dinsdag 1 juli 2014

William Rivers Pitt 2

William Rivers Pitt | Iraq, Two Bullets and the Long Arc of History

Tuesday, 01 July 2014 10:25By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed

14
font size
Print
Email

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie leave the Sarajevo Guildhall after reading a speech on June 28, 1914. They were assassinated five minutes later. (Image via Wikipedia)

There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.

- Eugene O'Neill

Over the weekend, the world observed what must be considered one of the bleakest, bloodiest anniversaries in the history of humanity. One hundred years ago, on June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo along with his wife by Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb who was a member of a group known as the "Black Hand." The Archduke was struck by two bullets and died within minutes, while his wife died en route to the hospital.

One month later, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, the other great European powers soon joined the fray, and with banners flying and trumpets blaring, the awesome butchery that was World War I began. The bloodletting did not end until November of 1918, and once the smoke and mustard gas had cleared, four of the great powers in Europe - the Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and German empires - no longer existed. Millions were dead, whole swaths of Europe lay in ruins, and the old Napoleonic practice of close-order battle marches had been rendered into so much meat by the lethal metal truth of modern mechanized warfare.

The cascading aftermath, however, was only just beginning. The chaos unleashed in Russia by the war led to the collapse of the government, the rise of Vladimir Lenin, and the birth of the Soviet Union. Ten years after the creation of the USSR, Josef Stalin was named General Secretary of the Communist Party. He remained the undisputed leader of the USSR until his death in 1953, and during those intervening years, Stalin oversaw one of the most ruthless, paranoid regimes that has ever existed on the skin of the Earth. At the peak of his atrocities, there were as many as 1,000 executions a day, while millions more were "disappeared" into gulags. Despite this, the Soviet Union under Stalin grew to be a tremendous industrial power, and a dominant presence on the world stage.

In Germany, the turmoil left in the wake of the war was just as pronounced, and came to affect the entire planet along with the course of human history. The war, and the armistice that was signed to end it, left Germany shattered and humiliated. The rage, deprivations and despair left in the wake of the collapse of the Weimar Republic became fertile soil for the growth of German fascism, from which a failed painter named Adolf Hitler was able to reap a truly bitter harvest. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, the slaughter of the Holocaust was underway, and the global massacre that was World War II came to pass.

World War II beget the creation and use of the atomic bomb, the subsequent spread of which placed the human race in peril of extinction, a peril that lingers to this day. Upon observing the governing principles of Stalin, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, penned and transmitted the "Long Telegram" in 1946, the document credited by history as being the genesis of the Cold War. The aftermath of World War II, combined with the onset of the Cold War, inspired the passage of the National Security Act in 1947 and the creation of the American "National Security State."

The National Security State beget the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, and their all-encompassing ethos of secrecy and broad-spectrum surveillance. The National Security State, along with the hyper-militarization of America caused by World War II, beget the military-industrial complex and the decision to put and keep the American economy on a permanent wartime footing, a status that remains in place today. The astonishing profits available to that complex by way of war, combined with the paranoia of the Cold War and the callow opportunism of American politicians, beget the decades-long carnage of the Vietnam War, as well as a dozen other "actions" around the world, including war in Iraq, war in Iraq again, and soon enough, war in Iraq once again.

All of that from two bullets, fired by a 19-year-old boy one hundred years ago.

To be sure, this is an abridged and incomplete history. Threaded through this tapestry of woe are bolts of random chance and the vagaries of fate; had Franz Ferdinand's driver known the route he was supposed to take through Sarajevo, for example, he would not have taken a wrong turn and inadvertently presented the Archduke before the pistol of Gavrilo Princip. That being said, quantifying the twisted possibilities of all the might-have-beens we have passed over the hundred years since those two bullets were fired is, in the end, an exercise in futility. It happened, and here we are.

I make mention of this long, grim thread of history in the looming shadow of the ongoing chaos in Iraq. Over the weekend, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) announced the creation of what they call a caliphate, which spans large portions of those two nations. The current situation in those two nations, and in the Middle East entire, can be laid in large degree to the decision by the Bush administration to lie the United States into a war in Iraq, a decision based upon feckless dreams of empire and the desire for political and financial profit. The matter is on the verge of spiraling beyond control and could lead to a region-wide conflagration, the ultimate outcome of which is anyone's guess.

