NYT and the Iranian Capture Story

/in /by

In a curious story yesterday, the NYT quotes freed Iranian captive Sarah Shourd explaining that when she and two other hikers were captured in July 2009, they were inside Iran.

Ms. Shourd, 32, said she wanted to correct the gathering false impression, fueled by a classified United States military report made public last week by WikiLeaks, as well as earlier American and British news reports, that the hikers were detained inside Iraq and forced across the border. Her comments came just days before her two fellow hikers, her fiancé, Shane M. Bauer, and their friend Joshua F. Fattal, both 28, are scheduled to go on trial in Iran on Saturday.

On the fateful day, when they approached the armed border guard who had gestured to them, “He pointed to the ground and said ‘Iran’ and pointed to the trail we had been on before he waved to us, then said ‘Iraq,’ ” Ms. Shourd said by telephone from her home in Oakland, Calif. “We did not actually enter Iran until he gestured to us. We were confused and worried and wanted to go back.”

The NYT reports this without acknowledging–or amending–their earlier report on the capture, which (not least because NYT used different redaction standards than Wikileaks) was a key part of spreading the story that they were captured in Iraq.

Perhaps the NYT has left the two contradictory stories as they are because of the later story’s implied suggestion about Shourd’s motive. Her fiance is about to go on trial in Iran, and she surely wants to do anything she can to improve his chances of being freed, even if it means supporting Iran’s version of the story. And if you think about it, the story most sources are telling is that the hikers had no idea which side of the border they were on, which means any certainty Shourd has about where they were captured would come primarily from her Iranian captors.

Note, too, that the NYT only seeks comment from the State Department, and not DOD or any other government agency, to clarify the question. The State Department appears very interested in avoiding any conclusion about whether the hikers were in Iraq or Iran.

The United States State Department has never suggested the version published by WikiLeaks, she said, always maintaining that it did not know how their arrest happened.

The State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, confirmed that on Sunday. “We don’t know whether they had two feet on one side or the other or one foot on each,” he said. “All we know is Iran has held them far too long.”

Which in turn suggests that the NYT is not interested in using the story to get to the truth of the issue, but rather to make sure Shourd’s refutation of the DOD report appears in a prominent location.

At the moment, I won’t say any more about the credibility of the many conflicting stories that have been told about this capture, except to remind that the NYT (but not Wikileaks) left the closing date on the report unredacted; that closing date, at least, appears to show the report being closed–at 2:18 on July 31–almost two hours before the first time recorded in the report, 4:00.

That doesn’t say anything about the credibility of the report.

But what NYT’s contradictory stories about the capture appear to suggest is that, in their glee to release the Iran capture report in a form that served their Michael Gordon-written narrative about Iran, they may have done far more than Wikileaks itself did to put American lives at risk. That is, by publishing the report and the story, the NYT introduced a claim that Shourd feels obliged to refute before her fiance’s trial starts.

I’ll let others weigh in on the journalistic ethics of the NYT’s contradictory stories. I just wanted to note this to point out that the US’ own attempts to craft the Wikileaks dump with their preferred spin seems to have done the most damage, thus far.

Share this entry

The $258 of Intelligence You Bought This Year

/in , /by

Congratulations to Steven Aftergood, whose persistent efforts to get the government to reveal the topline intelligence budget have finally paid off. Yesterday, the government officially announced that it spent $80.1 billion on intelligence in the last year, up 7% in just the last year and 100% since 9/11.

The government announced Thursday that it had spent $80.1 billion on intelligence activities over the past 12 months, disclosing for the first time not only the amount spent by civilian intelligence agencies but also by the military.

The so-called National Intelligence Program, run by the CIA and other agencies that report to the Director of National Intelligence, cost $53.1 billion in fiscal 2010, which ended Sept. 30, while the Military Intelligence Program cost an additional $27 billion.

[snip]

The disclosure Thursday that intelligence spending had risen to $80.1 billion, an increase of nearly 7 percent over the year before and a record high, led to immediate calls for fiscal restraint on Capitol Hill.

That’s $258 a year for every man, woman, and child in this country. $21 a month per person, or $86 for a family of four.

But don’t worry; I’m sure all the people losing their homes and relying on food stamps can afford that much intelligence. Think of it like a second phone bill–that’s undoubtedly where at least a chunk of that money is going.

