Daniel Ellsber on Manning verdict and why journalism is still threatened,

Exclusive: the first reaction of Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, to Bradley Manning’s acquittal on charges of “aiding the enemy,” but conviction under the espionage act, why journalism is still threatened, Manning’s motives, the positive consequences of his leaks — for instance ending America’s occupation of Iraq once and for all, and the importance of whistleblowers to a free society.

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Scott Horton interviews Daniel Ellsberg
July 30, 2013

Transcript

Scott Horton: All right, y’all. Welcome back. I’m Scott Horton, and we are joined on the phone live by Daniel Ellsberg, The Most Dangerous Man in America, the heroic liberator of the Pentagon Papers. Welcome back to the show, Dan, how are you doing?

Daniel Ellsberg: I’m doing okay. We’ll tell your listeners that you just informed me 30 seconds ago that Bradley Manning was found not guilty of aiding the enemy. That’s very, very important, and good news, because the alternative would have been extremely bad news. It would have been very close to being a death knell over time to investigative journalism in this country, which means a free press, which means ultimately democracy or any possibility of democratic control of our foreign policy, our defense policy, totally, if the prosecutor’s argument that his simply giving information to the internet and thereby making it available to the world, including whatever enemies we had, if that is enough to earn a death sentence or life in prison, without any attempt even to prove or indicate intent to harm the United States or to help an enemy – that’s the argument the prosecutor was making and the charges they’ve pursued ever since Bradley Manning pled guilty to 10 military offenses, which could still keep him in prison for 20 years, and I haven’t seen the full verdict here so it may well be that she has added some other offenses to that which may add up to a life sentence.

In my case, I didn’t face a single, one single count that carried a death sentence, such as the aiding the enemy charge in this case did, but I had 12 felony counts which added up to 115 years in prison, so the effect was much the same. That could still be the case here.

The truth is that he did not deserve a day in prison for informing the public here as he did. He certainly does not deserve an additional day after the abusive treatment he’s received here of three years awaiting trial, 10½ months in solitary confinement, part of that nude, a treatment which was described by the UN Rapporteur for Torture as, if not being torture – and he didn’t have all the facts there because he hadn’t been allowed to speak to Manning alone – but he said at the very least it was cruel, inhumane and degrading punishment, which is the definition of a crime under the Geneva Conventions we’ve signed and under domestic law. So he should have been released on the grounds of governmental misconduct, as was the case in my trial, but wasn’t.

And this charge of aiding the enemy should have been dropped earlier. It was absurd and ominous and had the most ominous implications for journalism in general in this country and for our learning what our government is doing. I might also mention that that charge is one of two charges in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that is not confined to military personnel but says “any person” who does this, and so it’s even more ominous than it might be. So, given that that’s taken out, which frankly I’ve been saying yesterday was 50-50 in my mind, looking at the judge’s behavior and others who follow the trial have said they thought the odds were greater than that, this is good.

Scott Horton: Yeah. Well, you know, the way that the judge had helped the prosecution redefine the charges at the last minute there, some of the charges, not the aiding the enemy charge – that made me, you know – you’re a hell of an optimist, Dan, if you were giving it 50-50. I was worried it was a much smaller chance than that. So this is really great news. Now –

Daniel Ellsberg: Oh, it is. It is. I was refusing to be interviewed the day before the trial. I had a number of offers or proposals to be interviewed the day before the verdict and I said, “What’s the use of that?” You know, wait for the verdict. But in my own mind I did not want to rehearse beforehand how bad I was going to feel, and foresee, if he was found guilty of aiding the enemy. So I (laughs) – “sufficient under the day is the evil thereof,” my father used to quote the Bible, and I thought, okay, I’ll wait for the verdict.

I’m glad that I did now, and in this respect it’s very good. And we’ll see what the rest – there are several other stages to this now. I presume it’s already available and I haven’t seen it yet, what else she’s finding him guilty of other than the 10 charges that he pled guilty to. There were the remaining 12 charges including the aiding enemy. You don’t know offhand, Scott?

Scott Horton: Yes, sir. I’m looking at Alexa O’Brien’s twitter feed now, Dan, and she has found him guilty of espionage for the Iraq war logs, for the Afghan war diaries, and the Gitmo files. Those are three different espionage charges at least.

Daniel Ellsberg: But not guilty – now, having been the first person who was prosecuted for a leak under the Espionage Act, let me correct you, Scott, and a lot of other people who describe this as espionage. The way it’s described legally is it is a non-espionage charge under the so-called Espionage Act. It’s 18 USC 793, paragraphs D and E. It’s known as the Espionage Act because before my prosecution it was used only against spying, only against espionage, giving information to an enemy with intent to help that enemy, or a foreign power if not an enemy, a foreign power, intent to help them and/or to harm the United States. In my case, they did not charge espionage. In fact, the prosecutor made a motion which was accepted by the judge that the word “espionage” should not be used in the courtroom lest it give the jury the impression that an absurd charge was being made, since it was obvious that neither my intent nor my actions were espionage. So, even so, I’ve often been described as having been charged with espionage.

In this case, he’s charged with – and convicted, it seems, at this stage, and I’m afraid later – of violations of 18 USC 793. Actually this is a military trial, but he is the second person ever to be convicted by a jury – in this case, a judge – of that charge. The only other person was Samuel Loring Morison, a dozen years after my case was dismissed for governmental misconduct, was found by a jury guilty of that violation, which Bradley is now the second person. There have been seven prosecutions, indictments, brought by Obama under that act, of which Bradley Manning was one. And there were only three by prior presidents, no president more than one. So Obama has now brought more than twice as many indictments under that law as any other, and to call it espionage in a way makes it sound absurd, because it obviously isn’t espionage, and as I say, that is actually incorrect.

