The Supreme Court ruled today that the United States can continue to withhold information about the CIA torture of prisoners at black sites during the early years of the post-9/11 war on terror from lawsuits trying to hold those involved responsible.
In a complex, technical ruling, six justices ruled in the federal government's favor (though there were multiple separate opinions from different justices explaining their reasoning). Justice Elena Kagan agreed with part of the ruling and dissented in part. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor were the only full dissenters.
The case, United States v. Zubaydah, revolved around Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and has been held by the U.S. since then under the belief that he was a senior Al Qaeda leader potentially planning further terrorist attacks against the United States. He was tortured extensively by the CIA, waterboarded dozens of times. He's currently a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay.
Zubaydah was reportedly held at a CIA black site in Poland as part of these interrogations. He has sued to try to hold the people who tortured him accountable. The European Court of Human Rights has already ruled that Poland violated the law when it cooperated with the CIA. The CIA and federal government, though, have refused to verify or validate that this black site actually existed. In the United States, the federal government has attempted to quash subpoenas of two former CIA contractors—James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two psychologists who consulted with the agency to develop the interrogation program—as part of Zubaydah's legal challenges. Even though there has been extensive press coverage and reports about the extent of the U.S. torture of prisoners, the CIA insists that acknowledging the existence of a black site in Poland falls under "state secrets" and that courts cannot force them to disclose the info.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled against the federal government, believing (like the rest of us) that the location of the black site was now public knowledge and that confirmation of the site's existence can no longer harm national security interests. Today the Supreme Court ruled that even though this information has entered the public domain, it can still be classified as a state secret.
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote most of the court's opinion, accepting the government's claim that even just confirming the existence of a black site in Poland is a threat to national security. The ruling is deferential to the authority of the executive branch to decide what falls under a national security interest and, therefore, can be kept secret. In this case, the CIA says that revealing whether we had a black site in Poland could impact intelligence-gathering efforts and "sensitive" relationships.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito concurred separately because Breyer's opinion wasn't deferential enough to the government. The two worried that calling for the court to probe any claim of national security privilege more deeply will lead to "judicial second-guessing of core national-security determinations." Thomas concluded that Zubaydah had demonstrated only "a dubious showing of necessity" and would have dismissed his request for that reason. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, similarly wrote that Zubaydah had only demonstrated a "dubious" need for the information. The two, however, are open to a more thorough court review if they find the claims more serious than they did in Zubaydah's situation. Nevertheless, Kavanaugh writes, "In state secrets cases, a court's review from start to finish must be deferential to the Executive Branch."
Kagan wrote separately that while she agrees with the U.S. that forcing confirmation of the black site location would pose a "reasonable danger" to national security, she does not believe that should end Zubaydah's suit. She says she'd allow him to resubmit his requests to remove all Poland-specific references to obtain the testimony he needs without revealing the locations of the black sites.
Gorsuch, joined by Sotomayor, fully dissented from the rest of the justices. Gorsuch launched a 30-page dissent with "There comes a point where we should not be ignorant as judges of what we know to be true as citizens," quoting Watts v. Indiana, a Supreme Court case from 1949 that established that police can't use coerced confessions that violate the 14th amendment as evidence at trials.
Gorsuch details the many, many sins of the CIA's torture program, which failed to actually extract the information from Zubaydah that it was looking for. He notes that while the CIA may not be willing to reveal that the black site was in Poland, the European Court of Human Rights ruled as such and cited more than 100 pages of evidence. A former president of Poland has acknowledged its existence.
Gorsuch notes that the state secrets privilege is not all-encompassing. "Even a statute that constitutionally allows federal courts to pass on matters touching on foreign affairs in most cases may, in some applications, trench on powers the Constitution reserves for the Executive," he writes, arguing that the government can't use the privilege of state secrets to conceal violations over which the judiciary has been granted the authority to redress.
Gorsuch concludes with a barn burner of a paragraph essentially accusing the court of allowing the CIA to use the state secrets privilege simply to avoid embarrassment:
Really, it seems that the government wants this suit dismissed because it hopes to impede the Polish criminal investigation and avoid (or at least delay) further embarrassment for past misdeeds. Perhaps at one level this is easy enough to understand. The facts are hard to face. We know already that our government treated Zubaydah brutally—more than 80 waterboarding sessions, hundreds of hours of live burial, and what it calls "rectal rehydration." Further evidence along the same lines may lie in the government's vaults. But as embarrassing as these facts may be, there is no state secret here. This Court's duty is to the rule of law and the search for truth. We should not let shame obscure our vision.
This is not the first time Gorsuch and Sotomayor have found themselves on the same page trying to demand more transparency from the executive branch about clandestine behavior. In November, the two of them dissented from the majority's decision not to hear a case about whether the public has the right to see opinions released by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Gorsuch's concerns were similar in that case as well: The two of them both saw the court being far too deferential to the executive branch's ability to keep information secret by declaring it a national security issue. In this particular case, the Supreme Court is insistent that it can do so even when the information is technically no longer a secret.
The post Supreme Court Rules the CIA Can Keep Mouths Shut About Its Post-9/11 Torture Black Sites appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Someone recently asked me when Congress would hold hearings to ensure the accountability of government officials who faltered during the pandemic. After all, there is lots to be learned from mistakes made at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Federal Reserve, and in the Trump and Biden administrations.
For instance, who will be held accountable for government-orchestrated lockdown policies that were in retrospect poorly designed, ineffective, and incredibly costly? Who at the CDC will be held accountable for that agency's failure to detect the virus sooner? Which CDC officials will speak to the utter confusion the agency created by constantly changing messaging and political guidance?
As for the FDA's failures, there are too many to list. But I'm not hearing anyone in power talk about, for example, holding its officials accountable for the continuing failure to approve COVID-19 testing.
Don't forget about the explosion of government spending that extended long past 2020 with no plan for post-crisis fiscal consolidation, or the Federal Reserve's failure to foresee the largest inflation in decades.
Unfortunately, in all likelihood, no one will be held accountable.
You think I'm exaggerating? Let me remind you that no one was publicly fired when President Joe Biden's Department of Defense led the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, nor when we learned that one of its drones killed a dozen innocent people by mistake. Nor did heads roll during George W. Bush's administration when it was revealed that a gaggle of CIA consultants with no credentials made millions selling ineffective and illegal torture techniques. These agents were enabled by bureaucrats across multiple agencies, many of whom still have their jobs. And no one is getting fired for the ongoing fiasco at America's southern border, where thousands of immigrant families seeking better lives suffer inhumanely.
More depressing yet is the fact that even if hearings were held and a consensus was reached over major mistakes, it would likely change nothing. After testifying in dozens of government oversight hearings on Capitol Hill, it seems to me that most are merely exercises designed to generate media coverage. Even when a particular program is unanimously flagged as wasteful or underperforming, it will almost certainly continue to be funded.
The best example of this comes from the Government Accountability Office, which publishes a report about improper payments every few years. The set of government programs making these payments always seems to involve the same offenders. But nothing happens, and the number of improper payments grows.
More recently, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was questioned by members of the House's Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations about the agency's guidance on continued mask wearing in school. Members on both sides of the aisle seemed uneasy with school mask mandates, and some noted that the studies used by the agency to justify its continued requirements had been debunked. The guidance was at odds with available evidence and with what most other countries were doing without an apparent increase in health risks.
Did this line of questioning make a difference? No. Walensky acknowledged the "limitations" of the mask studies but refused to change a thing. And so, many kids as young as two will continue to be masked at school. It's infuriating, especially since the guidance will likely change when enough Democrat-led states have lifted their own mandates. So much for following science.
It does raise the question of why people put up with it. In part, it's because most people understandably have too little information about any single, complex policy issue. In addition, The New York Times recently reported that the CDC isn't publishing large portions of available COVID-19 data out of fear that free-thinking readers would draw the wrong conclusions. But even if people demand change, they have little to no power over unelected bureaucrats.
Thousands of these unelected officials control our lives without being held accountable. That, unfortunately, will never change until we shrink government's size and scope.
COPYRIGHT 2022 CREATORS.COM.
The post The Government's Coronavirus Response Was a Complete Failure. Who Will Be Held Accountable? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), whose oversight of domestic surveillance ultimately led to Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, is alerting citizens that the CIA has been engaged in bulk collection of our private records, much like the National Security Agency (NSA).
Wyden and Sen. Martin Heinrich, (D–N.M.), both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, requested the declassification of a 2021 report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). The report, in heavily redacted form, was released on Thursday and reveals that the CIA had its own bulk data collection outside the review of Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court.
This entire program is completely separate from the NSA surveillance that Snowden exposed back in 2013. Then, the NSA contended that Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act authorized the mass collection of Americans' phone and internet metadata to gather information about potential terrorists. It sought (and received) blanket permission from the FISA Court. In 2015, after Snowden's whistleblowing, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which banned the government from collecting the data in bulk and set tighter rules for access.
This CIA surveillance is governed by Executive Order 12333, which was first issued in 1981, and is not under the purview of the FISA Court. Nevertheless, there are supposed to be precautions to ensure that the CIA is not secretly reviewing private data sent by Americans domestically. The PCLOB report explains that as part of its financial intelligence gathering on the operations of the Islamic State, CIA employees were able to collect (intentionally or not) significant amounts of data from domestic communications.
And so while this program is separate from what the NSA was doing, it had the same big flaw. While pursuing information on terrorists—what the CIA is supposed to be doing—the agency was also collecting and storing mass amounts of our private data without any warrants or any oversight outside the agency itself.
What sorts of records the CIA has collected has not been declassified, but given the comparisons and the time frame, it's easy to imagine that these are probably telephone and internet records. Wyden and Heinrich are calling for the CIA to provide details on what kind of records were collected and what legal framework they used to justify the collection.
"What these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside the FISA law," Wyden and Heinrich noted in a joint statement. "In particular, these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context."
The CIA, of course, has an extremely long history of surveilling Americans for political purposes. The Church Committee was established in 1975 to investigate allegations of domestic surveillance by the CIA, FBI, and other federal agencies. Its findings were, in part, what led to the founding of the FISA Court in 1978 to make sure that our privacy rights as Americans weren't violated by our own government.
The post New Report Highlights an Old Problem—the CIA Is Still Snooping on Americans appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The CIA reportedly had evidence that 10 employees or contract employees committed sex crimes against children. The agency fired those employees or canceled their contracts, but only one of them faced criminal charges. Buzzfeed, which broke the story, says the CIA is reluctant to prosecute employees, claiming it could reveal national secrets.
The post Brickbat: Spying Eyes appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One of the few people definitely having fun in No Time To Die, the new Bond film, is Ana de Armas, who scurries away with the picture during her relatively brief time onscreen. Armas plays a CIA agent called Paloma, and while her revelation that she's only had three weeks' training makes Bond (Daniel Craig again) a little nervous at first, he needn't have worried—in no time at all she's dropping bad guys with a repertoire of flying head kicks and full-auto chatter-gun salvos that might constitute a successful audition for the job of 008. It's too bad she isn't allowed to stick around (although she at least gets to leave under her own power, unlike many a disposable Bond girl of the past).
Armas' sparkling presence highlights the surprising droopiness of much of the rest of the movie. Oh, there are the usual lashings of action—fists fly, snarling antagonists tangle, trashed Euro cars twirl through the air—and some of it (a mad motorcycle ascent of a flight of ancient stone steps, Bond's blind leap off a bridge tethered only by a length of guide rope) is impressive. It's just not quite up to the gloriously ridiculous standards of earlier entries in the 007 franchise. And in a picture that's said to have cost some $250 million to make, glorious is what we want, and maybe ridiculous, too.
What we get instead, in a movie that runs two hours and 43 minutes, is quite a bit of talk. Because there's quite a bit to talk about—to explain, mainly. First of all, psychiatrist Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), back from Spectre, the last Bond film, seems now to be firmly established in the role of Bond's number-one lady. In a long and strangely flat introductory sequence, set years ago, we see Madeleine as a little girl being stalked across a frozen lake by a man in a creepy white Noh mask. This later turns out to be a demented terrorist called Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek, bearing perhaps the silliest Bond character name since Denise Richards' Dr. Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough). Lyutsifer, of course, wants to conquer the world, or maybe destroy it. Something like that.
Safin is headquartered on a remote island not unlike the ones occupied in the past by the villain of Dr. No, and by Donald Pleasence's Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice. First-time Bond director Cary Joji Fukunaga has no qualms about deploying nostalgic callbacks in this movie, among them Bond's Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger—its retractable machine guns still fully functional—and, rather oddly, "We Have All the Time in the World," the touching farewell song for Bond's newly deceased wife in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, now repurposed for another nostril-quivering moment in this film. (Fukunaga also attempts to undo one of the indignities imposed upon Bond in the 2006 Casino Royale—Craig's first appearance in the role—in which a bartender put to him the traditional question of whether he wanted his martini shaken or stirred, and the new, more ostentatiously modern Bond replied, "Do I look like I give a damn?" Now, in another bar scene, he's back to the traditional drink-making instruction.)
As No Time To Die begins, we find Bond retired from MI6 and living in Jamaica, separated from Madeleine after an explosive vacation incident in Italy. He thinks his spying days are over until he's contacted by his old CIA buddy Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), who wants him to do a job for the Agency in Cuba, where an important scientist named Obruchev has just been abducted by Spectre. Obruchev was supervising the development of a powerful biological weapon called Heracles, designed to spread disease via DNA and to be practically invincible. The evil fiends of Spectre are the last people who should be allowed to get their hands on it. Bond departs for Cuba.
As the story proceeds—and proceeds, and proceeds—many things happen. Bond learns that Spectre has business cards. He learns that he's been replaced at MI6 by a Black woman named Nomi (Lashana Lynch), and that she has inherited his old agent number, 007. And he is compelled to seek guidance from his longtime nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), who still controls Spectre's nefarious activities from inside the London mental facility to which he's been confined (in a pointlessly elaborate and very Lecterlike glass cage). As soon as we once again savor Waltz's purring menace in this role, we realize how insufficiently interesting Malek's Lyutsifer Safin is, despite his island "poison garden" and his weird, parboiled face. Safin is the movie's most serious flaw,
Its most successful element, disconcertingly, isn't the usual abundance of gadgets (there's only a tricky new watch) or the traditional byplay with a parade of seductive women (this is a movie with not a breath of sexy in it). What's really most effective in the film is the romance between Bond and Madeleine. Craig hasn't been encouraged to express much in his 15 years in the Bond role (this is his last go-round), but Seydoux seems to have a warming influence on him. And as Bond's love story with Madeleine evolves, it's hard not to be drawn in, and in the end to be moved by it.
All of which is well and good. But this is a Bond movie, for God's sake. Where's the snappy patter, the unconquerable joie de vivre? There are only a few things we demand of James Bond, and "I love you" isn't one of them.
The post Review: <em>No Time To Die</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On this Monday's Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie cover Biden's domestic agenda package, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and other ways D.C. exhibits dysfunction.
Discussed in the show:
1:49: Biden's domestic agenda package will allegedly cost "nothing."
27:46: The $778 billion NDAA illustrates D.C. dysfunction.
31:09: Weekly Listener Question: "While attending graduate school, it was obvious to me that people on both the left and the right have authoritarian tendencies. How do we as libertarians deal with people who can see bad instincts or tendencies in the other side but can't see those same instincts in themselves or their side? I feel like pointing out the hypocrisy won't be a productive approach, but haven't been able to come up with a way of bringing it up with friends and acquaintances who exhibit this behavior. What do you think?"
48:26: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Regan Taylor
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Check Your Authoritarian Blind Spot appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Well before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, U.S. officials had plenty of reasons for paying close attention to Al Qaeda. In addition to the 1998 bombings at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, Osama bin Laden had made his hatred of the United States well-known in a series of interviews and grandiose statements going back to 1995.
Given this long history, and given the ample evidence that Al Qaeda posed a threat to Americans, Washington's failure to stop the attacks has been a source of considerable attention and consternation. As with so much in intelligence collection and analysis, the central challenge is in separating the signal from the noise.
The 9/11 Commission report identified a series of opportunities to disrupt the 9/11 attacks, laying much of the blame on a lack of coordination and communication between the CIA and FBI, with some additional criticism leveled at the National Security Agency. In particular, the report focused on 10 instances from January 2000 to August 2001 when information regarding Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi, two Saudi nationals residing in the United States, should have been shared between the CIA and FBI. Mihdhar, Hazmi, and three others hijacked and crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on September 11. When the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General reviewed how the FBI handled intelligence before 9/11, it dedicated a chapter to information related to Mihdhar and Hazmi. According to these and other studies, a combination of bureaucratic impediments and personality clashes impeded efforts that might have complicated, or even thwarted, Al Qaeda's nefarious plans.
Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, for example, focuses on the turf battles between Alec Station (the CIA's Bin Laden unit headed up by the mercurial Michael Sheuer), the FBI counterterrorism guru John O'Neill, and White House advisor Richard Clarke. O'Neill had left the New York FBI office just prior to the attacks and taken a job as head of security at the World Trade Center. He was killed on 9/11, but both Scheuer and Clarke wrote books generally celebrating their role in trying to stop the attacks and faulting those who didn't listen.
Numerous other books, articles, and documentaries by more objective and disinterested observers have explored the CIA versus FBI story too. One of the first post-9/11 accounts, The Cell, even put it in the subtitle: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It.
Some serious and seasoned observers anticipated that the failure to share information within the sprawling national security apparatus could expose the United States to preventable dangers. In May 2001, President George W. Bush tapped Brent Scowcroft to head up a 12-member commission to assess the intelligence community and make recommendations for reform.
According to Scowcroft biographer Bartholomew Sparrow, the commissioners concluded that post–Cold War budget cuts contributed to low morale within the intelligence agencies prior to 9/11. Quoting from interviews with several commission members, Sparrow writes in The Strategist: "There was a general recognition that 'the whole concept of central intelligence had broken down. And largely because of budgetary reasons,' because the Department of Defense 'controls so much of the budget.'"
But Scowcroft also sensed that the intelligence agencies were focused on the wrong threats. "At the review board's first meeting," in July 2001, "Scowcroft said that terrorism had to be the nation's highest national security priority, but that the United States had not yet come to grips with the matter." The 9/11 Commission reached a similar conclusion. "The specific problems" associated with poor coordination and communication, the commissioners wrote, "are symptoms of the government's broader inability to adapt how it managed problems to the new challenges of the twenty-first century."
Scowcroft, the only person to have served as National Security Advisor to two different presidents, presented his recommendations to Vice President Dick Cheney in August 2001, and then returned about a month after the 9/11 attacks with a similar message. As Ron Suskind wrote in The One Percent Doctrine: "Knowing what we need to know, when we need to know it, Scowcroft said to Cheney, would mean rethinking the nature of intelligence. The intelligence function was now parceled out among a wide array of agencies, and intelligence services of the military branches." Scowcroft's conclusion: "We need a massive intelligence research library."
That isn't exactly how it played out. For one thing, the competition between the CIA and the Pentagon continued, with the latter winning many of the battles. While the intelligence agencies' budgets ballooned after 9/11, the Department of Defense grew even more. Meanwhile, the creation of a new office—the director of national intelligence—to coordinate among the various intelligence agencies engendered resistance. The post-9/11 reorganization of the various counterterrorism and homeland security agencies remains a work in progress.
Some impediments to information-sharing were there for good reason. Former CIA General Counsel Jeffrey Smith advised just after 9/11 that it would be "premature to conclude" that "rules and regulations, which have been designed to constrain the activities of an intelligence agency in a democracy…need to be thrown out just because of this one terrible intelligence failure."
He noted that Congress was already enacting new laws, and relaxing earlier restrictions to, for example, "make it easier….[to use] wiretaps to collect information," and to make that information "available to the intelligence community for foreign intelligence purposes." Smith thought these changes were appropriate, but he warned that the prior regulations "were put in place for good and valid reasons at the time. They have worked to protect the rights of American citizens, because we are still worried about an overreaching national security and law enforcement apparatus. And we're still worried about protecting American rights under the Fourth Amendment. We can move too quickly; we can move the line too far in the wrong direction, and find that we are abusing the rights of Americans."
Some now question whether the costs of U.S. counterterrorism efforts, writ large, were offset by the benefits. These include the abuses visited upon American Muslims and others. They also include the opportunity costs—how focusing on foreign terrorists, for example, may have prevented us from seeing other threats.
As we assess the counterterrorism measures instituted after 9/11, we should beware of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning. Immediately after 9/11, Americans expected there to be a wave of similarly spectacular terrorism incidents. Because that didn't occur, some have concluded that those measures must be why. But that isn't necessarily the case: We may have misinterpreted 9/11 as a harbinger, when it was really just an outlier. John Mueller and Mark Stewart have suggested that the enormous effort by the CIA and FBI to find terrorists since 9/11 mostly amounted to "chasing ghosts." Mueller's running database of the known terrorist cases in the United States since 9/11 suggests that there is a fine line between diabolical and delusional; some would-be terrorists don't deserve to be taken seriously.
In short, making it easier for the feds to find a needle in a haystack may mostly reveal lots of unthreatening hay.
The post Could the CIA and FBI Have Stopped 9/11? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others, helped create 21 million refugees and cause over 800,000 deaths, and spent over $6 trillion on combat and anti-terrorism measures. Republican and Democratic presidents and congressional leaders authorized sweeping new initiatives that effectively put all American citizens under surveillance.
Even as the United States has left Afghanistan, ending our longest war, many of the programs and mindsets born out of events 20 years ago are still firmly in place. In Reign of Terror, national security reporter Spencer Ackerman argues that the war on terror also profoundly destabilized American politics and helped to produce the Donald Trump presidency by stoking fears of a racialized Other. "The longer America viewed itself as under siege," he writes, "the easier it became to see enemies everywhere."
He talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about how a coalition of libertarians and progressives can work to stop ongoing government surveillance and military interventionism underwritten by overwrought fears of Islamic terrorism.
Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Paul Detrick. Interview by Nick Gillespie.
Photos: Randy Taylor/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom, GORAN TOMASEVIC/REUTERS/Newscom
The post Biden Won't End the Warfare-Surveillance State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>CIA vs. Bin Laden: First In. Reelz. Sunday, September 5, 8 p.m.
As the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attack approaches, there are at least a dozen TV specials available to watch, of varying merits. Here's one reason you might want to take a look at—CIA vs. Bin Laden: First In, the Reelz cable channel's documentary offering. Mike Morell, a former senior CIA official, is recounting how the agency was zeroing in on a compound in Pakistan where it suspected that Osama bin Laden was hiding out.
The CIA was intrigued by a tall figure its spy flights spotted walking briskly around the compound grounds, a man who the spooks called The Pacer—because they couldn't figure out who he really was; his face was always carefully shielded from view. Bin Laden was known to be 6-foot-5; Morell wondered if the vast U.S. counterterrorism empire that had mushroomed in the wake of 9/11 might be able to get a fix on The Pacer's exact height. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency was duly invited to examine the CIA's tapes of The Pacer, and proudly reported back to Morell that its photo analysts had established that the mysterious man was "somewhere between five and seven feet tall."
That wasn't much help with bin Laden, but it certainly offers an interesting new perspective on the Cuban Missile Crisis, when John F. Kennedy and his national security cowboys nearly took us to into a shootout with the Soviet Union after that same National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (then operating under the name National Photographic Interpretation Center) identified a bunch of shadowy objects in reconnaissance photos of Cuba as Russian missile launch pads. (By the way, if you, too, can guess a guy's height within a two-foot margin of error, they're hiring.)