In response to this admission, both DiFi and Silvestre Reyes issued statements promising improved fiscal oversight of the intelligence community. That’s great! They can have the phone companies fight over the right to get paid handsomely to spy on us!

Share this entry

Are Iran’s Bags of Euros for Daudzai Bigger than CIA’s Bags of Dollars for Karzai’s Brother?

/in /by

The outage of the day is the report that Hamid Karzai’s chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, receives a steady stream of bags of Euros from Iran.

One evening last August, as President Hamid Karzai wrapped up an official visit to Iran, his personal plane sat on the airport tarmac, waiting for a late-running passenger: Iran’s ambassador to Afghanistan.

The ambassador, Feda Hussein Maliki, finally appeared, taking a seat next to Umar Daudzai, Mr. Karzai’s chief of staff and his most trusted confidant. According to an Afghan official on the plane, Mr. Maliki handed Mr. Daudzai a large plastic bag bulging with packets of euro bills. A second Afghan official confirmed that Mr. Daudzai carried home a large bag of cash.

“This is the Iranian money,” said an Afghan official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Many of us noticed this.”

The bag of money is part of a secret, steady stream of Iranian cash intended to buy the loyalty of Mr. Daudzai and promote Iran’s interests in the presidential palace, according to Afghan and Western officials here. Iran uses its influence to help drive a wedge between the Afghans and their American and NATO benefactors, they say.

Mind you, Karzai claims he has told the US about his Iranian gravy train.

But I think the real question to ask is whether the bags of Euros Daudzai gets from Iran are bigger than the bags of dollars Ahmed Wali Karzai–Hamid’s brother–receive from the CIA?

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

And whether the money all ends up in the same place: in the Karzai clique’s private bank accounts in Dubai?

While we’re clutching pearls about monetary influence, we probably ought to ask how all the bags of money flowing to Karzai compare to the truck-loads of foreign money being spent to influence our elections. Granted, the $885,000 we know about is probably smaller than the total directly benefiting Karzai. But after Citizens United, we’re just getting started.

Share this entry

Eric Holder’s Defense of Ashcroft to Defend the Material Witness Statute

/in , /by

The NYT has a worthwhile editorial lambasting the Obama DOJ’s pursuit of SCOTUS review in Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, which will probably result in expanded immunity for government officials that abuse the law so as to abuse the rights of Americans. The editorial focuses closely on the way in which DOJ’s defense of absolute immunity amounts to a defense of using the material witness law as an improper basis for detention.

Prosecutorial immunity is intended to let prosecutors enforce the law without fear of being held personally liable. Protecting that legitimate aim did not require the administration to defend the indefensible. In forcefully defending the material witness statute on grounds that curtailing it would severely limit its usefulness, it is defending the law as a basis for detention. That leaves the disturbing impression that the administration is trying to preserve the option of abusing the statute again.

In other words, NYT argues that DOJ’s SCOTUS appeal in this case is as much about preserving the improper use of the material witness statute–to hold a person under the material witness statute so you can conduct an investigation into him–as it is about the immunity per se.

Of course it is.

After all, this is what Eric Holder (along with Janet Reno and two others) had to say about the material witness statute in 2004.

Even when there is insufficient evidence to charge a citizen with a crime, the material witness statute, 18 U.S.C. § 3144, permits the detention of a person whose testimony is “material in a criminal proceeding” if “it may become impracticable to secure the presence of the person by subpoena.” This statute is an effective counter-terrorism tool for several reasons. Because a grand jury investigation is a “criminal proceeding” for purposes of this statute, see United States v. Awadallah, 349 F.3d 42, 49-64 (2d Cir. 2003); Bacon v. United States, 449 F.2d 933, 939-41 (9th Cir. 1971), and because of the broad scope of grand jury investigations, see supra p. 11, the government can detain a suspected terrorist as a material witness before it has evidence sufficient to support a criminal arrest or indictment.

The government can obtain a material witness warrant with relative ease. For a grand jury witness, the required showing can be made by a good faith statement by a prosecutor or investigating agent that the witness has information material to the grand jury. Bacon, 449 F.2d at 943; Awadallah, 349 F.3d at 65-66. Nor would establishing that a suspected terrorist poses a flight risk be an onerous task. See 349 F.3d at 69 (bail denied in part because witness failed to come forward with material testimony concerning terrorist attack). [my emphasis]

Mind you, in its Cert Petition, the government doesn’t admit that the material statute really was used in al-Kidd’s case to hold him even though the government had insufficient evidence to do so.

