by Pratap Chatterjee*

Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background [...]]]> Speaking Truth From the Robotic Heavens

by Pratap Chatterjee*

Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone campaigns Washington has pursued since 9/11 into far greater focus.

Imagine if those drone wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen (as well as the United States) had a human face all the time, so that we could understand what it was like to live constantly, in and out of those distant battle zones, with the specter of death. In addition to images of the “al-Qaeda” operatives who the White House wants us to believe are the sole targets of its drone campaigns, we would regularly see photos of innocent victims of drone attacks gathered by human rights groups from their relatives and neighbors. And what about the third group — the military personnel whose lives revolve around killing fields so far away — whose stories, in these years of Washington’s drone assassination campaigns, we’ve just about never heard?

After all, soldiers no longer set sail on ships to journey to distant battlefields for months at a time. Instead, every day, thousands of men and women sign onto their computers at desks on military bases in the continental United States and abroad where they spend hours glued to screens watching the daily lives of people often on the other side of the planet. Occasionally, they get an order from Washington to push a button and vaporize their subjects. It sounds just like — and the comparison has been made often enough — a video game, which can be switched off at the end of a shift, after which those pilots return home to families and everyday life.

And if you believed what little we normally see of them — what, that is, the Air Force has let us see (the CIA part of the drone program being off-limits to news reporting) — that would indeed seem to be the straightforward story of life for our drone warriors. Take Rene Lopez, who in shots of a recent homecoming welcome at Fort Gordon in Georgia appears to be a doting father. Photographed for the local papers on his return from a tour in Afghanistan, the young soldier is seen holding and kissing his infant daughter dressed in a bright pink top. He smiles with delight as the wide-eyed child tries on his military hat.

From an online profile posted to LinkedIn by Lopez last year, we learn that the clean-cut U.S. Army signals intelligence specialist claims to be an actor in the drone war in addition to being a proud parent. To be specific, he says he has been working in the dark arts of hunting and killing “high value targets” using a National Security Agency (NSA) tool known as Gilgamesh.

That tool is named after a ruthless Sumerian king who ruled over Uruk, an ancient city in what is now Iraq. With the help of the massive trove of NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill recently explained that Gilgamesh is the code name for a special device mounted on a Predator drone that can track the mobile phones of individuals without their knowledge by pretending to be a cell phone tower.

Lopez’s resumé yields more details on what Gilgamesh is capable of. The profile writer claims that he “supervised a team of four personnel supporting the lead targeting force in Laghman and Nuristan provinces [in Afghanistan]. Assisted top-level commanders with developing concepts, approaches, and strategies to Capture/Kill HVTs [high value targets].”

Last year, on completing his time in the military, Lopez says he took a civilian job operating Gilgamesh for Mission Essential, an intelligence contractor providing technical support for Pentagon drones. For that company, he says he conducted “pattern of life analysis” and provided support for “targeting and strike operations.” Lopez lives in Grovetown, Georgia, home to a joint Army-NSA code-breaking and language translation operation, involving 4,000 personnel that, since 9/11, has taken the lead in analyzing real-time data feeds from Central Asia and the Middle East.

Gilgamesh is just one of several NSA tools used on drones to track targeted cell phones. Another program, Shenanigans, was designed specifically for use by the Central Intelligence Agency. According to other documents leaked by Snowden, an operation code-named Victorydance used these tools in March 2012 to map every computer, router, and mobile device in Yemen.

What do men like Lopez actually think about the sort of human destruction, not to speak of the destabilization of whole regions, that Gilgamesh and its like help to unleash? In his online job pitch, Lopez indicates straightforward pride in his work: “My efforts, both as a contractor and in the military, yielded success in identifying, locating, and tracking high value targets, and protection of U.S. and coalition forces.” It would be easy enough to assume that the kind of analytical work such remote pilots do would result in a sense of job satisfaction and little more. And that, it turns out, would be a mistake.

Haunted by Death

In recent months, the first evidence that drones are not only killing thousands in distant lands, but also creating an unexpected kind of blowback among the pilots themselves, provides a curious parallel to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the 5,000-year-old poem about the Sumerian king. In the ancient saga, the gods are said to have sent Enkidu to befriend the cruel king and divert him from the oppression of his subjects. When the pair travel together to slay a monster named Humbaba, Gilgamesh begins to have nightmares about death and war, causing him to question their plan.

Today, like Gilgamesh of old, signals intelligence personnel connected to the drone programs have started reporting themselves haunted by the deaths that they have participated in, and plagued by the knowledge that, in the end, they often had next to no idea who they were actually killing. The publicity about a “kill list” in the White House has left the impression that those who find themselves on the other end of a drone-launched missile have been carefully identified and are known to the drone pilots. “People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” one drone pilot told the Intercept two months ago. His view, however, was quite different: “It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people — we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”

Brandon Bryant, a 28-year-old U.S. airman, whose squadron has been credited with 1,626 kills, was among the first to be openly critical of the impact of remote tracking and targeting, of, that is, robot war. Bryant was a “sensor operator,” which meant that he operated the cameras on the drone aircraft as part of a three-person team that included a pilot and an intelligence analyst.

In an interview with GQ magazine last October, Bryant offered a vivid description of a targeting operation in Afghanistan he took part in when he was just 21. “This figure runs around the corner, the outside, toward the front of the building. And it looked like a little kid to me. Like a little human person,” he said. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.”

Bryant says he asked the pilot: “Did that look like a child to you?” The message came back from another intelligence analyst: “Per the review, it’s a dog.”

After six years, Bryant couldn’t take it any more. He saw a therapist who diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. This was a novel, even shocking development for an airman who had hardly ever come close to a battlefield. Bryant was suitably taken aback and, as a result, began speaking out against the system of killing he had been enmeshed in and what it does both to the killers and those killed. “Combat is combat. Killing is killing. This isn’t a video game,” he wrote in an angry tirade on Facebook. “How many of you have killed a group of people, watched as their bodies are picked up, watched the funeral, then killed them, too?”

Killing for the CIA

Bryant’s campaign against drone war without accountability took on new life in late April when Tonje Hessen Schei, a Norwegian filmmaker, released her film Drone. In it, Bryant reveals that his former colleagues in the Air Force had not just been carrying out drone strikes on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq where the military was involved in open warfare. They were also conducting the strikes in the supposed CIA drone assassination campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen.