It's the occasional odd anecdote like that one, coupled with a taut, dramatic construction, that make CIA vs. Bin Laden something more than a rehash of decades-old news. There's the former head of the CIA operations directorate admitting—maybe a better word is bragging—that the Navy SEALs who broke into bin Laden's compound (yes, the same one where The Pacer took his lonely walks) were bent on not capture but murder. "If we brought him to the United States, he would lawyer up," says the CIA official. "Our interest was not in building a case so we could charge him with a crime. Our interest was to prevent another major attack on the United States." Or the phone call the CIA intercepted from the house moments before the SEALs' chopper arrived, the voice not identifiable, but the message as clear as death: "They've come from above."
These details are related matter-of-factly in on-camera interviews with top officials of the West's leading intelligence agencies, including the CIA, France's DGSE and Great Britain's MI-6. Even in a world where intelligence officials are increasingly disposed to give us a peek inside through memoirs and TV documentaries, it's startling to watch a CIA boss confirm how an al-Qaeda triple agent faked his way into an agency compound with a suicide bomb that blew seven top American spies to bits.
Not that the spooks tell all. There is, for instance, not a word about how the CIA finally became convinced that they'd located bin Laden's Pakistan hideout. For a decade, the common wisdom has been that the agency set up a fake door-to-door inoculation program to collect DNA from the occupants of the house, but Morell curtly dismisses any questions along those lines: "I can't talk about that."
Perhaps some tradecraft issue still makes it impossible for the CIA to discuss that. But other omissions seem to be more a product of the desire to cover agency asses. Though some of the officials interviewed in the show say, truthfully, that the CIA had been hunting bin Laden for years before 9/11, none of them mention that the members of that unit were regarded as paranoid whack jobs who emptied rooms instantly at headquarters in Langley when they made the rounds warning that nobody outside their group was taking al-Qaeda seriously. They were such pariahs that they took to calling themselves "the Manson Family."
Not everybody interviewed in CIA vs. Bin Laden is a spy. Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick, author of three books on the war on terror, offers bits and pieces to keep the narrative on track, including the description of the raucous football-style rally outside the White House after the announcement of bin Laden's death. At last, Warrick declares, "there had been a concluding chapter to this terrible event in American history." As we saw in televised scenes from the Kabul airport last week, not quite.
The post Documentary on CIA's Hunt for Bin Laden Doesn't Truly Pull Back the Curtain appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Evan McMullin, a conservative ex-CIA analyst so disgusted with former President Donald Trump that he launched an independent presidential campaign in 2016, got on 11 state ballots, and finished in fifth place with 0.5 percent of the popular vote, has co-announced on Thursday a "new political movement" of 150 mostly right-of-center political figures, including former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, former Rep. Joe Walsh (R–Ill.), and former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, three conservatives so disgusted with Trump that they ran against him in the 2020 GOP presidential primary and lost by a combined 93 percentage points.
In a joint letter precipitated by the removal of Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.) from Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, and patterned consciously after the Declaration of Independence, McMullin and his anti-Trump co-signatories "declare our intent to catalyze an American renewal, and to either reimagine a party dedicated to our founding ideals or else hasten the creation of such an alternative."
As a political project, the would-be catalyzers face extremely long odds. The playing field of American politics these past six years has been littered with the corpses of failed or stillborn attempts to challenge Trump from the right. The only lasting third-party alternative in that span "dedicated to our founding ideals" is one that has put in a half-century of grunt work to get one percent of the vote.
But as a media and fundraising initiative, the effort may find more fertile terrain. McMullin's co-organizer of American Renewal is Miles Taylor, a government security analyst known mostly for being the anonymous author of the 2018 New York Times op-ed "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," which he then spun into the bestselling 2019 book A Warning. In August 2020, a no-longer-anonymous Taylor accused his former boss of "playing…on the Russian team and not the American team," and filmed a two-minute advertisement for Republican Voters Against Trump, a project launched by the 501(c)(4) group Republicans for the Rule of Law, which was co-founded by veteran Washington commentator and political schemer Bill Kristol.
"I'm still a Republican, but I'm hanging on by the skin of my teeth because how quickly the party has divorced itself from truth and reason," Taylor told The New York Times this week. "I'm one of those in the group that feels very strongly that if we can't get the G.O.P. back to a rational party that supports free minds, free markets, and free people, I'm out and a lot of people are coming with me."
Those people attracted to such concepts as truth, reason, "free minds," and "free markets" may find themselves nodding along to some of the principles espoused in the letter, especially if they have a strong stomach for portentous language. (The first line of the declaration reads: "These United States, born of noble convictions and aspiring to high purpose, have been an exemplar of self-government to humankind.")
McMullin, Taylor, & Co. favor "open, market-based economies…consistent with our natural liberty," reject "populism and illiberalism, whether of the right or the left," and stress that "it is the prerogative of all to make personal decisions in accordance with their free will." They want to welcome lawful immigrants, keep regulation limited, and protect property rights. So far, so unobjectionable.
Where the manifesto begins to diverge most sharply from the Libertarian Party platform is the unspecific yet ambitious paragraph titled "Leadership": "Having thrived in the abundance of a choice land, we believe that these United States must work in conjunction with friends and allies to advance worthy interests abroad and to promote freedom by example and with the judicious application of power."
This passage, in a document arranged by two security-state veterans, and unveiled in the service of supporting Liz Cheney, is a good prompt to cross-check some of the names on the bottom of the petition. Sure enough, #NeverTrump 6.0 is endorsed by several people with fingerprints all over an activist foreign policy.
There is Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, who lied to Congress about torture programs, has likened air strikes to "casual sex," and made jokes about putting Edward Snowden on a kill list. There is former national intelligence director and serial ambassador to geostrategic countries (Honduras in the 1980s, Iraq in the aughts) John Negroponte, former State Department counselor and World War IV booster Eliot A. Cohen, and former Department of Homeland Security chief and indefinite-detention enthusiast Michael Chertoff, among several other lesser-known veterans of the George W. Bush administration.
Many of these same people lent their names to anti-Trump efforts in 2016 on foreign policy grounds, then cheered on the Russia-related investigations that dogged the 45th president, and are now threatening to start their own party if Trumpism isn't sufficiently cleansed from the GOP.
That pro-market anti-Trumpers are talking about a third party while ignoring the Libertarians, even though one of the signatories (Weld) ran as the L.P. vice presidential nominee as recently as 2016, touches on each of the three main obstacles to herding Trump-averse non-Democrats into anything like a single tent.
1) The three biggest anti-Trump blocs are ideologically incompatible. It has been clear since the dawn of the Trump era that opposition to the crudely mannered America First mercantilist would come most intensely from foreign policy hawks (John McCain, John Kasich, Bill Kristol), libertarian-leaners (Justin Amash, Mark Sanford, George Will), and Mormons (Evan McMullin, Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake).
While Latter-day Saints members can swing between hawkery and dovery (just think of the significant ideological split between Utah's Republican delegation to the U.S. Senate), the fault lines are obvious: Libertarians and neocons generally dislike one another, and even the most loosey-goosey of Mormons have a hard time embracing the full legal logic of personal autonomy for consenting adults. Any movement that requires these camps to get along will likely be short-term and transactional, not unlike the 2016 third-party voters who in 2020 held their noses to vote for President Joe Biden.
2) Noisy anti-Trumpism is mostly incompatible with holding elected office as a Republican. The American Renewal letter signatures look like the roster of a political reunion for the Class of '95. In addition to two-time Massachusetts Gov. Weld, there's former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former California Rep. Tom Campbell, former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson, former Oklahoma Rep. Mickey Edwards, former Maryland Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, and dozens of others unburdened by the need to win reelection from the modern Republican electorate.
Of the vanishingly few current office-holders on the list, they tend to share a rare characteristic: recent defection from the GOP. Jim Hendren was the Republican majority leader of the Arkansas Senate until this January, when, disgusted by the Capitol riot, he stepped down from leadership, and then the next month left the party altogether. And California State Assemblyman Chad Mayes, the former Republican minority leader, left the party in late 2019 after drawing fire for his criticisms of Trump.
Prior to his departure, Mayes engaged in the kind of Third Way/No Labels activity common among many signatories of the American Renewal letter. From his Wikipedia page:
In January 2018, Mayes formed "New Way California," aiming to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party by advocating for "individual freedom, shared responsibility, educational excellence, environmental stewardship, efficient government and an open economy." The group has been publicly supported by former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and both Mayes and Schwarzenegger – along with Ohio governor John Kasich – headlined the group's inaugural summit in Los Angeles on March 21….The summit was criticized by some in the California Republican Party, including former chairman Ron Nehring, who described them as "elites talking down to grassroots voters."
As an independent and non-fan of Trump, I share the Renewalists' embarrassment at mainstream GOP fear of crossing Trump voters. Yet that is the world we live in. If you want to hold office as a Republican, and spend any measurable amount of time criticizing the former president, you better have a safe seat, stature, and bank vaults full of cash. Even then, you're going to get booed.
3) At a time of intense negative polarization, centrist scolds are popular mostly in limited corners of the media, and among opportunistic anti-Trump partisans. See: Jeff Flake, Howard Schultz, John Kasich, etc.
Arguably the most successful anti-Trump centrist initiative, at least as measured by revenue and media reach, has been The Lincoln Project, a political action committee of former GOP political operatives that raised scores of millions of dollars from Democrats to run anti-Trump ads in 2020. The project has been dogged by all kinds of scandal and controversy, particularly after the election was safely delivered to Biden.
Three of the American Renewal signatories—George Conway, Jennifer Horn, and Mike Madrid—were co-founders of The Lincoln Project; former Michigan GOP executive Jeff Timmer, too, has been a key member. Evan McMullin's most likely path to success lies less in the direction of dreary third-party construction, and more in a Lincoln Project-style initiative to raise money and make noise about the Republican Party's regnant Trumpism.
But there's an obstacle on that road, too. America's high alert about Trump has nowhere to go but down. The man is not the president, he is not going to be the president, and most people worried about such have moved on with their lives. Sure, I would love to see a GOP that explicitly rejects its most internally popular figure, just as I would love to see a Democratic Party worried about the national debt. In either case, the short-term chances of that happening are the same: slim, none, and fat.
The post Will a Coalition of Hawks, Mormons, and Libertarian-Leaners Form a New Third Party? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Black Banners (Declassified): How Torture Derailed the War on Terror After 9/11, by Ali Soufan, W.W. Norton & Co., 640 pages, $17.95
The terrorist has been captured, and the clock is ticking. FBI agents know they need to use humane interrogation methods to get the information that could stop a deadly attack. But clueless politicians in Washington want to use torture, wasting precious minutes and putting the mission at risk.
It sounds like a parody of a post-9/11 spy thriller. But it's a scenario that keeps recurring in Ali Soufan's autobiography, The Black Banners (Declassified). Soufan, a retired FBI agent who was pursuing Al Qaeda long before it was a household name, argues that secrecy and the thirst for torture made it harder to protect Americans. We would have been better served, he shows, if Washington had treated terrorism as a law enforcement problem, not an exception to the law.
Much of Soufan's story has already been told, both in the heavily censored 2011 edition of his book and in the official 9/11 Commission Report. In the months before September 11, 2001, the CIA failed to give the FBI crucial information that could have stopped the attackers and saved thousands of American lives. In the years that followed, the FBI-CIA rivalry continued to hinder counterterrorism efforts.
The new edition of The Black Banners—finally fully declassified after a lengthy legal battle—paints an even more disturbing picture. FBI agents had been waging an effective fight against Al Qaeda using ordinary interrogation tactics. But after 9/11, the Bush administration unleashed torture methods that were self-sabotaging as well as immoral.
Soufan had been tracking Al Qaeda since the 1990s, building an encyclopedic knowledge of Osama bin Laden's group. Sometimes he used this knowledge to catch suspects in a lie, flustering them and forcing them to tell the truth. Other times he got suspects to warm up to him with small talk and acts of kindness. Many terrorists knew they would have been viciously tortured by their home countries' security services; they had no idea what to make of the fearsome FBI sending a likeable Arab Muslim to chat with them over tea.
"Acting in a nonthreatening way isn't what the terrorist expects from a U.S. interrogator. This adds to the detainee's confusion and makes him more likely to cooperate," Soufan writes. "Because the interrogator is the one person speaking to and listening to the detainee, a relationship is built—and the detainee doesn't want to jeopardize it."
Soufan first caught an inkling of the 9/11 plot in 2000, while serving as lead investigator into the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. FBI agents on the ground discovered that Al Qaeda was transferring money to operatives abroad for something, and he wanted to find out what. But the CIA refused to share intelligence that, combined with the FBI's leads, could have led to the 9/11 hijackers.
Despite its failure to stop the attacks, the CIA grew more powerful after 9/11. The United States invaded Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was based, and captured scores of militants. These captives were treated neither as criminal suspects nor as prisoners of war but as "enemy combatants," a legal term invented to imply that they had no rights. Some were held at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, while the CIA disappeared others to secret black sites.
The climax of Soufan's story occurred at one such black site and nearly led him to arrest CIA officers on the spot. Pakistani forces had captured Zayn al-Abidin "Abu Zubaydah" Muhammad Hussein, a senior official from a militant training camp in Afghanistan, and handed him to the Americans in March 2002. Soufan knew of Abu Zubaydah from a previous investigation, and he was rushed to a secret base to help interrogate the prisoner.
CIA censors selectively redacted much of what happened next from the 2011 edition of Soufan's memoir. What remained could give readers the impression that torture helped soften up Abu Zubaydah. Only the 2020 edition tells the full, damning story.
FBI agents spent 10 long days interrogating Abu Zubaydah as medical personnel fought to keep the badly wounded militant alive. He cooperated quickly, even naming Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. The FBI also learned that Abu Zubaydah had trained and assisted many high-level members of Al Qaeda but was not a formal member of the group.
The Bush administration, which believed (and told the public) that it had captured Al Qaeda's third-in-command, insisted that Abu Zubaydah had simply bamboozled the FBI. So the CIA turned to former Air Force trainer and psychological consultant James Elmer Mitchell. (Although he is named only by a pseudonym in Soufan's book, Mitchell has written his own account of these events.)
Mitchell's solution, as Soufan puts it, was to "make Abu Zubaydah see his interrogator as a god who controls his suffering." In other words, torture.
Mitchell had never interrogated a terrorist. In fact, he had never interrogated anyone at all. His methods were not just cruel but bizarre. Abu Zubaydah was left naked and sleep-deprived as CIA officers blasted loud music into his cell. An interrogator playing the role of God would say "Tell me what you know?" only to leave the room every time Abu Zubaydah responded, "What do you want to know?" At one point, the CIA left a crayon in Abu Zubaydah cell, hoping he would spontaneously write down valuable information. Even other CIA officers on the ground were uncomfortable with these techniques. The pressure to torture came from the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Higher-ups eventually noticed that the information had stopped coming and gave Soufan permission to try his own methods. The torture stopped, and Abu Zubaydah began providing useful information again, leading to the arrest of wannabe bomber Jose Padilla.
Even this intelligence was distorted for political ends. Padilla had wanted to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb," and the Bush administration publicly took credit for stopping an "unfolding terrorist plot" to irradiate an American city. Soufan emphasizes that Padilla was indeed a "committed terrorist" with malicious intent, but he notes that he was "a brain transplant away" from actually building a radiation weapon. The Bush administration's statements "unnecessarily instilled fear in the American people," Soufan writes, and "made us look foolish in the eyes of al-Qaeda."
The CIA had another turn at Abu Zubaydah, and then the FBI got to interrogate him again. The cycle repeated a third time. Finally, the CIA brought in a coffin to terrify Abu Zubaydah with a mock burial. That was the last straw. When Soufan threatened to start making arrests, then–FBI Director Robert Mueller ordered his agents out of the black site.
Abu Zubaydah was extensively tortured after that. His mental state deteriorated, and he lost an eye. The information he provided under torture did not stop a single terrorist plot, but the Bush administration used some of it to justify the invasion of Iraq. In 2005, CIA officers destroyed videotapes of Abu Zubaydah's interrogation in order to cover their tracks. The following year, Abu Zubaydah was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where he told a U.S. military tribunal that he had made false statements just to make the pain stop.
Mitchell was paid millions for his services. Gina Haspel, one of the officers who destroyed evidence of Abu Zubaydah's torture, served as CIA director from 2018 to early 2021. Abu Zubaydah, who has not been charged with a single crime, is still imprisoned in Cuba.
Soufan managed to build a rapport with several detainees at Guantanamo Bay without torture. One prisoner—who knew bin Laden's wife, it turns out—even promised to provide more information if the FBI allowed him to call his family. Soufan agreed, but the U.S. military officers at Guantanamo Bay refused. Those officials "wouldn't let a detainee use a phone for a minute, which would have led to bin Laden," Soufan writes, "but they didn't mind disregarding the U.S. Constitution" with their harsh treatment of prisoners.
In September 2002, Pakistani forces handed militants Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Hassan bin Attash to the CIA. (Bin Attash is named only by a pseudonym in the book.) Soufan was given 45 minutes to interrogate them, against the wishes of CIA headquarters. Bin Attash knew that Soufan had previously treated suspects with kindness. Deciding to cooperate, he spilled the beans on Al Qaeda's plot to blow up an oil tanker in Yemen.
The CIA refused to believe that bin Attash was telling the truth and transferred him to an unnamed country to be tortured. Al Qaeda blew up the MV Limburg off the coast of Yemen the next month, just as bin Attash had warned. The attack killed one, wounded 12, and caused an oil spill.
Soufan left the FBI in 2005. He testified against torture to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2009 and remains an outspoken critic of the excesses of the war on terror. And he has something to say to his detractors: "If my account was not true, they would not have tried to censor it."
The post A Declassified Case Against Torture appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There are more than a few antique shops in historic Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, a short walk from my suburban neighborhood. Antiquing is normally of interest only if my mother-in-law is visiting, but some years back a friend messaged me to let me know one of the shops had something I should see. On the back wall, shunted behind a variety of well-preserved 19th century furniture, were two large Soviet propaganda paintings.
The first was a portrait of three strapping Russian sailors, wearing bandoleers across their chests, in front of the Aurora—the infamous ship that fired the first shot on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, launching the Russian Revolution. The second painting, of soldiers smoking in a field in Afghanistan, was less dramatic but a better and more impressionistic piece of art. Both paintings were done by well-known graduates of the Kharkov Art Institute and were fine examples of Soviet socialist realism—insofar as one can take any art movement that began under Stalin seriously. I inquired about the paintings, and all the clerk was able to tell me was that they originally came from the estate of a man named Samuel Cummings.
If you know anything about Samuel Cummings, you may suspect the two Soviet paintings were some of his more prosaic possessions. When the billionaire died in 1998, he owned, among many other things, the sword Napoleon carried at Waterloo. For years, he tried to open a museum in Alexandria to exhibit his collection of exotic and historic weaponry, though that never came to fruition.
As interesting as that sounds, Cummings' collection is in some respects less interesting than the manner in which he acquired it. For nearly 50 years, he was the largest arms dealer in the world.
In recent years, the waterfront in Old Town Alexandria along the Potomac River has been redeveloped. Some of the land was seized by eminent domain, the area turned into parks and boardwalks and otherwise made an inviting spot for tourists looking to schlep around the same streets once haunted by George Washington. But when I moved to the area a decade ago, there was also a small wooden building on the water where you could still make out a sign that said Interarms—the name of Cummings' company. The building is now gone, and it's hard to imagine that, through the 1980s, the same waterfront now littered with restaurants and boutiques was an industrial port where Cummings owned a series of converted tobacco warehouses stacked to the rafters with guns.
"At one point, we had 700,000 rifles, machine guns, pistols and submachine guns stored in our warehouses in Alexandria," Cummings told The Washington Post in 1986. "We could have instantly overwhelmed the American armed forces. We could have armed 700,000 mercenaries that could have goose-stepped right over the [Arlington] Memorial Bridge….We also had 150 pieces of artillery, ranging from 25 mm to 150 mm….So, if I didn't like a particular piece of legislation in the Congress, I could have phoned up the speaker and I could have said, 'My armies will be rolling over to the Capitol, if you don't do something about that.'"
Fortunately, Cummings was clearly joking. Well aware that such quotes were catnip to reporters, he was famously candid with the press, a remarkable trait for an arms dealer.
By the 1980s, the intrigue surrounding the Cold War's many proxy conflicts had made arms dealers figures of notable interest even in popular culture: The 1983 Chevy Chase comedy Deal of the Century was a satirical take on the arms trade, and the band Queen even wrote a song, "Khashoggi's Ship," about partying on the yacht of notorious Saudi Arabian arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. (Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, notoriously dismembered in a Saudi consulate in Turkey in 2018, was Adnan's nephew.)
But among arms dealers, no one was more intriguing than the straight-talking former CIA employee Cummings, who was born in Philadelphia and raised in D.C. but died a British citizen living in Monte Carlo.
Cummings was born in Philadelphia in 1927 to parents so wealthy they had never worked. Soon thereafter they lost everything in the Great Depression. His father died when Cummings was 8 from the stress of having to do actual labor for the first time in his life.
When Cummings was 5, he found a World War I German machine gun abandoned outside an American Legion post. An adult helped him carry the 40-pound weapon back to his house, where the boy learned to take it apart and reassemble it, sparking a lifelong fascination with guns.
After Cummings' father died, his enterprising mother found a way to make one of her primary skills as a rich woman—good taste—profitable. She convinced a local bank to let her move into a repossessed house and renovate it in exchange for a share of the sale profits. Cummings' mother proved quite adept at flipping houses this way. It eventually brought the family to D.C., where the housing market during the Depression was stronger. This unusual occupation necessitated moving the family every six months or so into a new home, but Cummings' mother was thrifty enough to put her children through some of D.C.'s better private schools.
Cummings enlisted immediately after high school, just as World War II was ending. As a teenager, he headed off to Fort Lee for basic training with his burgeoning collection of 50 guns packed into the trunk of his car. Cummings excelled in his cadet program in high school, and when he got to the Army he was so familiar with weapons and drills he was immediately made an acting corporal. He spent his hitch instructing other recruits on close-order drills and weapons handling. His 18-month service was uneventful—he never left Virginia—and in 1947 he enrolled in George Washington University on the GI Bill, earning a degree in political science and economics in just two years. While in school, Cummings pursued his hobby and supplemented his income by buying and selling guns. He even made a tidy profit after uncovering a cache of German World War II helmets in a Virginia scrapyard.
It was his time out of school during this period that proved to be the most fateful, however. Cummings headed off to Oxford for a term abroad during summer 1948. While in England, he and two friends pooled their money to buy the cheapest car they could find and toured the continent. For a young man obsessed with the military, the trip was a revelation.
Even though it had been over for years, the scale of World War II was so enormous that everywhere they went, the young men were surrounded by abandoned military equipment and fortifications. Cummings and his friends slept in bunkers, poked into arms caches, and drove around with a machine gun strapped to the roof of their car for fun. Anyone with a can of gasoline and a new battery could have driven away in one of the many vehicles abandoned on the side of the road. In the Falaise Pocket in France, six divisions of German soldiers had abandoned all of their supplies and equipment near the end of the war, never to return. European governments had resorted to gathering up mass quantities of leftover materiel and dumping it in the sea to get rid of it.
In Deadly Business: Sam Cummings, Interarms, and the Arms Trade, a 1983 biography by journalists Patrick Brogan and Albert Zarca that's long been out of print, Cummings recounts that the trip made an indelible impression. "The roads of rural England were lined with open-ended containers filled with ammunition," he said. "I couldn't get over it because they were standard-caliber small arms as well as artillery, and typical of law-abiding England, no one ever bothered with the stuff. To me it was astonishing."