First, respondent claimed that, in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, petitioner implemented a policy of using the material witness statute as a pretextual tool to investigate and detain terrorism suspects whom the government lacked probable cause to charge criminally. Respondent alleged that he was arrested as a result of this alleged policy, which he contended violated the Fourth Amendment. [my emphasis]

So even though a document–signed by the current Attorney General at a time when al-Kidd was still subject to restricted movement–boasts about how easy it is to use of the material witness statute to hold people without sufficient evidence to do so, DOJ calls this use of the material witness statute “alleged.”

I guess if they admitted this was an intentional policy, it’d be harder to get SCOTUS to wink at its use going forward.

Update: harpie’s right. This is an editorial, not an op-ed.

Share this entry

If DOD’s Got a Problem with Wikileaked Names, They’ve Got a Problem w/NYT

/in , /by

HTML tutorial

Before the Wikileaks document dump this afternoon, DOD and Murdoch were out with claims that the impending dump would put 300 Iraqis at significant risk of reprisal. As Wikileaks noted via Twitter, the article falsely claimed that Wikileaks would reveal actual names.

Besides, if DOD has a problem with leaks, they likely have a problem with the NYT, not Wikileaks.

I discovered this by looking at both outlets’ version of the same report, the July 31, 2009 report on the capture by Iranians of three American hikers.

Here’s the NYT version of the report (at least as it appeared at around 8PM tonight); here’s a PDF, or click on the image for a full image of the report. Here’s the version included in Wikileaks’ database (you probably need to sign up for a password to get it; to search for it, look for the document by time at 10:00 on 31 July 2009).

At first read, here’s the information that is redacted in the Wiki version but which appears in the NYT version (please tell me if you see something I’ve missed):

  • Indication–AMCIT–that the people kidnapped were American citizens
  • Information that appears to show injury/damage report: 0 INJ/DAM 2/1 07:112
  • The location of the kidnapping (NYT redacts part of this, but leaves Sulaymaniyah/Halabjah unredacted)
  • The identification of the captured people as 3 American citizens, where they were being taken (to the Iranian border)
  • Three reports of the coordinates where the hikers were taken (see Updates at 1630, 1631, 1715)
  • The acronym JPRC and the detail that the hikers had come to Iraq–though Wiki does reveal they intended to go rock climbing
  • Acronyms describing who would set up checkpoints
  • The name–“Meckfessel”–of the person who provides more info on the hikers–he was the fourth hiker (note, NYT puts this in quotes); but note that Wiki includes the following which NYT doesn’t include:

receive additional ___ from him and take him to a secure location for rotary transport to FOB Warrior.

  • That the hikers were hiking the “Ahmad al Waha (variant Waaha, Waah, etc.) Rock face outside of Sulaymaniyah (note, NYT does not close that quotation mark around Ahmad al Waha)
  • That “Pathfinder” was en route to refuel at FOB Warrior and that they would “remain” on standby
  • The bolded details in the update, “Colonel Latif of the 10th Pesh Murga brigade reports Iranians detained 3X AMCIT for being too close to the border”
  • The detail that “CJ3” was reporting that “President Barzani” was notified
  • Reference to Pathfinder and F16s and the detail that the AWT was 5 minutes out
  • Wiki then includes the following details from the pursuit that NYT redacted entirely:

UPDATE ___: Current situation

-2x ___ on station (controlled by /___ CAV)

-1x Warrior Alpha: en route (___ by MND-___)

–CF have ___ manned and ___ unmanned ISR on station

–CF en route ___ HQ to link up with ___.