The very simple moral: big clouds condense around small particles, as Richard Bachman once wisely wrote. Individuals certainly, and governments absolutely, must think long and hard about the consequences of their choices before they decide to pull the trigger. Two bullets in Sarajevo unleashed one hundred years of carnage. Some facile lies from a few American politicians may well have unleashed another hundred years of the same.

WILLIAM RIVERS PITT

William Rivers Pitt is Truthout's senior editor and lead columnist. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know," "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence" and "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation." He lives and works in New Hampshire.

Freedom and Democracy?

The slide towards American theocracy was nudged one more step forward by today's Supreme Court decision in support of the "freedom" of corporations with "religious" beliefs to restrict the rights of their employees. In essence, religious "beliefs" trump the obligations, rights, and responsibilities that come with being members of the polity and a broader political community.

The NY Times details the logic of the theocrats as:

The 5-to-4 decision, which applied to two companies owned by Christian families, opened the door to challenges from other corporations to many laws that may be said to violate their religious liberty.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the court’s five more conservative justices, said a federal religious-freedom law applied to for-profit corporations controlled by religious families. He added that the requirement that the companies provide contraception coverage imposed a substantial burden on the companies’ religious liberty. He said the government could provide the coverage in other ways.

The dissent offers up this chilling observation:

On that point, Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the court’s decision “is bound to have untoward effects” in other settings.
“The court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood,” Justice Ginsburg wrote, “invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faiths.”

The corporateocracy and the 1 percent are using the tricks, smoke, and mirrors of "religious faith" to expand their power and protections from civil authority and the social compact.

The tactic is Orwellian and dystopian.

Alas, if corporations are indeed "people"--an insult to the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution which was put in place to protect the rights of newly freed black slaves--then their behavior is sociopathic. The sociopath will lie, dissemble, and exploit others for his or her own gain because that is their essential nature.

There are many complications that will arise from the Supreme Court's "Hobby Lobby" decision.

The language of "religious liberty" and "free enterprise" are deified in American political culture and discourse. Those words are blinding and disorienting; therefore, they are also concepts that are not critically interrogated.

For example, "religious liberty" and "free enterprise" were used to justify slavery, as well as Jim and Jane Crow. The move towards privatized schools, "urban academies", and publicly funded religiously based secondary and primary education are the direct heirs of the "freedom academies" that whites used as a means to resist integration and the Black Freedom Struggle in the South and elsewhere.

[I wonder how many African-Americans and others who support school privatization are aware of that ugly history and the intersection between neoliberalism and white supremacy in the present?]

In practice, the language of religious liberty and free enterprise are in many ways antithetical to a true and expansive view of freedom, liberty, and civil rights.

The Roberts and Scalia court is operating under an assumption that Christianity is the United States' semi-official religion and that it should be legislated and protected in a way that other faiths are not. This is, of course, a misreading of the Constitution--despite what the deranged members of the Fox News Christian Evangelical Dominionist American public would like to believe.

Unintended consequences may lay bare the hypocrisy of the Right-wing and its agents on the Supreme Court.

How would conservatives and their agents respond if a company with Islamic beliefs (however defined) decided to impose its religious values on white, Christian, American employees?

Sharia hysteria would spread in such a way as to make the present day-to-day Islamophobia of the Right-wing echo chamber appear benign and muted by comparison.

What if a Black cultural nationalist organization such as the Nation of Islam or the Black Israelites claimed that they possessed a "religious freedom" to actively discriminate against white people in the workplace or elsewhere?

The White Right would explode with claims of "reverse discrimination" and "black racism".

The end game of the Supreme Courts' surrender to the theocrats and religious plutocrats could be the complete dismantlement of the liberal consensus politics of the post World War 2 era.

Consider the following questions.

Is there a "religious freedom" to practice housing discrimination if you are a member of a white supremacist "Christian" organization that leases or sells property? Does "religious freedom" for corporate entities trump anti-discrimination laws governing gender, sexuality, disability status, or race?

The beautiful thing about religious faith is its malleability and vagueness. "Faith" is a belief which cannot be proven by ordinary or empirical means: this trait makes religion dangerous and disruptive to a functioning democratic-liberal polity.

Religion can be anything to anyone.

The Framers understood this fact. Thus, their shrewd choice to separate church and state in the Constitution.