This was news. The CIA’s “covert” drone wars in those countries were, it turns out, secretly Air Force operations. “The CIA might be the customer, but the Air Force has always flown it,” Bryant says in the film. “A CIA label is just an excuse to not have to give up any information. That is all it has ever been.”

Schei’s film also reveals the name of the U.S. Air Force unit that does the CIA killing — the 17th Reconnaissance Squadron at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. “From what I was able to gather, it was pretty much confirmed they were flying missions almost exclusively in Pakistan with the intent to strike,” Michael Haas, another drone pilot, told Chris Woods at the Guardian.

Thanks to the film, Bryant made an unusual connection in the world of drone pilots — to the victims of Washington’s drone campaign, previously just so many pixels on a screen to him. Invited to Belgium and Norway to speak at the premieres of Schei’s film, he met with Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who runs the Foundation for Fundamental Rights and has been leading a campaign to put a face — quite literally — on the death and destruction CIA drone strikes have caused in his country.

Faces of the Victims

Up in the mountains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in northern Pakistan, a giant image of an orphan girl is now laid out next to the mud houses of the locals. She is nameless, but according to her photographer, Noor Behram, she lost her parents in a drone strike in 2010 in the village of Dande Darpa Khel. Her picture, the size of a soccer playing field, is a product of Akbar’s planning with the help of JR, a French street artist, and Clive Stafford-Smith, the founder of Reprieve, a British human rights organization. Their intent: to create images of the victims of Washington’s drone wars that could be seen from the sky. Smaller images have, in fact, been placed on rooftops in Waziristan. Their target audience: drone pilots like Bryant, Haas, and Lopez who, searching for targets to kill, might just see the face of the child of one of their previous victims. (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which keeps a tally of drone victims in Pakistan, offers a provisional figure of up to 957 civilians, including as many as 202 children, killed between 2004 and the present day.)

For the last five years, Akbar and Smith have worked tirelessly on similar projects. One of their first efforts was to reveal the name of the CIA station chief in Pakistan: Jonathan Banks.  In December 2010, they brought a $500 million lawsuit against him in that country, causing him to flee. The next summer they put together a collection of Noor Behram’s photographs of the dead, as well as their relatives and neighbors, that was exhibited in London.

Last year, Akbar even made plans to take the relatives of drone victims to testify before the U.S. Congress. Though he himself was denied entry to the country, he succeeded. Rafiq-ur-Rehman and his two children, nine-year-old Nabila-ur-Rehman and 13-year-old Zubair-ur-Rehman, did speak at a special hearing arranged by Representative Alan Grayson.

Now, with the unexpected support of a small but growing group of former drone pilots, a campaign against “targeted killings” might well take on a new life in the U.S. At least six other drone pilots have already spoken anonymously to Woods, largely confirming what Bryant and Haas have said publicly.

The Strain of Long-Distance War

There is evidence that other drone pilots are also beginning to crack under the pressure of drone war. Two recent studies by the Air Force strongly suggest that Bryant’s PTSD diagnosis is no anomaly, that no matter how far you may be from the battlefield, you never quite leave it.

Published in June 2011, the first study by Wayne Chappelle, Joseph Ouma, and Amber Salinas of the School of Aerospace Medicine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio concluded that nearly half of the drone pilots studied had “high operational stress.” A number also had “clinical distress” — that is, anxiety, depression, or stress severe enough to affect them in their personal lives. The study attributed this to long “flying” hours and erratic shifts, but did not compare drone pilots to those in combat aircraft fighting above the battlefield.

A second study by Jean Otto and Bryant Webber of the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, published in March 2013, compared drone pilots to those performing standard military missions. The level of stress, it found, was almost the same, a surprising conclusion for those who assumed that drone pilots were essentially video gamers.

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” Otto told the New York Times. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

Some believe that drone stress is significantly related to a major shortage of pilots for such planes. A Government Accountability Office report released in April tersely notes that “high work demands on RPA [remotely piloted aircraft] pilots limit the time they have available for training and development and negatively affects their work-life balance.”

Speaking from the Heavens

There is, however, likely to be far more to it than that. After Bryant came forward, for instance, Heather Linebaugh, a former drone intelligence analyst, broke her silence, too. Writing in the Guardian in late December, she summed up the largely unpublicized failure of Washington’s drones this way: “What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. The feed is so pixelated, what if it’s a shovel, and not a weapon? We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.” (And she didn’t even point out that, in the areas being attacked in Pakistan and Yemen, carrying a weapon is commonplace and not necessarily a sign that you are a “terrorist.”)

Linebaugh explained that, under these circumstances, a “mistake” had terrible consequences, and not just for those erroneously targeted, but even for the pilots. “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile? How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?” She added, “When you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience.”

And don’t count on Linebaugh being the last drone analyst to speak out, either. Whether future Rene Lopezes ever actually look down from the computerized “heavens” and see the picture of that little Pakistani orphan girl, we already know that they will see horrors that are likely to prove hard to absorb.

It is this third face of war, along with those of the “enemy” and innocent victims, which provides the crucial evidence that the drone project, Obama’s remote control campaign, is a failure; that it is not clinical but bloody and riddled with error; that it creates enemies even as it kills others; that it is, above all, no more a video game for those who fly the planes and loose the missiles than it is for those who die in distant lands.

Pratap Chatterjee, a TomDispatch regular, is executive director of CorpWatchand a board member of Amnesty International USA. He is the author ofHalliburton’s Army and Iraq, Inc.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook and Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars — The Untold Story.

Copyright 2014 Pratap Chatterjee

*This article was first published by Tom Dispatch and was reprinted here with permission.

by Ali Reza Eshraghi

“Restrictions on social media must be lifted,” said Ali Jannati, Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance to Aljazeera this Monday, admitting that he has been using Facebook for the past three years. His words are compelling, but recent events have not been very promising.

by Robert E. Hunter

Edward Snowden has left Moscow for an “undisclosed location” in Russia, with a one-year freedom-of-the-country pass. The US government is naturally incensed with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

To borrow a Russian phrase coined by Nikolai Chernyshevsky and plagiarized by V. I. Lenin, Что делать? (Chto delat), or, “what [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Robert E. Hunter

Edward Snowden has left Moscow for an “undisclosed location” in Russia, with a one-year freedom-of-the-country pass. The US government is naturally incensed with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

To borrow a Russian phrase coined by Nikolai Chernyshevsky and plagiarized by V. I. Lenin, Что делать? (Chto delat), or, “what is to be done?”