After getting his undergraduate degree, Cummings' interest in guns was so consuming that he applied for jobs at the FBI, CIA, and National Rifle Association (NRA), thinking one of them might have use for a small arms expert. They all turned him down, at least initially. Cummings was working his way through law school when the CIA came calling. By then the Korean War was underway, and the agency was looking for people who could help identify the provenance of more exotic weapons that were turning up in the conflict. Cummings' old résumé was pulled out of the pile.
Unsurprisingly, Cummings proved particularly good at the work. He spent much of his time utilizing the CIA archives to enhance his already prodigious knowledge of weaponry.
Then one day a CIA report came across his desk, prepared in collaboration with U.S. military attachés in Europe, inquiring as to whether large quantities of German weapons still remained on the continent. The report concluded there was nothing noteworthy left. Cummings possessed considerable firsthand knowledge that the report was flat wrong, and he dashed off a memo saying so.
What Cummings didn't know was that the CIA had a specific reason for inquiring about surplus German arms. The agency was contemplating arming Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan to launch a new invasion of mainland China, in the hopes that such an invasion would distract the Chinese military and alleviate some of the pressure in the Korean conflict. In order for the plan to work, however, the CIA needed a supply of arms that couldn't be readily traced back to the U.S.
Cummings soon found himself summoned to a personal meeting with the then–deputy director of the CIA, Allen Dulles. The legendary spymaster quickly sized up the young Cummings as being more capable than many of his more experienced superiors, and soon Cummings was off on a clandestine mission for the ages: Dulles sent him to Europe with an unlimited budget to buy as many surplus World War II arms as he could obtain. Along for the ride was another man, Leo Lippe, a director of photography from Hollywood. Their cover story was that they were buying props for the steady stream of war films that American studios were pumping out. The two men spent months traveling to Europe's most exotic locales, doing deals with heads of state and top military leaders.
Though the plan to arm Chiang Kai-shek was never put in motion, the trip was a smashing success, with Lippe and Cummings uncovering and obtaining massive stashes of arms from Scandinavia to Italy, some of which were completely unused.
Cummings returned to the U.S. in 1952, and the agency soon dispatched him on another mission. Costa Rica was disposing of 10,000 guns and in excess of a million rounds of ammunition. Given the volatile politics of Central America, the agency didn't want the weapons to fall into the wrong hands. Cummings arranged for the munitions to be sold to Western Arms, a California-based company.
The CIA offered Cummings a permanent position. He declined. His two missions weren't just successful for the CIA—they proved to be excellent on-the-job training in dealing arms.
In February 1953, when he was just 26 years old, Cummings founded the International Armament Corporation. Interarms, as it later came to be known, started with no tangible assets. Cummings worked out of his modest house in Georgetown, and the company address was a P.O. box. He did, however, have a valuable list of contacts. Cummings composed a letter announcing he was interested in purchasing arms and fired it off to dozens of heads of state and military officials.
The first few months were disconcertingly quiet, until a letter from a colonel in the national guard of Panama arrived. The country had a relatively small weapons surplus it was looking to get rid of. Cummings flew down to inspect the lot—a mix of small arms, machine guns, and mortars—and offered $25,000 on the spot, provided Panama wouldn't expect payment until the arms arrived in the United States. Cummings quickly brokered a deal with Western Arms, whom he'd worked with in Costa Rica, to purchase the Panamanian shipment from him. He made $20,000 on the deal even after the considerable shipping costs.
That provided enough seed capital to cover travel expenses, and Cummings was off to the races. Like a lot of wildly successful ventures, the growth of Interarms was about 50 percent luck and 50 percent grit. Cummings traveled so much for the rest of the decade that he calculated he'd spent six months' worth of hours on planes. His constant absence cost him his first marriage. But his hard work, confident salesmanship, and unusual combination of discretion and blunt honesty ensured that deals started falling into his lap. Soon he had full warehouses of arms in Brooklyn and Alexandria. Many of his most notable successes involved profiting off the chaos created by energetic U.S. efforts to destabilize unfriendly governments in Latin America. Cummings soon became a Cold War Zelig—but where other historical figures got caught in the crossfire, Cummings was the crossfire.
The Panamanians referred Cummings back to Costa Rica, where he did more arms deals. The Costa Ricans, in turn, referred him to neighboring Nicaragua. In 1955, Nicaragua's U.S.-backed, right-wing Somoza government invaded Costa Rica. Cummings had armed both sides of the conflict.
Cummings' success was also a result of his brazen willingness to put profits over taking sides. When Cuban President Fulgencio Batista fled the country in late 1958, a shipment of AR-10 rifles the leader had ordered from Cummings was already en route to the island. Rather than chalk up a loss, Cummings dashed down to Cuba to demonstrate the rifles in person for Fidel Castro, the newly installed head of state, and his right-hand man Che Guevara. Castro gladly paid for the guns meant for Batista. This deal went sideways six months later, in 1959, when Cummings was again in the Caribbean visiting with one of his biggest customers, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Castro chose that moment to launch his first of many foreign escapades by sending a ragtag group of soldiers to invade the beaches of Hispaniola in an effort, presumably, to foment socialist revolution.
The assault was abruptly stymied, but Trujillo's men picked up AR-10 rifles from the Cuban expeditionary force that were identical to weapons Cummings had sold Trujillo. The dictator was furious. Cummings calmed him down by pointing out that the Cuban invasion was stopped by strafing the beaches with a handful of Swedish Vampire jets Cummings had sold Trujillo. (It was the only time Cummings, who mostly dealt in small arms, was involved in the sale of airplanes.)
Despite the hazards of dealing with such unstable leaders, Cummings famously told George Thayer, author of the seminal 1969 book on the modern arms trade, The War Business, that he liked working with dictators because "they have a sense of order and pay their bills promptly."
At the same time, Cummings rigorously observed any arms embargo imposed by the U.S. or British governments. He quickly stopped dealing with Cuba after that first sale to Castro and shut down an office in Pretoria in the early '60s when arms embargoes were imposed in South Africa.
Then there were the questions of his ongoing ties to the CIA. Arms used in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion came from Cummings. That same year, a massive quantity of Soviet ammunition—22 boxcars' worth—was unloaded off trains in Brownsville, Texas, triggering a Senate investigation into the shell companies behind the shipment. It led back to Cummings. The ammo may have been meant to support CIA operations in Indochina, where the conflicts were just heating up.
Regarding the CIA's ill-advised actions abroad during the Cold War, Cummings would dryly tell Brogan and Zarca that an agency starting wars without Congress' involvement wasn't exactly what he'd learned was in the Constitution during law school.
Cummings didn't make a massive fortune just by shuffling arms from one conflict zone to another. His real innovation was discovering there was a massive market among Americans for military surplus guns.
In the 1960s, American manufacturers such as Winchester and Remington made fine rifles—but at $100–$150 new, they were comparatively expensive. Interarms started a mail-order catalog, Hunters Lodge, that sold some military surplus rifles for as little as $9.95 (about $80 today, adjusting for inflation). They were literally marketed as "throwaway guns" a hunter could abandon in the woods after bagging his deer. It was the domestic demand for guns that caused his warehouses in Alexandria to reach peak capacity.
Also of interest is how his guns arrived in Alexandria in the first place. When Cummings started buying up warehouses in the only non-union port on the East Coast, there was just one other major company using the port: The Washington Post. Cummings struck a deal with the same Finnish shipping line that brought the paper its newsprint to also pick up his arms shipments. For years, the Post subsidized an unholy percentage of the world's small arms traffic.
Interarms' commercial peak ended in 1968, when Congress, prodded by domestic gun manufacturers upset over their lost market share, passed a law prohibiting the import of military surplus guns. (It didn't help that Lee Harvey Oswald had assassinated JFK with a cheap mail-order Italian rifle.)
Fortunately for Cummings, by then he also had a firm grip on the international arms trade. He was eagerly sought out for his ability to seemingly conjure weapons out of thin air. When the Sudanese ceremonial camel corps needed new lances, he just happened to have some World War I–era German lances made of blue steel in an Alexandria warehouse.
Governments the world over owed Cummings favors, big and small. Oddly, he was trusted by nearly everyone. When the Falklands War broke out, Argentina, as one of Cummings' biggest customers, approached him for weapons. Cummings—by then a British citizen—flatly refused to do business with the country, even as he cheerfully advised its leaders on where they might obtain what they needed. After the brief conflict ended, the British Ministry of Defense held a symposium on the war and wanted to get the Argentine military to participate as well. The diplomatic niceties could not be resolved in time for the event, so Cummings represented the Argentine position, to the satisfaction of everyone involved.
Aside from his regular dealings with the press—he received major coverage in The New York Times and was the subject of an Esquire profile in the magazine's '70s heyday—Cummings made his political influence felt in surprising ways. He had surrendered his U.S. citizenship not for any business or legal reason but for his family. By the early 1970s, he was remarried with two daughters and living full-time in Monte Carlo and Geneva. In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled that children born to Americans abroad could not become U.S. citizens unless they lived in the United States for three consecutive years before they turned 18. Both Monaco and Switzerland had restrictive citizenship laws, so his children were destined to be stateless. Cummings applied for and received British citizenship, surrendering his status as an American so his children could get a passport.
Still, surrendering his birthright chafed him quite a bit. Instead of making good on sending soldiers from Alexandria over the Memorial Bridge to threaten Congress, Cummings hired a lobbyist to change the law like everyone else. In 1980, thanks in part to his efforts, Congress passed legislation invalidating the Supreme Court ruling and allowing his daughters to claim U.S. citizenship.
The final noteworthy episode of Cummings' life was a tragedy—but an ironic one, considering how much he both doted on his children and courted press attention. In 1997, his daughter Susan shot and killed her unfaithful Argentine polo player husband on the lavish estate in Virginia's horse country that her father had given her. She claimed the husband was abusive and had threatened her with a knife. She was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and spent 57 days in jail.
The episode was irresistible to the gossip rags. Cummings died of a series of strokes in April 1998, the same month a lurid Vanity Fair story about his daughter's crime was on newsstands. He was 71.
At the time of Cummings' death, the industrial Alexandria waterfront was already largely redeveloped. He would be unsurprised to see tourists eating ice cream where his lethal empire once stood. But while Interarms' warehouses may be gone, the news that Americans bought 5 million new guns this year would certainly bring a smile to Cummings' face.
The post The All-American Arms Dealer appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Have you ever wanted to piece together an international conspiracy with nothing but a bunch of newspaper clippings, a corkboard, and some red twine? If you're reading this, there's an above-average chance you have, in which case you should check out A Hand With Many Fingers.
This indie computer game puts you in the shoes of a researcher spending a few late-night hours alone (or are you?) in a CIA archive. The gameplay is actually just doing archival research: flipping through card catalogs, retrieving cardboard boxes from the basement, and pinning the clippings you find onto your corkboard.
The incident you investigate is the real-life 1980 death of an Australian banker, whose associates included former CIA agents and U.S. special forces soldiers. You uncover a story of Cold War dirty laundry as you use the tidbits you find to pursue new leads. The game approximates the feeling and satisfaction of doing actual investigative work fairly well. It's short enough that it doesn't wear out its welcome, and it's only $5.
For those who like to connect dots, A Hand With Many Fingers scratches that very particular itch. It even manages, with impressively minimal effort, to be spooky. You might find yourself looking over your shoulder as you play.
The post A Hand With Many Fingers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Members of the political class are buying into burgeoning fantasies about a second civil war, indulging visions about sparring with parts of their own subject populations. In the wake of recent conflicts culminating in the Capitol riot, prominent figures have been extrapolating from our violent polarization to a dystopian future of insurgency within our borders. Officialdom seems dead set on fanning the sparks of existing political strife into something resembling a national house fire.
"The challenge facing us now is one of counterinsurgency," Robert Grenier, former CIA station chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan and later director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, insists in The New York Times. "Though one may recoil at the thought, it provides the most useful template for action."
The danger, Grenier adds, lies in "a large, religiously conservative segment of the population, disproportionately (though not entirely) rural and culturally marginalized." He doesn't believe that the entire segment is violent, but it constitutes "a mass of citizens—sullen, angry and nursing their grudges—among whom the truly violent minority will be able to live undetectably, attracting new adherents to their cause."
In a subsequent NPR interview he elaborated, "I think what is most important is that we drive a wedge between those violent individuals and the people who may otherwise see them as reflecting their interests and fighting on their behalf."
Days earlier, former CIA director John Brennan had similarly claimed that the Biden administration is focusing on "what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we've seen overseas," consisting of "an unholy alliance" of "religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, Nativists, even libertarians."
Brennan added that officialdom is "doing everything possible to root out what seems to be a very, very serious and insidious threat to our democracy and our republic."
While neither Grenier nor Brennan are currently in government, both are well-connected and influential. Tellingly, the same day that Grenier's Times screed appeared, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a terrorism bulletin that read like a sales brochure for the former CIA officials' desired domestic policies.
"The Acting Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin due to a heightened threat environment across the United States, which DHS believes will persist in the weeks following the successful Presidential Inauguration," warned the bulletin. "Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence."
As the DHS bulletin suggests, worries about violence and "insurgency" are rooted in reality. The Capitol really was stormed by Americans convinced, despite the evidence, that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. People died in the violence. The Republican Party around which they've coalesced has largely become a cult of personality venerating the former chief executive.
But few members of the rural and conservative segment of the population that troubles insurgency war-gamers are QAnon devotees, and only a tiny sliver had anything to do with the Capitol riot. If they come to support "violent individuals" because they "see them as reflecting their interests and fighting on their behalf," it will be because of deeper divisions and resentments that brought them to that point.
And those resentments really are deep. According to January YouGov polling, 53 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of Republicans, and 57 percent of Independents "think that the biggest threat to their way of life comes from domestic enemies."
The best way to calcify those perceptions of "domestic enemies" is for a government in the hands of one political faction to start treating its opponents as insurgents. That will inevitably entail the excesses and abuses that come with turning the security services loose not just on those who have committed crimes against others, but on whole segments of society viewed as potential threats.
"Overreactions give people an incentive to become terrorists—not only by creating grievances but also by reducing the relative risks of turning to violence," Northeastern University's Max Abrahms, a professor of public policy, recently cautioned in Reason. "A standard assumption in political science is that terrorists are rational actors. Many people decide against becoming terrorists because they know that the costs to them will be severe. But if the government is going to treat innocent people like terrorists anyway, then no additional risk is incurred."
Writing before Grenier's call for counterinsurgency efforts, Abrahms pointed out that John Brennan "did not distinguish between those who use extreme tactics and those with whom he disagrees politically. For Brennan, both are enemies worthy not only of contempt, but action or at least government scrutiny."
Grenier, for his part, wants to adopt tactics used in Afghanistan and Iraq, but neither country is exactly doing spectacular 20 years after the U.S. invaded and began battling insurgents. Iraq's capital city recently suffered two suicide bombings and the Biden administration is poised to, again, delay the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan because of escalating fighting in the country. Do we really want to inflict comparable counterinsurgency campaigns on our own country and risk similar outcomes?
That doesn't mean that we're helpless against politically motivated violence. Grenier rightly suggests that we "investigate and bring to account those who commit crimes." It makes sense to target people for harming others rather than for belonging to suspect groups. If he'd stopped there without talking about counterinsurgency efforts against whole communities, his column would have been unobjectionable.
We also should do something about Americans' perception of each other as "domestic enemies." We can't make people like each other, but we can pry their hands from each other's throats by decentralizing governance so that decisions are made as close as possible to affected individuals. Then, hostile communities couldn't use the reins of power to torment each other and would have fewer grounds for conflict.
Giving Americans less reason to hate and battle each other sounds a lot more promising than deploying counterinsurgency tactics at home and risking making a bad situation much worse.
The post Americans Shouldn't Be Treated Like ISIS Insurgents appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President-elect Joe Biden is being warned not to bring torture apologists who served under President Barack Obama into his administration.
The Daily Beast reported this week that Biden was considering Michael Morell as a potential CIA director, but Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) had objections. Wyden publicly warned that Morell, who served as deputy director of the CIA under Obama, shouldn't be considered due to his past ties in obscuring CIA torture. CNN subsequently interviewed Wyden:
"No torture apologist can be confirmed as CIA director. It's a nonstarter," Wyden told CNN, referring to Morell's previous suggestions that the agency's so-called "enhanced interrogation" of terrorists was both effective and moral—claims that go further than those made by other officials who have faced scrutiny over the agency's handling of detainees at black sites, including former Director John Brennan and current Director Gina Haspel.
Wyden isn't the only person trying to raise alarms about Morell. Over at Just Security, Scott Roehm, along with Daniel Jones (who investigated the CIA torture and wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on it), also warned against Morell. They note Morell's role in essentially absolving CIA staff (including current CIA Director Gina Haspel) of responsibility for destroying tapes of CIA torture of suspected terrorists during the Iraq War. He was also responsible for the CIA's response to the Senate's torture report, insisting that the CIA's methods had resulted in actionable intelligence. They had not. Roehm and Jones write:
In an interview … Morell said he rejected the description of the CIA program as torture "because to call it torture says my guys were torturers" and "I'm going to defend my guys to my last breath." He would go on to vocally support Haspel and her candidacy for CIA director.
CNN reported that Nick Shapiro, a spokesperson for Morell, insists that Morell was not familiar or involved with the CIA's torture program, didn't learn about it until 2006, and has since said that "he believed that waterboarding is indeed torture."
Biden hasn't named his choice for CIA director yet, but he did name Avril Haines as his choice for director of national intelligence. But Haines comes with similar baggage. Haines also supported Haspel's nomination as CIA director. And as deputy CIA director for a year under Obama, CNN notes, Haines made the decision not to punish any of the CIA employees who were secretly snooping on Jones and other Senate staffers working on the torture report.
As we start transitioning back to a Democratic administration, this fight is a reminder about the bipartisanship that drives a lot of the worst tendencies of national intelligence behavior. For anybody who might have forgotten what that looks like, check out The Report, which dramatizes the Senate's investigation of the CIA and absolutely does not shield the behavior of leaders under Obama from criticism.
The post Will Obama Torture Apologists Make a Triumphant Return to Joe Biden's White House? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Almost 70 years after a U.S.-backed coup deposed the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and replaced him with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the leader of Iran, relations between the two countries remain at a fever pitch. Just days ago, President Donald Trump, responding to unspecified intelligence reports, threatened that "any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!"
In the new documentary Coup 53, Taghi Amirani tells the story of how British and American secret agents overthrew Mossadegh after he nationalized the oil industry, starting a series of events that would lead to the rise of the autocratic, U.S.-hating Islamic regime that continues to reign to this day. Beyond its tragic effects on Iran and the Middle East, Amirani argues that the seemingly easy 1953 coup became the "playbook" for future U.S. covert actions in countries such as Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, and beyond, forever changing the face of global politics.
In a wide-ranging conversation about immigration, foreign policy, and filmmaking, Amirani tells Nick Gillespie that Trump's policies, like those of all U.S. leaders, are "the product of the military-industrial complex and that, ultimately, matters more" than whatever a president enters office thinking.
The post Taghi Amirani: How the U.S.-Backed 1953 Coup in Iran Is Still Changing Global Politics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>We are often told that law enforcement must have a way to get around strong encryption technologies in order to catch bad guys. Such a "backdoor" into security techniques would only be used when necessary and would be closely guarded so it would not fall into the wrong hands, the story goes.
The intelligence community does not yet have a known custom-built backdoor into encryption. But intelligence agencies do hold a trove of publicly unknown vulnerabilities, called "zero days," they use to obtain hard-to-get data. One would hope that government agencies, especially those explicitly dedicated to security, could adequately protect these potent weapons.
A recently released 2017 DOJ investigation into a breach of the CIA Center for Cyber Intelligence's (CCI) "Vault 7" hacking tools publicized in 2016 suggests that might be too big of an ask. Not only was the CCI found to be more interested in "building up cyber tools than keeping them secure," the nation's top spy agency routinely made rookie security mistakes that ultimately allowed personnel to leak the goods to Wikileaks.
The released portions of the report are frankly embarrassing. The CCI cyber arsenal was not appropriately compartmentalized, users routinely shared admin-level passwords without oversight, there seemed to be little controls over what content users could access, and data was stored and available to all users indefinitely. No wonder there was a breach.
It gets worse. Because the CIA servers lacked activity monitoring and audit capabilities, the agency did not even realize it was hacked until Wikileaks publicly announced it in March of 2017. As the report notes, if the hack was the result of a hostile foreign government like, say, China, the CIA might still be in the dark about the hack. Might there be other unknown breaches that fit this bill?
The report recommended several measures the CIA should take to shore up its internal defenses. Among the few that were not redacted: do a better job of protecting zero days and vetting personnel. Okay, so don't make all of the same mistakes again: got it.
Well, it looks like even this goal was too ambitious for the CIA. Intelligence gadfly Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), who first publicized the report, wrote a letter Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe stating that "the intelligence community is still lagging behind" three years after the report was first published. He demanded public answers for outstanding security problems in the intelligence community, such as a lack of basic practices like multi-factor and email authentication protocols.
What a snafu. It is absurd enough that the CIA of all places cannot even implement basic password protection programs. But when intelligence hacking units cannot even manage to protect its own hacking tools, our troubles multiply.
The CIA is unfortunately not uniquely incompetent among the intelligence community. The National Security Agency (NSA) found itself the victim of a similar zero day link in the 2016 Shadow Brokers dump. These are just two incidents that the public knows about. A culture of lax security practices invites attacks from all kinds of actors. We don't know how many times such hacking tools may have been discovered by more secretive outfits.
Many policy implications follow. There is a strong case to be made that intelligence agencies should not hoard zero-day vulnerabilities at all but should report them to the appropriate body for quick patching. This limits their toolkit, but it makes everyone safer overall. Of course, foreign and other hostile entities are unlikely to unilaterally disarm in this way.
The intelligence community supposedly has a process for vetting which zero days should be reported and which are appropriate to keep secret, called the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP). Agencies must describe a vulnerability to a board who decides whether it's dangerous enough to need patching or useful enough for spying purposes.
For example, a vulnerability in some technology that is only used in China would probably be kept for operations. Theoretically, a vulnerability in some technology that is widely-used in the United States would be reported for fixing to keep Americans safe. As these incidents show, this does not always happen.
The VEP process is clearly insufficient, given these high-profile breaches. The very least the intelligence community can do is appropriately secure the bugs they've got. Efforts like Wyden's seek to impose more accountability on these practices.
There's a more general lesson about government efforts to improve security and privacy as well.
As implied earlier, we should strongly resist government efforts to compromise encryption in the name of law enforcement or anything else. Some of the most technically savvy government bodies cannot even secure the secret weapons they have not advertised. Can you imagine the attack vectors if they publicly attain some master encryption-breaking technique?
It also demonstrates the weaknesses of many top-down proposals to promote privacy or security. Government plans often attempt to sketch out master checklists that must be followed perfectly on all levels to work well. They can be time-consuming and burdensome, which means that personnel often cut corners and shirk accountability. Then when disaster inevitably strikes, the conclusion is that "people didn't stick to the plan hard enough," not that the plan was generally unrealistic to start.
There isn't a lot that the public can do about seemingly out-of-control intelligence agencies failing to secure potent cyberweapons beyond making a fuss. "National security" and all that. But it does give us a powerful argument against granting more power to these insecure intelligence bodies to break strong encryption. Governments can't even protect their secret cyber weapons. They almost certainly will not be able to protect a known backdoor into encryption.
The post The CIA Can't Protect Its Own Hacking Tools. Why Should We Trust Government Privacy and Security Proposals? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2013, Barton Gellman of The Washington Post started publishing stories about what he called the "surveillance-industrial state" based on documents given to him by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. Along with work done by filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald, Gellman's exposés laid bare an extensive and previously unacknowledged network by which the federal government systematically and illegally spied on American citizens and routinely circumvented checks on its power.