Movement conservatism is no longer a centrist force, one interested in stability or "tradition". Its members are radicals who want to fundamentally destroy and transform the standing bargains and norms which have guided American society and politics for decades.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court, what was once the United States' most respected political institution, is soiling itself by surrendering to the American Right's radical agenda.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/30/1310729/-What-if-a-Muslim-Company-Used-the-Hobby-Lobby-Decision-to-Impose-Its-Values-on-White-Christians?detail=email#

De Falende Mainstream Media

The Failure of Mainstream Media

By Global Research

Global Research, June 30, 2014

Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-failure-of-mainstream-media/5303496

Dear Global Research Readers,

The European Union is in economic crisis while the people of a drastically de-industrialized United States are being held hostage by Wall Street’s greed and quest for monopoly, which is leading America towards a militarized police state.

War clouds are also hanging over the Middle East and a cold war is unfolding between the US on one side and China, Russia, and Iran on the other.

Many important questions and contradicting stories also remain regarding the tragic events of September 11, 2001. The mainstream and corporate media has failed to investigate the implausible official 9/11 narrative of the US federal government. It has failed as the watchdog of the public, leaving the job to alternative and non-corporate information media.

Global Research has worked hard to bring these critical issues to the attention of our valued readers and to the forefront of respectful debate. The destruction of theenvironment, the decline of civil liberties, the erosion of international law, the growing deficit of social justice, media disinformation, and so many other topics are all regularly focused on by Global Research.

In the face of mainstream media lies, Global Research has remained independent and continues to act as a vital information portal for the public, and we are grateful to all those involved in this process.

Our reader feedback has been an invaluable source of encouragement, motivation, and growth. But we also need reader support and help.

Without the support of our readers, the Global Research websites would not exist in their present forms and we would not be able to offer our valued readers the expanded coverage and services that we presently have. We have been able to develop our activities, including this week’s much-anticipated launch of a newly redesigned website template, thanks to the contribution of Global Research readers.

Global Research does not seek financial support from private and public foundations. This is why we value every single donation and contribution made by our readers.

We encourage you to re-post Global Research articles, cite them in your work, politely talk about them to friends, use them for group discussions, and embed GRTV videos in your webpages.

DONATE ONLINE

For online donations, please visit the DONATION PAGE

DONATE BY MAIL

To send your donation by mail, kindly send your cheque or international money order, in US$, Can$ or Euro, made out to CRG, to our postal address:

Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
PO Box 55019
11, Notre-Dame Ouest
Montreal, QC, H2Y 4A7
CANADA

DONATE BY FAX

For payment by fax, please print the credit card fax authorization form and fax your order and credit card details to Global Research at 1 514 656 5294

BECOME A MEMBER

Show your support by becoming a Global Research Member (and also find out about our FREE BOOK offer!)

BROWSE OUR BOOKS

Visit our newly updated Online Store to learn more about our publications. Click to browse our titles.

Visit our newly updated Online Store to learn more about our publications. Click to browse our titles:

A note to donors in the United States: Tax Receipts for deductible charitable contributions by US residents

Tax Receipts for deductible charitable contributions by US residents can be provided for donations to Global Research in excess of $400 through our fiscal sponsorship program. If you are a US resident and wish to make a donation of $400 or more, contact us at [email protected] (please indicate “US Donation” in the subject line) and we will send you the details. We are much indebted for your support.

Chris Hedges 68

Pity the Children

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/pity_the_children_20140630/

Posted on Jun 30, 2014

By Chris Hedges
For the United States, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be over soon. We will leave behind, after our defeats, wreckage and death, the contagion of violence and hatred, unending grief, and millions of children who were brutalized and robbed of their childhood. Americans who did not suffer will forget. People maimed physically or psychologically by the violence, especially the Iraqi and Afghan children, will never escape. Time and memory will play their usual tricks. Those who endured war will begin to wonder, years from now, what was real and what was not. And those who did not taste of war’s noxious poison will stop wondering at all.
I sat last Thursday afternoon in a small conference room at the University of Massachusetts Boston with three U.S. combat veterans—two from the war in Iraq, one from the war in Vietnam—along with a Somali who grew up amid the vicious fighting in Mogadishu. All are poets or novelists. They were there to attend a two-week writers workshop sponsored by the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences. It is their voices and those of their comrades that have to be heeded now, and heeded in the future, if we are to curb our appetite for empire and lust for industrial violence. The truth about war comes out, but always too late. And by the time the drums begin beating, the flags waving and the politicians and press hyperventilating as they shout out their nationalist cant, once again we have forgotten what we learned, as if the debacles of the past had no bearing on the debacles of the future.
Joshua Morgan Folmar, 29, a bearded Marine Corps veteran from Alabama who participated in 200 combat patrols in Iraq, sat next to me. He handed me his poem “Contemplating the Cotard Delusion on the Downeaster to Boston.” It begins:

