Clapper Good To Go


Slate's Fred Kaplan believes Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be fired. Sitting on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Clapper in March  had this entertaining exchange:

Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" 

Clapper: "No, sir."

Wyden: "It does not."

Clapper: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly."

Wyden: "All right. Thank you. I'll have additional questions to give you in writing on that point, but I thank you for the answer."

Later queried by NBC's Andrea Mitchell, Clapper rationalized "I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked [a] ‘when are you going to … stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is … not answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘No.’"   How this is a "when are you going to stop beating your wife" question was not explained.

Clapper exacerbated his quarrel with objective reality when he told Mitchell “To me.collection of U.S. persons’ data would mean taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it." But Kaplan explains

Neither in everyday speech nor in tech-intelligence jargon does “collect” mean anything other than what it obviously means: to gather, to sweep up, to bring together. No one says, “I’m going to collect The Great Gatsby from my bookshelf and read it.” Nor does anyone say, “I’m going to collect this phone conversation from my archive and listen to it.”

Clapper's deficiency is not an inability to think on his feet, to deliver extemporaneously an answer which would protect national security while falling short of an actual lie.  Wyden later noted "So that he would be prepared to answer, I sent the question to Director Clapper’s office a day in advance. After the hearing was over, my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his answer."

Kaplan argues "we as a nation are being asked to let the National Security Agency continue doing the intrusive things it's been doing on the premise that congressional oversight will rein in abuses. But it's hard to have meaningful oversight when an official in charge of the program lies so blatantly in one of the rare open hearings on the subject."   Because Clapper "lied about what he thinks 'collect' means, he will lie about a lot of things.  If he really thinks the English language is this flexible, it is unwise to assume that any statement he makes means what it appears to mean."   He concludes "if President Obama really welcomes an open debate on the subject"- which he has urged- "James Clapper has disqualified himself from participation in it. He has to go."

The leak which has so exorcised Washington was put into perspective by Reuters' Jack Shafer when he explained

Snowden’s leak has more in common with the standard Washington leak than should make the likes of Brooks, Simon and Cohen comfortable. Without defending Snowden for breaking his vow to safeguard secrets, he’s only done in the macro what the national security establishment does in the micro every day of the week to manage, manipulate and influence ongoing policy debates. Keeping the policy leak separate from the heretic leak is crucial to understanding how these stories play out in the press.

Secrets are sacrosanct in Washington until officials find political expediency in either declassifying them or leaking them selectively. It doesn’t really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty. For instance, President George W. Bush’s administration declassified or leaked whole barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered the release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003.

Sometimes the index finger of government has no idea of what the thumb is up to. In 2007, Vice President Cheney went directly to Bush with his complaint about what he considered to be a damaging national security leak in a column by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. “Whoever is leaking information like this to the press is doing a real disservice, Mr. President,” Cheney said. Later, Bush’s national security adviser paid a visit to Cheney to explain that Bush, um, had authorized him to make the leak to Ignatius.

But in January, 2009 The New York Times had reported

In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”

Mr. Obama added that he also had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Well, of course not, because it appears that in the matter of leaking sensitive, even classified, national security information, this Administration will not be outdone.   Shafer wrote also

In 2010, NBC News reporter Michael Isikoff detailed similar secrecy machinations by the Obama administration, which leaked to Bob Woodward “a wealth of eye-popping details from a highly classified briefing” to President-elect Barack Obama two days after the November 2008 election. Among the disclosures to appear in Woodward’s book “Obama’s Wars” were, Isikoff wrote, “the code names of previously unknown NSA programs, the existence of a clandestine paramilitary army run by the CIA in Afghanistan, and details of a secret Chinese cyberpenetration of Obama and John McCain campaign computers.”

The secrets shared with Woodward were so delicate Obama transition chief John Podesta was barred from attendance at the briefing, which was conducted inside a windowless, secure room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or “SCIF.”

Isikoff asked, quite logically, how the Obama administration could pursue a double standard in which it prosecuted mid-level bureaucrats and military officers for their leaks to the press but allowed administration officials to dispense bigger secrets to Woodward. The best answer Isikoff could find came from John Rizzo, a former CIA general counsel, who surmised that prosecuting leaks to Woodward would be damn-near impossible to prosecute if the president or the CIA director authorized them.

In June 2012, in the wake of stories published in the New York Times about a "kill list," the drone program, the bin Laden raid, and cyberattacks against Iran, Senator John McCain accused administration officials of leaking information about the "secret program to expand the use of drones for sensitive counterterrorism missions in Yemen and the Horn of Africa" and the "classified counterterrorism 'kill list.'" He maintained they had "the effect of making the President look strong and decisive on national security in the middle of his re-election campaign" and were made with "a deeper political motivation."

When President Obama decided the Administration would look "forward," not "backwards," it was assumed he was acting out of a fullness of spirit by transcending partisan divides, from a reluctance to offend, or perhaps simply acknowledging reality, that what's done is done. But it is becoming increasingly clear thathis motivation is less altruistic.  It would have been awkward-  if not hypocritical- to prosecute Bush Administration officials for policies which he expected to continue, even expand.

The Attorney General's office reportedly is intent on the extradition, and prosecution, of Edward Snowden. His widespread condemnation by the political class, obscuring debate on issues his actions have raised, paradoxically dovetails neatly with a practice of leaking sensitive information either for electoral gain or for ginning up support for presidential policies. James Clapper will not be fired because he has violated no norms of the Administration, but instead is dedicated to the National Secrecy State begun by George W. Bush and expanded by Barack Obama.




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Don't Clap For This Guy- Or Believe Him

"Over the last week," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement (transcript here), "we have seen reckless disclosures of intelligence community measures used to keep Americans safe. " He added that "the surveillance activities" revealed "are lawful and conducted under authorities widely known and discussed, and fully debated and authorized by Congress."