Case Snowden is not an isolated event involving a felon who stole secrets that were properly and necessarily classified and willfully leaked them, knowing this would be detrimental to the country whose security he had sworn to protect. Nor is he a whistleblower who was rightly — in his view — trying to promote a national debate on things that have “gone too far.”

What is taking place is the coming together of two strands. And understanding context is necessary to understanding current events.

The first strand is the fact that “9/11” is now almost 12 years in the past, and, except for a few isolated instances — a shoe bomber, an underwear bomber, a nutcase in Times Square and the horrendous bombing at the Boston Marathon (not part of organized terror) — the United States has been more-or-less free from terrorism in the homeland. How much of that is due to the actions of US security institutions and personnel, no one can tell, but it’s probably considerable.

This very success has led to the attenuation of fear in the US about more terrorism here. Except for New York City, that fear hovers around like what scientists call “background radiation” — something that is always there but not worried about in our own lives. Furthermore, the average American has tuned out of the two wars that were spawned by 9/11, one that has been dubbed a “war of necessity” — Afghanistan, though that is a debatable proposition, beyond the initial spasm response in later 2001 — and the other “war of choice” in Iraq, which has helped create the mess in Syria and a general Sunni-Shite low-grade civil war throughout the center of the Middle East.

Against this background is questioning around whether a second look should be taken at the balance struck after 9/11 between “homeland security” and civil liberties, including the adequate and fair functioning of the US criminal justice system.

This questioning has had several parts, including the continued incarceration of alleged terrorists at Guantanamo; the use of military tribunals rather than civilian courts for Guantanamo inmates who have had trials; the holding of Private Bradley Manning in solitary for a long time before his court martial this month on multiple counts, including “aiding the enemy;” revelations about US spying on allies including the European Union missions in Washington and New York; surveillance activities by the National Security Agency, about which we still have been told very little; and even the appearance of NSA Director General Keith Alexander at the Black Hat  hackers’ conference in Las Vegas.

Case Snowden is only one element of this overall picture and is playing out against the failure of the US government to makes its case in public that its activities in the sphere of intelligence-gathering and protecting pass muster and are indeed needed to keep us all safe. Indeed, a Quinnipiac poll indicates that a majority of Americans surveyed believe that Snowden is just a whistleblower.

Strand two is in Russia. When the Soviet Union came to an end, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton worked hard to prevent the principal successor state, the Russian Federation, from being stigmatized as a loser: “Costa Rica with nuclear weapons.” For a long time, it was a country whose GDP was equivalent to that of the Netherlands, save for oil and gas, where Russia was bursting at the seams but which, any economist can tell you, made Russia a “rentier” state, able to sell stuff that comes out of the ground but not able to do much else. The Russian military even took five days to gain the upper hand in its 2008 mini-war with Georgia, a country well down the league table in military terms — simultaneously with the Beijing Olympics, which showed off an economic powerhouse.

Russia has also objected to US (and NATO) plans to extend anti-ballistic missile systems to part of Central Europe. The Russian elite has to know that this in no way would pose a threat to Russian offensive nuclear missile systems; at least part of Moscow’s objection must be due to the sense that, somehow, the US is taking advantage of its relative weakness. We can reject that reasoning but we should not just dismiss the possibility that it could be real psychologically and hence politically for the Russians.

Something we do have to take more seriously is Russia’s interest in being more directly engaged in the Middle East. In major parts, our interests are at least compatible; in others (Syria, and beneath the surface of a supposed agreement on Iran) far less so; and, in general, we have to deal with one another at a structured, strategic level, beyond the often episodic nature of current US-Russia relations regarding this region. Snowden is grist to this particular Russian mill.

Despite what Presidents Bush and Clinton tried to do to provide Russia with at least some (limited) role in the European strategic future, it was natural that the new Russia was portrayed negatively by a lot of people, some who had (legitimate) scores to settle with the Soviet Union. A lot of Americans did likewise; it even took 20 years for the US Congress to repeal the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which had been designed to encourage the Soviet Union to permit the emigration of Soviet Jews; and the US and others did not permit Russia until August 2012 to join the World Trade Organization, despite urging by some of us, then serving in the US government in the 1990s, to do this instantly — WTO membership criteria be damned. We urged this in order to help give the average Russian a sense that, despite having lost so much, their country could become engaged in the global economy, with benefits for their daily lives and thus perhaps helping to engender a more positive attitude toward working with the West.

The Clinton administration did the right thing in balancing NATO enlargement, designed to provide confidence to Central European states, with the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997; and the George W. Bush administration took a small added step at the Rome NATO summit in 2002. But there was still no real acknowledgement, whether earned or not, that, like Pinocchio, Russia had become a “real boy” in the international political and economic system.

Case Snowden also has come at a time when the US, in particular, has been objecting to certain human rights practices in Russia, including limits not just on non-governmental organizations that are exclusively Russian, but also those which have foreign ties, like the Carnegie Moscow Center and the German political party foundations. And there have been the show trials of people who have fallen out with Putin and his supporters. The US Congress has even passed condemnatory legislation, an ultra vires action if there ever were one — except that, as the principal successor state to the Soviet Union, Russia is still bound by the 1976 Helsinki Final Act, with its human rights and activities provisions, even within the territory of sovereign states.

Take me seriously, as well as my country, Vladimir Putin is saying; and surely most Russians agree. And given that the Snowden affair at least raises issues of “fairness” and “human rights,” Putin is enjoying the chance to play games with the United States. (Of course, Putin might have more serious business in mind, which may be detrimental to US and Western interests, and this needs to be tested).

These two strands — U.S. Post-Terrorism-Stress-Rebalancing and Putin/Russia’s search for a renewed place in the sun — come together and at least in part explain the current imbroglio in US-Russian relations over Edward Snowden’s fate.

Chto Delat?

Since even in the medium-term, neither Russia nor the US really has very much to gain by this continuing controversy except mutual headaches, some way out needs to be found.

The first thing is for the US to make clear that President Obama will take part in next month’s G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg and will not make the Snowden business hostage to his being there.  Of course, as host, Putin has a stake in helping the president save face. Experience from 33 years ago counsels this approach. President Jimmy Carter pursued a “Rose Garden Campaign Strategy” in 1980 because of the Iranian hostage crisis. It cost him at the polls. And the US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This also cost Carter at the polls.