Maybe I’m a walking corpse, or maybe I’m in a coma in
Germany, or Walter Reed, sucking MREs
through plastic tubes, while a few children in Haditha pick up bone
shards from the explosion and trade them like card games for chocolate.
My head droops against the window: face reflecting broken
limbs and stagnant water, blurring against the train’s scratched safety
glass. And somewhere out there is my last combat patrol. And somewhere out there, my dead friends are waiting.

Brian Turner, 47, who was a sergeant and infantry team leader in the 3rd Stryker Brigade in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, wrote poems in a small notebook he carried while he was there. They were published in a collection called “Here, Bullet” (Alice James Books). One lament, called “Ashbah”(a transliteration of the Arabic word for “ghosts”), reads:

The ghosts of American soldiers
Wander the streets of Balad by night,
Unsure of their way home, exhausted,
The desert wind blowing trash
Down the narrow alleys as a voice
Sounds from the minaret, a soulful call
Reminding them how alone they are,
how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,
leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.

None of these veterans are at ease in America. They never will be.
“I live in a country that is so wealthy we can wage wars and not have to think about them,” Turner said. “It is a pathology handed down from generation to generation. We talk about our military. We use words like ‘heroism.’ But when will we start to care about people whose names are difficult to pronounce? The list of people lost is so vast. How do I write about this and share it in a country that does not want to hear it? We want narratives that are easy and complete, ones we can process. We want wars to be recorded the way historians or people who make tombstones in cemeteries do. They give us the start, the duration and end of the war. But for those of us who were in war it does not end. If you talk to my grandfather in Fresno, Calif., at some point during the day you will be in the presence of World War II.”
Combat brings with it trauma for those who inflict the violence as well as those who suffer it. See a lot of combat and the trauma is severe. But the worst trauma is often caused not by what combat veterans witnessed but by what they did. The most disturbing memories usually involve children. War creates bands of ragged, poor, dirty street urchins. The bands wander about the edges of a conflict looking for something to eat. They pick through the garbage dumps. They line the sides of roads begging convoys for food or chocolate. They attempt to sell a few pathetic items to make money. In Iraq they offered American troops “freaky”—the slang for European porn videos—whiskey or heroin (Turner said he doubted there was heroin in the packets). The children lived in fear. They saw their parents, brothers, sisters and grandparents publicly humiliated by occupation troops. They cowered in terror during night raids as troops kicked down the doors of their houses and herded them and their families into rooms where they were made to sit, sometimes for hours, with their arms bound behind their backs with plastic ties. They warily eyed the drones circling overhead day and night, never sure when death would rain down from the sky. They saw brothers and fathers killed. They dreamed of growing up to revenge their deaths.
Children threw rocks at convoys or patrols. They worked as spotters for insurgents and at times they carried automatic weapons. And in the long nightmare of a war of occupation, where every Afghan or Iraqi outside the perimeter of a base was viewed as the enemy, it was not long until children were targets. Soldiers and Marines often threw the bottles they used for urination inside their vehicles at children begging for water along the road.
Folmar said that on occasion children fired air guns at his patrols. The Americans were unable to tell if these were toy guns or real guns and carried out confiscations to avoid killings.
“We would go to shop owners to say, ‘Please don’t sell these,’ ” he said. “One day this kid comes out and shoots at us. We yell “Hey!” This scares him. We take the gun out of his hand. The father comes up. He is trying to figure out what is going on. We don’t have an interpreter. I was a radio operator and was usually next to my squad leader so I was to be the Arabic translator, which is hilarious because I only had two or three weeks of training. Through hand gestures and a little Arabic I tried to explain to the father why we had to take this gun away. We did not want his kid to die. If it were dark we would not know if that was [an air] gun or not. The father did not understand. I don’t blame him. I had crappy Arabic. My squad leader was exhausted and pissed. He pulled out his M9 service pistol and put it in the father’s face. He said, ‘Do you understand this?’ ”
Children threw rocks into the windshields of passing trucks. This was a persistent problem that caused some U.S. troops to answer with live fire.
“Kids would run out and throw rocks at us,” Turner said. “We were going 35 or 40 miles an hour. A rock hits you like that and you can be damaged for life. One of those kids smashed the windshield of one of the freight trucks. It jackknifed, flipped and the driver died in about 90 seconds. I remember hearing over the radio some higher-up saying, ‘You are authorized to shoot children.’ ”
The schizophrenic nature of the war meant that on some days children were to be courted and on other days threatened. The children could never tell how troops would respond.
