity of those who commit them: namely, whether it's themselves or someone else doing it. As Rudy Giuliani put it when asked if waterboarding is torture: "It depends on who does it." Today's version of that is: Israel and the US (and its dictatorial allies in Riyadh and Doha) have the absolute right to bomb other countries or arm rebels in those countries if they perceive doing so is necessary to stop a threat but Iran and Syria (and other countries disobedient to US dictates) do not. This whole debate would be much more tolerable if it were at least honestly acknowledged that what is driving the discussion are tribalistic notions of entitlement and nothing more noble.

Other notes

Former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who was one of the loudest and most influential advocates of the attack on Iraq, today demands that the US "get[] over Iraq" and militarily attack Syria. He does so even as he says that his public drum-beating for the Iraq war "turned out to be a humbling error of judgment, and it left [him] gun-shy," but then argues that the attack on Syria is justified, in part, by the fact that Assad has "apparently" used "chemical weapons" on his own people. The only problem: a UN investigator said yesterday that the widely reported use of sarin gas came from Syrian rebels, not government forces. All of these claims deserve great skepticism, which is precisely why starting wars based on them is so foolish, and why Keller has obviously learned nothing despite his claims to the contrary.

For a nuanced and interesting analysis of the civil war in Syria, see this 2012 Al Jazeera column by the Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar, who was abducted at JFK Airport in 2002 and then imprisoned and tortured in Syria at the behest of the US, even though he was (as everyone now acknowledges) guilty of nothing. Although many important events have developed since that column, the context he provides on the Assad regime, what started the rebellion, and the relationship between the US and Syria are valuable.

Finally, claims of US and western superiority and entitlement are always amazing to behold given the behavior by those countries: see today's Guardian article on how the British systematically abused, tortured and killed Kenyan rebels fighting against colonial rule in the 1950s, then spent decades hiding the evidence of it and lying about it, all in an effort to avoid compensating the victims and having the world know about the atrocities they committed. The parallels between that and today's War on Terror are obvious and glaring. Whatever descriptive phrases might apply to the US, Britain and its allies, "so objectively superior so as to warrant exemption from or special standing under international law" is most certainly not among them.

• Syria

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case

The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN's Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is being captured as we speak".

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored:

Let's repeat that last part: "no digital communication is secure", by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained "that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein's claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens" (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that "the data that's being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want."

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.

Strangely, back in 2002 - when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak - the Pentagon's attempt to implement what it called the "Total Information Awareness" program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted - without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo - with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

"'In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance - and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight - that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,' [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. 'Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'"

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That's why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter's TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one's views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.

• Boston Marathon bombing
• Surveillance

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Newly released data show that the government submitted 1,789 eavesdropping requests last year, and none was rejected

(updated below)

In the mid-1970s, an investigation by the US Senate, conducted by the Church Committee, uncovered decades of serious, systemic abuse by the US government of its eavesdropping powers: listening in on the telephone calls of civil rights leaders, reading the mail of political opponents, spying on anti-war groups. The supposed lesson learned from this was that political leaders will inevitably abuse their surveillance powers if they are permitted to exercise them in the dark and without meaningful oversight. The "solution" was the enactment of a law - the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) - that made it a criminal offense for government officials to eavesdrop on the electronic communications of Americans without first obtaining a warrant from the newly created Fisa court.

From the start, the Fisa court was a radical perversion of the judicial process. It convened in total secrecy and its rulings were classified. The standard the government had to meet was not the traditional "probable cause" burden imposed by the Fourth Amendment but a significantly diluted standard. There was nothing adversarial about the proceeding: only the Justice Department (DOJ) was permitted to be present, but not any lawyers for the targets of the eavesdropping request, who were not notified. Reflecting its utter lack of real independence, the court itself was housed in the DOJ.

And, and was totally predictable, the court barely ever rejected a government request for eavesdropping. From its inception, it was the ultimate rubber-stamp court, having rejected a total of zero government applications - zero - in its first 24 years of existence, while approving many thousands. In its total 34 year history - from 1978 through 2012 - the Fisa court has rejected a grand total of 11 government applications, while approving more than 20,000.

Despite how obedient and compliant this court always was, the Bush administration decided in late 2001 that it would have its National Security Agency (NSA) intercept the calls and emails of Americans without bothering to obtain the Fisa court approval required by the criminal law, claiming - with a straight face - that complying with the law was "too cumbersome" in the age of Terrorism. Once this lawbreaking was revealed by the New York Times in late 2005, the response from the DC political class was not to punish the responsible government officials for their lawbreaking, but rather to enact a new law (called the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008) that, in essence, simply legalized the warrantless eavesdropping scheme of the Bush administration.

That new Fisa law vested vast new surveillance powers in the US government to spy on the communications of Americans without the annoyance of obtaining permission from the Fisa court. It requires warrants from the Fisa court only in the narrowest of circumstances: the ones most susceptible to abuse. Although candidate Obama pretended to have serious concerns about the law (when he voted for it) and vowed to rein in its excesses, his administration last year demanded the renewal of this law with no reforms, and Congress, on a fully bipartisan basis, complied.