Step two is for both countries to lower the rhetoric and, at the same time, transition to grown-up diplomacy, with an aim to get this matter resolved by the time of the G-8 summit. From the US perspective, the objective should be Snowden’s either deciding to return voluntarily to face the music, or showing himself unwilling to take any responsibility for his declared ambition and goals as a whistleblower.

For the US to achieve this means doing things about the two strands, noted above. On the role of the US intelligence community and government secrecy, it means getting on top of the controversy now rather than later and coming clean about what it is doing and what it is not doing and what it is prepared to place off-limits in the future. That includes revisions to the secret FISA Court (one that might actually turn down more than a tiny handful of government requests for surveillance authority); coming clean with Congress and the public about surveillance activities that affect Americans (where some small steps toward reassurance have been taken); and creating a process with congressional and public participants to ensure that civil liberties will indeed be protected; in effect, to strike a new, valid and enduring balance between security and citizens’ civil liberties and privacy rights.

At the same time, the Justice Department, along with the security agencies, needs to make clear that if and when Snowden returns to the US, he will be properly tried in a civilian court with a limited number of charges directly related to the real damage he (allegedly) has done to US security. No “secret list” of supposed damage to national security, where US government credibility has suffered so much. No piling on of charges, with potential consecutive sentences that add up to multiple lifetimes. And no overreaching, which even the military judge in the Manning court-martial decided the government had done by charging him with aiding the enemy.

If Snowden is thus assured of a fair trial, maybe he would then come home. Certainly, Russia could not detain him. If instead he decided to remain a “man without a country,” he would lose in the court of public opinion. Further, the damage he can cause to national security has already been done; but a standard for whistleblowing could be reset, with reasonable protections for those who do see misfeasance and malfeasance, but no free pass for those who cross the line.

Then, about Russia. Here, Putin has as much of a role to play as the US. While we need to show that we respect legitimate Russian interests that are not in conflict with ours, Putin and company have to recognize that, to be taken seriously in the outside world, they have to play by the international standards that have been developing over the last half-century. Cracking down on foreign NGOs has to be beyond the pale, as well as trying and convicting dead people (Sergei Magnitsky) who have challenged Putin’s authority or who have had the temerity to try running for Mayor of Moscow next month as a Putin critic (Alexei Navalny). What’s the point of Putin’s doing all this? These actions, while “sending signals” to other Putin opponents, should be small beer for him compared with the needs of an aspiring great power to be taken seriously by other countries.

The “Snowden part” of this drama cannot be brought to resolution unless and until he decides that he will return home. The “Putin part” can be bought to resolution when grown-ups in Moscow and Washington get together and understand why the needs of their mutual relationship should not be held hostage to anything that is not genuinely important to one side or the other.

We shall see if both sides have the wit and wisdom to proceed in this way.

The globe-trotting travails of the fugitive Edward Snowden have given us an unexpected opportunity to hear from our senior intelligence officials about the necessity of their far-reaching surveillance program designed to protect us from terrorism. But as shown by the testimony of General Keith Alexander, the chief [...]]]> via LobeLog

by James A. Russell

The globe-trotting travails of the fugitive Edward Snowden have given us an unexpected opportunity to hear from our senior intelligence officials about the necessity of their far-reaching surveillance program designed to protect us from terrorism. But as shown by the testimony of General Keith Alexander, the chief of the National Security Agency (NSA), few details have been revealed about the actual threat we are facing. These details, we are told, need to be kept secret.

Yet we are awash in information about the terrorist threat from the media. To be sure, frightening images of enemies have always figured prominently for the United States in the conduct of foreign policy and national security. During the Cold War, the specter of godless communist hordes assaulting the ramparts of democracy served as a centerpiece for the American defense buildup and its strategy of containment. Ronald Reagan famously rode his “evil empire” metaphor to election victory in 1980 — while the Soviet Union slowly crumbled before our eyes.

Even if we hyped their claims, there is no getting around the fact that the Soviet Union threatened the United States and Western Europe with incineration courtesy of its thousands of nuclear weapons. This very real threat caused the United States to pursue various arms control initiatives with its bitter adversary — much to the annoyance of the neoconservative “cold warriors” who later re-emerged to lead the country into the disastrous war in Iraq.

The 9/11 attacks provided us with the pretext needed after the end of the Cold War to prop up another boogeyman — international terrorism — to replace the dreaded “red menace”.

Of course, the spectacular nature of the 9/11 attacks deeply and rightfully disturbed Americans. The images of crumbling towers with thousands of innocent people trapped inside seemed like an apt metaphor for a new age of unrestricted warfare pitting us against shadowy networks of terrorists armed with new, dastardly and unconventional weapons.

Much of the right-wing and its neoconservative acolytes eagerly seized upon the new boogeyman to justify a decade of war and targeted assassinations abroad while shredding the constitution by unleashing the NSA to listen to our phone calls, read our e-mails and cruise our Facebook profiles.

As usual, democrats cowered in fear, not wanting to be seen as “weak” on defending the country. Government officials, terrified of another Pearl Harbor attack on their watch, left no stone unturned in expanding the reach of the state — all in the name of protecting us from the new, 10-foot tall terrorist boogeyman. In essence, the Vietnam-generation that had once protested so vigorously against the abuse of state power in the 1960s consolidated the national security surveillance state — without so much as a shoulder shrug — as they took over responsibility for governing 40 years later.

But while America’s perception of the world changed on 9/11, the world pretty much remained the same.

The 9/11 attacks turned out to be an outlier and were not followed by a new age of mass casualty terrorist war. According to figures compiled by the Rand Corporation, an average of 341 people were killed annually in attacks attributed to international terrorism from 1985-2000; from 2001 through 2008, an average of 582 people were killed.

As noted in all of the databases collecting information on terrorism, the overwhelming number of terrorist incidents around the world occur in the context of local and/or national political disputes and are confined to a relatively small number of states including Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, India, Yemen, Syria and Somalia. International terrorism is virtually nonexistent at this point. Regrettably, the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have played a role in the prominence of terrorist violence in these locations.

According to the State Department, 12 Americans were either killed or wounded as a result of terrorist violence around the world in 2012. By contrast, over the decade of America’s wars abroad, 1,000,000 Americans were killed or wounded in the United States as a result of gun-related violence.

If the foreign policy establishment and its finger-wagging commentariat bothered to dig a little deeper, they would discover that terrorism is a comparatively minor form of international violence that is not a strategic threat to the United States or the international community.