“The rules of engagement constantly changed,” Folmar said. On some days it was shoot anything in sight. Then it would be about hearts and minds. Giving out chocolate. Giving stuff to schools that were blown to bits. We would carry candy. Then the next week the kids would scream ‘Chocolate! Chocolate!” and we would have been told to keep the kids away.”
“We were on patrol and I was pegged by a rock on the head,” Folmar said. “The father comes out of nowhere and starts whacking the shit out of this kid. We were all laughing. But later on I thought what kind of world must you live in where the father is beating the crap out of his son? It was partly out of respect. But it was also about recognizing that your kid can be killed for throwing a rock.”
“There was this point where we really started, I don’t want to say hating the children, but we were exasperated,” said Folmar, who emphasizes that he never saw Americans shoot a child during his deployment. “We became cynical. There became a moment where we realized we were stuck in it. That what we were doing was just creating a new generation that would hate each other. It never got to the point where anyone in my unit said let’s just kill them, but there became a moment when we all felt ‘What is the point?’ We were making them mad. They are going to hate us. It’s just going to continue.”
Folmar said that when U.S. troops inspected trucks at checkpoints many of the vehicles were carrying corpses to be buried and it was not uncommon to see corpses of children. “It was a regular thing,” he said.
The war in Vietnam had many of the same dynamics, with the added abuse of thousands of girls who populated brothels that sprang up outside the vast military bases and in cities like Saigon. George Kovach, 66, the third combat veteran in our group last Thursday, was wounded in Vietnam with a friend from his unit. When they were being evacuated by helicopter his friend died next to him. Forty years later he says he still fights off depression and thoughts of suicide.
“I remember soldiers chucking C-ration cans at the heads of children—I know I did, and sometimes it was worse,” he said. “There were lots of kids that were camp followers. In Vietnam these kids would point you out [to the Viet Cong]. When we left on patrol we were always worried the kids would report our movements.”
People who carry weapons and travel with armed units have a terrifying God-like power to humiliate, to demand instant and unquestioned obedience and to kill. Those who do not carry weapons live in states of unrelenting terror and powerlessness. The powerless often seek to become invisible, avoiding contact with the hydra-headed groups of killers that roam the landscape and speak in the language of violence.
Boyah J. Farah, 36, endured the war in Somalia as a teenager with his mother. He was the oldest of five siblings. During our Boston meeting he listened in silence to the stories of the military veterans, remembering, he said, what it was like to be on the other side of the divide. He quoted an African proverb: “When the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”
“Militia would come into the city and take everything,” Farah said. “Then that militia would be defeated. A new militia would come in. Each militia that came in was hungry, hungry to steal, hungry to rape. They would take everything, including our small amount of rice. If there were food on the stove they would take it. As soon as you thought you had adapted, new militias appeared.”
Turner turned to Farah. “I used to kick in people’s doors,” he said to him. “My job was to do raids night after night after night. I wonder about this now. And this is difficult for me to write about. I can write about what it is like to kick in a door. But ... I wonder about the kids that were in some of those houses. When the war is over do you feel comfortable in your own house? Do you feel safe?”
Farah shook his head. “Once you go through that experience it never goes away,” he answered. “It is like the experience you had [in combat]. I came here [to the United States] in 1993. I never feel completely safe. I never get used to the Fourth of July. As soon as I hear the boom sound [of the fireworks] the war comes. Even the bang of a door brings it back.”
“I escaped,” Farah said. “I got educated. I came to a country at peace. But most of my friends did not make it to a peaceful country. They remained behind. And those left behind lived only for revenge. When I was in the refugee camp in Kenya I heard my friend, whose father was killed, pray out loud and say: ‘God, I don’t know what you have planned for me. But I am going back and kill 100 men.’ He was 16 or 17. I am sure he went back. I am sure he killed. I doubt he is alive.”
None of this is what these veterans or children wanted. They wanted, and continue to want, what we were created for—love. And the battle with the demons of war is the battle back to what is sacred and whole in life. Some will make it. Many will not.
“The hardest thing to write about is love,” Turner said. “It comes across as sappy. This inability to write about love is part of the pathology of war. Writing about war is easy. War is addictive. I am drawn to that sort of frenetic experience. But what I want is love. I want to write poems for my wife. But when I try they are not good.”
Folmar voiced a similar thought. “I understand violence,” he said. “I can put it on a page. I can do it well. But it is the love that I can’t do. How am I supposed to write about love? Especially when I have these other things to write about. My wife asked me, ‘You write about all these sad things. When are you going to write about me?’ I have to get the other stuff out first. I am hoping I will get it out. I am hoping it will go away.”