Gellman has just published Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, which tells the story of his interactions with the whistleblower, bureaucrats, politicians, and the media as he helped reveal one of the biggest secrets in U.S. history. Nick Gillespie spoke with him about his new book and earlier, Pulitzer Prize-winning work that revealed how Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others in the Bush administration exceeded constitutional limits in the name of prosecuting the war on terror.
They also discuss national surveillance in light of the two major-party presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Former heads of intelligence services are "much less sanguine about the government accumulating this enormous machinery of surveillance" with Trump in the White House because they openly acknowledge "it is subject to horrific potential abuse," says Gellman. At the same time, he stresses that Biden, who served in the Senate for decades and eight years as vice president under President Barack Obama, "has not been an apostle of transparency in the national security world. He was a strong backer of the prosecution of whistleblowers and leakers in the Obama administration and there were more prosecutions with charges of espionage against people who talked to journalists during the Obama administration than in all previous administrations combined, which had a chilling effect on national security reporting."
The post Edward Snowden, the Surveillance State, and the 'Dark Mirror' Still Watching Us All appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When Edward Snowden decided to reveal constitutionally dubious mass surveillance programs operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, one of the three people he contacted was Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with a long history at The Washington Post. In his riveting new book, Dark Mirror, Gellman details his intense relationship with arguably the biggest whistleblower in U.S. history, the angry response of leaders of the national security community, and the ways in which the privacy of ordinary Americans remains at risk from the state.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Gellman puts the Snowden revelations in the context of post-9/11 actions by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other members of the Bush administration who ignored constitutional limits on executive power; the Obama administration's false claims to transparency; and the understandable ambivalence of major tech companies to work with a government that is simultaneously threatening and trying to protect American lives.
Gellman also comments on the reputations of President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden in the intelligence community. Former heads of intelligence services are "much less sanguine about the government accumulating this enormous machinery of surveillance" with Trump in the White House because they openly acknowledge "it is subject to horrific potential abuse," says Gellman. At the same time, he stresses that Biden, who served in the Senate for decades and for eight years under President Barack Obama, "has not been an apostle of transparency in the national security world. He was a strong backer of the prosecution of whistleblowers and leakers in the Obama administration and there were more prosecutions with charges of espionage against people who talked to journalists during the Obama administration than in all previous administrations combined, which had a chilling effect on national security reporting."
Edited by John Osterhoudt, Intro by Lex Villena.
Photo credits: "Redacted Image" ID 95960034 © David Andrews | Dreamstime.com; "Bartman Gellman" Phil McAuliffe/Polaris/Newscom; "Glenn Greenwald" Gage Skidmore;
"Laura Poitras" Laura Poitras; Eyeball ID 22934579 © Gandolfo Cannatella | Dreamstime.com; "Dick Cheney" JONATHAN ERNST/picture alliance/Consolidated/Newscom
The post How Edward Snowden Revealed the 'Dark Mirror' of the Surveillance State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"You have to make this work! It's only legal if it works!" yells a CIA functionary overseeing the torture of prisoners in overseas black sites. It seems unlikely that an actual CIA leader would yell something so on-the-nose, but this is The Report, Amazon Prime's attempt to dramatize not just the "enhanced interrogations" that took place under President George W. Bush but the concealment of these tactics by the CIA (from Congress and Bush himself), the fight by the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate what happened, and ultimately the Obama administration's failure to hold anybody to account.
The name of the movie is actually The Torture Report, but the word torture is cleverly redacted. The torture is not redacted from the film, though; it's re-enacted in vivid flashbacks. The protagonist—Senate investigator Daniel Jones, portrayed by Adam Driver—attempts to determine what happened at these CIA sites, why, and what laws might have been broken.
That's just half the movie. The other half is the intense struggle to get any of the information into the hands of the public. We see how the CIA attempted to block the report's release and even engaged in illegal surveillance against Senate staff, then accused the staffers of hacking into the computer system of America's spy agency.
The Report ends on the dour real-world reminder that there's been no real punishment of the people involved in the decision to torture detainees—or even for the CIA staff who illegally snooped on Jones' work.
The post The Report appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>U.S. officials have been insisting to tech platforms that overly strong encryption is a threat to public safety and that "back doors" must be provided for law enforcement to bypass security, all in the name of fighting crime.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials have also been claiming that China-based tech company Huawei can use secret security bypasses that are intended for law enforcement use only in order to access data that could be used by the Chinese government for surveillance purposes.
In summation: The same U.S. government that wants tech companies and telecoms to create secret software doors that would allow it to snoop on our private communications and data is also worried that other governments will be able to use those same back doors to do the same thing. This is what tech privacy experts have been warning U.S. officials (and U.K. officials and Australian officials) all along: Any back door that allows law enforcement to circumvent user privacy protections will ultimately be used by people with bad intentions.
The context here is a Wall Street Journal report that reveals U.S. officials have been quietly telling allies that Huawei can secretly access data from its phone networks through taps that the company built into the hardware it sells to cellphone carriers. Laws mandate that Huawei (and other telecom companies) install these "interception interfaces" into their equipment, but only authorized law enforcement officials are supposed to have access. Even Huawei itself is not supposed to be able to gain access without the permission of the phone carriers. But U.S. officials are insistent that Huawei has maintained secret access to these taps since at least 2009.
Huawei says these claims are not true and that these hardware taps can only be accessed by "certified personnel of the network operators." The company also insists it is not surveilling data and passing it along to the Chinese government.
The story leans heavily on U.S. claims from secret intelligence that has recently been declassified, but it's not exactly proof of the claims.
On a surface level, this is about the global tech market and the competition between China and the United States. But dig deeper and you can see the relevance to our encryption fight.
The FBI and Department of Justice insist that tech companies need to be adding similar, virtual back doors in our communication tools, phones, and apps in the name of fighting crime and terrorism. People like FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General William Barr are willing to discuss encryption back doors only in terms of how it helps the U.S. government. But this Wall Street Journal report makes it clear that the U.S. government is abundantly aware that any access point (real or virtual) to look at private data is a point of vulnerability.
If this intelligence is true, it means that any government-mandated encryption bypass is potentially abusable and the U.S. should not be demanding tech companies make them, lest the Chinese government (or Saudi government, or Russian government, or United Arab Emirates, or identity thieves with hacking skills) get their hands on whatever mechanism created for law enforcement use only.
If the intelligence is not true, it nevertheless makes it clear that the United States understands that back doors create huge vulnerabilities. Government officials know full well that the Justice Department's demands are unreasonable and should be shut down, and lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) should not be proposing bills to force companies to implement encryption back doors.
But then, perhaps I should simply stop treating the Justice Department and Congress as though they're making these arguments in good faith. You see, yesterday, the Washington Post published a very different story about encryption and data privacy. It turns out that, for decades, the CIA and German intelligence owned and secretly operated an encryption company named Crypto AG. They sold compromised encryption technology to other countries, then secretly spied on them. The Washington Post reports that
they monitored Iran's mullahs during the 1979 hostage crisis, fed intelligence about Argentina's military to Britain during the Falklands War, tracked the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and caught Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco.
Germany left the partnership in the 1990s, fearing exposure. So the CIA ran the company until 2018 when it liquidated Crypto AG and sold it off to two companies, one of whom apparently had no idea about its secret background.
We should be wary of the U.S. government doubling down on its efforts to compromise encryption, especially now that Crypto AG is not of use to the CIA. We know full well those back doors are going to be used for a lot more than trying to track down alleged pedophiles, and the federal government knows that, too.
The post CIA Encryption Meddling and Chinese Espionage Allegations Make It Clear: We All Need Strong Data Protection appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"You have to make this work! It's only legal if it works!" yells a CIA functionary overseeing the torture of prisoners in overseas black sites.
She's yelling at the two smarmy psychologists who came to the CIA to design and encourage the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques"—torture—on the men the CIA had secreted away after the September 11 attacks. The psychologists had insisted these measures would result in the CIA learning new actionable intelligence to help keep Americans safe from new terror attacks. It wasn't working.
It seems unlikely that an actual CIA leader would yell something so on-the-nose, but this is The Report, a Hollywood attempt to dramatize not just the CIA torture that took place under President George W. Bush but the concealment of these tactics (from Congress and Bush himself), the fight by the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate what happened, and ultimately the Obama administration's failure to hold anybody to account for some truly terrible behavior.
The name of the movie is actually The Torture Report, but the word "torture" is cleverly redacted to indicate the secrecy level. The torture is not redacted from the movie, though; all of it (including waterboarding and a forced enema) is re-enacted in vivid flashbacks. The protagonist—investigator Daniel Jones, portrayed by Adam Driver—attempts to determine what happened at these CIA sites, why, and what laws might have been broken in the process.
The investigation itself (which was supported at first by almost the entire Senate Intelligence Committee only to see it become a partisan battleground during Obama's presidency) represents only half the movie. The other half is the massive struggle to try to get any of the information into the hands of the public. We see how the CIA attempted to block its release and even engaged in illegal surveillance against the Senate staff, then accused the staffers of hacking into the computer system of America's spy agency.
The movie's available now on Amazon Prime. It's a good time to watch it, given the American drone strike that just took out Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani. As information about the torture became public knowledge, the government's defenders insisted that this unauthorized and brutal behavior helped protect Americans and provided valuable actionable intelligence. But Jones' investigation showed that the torture failed to provide the CIA with any intelligence it didn't already have or was able to access by other means, a conclusion that was also reached by the CIA itself in an internal report (known as the Panetta Report after former CIA Director Leon Panetta). The investigation showed that many of the detainees the CIA tortured shouldn't have been taken in the first place and didn't even have useful information to share.
In hindsight, we can see that none of this helped stabilize the Middle East in any substantial way. We are most certainly not safer as a country as a result of the CIA's torture methods. One lesson of The Report is that people in positions of power have a vested interest in telling us that whatever brutal actions they back will help keep America safe, even if that's not really true.
And to be clear here, this is not a #Resistance movie. While The Report accurately portrays Senate Democrats as leaders who kept the investigation going, it also makes clear that the Obama administration is one of the forces working against them. Ted Levine plays former CIA Director John Brennan as a cocky and obnoxious jerk who seems interested only in protecting the CIA from criticism. Brennan, who tried to get Jones fired and possibly even charged with a crime, is unmistakably presented as a villain; his current critiques of the Trump administration do not shield him from criticism.
The film's handling of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.), by a no-nonsense Annette Bening, is also interesting. The Report does not shy away from Feinstein's authoritarian streak. She declares at one point in the movie that she believes whistleblower Edward Snowden is a traitor, and she later mentions her support for Obama's secret drone warfare (newly relevant after Thursday's assassination). Nobody challenges her views, unfortunately, but the movie also pivots from giving her the big anti-torture speech at the end to showing an actual clip of deceased Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) giving a speech on the Senate floor opposing the use of torture by the CIA.
The Report ends on the dour real-world reminder that there's been no real punishment of the people involved in the decision to torture detainees—or even for the CIA staff who illegally snooped on Jones' work. The current director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, oversaw one of the black sites in Thailand where waterboarding occurred. Brennan is now a television news regular as an intelligence analyst and expert. Advisors who push the country in harsh and violent directions rarely pay a price when they're wrong. Keep that in mind as these same voices insist that whatever violence the Trump administration has in mind for Iran will make our country and the Middle East safer.
The post To See How Our Last 'War on Terror' Went Awry, Watch <em>The Report</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that the U.S. government has the authority to seize the proceeds of Edward Snowden's book because he failed to submit his book to the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) for pre-publication review to analyze any classified information printed within.
The ruling, by Liam O'Grady, U.S. District Judge of the Eastern District of Virginia, is a perfect encapsulation of the letter of the law and also the bizarreness of its application. Snowden's book, Permanent Record, documents his decision to blow the whistle on the NSA's secret surveillance and mass unwarranted collection of Americans' communication data. He is currently a fugitive from the Department of Justice (DOJ), living in Russia, charged with espionage, though many Americans see him as a hero.
Snowden's former work agreements with the CIA and NSA are clear that he (and any other employee) must submit the contents of books or speeches for review. There is no exception to account for him blowing the whistle on what many Americans see as misconduct. He's still supposed to submit his book for review to the very agencies whose misbehavior he was revealing. So in response to the book's publication, the DOJ sued Snowden and his publishers, demanding the money from both the book and from Snowden's public presentations.
It seems very unlikely that Permanent Record would get a fair review from the CIA and NSA but the rules don't care. O'Grady even canceled a planned hearing for verbal arguments because he said they weren't necessary. O'Grady notes in the ruling that "there is no genuine dispute of material fact publicly disclosed the type of information and materials described above in Permanent Record and his speeches…" So, he loses and the feds will get to take the money he would have made from the book, a New York Times bestseller.
Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who helps represent Snowden, put out a statement saying, "It's farfetched to believe that the government would have reviewed Mr. Snowden's book or anything else he submitted in good faith. For that reason, Mr. Snowden preferred to risk his future royalties than to subject his experiences to improper government censorship." He also calls for reforms to an "unfair and opaque pre-publication review system affecting millions of former government employees."
Snowden's team is considering their options.
Read the ruling here. Read an excerpt from Permanent Record here.
The post The Feds Get Permission To Seize Edward Snowden's Book Profits appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On the impeachment front… The anonymous whistleblower complaint about Donald Trump's July call with Ukraine's president (and subsequent alleged attempts to cover it up) was apparently lodged not long after a CIA officer raised the issue around the office.
"The officer first shared information about potential abuse of power and a White House cover-up with the C.I.A.'s top lawyer through an anonymous process," The New York Times reported on Thursday night. "The lawyer shared the officer's concerns with White House and Justice Department officials, following policy."
Then, about two weeks later, the officer "decided to file a whistle-blower complaint to [inspector general for intelligence agencies Michael] Atkinson, a step that offers special legal protections, unlike going to a general counsel," according to the Times.
Lawyers representing the person who filed the whistleblower complaint did not confirm that the CIA agent was their client, saying: "The whistle-blower has a right to anonymity."
Executive Editor Dean Banquet defended the paper's decision:
We decided to publish limited information about the whistle-blower—including the fact that he works for a nonpolitical agency and that his complaint is based on an intimate knowledge and understanding of the White House—because we wanted to provide information to readers that allows them to make their own judgments about whether or not he is credible. We also understand that the White House already knew he was a C.I.A. officer.
Meanwhile, Trump isn't letting whistleblowers and the possibility of impeachment dim his capacity for cruel immigration policy. Yesterday the administration announced that it would lower the refugee cap from its current 30,000 down to 18,000.
"The coming year's 18,000-person cap will be the lowest since the refugee resettlement program began in 1980, a major shift from the 110,000 refugee admissions former President Barack Obama proposed for fiscal year 2017," Politico points out.
The announcement comes at the same time as new figures on dwindling immigration rates:
The net increase of immigrants in the American population dropped to about 200,000 people in 2018, a decline of more than 70 percent from the year before, according to William Frey, chief demographer at the Brookings Institution, who conducted the analysis.
"It's remarkable," said David Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, of the 2018 numbers. "This is something that really hasn't happened since the Great Recession. This should be very concerning to the administration that its policies are scaring people away."
Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner Excitedly Hoping Nation's Newfound Approval Of Whistleblowers Will Get Them Out Of Jail https://t.co/De1wwq0xEQ pic.twitter.com/jrXLoedY1N
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 26, 2019
Young people are leaving big cities. "Large U.S. cities lost tens of thousands of millennial and younger Gen X residents last year, according to Census figures released Thursday that offer fresh signs of cooling urban growth," The Wall Street Journal reports. According to the paper's analysis of census figures:
Cities with more than a half million people collectively lost almost 27,000 residents age 25 to 39 in 2018….It was the fourth consecutive year that big cities saw this population of young adults shrink. New York, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Washington and Portland, Ore., were among those that lost large numbers of residents in this age group.
The drop in young urban residents last year was smaller than in 2017, when big cities lost nearly 54,000 residents in this age group. But the sustained declines signal a sharp reversal from the beginning of the decade, when young adults flooded into cities and helped lead an urban revival.
The 2018 drop was driven by a fall in the number of urban residents between 35 and 39 years old. While the number of adults younger than that rose in big cities, those gains have tapered off in recent years.
To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle', not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle' Adam Schiff. Low ratings @CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2019
Sweet Moses. Last year, cops in Miss. went to the wrong address, then shot and killed an innocent man in his own home. His family sued. The city claims his family has no standing, because as an undocumented immigrant, **he had no constitutional rights.** https://t.co/Nk7XQz7IKp
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) September 26, 2019
No, you idiots, you weren't supposed to fire the reporter for his dumb old tweets, you were supposed to not have him write about other people's dumb old tweets in the first place
You did the stupidest thing at every possible turn https://t.co/JiN1N5cr3r
— Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) September 27, 2019
The post <em>The New York Times</em> Defends Outing Trump Whistleblower as CIA appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>My copy of Edward Snowden's new autobiography, Permanent Record, arrived in the mail yesterday just hours after the Department of Justice announced that they want to seize the money I (and many others) paid for it and transfer that money to the federal government.
The Justice Department has filed a civil suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia accusing Snowden of breaching his non-disclosure agreement as a former CIA employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor by not submitting his book for pre-publication review so that government officials can make sure it didn't reveal any classified information.
Snowden is living in exile somewhere near Moscow, charged by this same Justice Department with espionage in 2013 for leaking troves of classified documents showing how the NSA had been secretly collecting massive amounts of private phone and internet communications data from millions of Americans, using a section of the post-9/11 Patriot Act as justification.
Rather remarkably, the Justice Department, despite its concerns that the CIA and NSA did not pre-review his book, is not seeking to stop the book's distribution. Instead, they want to force MacMillan Publishers, MacMillan Publishing Group, and Holtzbrinck Publishers to hand over to the government any money they earn from the book's sales and not pass along any of the proceeds to Snowden.
They're invoking a Supreme Court precedent from 1980, Snepp v. United States, that allows the government to seize royalties from former CIA and NSA employees if they publish books about agency activities without submitting their manuscripts for pre-publication review.
Mind you, there's nothing in this Justice Department lawsuit and its press release that explains what would have happened had Snowden, a fugitive, actually submitted his manuscript for review or how that would even work.
It doesn't stop there. Snowden has been giving speeches and remote interviews since 2014 about his work and his whistleblowing, and the Justice Department is going after him about that as well. The lawsuit notes that he makes money from his speeches, which he also does not submit to the CIA or FBI for pre-review (as his agreements with the agencies require).
The lawsuit seems rather comical given that Snowden is famous for leaking classified information, and Snowden's lawyer, Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, has said in a statement that the book contains no classified information that hasn't already been published by the media.
But the lawsuit isn't supposed to make logical sense. The purpose of the lawsuit is to punish Snowden, even though they cannot get him back to the United States to put on trial. It's a bit similar to civil asset forfeiture: They aren't able to convict Snowden, so they're just going to try to take his stuff. Look at the way Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt describes the actions of a man who became famous for informing the public that its own government was secretly collecting their private data:
"This lawsuit demonstrates that the Department of Justice does not tolerate these breaches of the public's trust. We will not permit individuals to enrich themselves, at the expense of the United States, without complying with their pre-publication review obligations."
(Emphasis mine.)
Polls show that more Americans see Snowden as a whistleblower, not as a traitor. The public's trust was breached by the NSA's secret surveillance, not Snowden, who has maintained that the reason he won't return to the United States for a trial is because he won't be allowed to make the case to a jury that his actions were justified whistleblowing for the purpose of benefiting the American public—not an attempt to aid foreign opponents of the United States, as detractors claim.
Snowden, is of course, basking in the extra attention he's getting from the lawsuit, as well he should:
Yesterday, the government sued the publisher of #PermanentRecord for—not kidding—printing it without giving the CIA and NSA a change to erase details of their classified crimes from the manuscript. Today, it is the best-selling book in the world: https://t.co/oMJLOvUjG7
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 18, 2019
In the meantime, the authority for the type of domestic surveillance Snowden exposed expires this year unless Congress acts. Even though the NSA has actually abandoned this type of mass metadata collection and recommended that Congress let authorization lapse, the White House is not only asking for these authorities to be renewed, but to be made permanent.
We would not know nearly as much about the extent of unwarranted federal government snooping and the mass collection of Americans' data were it not for Snowden's whistleblowing. It's absurd and insulting—but not surprising—that the Department of Justice continues to paint him as an enemy of the American people and use that as justification to try to seize any money he makes, even from American citizens like myself who are voluntarily purchasing his book.
Below, defy the Justice Department to watch this interview of Snowden by Reason's Nick Gillespie in 2016:
The post DOJ Gives Edward Snowden's New Book Free Publicity With Lawsuit Demanding Its Proceeds appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's been nearly five years since the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, after a long fight with the CIA and a reluctant Obama administration, released part of a heavily redacted report that described the extent of CIA abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report determined that the torture failed to gather new intelligence and was much more brutal than policy makers had been told.
Now that fight to investigate the CIA and release that information to the public has been dramatized in a movie, The Report, which Amazon Pictures is distributing to theaters November 15. Adam Driver (a.k.a. Kylo Ren in the new Star Wars trilogy) stars as Daniel J. Jones, the real-life lead investigator and author of the Senate's report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program. Annette Bening portrays Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.), who as then-head of the intelligence committee commissioned the investigation and fought for the public release of part of the report.
Here's the trailer that dropped yesterday:
The movie had its public premiere back in January at the Sundance Film Festival, and it received generally positive reviews. It's the anti–Zero Dark Thirty, highlighting how the CIA attempted to cover up its torture of terror suspects and then inaccurately insisted that this torture garnered valuable useful intelligence. According to a review at IndieWire, the movie specifically references Zero Dark Thirty, which has been criticized for allowing CIA officials to manipulate the story. The reference is apparently not a positive one. (The reason the movie's official title is so vague is because the word "Torture" is redacted in the marketing imagery for The Report.)
While the torture began under President George W. Bush, the fight to investigate the CIA's tactics and report out the results took place under President Barack Obama. According to Vanity Fair reviewer Richard Lawson, The Report does not shy away from the role Obama's administration played in attempting to keep this information out of public view:
What the investigation uncovers is horrifying: not only did the C.I.A. do this stuff, but the agency pretty quickly knew that it didn't yield any real intel. Yet it continued anyway, essentially to save face. What The Report also details is how the nascent Obama administration, though it swiftly ended the enhanced interrogation program after the inauguration, nonetheless worked to stifle the report in order to maintain a harmonious relationship with the C.I.A. If you aren't already frustrated with the knotted, gunky, favor-trading mechanics of Washington politics, here's The Report to give you another dose.
When the torture report initially dropped five years ago, I read as much as the redactions allowed and noted that outside the horrifying details of what the CIA actually did—not just waterboarding, but forced enemas, slamming people into walls, slapping them, and freezing them—much of the 500-page document was devoted to the complicated, opaque bureaucratic apparatus that shielded everybody from responsibility, even when the CIA secretly surveilled the Senate staffers putting the report together to find out what CIA records they were looking at.
Ultimately, after a round of news coverage of the worst details in the report—and some limp attempts by CIA officials to find fault with it, though more than a year later they quietly admitted the facts in the report were true—interest in the report faded. Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Donald Trump declared his support for waterboarding suspected terrorists.
Lawson wonders how well the movie will perform, given that Amazon apparently paid $14 million for the global rights. As horrible as that torture was, it seems almost quaint now that we are abusing and neglecting detained immigrants in terrible conditions right here, right now, in the United States, and they're dying.
I'll be heading out to the movies in November to see how well The Report covers the details, politics, and bureaucratic ass-covering that took place back then. I might be pretty lonely in the theater, though.