But to use that law in that fashion is to use it as if it were a British Official Secrets Act which criminalizes any and all release of classified information, and that is in fact a very ominous development itself for investigative journalism because if any release of classified information, which after all occurs, usually anonymously, every day – in other words, there are thousands of cases and not seven, and not 700; it would be closer to 7,000 over a long period, of which Obama has prosecuted just seven. But if this is upheld, it will be one more precedent that will encourage Obama to bring even more cases, and even though then leakers, people who give unauthorized disclosure of information that the public needs to know and for which there will be no authorization because the government doesn’t want the public to know it, because it’s criminal, deceptive, reckless, irresponsible, whatever, it would be embarrassing, so they will not authorize information on that. An unauthorized disclosure will now not carry a death sentence or in itself a life sentence, but a multiplication of those could be a life sentence and even one can be 10 years, so that’s more than enough disincentive to keep us from having the information we need and to avert wars like Vietnam and Iraq. So this is bad news, but it could have been a lot worse. That’s all I’m going to have to say.

Scott Horton: Mmhmm. Well, now, there’s been a lot of smears, and, you know, TV hardly covers this subject of Bradley Manning and what he did and the trial and everything else at all, and when they do mention it, it’s always with a sneer and always taking the government’s side. I was wondering if you could remark about what you understand about Bradley Manning’s motives for leaking the Iraq and Afghan war logs.

Daniel Ellsberg: Oh, when I hear Bradley Manning and when I read what he said in the chat logs and whatever, I’m hearing myself when I was twice his age 40 years ago, and I know my motives and I perceive the same motives in his case, in each case actually, to save lives, to shorten a wrongful, hopeless, stalemated war, and to do so by informing the public and challenging them to live up to the Constitution in an unconstitutional war, to live up to ideals of democracy and of nonaggression, rather than fighting an aggressive war, as Iraq, the war that Manning was involved in, was an aggressive war from start to finish. Moreover – so I see his motives as admirable, and indeed in his case I think that without the revelation that he made of American atrocities over there, which have been covered up by Americans, we would still have 10 to 20,000 American troops in harm’s way in Iraq because Prime Minister Maliki there would have allowed immunity for our troops, which was the condition for their remaining. Given the revelations that Manning made through WikiLeaks, the immunity was impossible for Maliki to give, since it was obvious that we would not prosecute American atrocities and would cover them up and lie about them instead, and therefore we couldn’t keep the troops there although Obama wanted to do it. So he has taken at least 10,000 troops out of harm’s way in Iraq, even though many of them were, in our general imperial mode here, switched to Afghanistan, where they are subject to dying and killing hopelessly and wrongfully as well.

So it’s a long process here. He did the right thing. I did the right thing then. I haven’t always done the right thing, the best thing, in my life, but doing what Bradley Manning did at a younger age was right for me then and it’s right for him now. So he remains, he will always be, a hero of mine.

Scott Horton: All right, now, Dan, before you leaked from the Rand Corporation all that, you were a Marine. You know all of this, the matter of – and obviously charged as you were by the Nixon goons, clearly you’re very familiar with the legalities of all of this. So what I wonder is if you could answer, according to Manning, the situation that he was put in of helping the Iraqi police arrest and then presumably torture people for writing articles – never mind morality and what’s just the right thing, but what was his legal obligation at that point when his commanding officer ordered him to continue?

Daniel Ellsberg: First to reveal to his commanding officer – well, to a superior officer – what he had discovered. And he was very excited by that. And he ran, as everybody has agreed, he ran to the officer to tell him that he had discovered that these people were wrongfully convicted, wrongfully held, and were going to be tortured and should be released. The first point was that his superior officer told him that he should forget that, don’t worry about that; his job was collecting more suspects, on the same basis as before, and handing them over to the Iraqis – we got points for that, giving them prisoners to torture – and that’s what he should do.

Now that was an illegal response. The legal response would have been investigate this further and do what we can to stop it. We are legally obligated to do that. So the order not to investigate and not to act was an illegal order. Under Nuremberg it’s blatantly illegal, and he I think knew that. Certainly if you recognize it as such, it’s your Nuremberg obligation to disobey an illegal order.

Well, there was testimony during this trial by other members there that he came back and was very upset, quote, “very concerned,” quote, that nobody was concerned about this situation, that people, other people, weren’t worrying about it and that we were torturing innocent people and that that bothered him a lot. So since there was obviously a cover-up going on, he couldn’t really go higher in the chain of command with any prospect of doing it, he ended up doing exactly what he should have done, and that was exposing this situation to the American people in the hope, which his own defense attorney suggests may have been, quote, “naïve.” I would like to think that it was not totally naïve. If he’d thought that it was certain we would stop that practice if he only exposed it, that would be naïve, inexperienced. But he didn’t. He hoped that the American people would respond to this and be concerned, as he was, and stop it.

Well, the hope hasn’t been particularly satisfied, I have to say. I am very reluctant to say that it was an absurd, naïve hope, that there’s no hope that Americans will rise to this sort of thing, but there is an interesting contrast. I’m sure Snowden, when he released stuff to the American people, was thought to be, could be described as naïve, but again he thought his, his greatest fear he said was that nothing would change. Well, that’s likely. The probabilities are that nothing will change. But there really is a kickback on this one, and 205 people in Congress voted to rein in the NSA as a result of Snowden’s revelations, a very big effect.

Now that’s quite in contrast to what happened with Manning, and as I see it, and I’m not happy to say this as an American, or as human, let’s say, but it is the case that what Manning revealed was what we were doing to other people. Not our enemies – civilians, babies, infants, children, women, old people and whatnot, but not Americans. Others. They were over there. Collateral damage. And the American people, some of whom got very concerned, and Manning has gotten a number of awards, as you know, from minority factions in this county, and he does have support, but the majority aren’t very concerned about it.