They would also discover that the world is actually becoming a safer place, with a steady reduction in the number of interstate wars since 1990, continued declines in the numbers of people being killed in these wars, and the complete absence of wars between developed states following the end of the Cold War.

The world’s oceans are almost completely free of political violence and it is safer to board an airplane than it is to get into your car. Conflict, terrorism and international violence are phenomena associated with failed and/or failing states in the developing world.

Like the exaggerated claims of an impending Soviet takeover of the world in the 1980s, we need to view this issue for what it really is and reign in the urge to see terrorists lurking behind every corner. They are not the equivalent of the nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Instead, we get bombarded with hysterical assertions of a dangerous and threatening global environment that is simply not supported by evidence. It is a canard being foisted on the public — one that obscures the actual and serious security challenges facing the United States and the international community.

We need leaders, columnists and citizens to discuss these central points. The discourse should be used as the basis for a national debate over our proper security posture.  The world has moved on — and we need to move along with it.

via IPS News

Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar [...]]]> by Pratap Chaterjee

via IPS News

Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar intelligence budget.

Some commentators have pounced on Snowden’s disclosures to denounce the role of private contractors in the world of government and national security, arguing such spheres are best left to public servants. But their criticism misses the point.

It is no longer possible to determine the difference between the two: employees of the NSA – along with agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – and the employees of companies such as Booz Allen have integrated to the extent that they slip from one role in industry to another in government, cross-promoting each other and self-dealing in ways that make the fabled revolving door redundant, if not completely disorienting.

Snowden, a systems administrator at the NSA’s Threat Operations Centre in Hawaii, had worked for the CIA and Dell before joining Booz Allen. But his rather obscure role pales in comparison to those of others.

To best understand this tale, one must first turn to R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, who appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives in the summer of 2004 to promote the idea of integrating U.S. domestic and foreign spying efforts to track “terrorists”.

One month later, he appeared on MSNBC television, where he spoke of the urgent need to create a new U.S. intelligence czar to help expand the post-9/11 national surveillance apparatus.

On neither occasion did Woolsey mention that he was employed as senior vice president for global strategic security at Booz Allen, a job he held from 2002 to 2008.

“The source of information about vulnerabilities of and potential attacks on the homeland will not be dominated by foreign intelligence, as was the case in the Cold War. The terrorists understood us well, and so they lived and planned where we did not spy (inside the U.S.),” said Woolsey in prepared remarks before the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security on Jun. 24, 2004.

In a prescient suggestion of what Snowden would later reveal, Woolsey went on to discuss expanding surveillance to cover domestic, as well as foreign sources.

“One source will be our vulnerability assessments, based on our own judgments about weak links in our society’s networks that can be exploited by terrorists,” he said. “A second source will be domestic intelligence. How to deal with such information is an extraordinarily difficult issue in our free society.”

One month later, Woolsey appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, a news-talk show hosted by Chris Matthews, and told Matthews that the federal government needed a new high-level office – a DNI, if you will – to straddle domestic and foreign intelligence. Until then, the director of the CIA served as the head of the entire intelligence community (IC).

“The problem is that the intelligence community has grown so much since 1947, when the position of director of central intelligence was created, that it’s [become] impossible to do both jobs, running the CIA and managing the community,” he said.

Both these suggestions would lead to influential jobs and lucrative sources of income for his employer and colleagues.

The Director of National Intelligence

Fast forward to 2007. Vice Admiral Michael McConnell (ret.), Booz Allen’s then-senior vice president of policy, transformation, homeland security and intelligence analytics, was hired as the second czar of the new “Office of the Director of National Intelligence”, a post that oversees the work of Washington’s 17 intelligence agencies, which was coincidentally located just three kilometres from the company’s corporate headquarters.

Upon retiring as DNI, McConnell returned to Booz Allen in 2009, where he serves as vice chairman to this day. In August 2010, Lieutenant General James Clapper (ret), Booz Allen’s former vice president for military intelligence from 1997 to 1998, was hired as the fourth intelligence czar, a job he has held ever since. Indeed, one-time Booz Allen executives have filled the position five of the eight years of its existence.

When these two men were put in charge of the national-security state, they helped expand and privatise it as never before.

McConnell, for example, asked Congress to alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the NSA to spy on foreigners without a warrant if they were using Internet technology that routed through the United States.

“The resulting changes in both law and legal interpretations (and the) new technologies created a flood of new work for the intelligence agencies – and huge opportunities for companies like Booz Allen,” wrote David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in a profile of McConnell published in the New York Times Jun. 15.

Last week, Snowden revealed to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA had created a secret system called “Prism” that allowed the agency to spy on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, both within and outside the United States.

Snowden’s job at Booz Allen’s offices in Hawaii was to maintain the NSA’s information technology systems. While he did not specify his precise connection to Prism, he told the South China Morning Post newspaper that the NSA hacked “network backbones – like huge Internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one”.

Woolsey had argued in favour of such surveillance following the disclosure of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping by the New York Times in December 2005.

“Unlike the Cold War, our intelligence requirements are not just overseas,” he told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the NSA in February 2006. “Courts are not designed to deal with fast-moving battlefield electronic mapping in which an al Qaeda or a Hezbollah computer might be captured which contains a large number of email addresses and phone numbers which would have to be checked out very promptly.”

Close ties

Exactly what Booz Allen does for the NSA’s electronic surveillance system revealed by Snowden is classified, but one can make an educated guess from similar contracts it has in this field – a quarter of the company’s 5.86 billion dollars in annual income comes from intelligence agencies.

The NSA, for example, hired Booz Allen in 2001 in an advisory role on the five-billion-dollar Project Groundbreaker to rebuild and operate the agency’s “nonmission-critical” internal telephone and computer networking systems.

Booz Allen also won a chunk of the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness contract in 2001 to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases – a controversial programme defunded by Congress in 2003 but whose spirit survived in the Prism and other initiatives disclosed by Snowden.

The CIA pays a Booz Allen team led by William Wansley, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, for “strategic and business planning” for its National Clandestine Service, which conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies.

The company also provides a 120-person team, headed by a former U.S. Navy cryptology lieutenant commander and Booz Allen senior executive adviser Pamela Lentz, to support the National Reconnaissance Organisation, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation’s military spy satellites.

In January, Booz Allen was one of 12 contractors to win a five-year contract with the Defence Intelligence Agency that could be worth up to 5.6 billion dollars to focus on “computer network operations, emerging and disruptive technologies, and exercise and training activity”.