One of the provisions of the new Fisa law requires the DOJ annually to disclose to Congress the number of eavesdropping applications it files and the number approved and rejected by the Fisa court. Earlier this week, that disclosure was provided to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for the year 2012, and this is what it reported:

Let's repeat that: "of 1,789 applications, the FISA court did not deny any applications in whole or in part." What fantastic oversight (1789 is, ironically, the year the Constitution was ratified). The court did "modify" 40 of those applications - less than 3% - but it approved every single one. The same was true of 2011, when the DOJ submitted 1,676 applications and the Fisa court, while modifying 30, "did not deny any applications in whole, or in part".

What makes all of this worse is just how extreme the US government is "interpreting" - i.e. distorting - its eavesdropping powers under the law. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that the Obama administration is exploiting these laws in ways far beyond what the public knows or what a reasonable reading of the laws would permit. One of the nation's most knowledgeable surveillance experts, Julian Sanchez, has documented - citing the writing of a former Obama lawyer - documented that the law is used to target even "an American citizen located within the United States, and no court or judge is required to approve or review the choice of which individuals to tap": exactly the type of warrantless surveillance we were all told this law would prohibit. And yet, the Fisa court - even for those narrow set of cases where a warrant is required - continues as it always has: rubber-stamping virtually anything and everything the government wants to do.

There are many reasons that explain this judicial obeisance. Part of it is fear and abdication of duty: no federal judge wants to be the one who rejects a surveillance request from the government only to have the target perpetrate an attack, even though federal judges are immunized with life tenure from such political pressures so that they can apply the law and provide a real check on government conduct. Part of it is nationalistic delirium: federal courts in general have been disgracefully subservient to the Executive Branch every time they utter the word "Terrorism" since 9/11. And part of it is just the nature of persuasion: even the most mediocre lawyers can convince someone of almost anything if they have no opposition and can unilaterally select and depict all facts without challenge. The entire process, though depicted as some kind of check on Executive Branch behavior, is virtually designed to do the opposite: ensure the Government's surveillance desires are unimpeded. These shockingly lopsided statistics attest to the success of this design.

This is significant not only because it means there is no real check on the government's surveillance power, even as they exercise those powers in much broader ways than most people suspect. It's also significant in light of recent calls that a "drone court" be created that would provide for a similar process for the president's desire to target for execution people who have been charged with no crime. The New York Times Editorial Page has been advocating this for years.

The rationale offered is the same as what was used to justify the Fisa court: the President needs some check on who he targets, but requiring that he charge the person he wants to kill with a crime and convict them in a real court is too cumbersome. Therefore, this reasoning goes, a "drone court" modeled on the Fisa court is the happy medium: he'll have some constraints on his power to kill whomever he wants, but its secretive, one-sided process and lowered levels of required proof will ensure the necessary agility and flexibility he needs as Commander-in-Chief. As the NYT Editors put it: the drone court "would be an analogue" to the Fisa court whereby: "If the administration has evidence that a suspect is a terrorist threat to the United States, it would have to present that evidence in secret to a court before the suspect is placed on a kill list."

But does anyone believe that a "drone court" would be any less of a mindless rubber-stamp than the Fisa court already is? Except for a handful of brave judges who take seriously their constitutionally assigned role of independence, the vast majority of federal judges are far too craven to tell the president that he has not submitted sufficient proof that would allow him to kill someone he claims is a Terrorist. The fact that it would all take place in secret, with only the DOJ present, further ensures that the results would mirror the embarrassing subservience of the Fisa court. As former Pentagon chief counsel Jeh Johnson put it in a speech last month discussing this proposal:

"Its proceedings would necessarily be ex parte and in secret, and, like a FISA court, I suspect almost all of the government's applications would be granted, because, like a FISA application, the government would be sure to present a compelling case. So, at the same time the New York Times editorial page promotes a FISA-like court for targeted lethal force, it derides the FISA court as a 'rubber stamp' because it almost never rejects an application. How long before a 'drone court' operating in secret is criticized in the same way?"

Precisely. But like the Fisa court, such a "drone court" would be far worse than merely harmless. Just imagine how creepy and tyrannical it is to codify a system where federal judges - in total secrecy and with only government lawyers present - issue execution warrants that allow the president to kill someone who has never been charged with a crime. It's true that the president is already doing this, and is doing it without any external oversight. But a fake, illusory judicial process lends a perceived legitimacy to his execution powers that is not warranted by the reality of this process. Worse, it further infects the US judiciary with warped, secretive procedures more akin to a Star Chamber than anything recognized by the US Constitution. Beyond that, it takes a program that is now seen as a radical presidential power grab - Obama's kill list - and legitimizes and entrenches it by making both the Congress and courts cooperative parties.

It's one thing to have a secret court that lends a veneer of legality and legitimacy to the government's rampant spying behavior. It's quite another to have one that authorizes the government to kill people who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any actual crime. But it's a rather powerful reflection of how warped our political culture has become that a secret, unaccountable, one-sided "court" is being widely proposed to issue execution warrants, and that this is the "moderate" or even "liberal" position. How anyone could look at the Fisa court and want to replicate its behavior in the context of presidential executions is really mystifying.

UPDATE

The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer makes an important point:

"Fisa stats don't include surveillance under 2008 amendments. Public stats grossly understate extent of surveillance. . . . It's like disclosing stats for personality strikes while failing even to mention the signature strikes. Totally misleading."