In the Snowden case, he showed that every one of us in America is having our conversations recorded and stored for later retrieval, tivoed in effect, even though not listened to in real time, and the American people are concerned about that, a lot of them, not all of them, but more than half are concerned and there may really be a change. So that is a promising development here, that there will be a revolt against these abuses by the government. And if the Bradley Manning case were happening in a vacuum, it would be almost nothing but bad news. As it is, it could have been worse. The aiding the enemy charge was dismissed, properly, by the judge, and that wasn’t entirely foreseeable, and Bradley Manning inspired Snowden.

Snowden has said he admired Bradley Manning, he said he admired me also, that’s a long time ago, and he was directly influenced by Manning, and he learned from Manning’s example not to release the stuff and stay in the country. Snowden would be in a cell like Manning right now, incommunicado, not able to take part in the debate over these issues, which is in this case a real debate had he made his releases while he was in the country.

So he learned from Manning’s case, Manning contributed to that and for what happens if we do manage to get the National Security Agency under some kind of democratic oversight and control, which it does not suffer at this moment – it’s out of control, it’s responsible to the president but the president and NSA are at this moment out of informed control by the public or Congress or the court, and if that changes, which may happen, and I hope it will happen, Bradley Manning will deserve some direct credit for that. And I’m going to leave it at that, if you will, Scott.

Scott Horton: Okay. Thank you very much, Dan. I sure appreciate your time on the show again as always.

Daniel Ellsberg: Thanks for calling. Bye.

Scott Horton: All right, everybody. That is the American hero, Daniel Ellsberg. He’s the liberator of the Pentagon Papers, and he’s the author of the book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. He’s the subject of the documentary film The Most Dangerous Man in America. His website is Ellsberg.net, and his twitter handle is @DanielEllsberg. And did I leave anything out? He’s the American hero who ended the Vietnam war. We’d probably still be at war in Vietnam right now if it wasn’t for him. That’s what I think. All right.

http://scotthorton.org/2013/07/30/73013-daniel-ellsberg/

"We Steal Secrets": A Masterclass in Propaganda The Assassination of Julian Assange

"We Steal Secrets": A Masterclass in Propaganda

The Assassination of Julian Assange

by JONATHAN COOK

I have just watched We Steal Secrets, Alex Gibney’s documentary about Wikileaks and Julian Assange. One useful thing I learnt is the difference between a hatchet job and character assassination. Gibney is too clever for a hatchet job, and his propaganda is all the more effective for it.

The film’s contention is that Assange is a natural-born egotist and, however noble his initial project, Wikileaks ended up not only feeding his vanity but also accentuating in him the very qualities — secretiveness, manipulativeness, dishonesty and a hunger for power — he so despises in the global forces he has taken on.

This could have made for an intriguing, and possibly plausible, thesis had Gibney approached the subject-matter more honestly and fairly. But two major flaws discredit the whole enterprise.

The first is that he grievously misrepresents the facts in the Swedish case against Assange of rape and sexual molestation to the point that his motives in making the film are brought into question.

To shore up his central argument about Assange’s moral failings, he needs to make a persuasive case that these defects are not only discernible in Assange’s public work but in his private life too.

We thus get an extremely partial account of what occurred in Sweden, mostly through the eyes of A, one of his two accusers. She is interviewed in heavy disguise.

Gibney avoids referring to significant aspects of the case that would have cast doubt in the audience’s mind about A and her testimony. He does not, for example, mention that A refused on Assange’s behalf offers made by her friends at a dinner party to put up the Wikileaks leader in their home — a short time after she says the sexual assault took place.

The film also ignores the prior close relationship between A and the police interviewer and its possible bearing on the fact that the other complainant, S, refused to sign her police statement, suggesting that she did not believe it represented her view of what had happened.

But the most damning evidence against Gibney is his focus on a torn condom submitted by A to the police, unquestioningly accepting its significance as proof of the assault. The film repeatedly shows a black and white image of the damaged prophylactic.

Gibney even allows a theory establishing a central personality flaw in Assange to be built around the condom. According to this view, Assange tore it because, imprisoned in his digital world, he wanted to spawn flesh-and-blood babies to give his life more concrete and permanent meaning.

The problem is that investigators have admitted that no DNA from Assange was found on the condom. In fact, A’s DNA was not found on it either. The condom, far from making A a more credible witness, suggests that she may have planted evidence to bolster a case so weak that the original prosecutors dropped it.

There is no way Gibney could not have known these well-publicised concerns about the condom. So the question is why would he choose to mislead the audience?

Without A, the film’s case against Assange relates solely to his struggle through Wikileaks to release secrets from the inner sanctums of the US security state. And this is where the film’s second major flaw reveals itself.

Gibney is careful to bring up most of the major issues concerning Assange and Wikileaks, making it harder to accuse him of distorting the record. Outside the rape allegations, however, his dishonesty relates not to an avoidance of facts and evidence but to his choice of emphasis.

The job of a good documentarist is to weigh the available material and then present as honest a record of what it reveals as is possible. Anything less is at best polemic, if it sides with those who are silenced and weak, and at worst propaganda, if it sides with those who wield power.

Gibney’s film treats Assange as if he and the US corporate-military behemoth were engaged in a simple game of cat and mouse, two players trying to outsmart each other. He offers little sense of the vast forces ranged against Assange and Wikileaks.

The Swedish allegations are viewed only in so far as they question Assange’s moral character. No serious effort is made to highlight the enormous resources the US security state has been marshalling to shape public opinion, most notably through the media. The hate campaign against Assange, and the Swedish affair’s role in stoking it, are ignored.