Last month, the U.S. Navy picked Booz Allen as part of a consortium to work on yet another billion-dollar project for “a new generation of intelligence, surveillance and combat operations”.

Booz Allen wins these contracts in several ways. In addition to its connections with the DNI, it boasts that half of its 25,000 employees are cleared for top secret-sensitive compartmented intelligence, one of the highest possible security ratings. (One third of the 1.4 million people with such clearances work for the private sector.)

A key figure at Booz Allen is Ralph Shrader, current chairman, CEO and president, who came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company’s government communications system division.

In the 1970s, Western Union and RCA both took part in a secret surveillance programme known as Minaret, where they agreed to give the NSA all their clients’ incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams.

Minaret and similar snooping programmes led to an explosive series of Congressional hearings in the 1970s by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho in 1975.

* Jim Lobe contributed to this article.

by Bernard Chazelle

Daniel Ellsberg, a man well versed in the matter, calls it “the most important leak in American history.” The scale of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program is indeed staggering. Not to put too fine a point on it, if your phone records and Internet clicks are not [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Bernard Chazelle

Daniel Ellsberg, a man well versed in the matter, calls it “the most important leak in American history.” The scale of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program is indeed staggering. Not to put too fine a point on it, if your phone records and Internet clicks are not already in federal custody, rest assured they soon will be. To add insult to injury, it might all be legal. A 29-year old Booz Allen employee, Edward Snowden, has risked his freedom to expose the mischief.

Not everyone was pleased. Ranting like a mad preacher, David Brooks called it a betrayal no fewer than ten times in one column. Wagging the mighty finger of pop psychology, the Times‘s self-anointed Mother Superior blamed Snowden’s betrayals on a life “unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society,” ie, untutored in the Brooksian view of authority as a call to blind worship. To others, the episode was a discomfiting reminder that the mantle of heroism can make cruel demands on those willing to put it on—especially the young. Snowden has forced open a much-needed debate, one that President Obama openly welcomes. And what better way to echo the sentiment than to have his National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, lie under oath to preempt any such debate?

Not that Snowden’s revelation did more than turn suspicion into confirmation. Ordinary Americans might not have suspected the cosmic scope of the snoopery, but terrorists, a breed to whom suspicion comes naturally, surely did. Indeed, the Pentagon has made no secret of its plan to expand its Global Information Gridpast the “yottabyte” mark. How big is that? Think of a giant vacuum cleaner designed to hoover up the equivalent of one million DVDs for every human being on earth. Now ask yourself: why would anyone need so much storage if not for trawling every critter that swims the waterways of the Internet: emails, tweets, pics, vids, chats, etc? The NSA’s claim to be merely after your metadata (email addresses, phone numbers, durations, etc) is preposterous. Metadata alone could never use up more than one millionth of the storage capacity. The NSA has hopped on the Big-Data bandwagon or, as it were, the All-Data supertrain.

Any terrorist aware of the hazards of Big Data knows that spurious correlations increase faster than data size and so will pray that the NSA keeps a diary of all life forms on the planet. If you’re a needle hiding in a haystack, all you want is more hay, like, say, a yottabyte worth of it. Bad guys will love Big Data. Social activists not so much. If the next J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t fancy the cut of your jib, he’ll come after you, file servers blazing, with more details about your past than you’ll ever remember. No need to be unduly paranoid, though. The craven Chinese may have hacked into the Obama and Romney campaigns, but thank God no American president would ever break into the party headquarters of his rival. Thank God the FBI would never spread lies about a university administrator. Thank God it would never pressure a civil rights leader to commit suicide. Let’s not surrender to cynicism and imagine that anything like McCarthyism could ever happen in the United States. We don’t call it the land of the free for nothing.

But what’s freedom good for if you’re dead? Some say that global surveillance is the price to pay for staying alive. Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, and her House counterpart, Mike Rogers, credit Big Brother for the capture of Najibullah Zazi and David Headley, two genuine nasties. Alas, if that’s the best our two NSA cheerleaders have to offer, they might as well pack up their pom-poms and go home. A former British foreign office minister dispatched their boast as an illusion: Zazi’s name was caught by British Intelligence the old-fashioned way; likewise, the arrest of David Headley, who was involved in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, came in the wake of a British tip-off of the conventional kind. Former NSA surveillance huncho, William Binney, characterizes the entire spying dragnet as useless. Acting on a Russian tip, the NSA did record phone calls of the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston bombings, and we all know how effective that was. Almost as helpful as the interceptions of the phone calls that bin Laden’s chief of operations made right before 9/11. The only attacks the Feds seem good at preventing are those it instigates. All-time favorites include the sting operation that netted the crackerjack squad of terrorists whose first step to Armageddon was to order al-Qaeda boots from an FBI informant. (Who would want to meet the 72 virgins with the wrong shoes on?)

Despite our best efforts to create new terrorists by vaporizing their children with our drones, they still remain a rare breed. Matthew Yglesias estimates the number of lives saved annually by airport security measures as approximately zero. Saving zero lives does not come cheap, mind you. Body scanning alone has cost the US taxpayer billions of dollars. No sooner was he done running Homeland Security than Michael Chertoff cashed in the big bucks at Rapiscan Systems by leading thecheers for full-body scans. This revolving-door pathology afflicting the Beltway can appear paradoxical. Ever wondered why the NSA outsources work that falls squarely within its core competencies? No surprise if the agency contracts out its catering, plumbing, and lawn mowing, but… information technology? The NSA employs thousands of IT experts, from seasoned sysadmins to world-class cryptographers. Whatever Snowden did for the agency as a Booz Allen employee, the NSA could do it in-house more cheaply. So why doesn’t it? The answer to this $75-billion question is money, gobs of it floating right under the nose of public servants cruelly kept by law from getting a piece of the action. The revolving door is there to release the tension. It is a legal mechanism for funneling billions of taxpayer dollars into a handful of private wallets. Contractors serve stints in government for the same reasons thieves case a bank before robbing it. There they learn to operate the moola pipeline and keep it flowing into the right pockets.