The prime purpose of the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act was to authorize US government surveillance without the need for individualized warrants except in the narrowest cases. Instead, the government need merely obtain "program warrants": general approval for its methodology for spying but without any oversight over the specific targets chosen. The stats I quoted here reflect only the individual warrants the government sought and obtained. For that reason, as Jaffer notes, these public stats "grossly understate the extent of surveillance" conducted by the US. It's much, much greater: because most of it is conducted without warrants, the bulk of the surveillance is not part of what gets disclosed.

• Surveillance
• Drones
• Judiciary

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The 24-year-old Ibrahim Mothana speaks eloquently and insightfully about what the US is doing to his country. We should listen

Ibrahim Mothana is a 24-year-old Yemeni writer and activist. I first became aware of him when he wrote an extraordinary Op-Ed in the New York Times last year urging Americans to realize how self-destructive and counter-productive was Obama's escalating drone campaign in his country, writing:

Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair. . . .

"Anti-Americanism is far less prevalent in Yemen than in Pakistan. But rather than winning the hearts and minds of Yemeni civilians, America is alienating them by killing their relatives and friends. . . . Certainly, there may be short-term military gains from killing militant leaders in these strikes, but they are minuscule compared with the long-term damage the drone program is causing. A new generation of leaders is spontaneously emerging in furious retaliation to attacks on their territories and tribes. . . .

"Unfortunately, liberal voices in the United States are largely ignoring, if not condoning, civilian deaths and extrajudicial killings in Yemen — including the assassination of three American citizens in September 2011, including a 16-year-old. During George W. Bush's presidency, the rage would have been tremendous. But today there is little outcry, even though what is happening is in many ways an escalation of Mr. Bush's policies.

"Defenders of human rights must speak out. America's counterterrorism policy here is not only making Yemen less safe by strengthening support for A.Q.A.P. [al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula] but it could also ultimately endanger the United States and the entire world."

Since then, I've watched his work and have periodically spoken with him on various matters, and am unfailingly impressed by the thoughtful, smart and sophisticated way he thinks about these issues. Ibrahim was invited to travel to Washington to testify before a Senate sub-committee which met last week to examine the legality and wisdom of Obama's drone program. He was unable to attend, so one of his friends, Farea al-Muslimi, testified instead, and was eloquent and powerful.

But Ibrahim prepared what would have been his opening remarks to the Committee and has sent them to me (the Committee has also agreed to publish them in the Congressional Record). I'm publishing them here in full because they are remarkably insightful and poignant, and because Americans hear far too little from the people in the countries which their government continues to bomb, attack, and otherwise interfere in. I really hope as many people as possible will take the time to read his words:

Written testimony of Ibrahim Mothana for the United States Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights

Chairman Durbin, Ranking Member Cruz, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to provide my written testimony on the critical issue of the increasing US targeted killings in Yemen.

Yemen and the United States of America

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I would like to tell you about my country. The people of our two countries share many of the same dreams although many Americans may not realize this, in part because of a media that focuses on terrorism to the exclusion of a broader understanding of Yemen. Al-Qaida and its associates in Yemen, at the most extreme estimates, number a few thousand members, no more than a tiny fragment of our 24 million people who hope and dream of a better future — one that offers them dignity, freedom, and economic stability.

We are the poorest country in the Middle East with over 50 percent of our people living on less than 2 dollars a day. We are running out of water and out of oil, our major source of foreign revenue. Our nation has been troubled by decades of conflicts and an irresponsible, corrupt governments. A lot of my childhood friends are unemployed and live a daily struggle to maintain their basic human needs. In 2011, millions of Yemenis who lived decades under one autocratic ruler rose up in a largely peaceful revolution calling for democracy, accountability and justice, the very values cherished in American democracy.

Many young people like me grew up looking to America and its people for inspiration. Among many other things my teenage years were enriched by Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Martin Luther King Junior's speeches, Mark Twain's sarcasm and American TV shows. The promise of equality and freedom seemed fulfilled when America elected its first black president. With an upsurge of happiness, many Yemenis celebrated the inauguration day and, at that point, President Obama was more popular among my friends than any other Yemeni figure. I was inspired by President Obama's promise of "a new era of leadership that will bring back America's credibility on human rights Issues and reject prioritizing safety to ideals."

But happiness and inspiration gave way to misery. My admiration for the American dream and Obama's promises has become overshadowed by the reality of the American drones strike nightmare in Yemen.

The Impact on Yemen and its People of the US Targeted Killing Policy

In the past few years, I have visited and worked in areas of Yemen that are the forefront of what the United States views as a global conflict against Al-Qaeda and associated forces. I have witnessed how the US use of armed drones and botched air strikes against alleged militant targets has increased anti-American sentiment in my country, prompting some Yemenis to join violent militant groups, motivated more by a desire for revenge than by ideological beliefs.

We Yemenis got our first experience with targeted killings under the Obama administration on December 17, 2009, with a cruise missile strike in al-Majala, a hamlet in a remote area of southern Yemen. This attack killed 44 people including 21 women and 14 children, according to Yemeni and international rights groups including Amnesty International. The lethal impact of that strike on innocents lasted long after it took place. On August 9, 2010, two locals were killed and 15 were injured from an explosion of one remaining cluster bomb from that strike.