None of this is too surprising. Were Gibney to have highlighted Washington’s efforts to demonise Assange it might have hinted to us, his audience, Gibney’s own place in supporting this matrix of misinformation.

This is a shame because there is probably a good case to make that anyone who takes on the might of the modern surveillance and security empire the US has become must to some degree mirror its moral failings.

How is it possible to remain transparent, open, honest — even sane — when every electronic device you possess is probably bugged, when your every move is recorded, when your loved ones are under threat, when the best legal minds are plotting your downfall, when your words are distorted and spun by the media to turn you into an official enemy?

Assange is not alone in this plight. Bradley Manning, the source of Wikileaks’ most important disclosures, necessarily lied to his superiors in the military and used subterfuge to get hold of the secret documents that revealed to us the horrors being unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan in our names.

Since he was caught, he has faced torture in jail and is currently in the midst of a show trial.

Another of the great whistleblowers of the age, Edward Snowden, was no more honest with his employers, contractors for the US surveillance state, as he accumulated more and more incriminating evidence of the illegal spying operations undertaken by the National Security Agency and others.

Now he is holed up in a Russian airport trying to find an escape from permanent incarceration or death. Should he succeed, as he did earlier in fleeing Hong Kong, it will probably be because of secrecy and deceit.

This documentary could have been a fascinating study of the moral quandaries faced by whistleblowers in the age of the surveillance super-state. Instead Gibney chose the easy course and made a film that sides with the problem rather than the solution.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books).  His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/29/the-assassination-of-julian-assange/

Rifle-wielding soldiers develop breasts

I would venture another explanation for the increase in size of the  male left breast .Men who wield too much of those ultra male ultra phallic weapons need a balance of female energy. The energy of the Heart Chakra. My practice of Reiki and my readings around the Yin/yang , Linga/Yoni   balance in Nature  point to Nature enforcing a much needed Balance. A reversal of the old myth of Amazons who cut off a breast to  shoot better with their bows.

Males need to find the  female in themselves. 

Or nature will do it for them. 

Rifle-wielding soldiers develop breasts

Research on German soldiers has shown that enlarged breasts are an unfortunate side-effect of gun-toting

Marc Abrahams

Raising a rifle can have unintended consequences. Photograph: Jim Macmillan/AP

The rhythmic impact of a rifle wielded by a military man can puff up his chest. This sometimes leads to worry, or worse. Though soldiers might appreciate a good pair of breasts, what would happen if they themselves grew a pair? Or if they grew just one?

Some men do experience this affront. A study called Gynecomastia in German Soldiers: Etiology and Pathology, published last year in the journal GMS Interdisciplinary Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, analysed the plight of 211 male German soldiers who suffered from, or at least exhibited, one or two enlarged breasts. The ailment has a medical name: gynecomastia.

The study's authors, Prof Björn Dirk Krapohl, Dr Dietrich Doll, and four colleagues at Bundeswehrkrankenhaus, the German Armed Forces Hospital in Berlin, played detective. They set out "to investigate the increased incidence of left-sided gynecomastia in members of the German Ministry of Defense Guard Battalion who perform ceremonial duties in Berlin … A possible explanation is the mechanical impact of the carbine against the left side of the body during the drills that these soldiers regularly perform as part of their ceremonial duties".

The doctors compared those patients with other enlarge-breasted men who had not spent years frequently and intensively slapping rifles into their left breast.

They noticed a stark difference.

Seventy-five percent of the gynecomastiacal Guard Battalion chest-slappers had an enlarged left – only the left, not the right – breast.

The other patients – the non-chest-slappers – as a group showed neither sinister nor dexter breastedness. One third of them did have an enlarged left breast only. But another third of them had only a big right breast. The third third had a big pair.

The doctors suggest that this ritual breast-beating damages the tissue so much that "surgical resection of excess breast tissue is the only effective treatment".

This medical investigation, with its tight focus on one possible cause of gynecomastia, smacks of an old national stereotype: that Germans over-indulge their love of military precision.

An earlier medical inquiry, also performed by military physicians in Germany, looked at a different possible cause of gynecomastia, in soldiers from a different nation. Their homeland, far from Germany in both place and spirit, was famed at that time for its fascination with marijuana.

Two doctors at the US Army Hospital in Nuremberg published, in 1977, a study called Gynecomastia and Cannabis Smoking. They examined 11 low-ranking, abnormally big-breasted American soldiers. Some of those swell-chested fellows admitted to smoking marijuana. Others did not.

The report ends with a clear, sober statement: "Our epidemiologic evidence does not support [any] relationship between chronic cannabis use and gynecomastia."

The cannabis report, seen in retrospect, is incomplete. It makes no mention of how many of the toking soldiers had just one enlarged breast, let alone which.

(Thanks to James Harkin for bringing the chest-slapping to my attention.)

• Marc Abrahams is founder of the Ig Nobel prizes and editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/jul/29/german-soldiers-develop-enlarged-breasts

Chomsky on terror, Snowden, and why "security" is usually an excuse for government repression.

Noam Chomsky: The State Fears Its Own People

Chomsky on terror, Snowden, and why "security" is usually an excuse for government repression.

 

 

In a recent media appearance Noam Chomsky said that whistleblower Edward Snowden, who remains in Russia after releasing a trove of documents about secret NSA surveillance, should be honored.  

"He was doing what every citizen ought to do," Chomsky says in the video below. "He was telling Americans what the government is doing."

Chomsky goes on to explain that governments always claim security as their justification for civil liberties abuses, but that overwhelmingly the security in question is that of the state ... from its own population. To smatterings of applause, Chomsky goes on to explain how America's drone campaign abroad is a far bigger threat to our security than leaked information about surveillance. 