An Afghan child looks toward the site of a suicide bombing that occurred near a NATO convoy in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, last February.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/pity_the_children_20140630

U.S. Hegemony

National Security

Court gave NSA broad leeway in surveillance, documents show

The U.S. Courthouse in Washington, where the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court resides, is seen in a parking garage safety mirror at left. (Cliff Owen/AP)

BY ELLEN NAKASHIMA AND BARTON GELLMAN June 30 at 3:07 PM

Virtually no foreign government is off-limits for the National Security Agency, which has been authorized to intercept information “concerning” all but four countries, according to top-secret documents.

The United States has long had broad no-spying arrangements with those four countries — Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — in a group known collectively with the United States as the Five Eyes. But a classified 2010 legal certification and other documents indicate the NSA has been given a far more elastic authority than previously known, one that allows it to intercept through U.S. companies not just the communications of its overseas targets but any communications about its targets as well.

The certification — approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courtand included among a set of documents leaked by former NSA contractorEdward Snowden — lists 193 countries that would be of valid interest for U.S. intelligence. The certification also permitted the agency to gather intelligence about entities including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The NSA is not necessarily targeting all the countries or organizationsidentified in the certification, the affidavits and an accompanying exhibit; it has only been given authority to do so. Still, the privacy implications are far-reaching, civil liberties advocates say, because of the wide spectrum of people who might be engaged in communication about foreign governments and entities and whose communications might be of interest to the United States.

“These documents show both the potential scope of the government’s surveillance activities and the exceedingly modest role the court plays in overseeing them,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, who had the documents described to him.

NSA officials, who declined to comment on the certification or acknowledge its authenticity, stressed the constraints placed on foreign intelligence-gathering. The collection must relate to a foreign intelligence requirement — there are thousands — set for the intelligence agencies by the president, the director of national intelligence and various departments through the National Intelligence Priorities Framework.

Furthermore, former government officials said, it is prudent for the certification to list every country — even those whose affairs do not seem to immediately bear on U.S. national security interests or foreign policy.

“It’s not impossible to imagine a humanitarian crisis in a country that’s friendly to the United States, where the military might be expected on a moment’s notice to go in and evacuate all Americans,” said a former senior defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “If that certification did not list the country,” the NSA could not gather intelligence under the law, the former official said.

The documents shed light on a little-understood process that is central to one of the NSA’s most significant surveillance programs: collection of the e-mails and phone calls of foreign targets under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act.

The foreign-government certification, signed by the attorney general and the director of national intelligence, is one of three approved annually by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, pursuant to the law. The other two relate to counterterrorism and counterproliferation, according to the documents and former officials.

Under the Section 702 program, the surveillance court also approves rules for surveillance targeting and for protecting Americans’ privacy. The certifications, together with the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, serve as the basis for targeting a person or an entity.

The documents underscore the remarkable breadth of potential “foreign intelligence” collection. Though the FISA Amendments Act grew out of an effort to place under statute a surveillance program devoted to countering terrorism, the result was a program far broader in scope.

An affidavit in support of the 2010 foreign-government certification said the NSA believes that foreigners who will be targeted for collection “possess, are expected to receive and/or are likely to communicate foreign intelligence information concerning these foreign powers.”

That language could allow for surveillance of academics, journalists and human rights researchers. A Swiss academic who has information on the German government’s position in the run-up to an international trade negotiation, for instance, could be targeted if the government has determined there is a foreign-

intelligence need for that information. If a U.S. college professor e-mails the Swiss professor’s e-mail address or phone number to a colleague, the American’s e-mail could be collected as well, under the program’s court-approved rules.

Even the no-spy agreements with the Five Eye countries have exceptions. The agency’s principal targeting system automatically filters out phone calls from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But it does not do so for their 28 sovereign territories, such as the British Virgin Islands. An NSA policy bulletin distributed in April 2013 said filtering out those country codes would slow the system down.