After that tragic event in 2009, both Yemeni and US officials continued a policy of denial that ultimately damaged the credibility and legitimacy of the Yemeni government. According to a leaked US diplomatic cable, in a meeting on January 2, 2010, Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alimi joked about how he had just "lied" by telling the Yemeni parliament the bombs in the al-Majala attack were dropped by the Yemenis, and then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh made a promise to General Petreaus, then the then head of US central command, saying: "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours." Such collusion added insult to injury to Yemenis.

Animosity has been heightened by the US use of so-called "signature strikes" that target military-age males and groups by secret, remote analysis of lifestyle patterns. In Yemen, we fear that the signature strike approach allows the Obama administration to falsely claim that civilian casualties are non-existent. In the eye of a signature strike, it could be that someone innocent like me is seen as a militant until proven otherwise. How can a dead person prove his innocence? For the many labeled as militants when they are killed, it's difficult to verify if they really were active members of groups like AQAP, let alone whether they deserved to die.

In Yemen, we know that the reliability of the intelligence the United States uses to launch and report drone strikes is questionable. For instance, the Yemeni authorities have claimed three times that Saeed al-Shiri, the second-in-command of Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), was killed by a drone strike. According to Yemeni and international media, at least 30 other suspected militants were announced to be killed in these strikes. But as recently as April 8, 2013, Shihri appeared to be alive. So who were the dozens of people killed in the three strikes that allegedly killed Shihri?

In the majority of cases, we Yemenis receive no explanation about why suspected militants are killed and what threat they posed to the United States. If the intelligence misidentified Shihri, the suspected militants who were killed in these incidents might just be random people who were in the wrong place.

We Yemenis are deeply worried that the Obama administration appears to be avoiding the Guantanamo dilemma of indefinite detentions without charge by killing suspects in Yemen rather than trying to capture them. An example is the November 7, 2012 targeted killing of Adnan al-Qadhi, who was a lieutenant colonel in the Yemeni army and reported to be a suspected al-Qaida militant in Sanhan, a district 22 miles east from the Yemeni capital and a 15-minute drive from where I live. Sanhan is near to one of the biggest bases of the Republican Guard, at the time one of Yemen's most powerful military units. According to his family members, Yemeni authorities could have arrested Adnan any time. Adnan's brother Hemyar al-Qadhi told me, "Adnan was arrested and released by the government in 2008 and we would've taken him ourselves to the authorities if they requested him again."

We Yemenis ask ourselves, how many more of our citizens were killed without any attempt at capture instead? Why is it that in the four years that John Brennan was the top counterterrorism advisor, only one so-called "high-value target" was arrested anywhere outside the United States?

More Human Costs and the Consequences of US Targeted Killing Policy

During my visits to Abyan, Shabwa and Radaa, three areas of central and southern Yemen where the US has carried out targeted killings, I was overwhelmed with sadness meeting families of drone victims suffering a miserable combination of personal loss and devastating economic burden. Many of the children of strike victims that I saw were severely malnourished and families who lost their main financial provider had little hope for the future. For many of the youngsters, death seemed an easier burden than life so, with this bleak outlook, they joined the fight against the government.

With drones flying overhead 24/7, people are living in constant fear and anxiety over the possibility of another strike. During my visits to these areas, I shared their fear. I felt as Adel al-Jonaidi, a high school student living in Radaa did, when he told me, "Whenever drones are hovering in the area, it's like being in a state of waiting endlessly for execution."

The more unjustified the drone strike victim, the more rage it creates within local communities. Angry reaction followed in Hadramout when Salem Ahmed Bin Ali Jaber, a moderate cleric who often denounced violence and publicly opposed al-Qaeda, was killed in a drone strike on August 25, 2012. Such strikes call into question US claims of tidy surgical strikes and explain why the number of AQAP estimated fighters increased from a few hundred in 2009 to a few thousand in 2013, according to Yemeni and US government estimates.

In another botched strike, a missile struck a passenger van in central al-Bayda governorate on September 2, 2012, killing 12 civilians, 3 of them children. Local and international media initially quoted anonymous Yemeni officials as saying the strike targeted militants, but state-run media later conceded the killings were an "accident" that killed civilians. During a recent visit to Radaa, the city near the attack site, I met Mohamed Mabkhoot, a relative of one of the civilians who was killed. Mabkhoot explained how months after the attack there is still mounting rage at the apathy and inability of the Yemeni government to bring justice for those affected by the strike.

"Our lives are not worthless and it's common sense that people start hating America when their innocent relatives and family members are killed. Young people here are desperate and will fight to die if they don't have anything left for them to live for," he told me.

Drone strikes and US military intervention are the rallying cry that al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Yemen use to recruit more fighters. In a country like Iraq, al-Qaeda was created from scratch after 2003, seizing on the existing local grievances the war created. Something similar is happening here in Yemen. During my visits to different parts of my country, even though I hear broad opposition to AQAP, I also hear objections to foreign intervention by the United States.

Even natural allies of the United States like young leaders, intelligentsia and the upper middle class feel that the targeted killings infringe on Yemen's sovereignty. Many of us ruefully repeat a line from one President Obama's press conference on November 18, 2012: "There is no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders."

Moreover, it's vital to grasp the intricacies of our society's reality, where tribal dynamics and laws are vital in largely under-governed areas. In Yemen, killing a person without trial is not only extrajudicial, it also violates the sovereignty and dignity of the entire tribe to which the slain person belonged. Each tribe is responsible for defending and ensuring the safety of its members. Understanding the tribal system and traditions is key to winning hearts and minds of the local populations and to gaining their support. The lack of any apology, compensation or damage control-mechanisms, outrages tribes and local populations in the affected areas.

