NSA Surveillance Played Little Role in Foiling Terror Plots, Experts Say

Published on Wednesday, June 12, 2013 by The Guardian

NSA Surveillance Played Little Role in Foiling Terror Plots, Experts Say

Obama administration says NSA data helped make arrests in two important cases – but critics say that simply isn't true

 

by Ed Pilkington and Nicholas Watt 

 

 

Lawyers and intelligence experts with direct knowledge of two intercepted terrorist plots that the Obama administration says confirm the value of the NSA's vast data-mining activities have questioned whether the surveillance sweeps played a significant role, if any, in foiling the attacks.



 
(Image via eff.org)



The defence of the controversial data collection operations, highlighted in a series of Guardian disclosures over the past week, has been led by Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, and her equivalent in the House, Mike Rogers. The two politicians have attempted to justify the NSA's use of vast data sweeps such as Prism and Boundless Informant by pointing to the arrests and convictions of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009 and David Headley, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for his role in the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Rogers told ABC's This Week that the NSA's bulk monitoring of phone calls and internet contacts was central to intercepting the plotters. "I can tell you, in the Zazi case in New York, it's exactly the programme that was used," he said.
A similar point was made in anonymous briefings by administration officials to the New York Times and Reuters.

But court documents lodged in the US and UK, as well as interviews with involved parties, suggest that data-mining through Prism and other NSA programmes played a relatively minor role in the interception of the two plots. Conventional surveillance techniques, in both cases including old-fashioned tip-offs from intelligence services in Britain, appear to have initiated the investigations.

In the case of Zazi, an Afghan American who planned to attack the New York subway, the breakthrough appears to have come from Operation Pathway, a British investigation into a suspected terrorism cell in the north-west of England in 2009. That investigation discovered that one of the members of the cell had been in contact with an al-Qaida associate in Pakistan via the email address sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com.

British newspaper reports at the time of Zazi's arrest said that UK intelligence passed on the email address to the US. The same email address, as Buzzfeed has pointed out, was cited in Zazi's 2011 trial as a crucial piece of evidence. Zazi, the court heard, wrote to sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com asking in coded language for the precise quantities to use to make up a bomb.

Eric Jurgenson, an FBI agent involved in investigating Zazi once the link to the Pakistani email address was made, told the court: "My office was in receipt – I was notified, I should say. My office was in receipt of several email messages, email communications. Those email communications, several of them resolved to an individual living in Colorado."

Michael Dowling, a Denver-based attorney who acted as Zazi's defence counsel, said the full picture remained unclear as Zazi pleaded guilty before all details of the investigation were made public. But the lawyer said he was sceptical that mass data sweeps could explain what led law enforcement to Zazi.

"The government says that it does not monitor content of these communications in its data collection. So I find it hard to believe that this would have uncovered Zazi's contacts with a known terrorist in Pakistan," Dowling said.

Further scepticism has been expressed by David Davis, a former British foreign office minister who described the citing of the Zazi case as an example of the merits of data-mining as "misleading" and "an illusion". Davis pointed out that Operation Pathway was prematurely aborted in April 2009 after Bob Quick, then the UK's most senior counter-terrorism police officer, was pictured walking into Downing Street with top secret documents containing details of the operation in full view of cameras.

The collapse of the operation, and arrests of suspects that hurriedly followed, came five months before Zazi was arrested in September 2009. "That was the operation that led to the initial data links to Zazi – they put the clues in the database which gave them the connections," Davis said.

Davis said that the discovery of the sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com email – and in turn the link to Zazi – had been made by traditional investigative work in the UK. He said the clue-driven nature of the inquiry was significant, as it was propelled by detectives operating on the basis of court-issued warrants.

"You can't make this grand sweeping [data collection] stuff subject to warrants. What judge would give you a warrant if you say you want to comb through vast quantities of data?"
Legal documents lodged with a federal court in New York's eastern district shortly after Zazi's arrest show that US counter-intelligence officials had been keeping watch over him under targeted surveillance with the warranted approval of the special intelligence court. During the course of the prosecution, the US served notice that it would be offering evidence "obtained and derived from electronic surveillance and physical search conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (Fisa)."

Feinstein and Rogers have also pointed to the case of David Headley, who in January was sentenced to 35 years in jail for having made multiple scouting missions to Mumbai ahead of the 2008 terrorist attacks that killed 168 people. Yet the evidence in his case also points towards a British tip-off as the inspiration behind the US interception of him.

In July 2009, British intelligence began tracking Headley, a Pakistani American from Chicago, who was then plotting to attack Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in retaliation for its publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Information was passed to the FBI and he was thereafter, until his arrest that October, kept under targeted US surveillance.

An intelligence expert and former CIA operative, who asked to remain anonymous because he had been directly involved in the Headley case, was derisive about the claim that data-mining sweeps by the NSA were key to the investigation. "That's nonsense. It played no role at all in the Headley case. That's not the way it happened at all," he said.

The intelligence expert said that it was a far more ordinary lead that ensnared Headley. British investigators spotted him when he contacted an informant.
The Headley case is a peculiar choice for the administration to highlight as an example of the virtues of data-mining. The fact that the Mumbai attacks occurred, with such devastating effect, in itself suggests that the NSA's secret programmes were limited in their value as he was captured only after the event.