“Intelligence requirements, whether satisfied through human sources or electronic surveillance, involve information that may touch on almost every foreign country,” said Timothy Edgar, former privacy officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and now a visiting fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Affairs.

Those efforts could include surveillance of all manner of foreign intelligence targets — anything from learning about Russian anti-submarine warfare to Chinese efforts to hack into American companies, Edgar said. “It’s unlikely the NSA would target academics, journalists or human rights researchers if there was any other way of getting information,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the NSA, Vanee Vines, said the agency may only target foreigners “reasonably believed to be outside the United States.”

Vines noted that in January, President Obama issued a policy directive stating that U.S. surveillance “shall be as tailored as feasible.” He also directed that the United States no longer spy on dozens of foreign heads of state and that sensitive targeting decisions be subject to high-level review.

“In short, there must be a particular intelligence need, policy approval and legal authorization for U.S. signals intelligence activities, including activities conducted pursuant to Section 702,” Vines said.

On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released atransparency report stating that in 2013 the government targeted nearly 90,000 foreign individuals or organizations for foreign surveillance under the program. Some tech-

industry lawyers say the number is relatively low, considering that several billion people use U.S. e-mail services.

Still, some lawmakers are concerned that the potential for intrusions on Americans’ privacy has grown under the 2008 law because the government is intercepting not just communications of its targets but communications about its targets as well. The expansiveness of the foreign-powers certification increases that concern.

In a 2011 FISA court opinion, a judge using an NSA-provided sample estimated that the agency could be collecting as many as 46,000 wholly domestic e-mails a year that mentioned a particular target’s e-mail address or phone number, in what is referred to as “about” collection.

“When Congress passed Section 702 back in 2008, most members of Congress had no idea that the government was collecting Americans’ communications simply because they contained a particular individual’s contact information,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who has co-sponsored legislation to narrow “about” collection authority, said in an e-mail to The Washington Post. “If ‘about the target’ collection were limited to genuine national security threats, there would be very little privacy impact. In fact, this collection is much broader than that, and it is scooping up huge amounts of Americans’ wholly domestic communications.”

Government officials argue that the wholly domestic e-mails represent a tiny fraction — far less than 1 percent — of the volume collected. They point to court-

imposed rules to protect the privacy of U.S. persons whose communications are picked up in error or because they are in contact with foreign targets.

In general, if Americans’ identities are not central to the import of a communication, they must be masked before being shared with another agency. Communications collected from companies that operate high-volume cables — instead of directly from technology firms such as Yahoo or Google — are kept for two years instead of five. Some of the most sensitive ones are segregated and may not be used without written permission from the NSA director.

Privacy advocates say the rules are riddled with exceptions. They point out that wholly domestic communications may be kept and shared if they contain significant foreign intelligence, a term that is defined broadly, or evidence of a crime. They also note that the rules allow NSA access to certain attorney-client communications, pending review by the agency’s general counsel.

Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, expressed concern about the prospect of capturing e-mails and phone calls of law-abiding foreigners. “The breadth of the certification suggests that the court is authorizing the government to spy on average foreigners and doesn’t exercise much if any control beyond that,” she said.

Some former officials say that the court’s role has been appropriately limited when it comes to foreign targeting decisions, which traditionally have been the purview of the executive branch. The court generally has focused on ensuring that domestic surveillance is targeted at foreign spies or agents of a foreign power.

“Remember, the FISA court is not there to protect the privacy interests of foreign people,” the former defense official said. “That’s not its purpose, however noble the cause might be. Its purpose is to protect the privacy interests of persons guaranteed those protections under the Constitution.”

The only reason the court has oversight of the NSA program is that Congress in 2008 gave the government a new authority to gather intelligence from U.S. companies that own the Internet cables running through the United States, former officials noted.

Edgar, the former privacy officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said ultimately he believes the authority should be narrowed. “There are valid privacy concerns with leaving these collection decisions entirely in the executive branch,” he said. “There shouldn’t be broad collection, using this authority, of foreign government information without any meaningful judicial role that defines the limits of what can be collected.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/court-gave-nsa-broad-leeway-in-surveillance-documents-show/2014/06/30/32b872ec-fae4-11e3-8176-f2c941cf35f1_story.html?hpid=z1

stan van houcke

Zoeken in deze blog 🔎🔎