In one case, a drone strike exacerbated my country's already serious political and economic difficulties. On May 25, 2010, a US drone strike killed Jabr al-Shabwani, a prominent sheikh and deputy governor of Marib province who was a US counterterrorism ally After Sheikh Shabwani was killed by the strike, his tribe carried out retaliatory attacks on my country's main oil pipeline, which runs through Marib, costing Yemen billions of dollars. This is no small matter when you consider that 70 percent of Yemen's national budget relies on oil exports. The strike also erased years of progress and trust-building between the US and other tribes who had helped fight Al Qaeda in their areas; they considered the killing a betrayal.

The Targeted Killing Policy is Counter-Productive

Many of us in Yemen believe that even strikes that kill AQAP leaders can be counterproductive. The short-term military gains are miniscule compared to the long-term damage that the targeted killing program causes. In the place of one slain leader, new leaders swiftly emerge in furious retaliation for attacks in their territories. And with each strike, it becomes ever easier to belong to a militant group in the region where your tribe lives.

As Khaled Toayman, a young Sheikh from Marib and a son of a Yemeni member of parliament told me, "We are against terrorism and we seek to live in peace and dignity like anyone else in the world. I don't hate America or Americans. I just want to know why my relatives are killed."

In my visits to the areas affected by drone strikes, I observed an increasing sentiment that America is part of a problem and not a solution, something that is hard for diplomats to feel while living disconnected from Yemenis in the emerging Green Zones of Sanaa. In Yemen, it's impossible to win a war with drone strikes where basic services and human needs remain unmet. For a loaf of bread, you can push a hungry, desperate and angry young man to fight for al-Qaeda, possibly regardless of his ideological beliefs.

Conclusion

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, we Yemenis are the ones who suffer the most from the presence of Al Qaeda and getting rid of this exhausting plague is a top priority for the majority of people in the country. But we also see that there is no easy way to end terrorism. Only a long-term approach that strengthens democracy, accountability and justice, together with programs to address structural economic and social drivers of extremism can bring about security in my country.

When I think of solutions, I think of our common ideals. The drone program is far from these. Edward S. Herman offers us a critique and an opportunity in his reflection on Hana's Arendt concept of the Banality of Evil: "Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization.' This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as 'the way things are done.' "

As a Yemeni citizen, I urge the US government not normalize crimes committed under the name of your great country. I call on the US administration to be transparent regarding the strikes it has authorized in Yemen and to compensate affected civilians. I call on the United States to critically reflect on using targeted strikes and the existing counterterrorism policy in Yemen and to see that, it is insecurity and not security that these are creating in my country, the region, the US, and the entire world.

• Yemen
• Drones

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

There is zero legal or ethical justification for denying a suspect in custody this fundamental right

(updated below - Update II [Tues.])

The initial debate over the treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev focused on whether he should be advised of his Miranda rights or whether the "public safety exception" justified delaying it. In the wake of news reports that he had been Mirandized and would be charged in a federal court, I credited the Obama DOJ for handling the case reasonably well thus far. As it turns out, though, Tsarnaev wasn't Mirandized because the DOJ decided he should be. Instead, that happened only because a federal magistrate, on her own, scheduled a hospital-room hearing, interrupted the FBI's interrogation which had been proceeding at that point for a full 16 hours, and advised him of his right to remain silent and appointed him a lawyer. Since then, Tsarnaev ceased answering the FBI's questions.

But that controversy was merely about whether he would be advised of his Miranda rights. Now, the Los Angeles Times, almost in passing, reports something which, if true, would be a much more serious violation of core rights than delaying Miranda warnings - namely, that prior to the magistrate's visit to his hospital room, Tsarnaev had repeatedly asked for a lawyer, but the FBI simply ignored those requests, instead allowing the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group to continue to interrogate him alone:

"Tsarnaev has not answered any questions since he was given a lawyer and told he has the right to remain silent by Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler on Monday, officials said.

"Until that point, Tsarnaev had been responding to the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, including admitting his role in the bombing, authorities said. A senior congressional aide said Tsarnaev had asked several times for a lawyer, but that request was ignored since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule."

Delaying Miranda warnings under the "public safety exception" - including under the Obama DOJ's radically expanded version of it - is one thing. But denying him the right to a lawyer after he repeatedly requests one is another thing entirely: as fundamental a violation of crucial guaranteed rights as can be imagined. As the lawyer bmaz comprehensively details in this excellent post, it is virtually unheard of for the "public safety" exception to be used to deny someone their right to a lawyer as opposed to delaying a Miranda warning (the only cases where this has been accepted were when "the intrusion into the constitutional right to counsel ... was so fleeting – in both it was no more than a question or two about a weapon on the premises of a search while the search warrant was actively being executed"). To ignore the repeated requests of someone in police custody for a lawyer, for hours and hours, is just inexcusable and legally baseless.

As law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky explained in the Los Angeles Times last week, the Obama DOJ was already abusing the "public safety" exception by using it to delay Miranda warnings for hours, long after virtually every public official expressly said that there were no more threats to the public safety. As he put it: "this exception does not apply here because there was no emergency threat facing law enforcement." Indeed, as I documented when this issue first arose, the Obama DOJ already unilaterally expanded this exception far beyond what the Supreme Court previously recognized by simply decreeing (in secret) that terrorism cases justify much greater delays in Mirandizing a suspect for reasons well beyond asking about public safety.