Headley was also subject to a plethora of more conventionally obtained intelligence that questions the central role claimed for the NSA's data sweeps behind his arrest. In a long profile of Headley, the investigative website ProPublica pointed out that he had been an informant working for the Drug Enforcement Administration perhaps as recently as 2005. There are suggestions that he might have then worked in some capacity for the FBI or CIA.

Headley was also, ProPublica found, the subject of several inquiries by agents of the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. A year before the Mumbai attacks his then wife, Faiza Outalha, reported on him to the US embassy Islamabad, saying he was on a secret mission in India and was a "drug dealer, terrorist and spy".

© 2013 The Guardian

Is Pope Francis Going After the Vatican’s ‘Gay Lobby’?

WORLD NEWS

Content Section

Is Pope Francis Going After the Vatican’s ‘Gay Lobby’?

by Barbie Latza Nadeau Jun 12, 2013 12:08 PM EDT

Priests caught with their pants down have fueled rumors for years that there’s a ‘gay lobby’ in the upper echelons of the Vatican. Now that Pope Francis is said to have confirmed it, what’s he going to do about it?

So, it seems there really are gay priests in the upper echelons of the Vatican hierarchy. At least that’s what Pope Francis reportedly told a group of Latin American prelates in a private audience June 6.

Pope Francis presides over a meeting at the Vatican on May 23. (Gregorio Borgia/AP)

The remarks, which were made off-the-cuff and were not meant for the general public, were first published Tuesday in Spanish on the Chilean website Reflexión y Liberación, sourced to the participants in the audience who allegedly spilled the beans on the pope’s address. The comments were then translated and published in English on Rorate Caeli, a popular blog among the religious set. "In the Curia there are holy people, truly holy people,” Francis reportedly told the Latin American delegation. “But there is also a current of corruption, also there is, it is true … They speak of a 'gay lobby,' and that is true, it is there.”

Gay priests in the Vatican are not exactly a new revelation. Allegations of a powerful “gay lobby” in the Vatican’s governing body known as the Roman Curia have been floating around Rome for years. There have been ample examples of priests in compromising positions dating back to 2010 when Carmello Abbate, an undercover reporter for Panorama magazine, caught priests strutting around in panties and fornicating on church property with a hidden camera. He painted a shocking portrait of how priests in Rome blatantly disobey their vows of celibacy, complete with rumors of steamy Turkish baths where top-ranking cardinals and prelates met up for some not-so-holy horseplay.

The impact of the gay lobby, and rumors that high-ranking prelates allegedly put pressure and blackmailed some of the gay group, reportedly troubled Pope Benedict XVI in the days before he retired. Last year when his butler was on trial for leaking his private papers to an Italian journalist, Benedict ordered a parallel clergy-led investigation to try to get to the bottom of the scandal and to find out if anyone was assisting the butler with his dirty work. In December 2012, the three-cardinal commission tasked with sleuthing for the truth presented Benedict with a two-volume red-covered secret dossier that supposedly outlined a variety of unholy business at the Holy See, including the gay lobby. Benedict reportedly locked up the dossier in the papal apartments for the next pope to deal with.

Since then Vatican experts have argued whether the dossier and its contents about gay priests was the real reason Benedict resigned. “It seems a stretch that a gay lobby would have caused Benedict to resign,” John Allen, Vatican expert and senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, told The Daily Beast last February when Benedict resigned. In a column published on Wednesday, Allen cautioned that there was no indication that “here's no reason to believe now that Francis is on the cusp of launching an anti-gay witch hunt.”

The fact that Francis was willing to talk about the gay lobby at all most likely means that he is already thinking of doing something about it.

On Wednesday the Vatican was quick to distance itself from the pope’s remarks. Father Federico Lombardi, chief spokesman for the pope, said that because the comments were made in a private audience, the Vatican had no official statement to give. The event was not recorded, and the members of the Congregation for Latin American and Caribbean Religious, to whom the pope made the comments, reportedly told reporters what the pope said without the his permission to release the contents of his address. The congregation has since issued a statement regretting that the contents of the pope’s message made it to the press and distancing itself from quoting the pope. “It is clear that based on this one cannot attribute singular expressions to the Holy Father with certainty, but just a general sense,” according to the statement.

Semantics aside, the fact that Francis was willing to talk about the gay lobby at all most likely means that he is already thinking of doing something about it. In his first 100 days of his papacy, he has shunned the status quo and opted for transparency in his actions, speaking unscripted on a number of occasions about the need to stop the corruption and reform the Vatican’s governing body. He assigned an eight-cardinal papal posse of reform-minded church leaders from across the world to help him with tough reforms he says are needed in the Vatican bank and Roman Curia. He has also won favor among Catholics for focusing on poverty and shunning the opulence the popes before him have enjoyed, choosing to live in common guesthouse inside Vatican City instead of the lavish papal apartments. He also says he will stay in Rome this summer, like so many who cannot afford vacations, and not escape the heat at the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo in the foothills outside Rome.