Watch Chomsky discuss the relationship between the state, the people, and "security" below. 

http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-state-always-claims-security-risk-what-governments-really-fear-people

Major opinion shifts, in the US and Congress, on NSA surveillance and privacy - Greenwald in the Guardian

Major opinion shifts, in the US and Congress, on NSA surveillance and privacy

Pew finds that, for the first time since 9/11, Americans are now more worried about civil liberties abuses than terrorism

• • Glenn Greenwald

Numerous polls taken since our reporting on previously secret NSAactivities first began have strongly suggested major public opinion shifts in how NSA surveillance and privacy are viewed. But a new comprehensive poll released over the weekend weekend by Pew Research provides the most compelling evidence yet of how stark the shift is.

Among other things, Pew finds that "a majority of Americans – 56% – say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts." And "an even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism." Moreover, "63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications." That demonstrates a decisive rejection of the US government's three primary defenses of its secret programs: there is adequate oversight; we're not listening to the content of communication; and the spying is only used to Keep You Safe™.

But the most striking finding is this one:

"Overall, 47% say their greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person's civil liberties, while 35% say they are more concerned that policies have not gone far enough to protect the country. This is the first time in Pew Research polling that more have expressed concern over civil liberties than protection from terrorism since the question was first asked in 2004."

For anyone who spent the post-9/11 years defending core liberties against assaults relentlessly perpetrated in the name of terrorism, polling data like that is nothing short of shocking. This Pew visual underscores what a radical shift has occurred from these recent NSA disclosures:

Perhaps more amazingly still, this shift has infected the US Congress. Following up on last week's momentous House vote - in which 55% of Democrats and 45% of Republicans defied the White House and their own leadership to vote for the Amash/Conyers amendment to ban the NSA's bulk phone records collection program - the New York Times hasan article this morning which it summarizes on its front page this way:

The article describes how opposition to the NSA, which the paper says was recently confined to the Congressional "fringes", has now "built a momentum that even critics say may be unstoppable, drawing support from Republican and Democratic leaders, attracting moderates in both parties and pulling in some of the most respected voices on national security in the House."

It describes how GOP Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner - a prime author of the Patriot Act back in 2001 and a long-time defender of even the most extremist War on Terror policies - has now become a leading critic of NSA overreach. He will have "a bill ready when Congress returned from its August recess that would restrict phone surveillance to only those named as targets of a federal terrorism investigation, make significant changes to the secret court that oversees such programs and give businesses like Microsoft and Google permission to reveal their dealings before that court."

Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren is quoted this way: "There is a growing sense that things have really gone a-kilter here". Yesterday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Democratic Sen Dick Durbin, one of Obama's closest Senate allies, said that the recently revealed NSA bulk record collection program "goes way too far".

The strategy for the NSA and its Washington defenders for managing these changes is now clear: advocate their own largely meaningless reform to placate this growing sentiment while doing nothing to actually rein in the NSA's power. "Backers of sweeping surveillance powers now say they recognize that changes are likely, and they are taking steps to make sure they maintain control over the extent of any revisions," says the NYT.

The primary problem enabling out-of-control NSA spying has long been the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress. That's an ironic twist given that those were the committees created in the wake of the mid-1970s Church Committee to provide rigorous oversight, as a response to the recognition that Executive Branch's surveillance powers were being radically abused - and would inevitably be abused in the future - without robust transparency and accountability.

But with a few rare and noble exceptions, the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress are filled with precisely those members who are most slavishly beholden to, completely captured by, the intelligence community over which they supposedly serve as watchdogs. Many receive large sums of money from the defense and intelligence industries.

There is a clear and powerful correlation between NSA support and amounts of money received by these members from those industries, asWired's Dave Kravets adeptly documented about last week's NSA vote and has been documented before with similar NSA-protecting actions from the Intelligence Committee. In particular, the two chairs of those committees - Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House - are such absolute loyalists to the NSA and the National Security State generally that it is usually impossible to distinguish their behavior, mindset and comments from those of NSA officials.

In sum, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees are the pure embodiment of the worst of Washington: the corrupting influence of money from the very industries they are designed to oversee and the complete capture by the agencies they are supposed to adversarially check. Anything that comes out of the leadership of those two Committees that is labeled "NSA reform" is almost certain to be designed to achieve the opposite effect: to stave off real changes in lieu of illusory tinkering whose real purpose will be to placate rising anger.

But that trick seems unlikely to work here. What has made these disclosures different from past NSA scandals - including ones showingserious abuse of their surveillance powers - are the large numbers of the NSA's own documents that are now and will continue to be available for the public to see, as well the sustained, multi-step nature of these disclosures, which makes this far more difficult for NSA defenders to predict, manage and dismiss away. At least as much as they are shining long-overdue light on these specific NSA domestic programs, the NSA disclosures are changing how Americans (and people around the world) think about the mammoth National Security State and whether it can and should be trusted with unchecked powers exercised in the dark. Those public opinion shifts aren't going to disappear as the result of some blatantly empty gestures from Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers masquerading as "reform".

Despite the substantial public opinion shifts, Pew found that Americans are largely split on whether the NSA data-collection program should continue. The reason for this is remarkable and repugnant though, at this point, utterly unsurprising:

Nationwide, there is more support for the government's data-collection program among Democrats (57% approve) than among Republicans (44%), but both parties face significant internal divisions: 36% of Democrats disapprove of the program as do 50% of Republicans.