But that debate was merely about whether Tsarnaev would be advised of his rights. This is much more serious: if the LA Times report is true, then it means that the DOJ did not merely fail to advise him of his right to a lawyer but actively blocked him from exercising that right. This is a US citizen arrested for an alleged crime on US soil: there is no justification whatsoever for denying him his repeatedly exercised right to counsel. And there are ample and obvious dangers in letting the government do this. That's why Marcy Wheeler was arguing from the start that whether Tsarnaev would be promptly presented to a federal court - as both the Constitution and federal law requires - is more important than whether he is quickly Mirandized. Even worse, if the LA Times report is accurate, it means that the Miranda delay as well as the denial of his right to a lawyer would have continued even longer had the federal magistrate not basically barged into the interrogation to advise him of his rights.

I'd like to see more sources for this than a single anonymous Congressional aide, though the LA Times apparently concluded that this source's report was sufficiently reliable. The problem is that we're unlikely to get much transparency on this issue because to the extent that national politicians in Washington are complaining about Tsarnaev's treatment, their concern is that his rights were not abused even further:

"Lawmakers were told Tsarnaev had been questioned for 16 hours over two days. Injured in the throat, he was answering mostly in writing.

"'For those of us who think the public safety exemption properly applies here, there are legitimate questions about why he was [brought before a judge] when he was,' said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a former federal prosecutor who serves on the House Intelligence Committee.

"Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the committee, wrote Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. asking for a full investigation of the matter, complaining that the court session 'cut off a lawful, ongoing FBI interview to collect public safety information.'"

So now the Washington "debate" is going to be whether (a) the Obama DOJ should have defied the efforts of the federal court to ensure Tsarnaev's rights were protected and instead just violated his rights for even longer than it did, or (b) the Obama DOJ violated his rights for a sufficient amount of time before "allowing" a judge into his hospital room. That it is wrong to take a severely injured 19-year-old US citizen and aggressively interrogate him in the hospital without Miranda rights, without a lawyer, and (if this report is true) actively denying him his repeatedly requested rights, won't even be part of that debate. As Dean Chemerinsky wrote:

"Throughout American history, whenever there has been a serious threat, people have proposed abridging civil liberties. When that has happened, it has never been shown to have made the country safer. These mistakes should not be repeated. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be investigated, prosecuted and tried in accord with the US Constitution."

There is no legal or ethical justification for refusing the request for someone in custody to have a lawyer present. If this report is true, what's most amazing is not that his core rights were so brazenly violated, but that so few people in Washington will care. They're too busy demanding that his rights should have been violated even further.

UPDATE

In March of last year, the New York Times' Editorial Page Editor, Andrew Rosenthal - writing under the headline "Liberty and Justice for Non-Muslims" - explained: "it's rarely acknowledged that the [9/11] attacks have also led to what's essentially a separate justice system for Muslims." Even if you're someone who has decided that you don't really care about (or will actively support) rights abridgments as long as they are applied to groups or individuals who you think deserve it, these violations always expand beyond their original application. If you cheer when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's right to counsel is denied, then you're enabling the institutionalization of that violation, and thus ensuring that you have no basis or ability to object when that right is denied to others whom you find more sympathetic (including yourself).

UPDATE II [Tues.]

For those who are still having trouble comprehending the point that objections to rights violations are not grounded in "concern over a murderer" but rather concern over what powers the government can exercise - just as objections to the US torture regime were not grounded in concern for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - perhaps the great American revolutionary Thomas Paine can explain the point, from his 1795 A Dissertation on the First Principles of Government:

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

That's the same principle that led then-lawyer-and-revolutionary John Adams to vigorously defend five British soldiers (of the hated occupying army) accused of one of the most notorious crimes of the revolutionary period: the 1770 murder of five colonists in Boston as part of the so-called Boston Massacre. As the ACLU explained, no lawyers were willing to represent the soldiers because "of the virulent anti-British sentiment in Boston" and "Adams later wrote that he risked infamy and even death, and incurred much popular suspicion and prejudice."

Ultimately, Adams called his defense of these soldiers "one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country." That's because Adams understood what Paine understood: if you permit the government to trample upon the basic rights of those whom you hate, then you're permitting the government to trample upon those rights in general, for everyone.

This is not a platitude they were invoking but an undeniable historical truth. Governments know that their best opportunity to institutionalize rights violations is when they can most easily manipulate the public into acquiescing to them by stoking public emotions of contempt against the individual target. For the reasons Paine and Adams explained, it is exactly in such cases - when public rage finds its most intense expression - when it is necessary to be most vigilant in defense of those rights.

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

A seemingly trivial controversy reveals quite a bit about pervasive political values

News reports yesterday indicated that Bradley Manning, widely known to be gay, had been selected to be one of the Grand Marshals of the annual San Francisco gay pride parade, named by the LGBT Pride Celebration Committee. When the predictable backlash instantly ensued, the president of the Board of SF Pride, Lisa L Williams, quickly capitulated, issuing a cowardly, imperious statement that has to be read to be believed.