If Francis’s reference to problematic gay lobby was meant as a warning shot, it worked. “We will have to see what we can do,” he was quoted as saying in reference to the problem. No doubt many of the Vatican’s governing elite are wondering just what he means by that.

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Barbie Latza Nadeau, author of the Beast Book Angel Face, about Amanda Knox, has reported from Italy for Newsweek since 1997 and for The Daily Beast
since 2009. She is a frequent contributor to CNN Traveller, Departures, Discovery, and Grazia. She appears regularly on CNN, the BBC, and NPR.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Tags:

• Pope Francis I,
• Rome,Province of Rome,Italy,
• Vatican

Libertarians: Still a cult

SALON

Tuesday, Jun 11, 2013 7:57 PM UTC

Libertarians: Still a cult

Simply note libertarianism's fatal flaw and you'll get an enraged, hysterical response. They still don't get it

By Michael Lind

Topics: Libertarianism, libertarians, Calvin Coolidge, LaRouche, Cults, Pat Buchanan, American History, reconstruction, laissez-faire, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, tariffs, protectionism, Politics News

 

 

Ron Paul (Credit: Reuters/Scott Audette)

My previous Salon essay, in which I asked why there are not any libertarian countries, if libertarianism is a sound political philosophy, has infuriated members of the tiny but noisy libertarian sect, as criticisms of cults by outsiders usually do. The weak logic and bad scholarship that suffuse libertarian responses to my article tend to reinforce me in my view that, if they were not paid so well to churn out anti-government propaganda by plutocrats like the Koch brothers and various self-interested corporations, libertarians would play no greater role in public debate than do the followers of Lyndon LaRouche or L. Ron Hubbard.

An unscientific survey of the blogosphere turns up a number of libertarians claiming in response to my essay that, because libertarianism is anti-statist, to ask for an example of a real-world libertarian state shows a failure to understand libertarianism. But if the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be similarly ignored.

Another response to my essay has been to claim that a libertarian country really did exist once in the real world, in the form of the United States between Reconstruction and the New Deal. Robert Tracinski writes that I am “astonishingly ignorant of history” for failing to note that the “libertarian utopia, or the closest we’ve come to it, is America itself, up to about 100 years ago. It was a country with no income tax and no central bank. (It was on the gold standard, for crying out loud. You can’t get more libertarian than that.) It had few economic regulations and was still in the Lochner era, when such regulations were routinely struck down by the Supreme Court. There was no federal welfare state, no Social Security, no Medicare.”

It is Tracinski who is astonishingly ignorant of history. To begin with, the majority of the countries that adopted the “libertarian” gold standard were authoritarian monarchies or military dictatorships. With the exception of Imperial Britain, an authoritarian government outside of the home islands, where most Britons were denied the vote for most of this period, most of the independent countries of the pre-World War I gold standard epoch, including the U.S., Germany, France, Russia and many Latin American republics, rejected free trade in favor of varying degrees of economic protectionism.

For its part, the U.S. between Lincoln and FDR was hardly laissez-faire. Ever since colonial times, states had engaged in public poor relief and sometimes created public hospitals and asylums. Tracinski to the contrary, there were also two massive federal welfare programs before the New Deal: the Homestead Act, a colossal redistribution of government land to farmers, and generous pension benefits for Union veterans of the Civil War and their families.  Much earlier, the 1798 act that taxed sailors to fund a small system of government-run sailors’ hospitals was supported by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton alike.
State and local licensing rules and trade laws governed economic life in detail, down to the size of spigots in wine casks, in some cases.

It was precisely these state and local regulations that the Supreme Court struck down, in Lochner v. New York (1905) and other cases, to promote the goal of creating a single national market. At the same time, sharing their racism with most white Americans, federal judges in Tracinski’s “libertarian” America permitted the most massive system of labor market distortion of all: racial segregation, which artificially boosted the incomes and property values of whites.

 

The single national market that Lochner-era courts sought to protect from being Balkanized by state and local regulations (other than racial segregation) was walled off by the highest protective tariffs of any major industrial nation. The U.S. government between Lincoln and FDR engaged in a version of modern East Asian-style mercantilism, protecting American industrial corporations from import competition, while showering subsidies including land grants on railroad companies and using federal troops to crush protesting workers.  This government-business mercantilism was anti-worker but it was hardly libertarian.
High tariffs to protect American companies in Tracinski’s alleged Golden Age of American libertarianism were joined by racist immigration restrictions that further boosted the incomes of white workers already boosted by de jure or de facto racial segregation. The 1790 Naturalization Act barred immigrants from becoming citizens unless they were “free white persons” and had to be amended by the 1870 Naturalization Act to bestow citizenship on former slaves of “African nativity” and “African descent.” Although the Supreme Court in 1898 ruled that the children of Asians born in the U.S. were citizens by birth, Tracinski’s libertarian utopia was characterized by increasingly restrictive immigration laws which curtailed first Asian immigration and then, after World War I, most European immigration.