Booz Allen Hamilton revolves doors better than most. The aforementioned spook-in-chief, James Clapper, is a proud alum. One of his predecessors as National Intelligence director, Mike McConnell, is now vice-chairman of the company. Former CIA director, James Woolsey, was a Booz Allen VP. The company is majority-owned by the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant with long ties to the Bush family. Carlyle has syphoned a cool $2 billion from Booz Allen, which itself derives 98% of its revenues from the US taxpayer. This is crony capitalism at its finest. Being perhaps a bit too obvious, the scheme requires a bevy of propagandists to hide the true motives behind a veil of fear. To point out that lightning outkills terrorism will earn you a stern reminder that “we must kill them over there so they don’t kill us over here.” The propagandists keep at the ready a whole Ptolemaic jumble of rhetorical epicycles with at its center the winning slogan: “Be scared, be very scared!” And thus, with Monty-Pythonesque clarity, can Tom Friedman urge us to surrender our privacy now so a new terrorist attack does not force us to surrender it later.

Politicans play along with this charade for fear of being seen as soft on terrorism, some of them hoping that one day they too will hitch a ride on the gravy train. President Obama gives the spooks a blank check to buy himself an insurance policy: a means to deflect the blame if and when terror strikes. Don’t count on any pushback from the mainstream media. Terrorism makes good copy and, like a four-leaf clover, gets hyped in proportion to its rarity. Thriving on its incestuous relationship with power, the corporate media has blinded itself to the very idea of a conflict of interest. When someone hinted at a sweet deal between Chertoff and Rapiscan on Hardball, a “shocked, shocked” Chris Matthews called it slander.

No one disputes the need to keep secret tabs on terrorists and monitor their communications. What’s at issue is the existence of a cyber-panopticon handing over all details of everyone’s private life to government agencies with no meaningful oversight. The current outrage over the NSA is rightly focused on its Orwellian angle. Yet to sate the vengeful hunger of latter-day J. Edgar Hoovers doesn’t alone explain the rise of the Surveillance State. An important driver is the dominant social engineering project of our time: the upward redistribution of wealth to the one percent. In the case at hand, the project was given a boost by the co-occurrence of two trends: the commodification of Big-Data technology and the post-9/11 resurgence of American paranoia. When your enemy hates you for your freedoms, don’t you want a supersized Big Brother by your side? But here’s the twist: the attendant growth in defense spending ran smack against the neoliberal push for smaller government. The solution? The rise of a bloated industry of overpaid private contractors feeding off the public trough. Bravo, one percent, the maneuver was brilliant!

As his antsy critics swarm out to smear him, Edward Snowden faces a bleak future. He didn’t just expose the powerful: he humiliated them. For that unforgivable sin, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen called Snowden a “cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood.” (As a hack cross-dressing as a journalist, he would know.) House Speaker John Boehner labeled the young whistleblower a traitor. Were he to be extradited to the US, Snowden would face a long prison sentence. Perhaps President Obama will indulge his forgotten love of whistleblowers and pardon him as penance for letting the DOJ prosecute more whistleblowers than all of his predecessors combined. Perhaps he will bestow the medal of freedom upon Glenn Greenwald for shining light on government scandals. Perhaps the NSA will turn its Fort Meade headquarters into a soup kitchen…

– Bernard Chazelle is Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is currently on sabbatical at the College de France in Paris and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the author of the book, “The Discrepancy Method,” an investigation into the power of randomness in computing, his current research focuses on “natural algorithms” and the algorithmic complexity of living matter. He has written extensively about politics and music.

by Mitchell Plitnick

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Mitchell Plitnick

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s pretty incredible that in the United States an enormous lobby exists to distort the Second Amendment to make people believe that citizens should have unfettered access to enormous firepower, but there is nothing similar to guard the right to privacy. And when someone comes along and reveals the massive extent to which the United States government is spying on private communication between ordinary citizens, the debate becomes about “national security.”

There are, to be sure, good reasons why any government must keep things secret, and why there are laws to punish those who break the confidence the government places in them when it trusts them with classified information. But even the most elementary definition of notions like liberty and democracy demands that such secrecy be restricted to absolute necessity. The PRISM program and the revelations Edward Snowden made about it don’t begin to meet that standard. And the responses from not only US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper but also President Barack Obama are extremely chilling.

Explaining why the program was classified, Clapper said, “Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a ‘playbook’ of how to avoid detection.” Put bluntly, that’s just nonsense. How many of us, before the revelations about PRISM, believed all of our electronic communications, including the telephone, were impervious to government spying? The only thing Edward Snowden revealed was the existence of the program. Does anyone seriously believe that al-Qaeda thought they could just send emails around the world with no risk of discovery by the US government? Please.

As Obama said, “There’s a reason these programs are classified.” That’s true, but it is not because of the false choice the President laid out that US citizens “can’t have 100 percent security, and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” No one is asking for that. Obama’s statement is meant to frighten us with the threat of terrorism into sacrificing more of our freedom. It speaks volumes that the PRISM program, though started by George W. Bush, has expanded exponentially under Obama. It says even more that the author of the Patriot Act (which first expanded the government’s power using the excuse of fighting terrorism after the 9/11 attacks), Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner Jr., a Republican, considers the program “an abuse” of the draconian law he wrote.

No, PRISM was not classified for security reasons, as the information it uncovered could be argued to have been. It was kept secret because US citizens would be angered by the breadth of the surveillance of their electronic communications. Again, many already assumed this was going on, though PRISM’s scope probably surprised them too. But the acquiescence of the internet corporations who own the servers being monitored — all the big ones, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, et al — is going to have a chilling effect on internet traffic and internet commerce. That is one reason it was kept secret. The other is that the Bush and Obama Administrations were concerned that if the breadth of the surveillance was known, the people of the United States just might object.

Can there be a clearer violation of the Constitution? Not only does PRISM directly violate the Fourth Amendment in as blatant a manner as could be conceived, it was intentionally hidden only to make sure the will of the people could not enter the conversation. Yet the streets are not filled with US citizens demanding accountability. This says a great deal about the post-9/11 US, and just how much freedom we are now willing to sacrifice for a “war on terror” that has availed us nothing.

But the issue speaks to much more than just the rights of US citizens to privacy. Almost all of the restrictions that are in place and even the more ephemeral ones that Obama and Clapper claim to be in place act only to protect some measure of US privacy. According to the leaked PowerPoint presentation on PRISM (which, it should be noted, no one has claimed is falsified), the program uses search terms to find out which of the trillions of pieces of data it has intercepted are “foreign.” That it has only a 51% level of certainty is troublesome for Americans, but the implication that every single person on the planet outside of US citizens is fair game should trouble us even more.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is the legal basis for this program, such spying on citizens of other countries can proceed virtually unencumbered. In olden times, before the internet, the limitations of access and prohibitive cost served as barriers to wanton surveillance. It simply was too much trouble and too costly to spy on random citizens of other countries.