Williams proclaimed that "Manning will not be a grand marshal in this year's San Francisco Pride celebration" and termed his selection "a mistake". She blamed it all on a "staff person" who prematurely made the announcement based on a preliminary vote, and she assures us all that the culprit "has been disciplined": disciplined. She then accuses Manning of "actions which placed in harms way [sic] the lives of our men and women in uniform": a substance-free falsehood originally spread by top US military officials which has since been decisively and extensively debunked, even by some government officials (indeed, it's the US government itself, not Manning, that is guilty of "actions which placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform"). And then, in my favorite part of her statement, Williams decreed to all organization members that "even the hint of support" for Manning's actions - even the hint - "will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride". Will not be tolerated.

I originally had no intention of writing about this episode, but the more I discovered about it, the more revealing it became. So let's just consider a few of the points raised by all of this.

First, while even a hint of support for Manning will not be tolerated, there is a long roster of large corporations serving as the event's sponsors who are welcomed with open arms. The list is here. It includes AT&T and Verizon, the telecom giants that enabled the illegal warrantless eavesdropping on US citizens by the Bush administration and its NSA, only to get retroactively immunized from Congress and thus shielded from all criminal and civil liability (including a lawsuit brought in San Francisco against those corporations by their customers who were illegally spied on). Last month, AT&T was fined by OSHA for failing to protect one of its employees who was attacked, was found by the FCC last year to have overcharged customers by secretly switching them to plans they didn't want, and is now being sued by the US government for "allegedly bill[ing] the government improperly for services designed for the deaf and hard-of-hearing who place calls by typing messages over the web."

The list of SF Pride sponsors also includes Bank of America, now being sued for $1 billion by the US government for allegedly engaging in a systematic scheme of mortgage fraud which the US Attorney called "spectacularly brazen in scope". Just last month, the same SF Pride sponsor received a record fine for ignoring a court order and instead trying to collect mortgage payments from bankrupt homeowners to which it was not entitled. Earlier this month, SF-Pride-sponsoring Bank of America paid $2.4 billion to settle shareholder allegations that Bank executives "failed to disclose information about losses at Merrill Lynch and bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch employees before the brokerage was acquired by Bank of America in January 2009 for $18.5 billion."

Another beloved SF Pride sponsor, Wells Fargo, is also being "sued by the US for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages over claims the bank made reckless mortgage loans that caused losses for a federal insurance program when they defaulted". Last year, Wells Fargo was fined $3.1 million by a federal judge for engaging in conduct that court called "highly reprehensible" relating to its persecution of a struggling homeowner. In 2011, the bank was fined by the US government "for allegedly pushing borrowers with good credit into expensive mortgages and falsifying loan applications."

Also in Good Standing with the SF Pride board: Clear Channel, the media outlet owned by Bain Capital that broadcasts the radio programs of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck; a pension fund is suing this SF Pride sponsor for making cheap, below-market loans to its struggling parent company. The health care giant Kaiser Permanente, another proud SF Pride sponsor, is currently under investigation by California officials for alleged massive privacy violations in the form of recklessly disclosing 300,000 patient records, and was previously targeted with criminal and civil charges, which it settled, for dumping a homeless patient, still in a hospital gown, on skid row.

So apparently, the very high-minded ethical standards of Lisa L Williams and the SF Pride Board apply only to young and powerless Army Privates who engage in an act of conscience against the US war machine, but instantly disappear for large corporations and banks that hand over cash. What we really see here is how the largest and most corrupt corporations own not just the government but also the culture. Even at the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, once an iconic symbol of cultural dissent and disregard for stifling pieties, nothing can happen that might offend AT&T and the Bank of America. The minute something even a bit deviant takes place (as defined by standards imposed by America's political and corporate class), even the SF Gay Pride Parade must scamper, capitulate, apologize, and take an oath of fealty to their orthodoxies (we adore the military, the state, and your laws). And, as usual, the largest corporate factions are completely exempt from the strictures and standards applied to the marginalized and powerless. Thus, while Bradley Manning is persona non grata at SF Pride, illegal eavesdropping telecoms, scheming banks, and hedge-fund purveryors of the nation's worst right-wing agitprop are more than welcome.

Second, the authoritarian, state-and-military-revering mentality pervading Williams' statement is striking. It isn't just the imperious decree that "even a hint of support" for Manning "will not be tolerated", though that is certainly creepy. Nor is it the weird announcement that the wrongdoer "has been disciplined". Even worse is the mindless embrace of the baseless claims of US military officials (that Manning "placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform") along with the supremely authoritarian view that any actions barred by the state are, ipso facto, ignoble and wrong. Conduct can be illegal and yet still be noble and commendable: see, for instance, Daniel Ellsberg, or most of the leaders of the civil rights movement in the US. Indeed, acts of civil disobedience and conscience by people who risk their own interests to battle injustices are often the most commendable acts. Equating illegal behavior with ignominious behavior is the defining mentality of an authoritarian - and is particularly notable coming from what was once viewed as a bastion of liberal dissent.

But the more one learns about the parties involved here, the less surprising it becomes. According to her biography, Williams "organized satellite offices for the Obama campaign" and also works for various Democratic politicians. It was President Obama, of course, who so notoriously decreed Bradley Manning guilty in public before his trial by military officers serving under Obama even began, and whose administration was found by the UN's top torture investigator to have abused him and is now so harshly prosecuting him. It's anything but surprising that a person who was a loyal Obama campaign aide finds Bradley Manning anathema while adoring big corporations and banks (which funded the Obama campaign and who, in the case of telecoms, Obama voted to immunize).