Calvin Coolidge, the subject of a hero-worshiping new biography by the libertarian conservative Amity Shlaes, defended both high tariffs and restrictive immigration. Here is an excerpt from President Coolidge’s second annual address in 1924:

Two very important policies have been adopted by this country which, while extending their benefits also in other directions, have been of the utmost importance to the wage earners. One of these is the protective tariff, which enables our people to live according to a better standard and receive a better rate of compensation than any people, any time, anywhere on earth, ever enjoyed. This saves the American market for the products of the American workmen. The other is a policy of more recent origin and seeks to shield our wage earners from the disastrous competition of a great influx of foreign peoples. This has been done by the restrictive immigration law. This saves the American job for the American workmen.

In 1921 then vice-president Coolidge wrote an article entitled “Whose Country is This?” in Good Housekeeping, in which he declared:

“Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.” (Amity Shlaes’s hero evidently believed racist pseudoscience about dangerous and inferior “half-breeds”).

Protectionist, nativist paleoconservatives of the Patrick Buchanan school might have reason to idealize the U.S. as it existed between 1865 and 1932. But libertarians who want to prove that a country based on libertarian ideology can exist in the real world cannot point to the United States at any period in its history from the Founding to the present.

Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation. More Michael Lind.

Origins of the Church Key

 

 

 

 

 CHURCH KEY

 

 

 

 

 

 

Q From Stan Kid: Do you know how the term church key came to be used as a slang for a bottle opener? The best info I could find dates the usage to 1951 in the United States, but I can find no specifics.

A This one is getting a little long in the tooth, like its users (such as me), who can remember when beer always came in bottles fitted with caps that needed a special tool to open them (though the more macho or foolish would show off by opening them with their teeth; gripping bottle tops in a vice between door and doorframe was a trick for emergencies, but only when the door belonged to somebody else). The standard bottle opener was made of metal, with a roughly round, oval or triangular open shape at one end to grip the cap.

The shape of the business end of the tool reminded people of the often ornate handles to big, old-fashioned door keys. The link with churches in particular was surely because in the experience of most people such big keys opened church doors. It’s also more than probable that an irreverent joke was attached as well, in that drinking beer was an unchurchly thing to do.

Before the messages start to be written, let me rapidly move on to a further stage in the development of the term. As you say, the phrase church key is only recorded in print from 1951, though there is much anecdotal evidence to suggest it is rather older in the spoken language, perhaps from the late 1930s. This was around the time at which beer began to be sold in cans rather than bottles.
These early cans also needed a tool to open them, since the pull tabs of today were not to be introduced until about 1962. The tool was a stout flat strip of metal with a sharp point, which you pressed into the top of the can to puncture a triangular hole (two were needed on opposite sides, I recall, to let air in so the beer would flow easily). By an obvious analogy, these also came to be called church keys, even though they were a completely different shape.

The cap on these beer bottles, by the way, is a crown cork, named after a fanciful view of the ring of crinkled points around the edge of the metal closure before it was clamped on the neck of the bottle. It was invented in 1898 by William Painter, and his firm, the Crown Cork and Seal Company of Baltimore, is still very much around, though these days it spends most of its time making aluminium cans and other packaging products. (Please forgive an enthusiast’s digression: I used to run a museum of cidermaking and would demonstrate a hand crown corker to visiting parties. A good operator could do 15 a minute but I never managed so many.)

World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2013. All rights reserved. See the copyright page for notes about linking to and reusing this page. For help in viewing the site, see the technical FAQ. Your comments, corrections and suggestions are always welcome.

 

 

 

Churchkey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

History

A churchkey initially referred to a simple hand-operated device for prying the cap (called a "crown cork") off a glass bottle; this kind of closure was invented in 1898, although there is no evidence that the opener was called a "church key" at that time.^[1] The shape and design of some of these openers did resemble a large simple key.^[2]

In 1935, beer cans with flat tops were marketed, and a device to puncture the lids was needed. The same term, "church key", came to be used for this new invention: made from a single piece of pressed metal, with a pointed end used for piercing cans — devised by D.F. Sampson^[3][4] for the American Can Company, who depicted operating instructions on the cans themselves,^[5] and typically gave away free "quick and easy" openers with their beer cans.^[6]
 

Three Things to Know About the NSA Verizon Surveillance Scandal

FindLaw  FOR LEGAL PROFESSIONALS

Three Things to Know About the NSA Verizon Surveillance Scandal

By William Peacock, Esq. on June 6, 2013 11:11 AM

 

 

 

When the news of the latest, and some might argue greatest, overreaching surveillance effort by the U.S. government broke, my initial response was a half-yawn. Phone records? Whoo-hooo. The NSA will now know exactly how lonely my life is.

Actually, they won't. Verizon is too dang expensive.

Then we learned that more than phone numbers were involved. The NSA has been subpoenaing metadata, from phone serial numbers to GPS locations. This is more than "how many times did he call Pizza My Heart?" This is every call, every GPS location, and even every cell tower that your phone connects to, transferred to the government's computers daily.

This isn't 1984. This is Enemy of the State.

1. The Data is Not Simply Numbers

In U.S. v. Maynard, the D.C. Circuit addressed what one might be able to discern from GPS tracking:

"A person who knows all of another travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."