-1x AWT on standby at FOB warrior

-1x ___ team on standby at FOB Warrior

  • The detail that OSINT was reporting that Iranians had reported picking up the Americans
  • More references to Meckfessel being picked up and, ultimately, delivered to Baghdad
  • MND-N’s confirmation they will “C2” the recovery operations
  • Wiki includes the following that NYT redacts entirely:

UPDATE 311815JUL09: ___ is at ___ HQ–made link up with , ___ x CF personnel on site, ___ to a secure location, ___ digit grid when ___ is designated

  • Details about taking Meckfessel to PB Andrea and from there, on a C12, to Baghdad
  • Read more →
Share this entry

CIA Had Warning on Khost Attack, Will Not Hold Anyone Responsible

/in /by

Jordanian intelligence warned the CIA that Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Khost bomber, might be working for al Qaeda three weeks before al-Balawi killed 7 CIA people in the attack. But because the CIA still suffers from the same information sharing shortcomings problems that prevented it from finding out about 9/11, the CIA still allowed al-Balawi onto their forward operating base.

Three weeks before a Jordanian double agent set off a bomb at a remote Central Intelligence Agency base in eastern Afghanistan last December, a C.I.A. officer in Jordan received warnings that the man might be working for Al Qaeda, according to an investigation into the deadly attack.

But the C.I.A. officer did not tell his bosses of the suspicions — brought to the Americans by a Jordanian intelligence officer — that the man might try to lure Americans into a trap, according to the recently completed investigation by the agency.

But the CIA is not holding anyone responsible for this horrible lapse, partly because the station chief killed in the attack would have received much of the blame.

Mr. Panetta said that the report did not recommend holding a single person or group of individuals directly accountable for “systemic failures.”

“This is a war,” he said, adding that it is important for the C.I.A. to continue to take on risky missions.

[snip]

Current and former C.I.A. officials said that the decision not to hold officers directly responsible for the bombing was partly informed by an uncomfortable truth: some of them might have been among those killed in the bombing.

The officials said there was particular sensitivity about how much fault to assign to Jennifer Matthews, a Qaeda expert who was the chief of the Khost base.

Before you accept that explanation, re-read the piece that Bob Baer wrote on the Khost killing in April. He attributes the lapses to the de-professionalization of operations within CIA, and argues that Matthews (whom he calls Kathy) was set up to fail.

On January 10, 2010, CIA director Leon Panetta wrote a Washington Post op-ed in which he disputed that poor tradecraft was a factor in the Khost tragedy. Panetta is wrong.

An old operative I used to work with in Beirut said he would have picked up Balawi himself and debriefed him in his car, arguing that any agent worth his salt would never expose the identity of a valued asset to a foreigner like the Afghan driver. I pointed out that if he’d been there and done it that way, he’d probably be dead now. “It’s better than what happened,” he said.

One thing that should have raised doubts about Balawi was that he had yet to deliver any truly damaging intelligence on Al Qaeda, such as the location of Zawahiri or the plans for the Northwest bomb plot. Balawi provided just enough information to keep us on the hook, but never enough to really hurt his true comrades. And how was it that Balawi got Al Qaeda members to pose for pictures? This should have been another sign. These guys don’t like their pictures taken. So there were a few clear reasons not to trust Balawi, or at least to deal with him with extreme caution.

But the most inexplicable error was to have met Balawi by committee. Informants should always be met one-on-one. Always.

The fact is that Kathy, no matter how courageous and determined, was in over her head. This does not mean she was responsible for what happened. She was set up to fail. The battlefield was tilted in Al Qaeda’s favor long ago—by John Deutch and his reforms, by the directors who followed him, by the decision to drop the paramilitary course from the mandatory curriculum (which would have made Kathy a lot more wary of explosives), and by two endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have worn the CIA down to a nub. Had Kathy spent more time in the field, more time running informants, maybe even been stung by one or two bad doubles, the meeting in Khost probably would have been handled differently—and at the very least there would have been one dead rather than eight.

And while two of the recommendations Leon Panetta offered in response to the investigation was to provide more training on counterintelligence and to make sure veterans are involved in the most critical counterterrorism operations, that doesn’t address what Baer, at least says needs to happen: fixing the entire career path of CIA professionals out in the field.

Is not holding anyone responsible for this horrible mistake about protecting a CIA officer who died after being set up to fail? Or protecting her superiors who put her in that position?

Share this entry

CIA Sues over Whistleblower Book

/in , /by

Jeff Stein reports that, after months of rumors this would happen, the CIA has sued Ishmael Jones for publishing The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture without approval from CIA’s review board.

The Justice Department suit, on behalf of the spy agency, seeks “an injunction against any further violations of ‘Jones’ secrecy obligations and recovery of the proceeds from the unauthorized publication.”