Just as Democrats went from vehement critics of Bush's due-process-free War on Terror policies to vocal cheerleaders of Obama's drone kills and even Guantanamo imprisonments, the leading defenders of the NSA specifically and America's Surveillance State generally are now found among self-identified Democrats. That was embodied by how one of the most vocal Democratic NSA critics during the Bush years - Nancy Pelosi - in almost single-handedly saved the NSA from last week's House vote. If someone had said back in 2007 that the greatest support for NSA surveillance would be found among Democrats, many would find the very idea ludicrous. But such is life in the Age of Obama: one of his most enduring legacies is transforming his party from pretend-opponents of the permanent National Security State into its most enthusiastic supporters.

But despite that hackish partisan opportunism, the positive opinion changes toward NSA surveillance and civil liberties can be seen across virtually all partisan and ideological lines:

The largest changes toward demanding civil liberties protections have occurred among liberal Democrats, Tea Party Republicans, independents and liberal/moderate Republicans. Only self-identified "moderate/conservative Democrats" - the Obama base - remains steadfast and steady in defense of NSA surveillance. The least divided, most-pro-NSA caucus in the House for last week's vote was the corporatist Blue Dog Democrat caucus, which overwhelmingly voted to protect the NSA's bulk spying on Americans.

As I've repeatedly said, the only ones defending the NSA at this point are the party loyalists and institutional authoritarians in both parties. That's enough for the moment to control Washington outcomes - as epitomized by the unholy trinity that saved the NSA in the House last week: Pelosi, John Bohener and the Obama White House - but it is clearly not enough to stem the rapidly changing tide of public opinion.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/29/poll-nsa-surveillance-privacy-pew

another book review . about what the west does in in the middle east.

Think about how the West is not reacting to the scores killed. with shots in the head, by an Army Government in Egypt  as u read this. 