The metadata sought by the government explicitly excludes personal identification, except, how many public records don't have your phone number? Applied for federal benefits, a driver's license, or a student loan lately? You probably included your phone number.

If the NSA computers are powerful enough to dig through every cell in America's metadata, they can certainly handle a little cross-referencing to public records databases.

2. Bush Did it First

Senator Diane Feinstein told the Guardian, "As far as I know this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the [foreign intelligence surveillance] court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress."

Unfortunately, saying, "the Republicans did it too" doesn't make it right, nor does "Judge OK'd it" ensure legality.

3. It May Not be Legal

The statute allowing such intrusions into Americans' privacy, 50 USC § 1861, requires "reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation... to ... protect against international terrorism ..."

Relevance, most would agree, is amongst the vaguest terms of legal art. Anything could be arguably relevant to a terrorism investigation. That is why discretion is generally vested in judges to make reasoned decisions. We'd be curious to know if there was any reasoning used at all when the judge approved tracking every Verizon-serviced cell phone in America.

Finally, note that the statute requires "minimization procedures" to be adopted by the Attorney General. These are supposed to detail retention and dissemination of information concerning "unconsenting United States persons" and presumably would limit the amount of time the NSA can store the data (though there is no specific time limit in the statute).
Related Resources:

• Verizon court order: telephone call metadata and what it can show (The Guardian)
• Verizon's Internal Memo On The NSA Surveillance Snafu (BuzzFeed)
• Should You Be Scared of FBI Spyware? (FindLaw's Technologist)

Is Prism Really a Scandal?

The Surveillance Scandals

Content Section
 

Is Prism Really a Scandal?

 
by Alan M. Dershowitz Jun 9, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

 

Pundits are ranting about it, but what we really need is a discussion about privacy vs. security.

Half a century ago, the great American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about “the paranoid style in American politics.” He discussed the influence of conspiracy theories and extremism in our collective mindset.

Mark Lennihan/AP

Since that time, two phenomena have become apparent. The first is that we may indeed have much to be paranoid about. Or put another way, “Even paranoids have real enemies.” Watergate, and the Nixon Administration in general, demonstrated even to the least paranoid among us that government officials are fully capable of misusing the IRS against political enemies, breaking into psychiatric records of perceived traitors, burglarizing the political opposition, and all other manner of dirty tricks that cross the line from politics as usual to felonies.

The second phenomenon is that the first phenomenon has caused many Americans to become even more paranoid, to seek conspiracies where none exist, to confuse overzealousness with evil intentions, and to assume malevolence rather than incompetence or laziness. The reality is that over the past 50 years, while we have somewhat less to be paranoid about, the paranoid streak in American politics has broadened considerably.

The most recent revelations regarding the mining of phone and internet data provide a case in point. The initial revelation was made by a man named Glenn Greenwald, who wrote about them in the Guardian and who has been all over the media taking a victory lap. Greenwald is the personification of the paranoid streak in American politics. He is more of an ideologue than a reporter. He has long been an apologist for terrorism—a word he believes serves only as an excuse for violence and oppression by America and its allies. He has pushed false stories that his paper was forced to backpedal on, such as an AP report blaming the incendiary video “The Innocence of Islam” on an Israeli Jew living in California. He is Chomsky-like in his willingness to blame most of the world’s ills on the United States, Israel, the Obama Administration and liberals who do not buy into his radical worldview. He viciously opposed Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Greenwald would not understand the word “nuance” if he tripped over it, which he often does.

Now he is pushing the view that the Obama Administration’s surveillance program is not really designed to prevent terrorism but rather to gather information for less salutary purposes. Greenwald’s hard-left conspiracy theories are attractive to far-right talk show hosts and bloggers who share a common suspicion of liberal government. This suspicion has been nurtured by the recent IRS scandal and the Justice Department’s overzealous pursuit of journalists. The result has been a debate dominated by the extremes, with little patience for nuance, calibration, or balancing. The reality may be less exciting (and less suited for talk show dialogue) than the paranoid narrative, but the boring reality is what must be addressed if necessary reform is to be implemented.

There is an enormous difference between listening to the content of people’s phone calls and creating a database of telephone numbers.

And reform of the current excesses of surveillance is indeed necessary. There is too much secrecy, too little accountability, too much classification, not enough information, too much speculation. This all feeds into the paranoid streak because we don’t know what we don’t know. For those who trust the government this informational lacunae is an excuse for inaction. For those who do not trust the government, it is an excuse for ranting and raving instead of legislating compromised reform.

It is important not to lump all forms of intrusion together, but rather to consider them category by category.

There is an enormous difference between listening to the content of people’s phone calls and creating a database of telephone numbers used to make and receive calls and their duration. Creating the meta-database is a fairly debatable issue and should be the subject of hearings at which non-classified information can be discussed. I, for one, would like to hear the arguments for and against such a database before deciding whether on balance the benefits of the intrusion outweigh their obvious costs. For decades, the Supreme Court has permitted what are called mail watches, under which postal authorities have the power to maintain data based on the outsides of envelopes—the address to and from which the letter is sent. We no longer send letters. Now we use quicker and more efficient forms of communication. As technology changes, so must the law.