The post Can Adam Driver Make Americans Care About CIA Torture Again? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For weeks, former CIA Director John Brennan has hinted that he believed Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation would end with the indictment of President Trump or another member of the Trump family. He suggested as much during a recent appearance on MSNBC, in which host Lawrence O'Donnell desperately tried to convince his audience that Brennan knew something they didn't.
Now that Attorney General William Barr has received Mueller's report, and is not considering charges against the Trump family, Brennan is singing a different tune.
"I don't know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was," he admitted on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program Monday morning.
Former FBI Director James Comey appeared completely stumped, and tweeted a picture of himself staring at the water with the caption, "Geologic time offers useful perspective."
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who for weeks promoted the idea that Trump is an "unwitting asset" of Russian President Vladimir Putin, maintained that the cloud of suspicion had not been lifted—indeed, he said this even before the summary of the report had been released.
"I doubt that the Mueller report is going to explain the strange and disturbing deferential behavior of the president toward Vladimir Putin, his refusal to call out the Russians for their meddling in the election, to the extent I assert in my book, I think the Russians actually turned the election for Trump," Clapper told CNN.
Clapper, readers may recall, once lied under oath to Congress about the National Security Agency's warrantless electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens.
The "deep state" theory—the idea that a shadow government of military and intelligence officials secretly runs the government, or is working to subvert Trump's White House—currently beloved by many conservative activists is excessively conspiratorial. But it is true that many people in media, in politics, and the broader public at large are all too willing to give the benefit of the doubt to intelligence officials who got things very wrong, violated civil liberties, and misled Congress.
Neither the military, nor the CIA, nor the FBI, nor any other branch of the federal government is immune to politics. Many like to pretend that Brennan is some objective, just-the-facts purveyor of raw information, but he's just as self-interested as anyone else in politics.
Blindly trusting the intelligence community has had disastrous results, and one of the few admirable things about Trump is that he's not been afraid to disregard the opinions of those who seem to always prefer the military option over the diplomatic one. It's long past time the rest of us did the same.
The post Stop Listening to the Spymasters and Generals appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>NowThis, a news website that primarily caters to left-of-center millennials and Gen Z-ers, tweeted this on Wednesday: "The CIA's highest level positions are now all held by women—another stride towards progress." The tweet even included a flexed bicep emoji, a symbol of progress that invokes Rosie the Riveteer. Here it is:
The CIA's highest level positions are now all held by women — another stride towards progress pic.twitter.com/Sz4rDw4U7m
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) January 9, 2019
Most of the responses to the tweet involve people dunking on it, and for good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) being run entirely by women is not another stride toward progress. A stride toward progress would be the CIA shutting down, or at the very least renouncing its past misdeeds: torturing prisoners, spying on American citizens, overthrowing foreign governments, etc., etc.
Yes, current CIA Director Gina Haspel is a woman. She also ran a CIA black site in Thailand and was personally involved in the waterboarding of at least one detainee. When asked about these activities during her confirmation hearings, she was unrepentant. She said, essentially, that she was just following orders.
I'm highlighting this tweet because it speaks to intersectionality's corruption of the modern progressive movement. Intersectionality, of course, is the academic tradition from the late 1980s that stressed group-based oppression: particularly racism and sexism. Over the years, proponents of intersectionality have added other areas of concern: everything from transphobia and homophobia to size-ism and able-ism. It's not that the intersectional thinkers are necessarily wrong—transphobia exists, and it's bad—but rather that a monomaniacal focus on group-based oppression can be naïve. Haspel taking over the CIA, for instance, might be a blow to sexism in some very narrow sense, but it does nothing to remedy the CIA's appalling record on civil liberties, something progressives purport to care about.
This is not the first time generic yaaassss slay kween feminism has been used to obscure Haspel's appalling awfulness: My colleague Scott Shackford made a note of The Advocate's coverage, which commended the CIA director for making "herstory" in a tweet that practically demands a barf emoji response.
Recall that some on the left complained Trump had threatened to drop "the mother of all bombs" on Afghanistan—not because killing yet more people in the war-torn country would be wrong, but because the phrase itself is sexist. This approach should frustrate true progressives. It certainly frustrates libertarians who would occasionally like to ally with them.
The post Millennial News Site Thinks the CIA Being Run Entirely by Women Is a Progressive Victory appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves, by Matthew Sweet, Henry Holt and Company, 365 pages, $30
In March 1981, I delivered a comedy routine cum keynote address at a convention of Yippies. I asked the audience a rhetorical question: "How would you like to be a Secret Service agent guarding Ronald Reagan, knowing that his vice president, George Bush, is the former head of the CIA?" Satire would soon be outdistanced by reality: At the end of the month, John Hinckley shot the president, hoping to impress the actress Jodie Foster and take her bowling.
On April 2, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner quoted a dispatch from the New Solidarity International Press Service, an outfit run by followers of the unlovable conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche. "A group of terrorists and drug traffickers linked to Playboy magazine," it said, "met in New York City's Greenwich Village area and publicly discussed an assassination of President Ronald Reagan and Vice-President George Bush. The meeting, convened by the Yippie organization, featured former Playboy editor Paul Krassner and numerous individuals associated with High Times magazine, Hustler magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times."
I was scheduled to perform stand-up at Budd Friedman's Improvisation Comedy Club in Hollywood the next month, and Friedman had asked me to try to get some advance publicity. "Paul," he told me after the report appeared, "that's not exactly what I meant."
My show went fine, but in July the LaRouchies escalated the attack by publishing a whole dossier on me. "In the early 1950s," it claimed, "Paul Krassner was recruited to the stable of pornographers and 'social satirists' created and directed by the British Intelligence's chief brainwashing facility, the Tavistock Institute, to deride and destroy laws and institutions of morality and human decency." (For the record, I was never in England.)
Although LaRouche and I both taught at the Free University of New York in 1966, we didn't cross paths. Even then, he had his devoted fans: One student there told me that "LaRouche presented the most credible, most articulate, and best-argued version of Marxist economics that I ever heard." My own class was titled "Journalism and Satire and How to Tell the Difference."
LaRouche is a major character in Operation Chaos, the British journalist Matthew Sweet's account of some American deserters who made their way to Stockholm at the height of the Vietnam War. But LaRouche wasn't a deserter himself, and he didn't live in Sweden—he was a management consultant turned Trotskyist turned cult leader based in the United States. In the first half of the book, he's mostly offstage as Sweet focuses on the fractious, fearful world the deserters made.
If a psychologist giving you a free-association test said "Vietnam War deserters," you would probably reply "Canada." But by 1968, more than a thousand deserters and draft resisters had escaped to Sweden. Many of them formed an organization called the American Deserters Committee, which soon devolved from a militant protest group into a sort of insane inadvertent satire.
Part of the problem involved the group's members, who weren't all high-minded anti-war idealists; many of them were just unstable, and they seemed to have as much trouble functioning in exile as they did in the Army. Another part of the problem was the group's leader, a professional translator named Michael Vale, who inflicted manipulative mind games on his followers in the name of "ego-stripping" and revolutionary purity.
And part of the problem was that the deserters were clearly under surveillance. When many of an organization's members are already damaged people, and when their leader is already subjecting them to psychological abuse, it doesn't do anyone's sanity any favors to have actual good reasons to suspect some of your comrades are spies. As Sweet interviews the men who fled to Stockholm, he finds that several still carry suspicions about one another to this day—and he can't help wondering about some of them himself.
Sweet never quite solves the mystery of who was or wasn't a government agent, but he paints an engrossing portrait of a place and time where such fears were rampant. Along the way, he follows threads that lead everywhere from a '70s Swedish soft-porn flick (a suspected infiltrator among the deserters had a role in the movie as "The Mechanic") to a medical marijuana operation in Oregon, where one former member of the American Deserters Committee is now both a pot grower and a devoted follower of the alt-right.
But the biggest thread, the one that essentially takes over the second half of the book, is the one that leads to Lyndon LaRouche.
As the '70s dawned, LaRouche was leading one of several would-be successor organizations that emerged from the wreckage of Students for a Democratic Society following the club's chaotic 1969 convention. (Another offshoot was the Weather Underground, which soon commenced a bombing campaign.) Vale found the man's spin on Marxism interesting and, hungry for allies, he moved the American Deserters Committee into LaRouche's international orbit.
Vale soon discovered that he had paved the way for LaRouche to take over his crew of war deserters' lives. In Sweet's words, Vale "had stripped them of their egos and, unwittingly, prepared them for servitude to another charismatic leader." He also learned that it's not easy for two cult leaders to coexist in the same organization. LaRouche and Vale weren't able to work together for long—and once Vale was out of the fold, he became a prominent villain in LaRouche's labyrinthine conspiracy theories, a man denounced as fervently as Henry Kissinger, Queen Elizabeth II, and the LaRouche movement's other favorite demons.
Before long, LaRouche would be delivering an unnerving address in a shabby New York ballroom. The speech described a vast psy-war allegedly designed by the CIA, one where trusted comrades are drugged, imprisoned, brainwashed, turned into programmed killers, and returned to their friends as the unwitting vehicles of a murderous conspiracy. "We have the scoop," he said, "on one of the nastiest, most vicious CIA operations—the brainwashing institutes of Sweden. It's a great place to go for a vacation. But don't eat anything, don't drink anything. You may not come back a man, or a woman."
Paranoia can be contagious. "If I were to die without finishing this book," Sweet (who's still alive) eventually realizes, "then someone out there would undoubtedly set up a Web page claiming that I'd been bumped off, by either the CIA, the Swedish secret services, or the bizarre political group that had once counted many of my interviewees as its members—and would, by the time my research was concluded, come to regard me as an enemy infiltrator. And that was when I knew I'd been swallowed by my own story."
LaRouche and his followers drastically revised their worldview several times, drifting from the radical left to the radical right in the process. They spent most of 2016 mocking the Republican candidate for president, even recording a satirical song about him: "He's a festering pustule on Satan's rump!/Don't you be a chump for Trump!" But when the reality star won, their tune changed. "Suddenly," Sweet recounts, "Donald Trump was not, as had been previously thought, a maniac poised to legalize heroin and govern on behalf of Wall Street, but America's best chance to defeat the British Empire and forge a new alliance with Russia."
Some of the old Stockholm deserters are still in the LaRouche fold, while others have departed. One of the departers, a mysterious man named Clifford Gaddy, managed to move from the LaRouche network into a job at one of Washington's premier think tanks, the center-left Brookings Institution, where he became known as an expert on Vladimir Putin. Gaddy even co-wrote a book on Russia with Fiona Hill, now an advisor to the White House.
Hill was, Sweet notes, "a hawk on Putin and no fan of Trump," so her appointment to the administration was as puzzling as Gaddy's appointment to Brookings. Also puzzling: Gaddy himself quietly left the think tank around the same time, and no one there would tell Sweet why.
Sweet attempts to interview Gaddy at a club in Georgetown, where he encounters the erstwhile Putin expert playing cello in a folk band. Gaddy's wife shoos him away. "We have no interest in this," she tells him. "Do you respect that? Do you respect that? Do you respect that? Do you respect that?"
Denied his interview, Sweet sticks around for the band's second set. Gaddy—the former deserter, former LaRouche acolyte, and possible former spy—sits onstage singing a Leonard Cohen song: "Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed / Everybody knows the war is over / Everybody knows the good guys lost…"
The post The Wild Rise of Lyndon LaRouche appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Is the new corporate-charter bill unveiled by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) last week a plot to "To Destroy Capitalism By Pretending To 'Save' It," as the Scott Shackford headline put it? Or is it another "clear" example (in the words of Vox's Matthew Yglesias) that "the people working on this subject so far don't actually know anything about it"?
We put that question to the test on today's editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, first by running the details through Peter "Computerman" Suderman, then adding some hot sauce from Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and me. Other issues coming under discussion: the Catholic abuse/coverup scandal, the "good and bad news" about John Brennan getting his security clearance revoked, the journalism profession's haughty self-regard, and Gary Johnson's shockingly competitive poll numbers in New Mexico.
Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Smooth Actor' by Podington Bear is licensed under CC BY NC 3.0
Relevant links from the show:
"Elizabeth Warren Plans To Destroy Capitalism By Pretending To 'Save' It," by Scott Shackford
"Elizabeth Warren's 'Rules' for Markets Won't 'Make Capitalism Great Again' But May Help Her 2020 Chances," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"It Sure Seems Like Elizabeth Warren Is Running for President. Could She Topple Trump?" by Ira Stoll
"Progressive Insurgents Endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Lost to Moderate Opponents In Tuesday's Primaries," by Christian Britschgi
"Contract Killing," by Matt Welch
"Pennsylvania Lawmakers Want to Lift the Statute of Limitations Amid the Catholic Priest Sex Abuse Report," by Zuri Davis
"Revoking Ex-CIA Chief John Brennan's Security Clearance Is Both Good and Bad News," by Scott Shackford
"Rand Paul: Trump Should Keep Revoking Ex-Obama Officials' Security Clearances," by Joe Setyon
"Newspapers Team Up to Tell Trump They Aren't Colluding Against Him," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Trump's Presser with Putin Was Disgraceful. But No, It's Not 'Treason' to Meet with Russia," by Robby Soave
"The Deep-State Liars of the #Resistance," by Matt Welch
Don't miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)
The post Elizabeth Warren's Corporate Buttinskyism Is the Future Liberals Want: Podcast appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Donald Trump has revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan.
In a statement, Trump accused Brennan of leveraging his "status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations—wild outbursts on the internet and television—about this administration." Trump added that "Mr. Brennan's lying and recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary, is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation's most closely held secrets and facilitates the very aim of our adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos."
Which is to say, Trump doesn't like Brennan's very vocal criticism of him. The president told The Wall Street Journal he holds Brennan largely responsible for the special investigation to determine the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and whether anybody in Trump's orbit was involved.
Let us not weep much over Brennan's fate. As director of the CIA, Brennan defended terrible practices such as torture and extrajudicial drone assassinations. Under him, the CIA secretly snooped on Senate Intelligence Committee staff who were researching and producing a report critical of the CIA's use of torture in interrogations of terrorism suspects during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then Brennan played dumb about it. And then nothing happened. Brennan is neither the hero of this story nor a victim, and he is probably still going to do just fine as a talking head on the news.
Sadly, not very many people cared about Brennan's behavior in connection with the Senate torture report at the time, which makes Trump's inclusion of it as a justification in his statement a bit unexpected. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is encouraging Trump to revoke the security clearances of former officials and who filibustered Brennan's appointment as CIA director to highlight the secret use of drones by Barack Obama's administration, certainly knows all about Brennan's background. Other Republicans, however, were hardly big supporters of the torture report, and the Trump administration apparently wants nothing to do with the issue.
There is little about Brennan's actual behavior as CIA director that Trump would disagree with, so let's not play dumb about Trump's motivation in revoking his security clearance or those of other potential targets. It's obviously a way of punishing critics within the national security and intelligence community whom Trump loathes (and who loathe him in return).
Does the motive matter? Trump, for his own reasons, is punishing former officials whose behavior may be detestable on other grounds. Or even possibly illegal: One of Trump's targets is form National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who lied to a Senate panel about the existence of the National Security Agency's massive domestic surveillance program.
Let's not fall for a false choice. We can welcome the outcome here and still be concerned about the downstream consequences of tying security clearances to personal loyalty. This is an administration under investigation, and Trump is clearly using his powers against those who support the investigation. There's a pretty clear message here for anyone working within the administration who may be connected to the Trump investigation or anybody currently employed by the Justice Department who may be involved: If you support this investigation, it could hurt your career.
The post Revoking Ex-CIA Chief John Brennan's Security Clearance Is Both Good and Bad News appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After a suggestion from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the White House is considering possibly revoking the security clearances of some big name officials who have been critical of President Donald Trump.
Among the names that have been floated are former CIA directors John Brennan and Michael Hayden, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, fired FBI Director James Comey, and fired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Those last two no longer have national security clearances anyway, so there's been some mocking of the White House for floating those names without even checking.
No former federal official has a right to a security clearance, and the president has a significant amount of leeway to operate here. Historically, though, security clearances are revoked for misconduct, not for speech critical of an administration. But accusations of political motivations are not unheard of, and you can see some examples from previous administrations. Here's a case from President Barack Obama's State Department.
Currently, there are more than 4 million people with security clearances of various levels. The New York Times notes that the maintenance of these security clearances serves a couple of functions. First, it allows the federal government to bring in former staff to consult and advise, which happens fairly frequently. Second, the access provided by the security clearance has market value. It translates into job opportunities in the private sector with consultants and lobbyists who want to influence government policy.
It's that second part that Trump and Paul seem to be targeting. Paul says that government officials shouldn't be using their security clearances to leverage speaking fees or cable appearances.
But why not? I mean, if the market places value in these prior relationships, what exactly is the ethical problem here if the private sector is willing to pay for these ties? But let's say there is an ethical problem. Why is this push only targeting Trump critics? If this is profiteering off of political access, shouldn't it be targeting a much wider swathe of people?
There's potentially a case that, yes, too many people maintain these security clearances and it fosters a marketplace in Washington, D.C., that revolves around the capacity to influence government spending and regulations. That's the whole "swamp" that Trump and his supporters go on about. Tackling this component of the swamp would involve reducing the size and scope of our government's defense and national security apparatus, which is pretty much the opposite of what Trump is doing. Trump loves the part of the swamp where all the defense contractors live.
This proposal does not in any meaningful way tackle the larger issue of the revolving door between government employees and private lobbying and consulting firms. It is instead an extremely transparent way for the administration to attempt to punish critics with ties to the government.
And to be clear here, this group the White House is targeting will do just fine. They're powerful and known enough and have enough experience to not need their security clearances. Brennan and Hayden both said that this wouldn't affect them in any way. And nothing short of a meteor strike can puncture Comey's overinflated sense of self-regard.
It's what happens downstream we need to pay attention to. What does this threat mean for those in the FBI responsible for investigating the role Russia played in meddling with the 2016 election? What does this mean for whistleblowers or anybody connected to the government who may attempt to warn the public of misconduct? Because this is not an effort to "drain the swamp" in any real way, it's really threatening that anybody who puts out information critical of the president could lose their security clearance and thereby lose job prospects. This isn't about stopping the revolving door between government and private lobbying; it's the White House deciding who gets to spin through that door based on how they treat the president.
That's pretty nasty, and if this happens, there will be further consequences. Patrick Eddington, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, is, like myself, no fan of men like Clapper, Brennan, and Hayden. These are men with lengthy histories supporting violations of Americans' civil liberties in the name of national security. But over at Just Security, Eddington sees the long game if Trump goes forward with this proposal:
The real losers in this are the professional civil servants elsewhere in America's vast national security bureaucracy, especially anybody working at the Justice Department. Trump's real target is the FBI agent in his mid-40s, with two kids on their way to college and a mortgage to pay, who happens to be working on the Russia investigation. Or, it could be his counterpart, a federal prosecutor who's in the middle of her career and helping to guide the investigation. Trump's crude message to the bureaucracy is clear: Do anything to embarrass or implicate me in a crime, and I'll take away your meal ticket: Your security clearance.
It's a viable threat. There's no statute, much less a constitutional provision, that prevents Trump from revoking any executive branch employee's security clearance—for any reason or no reason. And without a valid security clearance, you can't hold a job as an FBI agent, FBI intelligence analyst, or attorney in the Justice Department—because those jobs require agents and lawyers to have access to sometimes highly classified information on potential suspects, particularly but not exclusively foreign national suspects. Like known Russian intelligence operatives.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said today he thought Trump was just "trolling people" with this proposal. But is he trolling people like Clapper and Hayden or is he trolling the sort of FBI agents that Eddington mentions?
The post Rand Paul Encourages Trump to Attack Security Clearances of Government Critics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has an important message for Americans: He thinks y'all are dumb.
Clapper is best known around here for the time he lied to a Senate committee by denying that the feds were engaged in the mass collection of American citizens' phone and internet records. His lie was part of what prompted Edward Snowden to steal and release loads of classified documents revealing the truth.
Clapper has since insisted that he didn't actually lie but rather just totally forgot about this massive secret data collection program. He's been spinning that response for a couple years now. He brought it up again just recently on The View.
Clapper is making the rounds again to promote a new book, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence. Also providing publicity is his open feud with President Donald Trump, who is now taking his attacks on the "deep state" to the point where he's accusing the FBI of installing a "spy" in his campaign.
While it seems obvious that the FBI was monitoring Trump's campaign to determine the extent of connections with Russian interests, the "spy" claim seems absurdly overheated (for now, anyway). And so we've reached a point where Americans are "taking sides" between two men who have reputations for not exactly being honest and for treating Americans like stupid rubes.
In an interview this week with Judy Woodruff on PBS, Clapper makes it very clear how big a bunch of rubes he thinks Americans are. He believes not only that Russian interests attempted to influence the election—obviously true—but that they tipped the outcome.
This unprovable claim is based on the idea that Americans' votes are easily manipulated. Clapper acknowledges that his former agency has not made such a formal determination, but
as a private citizen, it's what I would call my informed opinion that, given the massive effort the Russians made, and the number of citizens that they touched, and the variety and the multidimensional aspects of what they did to influence opinion and affect the election, and given the fact that it turned on less than 80,000 votes in three states, to me, it just exceeds logic and credulity that they didn't affect the election, and it's my belief they actually turned it.
The evidence doesn't really show that the Russian influence campaign amounted to much. As Reason's Jacob Sullum has carefully detailed, the Russian social media campaign spending was a drop in the bucket when compared to overall online ad revenue, and the content seemed to focus on affirming preexisting beliefs. If it accomplished anything, it was to heighten already existing points of cultural conflict. It "exceeds logic and credulity" to think that this campaign of affirmation altered the election's outcome. Especially when you remember that this didn't happen in a vaccum: At the same time the Russians were buying Facebook ads, countless other groups were spending far more on election messages.
Woodruff asks Clapper why he's inflaming this feud now. He explains, "I am so concerned about the health and strength of our institutions and our values that I spent a lot of time defending, that I had to speak out."
Ah, the health and strength of those institution and its values. Let's scroll up the interview a little bit. When Woodruff asked whether the intelligence community had, indeed, sometimes gone too far in their work, here's the extremely vague way Clapper talks about the congressional committees that monitor intelligence agencies:
So the members on those committees have to represent our citizens to make sure that what the intelligence community is doing is legal, ethical and moral. And we have had cases where, depending on the situation, post-9/11, for example, where our intelligence community did things that, after the fact, people objected to.
Torture. He's talking about torture. What's amazing here is that he can't even bring himself to use the "advanced interrogation techniques" doublespeak that they had settled on. The intelligence community "did things." Just, you know, stuff. And people objected to it "after the fact," as though the totality of what they were up to hadn't been carefully concealed from us and the evidence destroyed.
I cannot imagine why Americans should be interested in the opinions about the norms and ethics of our federal institution from a man who won't speak honestly about Americans' distrust of our intelligence agencies, and who thinks we're so stupid that some Facebook ads can trick us into voting for candidates we don't want.
The post James Clapper Thinks Americans Are Dumb Enough to Vote for Trump Because of Facebook Ads appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Gina Haspel was formally sworn in yesterday afternoon as the first female director of the CIA. The identity-laden cultural dynamic of "First Woman to Ever X" was severely undercut by Haspel's troubled history with and relationship to the CIA's torture of suspected terrorists during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the subsequent destruction of evidence.
It's awful that anybody involved in the CIA's torture tactics in any way ended up in charge, but it's sadly not surprising that President Donald Trump would embrace her (remember, Trump is pro-torture), and it's also not surprising that the Senate would fall in line behind an "establishment-approved" candidate. I'm glad we had at least another public debate about torture tactics before the vote and swearing in.