But now, with a global data network, where every bit of information passes through numerous servers and where US corporations that own many of the biggest servers do a lot of their business globally as well, those restrictions are absent. Yet nothing in US law changes the playing field with the new technology.

Voices of outrage have already been heard in Great Britain, Germany, New Zealand and other US allies. But the main focus of the surveillance, of course, is countries like Pakistan and Iran. But what have we said to the citizens of those countries? That’s a question we might consider the next time we start thinking “they hate us for our freedoms,” which we in the US are sacrificing because of our own fear, rather than wondering if we are not enraging “them” with our hubris.

The scandal has been prominent, and the media fallout severe. Yet the US moves along with business as usual. The US government has violated the Constitution in the most egregious way, and we have established ourselves as a state that considers it perfectly acceptable to spy on everyone else, without any control or semblance of probable cause. You wonder what it would take to bring US citizens into the streets en masse. We could, perhaps, learn something from the Turks.

In what is sure to be one of the most glaringly obvious headlines written about the General Petraeus-Paula Broadwell affair, the Washington Post writes: “Petraeus hoped affair would stay secret and he could keep his job as CIA director.”

Clearly, things did not go according to plan. Right after the [...]]]> via Lobe Log

In what is sure to be one of the most glaringly obvious headlines written about the General Petraeus-Paula Broadwell affair, the Washington Post writes: “Petraeus hoped affair would stay secret and he could keep his job as CIA director.”

Clearly, things did not go according to plan. Right after the election, Petraeus submitted his resignation to President Obama after being under investigation by the FBI for months; he had already reportedly broken off his relationship with Broadwell, his biographer.

ABC reports that the FBI did not in fact inform the White House because their findings were “the result of a criminal investigation that never reached the threshold of an intelligence probe” — but even as the FBI was mulling over what to do next, one of the agents on the case was contacting Florida socialite Jill Kelley to inform her of their findings so far.

The investigation showed just how broad the Bureau’s powers are with respect to communications monitoring. Rather than observing what The Daily Beast calls “the spirit of minimization to lead the FBI to keep any personal revelations within the bureau and not say anything to anybody” in other cases involving personal threats, it seems that the since-dismissed agent violated this policy and not only told Kelley, but Members of Congress as well, before the Tampa office handling the email-reading contacted the Director of the FBI to warn of possible national security implications.

As a result of the FBI’s case with Kelley, the US/NATO commander in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen, is also now “involved” in the scandal due to his lengthy email correspondence with Kelley that has raised concerns over potential breaches of national security.

Though the details of the affair have captured headlines and a large number of officials and foreign policy commentators are bemoaning the damage done to Petraeus’s military-policy reputation, some discussion is occurring over the ex-DCIA’s record as top general in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Langley’s chief drone advocate.

Issandr El Amrani at the Arabist offers a succinct observation of how Petraeus’s star rose in the Beltway hierarchy as the US sought a way out of Iraq: “[h]e delivered results of sorts for the US, which gave Washington political cover for an exit.” While this certainly represented a success for a despairing Bush White House, it was not a step towards carrying out an extended occupation, or even reinvigorating the potpourri of war aims increasingly advanced after 2003 to re-spin the war’s WMD casus belli. Iraq’s ongoing political troubles offer few hints as to how counterinsurgency, or COIN, may have staved off total collapse. At least, from the military’s perspective, the “Surge” staved off a complete collapse and ensured the US could withdraw in the near future, not unlike Nixon’s 1973 “peace with honor” adage in Vietnam. With Iran maintaining its influence in Baghdad (handed to them by the US invasion), disparate militias eyeing each other warily in Kurdistan, and Iraq’s anti-Iranian & anti-American terror cells looking to Syria to revitalize their regional struggle, America’s 21st century “peace with honor” may sound just as hollow for some Iraqi officials today as it sounded for South Vietnamese negotiators back then.

COIN itself never came to reoccupy the spot formerly reserved for “nation-building” in the years Robert McNamara’s whiz kids rode high. As Andrew Sullivan and Michael Hastings note, the general himself did not exactly follow his own press in practice when he transfered over to Afghanistan, emphasizing air strikes and special operations missions over his much-lauded counterinsurgency practices of going door-to-door to win the population over. As Spencer Ackerman, who has issued an apology for not being more aware of how the general’s Army office was influencing his past reporting, Petraeus has done much to expand the CIA’s own drone program, calling for a significant expansion of the program just weeks before his resignation.

COIN and its mythologizing aside, there are few reasons to expect that the general’s counterterrorism policies will suddenly fall out of favor with the White House, not least because Deputy NSA John O. Brennan has been one of the driving forces for institutionalizing drone warfare since his appointment in 2009. The influential former DCIA Michael Hayden, now coming off of his stint as an advisor to former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, is urging the agency to move away from its targeted killing trajectory and back towards threat assessment and anticipation. He remarked that looking to the future of the Agency, “[t]he biggest challenge may be the sheer volume of problems that require intelligence input.”

There is little chance though that Petraeus’s downfall will see the downgrading of the Agency’s robot presence. With both the US and Pakistan unwilling to launch ground major operations into the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions due to the casualties their armed forces would incur, the drone wars are regarded as the most effective military option available. Neither Washington nor Islamabad — or on the other side of the Indian Ocean, Sana’a and Mogadishu — have either the capacity or will for anything more. Or for anything less, in fact, since that would mean ceding the field to the targets, who despite their losses, can draw strength from these strikes. The CTC man told the Washington Post last year while the Agency may be “killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now,” he himself does not think he’s implementing a truly sustainable policy for this Administration, or for those that will follow.

But as the Post reported this past month, Deputy NSA Brennan seems to think otherwise, along with those reportedly elevated in the CIA under Petraeus’s directorship.

While the relationship between reporter and officer — whether sexualized or not — is likely to remain a topic of debate and “soul-searching” for commentators in the coming months, and COIN may fade away from Army manuals trying to plan out the next “time-limited, scope-limited military action, in concert with our international partners,” the new face of counterterrorism that is the General Atomics MQ series is likely to be the general/DCIA’s most lasting legacy. And this will be the one that holds the fewest headlines of all in the weeks to come, given it’s broad acceptance across both major parties and the “punditocracy.”