It cited as precedent Snepp vs. United States, the 1980 Supreme Court decision against former CIA officer Frank Snepp that validated the agency requirement that employees submit their writings for approval as a fiduciary obligation.

As a result of the decision, the government was able to seize Snepp’s profits from the book. Snepp subsequently wrote a second book, “Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took on the CIA in an Epic Battle Over Free Speech,” which was cleared by the agency.

Like Snepp, whose memoir “Decent Interval” harshly criticized CIA activities at the end of the Vietnam War, Jones maintains that his book contained “no classified information.”

He said he used a pseudonym because “I was under deep cover for most of my career, so to use my real name might expose people I’ve met.”

Publishing the book without approval was necessitated because “there are no viable whistleblower mechanisms within the CIA,” he said.

I guess, unlike Bob Woodward, Jones is one of the people whom the President won’t allow to leak secrets.

Share this entry

Unconstitutional Surveillance & United States v. U.S. District Court: Who The Winner Is May Be A Secret – Part 1

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

[Given the current surveillance state situation in America, the Keith case, formally known as United States v. United States District Court, is one of the most important cases from our recent past. But I don’t really believe you can understand or know the law of a case, without really understanding the facts. The Keith case doesn’t have simple facts, but they are fascinating and instructive. So bear with me – this is going to take awhile, and will be laid out over a series of four posts. What follows today is Part I. – Mary]

It was a time of war. America had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. The National Security Agency (NSA) and our military had reassured us this was true. Our national security apparatus, Congress and press had joined behind the office of the President to lead us into a series of forays (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) that would leave tens of thousands of American soldiers dead and many times that wounded physically or mentally, while at the same time decimating over three million Vietnamese and over a 1.5 million Laotians and Cambodians.

At home, we were working our way through the civil rights movement, dealing with the cold war and threats of Russian nuclear weapons and witnessing anti-war protests that left students dead and buildings bombed. Algeria was hosting U.S. fugitives from justice, Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary, while Cuban connections were alleged to be behind much of the organized anti-war movement.

Court martial proceedings had begun for the My Lai killings with polls showing most of America objected to the trial. President Nixon would later pardon Lt. Calley for his role. A trial had also, briefly, seemed to be in the works for the “Green Beret Affair,” the killing of Thai Khac Chuyen by Green Berets running an intelligence program called Project GAMMA. The investigation began after one of the soldiers assigned to the Project became convinced that he was also being scheduled for termination. Charges in the Green Beret Affair would be dropped after the CIA refused to make personnel available, claiming national security privileges.

Against this backdrop, Nixon and his campaign manager – attorney general, John Mitchell (the only Read more →

Share this entry

The Compromise Intelligence Authorization

/in , /by

As DDay noted, it looks like we’ll finally have an intelligence authorization bill. The bill is a partial win for Speaker Pelosi, as it makes full briefing to the Intelligence Committees within six months of the start of a program the default (though the Administration can still avoid doing so if it provides written rationale). And it includes at least a nod to Pelosi’s demand that GAO be giving some authority to review intelligence programs. Steven Aftergood calls the GAO access “a foothold.”

The Act (in section 348) requires the Director of National Intelligence to prepare a directive on GAO access to intelligence community information — thereby setting the stage for a stable new role for the GAO in intelligence agency audits and reviews.In a letter to Congress (reprinted in the record of the floor debate) withdrawing the threat of a veto, ODNI General Counsel Robert S. Litt stressed that the new directive would not imply any change in existing law or GAO authority. He added that the new directive would also conform with “relevant opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel.” However, the only OLC opinion on the subject is from 1988, and it argued that GAO access to intelligence information is “precluded” by law. It hardly seems likely that the new directive would affirm that view.

Instead, the required directive should be seen as analogous to the recently updated Pentagon directive that permitted GAO access to highly classified special access programs,

It remains to be seen whether this compromise will give Congress enough new oversight powers to prevent the abuses that happened under Bush (and heck–I assume the Gang of Four, if not the Gang of Eight–has signed off on assassinating US citizens solely on the President’s say so, so it’s not clear that oversight will be any use in protecting the Constitution). But Jeff Stein reports both Pelosi and DiFi declaring victory, while the White House and DOD remain silent. Here’s Pelosi:

“In passing the Intelligence Authorization Act last night, the Senate upheld our first responsibility – to ensure the security of the American people – while addressing two key objectives,” Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday.