Clapper did not explain how activities which are denied by the Executive branch can be "fully debated" by Congress.  In March, this exchange between Clapper and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) transpired in a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee:

Wyden: "And this is for you, Director Clapper, again on the surveillance front. And I hope we can do this in just a yes or no answer, because I know Sen. Feinstein wants to move on.

"Last summer the NSA director was at a conference and he was asked a question about the NSA surveillance of Americans. He replied, and I quote here, '... the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false.'

"The reason I'm asking the question is, having served on the committee now for a dozen years, I don't really know what a dossier is in this context. So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

Clapper: "No, sir."

Wyden: "It does not."

Clapper: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly."

Wyden: "All right. Thank you. I'll have additional questions to give you in writing on that point, but I thank you for the answer."

Clapper was confronted on Sunday by Mrs. Alan Greenspan about his apparent departure from objective reality:

ANDREA MITCHELL: Senator Wyden made quite a lot out of your exchange with him last March during the hearings. Can you explain what you meant when you said that there was not data collection on millions of Americans?

JAMES CLAPPER: First-- as I said, I have great respect for Senator Wyden. I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked-- "When are you going to start-- stop beating your wife" kind of question, which is meaning not-- answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no. And again, to go back to my metaphor. What I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers-- of those books in that metaphorical library-- to me, collection of U.S. persons' data would mean taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Taking the contents?

JAMES CLAPPER: Exactly. That's what I meant. Now--

ANDREA MITCHELL: You did not mean archiving the telephone numbers? 

JAMES CLAPPER: No.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Let me ask you about the content--

JAMES CLAPPER: And this has to do with of course somewhat of a semantic, perhaps some would say too-- too cute by half. But it is-- there are honest differences on the semantics of what-- when someone says "collection" to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him.

No, "collection" has the same meaning to Clapper as it does to Wyden, which would include "obtain" or "acquire."  That's the only reasonable conclusion, given that Clapper added "There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect" data.  If "collect" did not describe the means by which the NSA gained its data, there would be no chance to obtain/acquire it "inadvertently."

That's a little convoluted, but a diplomatic, perhaps passive/aggressive, way of stating:  James Clapper lied.   Perhaps when he was selected by Obama, the President had no way of knowing what kind of fellow he was getting.  Oh, wait- he did.   On October 29, 2003 Douglas Jehl reported in The New York Times

The director of a top American spy agency said Tuesday that he believed that material from Iraq's illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an effort by the Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before the recent war.

The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material ''unquestionably'' had been moved out of Iraq.

''I think people below the Saddam Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse,'' General Clapper, who leads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said at a breakfast with reporters.

He said he was providing a personal assessment. But he said ''the obvious conclusion one draws'' was that there ''may have been people leaving the scene, fleeing Iraq, and unquestionably, I am sure, material.'' A spokesman for General Clapper's agency, David Burpee, said he could not provide further evidence to support the general's statement.

And so the credibility of the United States government takes another hit.  Way to go, Obamie.



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Prospects Dim

Staff writer Sarah Avery of the newsobserver.com writes

Maybe it was just lousy timing, but many customers of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina are ticked off at the mail they've received recently from the state's largest insurer.

First, they learned their rates will rise by an average of 11 percent next year.

Next, they opened a slick flier from the insurer urging them to send an enclosed pre-printed, postage-paid note to Sen. Kay Hagan denouncing what the company says is unfair competition that would be imposed by a government-backed insurance plan. The so-called public option is likely to be considered by Congress in the health-care overhaul debate.

"No matter what you call it, if the federal government intervenes in the private health insurance market, it's a slippery slope to a single-payer system," the BCBS flier read. "Who wants that?”

According to the health insurer, the mailings relied on a list of registered voters, not on one of the company’s customers. The post card reads

Senator Hagan,

Please oppose government-run health insurance. We can meet our health care challenges without the government unfairly competing with the private sector. Tell Senate leaders North Carolina doesn’t need government-run insurance.

Fortunately, there is reportedly a grass roots movement to send to Senator Hagan many of these post cards, but with the message so modified (although slightly varying one from the other):

Please support government-run health insurance. We can’t meet our health care challenges without the government competing with the private sector. Tell Senate leaders North Carolina does need government-run insurance.

While this is heartening, as Jason Rosenbaum at Firedoglake has pointed out, the health insurance industry really has few worries. While the House’s health care bill, announced by Speaker Pelosi today, is superior to that of the Senate Finance Committee, it does not contain a “robust” (Medicare plus 5%) public option.

Senator Wyden (D.-Oregon) has been explaining lately that the range of the Senate’s likely bill is inadequate:

If folks at the grassroots level, the folks who are carrying those signs about the public option now, say, "Look, it's not good enough that only 10 percent of the population can hold insurance companies accountable, it's not good enough at a crucial time in American history to have choice available only to a handful of people who are poor and sick and unemployed," that's almost like a health care ghetto....

Let's hold insurance companies accountable the right way by making them put their whole customer base on the line.

Even the House bill (transcript, in PDF)- the more progressive, liberal, and humane alternative- will severely limit the number of people eligible for the public option , thereby creating this “health care ghetto.” As costs of the public option rise, government increasingly will be blamed for a spectacularly expensive health care system. Greater government involvement in health care, with a greater range of plans available to a wider group of individuals and families, would have held down costs, but the irony will be lost on most people, and surely on the media.

This is a time for presidential leadership- not in making deals with the pharmaceutical or the health insurance industries or for urging a Senate bill weak enough so as not to offend the Blue Dogs. It is time, finally, for the leadership that President Obama has yet to demonstrate on this issue. Not likely.