BOOK REVIEW How humanitarians trumped neo-cons in Libya Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO's War on Libya and Africa byMaximilian Forte Reviewed by Dan Glazebrook  The media has gone very quiet on Libya of late; clearly, liberal imperialists don't like to dwell on their crimes. This is not surprising. The modus operandi of the humanitarian imperialist is not one of informed reflection, but only permanent outrage against leaders of the global South; besides, in the topsy-turvy world of liberal interventionism, the "failure to act" is the only crime of which the West is capable.  As Forte puts it, their moral code holds that "If we do not act, we should be held responsible for the actions of others. When we do act, we should never be held responsible for our own actions." With Muammar Gaddafi dead, the hunt is on for a new hate figure on whom to spew venom (Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, North Korean leader Kim Jong-eun); far more satisfying than actually evaluating our own role in the creation of human misery. This is the colonial mentality of the liberal lynch mob.  For the governments that lead us into war, of course, it makes perfect sense that we do not stop to look back at the last invasion before impatiently demanding the next one - if we realized, for example, that the 1999 bombing of Serbia - the textbook "humanitarian intervention"- actually facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo it was supposedly designed to prevent, we might not be so ready to demand the same treatment for every other state that falls short of our illusory ideals. That is why this book is so important. Thoroughly researched and impeccably referenced, it tells the story of the real aims and real consequences of the war on Libya in its historical perspective.  One of the book's accomplishments is its comprehensive demolition of the war's supposed justifications. Forte shows us that there was no "mass rape" committed by "Gaddafi forces" - as alleged by US Permanent Representative to the United Nations Susan Rice, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Ocampo and others at the time, but later refuted by Amnesty International, the UN and even the US army itself.  Despite hysterical media reports, there was no evidence of aerial bombing of protesters, as even former CIA chief Robert Gates admitted. Gaddafi had no massacre planned for Benghazi, as had been loudly proclaimed by the leaders of Britain, France and the US. The Libyan government forces had not carried out massacres against civilian populations in any of the other towns they recaptured from the rebels, and nor had Gaddafi threatened to do so in Benghazi.  In a speech that was almost universally misreported in the Western media, he promised no mercy for those who had taken up arms against the government, whilst offering amnesty for those who "threw their weapons away", and at no point threatening reprisals against civilians. When the NATO invasion began, French jets actually bombed a small retreating column of Libyan armor on the outskirts of Benghazi, comprising 14 tanks, 20 armored personnel carriers, and a few trucks and ambulances - nothing like enough to carry out a "genocide" against an entire city, as had been claimed.  Indeed, the whole image of "peaceful protesters being massacred" was turning reality on its head. In fact, Forte notes, rebels "torched police stations, broke into the compounds of security services, attacked government offices and torched vehicles" from the very start, to which the authorities responded with "tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets - very similar to methods frequently used in Western nations against far more peaceful protests that lacked the element of sedition". Only once the rebels had proceeded to occupy the Benghazi army barracks, loot its weapons, and start using them against government forces did things begin to escalate.  But the most pernicious of the lies that facilitated the Libyan war was the myth of the "African mercenary". Racist pogroms were characteristic of the Libyan rebellion from its very inception, when 50 sub-Saharan African migrants were burnt alive in Al-Bayda on the second day of the insurgency.  An Amnesty International report from September 2011 made it clear that this was no isolated incident: "When al-Bayda, Benghazi, Derna, Misrata and other cities first fell under the control of the NTC in February, anti-Gaddafi forces carried out house raids, killing and other violent attacks" against sub-Saharan Africans and black Libyans, and "what we are seeing in western Libya is a very similar pattern to what we have seen in Benghazi and Misrata after those cities fell to the rebels" - arbitrary detention, torture and execution of black people.  The "African mercenary" myth was thus created to justify these pogroms, as the Western media near-universally referred to their victims as "mercenaries" - or "alleged mercenaries" in the more circumspect and highbrow outlets - and thus as aggressors and legitimate targets. The myth was completely discredited by both Amnesty International - whose exasperated researcher told a TV interviewer that "We examined this issue in depth and found no evidence: the rebels spread these rumors everywhere [with] terrible consequences for African guest workers" - and by a UN investigation team, who drew similar conclusions - but not until both organizations had already helped perpetuate the lie themselves.  That liberal humanitarians would launch a war of aggression in order to facilitate racist massacres is not as ironic as it might at first seem. Forte writes that "if this was humanitarianism, it could only be so by disqualifying Africans as members of humanity".  But such disqualification has been a systematic practice of liberalism from the days of John Locke, through the US war of independence and into the age of nineteenth century imperialism and beyond. Indeed, Forte argues that the barely-veiled "racial fear of mean African bogeymen swamping Libya like zombies" implicit in the "African mercenary" story, was uniquely and precisely formulated to tap into a rich historical vein of European fantasies about plagues of black mobs. That the myth gained so much traction despite zero evidence, says Forte, "tells us a great deal about the role of racial prejudice and propaganda in mobilizing public opinion in the West and organizing international relations".  Yet the racism of the rebel fighters was not only useful for mobilizing European public opinion - it also played a strategic function, as far as NATO planners were concerned. By bringing to power a virulently anti-black government, the West has ensured that Libya's trajectory as a pan-African state has been brought to a violent end, and that its oil wealth will no longer be used for African development.  As Forte succinctly puts it, "the goal of US military intervention was to disrupt an emerging pattern of independence and a network of collaboration within Africa that would facilitate increased African self-reliance. This is at odds with the geostrategic and political economic ambitions of extra-continental European powers, namely the US".  A large part of the book is dedicated to outlining Libya's role in the creation of the African Union, and its subsequent moves to unify Africa at the economic, political and military levels. This included the investment of billions of petrodollars in industrial development across the continent, the creation of an African communications satellite, and massive financial contributions towards the African Development Bank and the African Monetary Fund - institutions designed specifically to challenge the hegemony of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.  Gaddafi was passionate about using Libyan oil money to help Africa industrialize and "add value" to its export materials, moving it away from its prescribed role in the global economy as a supplier of cheap raw materials.  This was a threat to Western financial and corporate control of African economies, and combined with the rise of Chinese investment, was considered a strategic obstacle to Western domination that had to be removed. As Forte put it, "The US, France and the UK could not afford to see allies that they had cultivated, if not installed in power, being slowly pulled from their orbits by Libya, China and other powers".  The African Oil Policy initiative Group - a high level US Committee comprising members of Congress, military officers and energy industry lobbyists - noted in 2002 the growing dependence of the US on African oil, and recommended a "new and vigorous focus on US military cooperation in sub-Saharan Africa, to include design of a sub-unified command structure which could produce significant dividends in the protection of US investments".  They noted that "failure to address the issue of focusing and maximizing US diplomatic and military command organization…could…act as an inadvertent incentive for US rivals such as China [and] adversaries such as Libya". In other words, with their economic grip on the continent facing serious challenge, the Western world would increasingly have to rely on aggressive militarism in order to maintain its interests.  The recommendations of the committee would be implemented in 2006 with the creation of AFRICOM - the US army's African Command. AFRICOM was conceived as a sort of "School of the Americas" for Africa, designed to train African armies for use as proxy forces for maintaining Western control, with the 2010 US National Security Strategy specifically naming the African Union as one of the regional organizations it sought to co-opt.  