Most media coverage attempted to acknowledge that she's the first female director while not ignoring the controversy. But then there was the Advocate, once the most prominent national magazine serving the LGBT community, blithely going all in on the "YAAAASSSS! SLAY KWEEN!" approach to Haspel's swearing in. Here's what the publication tweeted out:
#GinaHaspel has made herstory. https://t.co/34SvD7YDMJ
— The Advocate (@TheAdvocateMag) May 21, 2018
It gets weirder. The post at the Advocate is tagged "women" not "politics." It contains a short video obviously meant to be shared on social media with images of Haspel and some straightforward text, set to a disco beat for some baffling reason. It vaguely refers to the torture controversy as her "involvement" with the "detention system" used by the CIA under President George W. Bush. And that's it.
Even weirder, the attached "story" consists of just three sentences. And it's only the last one that matters: Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D–Wis.), who is an out lesbian, voted against Haspel's nomination. Baldwin said she was troubled that Haspel would not say that the tactics the CIA used to try to extract information from detainees were immoral and agreed with Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) that this was disqualifying behavior.
As a matter of fact, other than this one-sentence mention, there's no coverage of Baldwin's opposition to Haspel's nomination to be found at the Advocate. So the LGBT site weirdly downplayed the opposition of a lesbian senator in order to push the narrative of the history-making female leader.
There was a very interesting reaction that should be heartening for folks who worry that tribal identity is taking the place of principles and ethics. People who follow the Advocate on Twitter are absolutely repulsed by the tweet and the superficial manner in which the magazine covered Haspel's swearing in:
Yassss! C.I.SLAY Kween! Not a torturer! A torturHER!
— Brandon (@bnowalk) May 21, 2018
For the benefit of non-Twitter users (how I envy you!), there's a concept of the "ratio": If people are replying to your tweet in very high numbers, but they aren't clicking "like" or retweeting your tweet, that probably means they're mocking you and think your tweet is stupid or offensive.
As I blog this, the tweet from the Advocate has more than 900 tweeted responses, but only 42 retweets (one of which was me) and 95 "likes." Folks were not happy with the Advocate.
It's worth recognizing that sometimes the cultural conflict of "principles over principals"—where the identities or affiliations of a person are deemed more important than ethical or moral interests—is reflected more in media coverage than by the actions of a community itself.
The post Top LGBT Magazine Invokes 'HerStory' Covering Gina Haspel's Swearing In and Gets Smacked Down appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Senators on both sides of the aisle are calling for the release of a classified memo that could give lawmakers—and the general public—a better understanding of the role Gina Haspel played in the CIA's torture program. Haspel is Donald Trump's nominee to run the spy agency, and a key Senate committee is set to vote this week on her confirmation, which could go to the full chamber before the end of the month.
A potential stumbling block to her appointment is the so-called Durham Report, written at the conclusion of an Obama-era Justice Department's investigation into "whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations." Haspel ran one of those secret prisons in Thailand for several months in 2002, and she oversaw the torture of at least one detainee: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was involved in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Three years later, she drafted a memo ordering the destruction of videos showing the interrogation and torture of detainees.
The full report has never been released, and a Senate memo describing the parts of the report that concern Haspel's career is also being kept secret. The classified document, prepared by Democratic staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee, includes "details some senators and aides have found disturbing," NBC reports, citing four sources familiar with the document.
"I have never in my life wished that more classified information could be available to the public," Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) told a Huffington Post reporter last week after she'd viewed the classified documents.
McCaskill can see the documents because she's a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will vote Wednesday on whether to recommend Haspel's confirmation to the full Senate. But the rest of the chamber will be left in the dark, it seems, since the classified report has been removed from Senate servers in an apparent attempt to prevent leaks.
"It is critical that all senators have access to information detailing Ms. Haspel's role in the 2005 destruction of videotapes belonging to the CIA," Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) wrote in a letter to the Justice Department last week, requesting the release of the Durham Report. "It is critical that all senators have access to the same important, relevant information regarding the person nominated to the lead the CIA."
Will the memo change the course of Haspel's confirmation? Unnamed sources tell NBC that there is "nothing explosive" in the report capable of derailing her nomination, while The Intercept cites "people briefed on the contents of the memo" who say "it is not possible to read it and come away without serious doubts about whether Haspel ought to be confirmed." It would be nice to be able to read it and judge for ourselves.
During her confirmation hearing last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) pressed Haspel about whether she would object to the release of the Durham investigation.
"I haven't seen it, so I haven't read it, so I don't know," Haspel replied.
"So far, the American people have only been given information that is designed to help you get confirmed," said Wyden. "Everything else has been classified."
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are the only two Republican senators to declare their intent to vote against Haspel's confirmation, but their opposition could be canceled out by two Democrats, Sens. Joe Donnelly (D-In.) and Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.), who say they will vote for Haspel. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee and potentially a key swing vote, announced today that he would support Haspel's confirmation after getting a letter from the nominee clarifying her views on the torture program.
McCain's opposition to Haspel is a both personal and political. A torture survivor himself, McCain says Haspel's "refusal to acknowledge torture's immorality is disqualifying."
In her hearing, Haspel admitted that she did not believe torture "worked," but she blurred the line a bit by defending the long-standing claim that the CIA's torture program produced useful intelligence and valuable leads in the early days of the War on Terror. Defenders of torture have long argued that it helped produce key details in the search for 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, despite a lack of evidence to back up that claim.
"When bin Laden finally met the fate he deserved, the apologists for torture appeared in numbers on cable news shows and in the newspapers claiming bin Laden wouldn't have been found without intelligence gained through the use of [enhanced interrogation]," McCain says in his just-released book The Restless Wave.
"In truth, most of the CIA's claims that abusive interrogations of detainees had produced vital leads to help locate bin Laden were exaggerated, misleading, and in some cases, complete bullshit," McCain writes.
McCain explains that he came to those conclusions—ones that "angered" him—only after being able to review other classified reports on the CIA torture regime. More than a dozen years after Haspel ordered the destruction of the interrogation tapes, it's time for everyone else to have a chance to see the evidence.
The post Senators Want to See Secret Torture Memo Before Haspel's Confirmation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted this morning, the Trump administration officially opened the new U.S. embassy to Israel today in Jerusalem, amid the horrific gunning down of scores of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers at the border in Gaza. "Like Lucy and the football," Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler had written back in 2012, "the pledge to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem is a campaign promise that is never fulfilled." But that was before the rise of Donald Trump.
On today's Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and yours truly drill down into policy areas where Trump has actually gone through with some of the insincere promises Republicans have long made to their voters, starting with the harsh policy announced last week to use family separation—ripping children from their parents—as a conscious deterrent to illegal immigration and in-person asylum applications. Other subjects covered include the Gina Haspel confirmation process, the re-litigation of torture, Trump's attempted tamping down of drug prices, and some apologetics for pre-2008 Reason headlines.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Relevant links from the show:
"Trump Calls the Congressional GOP's Bluff," by Matt Welch
"Trump's Official Policy: If You Cross the Border, We'll Kidnap Your Children," by Jacob Sullum
"Undocumented Immigrants Make America Safer," by Steve Chapman
"Do Family Values Stop at the Rio Grande for Conservatives?" by Shikha Dalmia
"Trump's Tribal Immigration Policies Hit a Wall of Facts," by A. Barton Hinkle
"Gina Haspel, Susan Collins, and the Folly of the 'Good Soldier' Defense of Torture," by Eric Boehm
"Gina Haspel's Confirmation Hearing Is a Reckoning for America's Use of Torture During the War on Terror," by Eric Boehm
"Under Trump, Republicans Have Become the Party of No Ideas," by Peter Suderman
"President Trump: Competition Is the Solution to High Drug Prices," by Ronald Bailey
"'All Gov't Support of Higher Ed Should Be Abolished': Live Debate in NYC, 5/14," by Nick Gillespie
"Reason at FEEcon 2018, June 7-9 in Atlanta!" by Nick Gillespie
Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:
Don't miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)
The post Is Trump Just Doing the Crazy Things Republicans Always Promised?: Podcast appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The most interesting moment of Gina Haspel's confirmation hearing on Wednesday morning occurred when Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a key swing vote in the Senate, took her turn at grilling President Donald Trump's pick to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Collins zeroed in on the most controversial part of Haspel's CIA career: the few months in 2002 that she spent overseeing a secret prison in Thailand where suspected al-Qaeda terrorists (including at least one pregnant woman) were subjected to torture—including waterboarding—in apparent violation of international norms and treaties outlawing such practices. Years later, Haspel drafted a cable ordering other CIA agents to destroy videotaped evidence of interrogations.
Collins began by asking Haspel whether she was involved in the creation of the CIA's so-called "enhanced interrogation program." Haspel said she was not. Collins followed up by asking whether Haspel was a senior executive at the CIA when the program was conceived. Again, no.
And when you did find out about the program, Collins continued, what did you think of it?
"I was told that interrogation experts had designed the program, that the highest legal authority in the United States had approved it, and that the President of the United States had approved it," Haspel replied.
This represents, in a nutshell, the best defense that Haspel and her supporters have been able to offer for her involvement in the CIA's torture program—that she was, in so many words, following the orders of people she trusted at a time when the nation was shaken by terrorism. It was the same line of reasoning offered by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, at the outset of Wednesday's hearing when he praised Haspel for acting "morally, ethically, and legally" throughout her career and said he would not tolerate any significant digging into Haspel's connection to torture.
"Those who have issues with programs or operations conducted years ago should address those concerns and their questions to former presidents, former directors, and former attorney generals," Burr said. "This hearing is about how you'll lead the Central Intelligence Agency into the future, not how you've faithfully executed missions in the past."
Faithfully executed. Approved by the highest legal authorities in the country. Yes, Haspel might have engaged in some questionable activities, her defenders argue, but she was only doing what other people told her was right. The question of whether torture was legal, moral, or even effective should be put to other people. Leave Haspel alone, and vote to give her a promotion.
Collins seemed to be walking Haspel down that same path, letting the nominee parry each question by confirming that, no, she did not have anything to do with designing or approving the torture program. And, reiterating something she had said at the outset of the hearing, Haspel told Collins in no uncertain terms that she "would never permit CIA to resume an interrogation program."
Then, the senator snapped the trap shut.
"As a candidate, President Trump repeatedly expressed his support for waterboarding. In fact, he said we should go beyond waterboarding," Collins pointed out. If the CIA had a high value detainee, and "the president gave you a direct order to waterboard that suspect, what would you do?"
Haspel, for the first time all morning, looked uncomfortable. "I don't believe the president would ask me to do that," she offered, unconvincingly. Several awkward seconds ticked by before Haspel regained her balance and launched into a tangential explanation of current CIA policy about "debriefing" suspects. (The exchange between Collins and Haspel begins at 1:37:30 in the video below; Collins drops the hammer at 1:40:05.)
Moments later, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) pointed out that Haspel had failed to answer the "what if the president told you to do it" hypothetical.
Haspel was more resolute. "Under no circumstances" would the CIA engage in that activity under her watch.
But the point lingers, doesn't it? This is exactly how the "good soldier" defense falls apart. Haspel, we are told, is not responsible for the decisions she made in the past because she was following orders and listening to the legal advice of others. Yet we are also supposed to believe that today she would disobey those same orders and ignore that same advice. Does chain of command no longer matter? Should Haspel have ignored it in Thailand?
Atop the logical problems exposed by Collins' line of questing, there are factual and historical hurdles to advancing Haspel with this reasoning.
For starters, it is untrue that Haspel was obligated to carry out the orders of her superiors while running the "black site" prison in Thailand where waterboarding took place. In fact, she had an obligation to refuse them. American military and intelligence officials have an affirmative obligation not to obey an illegal order, and a prohibition on torture is a fundamental principle of American and international law governing human rights, says Alberto Mora, a former general counsel for the U.S. Navy who reviewed, and opposed, the legal rationale for torture during the Bush administration.
"We should expect every American to know this, particularly highly trained officers in the CIA," he says. "She cannot claim that she was following orders."
The law prohibiting torture existed in 2002, and post-9/11 attempts to create legal loopholes for brutalizing suspected terrorists should have been questioned. Indeed, in some cases, CIA officers did push back against the order to torture, at least in part because—as Haspel pointed out during Wednesday's hearing, too—the CIA did not have an interrogation role historically.
"A lot of people in the CIA would probably agree that they should never have been in the business of detentions and interrogations," Navy Lieutenant Alaric Piette, an attorney for Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, one of the al-Qeada detainees Haspel tortured, told The Daily Beast this week. "Forcing them to shift that mission is part of the problem. But that is the point when she should have fought back. Other people did. She just didn't."
Even after Wednesday's hearing, it remains fairly unclear exactly how closely involved Haspel was to the waterboarding. The CIA has pushed back against news outlets like The Daily Beast and Propublica that have claimed she directly oversaw his torture, with mixed success in getting the story changed. The only way to know for sure what role Haspel played is to have more information about her time in Thailand declassified so senators—and, more importantly, the general public—can assess what she did or did not do.
Lacking that clarity, we are left with two contradictory messages about Haspel. She is simultaneously presented as being a good soldier who might have done some bad things, but only because she was told to do them—and as someone who would stand up to the president of the United States if asked to do the very same things today. Both of those things can be true, of course, but the limited evidence for the former assertion makes the latter one impossible to believe.
The post Gina Haspel, Susan Collins, and the Folly of the 'Good Soldier' Defense of Torture appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When senators gather Wednesday to consider Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump's nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, they'll also be reckoning with broader questions about the agency's use of torture during the first decade of the War on Terror.
Haspel's personal involvement in torture—she ran a CIA "black site" in Thailand, was involved in the waterboarding of at least one detainee, and later ordered the destruction of videotapes showing the waterboarding of another—should draw significant scrutiny from senators. But her own record is only part of the story. Critics charge that confirming her would send a clear message to CIA employees, foreign governments, and American citizens about how elected officials view the use of torture.
"It says that it's OK to engage in war crimes and crimes against humanity, and if you do it, you'll get promoted," says retired Gen. David Irvine, a former Army intelligence officer. "Don't worry about the law, don't worry about morality, don't worry that torture doesn't work. Do it anyway, and we'll cover for you. And you can destroy the evidence as well."
Irvine is one of more than 100 former American military officials who signed a letter urging the Senate to reject Haspel's nomination. It argues that "the torture and cruel treatment of prisoners undermines our national security" by hindering cooperation with allies, alienating local populations, and giving extremists a propaganda tool.
Confirming someone personally entangled with the torture program will undermine America's credibility in addressing global human rights issues, says Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, one of dozens of former American ambassadors to sign a separate letter opposing Haspel's confirmation on the grounds that having her lead the CIA would make it more difficult for diplomats to work with foreign governments.
"Her confirmation is going to be interpreted not just as sweeping it under the rug," he said Tuesday on a conference call organized by Human Rights First. "People overseas are going to look at it as an implicit approval of that program."
Haspel currently serves as the CIA's deputy director. She has worked for the agency for 33 years, and she spent most of that time undercover. She was tapped by Trump to replace Mike Pompeo, who was elevated to the post of secretary of state last month.
Part of her undercover duties included, in 2002, helping set up the CIA's first secret prison for suspected Al Qaeda terrorists to be interrogated, The New York Times reported earlier this year. While there, she reportedly oversaw the waterboarding of at least one detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was involved in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.
Though she left the so-called "black site" prison in 2003, Haspel was later involved in the destruction of videotapes showing the brutal torture of another detainee. According to declassified summary of the still-classified Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's torture program, those tapes showed the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded at least 83 times. During one of those sessions, Abu Zubaydah "became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth," according to a CIA cable included in the Senate report.
Following his torture, the CIA made plans "to get reasonable assurances that [he] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life." In 2005, Haspel drafted a document ordering the destruction of the tapes of Abu Zubaydah's torture, and then-CIA counterterrorism official Jose Rodriguez issued the order, according to Rodriguez' memoirs.
The torture program was approved by Haspel's bosses at the CIA, by the Justice Department, and by other higher-ups in the government. But Laura Pitter, senior national security counsel for Human Rights Watch, notes that "the culpability of other senior officials doesn't absolve her of responsibility."
The president has defended Haspel's record as being "tough on terror," and has tried to turn legitimate questions about her appointment into another partisan fight. He tweeted on Monday that "Democrats" want Haspel "out because she's too tough on terror." Trump has taken a glib view of torture in the past, saying during the 2016 campaign that he would "bring back waterboarding, and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding."
"With a president evidently committed to policies of torture," says Irvine, "we think this would be a dangerous step backwards."
In excerpts of her prepared testimony, released Tuesday, Haspel says she does not intend to resume the use of torture. "I can offer you my personal commitment, clearly and without reservation that under my leadership CIA will not restart such a detention and interrogation program," she will tell senators, according to NPR.
The extent of Haspel's involvement in the CIA's torture program is unknown. But senators on both sides of the aisle have raised concerns about her record.
Haspel has her own reservations about her confirmation. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that she considered withdrawing her nomination to avoid the spectacle of a hearing that could damage her own reputation and that of the CIA. According to the Post, the White House dispatched a team of aides, including Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to meet with Haspel and reassure her of Trump's support.
Whether Haspel can win support from a majority of the U.S. Senate remains to be seen. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has said he will oppose Haspel's confirmation, but he previously threatened to torpedo Pompeo's confirmation as secretary of state before reversing his position on the day of the vote. Further complicating things is the absence of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is back home ailing from brain cancer.
More than 15 years after her involvement in the CIA's torture of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists, Haspel's confirmation hearing will serve as an opportunity for some of America's most powerful elected officials to offer their perspective—on her career at the CIA, yes, but also on what that track record represents. And on what her appointment to lead the CIA would represent.
"She might be a great intelligence officer," says Ali Soufan, a former anti-terrorism official for the FBI, "but at the same time she has a lot of baggage that will stain—further stain—our reputation in the world."
The post Gina Haspel's Confirmation Hearing Is a Reckoning for America's Use of Torture During the War on Terror appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During his half-century spent defending Americans' civil liberties, here's what has changed, according to lawyer Alan Dershowitz: "Now conservatives have become civil libertarians, and liberals have become strong supporters of law enforcement, the Justice Department and the FBI," the professor and pundit said after dining with President Trump on Tuesday night.
That snorting sound you hear? That's a thousand libertarians shooting coffee through their noses at the notion that the GOP is newly sympathetic to issues of law enforcement overreach and intrusive investigative tools. Republicans had an opportunity as recently as three months ago to rein in warrantless snooping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. What did they do? They voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize the practice for another six years: 191-45 among GOP members in the House, 43-7 in the Senate.
It's unfortunate how wrong Dershowitz is about the Republican Party. But what's also depressing is that he may be right about the Democrats. In their efforts to oust a potentially lawless president, they are exalting a rogue's gallery of surveillance-state officials who have abused their power.
Take James Clapper. The man who oversaw a vast surveillance apparatus as director of national intelligence under President Obama is now the toast of left-leaning media outlets including Salon, the Guardian and the Huffington Post for questioning Trump's "fitness to be in office," saying that Watergate "pales" in comparison to the current crisis, and quipping that Russian President Vladimir Putin treats Trump "like an asset."
California Democrat Rep. Adam B. Schiff tweeted his Clapper endorsement last year: "James Clapper is a patriot who served his country for 50 years & knows dangerous bluster when he sees it. So yes, he's an authority on DJT." But as Schiff certainly knows through his work on the House intelligence committee, Clapper straight-up lied to Congress and the American people in March 2013 when asked by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) whether the National Security Agency collects "any type of data at all" on millions of Americans. "No sir. Not wittingly," Clapper replied.
Three months later, after the revelations of phone logs and email data collected by the NSA made front pages, Clapper characterized his lame answer as the "least untruthful" way he felt he could respond. If Trump and his B-movie gang of hangers-on are eventually to be tripped up on a series of lying and obstruction-style charges, surely there are better character witnesses for the prosecution than a perjurer.
It's difficult these days to get the latest #resistance news without encountering some of Clapper's partners in government malfeasance. One of MSNBC's latest contributor hires, for example, is former Obama-administration CIA Director John Brennan. Like former FBI director James B. Comey (coming soon to a bookstore near you!) Brennan is one of the more melodramatic voices on Twitter, delivering stern lectures to a presidential interloper who dares impugn our noble intelligence state.
"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known," Brennan tweeted at Trump last month in a characteristic effort, "you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America. … America will triumph over you."
(McCabe, the FBI deputy director who got fired the day before his planned retirement, raised a quarter-million dollars for a legal defense fund within six hours, helped out by retweets from the likes of MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.)
Brennan's moral compass has not always been so prominently displayed. During his tenure as CIA director, the agency got caught spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee's computers. When confronted by then-Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) about it, Brennan used the same how-dare-they tone he now reserves for the president: "Nothing could be further from the truth," he said at first. "We wouldn't do that. I mean, that's just beyond the scope of reason."
By uncritically cheering on such flawed actors, the Trump opposition is sending a clear if unwitting message to future abusers of power: To rehabilitate your image, simply oppose the president with enough flowery adjectives. I predict we will hear more such performances — complete with applause from progressives — during the upcoming book tours of Comey and former CIA Director Michael Hayden.
To the extent that these former officials have direct knowledge of matters relevant to the Trump/Russia investigation — and Comey, at least, certainly does — we need to hear from them. But if in these fraught political times we're taking our moral cues from a gang of former intelligence officials, then our problems run deeper than — and will outlast — the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
The post The Deep-State Liars of the #Resistance appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) plans to oppose the nominations of Mike Pompeo for secretary of state and Gina Haspel as Pompeo's replacement running the Central Intelligence Agency.
Paul's opposition could complicate the Trump administration's plans to replace outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was fired this week and will leave his post at the end of the month.
When it comes to picking a replacement for America's top diplomat, Paul says he could not support nominees who are trying to steer Trump in a more interventionalist direction.
"I cannot endorse his nomination of people who loved the Iraq war so much that they want an Iran war next," Paul says. "President Trump sought to break with the foreign policy mistakes of the last two administrations. Yet now he picks for secretary of state and CIA director people who embody them, defend them, and, I'm afraid, will repeat them."
Paul sits on the crucial Senate Foreign Relations Committee, giving him significant leverage over these nominations. If the committee's 10 Democratic members also oppose Pompeo's or Haspel's appointment, Paul would be the swing vote on the 21-member committee. If either nominations make it to the Senate floor via a different route (Senate leaders could bypass the committee process, Politico says), Republicans could face another close vote with a slim 51–49 majority.
There's good reason for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to think long and hard about a confirmation vote for Pompeo. As Emma Ashford explains, Pompeo has been very vocal on policy, including his outspoken support for withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear deal. It's unusual for the director of the CIA to speak out on matters of policy, and Pompeo's tendency to do so might complicate the high-level diplomatic negotiations he would oversee as secretary of state. When it comes to other potential hotspots, from North Korea to the ongoing proxy war on the Arabian Peninsula, Pompeo is likely to take a more hawkish stance than Tillerson did.
Domestically, Pompeo has supported the expansion of a surveillance state. In a 2016 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Pompeo called on Congress to "pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database." He has also called for the execution of Edward Snowden.
Paul opposed Pompeo's appointment to run the CIA last year, saying in January 2017 that Pompeo's "desire for security will trump his defense of liberty."
Less high-profile but no less important is Trump's pick to replace Pompeo at the CIA. Paul says that Haspel's record on torture, which includes running a CIA "black site" prison in Thailand, should disqualify her from consideration.