I also want to hear both sides of the debate concerning the far more serious intrusions into e-mails and other forms of modern electronic communication. Although the Obama Administration assures us that these more intrusive techniques are not used against Americans, there is every reason to believe that at least some Americans are caught up in the electronic net, whether deliberately or inadvertently.

So let the debate begin, but don’t let it be dominated by the extremes or fueled by paranoia. We need reform, not revolution—improvement, not impeachment.

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Alan Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard and author of The Case For Peace and The Trials of Zion.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Tags:

• Terror networks,
• Barack Obama,
• U.S. News

How Come It's Not Terrorism When a White Guy from the South Does It?

Consortium News / By Nima Shirazi

How Come It's Not Terrorism When a White Guy from the South Does It?

 

The terror double standard continues to be exploited by law enforcement authorities. 

 

 

 

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pictured in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on February 14, 2013. Bloomberg said Sunday he will invest $12 million in a nationwide ad campaign to counter the powerful US gun lobby and rally support for background 

June 5, 2013  |  

 

In late May, a threatening letter laced with the deadly chemical ricin was sent from Shreveport, Louisiana, to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a response to the mayor’s outspoken support for stricter gun control laws. Two identical letters, also containing the lethal substance, were addressed to both President Barack Obama and the head of the Washington D.C. lobbying group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which is managed and funded by Bloomberg himself.

The contents of the letters are clearly the work of a right-wing gun nut and readas follows: “You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face. The right to bear arms is my constitutional, god-given right and I will exercise that right till the day I die. What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what I’ve got planned for you.”

Despite lethally targeting civilians and non-military officials far from any active battlefield, no one is referring to these acts as terrorism. Not the press, not political pundits, not the intended victims. No one.

In fact, Bloomberg himself was nonplussed by the whole ordeal, tellingreporters on May 30, “I’m not angry. There are people who I would argue do things that may be irrational, do things that are wrong, but it’s a very complex world out there and we just have to deal with that.”

Yes, Mike, it is a very complex world. This world is so complex, in fact, that an easily identifiable act of terrorism isn’t considered terrorism for one simple reason: it probably wasn’t committed by a Muslim, but rather by some white guy in the South.

Clearly, while white guys who send murderous mail are merely acting irrationally and doing something wrong, potential violence by members of the Muslim faith present a singular threat to our civilized society. So much so, in fact, that Michael Bloomberg himself believes our own laws and the bedrock of that very society are not good enough to defend against such a scourge to humanity.

In April, following the horrific Boston Marathon bombing, Bloomberg declared that the American obsession with privacy, civil rights and basic freedoms were antiquated and trite when compared to the dire threat posed by hypothetical barbarian hordes of “Islamists.”

At a press conference at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, Bloomberg said, “The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

Yes, how complex it is. So complex that, although a 2010 study by Duke University and the University of North Carolina found that Islamic terrorism accounted for only six percent of all terrorist attacks in the United States between 1980 and 2005 while a 2012 analysis by the Center for American Progress reported that a whopping“[f]ifty-six percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists,” Michael Bloomberg has made it his duty to illegally spy on and harass Muslim communities in the New York Metro area.

Bloomberg has presided over a massive, illegal covert domestic surveillance and ethno-religious profiling program that have targeted, alienated and traumatized Muslims throughout the Northeast, despite the fact that, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, more Americans have been killed in right-wing terrorist plots than byIslamic terrorists.

“NYPD surveillance has impacted every facet of American Muslim life,” explains Nermeen Arastu, a volunteer attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), which co-authored a March 2013report entitled, “Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims.”

“The program has stifled speech, communal life and religious practice and criminalized a broad segment of American Muslims,” Arastu added, “The isolationism that comes with being a ‘spied on’ community means that American Muslims are getting a fundamentally inferior opportunity to exercise their constitutional rights.”

But, for Mayor Mike, just because a white guy tries to kill you by post doesn’t mean white people in general deserve to be spied on, rounded up, marginalized, and profiled. Keep calm and carry on, he says. These things happen.

Last week, on Chris Jansing’s MSNBC show, USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page said it was “probably not fair to taint the entire gun rights movement with the actions of this disturbing letter because there is a serious debate and two sides to it when it comes to the issue of guns.” Jansing agreed. “Yeah, and it’s unfortunate that, for a few, it comes to this,” she said.
Not fair, she said. Unfortunate, she said.

Just last year, Bloomberg defended his Muslim surveillance program, claiming, “Everything the NYPD has done is legal, it is appropriate, it is constitutional,” and, unsurprisingly, by invoking that sacred strawman: 9/11. “We have not forgotten the lesson of that terrible day on 9/11,” he insisted, sanctimoniously adding, “We have to keep this country safe. … Remind yourself when you turn out the light tonight.”

Bloomberg’s insistence that, “We don’t target individuals based on race or religion. We follow leads,” is fascinating because, just six months after he said this, an Associated Press report on court testimony by the NYPD stated, “In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department’s secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.”

But Bloomberg’s targeting of Muslims isn’t his only method of rooting out the evil that lurks in the hearts of brown and black men. A month ago, the billionaire mayor defended his racistStop-and-Frisk policy by invoking – what else? – the ever-looming conversation-ender: the constant scourge and fear of terrorism.