Libya, however, proved most uncooperative. The leaked US diplomatic cables make it very clear that Libya was viewed by the US as THE main obstacle to establishing a full muscular US military presence on the African continent, regularly highlighting its "opposition" and "obstruction" to AFRICOM. With Gaddafi still a respected voice within the AU, having served as its elected Chairman in 2009, he wielded significant influence, and used this to spearhead opposition to what he considered the neocolonial aims of the AFRICOM initiative.  Meanwhile, Chinese investment in Africa was growing rapidly, having grown from $6 billion in 1999 to $90 billion 10 years later, displacing the US as the continent's largest trading partner. The need for a US military presence to cling on to the West's declining influence in Africa was growing ever more urgent. But Africa was not playing ball - and Gaddafi was (rightly) seen as leading the charge.  Fast forward to 2012, and US General Carter Ham, head of AFRICOM, was able to claim that "the conduct of military operations in Libya did afford now the opportunity to establish a military to military relationship with Libya, which did not previously exist". He went on to suggest that a US base would be established in the country (Gaddafi having expelled both the US and British bases shortly after coming to power in 1969), saying that some "assistance" would probably be necessary, in the form of a "military presence".  President Obama wasted no time in announcing the deployment of soldiers to four more African countries within weeks of the fall of Tripoli, and AFRICOM announced an unprecedented 14 joint military exercises in Africa for the following year.  Furthermore, NATO's attack had not only destroyed a powerful force for unity and independence in Africa, and a huge obstacle to Western military penetration of the continent, but it had also created the perfect conditions to justify further invasions.  The US had previously attempted to argue that its military presence was required in North Africa in order to fight against Al Qaeda; indeed, it had set up the Trans-Saharan Counter Terrorism Programme to this end. But as Muattasim Gaddafi had explained to Hillary Clinton in Washington in 2009, the program had been rendered redundant by the existing, and highly effective, security strategy of CEN-SAD (the Libyan-led Community of Sahel and Saharan states) and the North African Standby Force.  Like a classic protection racket, however, the British, US and French decided that if their protection wasn't needed, then they would have to create a need for it. The destruction of Libya tore the heart out of the North African security system, flooded the region with weapons and turned Libya into an ungoverned safe haven for violent militias. Now the resulting - and entirely predictable - instability has spread to Mali, the West are using it as an excuse for another war and occupation.  In a prescient warning (the book was published before France's recent invasion of Mali), Forte wrote that "intervention begets intervention. More intervention is needed to solve the problems caused by intervention".  The book is also very strong in exposing the ideology of the "human-rights industry" and its role in bringing about the Libyan war. Western liberal humanitarianism, argues Forte, "can only function by first directly or indirectly creating the suffering of others, and by then seeing every hand as an outstretched hand, pleading or welcoming". He exposes the role of groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who helped perpetuate some of the worst lies about what was happening in Libya, such as the fictitious "African mercenaries" and "mass rape", and who in the case of Amnesty, "mere days into the uprising and well before it had a chance to ascertain, corroborate or confirm any facts on the ground…began launching public accusations against Libya, the African Union and the UNSC for failing to take action".  By calling for an assets freeze on Libya and an arms embargo ("and more actions with each passing day"), Amnesty "thus effectively made itself a party to the conflict"; it had become part of the propaganda war and myth making that was designed to facilitate the invasion.  This should not be surprising given Amnesty's history. Forte helpfully recalls that their promotion of the infamous "incubator babies" myth that justified the Iraq war of 1991 was later given by many Senators as having influenced their decision to vote for the attack. In the event, the Senate vote was passed by a majority of just six. The 1991 war devastated Iraq, which had barely recovered from the Iran-Iraq war and killed well over 100,000 people, as well as hundreds of thousands more from the diseases that ravaged the country following the deliberate destruction of its water and sewerage systems.  So it should be little surprise that Suzanne Nossel, a State Department official on Hillary Clinton's team, was made Executive Director of Amnesty-USA in November 2011. In her State Department job, Nossel had played a key role drawing up the UN Human Rights Council resolution against Libya that ultimately formed the basis of Security Council resolution 1973 that led to the aggression.  Forte also discusses the role of Soliman Bouchuiguir, former president of the "Libyan League for Human Rights", who emerges as the Libyan "Curveball". Curveball was the Iraqi "source" who came up with the lies about Saddam's non-existent "mobile chemical weapons factories" that were used to justify the 2003 Iraq war. Likewise, Bouchuiguir's wildly inflated casualty figures provided the raw material for the hysterical UNHRC resolutions against Libya that set the ball for war rolling. He admitted on camera later that there was no evidence for his claims - but not before 70 NGOs had signed a petition "demanding action" in response to them.  Much has been written elsewhere about the "neo-cons" who became (rightly) hated for their brutally idiotic conceptions of social change. But the liberal humanitarians are perhaps even more contemptible; after all, at least the neo-cons never claimed to be kind, or even interested in anything other than their own self-interest. Yet the liberal humanitarians seem - or at least claim - to be driven by some kind of higher purpose, which makes their constant calls for wars of aggression even more repulsive.  Forte puts it brilliantly: "The vision of our humanity that liberal imperialists entertain is one which constructs us as shrieking sacks of emotion. This is the elites' anthropology, one that views us as bags of nerve and muscle: throbbing with outrage, contracting with every story of "incubator babies", bulging up with animus at the arrest of Gay Girl in Damascus, recoiling at the sound of Viagra-fuelled mass rape.  From mass hysteria in Twitter to hundreds of thousands signing an online Avaaz petition calling for bombing Libya in the name of human rights, we become nerves of mass reaction….We scream for action via "social media", thumbs furiously in action on our "smart" phones. ..Then again, our "action" merely consists of asking the supremely endowed military establishment to act in our name." This anthropology is of course "accompanied by NATO's implicit sociology: societies can be remade through a steady course of high altitude bombings and drone strikes".  How exactly Libya has been remade is also discussed. The July 2012 elections in Libya, their very existence trumpeted in Western media as immediately vindicating every act of butchery the war brought about - regardless of whether the parliament being elected was likely to wield any actual influence over the country - saw fewer than half the eligible voting population take part. Even more intriguing were the results of a survey carried out in Libya by Oxford Research International that found that only 13% of Libyans said they wanted democracy within a year's time, and only 25% within five years.  Meanwhile, the new authorities set about persecuting their opponents, real and imagined. Tawergha was emptied of its entire population of around 20,000 black Libyans after militias from Misrata began systematically torching every home and business in the town, with the support of the central government.  Former residents now reside in refugee camps where they continue to be hunted down and killed, or in arbitrary detention in makeshift prisons. Candidacy for elections is barred to: workers (a professional qualification is needed); anyone who ever worked in any level of government between 1969 and 2011 (unless they could demonstrate "early and clear" support for the insurrection); anyone with academic study involving Gaddafi's Green book; and anyone who ever received any monetary benefit from Gaddafi.  A constitutional lawyer noted these restrictions would disqualify the Libyan population. Other new laws banned the spreading of "news reports, rumors or propaganda" that could "cause any damage to the state", with penalties of up to life in prison; and prison for anyone spreading information that "could weaken the citizens' morale" or for anyone who "attacks the February 17 revolution, denigrates Islam, the authority of the state or its institutions".  This is the new Libya for which the human-rights imperialists and their allies lobbied, killed and tortured so hard.  "The next time empire comes knocking in the name of human rights", concludes Forte, "please be found standing idly by".  This book is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in understanding the motives and consequences of the West's onslaught against Libya and African development.  Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO's War on Libya and Africa byMaximilian Forte. 341 pages Publisher: Baraka Books (15 Nov 2012). Language: English. ISBN-10: 1926824520. ISBN-13: 978-1926824529. Price: $22.60  Dan Glazebrook is a teacher and writer specializing in the military and economic relationships between the global South and the Western world.  This article originally appeared in Ceasefire Magazine.  (Copyright 2013 Dan Glazebrook)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-02-250413.html