“It expands and improves the congressional notification process for covert action and provides the framework for GAO access to intelligence community information so that the GAO can conduct investigations, audits, and evaluations as requested by Congress,” Pelosi said.

Again, I remain skeptical, but at least this is better than nothing.

Think of it this way. Under these rules, the Bush White House would have had to tell the entire Intelligence Committees they were systematically torturing prisoners by February 1, 2003 (or at least admit in writing they hadn’t and wouldn’t inform the committees, rather than altering documents after the fact to pretend they had). Technically, they would have to have informed Congress of the September 17, 2001 finding dubiously used to authorize the torture program by March 17, 2002. As it happened, they apparently didn’t brief any Democrats that they were torturing prisoners until February 5, 2003, at which point the one they did brief (Jane Harman) objected in writing (and asked whether the President had signed off on the policy, which presumably meant she had never been briefed on the actual finding). We know Bob Graham had been proposing oversight of the interrogation program by that point, backed by a majority of the committee, even though he had no clue they were torturing (though Tony Blair apparently did). So it’s possible Congress would have at least demanded more information sooner about the torture under this system.

That may not have been enough to forestall Dick Cheney’s torture program. But it might have subjected it to at least a little more review.

At which point–as presumably has happened on Presidential hit lists–the blame for our egregious abuse of the Constitution would be more widely shared.

Congratulations, Intelligence Committees: you now share in the moral responsibility to protect the Constitution. Please take that responsibility seriously.

Share this entry

Obama’s Still Obfuscating about Domestic Surveillance

/in , , , /by

Adam Serwer does a pretty thorough job debunking Obama’s lame effort to defend his civil liberties record.

When people start being concerned about, “You haven’t closed Guantánamo yet,” I say, listen, that’s something I wanted to get done by now, and I haven’t gotten done because of recalcitrance from the other side. Frankly, it’s an easy issue to demagogue. But what I have been able to do is to ban torture. I have been able to make sure that our intelligence agencies and our military operate under a core set of principles and rules that are true to our traditions of due process. People will say, “I don’t know — you’ve got your Justice Department out there that’s still using the state secrets doctrine to defend against some of these previous actions.” Well, I gave very specific instructions to the Department of Justice. What I’ve said is that we are not going to use a shroud of secrecy to excuse illegal behavior on our part. On the other hand, there are occasions where I’ve got to protect operatives in the field, their sources and their methods, because if those were revealed in open court, they could be subject to very great danger. There are going to be circumstances in which, yes, I can’t have every operation that we’re engaged in to deal with a very real terrorist threat. [my emphasis]

But I wanted to add one thing.

Obama suggests his Administration has only invoked state secrets to protect “operatives in the field.”

That’s the case only in one of the most notable state secrets invocations the Administration has made or sustained. Consider:

  • Jeppesen Dataplan
  • Al-Haramain
  • Al-Awlaki

I’ll grant that one of the things the Administration refuses to publicize about the al-Awlaki case is how they know what they know. And we know there are covert teams operating in Yemen, so it is probable that one of the things–though certainly not the only thing–they are protecting are those operatives in the field.

But in Jeppesen Dataplan, the government is protecting a publicly traded company from the backlash it would experience if its role in torture were confirmed. And it is protecting the governments that tortured on our behalf: Egypt and Morocco.

The government’s invocation of state secrets in al-Haramain has even less to do with protecting operatives in the field. In that case, the government is (again) protecting publicly traded companies from even more certain backlash from consumers. And it is protecting the details about how and the extent to which the government conducts domestic surveillance and data mining. The government is not protecting operatives in the field at all. On the contrary, the government is protecting itself from the wrath of its citizens. (He’s also protecting the prior Administration, including his current top terrorism advisor, John Brennan.)

And to hide that fact–to try to legitimize his government’s secrecy–Obama invents a largely bogus concern about men and women risking their lives overseas.

Though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about that fact. After all, Obama’s flip-flop on FISA was the first big disappointment, the first promise he broke. From that point, it was clear Obama would place political considerations ahead of his stated commitment to civil liberties.

Which is, I guess, what his lame defense is all about.

Share this entry