“Look at what’s happened in Boston,” he said. “Remember what happened here on 9/11. Remember all of those who’ve been killed by gun violence and the families they left behind.”

Again he even claimed that our own laws and efforts not to discriminate against certain communities are making us less safe. “God forbid terrorists succeed in striking our city because of a politically driven law that undermines the N.Y.P.D.’s intelligence-gathering efforts,” he said.

Even the editors of the New York Times were unmoved by Bloomberg’s fear-mongering defense of racial profiling. “Mayor Michael Bloomberg trotted out shopworn, discredited arguments this week,” they wrote, “while defending the constitutionally suspect police program under which hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers have been detained and questioned on the streets every year.”

They note, “[G]uns were seized in only 0.15 percent of all stops. In addition, only 5.4 percent of all stops resulted in an arrest, and about 6 percent led to a summons. This means that in nearly 90 percent of cases, the citizens who were stopped were doing nothing illegal. In some cases, prosecutors declined to automatically prosecute arrests made in connection with the program because they knew that the stops were illegal.”

In 2011, 84 percent of all those stopped under the NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk rampage were black and Hispanic, despite respectively representing 23 and 29 percent of New York City’s total population.

Under Michael Bloomberg’s reign, minority communities have been collectively punished for the criminal actions of a few. In his complex world, blacks and Latinos are all potential gun-toting killers, while all Muslims are jihadists-in-training. Yet, an actual gun-toting lunatic who actually tries to murder Bloomberg is an anomaly, an aberration, nothing to be concerned with. Simply something “we just have to deal with.”

But call it terrorism? No, never. Not if the perpetrator is white and not Muslim.
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer and currently a columnist for The Guardian, has been addressingthis double standard for years.
“Terrorism,” he writes, “is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: ‘a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies.’”

So while the NYPD continues to terrorize minority communities and the FBI continues to foil phony Muslim terror plots that it itself devises, plans and funds, rest assured that all the well-armed and well-represented white folks in our noble nation will continue to live free from suspicion, scrutiny and surveillance no matter how muchpostal poison some of them send and how many mass shootings some of them carry out.

Maybe it’s not complex after all, maybe it’s just complexion. Remember that when you turn off the light tonight.

Nima Shirazi is co-editor of the Iran, Iraq and Turkey pages for the online magazine Muftah. His political analysis can be found on his blog, Wide Asleep in America. He tweets @WideAsleepNima.

Nima Shirazi is a political commentator from New York City. His analysis of United States foreign policy and Middle East issues is published on his website, WideAsleepInAmerica.com

5 ways Congress wants to tackle the military’s sexual assault problem

5 ways Congress wants to tackle the military’s sexual assault problem

By Pro Publica

Wednesday, June 5, 2013 13:02 EDT

Topics: air force

By Christie Thompson, ProPublica



When the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on the U.S. military’s sexual assault crisis, lawmakers grilled Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine officials on the alarmingly high number of rapes and other sexual abuses in their ranks.

Political momentum to address the problem has been building since the Pentagon released statistics last month showing that sexual assault increased by 35 percent between 2010 and 2012. The outcry grew louder when a string of scandals came to light, including alleged sexual assaults by Army and Air Force officials who were in charge of preventing sexual abuse.

Senators have rushed to draft legislation to hold attackers accountable and provide support for victims. But at the Senate hearing, officials steadfastly opposed most major changes in the way sexual assault cases are prosecuted. “It will undermine the readiness of the force … [and] will hamper the timely delivery of justice,” said Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno.

Here’s a rundown of key congressional proposals and what the military is saying about them.

1. Stop giving military commanders the final say on rape convictions

Under the military’s criminal procedures, commanders have clemency powers, which means they can dismiss military court convictions “for any reason or no reason.” The policy came under fire this spring when Air Force Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin overturned a jury’s ruling that Lt. Col. James Wilkerson, a fighter pilot, was guilty of aggravated sexual assault. Another official, Air Force Lt. Gen. Susan Helms, was blocked from a promotion in May for throwing out a captain’s sexual assault conviction without any public explanation.

In April, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel voiced support for stripping commanders of this power. Under Hagel’s proposal, commanders could still reduce someone’s sentence but would have to submit a reason in writing. Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., have called for similar changes. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., introduced a House bill that goes further, removing a commander’s authority to overturn or reduce a judge’s sentence.
Military officials are open to reforming the policy, though they say the Wilkerson case inflated outrage over a rarely-used power. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Armed Services Committee and former Air Force lawyer, has been the only lawmaker to speak out against the proposed change in policy.

2. Have lawyers determine which assault cases are credible 2014 not the defendant’s boss

 

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has called for the most major shift in how the military tries sexual assault cases. Now, commanders decide which cases are investigated and prosecuted, and which are thrown out. Gillibrand’s bill proposes giving independent military prosecutors that power for sex crimes and other serious charges. Commanders have an incentive to ignore rape allegations, advocates of the change say, because it reflects poorly on their leadership.