What we see here is how even many of the most liberal precincts in America are now the leading spokespeople for and loyalists to state power as a result of their loyalty to President Obama. Thus do we have the President of the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade sounding exactly like the Chairman of the Joints Chief, or Sarah Palin, or gay war-loving neocons, in depicting any meaningful opposition to the National Security State as the supreme sin. I'd be willing to bet large amounts of money that Williams has never condemned the Obama administration's abuse of Manning in detention or its dangerously radical prosecution of him for "aiding the enemy". I have no doubt that the people who did all of that would be showered with gratitude by Parade officials if they attended. In so many liberal precincts in the Age of Obama - even now including the SF Gay Pride parade - the federal government, its military, and its federal prosecutors are to be revered and celebrated but not criticized; only those who oppose them are villains.

Third, when I wrote several weeks ago about the remarkable shift in public opinion on gay equality, I noted that this development is less significant than it seems because the cause of gay equality poses no real threat to elite factions or to how political and economic power in the US are distributed. If anything, it bolsters those power structures because it completely and harmlessly assimilates a previously excluded group into existing institutions and thus incentivizes them to accommodate those institutions and adopt their mindset. This event illustrates exactly what I meant.

While some of the nation's most corrupt corporations are welcome to fly their flag over the parade, consider what Manning - for whom "even a hint of support will not be tolerated" - actually did. His leak revealed all sorts of corruption, deceit and illegality on the part of the world's most powerful corporations. They led to numerous journalism awards for WikiLeaks. Even Bill Keller, the former Executive Editor of the New York Times who is a harsh WikiLeaks critic, credited those leaks with helping to spark the Arab Spring, the greatest democratic revolution the world has seen in decades. Multiple media accounts describe how the cables documenting atrocities committed by US troops in Iraq prevented the Malaki government from allowing US troops to stay beyond the agreed-to deadline: i.e., helped end the Iraq war by thwarting Obama's attempts to prolong it. For all of that, Manning was selected by Guardian readers as the 2012 Person of the Year, while former Army Lt. (and 2009 SF Parade Marshal) Dan Choi said yesterday:

As we move forward as a country, we need truth in order to gain justice, you can't have justice without the whole truth . . . So what [Manning] did as a gay American, as a gay soldier, he stood for integrity, I am proud of him."

But none of those vital benefits matter to authoritarians. That's because authoritarians, by definition, believe in the overarching Goodness of institutions of power, and believe the only bad acts come from those who challenge or subvert that power. Bad acts aren't committed by the National Security State or Surveillance State; they are only committed by those who oppose them. If a person's actions threaten power factions or are deemed prohibited by them, then Good Authoritarians will reflexively view the person as evil and will be eager to publicly disassociate themselves from such individuals. Or, as Williams put it, "even the hint of support" for Manning "will not be tolerated", and those who deviate from this decree will be "disciplined".

Even the SF Gay Pride Parade is now owned by and beholden to the nation's largest corporations, subject to their dictates. Those who run the event are functionaries of, loyalists to, the nation's most powerful political officials. That's how this parade was so seamlessly transformed from orthodoxy-challenging, individualistic and creative cultural icon into yet another pile of obedient apparatchiks that spout banal slogans doled out by the state while viciously scorning those who challenge them. Yes, there will undoubtedly still be exotically-dressed drag queens, lesbian motorcycle clubs, and groups proudly defined by their unusual sexual proclivities participating in the parade, but they'll be marching under a Bank of America banner and behind flag-waving fans of the National Security State, the US President, and the political party that dominates American politics and its political and military institutions. Yet another edgy, interesting, creative, independent event has been degraded and neutered into a meek and subservient ritual that must pay homage to the nation's most powerful entities and at all costs avoid offending them in any way.

It's hardly surprising that someone who so boldly and courageously opposes the US war machine is demonized and scorned this way. Daniel Ellsberg was subjected to the same attacks before he was transformed many years later into a liberal hero (though Ellsberg had the good fortune to be persecuted by a Republican rather than Democratic President and thus, even back then, had some substantial support; come to think of it, Ellsberg lives in San Francisco: would expressions of support for him be tolerated?). But the fact that such lock-step, heel-clicking, military-mimicking behavior is now coming from the SF Gay Pride Parade of all places is indeed noteworthy: it reflects just how pervasive this authoritarian rot has become.

Corporate corruption and sleaze

For a bit more on the dominance of corporate sleaze and corruption in our political culture, see the first few paragraphs of this extraordinary Politico article on a new book about DC culture, and this Washington Post article detailing the supreme annual convergence of political, media and corporate sleaze called "the White House Correspondents' Dinner", to be held this weekend.

• Bradley Manning
• Gay rights

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Talking to the PBS host about civil liberties, terrorism, US foreign policy and the dangers of secrecy

(updated below)

Time constraints are preventing me from writing much today, but the full 25-minute interview I did with Bill Moyers, to air beginning this evening on PBS, is now available on the recorder below. We discuss the Boston Marathon bombing, terrorism and civil liberties, the dangers of secrecy, US foreign policy and general issues relating to US political and media culture:

UPDATE

Via commenter axenicely, the transcript to this interview, prepared by the Moyers show, is here.

• Boston Marathon bombing

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds