When At First We Practice To Deceive

David Sirota argues in Salon that President Obama might be lying or is blissfully unaware about spying by the National Security Agency.  In July, the Chief Executive had appeared on the CBS morning show to claim the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court is "transparent." In early August, he told NBC's Jay Leno "we don't have a domestic spying program."    And on August 9, the President in a news conference maintained "what you're not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and listening in on people's phone calls or inappropriately reading people's e-mails. What you're hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused."

Given the President's statements, he might have been unaware that The New York Times had reported in April 2009 "several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed on the matter, said the NSA had been engaged in 'overcollection' of domestic communications of Americans."

Oops. The day before Obama contended that "you're hearing" only about "the prospect that these" programs "could be abused by government," The Washington Post's Barton Gellman revealed

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence...

The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.

What the President doesn't consider "a domestic spying program" is ripe for abuse.  For a report on former NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, mathematician and former Sun Microsystem's engineer Susan Landau was interviewed by the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, who wrote

The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content. She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content.”

For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: “You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.” And information from cell-phone towers can reveal the caller’s location. Metadata, she pointed out, can be so revelatory about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive stories that it can make more traditional tools in leak investigations, like search warrants and subpoenas, look quaint. “You can see the sources,” she said. When the F.B.I. obtains such records from news agencies, the Attorney General is required to sign off on each invasion of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up millions of records a minute, it’s unclear if any such brakes are applied.

Metadata, Landau noted, can also reveal sensitive political information, showing, for instance, if opposition leaders are meeting, who is involved, where they gather, and for how long. Such data can reveal, too, who is romantically involved with whom, by tracking the locations of cell phones at night.

"Most" instances "of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications" were "unintended," the Post found, a far cry from the mere "prospect" of abuse President Obama claimed, among the reasons Sirota maintains

I just don’t buy that he’s so unaware of the world around him that he made such statements from a position of pure ignorance. On top of that, he has a motive. Yes, Obama has an obvious political interest in trying to hide as much of his administration’s potentially illegal behavior as possible, which means he has an incentive to calculatedly lie. For all of these reasons, it seems safe to suggest that when it comes to the NSA situation, the president seems to be lying.


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The Stepford Party

In the aftermath, a few weeks ago, of passage of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, there was major and justified criticism of the Democratic-led Congress. And I believe that contributions from the telecommunications industry to the Democratic and Republican national conventions played a role. Still, to keep matters in perspective: while there were in the Senate 21 misguided Democrats who voted in favor of the bill, a majority- 27- of Democrats voted against it. (In that calculation, Connecticut's Lieberman, who voted "aye," and Vermont's Sanders, who voted "no," are counted as Independents; Massachusetts' Kennedy, Arizona's McCain, and Alabama's Sessions did not vote.)

Aside from the Independent (but always caucusing as a Democrat) Sanders, the other Senators who voted against the bill were: Barbara Boxer, Joseph Biden, Christopher Dodd, Daniel Akaka, Richard Durbin, Thomas Harkin, Benjamin Cardin, John Kerry, Carl Levin, Debbie Stabenow, Amy Klobuchar, Jon Tester, Harry Reid, Frank Lautenberg, Robert Menendez, Hillary Clinton, Charles Schumer, Jeff Bingaman, Byron Dorgan, Sherrod Brown, Ron Wyden, John Reed, Patrick Leahy, Maria Cantwell, Patty Murray, Robert Byrd, and Russell Feingold.

That would be 27 Democrats. An insufficient number, but how many Repubs voted for the Fourth Amendment? Zero (0).

The Corporate Conventions

I'm still trying to figure out why Barack Obama on July 9, 2008 voted for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, which

- according to law professor Martin S. Lederman, permits the National Security Agency to intercept phone calls and e-mails between the U.S. and a foreign location, without making any showing to a court and without judicial oversight, whether or not the communication has anything to do with al Qaeda -- indeed, even if there is no evidence that the communication has anything to do with terrorism, or any threat to national security.

- grants retroactive immunity to those telecommunications companies which granted the Justice Department's request to spy (illegally) on American citizens

Among the possible reasons for Obama's vote:

a) a move to the center, the mainsteam media's favorite rationale, given that it sees almost everything in the simplistic terms of liberal vs. conservative;

b) fear of ads from 527 organizations targeting the nominee as coddling terrorists and endangering national security;

c) the interest the candidate has in preserving his own power as President to act as he sees fit in the interests of "national security," notwithstanding the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution;

d) economic interests.

Economic interests? Stephen Weissman, Associate Director for Policy at the Campaign Finance Institute, explained on a recent edition of Democracy Now! that while federal law prohibits unlimited contributions to a political candidate and any direct contributions from a union or a corporation, the Federal Election Commission permits unlimited contributions to the host committee of a presidential nominating convention in the guise that it is aimed to promote the convention city. While companies are not required to reveal what they have given either host committee, Weissman's group has determined that the companies which have given to the 2008 committees have spent approximately $1.1 billion lobbying the federal government since the last presidential election. There are 146 companies which have given thus far, nearly 40 of them having contributed to both parties- er, conventions.

Two of these are the telecommunications giantsComcast and AT&T, among those which collaborated with the Administration's spying formerly prohibited under FISA. (Admittedly, Qwest Communications, which refused the spying request, also is a contributor.) In a recent blog, author and constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald brings us a representation of the attractive bag, replete with company name and logo, every delegate and member of the media at the Democratic Convention will receive from AT&T in Denver. And in the discussion with Weissman and Goodman, Greenwald explains:

the Democrats in Congress just last month gave an extraordinary gift of telecom amnesty to most of the entire telecom industry, including AT&T and Comcast, in order to protect them from lawsuits and in a bill that was written by the telecom industry and their lobbyists. So, to turn around and see such a sort of tawdry expression of the very close relationship between the telecom industry and the Democrats, who had just given them an extraordinary gift, was, I thought, quite remarkable.

Repeating A Myth

Barack Obama gave a speech on June 30, 2008 in Independence, Missouri, homeplace to the greatest President of the 20th century, about patriotism. It contained this interesting observation:

some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself - by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day.

Did you notice? "Some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted.... by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day."

It's distressing to hear Obama peddling this conservative urban myth, that the opponents of the Vietnam War shunned, or worse, veterans returning from the war. This self-serving tale of the right should have been put to rest with the publication in 1998 of "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam" by Jerry Lembcke. In an article written for The Boston Globe on April 30, 2005, the author told of a Michael Smith, who in a typical story, claimed that he returned to the U.S.A. via an airport in Los Angeles where "people were lined up to spit on us." But, Lembcke explained,


Like many stories of the spat-upon veteran genre, Smith's lacks credulity. GIs landed at military airbases, not civilian airports, and protesters could not have gotten onto the bases and anywhere near deplaning troops. There may have been exceptions, of course, but in those cases how would protesters have known in advance that a plane was being diverted to a civilian site? And even then, returnees would have been immediately bused to nearby military installations and processed for reassignment or discharge.

The exaggerations in Smith's story are characteristic of those told by others. ''Most Vietnam veterans were spat on when we came back," he said. That's not true. A 1971 Harris poll conducted for the Veterans Administration found over 90 percent of Vietnam veterans reporting a friendly homecoming. Far from spitting on veterans, the antiwar movement welcomed them into its ranks and thousands of veterans joined the opposition to the war.

I don't know. Maybe Obama, who wasn't born until August, 1961, was too young during, and immediately after, the Vietnam War to have been paying attention, and there were those four years (1967-1971) he was living in Indonesia. But with the FISA bill, withdrawal from Iraq, campaign financing, and gun control, at some point those of us on the left are going to have to stop making excuses for Mr. Obama and instead ask: What does he actually believe?


HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!

Not A Profile In Courage


The hills, or at least the liberal blogs, are alive with criticism of Senator Barack Obama for his position on the "compromise" bill updating the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act, which would extend the government's power to eavesdrop without a warrant and pave the way for retroactive immunity for telecom giants. Obama's statement read (courtesy of tpmelectioncentral) in full:

Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance -- making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future. It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses. But this compromise guarantees a thorough review by the Inspectors General of our national security agencies to determine what took place in the past, and ensures that there will be accountability going forward. By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act.
It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives -- and the liberty -- of the American people.

So Senator Obama, after going through the motions of trying to remove retroactive immunity, will be voting for the bill. Perhaps, expecting to be the next President of the United States, he wants to accrue as much power to himself as possible. Perhaps he wants to curry favor with the telecommunication industry. More likely, however, it's a calculated, cynical, characteristic move on the part of a politician who has found in avoidance of casting a vote his own immunity against attack. Whether as an Illinois State Senator voting "present" on 136 bills, or ducking a vote in the U.S. Senate to condemn MoveOn.org's "General Betray Us" ad, or dodging the vote in the upper chamber on designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, it's all pretty much the same.

Change? Probably. Leadership? Hardly.

Illegal, Now Legal

The House of Representatives on Thursday, 6/19/08, approved a bill, pushed by the White House, which would grant the federal government sweeping new powers to spy on espionage and terrorism suspects under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. If approved (as expected) by the Senate, it also will enable telecommunications giants such as AT&T Communications and Verizon to gain retroactive immunity for the illegal spying it conducted between 2001 and 2005 (inclusive) in concert with the National Security Agency. Currently, there are multiple suits consolidated in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals against the telecom giants.

On alternet.com, there is a comprehensive article by The Nation's Aziz Huq explaining that the bill is no compromise, as its supporters characterize it, but rather "contains just enough of a pretense of accountability to allow the legislators to claim a victory for civil liberties, as it sells out core principles of accountability and privacy." He notes

pending lawsuits against the telecoms are the best opportunity for the American public to learn what kind of illegal surveillance occurred under Bush's watch, and how existing law against warrantless wiretapping was circumvented. As bad as the telecoms will look, the Administration will look worse as more of its cynical and results-oriented reasoning and contempt for constitutional rights is fully aired.

There is another reason that George W. Bush, the wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate class, lobbied for this bill. Yet again, the interests of the American as a citizen in a free state becomes subservient to the behemoths who have directed foreign policy and controlled economic policy in this Administration.

Admission Of Failure By The Attorney General?

So stated a tearful Attorney General Michael Mukasey on March 27, 2008 during a question-and-answer session after a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco: "We knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went. You've got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn't come home, to show for that."

Mukasey was lamenting being proscribed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from intercepting a communication from someone outside of the U.S.A. to someone inside the U.S.A. The government "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody picks up a phone in Iraq and calls the United States," Mukasey said.

Except of course, that it doesn't need a warrant, and didn't need one in the summer of 2001. The federal government could have requested a warrant to listen in on the call of a suspected foreign terrorist to someone in this country- or monitored the conversations for 72 hours without a warrant.

Now, this could be, and probably is, just another effort to blame the FISA for the Bush Administration's own inability to detect the terrorist attacks which took place on September 11, 2001. But if instead it really happened the way Mukasey claimed, the "liberal media" no doubt will jump on this story and demand a congressional investigation of this crew of bunglers. Just kidding.

FISA Reauthorization and Partisanship

The U.S. Senate on February 12, 2008 voted 67 to 31 to defeat the Dodd Amendment, which aimed to "strike the provisions providing immunity from civil liability to electronic communication service providers for certain assistance provided to the Government." Later, the upper chamber approved by a vote of 68 to 29 this update of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The House of Representatives had late last year passed a version of reauthorization which did not include immunity for the telecommunications industry and representatives of the two chambers will negotiate in conference.

There are approximately 40 lawsuits pending against companies for engaging in illegal wiretapping and internet eavesdropping against American citizens. Information about the program will not be revealed to the American people except by lawsuits, so it is not surprising that the Bush Administration is indulging its penchant for secrecy and contempt for the American people by vigorously supporting telecom immunity. And it's routine for Bush to frighten the American people, as by declaring "at this moment, somewhere in the world, terrorists are planning new attacks on our country. Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that will make September the 11th pale by comparison."

But as we approach a general election campaign for President in which the media, reporting the attacks by Repubs against the Democratic Party, waxes indignant at "hyperpartisanship" and longs for "bipartisanship," let's remember: S 2248, the bill which passed the Senate, was sponsored by the Intelligence Committee chairman- Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. And the crucial Dodd amendment was opposed by 19* (out of 51) Democrats, who thereby voted with the Republican President and all 48 Repubs (one not present) in denying the rule of law and declaring that, in America, some (corporations) are in fact above the law. This is what the GOP and the mainstream media consider bipartisanship.

*Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Evan Bayh (D-IN), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Tim Johnson (D-SD), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Ken Salazar (D-CO), Tom Carper (D-DE), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Jim Webb (D-VA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), and Joseph Lieberman (officially an "Independent Democrat").

Stepford GOP

We pause a moment while excoriating, ridiculing, and demeaning the House and Senate Democrats for permitting passage of the euphemistically named "Protect America Act of 2007," which amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2007 by expanding the executive branch's powers of surveillance. It is true, as the mainstream media emphasizes, that 41 Democrats in the House of Representatives and 17 Democrats (including Connecticut's Joe Lieberman, technically an Independent) voted for this unfortunate measure passed by the Democratic-controlled chambers. However, it is not so widely reported (as demonstrated in this Boston Globe article) and certainly not emphasized, that in the House, two (2) Republicans voted against the measure and in the Senate, 0 (that's zero) Republicans voted "nay." Yep- lots of independent thought in that GOP.