The post Rand Paul Will Oppose Trump's Pro-War, Pro-Torture Nominees for State, CIA appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Rex Tillerson, the Where's Waldo of the Trump administration's divided foreign policy shop, has been fired as secretary of state and replaced by CIA Director Mike Pompeo. According to the president, part of the reason was a difference of approach on the Iran-nuclear agreement. "We were not thinking the same," Trump told reporters. "With Mike Pompeo, we have a similar thought process."
The president's thought process about eighty-sixing Tillerson is likely to come under scrutiny, since the existing timeline doesn't make sense. White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders said today that Tillerson was informed Friday. The State Department, meanwhile, says the secretary found out today, from reading this Trump tweet:
Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2018
Trump later told reporters that Tillerson will be "much happier now."
Steve Goldstein, State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, has released this statement: "The secretary did not speak to the president and is unaware of the reason, but he is grateful for the opportunity to serve, and still believes strongly that public service is a noble calling. The secretary had every intention of staying because of the critical progress made in national security. He will miss his colleagues at the Department of State and the foreign ministers he has worked with throughout the world."
Tillerson, a government newbie who had spent the previous four decades at ExxonMobil, seemed frequently out of sync and even out of touch with the mercurial president. Yesterday, for example, Tillerson said that the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy in London was "an egregious act" that "clearly came from Russia," which was in sharp contrast to Huckabee Sanders' repeated reluctance to point the finger at Moscow. Last week, too, the secretary of state was clearly out of the loop when Trump decided to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. (Last October, in a reversal of those positions, the president said Tillerson was "wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.")
Pompeo, a former congressman and Army tank officer, is seen as much more hawkish than Tillerson. He supports the bulk collection of Americans' metadata, the use of CIA black sites, enhanced interrogation methods, and the execution of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Pompeo's replacement at the CIA, his former deputy Gina Haspel, had a "leading role in torture" during the Bush administration, according to this New York Times profile. Back when Tillerson/Pompeo rumors were heating up three months ago, the Weekly Standard pointed out that Haspel's prominence soothed some agency nerves frayed by Trump's sporadically intemperate criticisms.
So the out-of-touch realist is out at Foggy Bottom, the partisan pro-surveillance hawk is in, and Langley is now run by an in-house torturer. Meanwhile, Trump's personal assistant, John McEntee, has reportedly been escorted out of the White House due to security reasons. In other words, it's a normal Tuesday morning.
The post Trump to Rex Tillerson: Someone Has Told You That You're Fired! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As Scott Shackford reports, the White House has cleared the release of a classified memo by House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) that purports to show that FBI agents and others at the Department of Justice (DOJ) acted out of political motives in surveilling Carter Page, a campaign adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump. Nunes' Democratic counterpart, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has called out Nunes in no uncertain terms:
"The selective release and politicization of classified information sets a terrible precedent and will do long-term damage to the Intelligence Community and our law enforcement agencies."
Well, sure.
But to the extent that Schiff is trying to suggest the FBI and DOJ aren't constantly acting out of political motives and basic incompetence that hurt their credibility, he's completely out to lunch. Both of these units of government have remarkably and well-deserved bad reputations stretching back decades.
And this is where the obsessive fixation of details in Washington completely blocks out the big picture. Remember how Republicans figured that by endlessly sifting sand for details about "Benghazi," they would finally end Hillary Clinton's career in the public eye? They were too far up their own asses to ever ask the obvious question: What the hell were we doing in Libya to begin with? Especially given Barack Obama's manifest lack on interest in getting even a rubber-stamp authorization from Congress? Even after the United States helped plunge Libya into a total clusterfuck, that larger-picture view was left to the crazy-eyed libertarians.
Similarly with "the memo," which deals with a relatively obscure and meaningless Trump hanger-on and, as Shackford notes in his article, fails to advance either side of the debate over whether the president was playing footsie with the Russians. The important issue here isn't the damage that Nunes' document (and eventually, Schiff's minority report that will be published after it is vetted for security reasons) does or doesn't do to the reputation of the FBI and federal law enforcement. It's that the reputation of these groups is already awful.
Schiff is claiming that Nunes is acting only out of political interest, a charge that mirrors what Nunes is saying about the FBI and the Department of Justice. They are both almost surely correct. But those of us who actually care about proper governance would do well to think back to, I don't know, a few months before the 2016 election, when then-director of the FBI James Comey, appointed by Barack Obama, laid out a devastating case against Candidate Clinton…before saying he wouldn't recommend bringing charges against her.
Recall the rhetorical cherry that Comey put on the top of that shit sundae:
To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.
So regular Americans could get strung up, but not Hillary Clinton. This is not ancient history or a story about a black-bag job that J. Edgar Hoover ran. It's not even history. But we're not supposed to bring up the deservedly low opinions of the FBI and a Justice Department that have for decades done everything possible to make Americans suspect their employees aren't really trustworthy. The FBI in particular has a long history of abusing its power and the results of that show up in polls mostly showing a massive lack of confidence in it. To the right is a poll from 2016, which tracks with other measures of a broad-based decline in major U.S. institutions. Just one-third of Americans have strong confidence in the FBI, the same awful result that the CIA fetches. The federal government writ large does even worse, as does Congress.
A Harvard CAPS-Harris poll from late December found
Sixty-three percent of polled voters believe that the FBI has been resisting providing information to Congress on the Clinton and Trump investigations. This is a remarkable finding for an agency whose new head said a few days ago that the agency was in fine shape. No, it isn't.
Consider this gloss on Tim Weiner's damning 2012 of the FBI, Enemies:
Most presidents since Woodrow Wilson have been less intimidated by the F.B.I. than seduced by it. Under the rubric of protecting the nation, they secretly authorized the F.B.I. to open mail, infiltrate political parties, tap phones, perform "black bag" break-ins of homes and institutions, and draw up vast lists of Americans eligible for "custodial detention" during a crisis….
Botched confrontations with cults and right-wing radicals left a trail of blood from Whidbey Island to Ruby Ridge to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. The bureau was penetrated again and again by double agents from Russia, China, Cuba, even Al Qaeda. (The Chinese spy Katrina Leung, truly a double agent, seduced both the special agent in charge of her case and "a leading F.B.I. counterintelligence expert on China.") F.B.I. turncoats like Robert Hanssen and Earl Pitts went undetected for years, costing "hundreds of millions of dollars" and the lives of a "dozen or more foreign agents who worked for the bureau and the C.I.A."
The best terror informant the bureau actually had was dropped for fear that he might be a double agent, while as late as 2002, only eight agents could speak Arabic. The F.B.I. remained a "pyramid of paper," mysteriously unable to create a decent computer system; by 2000, "the average American teenager had more computer power than most F.B.I. agents," according to Weiner, and agents "could not perform a Google search or send e-mails outside their offices."
This is the essential context for any discussion of "the memo" and investigations by the government into actors such as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And the hits just keep coming. Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, who broke the story of the DOJ's heinous "Fast and Furious" gun-walking operation, reports on new text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two FBI officials whose political animus against Donald Trump has hurt the credibility of the Russia investigation.
Page: Have a meeting with turgal about getting iphone in a day or so
Strzok: Oh hot damn. . . We get around our security/monitoring issues?
Page: No, he's proposing that we just stop following them. Apparently the requirement to capture texts came from [Office of Management and Budget], but we're the only org (I'm told) who is following that rule. His point is, if no one else is doing it why should we. . . I'm told – thought I have seen – that there is an IG report that says everyone is failing. But one has changed anything, so why not just join in the failure.
It's a shockingly cavalier attitude from an attorney and high level FBI official.
There are more text messages between Strzok and Page from a critical time period, as we now know, that the FBI claimed had been lost in a technical glitch. After that became public, the Inspector General said he was able to recover them. (Interesting that the FBI couldn't.)
Are Americans stupid for feeling like its government is not worthy of respect and confidence? No, of course not. The people in government, especially a string of mostly inept-at-best and power-mad-at worst FBI directors and attorneys general have brought us to a place where we don't trust them anymore. Especially in an age of forced transparency, squabbles between highly partisan members of Congress is a diversion from bigger and harder truths. Just like in the early to mid-1970s, when the Pentagon Papers, LBJ's constant lies about Vietnam, Nixon's illegal actions here and abroad, and revelations of COINTELPRO and massive abuses by the FBI, CIA, and NSA came to light, we need a new Church Commission and Rockefeller Commission if we're ever going to be able to believe in our government again.
There are extremely serious problems with low-trust societies, and it seems pretty clear that the United States is sliding toward less and less faith in both public and private institutions. That's bad news, because it usually ends with people calling for more intervention into every aspect of our lives by the very government we know is either crooked, incompetent, or both. If we keep talking about "the memo" and the larger Russia investigation only in partisan terms, the only thing we'll have to show for ourselves is even less trust and confidence.
Related: "Why Libertarians Should Want MORE Trust in Government"
The post If You Think The Nunes Memo Will 'Discredit' FBI and DOJ, You Haven't Been Paying Attention For the Past 50 Years appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Wormwood. Available now on Netflix.
Nothing bores me more than weepy declarations of the end of American innocence. If there ever was such a moment, it came hundreds of years ago when the first slave ship arrived, the first Indian was shot, or maybe when the first witch was hanged.
But there's no denying that much of the country was pretty stunned to learn in 1975 that a CIA employee named Frank Olson jumped out a 10th-floor hotel window after being secretly dosed with LSD by his own boss as part of a U.S. government mind-control experiment. Toppling governments in Guatemala or Iran at least had some sense of purpose, however foul; Olson's death sounded more like a tawdry, callous frat prank, a profound and pointless repudiation of the very concept of morality.
Five decades later, investigative filmmaker Errol Morris' Wormwood is trying to convince us that it was something even worse, the ruthless murder of a political dissident with his six-part documentary Wormwood, a razzle-dazzle exercise in multimedia virtuosity that substitutes sinister showmanship for facts and silly sophistry for deductive logic. American innocence may have been lost a long time ago, but the casual acceptance of Wormwood's empty claims certainly suggests that the tides of American citizens' cynicism about their government are teaching new high points.
"Wormwood" in the Bible refers literally to poison and metaphorically to bitter truth, and both usages underlie the documentary. It recounts the quest of Eric Olson, Frank's son, to prove his father was not just collateral damage in a CIA experiment in behavioral control experiment but the victim of a government execution.
Frank Olson, a bacteriologist, began working during World War II as a civilian contractor for a U.S. Army biological warfare lab and then graduated to a Frankenstein-ish CIA unit dedicated to better covert living through chemistry. It provided poisons for CIA assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and leftist Congolese leader Patrice Lumemba and dabbled in the use of LSD and other hallucinogens as two-way weapons that might be used either to unmask Soviet moles in the West or create American moles behind the Iron Curtain.
In 1953, Olson and several CIA colleagues attended a retreat at a rural Maryland hunting lodge to discuss their work with psychotropic drugs. The meeting turned out to be more hands-on than anybody expected; Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the drug program, spiked the drinks of nearly all the participants with LSD. The idea was to see how they'd react to the drug in a non-clinical situation. The result was the spook version of a 1960s college dorm party; a lot of giggling and incoherent philosophical debates.
Olson, however, had the mother of all bad trips. Within a couple of days, convinced he had made a fool of himself at the retreat, he showed up at his supervisor's office to say he wanted to quit or be fired. As his condition deteriorated over the next 24 hours, Olson's bosses decided he needed psychiatric help. They sent him to New York to see a doctor named Harold Abramson, who was interested in psychiatry but had no formal training. (By trade, he was an immunologist.) But he had been a CIA contractor, had a security clearance, and, perhaps most importantly, had worked with the agency's LSD project.
Olson, however, grew even more paranoid. He was convinced the CIA was drugging him further. He snuck out of a Broadway show to avoid the armed men he was certain were waiting outside to grab him and spent a night wandering the streets, throwing away his identification and money, on what he imagined were CIA orders. The next night he went flying out his hotel room window. Olson's family was told only that he had jumped or fallen, not about the LSD dosing. And for the next 22 years, that was that.
But when government and media investigations into CIA domestic spying began in 1975, they soon came across a document listing what the agency called the "family jewels," secret operations that were embarrassing and possibly illegal. Olson's death was among them. For the first time, his family learned what was really behind his leap from the hotel window.
Or did it? Though Frank's son Eric, along with the rest of the family, signed a $750,000 settlement with the CIA and visited the White House to accept a personal apology from President Ford, he remained unconvinced by the CIA account. Eric even had his father's body exhumed and a new autopsy performed. Over the years, he's filed several lawsuits (all dismissed), convinced a cold-case unit of the New York DA's office to launch a new investigation of the case (after four years with results, it closed), and hectored investigative reporters, including Seymour Hersh and Morris, to pursue it.
Eric's obsession is entirely understandable, not only because his father's death, one way or another, was caused by a lawless government agency that treated its own employees as little better than livestock, but because there are some dangling threads in the case.
The biggest is the result of the body's exhumation. It showed no sign of the lacerations that might be expected on somebody who jumped through a closed window, as Frank Olson is alleged to have done. And it had a head wound that two of the three forensic pathologists who participated in the examination said could only have been inflicted before hitting the ground—suggesting the possibility that Olson could have been knocked unconscious by assailants his hotel room, then tossed out the window—by malign coincidence, exactly the technique recommended in a 1953 CIA assassination manual that's come to light in recent years.
Those loose ends morph into smoking guns in the bombastic alchemy of Wormwood. Morris, who in previous films has taken on police homicides (The Thin Blue Line) and the criminal deceptiveness of the intellectual authors of the Vietnam war (The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara), pulls out all the stops this time.
Photos, Olson home movies and TV newscasts, disturbing flim clips splash across a screen that often as not is split—two, three, nine times. They alternate with repetitive and disturbing flim clips of a lonely figure sitting (or sinking?) in a desolate body of water, perhaps the poisonous waters unleased by the malefic star Wormwood prophesied in the Book of Revelations. Morris' interviews with Eric Olson, shot under harsh light in a featureless office, look like they took place in the waiting room of Hell. The soundtrack is pockmarked with weird echoes and screechy sounds effects.
All this is a frame for the main narrative device of Wormwood, its recreations. Staged representations of events in a documentary were an innovation when Morris introduced them in The Thin Blue Line, but they've become a standard tool for documentarians in the years since.
Wormwood, however, suggests that the early industry skepticism about recreations may have been on target. These recreations are less dramatic aids to paper over a lack of documentary footage than a movie of their own, with a screenplay that goes well beyond established facts and a full cast (including Molly Parker of Deadwood and Peter Sarsgaard of The Killing) that interprets characters rather than representing them. Bob Balaban is unnvervingly creepy as the faux CIA shrink Harold Abramson, but it's hard to believe that such an obviously diabolical personality could attracted patients for a lucrative private practice, as the real-life Abramson did.
And in elevating Eric Olson's largely unsupported suspicions into objective fact in the extensive recreations, Morris leaves the realm of documentary for fictional drama. For instance, the CIA colleague sharing Frank Olson's room on the night he died was a slight, mild-mannered chemist who absolutely nobody believes could have picked Olson up and hurled him through a window. So Morris simply introduces two CIA musclemen who slip up to the room in the middle of the night, do the deed, and then depart, undetected.
Is that plausible? Perhaps. Is it true? There's not even a shred of evidence for that; nobody reported any such men at all, much less witnessed them entering Olson's room.
More fundamentally, the thesis that drives Wormwood—that the CIA's story about dosing Olson with LSD was a red herring to cover up the fact that the agency murdered him to keep him from disclosing its work with drugs—is absurd.
It rests entirely on the unproven (to put it mildly) assertion that Frank Olson, after a decade of working on biowarfare projects, suddenly threatened to blow the whistle on them because he realized the CIA was using hallucinogens during interrogations of prisoners. That would certainly appall many people. But Olson's major project in his biowarfare work was converting anthrax germs to an aerosol form. Did he really the goal was a new and improved deodorant? Was he really shocked, shocked to learn that Fort Detrick was all about churning out weapons to be used in the Cold War?
Beyond that, if the LSD story was devised as a red herring, it must have been in consultation with Rube Goldberg. Olson's death attracted little attention at the time and quickly became a closed book. Would it really have made any sense for the CIA to fabricate a lot of documents about a fictional LSD dose, bury them in its archives, then hand over to outside investigators two decades later? The leak of the LSD story didn't distract anybody from Olson's death; quite the reverse, it called attention.
Wormwood, ultimately, is a wildly overblown embarrassment to Morris' reputation. Yet, oddly, he's not the journalist who takes the biggest hit. That would surely be Hersh, who in an interview that caps Wormwood, blandly declares that Olson was murdered and he knows why, "but I can't tell you." Because, Hersh says, it would get his source in trouble. As Time magazine editor Henry Grunwald once said, "Journalism can never be silent: That is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault." Time to shut up, Sy.
The post <em>Wormwood</em>'s Bad Trip Peddles CIA Conspiracies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There are new insider rumors that President Donald Trump's administration is going to see another shake-up at the top.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is not long for his job, according to multiple sources for Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman at The New York Times. The plan, the Times reports, would be for CIA Director Mike Pompeo to take over as secretary of state. Then they're considering installing Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to lead the CIA.
As always with the Trump administration, be wary when rumors of people quitting or getting fired hit the press. This is a leak-prone administration, and frequently what comes out through unnamed sources are half-baked ideas, trial balloons, or just people within the administration trying to influence the president's decisions by going to the press.
It should not be a surprise if Tillerson gets dumped. He and Trump clearly have been at odds for some time. An entire news cycle in October was consumed with a report that Tillerson called Trump a "moron."
Cotton is one of the bigger champions of allowing the federal government to engage in domestic surveillance without a warrant, so the idea of putting him charge of the CIA might make more than a few folks blanch. He's on board with the Senate Intelligence Committee's bill to formalize the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 authorities to snoop on Americans to fight crimes, beyond the intent of the legislation.
Cotton also is quite vocal about wanting regime change in Iran. Putting him in charge of the CIA could facilitate further American meddling in that country. We could see more voices for interventionism and even war from within the Trump administration.
On the other hand, Cotton has a nasty record of taking any number of authoritarian, anti-liberty positions. Getting him out of the Senate could arguably be an improvement in terms of lawmaking. He has been a supporter of harsh mandatory minimum federal sentencing for drug crimes and has stood in the way of reforms of the criminal justice system. And about those harsh crackdowns on illegal immigrants in America—Cotton thinks we have too many legal immigrants, buying into the inaccurate talking point that low-skilled immigrant labor is what is keeping Americans' wages down. And he backs legislation to block online gambling. Cotton has been no friend of freedom as a senator.
Cotton has been so in tune with Trump's worst authoritarian urges the administration might want to keep him where he is, given their challenges in building coalitions with lawmakers. Officials told The Times that there is concern that he's more valuable to Trump in the Senate. If Cotton leaves the Senate to head the CIA, Gov. Asa Hutchinson (a Republican) would name a replacement to serve until next fall. Hutchinson initially endorsed Marco Rubio as president and has not been terribly thrilled with the way Trump has been handling himself as president.
Corrected to fix the misspelling of Tillerson's name.
The post CIA Director Tom Cotton: A Disaster for Foreign Policy or a Boon for Better Lawmaking? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Donald Trump's administration, specifically the CIA, may soon be unleashing armed drones in airstrikes in foreign countries with much less oversight.
Thank President Barack Obama for that. Obama installed a system of using armed drones to kill foreign targets in the war on terror. Many of these strikes happened in countries in which America was not even at war, such as Yemen and Pakistan.
He justified the secretive system—eventually described in the press as a "kill list"—under the post-9/11 authorization for war against Al Qaeda. The president ran the drone program through the Pentagon and the CIA with no outside oversight, and he resisted any sort of transparency until enough information leaked out about it that he could no longer ignore it.
These drone strikes have been credibly blamed for hundreds of deaths of civilians (including more than 100 children). His administration put the number of civilian deaths much lower, but independent observers have disagreed.
Obama sold this program on the basis of his personal, sober judgment. Once the existence of the kill list became public, there was much concern about the lack of due process, but not a whole lot was done to try to stop it, other than a famous filibuster by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in 2013.
Now the program belongs to Trump. Trump critics may worry that his bombastic temperament will lead to bad drone deployment decisions. Well, we probably won't have to worry about that. What we do have to worry about is a complete abandonment of oversight and accountability under a president who is willing to leave these decisions to others.
There were hints earlier in the year that Trump was going to loosen some Obama-era restrictions on CIA drone use. Today NBC is reporting that plans are in the works to cut the brakes and let the drones fly more freely:
[CIA Director Mike] Pompeo has pushed for more freedom of action. He wants Trump to authorize the spy agency to strike targets in Afghanistan, which had long been the domain of the military, a senior U.S. official with direct knowledge told NBC News. The New York Times first reported that news last week.
The White House also is drafting a new written policy on counterterrorist operations outside of war zones that would supercede the so-called drone playbook that the Obama administration had hoped would govern the decisions of future presidents, several officials said.
The drone playbook, known as the Presidential Policy Guidance, or PPG, includes a provision that no strike should go forward unless analysts determine that there is a near-certainty that no civilians will be harmed. And it includes a provision forbidding the addition of new detainees to the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Trump administration is contemplating removing both of those restrictions, officials involved in the planning told NBC News.
These developments concern human rights activists, who argue that the CIA is less accountable than the military.
"The last thing the U.S. should be doing right now is expanding a global, secret killing program," said Zeke Johnson, senior director of programs for Amnesty International USA. "By its own admission, the U.S. government's use of drones has meant the deaths of civilians and there has been insufficient accountability."
Reason TV warned back in 2012 that the Obama administration's secretive use of drone strikes was bad news and would lead to even worse problems down the line. And here we are, down the line:
The post Thanks, Obama, for That Unaccountable System of Deadly Drone Strikes! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"There's a huge story to be told," says Anthony Lappé, "about the actual extent of the U.S. government's involvement in drug trafficking."
And that's exactly the story Lappé and his co-producers Julian Hobbs and Elli Hakami tell in a mesmerizing four-part series that debuted this week on cable TV's History Channel. Through dramatic recreations and in-depth interviews with academic researchers, historians, journalists, former federal agents, and drug dealers, America's War on Drugs (watch full episodes online here) tells true tales of how, for instance, the CIA and Department of Defense helped to introduce LSD to Americans in the 1950s.
"The CIA literally sent over two guys to Sandoz Laboratories where LSD had first been synthesized and bought up the world's supply of LSD and brought it back," Lappé tells Nick Gillespie in a wide-ranging conversation about the longest war the U.S. government has fought. "With that supply they began a [secret mind-control] program called MK Ultra which had all sorts of other drugs involved."
The different episodes cover the history of drug prohibition, the rise of the '60s drug counterculture; heroin epidemics past and present; how drug policy has warped U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia, Central America, Afghanistan, and beyond; the bipartisan politics of prohibition; and much more. America's War on Drugs features exclusive and rarely seen footage and documents how, time and time again, the government was often facilitating trade and use in the very drugs it was trying to stamp out. The show's website adds articles, short videos, and more information in an attempt to produce an "immersive experience" that will change how viewers think and feel about prohibition.
Lappé, who has worked at Vice, Huffington Post, and elsewhere, tells Gillespie that he is particulary excited to see his series air on the History Channel because it's an indicator the drug-policy reform is in the air. Though not a libertarian himself, he says "a great trait of libertarianism…is that knowledge and reason will eventually win out over keeping things in the dark, making things taboo." Even when it veers off into questionable territory (such as the role of the government in creating the crack epidemic of the 1980s), America's War on Drugs performs the invaluable function of furthering a conversation about drug policies and attitudes that have caused far more harm than they have alleviated.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Image: America's War on Drugs, History Channel.