Military officials are strongly opposed to such a change in authority. “The consequences of such a decision would be … extraordinarily damaging to the nation’s security,” Army Gen. Martin Dempsey wrote in a letter to the Armed Services Committee chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. The change would “undermine good order and discipline” by sending a message that commanders “cannot be trusted,” Dempsey said.

3. Make sure a sex crime conviction means losing your job

Sen. McCaskill has led a bipartisan effort to require that anyone convicted of “rape, sexual assault, forcible sodomy, or an attempt to commit any of those offenses” be dismissed or given a dishonorable discharge.

At the hearing, McCaskill argued that a soldier’s job performance shouldn’t be a factor in deciding whether to move forward with sexual assault cases. Currently, commanders may consider it when deciding whether to prosecute. “The facts of a felony are the facts of a felony,” McCaskill said. “I don’t care how good a pilot it is.”

Lt. Gen. Richard C. Harding of the Air Force argued during the hearing that a defendant’s character should be relevant in determining the case but should not have “overriding weight.”

4. Scrutinize officers appointed to prevent sexual assault

In the past month, there have been not one but two instances of soldiers working in Sexual Assault Prevention and Response offices charged with sexual assault. The chief of the Air Force’s prevention office was arrested last month for groping a woman. A week later, an Army sergeant working as a sexual assault program coordinator was arrested on multiple accusations of sexual abuse and for running a prostitution ring.

Hagel immediately demanded that all officers in the services’ Sexual Assault Prevention and Response branches be retrained, rescreened, and recredentialed. Since then, Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Deb Fischer, R-Neb., have introduced a bill that would elevate those jobs to a higher status, requiring stricter screening and more certification. In a letter to Secretary Hagel, Shaheen and McCaskill wrote that “In many cases, no interviews are required, and the commander plays a hands-off role in choosing who will perform those duties.” The bill would require a commander to pick someone for the post.

5. Make it easier for sexual assault victims to access disability benefits

While the Senate was hearing testimonies by military officials, the House unanimously passed legislation to increase access to disability benefits for sexual assault victims in the military. Veterans battling military sexual trauma face a higher burden of proof than those with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. And because most sexual assaults go unreported, there is often little evidence available. Under the proposed law, veterans would only have to show they were diagnosed with a mental health condition that stems from military sexual assault.

Read our Muckreads roundup of the most important reporting on sexual assault in the military.

Is Enbridge Building a Secret Keystone Pipeline?

Published on Monday, June 3, 2013 by Common Dreams

Is Enbridge Building a Secret Keystone Pipeline?

While TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline gets scrutinized, Enbridge is quietly readying its own tar-sands carrying pipeline system

- Andrea Germanos, staff writer 

 

 

Is Enbridge building its own version of the tar sands-carrying Keystone XL pipeline?

 
(Photo: Environmental Defence Canada/cc/flickr)  


InsideClimate News' Lisa Song reports on Monday that the Calgary-based energy giant is putting together plans for 5,000-mile pipeline network that would bring tar sands crude to the U.S., but, unlike TransCanada's Keystone XL, Enbridge's project has thus far escaped the same kind of debate.
The company's piecemeal approach—the expansion would include both new and existing pipelines—has allowed the project to move forward under the radar, Song reports.

Like TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline, Enbridge's project would need State Department approval because it crosses the U.S./Canada border.
Al Monaco, Enbridge's CEO and president, laid out the company's expansion plans to shareholders at a meeting in Calgary last month.
In a press release from Enbridge dated May 8, 2013, the company wrote:

While reporting another year of strong corporate performance, Mr. Monaco said Enbridge is poised to connect growing energy supply with key North American markets by expanding its network of liquids pipelines infrastructure in the near future.
Existing pipeline bottlenecks, and the resulting Canadian crude oil discounts, "can be solved by a reconfiguration of the North American pipeline grid, where crude moves from inland markets to coastal markets - and Enbridge is right in the middle of this transformation," said Mr. Monaco.
Between now and 2016, Enbridge expects to roll out a series of major projects that will expand what is already the most complex crude oil pipeline system in the world - Enbridge's Eastern Access program to the U.S. Midwest and eastern Canada; the U.S. Gulf Coast Access program with 585,000 bpd of incremental capacity from the Chicago area; additional capacity to the U.S. Midwest and eastern Canada as part of the Light Oil Access initiative; and development of the Eastern Gulf project from the U.S. Midwest to the eastern Gulf Coast.

A key part of this secretive pipeline push is the company's Alberta Clipper pipeline, Song reports.  Enbridge describes the Alberta Clipper as a 1,000-mile crude oil pipeline between Hardisty, Alberta, and Superior, Wisconsin, and, while its current capacity is 450,000 barrels per day, it has an "ultimate capacity of up to 800,000 barrels per day."

This amount, Song points out, is "larger than the Keystone XL's proposed daily capacity of 830,000 barrels."

Enbridge was dealt a blow on Friday when the government of British Columbia formally rejected its proposed  Northern Gateway pipeline.

The company is also still mired in its disastrous tar sands spill in Michigan's Kalamazoo River three years ago, a spill, the National Transportation Safety Board reported, that happened after the company ignored warning signs for five years.

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