Subscribe, rate, and review the Reason Podcast at iTunes.
Listen at SoundCloud below:
Don't miss a single Reason podcast! (Archive here.)
This is a rush transcript—check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: Hi I'm Nick Gillespie and this is the Reason podcast. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you're there.
Today we're talking with Anthony Lappe who along with Julian Hobbs and Elli Hakami has produced a four part docuseries called America's War on Drugs for the History Channel. You can go to history.com to watch the series and read more about our country's longest war. The series aired this week and it will be in reruns on History Channel, so check it out there.
Anthony, thanks for joining the Reason podcast.
Anthony Lappe: It's great to be here Nick.
Gillespie: Give us the big picture first. Who's your audience for this and what do you hope to bring to people through the docuseries?
Lappe: The exciting thing about this project really is the fact that it's on the History Channel. I honestly didn't believe it was actually going to air until it started airing on Sunday night and I was sitting there watching it because what we do here is actually pretty radical. I don't think anyone has ever really told this story fully on mainstream cable television before. We take a very critical look at the entire history of the war on drugs. In particular, looking at American foreign policy and how the Central Intelligence Agency is not just been involved in a couple of bad apples here and there. In couple rogue operations as a lot of these drug trafficking allegations have been called before.
But actually very directly involved in drug trafficking not only drug trafficking but in the largest drug trafficking stories of our time. Whether that's in the secret tests that introduced LSD to the United States or heroin during the late 60's and early 70's from southeast Asia, to cocaine during the late 70's and early 80's onto opium and heroin coming out of Afghanistan. There's a huge story to be told there about the actual extent of the US government's involvement in drug trafficking.
Gillespie: Let's talk first about the old days of MK Ultra and mind control and the way that the CIA actually helped introduce LSD evolved drugs into America, to American minds. What was going on in the 50's with the CIA and how did they become involved in introducing LSD to Americans?
Lappe: This is a story that a lot of your listeners may have heard about, people have heard about MK Ultra and I had as well, but I never really understood the full origins of the story. They go all the way back to the 1950's. During the 1950's of course, US and the Soviet Union are locked in a battle for hearts and minds around the world and psychoactive drugs were a big part of the Cold War psychological warfare programs on both sides.
The CIA had heard rumors that the Soviet Union was starting to use LSD at this point as a truth serum to see if they could break spies and get them to expose details, admit they were spies et cetera. The CIA literally sent over two guys to Sandoz Laboratories where LSD had first been synthesized and bought up the world's supply of LSD and brought it back. With that supply they began a program called MK Ultra which had all sorts of other drugs involved.
In particular they started doing secret tests around the country. Some of them using in veteran's hospitals and through the military. Others were in mental hospitals, a lot of basic, pretty much a lot of them were unwitting people, mental patients. But one of the incredible stories we found, I never knew this before, is that Ken Kesey, famously the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and really the guy who started the famous acid tests in the San Francisco Bay area, it was really the godfather of acid movement. As a Stanford grad student, or sorry an undergrad, was part of a test at the Menlo Park Veteran's hospital. Loved it so much that he got a job in the lab, stole all the acid, went up to San Francisco and started his acid test. That was the origins of how LSD was introduced into United States. This was also happening in other places around the country. It was just that Ken Kesey was the progenitor of the entire movement. It literally was the CIA.
Gillespie: That is a real challenge to all good thinking Libertarians like myself. Small L Libertarians who say that the government can never do anything right. The manage to strangely change the course, not of, I guess maybe of Cold War history, but certainly of American cultural history through their actions. The first episode of the series, and again check these out on history.com, the History Channel if you have, you can download their app and take a look at it. Plus there's other material there that's well worth delving into.
You look at the prehistory of Richard Nixon's declaration of a war on drugs in the early 70's, what were some of the motivating factors you found behind Nixon declaring war on drugs? Very early in the 70's he talked about, famously used the phrase, declaring a war on drugs, that illegals drugs were the number one enemy facing America. What was going on, things like pot and acid and heroin rose to that level of attention from the federal government?
Lappe: You really had two strains happening. You had the psychedelic movement which was heavily influenced by acid which the CIA itself had introduced, which is just my blowing right. Then you had pot as well which basically increasing numbers of young people were smoking. Nixon declares famously this war on drugs in June 1971. At the same time there was a massive heroin epidemic that really was ravaging mostly the eastern seaboard. What a lot people don't realize is that too in part, you could argue another case of blow back from our own operations.
During the mid 60's to late 60's there was a famous, everyone knows, a war against communist forces in Vietnam but also next door there was a gigantic secret war happening in Laos that officially we were not supposed to be fighting. Both politically it was radioactive for Johnson to declare another front but there were also treaties that said that we couldn't have troops on the ground both with Laos and we had an agreement, a sort of tacit agreement with the Soviet Union they wouldn't put troops on the ground.
There was a massive clandestine CIA operation in Laos running this secret war. People have probably heard of this CIA airline called Air America. Basically we go into business helping a local warlord named Vang Pao. When we started the war in the mid 60's, around 65, Vang Pao was a sort of somewhat populous, anti-communist leader of the Hmong hill people in Laos and was peripherally involved in growing opium because that's really what the cash crop was in that area.
By 1968, 1969 into 1970 Vang Pao was the biggest heroin trafficker on the planet. Some of his partners were the Sicilian mobsters that we had gone into business to put in Havana Cuba and south Florida to try to kill Fidel Castro. Basically we had created this huge network or aided this huge network of international drug trafficking that created a massive heroin epidemic which has only been surpassed by the current opioid crisis and we go into that later.
What happens is, there's all this heroin in the theater of war in southeast Asia, a lot of troops are getting hooked, famously they all start bringing this heroin back and heroin really starts devastating the inner city and there was a legitimate belief by a lot of people that really it was out of control and crime rates were really skyrocketing especially in cities like New York. So Nixon was under a lot of pressure. He had run in 1960 under the banner of law and order and the country was literally falling apart by 1971 in his eyes.
Gillespie: As you were saying, the crime really ratcheted up. It started in the 50's but it really ratcheted up in the 60's, there was the perception that people were leaving cities in droves to avoid crime. You talk, I think, in the first episode, it's something that in 1960 the government figures had something like 50,000 heroin addicts around the country or heroin users and it had crept up to something like 200,000 or 500,000 by about 1970.
Lappe: Yeah.
Gillespie: Part of it Nixon was a law and order guy and there's, you go into this a bit at your site as well as in the show that John Ehrlichman one of Richard Nixon's chief lieutenants in a 1990, 94 interview with Dan Baum who ultimately published a story in Harper's about this, that he said that the war on pot and the war on drugs was really a way to control black people. There was also this sense that the urban American was going to hell in a hand basket as well.
Follow up question for that is, the war on drugs gets birthed out of mixed feeling and Nixon and there's some footage in one of the episodes of Ronald Reagan denouncing the use of acid in the 60's and obviously became drug warrior himself as president. There was a strong bipartisan element to the war on drugs because even people, Jimmy Carter seemed to be okay with the idea of pot legalization or decriminalization until events overtook him and he became a staunch drug warrior. People like Bill Clinton, people like Barack Obama also added to the drug war. What is the, I guess that's a long wind up for a pretty simple question, what is it about the war on drugs that pulls such support from Democrats and Republicans across the board?
Lappe: I think this is pretty deep question because I think it goes to what I found in working on this project which is really one of the most epic projects I've ever worked on in my life in terms of the amount of research we did. I think drugs have always played a scapegoat role in our society where we see other social forces, in particular economic forces and other things that have been pressures on communities and it's very easy to point the finger at drugs. In some ways it's a natural reaction to try to crack down on them in the harshest way. Of course by cracking down on drugs are an inanimate object, there is no such thing as a crack down on drugs. You're cracking down on people. And when you crack down on people, that has a reverberating effect. It also can be used as a tool.
Nixon is probably one of the most cynical politicians in our history but maybe not the worst in my opinion. He saw it purely, in my opinion, as a political move. As a way to take out this, he believed he had all these enemies that were growing around him, all these social movements, you had black nationalism, you had increasingly radicalized hippie movement that had turned from a peacenik movement into a more dangerous, whether underground type of operations. There was a feeling that society was unraveling to some degree. That was in large part because it was because we lived in a oppressive racist society and there was a war that in 1968, everyone knew was at a stalemate or that we had lost but continued going on. People don't realize half the people died, of our soldiers after 1968 when Nixon ran under this completely cynical lie that he had a secret plan to end the war [Editor's note: Journalism historian Joseph W. Campbell has documented that Candidate Nixon never publicly made such a pledge, which continues to be cited frequently.].
There was all these other forces going on in drugs were very easy way to demonize people.
Gillespie: At the website, at history.com, among the various things you have in timelines or whatnot that are worth going back to. The early attempts to link cocaine with black people and if you want to crack down on cocaine because white women may be taking it or something, you crack down on black people. When pot became illegal, under federal law, became effectively illegal in the 1930's, it was identified with Mexicans. Chinese and opium was a problem. It is fascinating in the 60's you have with something like LSD the youth movement and hippies and then again when ecstasy which was made illegal in the 80's thanks in large part to Joe Biden.
The identification of a subculture or subgroup or a particular ethnic group that you can crack down on is one of the really haunting elements, I think, of the drug war and that comes through in this, in this series. Talk a bit about how particularly after 9/11 part of the series, and I think you're absolutely right in looking at it, that what this does in a way that is really fresh and interesting is look at how foreign policy, US foreign policy has been both guided and infected by the drug war. Talk a bit about the post 9/11 era and how have fears of narco-terrorism really changed the way we go about our foreign policy?
Lappe: Narco-terrorism is a term that started, that was introduced after 9/11, shortly after really. We show how in the first Superbowl after 9/11, the Partnership for Drug Free America began running this very eerie infamous ad now where you had a bunch of kids saying, "I supported terrorists, I supported a suicide bomber, I did this." Basically saying because I did drugs I was helping all of these different terrorists groups et cetera. When the incredible irony is that our own government has been knee deep in drug trafficking for decades.
There was a big push though it was completely ironic and what we show in our last episode which is the post 9/11 era, is we actually have an undercover DEA agent. This was a huge theme that we saw throughout our series was the tension between the DEA and the CIA. I'll paint the picture of what was happening in Afghanistan.
In the late 1990's, opium has always been one of or the biggest cash crop in Afghanistan. During the 1990's there was a massive civil war. All sides were using opium to finance themselves. The Taliban comes in to power and starts taxing at first, opium growers but by the late 90's the Taliban is having a huge PR problem. They're chopping off women's heads in stadiums and they're blowing up the Buddhas. They were becoming an international pariah. They pulled this incredible PR coup where they said they were cracking down on opium. When really all they were doing were stockpiling it. Basically they launched this whole fake crackdown that got the UN off their back. The US, we even in 2000, sent them $40 million of aid money to help, quote unquote, crackdown on opium. But really what was happening was they were stockpiling opium and then after 9/11 used those stockpiles to ramp up their war effort.
At the time of 9/11, Afghanistan was about 30% of the world's heroin. Today it's about 90%. What Afghanistan has become is a drug war. People never talk about it in that context but Afghanistan is a giant drug war. The Taliban have, to quote REM, lost their religion. They're really are not much of a religious force any more as they are just any other militant insurgency group that is trying to take down a government. There isn't much, they're not putting a lot of effort into their Sharia program. They basically have become gigantic drug traffickers. But also our allies in Afghanistan. Including in the early days, Hamid Karzai's brother, Wali Karzai was the biggest heroin trafficker and drug lord who controlled all the traffic in Kandahar. Who was completely protected by the CIA.
I talked to soldiers who literally their job was to guard the opium fields of our local warlord allies. This heroin has had a major impact on the world's drug stage. It should be noted a lot of the heroin that comes into the United States is coming from Mexico now but a lot of it is coming from Afghanistan, especially on the east coast and in Canada. It's a really incredible story that no one really talks about. There's a great reporter that is one of our contributors to the show named, Gretchen Peters, wrote a book called, Seeds of Terror. That essentially is her thesis.
We also have great stories about the undercover DEA agents who were fighting to try to take down drug traffickers at the same time the CIA was undermining their efforts.
Gillespie: It's a phenomenal drama that unfolds and it has these dark, rich, historical ironies that abound throughout the series. The odds are good now at least and actually in a story that's up at the website, you guys talk about Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General under Donald Trump. Who has really, he's pledged to really redouble efforts at least domestically, on the war on drugs which you guys point out at least in it's Nixonian phase has been going on for 50 years. It's really more like a 100 years when you go all the way back to things like the Harrison Narcotics Act.
It's failing, it doesn't seem to have much effect on drug usage rates, they seem to be independent of enforcement, there's obviously problems with surgeon opiod use that is it's own tangled web of unintended consequences and weird interventions into markets. At the same time the odds are phenomenal that pot is going to be fully legal in the US within the next decade if not before. During the campaign, weirdly Donald Trump seemed to be at times okay with the idea of different states deciding what kind of marijuana policies, obviously the Sessions factors a big difference from that. Are you optimistic that we're at least entering the beginning of the end of the drug war, to borrow a terrible Vietnam phrase that there's light at the end of the tunnel in terms of American attitudes towards currently illegal drugs, and rethinking the drug war?
Lappe: There's no doubt that things are moving in that direction in the same way there's no doubt that things like gay rights and LGBT rights are moving in a certain direction. Jeff Sessions essentially is a weird outlier, historical blip, as you said, to try to pin Trump down on any one ideology or stance is literally impossible. He said we were going to stop all our foreign wars, yet he's sending 8,000 more troops in Afghanistan. Whatever Trump has said on the war on drugs is sort of irrelevant.
But Sessions is just a weird dinosaur throwback to another era that I think is just going to be, if he survives the next three years. Will just be a blip in the road towards eventually people moving, starting with marijuana towards legalization both for, at least, nationwide to medicinal use if not most states towards recreational use. Because people are seeing that it doesn't really have any negative effects, there isn't really a gigantic increase in use and there's great benefits to society in terms of being able to tax it and make it a normalized thing. I think a big part of the problem with drugs and Dr. Carl Hart at Columbia is one of the most iconoclastic guys on this and he's in our series, he's out on the far fringes of this. But what he really says is, the problem with drugs is not drugs. The problem is drug use and misuse and people being idiots with drugs and not knowing how to use them.
Gillespie: But it's hard to know how to use them if you're not allowed to freely and openly discuss the facts, your experiences, your parents, we have enough problems with alcohol abuse and that's fully legal. When you start talking about these other drugs it's hard to get good information.
Lappe: Right. It's the same thing with these abstinence programs. You see wherever there's abstinence programs there's more STD's, there's more pregnancies because people are ignorant. I think that's a great trait of libertarianism even though I don't believe in everything you guys believe in. Is that knowledge and reason will eventually win out over keeping things in the dark, making things taboo. I think that people are rational and when it comes … There's always going to be people who are going to abuse something, just the same way people abuse alcohol or any substance. I think there is a general consensus that we're moving in a particular direction and I think that ultimately it's going to be better for society.
Gillespie: I hope so and think that your series that was on History Channel will being rerun there as well as it's available on history.com along with a lot of other articles and timelines, does a really good job of helping to start that discussion which has been waiting to happen for decades now.
We have been talking with Anthony Lappe who along with Julian Hobbs and Elli Hakami has produced a great four part series for History Channel called, America's War on Drugs. It's available online and look for it on your basic cable package.
Anthony, thanks so much for talking to the Reason podcast today.
Lappe: Thanks a lot, it was a lot of fun.
Gillespie: This has been the Reason podcast, I'm Nick Gillespie, thanks for listening. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you're there. Thanks so much.
The post How the CIA Turned Us onto LSD and Heroin: Secrets of America's War on Drugs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A push to force the federal government to publicly release the full contents of a Senate report on the secret torture and detention of terror suspects ended quietly this morning with a simple rebuff by the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court declined to consider a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU had been suing under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to force the federal government to release the contents of a 6,000-page report from the Senate. The full report detailed not just the terrible treatment—waterboarding and other forms of torture—of people suspected (sometimes incorrectly) of terrorism overseas; it also argued that the violent interrogations failed to get useful information and that the CIA lied about the program to higher-ups in government to conceal what they were doing.
An executive summary—clocking in at more than 500 pages—was finally declassified and made public in heavily redacted form back in 2014 after a long fight over it. But the full report has been secreted away to the point that the Department of Justice has actually ordered federal agencies to not even open and read the report, and Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has attempted to get federal agencies to give their copies of the report back to the Senate.
The ACLU's lawsuit is partly why. In defending against the ACLU's lawsuit, the federal government argued that the full torture report was a congressional record and therefore not subject to FOIA. The ACLU countered that passing the report along to agencies in the executive branch meant otherwise. Unfortunately, courts have up until now found for the government. This morning the Supreme Court denied certification for the ACLU's lawsuit, so their push ends here with a loss for transparency.
It is the end of this particular legal fight, Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, tells Reason. "It is a very disappointing end because we think that the lessons of the full report are really necessary to learn."
Nevertheless, Shamsi felt as though the fight itself hasn't been a total loss. The outrage that followed the disclosure of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques led military and executive branch leaders to acknowledge the legal limitations to what they were permitted to do to prisoners of the war on terror, and the military has promised to use only interrogation techniques listed in the Army Field Manuals, meaning no waterboarding.
"Opposition [to torture] at the highest levels is going to be critically important," Shamsi said. That's particularly true because President Donald Trump campaigned fully in support of waterboarding and even harsher forms of torture as tools to fight the Islamic State.
The Supreme Court declining to hear the case means the legal fight is over, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the chance Americans will ever get to see the full report is completely gone. The president has the authority to declassify the full report's contents, but that seems extremely unlikely given Trump's positions. Before leaving office, President Barack Obama managed to save a copy in his presidential archive. So even if the Trump administration has all the copies of the full report destroyed, there's still one out there they can't touch.
When the executive report was initially released to the public, we made note of the outrageous incidents described in there. But while those violent incidents described in the report got the most media attention, huge chunks of the summary were devoted to whether proper procedures were followed or not and whether the torture actually got results or not. As I noted at the time, you could switch torture out and replace it with any other massive bureaucratic process the federal government put together and see the same kind of debates. So it seems likely that the massive full report would also be focused on the deep procedural issues of how the torture came to pass. Nevertheless, Shamsi says the full report would contain important information, and Americans should support its release.
"What we know is that the full report provides a lot more information about what was actually done and how, and critically … it sheds greater light on the essential corruption that [came from] a determination to torture—Which is that the CIA lied to the White House other parts of the executive branch and to Congress," she says. "Torture corrupts, and [the report] details the way torture corrupts and harms people along with institutions we care about."
The post You Won't Read a Full Accounting of America's Use of Waterboarding and Torture Anytime Soon appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Mike Pompeo, the former Republican congressman who is now President Donald Trump's director of the CIA, wants to protect America from fascism and authoritarian regimes by cracking down on media outlets that publish information he doesn't want them to.
Wait … what?
Pompeo delivered a prepared speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies yesterday that was clearly intended to be a boisterous defense of what all our federal snoops do to keep America safe. But the intelligence community has had some issues with leaks the past few years, to put it mildly, and Pompeo's speech has him playing company man, insisting through sheer assertion that disclosures about what the CIA and intelligence community at large are doing is a threat to America's ability to keep people safe and fight terrorism.
Pompeo's comments took a particularly dark turn when he addressed WikiLeaks. He does not like the media outlet, nor does he like Julian Assange. This is not terribly surprising and not unusual. Assange has a lot of critics even outside the beltway. He's a polarizing figure.
But Pompeo makes it very, very clear that he does not believe that WikiLeaks should be treated like a media outlet and actually threats some sort of government-sponsored retribution for publishing classified or private data. Here are two separate and rather chilling quotes from parts of his speech:
No, Julian Assange and his kind are not the slightest bit interested in improving civil liberties or enhancing personal freedom. They have pretended that America's First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice. They may have believed that, but they are wrong. …
[W]e can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.
We must destroy free speech in order to protect it! We must use government power to stop people from disclosing information in order to protect the media's right and responsibility to disclose information. It makes total sense!
Because of the allegations of ties between WikiLeaks and Russia and the possibility that Russian government representatives were the source of documents (like Democratic National Committee communications) that had been released during the presidential election, the site is the focus of even more criticism than it had been before.
But one does not have to be a supporter of WikiLeaks to see the deep, serious problems with what Pompeo argues here—that one's right to free speech and free press is dependent on one's agenda and whether it aligns with the federal government's.
Pompeo is hardly alone in wanting the government to decide what is and isn't a real media outlet and to want to exclude WikiLeaks entirely for the purpose of trying to punish them. Lawmakers have been wanting for ages to decide what counts as a "real journalist" in such a way that allows them to exert control over what really counts as news.
One doesn't have to wander very far to ponder the implications. You don't even have to turn away from Pompeo. As Reuters notes, Pompeo's criticism of WikiLeaks is a new thing. He was certainly willing to treat them like a media outlet with content worth sharing when it was revealing information about the Democrats' communications last year:
In July, Pompeo, than a Republican member of the House of Representatives, mentioned it in a Twitter post referring to claims that the DNC had slanted the candidate-selection process to favor Clinton. "Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by Wikileaks."
So it's absurdly obvious that Pompeo's evaluation of WikiLeaks is in part dependent on whose ox is getting gored.
In the Q&A section, Pompeo was even more specific in saying that the protections of the free press are in part bounded by what the government thinks is in its interest:
Julian Assange has no First Amendment privileges. He is not a U.S. citizen. What I was speaking to is an understanding that these are not reporters doing good work to try to keep the American Government on us. These are actively recruiting agents to steal American secrets with the sole intent of destroying the American way of life.
That is fundamentally different than a First Amendment activity as I understand them. This is what I was getting to. We have had administrations before that have been too squeamish about going after these people, after some concept of this right to publish. Nobody has the right to actively engage in the theft of secrets from America without the intent to do harm to it.
Over at The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, obviously concerned about what it might mean for somebody responsible for helping Edward Snowden reveal domestic surveillance by the National Security Administration, is bothered that the rest of the media is not terribly worried about this. Pompeo's threats are terrible:
When I worked at the Guardian, my editors were all non-Americans. Would it therefore have been constitutionally permissible for the U.S. Government to shut down that paper and imprison its editors on the ground that they enjoy no constitutional protections? Obviously not. Moreover, what rational person would possibly be comfortable with having this determination – who is and is not a "real journalist" – made by the CIA?
Even many of those who believe Snowden broke the law with his disclosures and think he should face some sort of criminal punishment are not on board with punishing the media outlets themselves for reporting information. Pompeo doesn't seem to be as willing to make the distinction. He throws out the word "treason" in reference to those who leak information. He has used the word before to describe Snowden directly.
Pompeo further insists that Snowden isn't a whistleblower because he didn't follow the proper procedures, which has been a common refrain from apologists for the surveillance state across party lines. Why should anybody accept the government's designation of who a "whistleblower" is any more than they would allow the government to decide what a real media outlet is or who a journalist is?
The reality is that because of Snowden's disclosures, Congress changed the laws in order to place restraints on the government's ability to collect and keep mass amounts of metadata on American citizens. If we were instead to evaluate Snowden on the basis of the outcome of his leaks, he sure as heck counts as a whistleblower. Congress changed laws because of what he showed us and because of the public's outrage over it.
Pompeo, though, supports bulk data collection and surveillance, even domestically. So really, when all is said and done, he is in a very disturbing fashion deciding that concepts like free speech and privacy are subservient to whatever the government declares is in its own interest.
And yet he's telling us to be worried about WikiLeaks.
The post CIA Head Pompeo Would Like to Decide What Counts as a Real Media Outlet appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>