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Did Lying Keith Just Accuse Obama of Lying?

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I noted the other day the reason the non-denial confirmation that NSA wiretapped Angela Merkel raised the stakes for what President obama told the Chancellor in June about the spying. Did he give assurances she hadn’t been tapped?

If he did, anonymous leakers from the NSA’s vicinity suggest, he knowingly lied.

In Germany, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS) had listed Merkel’s phone number since 2002. The number was still on the list – marked as “GE Chancellor Merkel” – weeks before Obama visited Berlin in June, raising the possibility that the German leader had been under surveillance for more than a decade. In an SCS document cited by the magazine, the agency said it had a “not legally registered spying branch” in the US embassy in Berlin, the exposure of which would lead to “grave damage for the relations of the United States to another government”.

The White House refused to comment on that report – or others that emerged in Germany overnight, raising questions about how much Obama personally knew about the spy operation.

[snip]

The German tabloid Bild reported that Obama was personally informed about US surveillance against Merkel by the director of the NSA, Keith Alexander, in 2010, and allowed the operation to continue. The newspaper cited “a secret intelligence employee who is familiar with the NSA operation against Merkel”. The Bild article also claimed that intelligence gathered by US spies based in Berlin was not channelled to NSA headquarters in Forte Meade, Maryland, but directly to the White House.

The newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reported that when Obama spoke to Merkel over the phone on Wednesday, he assured the German leader he had not previously known her phone had been monitored. [my emphasis]

Much of this is obviously coming from Germany’s own national security establishment. But the Bild leak is clearly identified as a US source. The NSA is now denying it (in language that seems desperate to deny that Alexander was Bild’s source).

NSA chief General Keith Alexander “did not discuss with President Obama in 2010 an alleged foreign intelligence operation involving German Chancellor Merkel, nor has he ever discussed alleged operations involving Chancellor Merkel,”

That said, any certainty about what Obama got briefed would move likely come from ODNI, which is likely just as tired of taking the fall for the Snowden leaks.

Nevertheless, someone at NSA and/or associated with the Embassy in Germany is trying to hang this on the President.

Obama’s public line has already been that his Administration will assess whether we should be doing something, whether or not we can. I’m not all that convinced, particularly given the puffery of his Committee to Make You Love the Dragnet, he really means that. But even the hint that some at NSA want to hang this on the President might make him much more critical of what its doing.

Did Obama Lie to Merkel in Berlin?

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As I noted here and the NYT lays out in more detail, Obama spoke with Angela Merkel about US spying in Germany in June when he was in Berlin.

The first disclosures from Der Spiegel in June almost soured the long-planned meeting between Mr. Obama and Ms. Merkel in her capital, which the president visited as a candidate in 2008, delivering a speech before an estimated 200,000 people.

In June, there were far fewer, carefully screened and invited Germans and Americans on hand to hear Mr. Obama at the Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of Berlin’s unity and freedom since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Shortly beforehand, Mr. Obama and Ms. Merkel stood side by side in her chancellery, fielding questions about American surveillance of foreigners’ phone and e-mail traffic. Pressed personally by Ms. Merkel, the president said that terrorist threats in Germany were among those foiled by intelligence operations around the world, and Ms. Merkel concurred.

A month later, Merkel quipped that she had not been wiretapped.

In July, Ms. Merkel joked with television interviewers asking about the situation, “I know of no case where I was listened to.”

Yet in the last few days, Merkel has discovered this is not true. The White House’s non-denial — “The President assured the Chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel” — makes it fairly clear the United States was monitoring her communications.

All of which raises the stakes for whatever explanation Obama offered in June.

The NSA’s strategy since Edward Snowden first leaked has been to emphasize (as Obama seems to have with Merkel) its use for counterterrorism. It has been increasingly clear NSA badly wants to hide the sheer scale of its spying — that it could effectively be taking everything. But even from the earliest leaks, it has been clear the US was spying on diplomats, particularly from the EU. So it should not be surprising that it is also spying on Merkel.

That said, it sounds like this tap, of Merkel’s private cell phone (which presumably had some kind of security, particularly given the involvement of Germany’s security services to assess whether it had been tapped), was probably a more deliberate tap than the broader spying NSA conducts, probably a TAO exploit. Not something that happens incidentally.

I would imagine Merkel would be pissed in any case, and gravely concerned about the topics of interest. (I’m acutely interested, for example, whether the US has shared any information about the plight of the Euro with the banks that have largely devastated the Euro.)

But there’s also the question of whether Obama gave Merkel assurances that have now turned out to be false.

Note, this article on how leaks are making it harder for the US to tout openness and human rights while secretly doing the opposite is closely related–it’s well worth your read.

Why Does France Get Publicly-Reported Phone Calls?

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The White House just released a readout of a call between President Obama and French President François Hollande pertaining to the spying revealed yesterday by Le Monde.

Readout of the President’s Call with President Hollande of France

The President spoke today with President Hollande of France. The United States and France are allies and friends, and share a close working relationship on a wide range of issues, including security and intelligence. The President and President Hollande discussed recent disclosures in the press – some of which have distorted our activities and some of which raise legitimate questions for our friends and allies about how these capabilities are employed. The President made clear that the United States has begun to review the way that we gather intelligence, so that we properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share. The two Presidents agreed that we should continue to discuss these issues in diplomatic channels moving forward.  The two leaders also discussed the ongoing violence in Syria and the importance of a political solution to the crisis.

Such releases tend to be blather, so I don’t take all that much from the content of the readout.

But I am interested that they released it.

Remember, this is not the first conversation with an angry world leader Obama has had about the runaway NSA. Angela Merkel, Dilma Rousseff, and Enrique Peña Nieto have as well. And while Obama was in Germany not long after the initial Germany releases, and saw Rousseff at the G20 in Russia not long after the worst of the Brazilian stories, I don’t see any call with Peña Nieto. Plus, we know there was a follow-up call between Obama and Rousseff on September 16 (he was supposed to report his findings about the nature of NSA’s spying on Brazil and Rousseff; she called off her State Visit the day afterwards).

I assume the Obama-Rousseff call couldn’t be spun into a happy message like this one.

But what of the call to Peña Nieto? Or did he already know about the spying they did before he was elected, because content from it has been used to pressure him to keep the DEA presence in Mexico?

James Clapper’s Financial War on the World

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I’m fundraising this week. Please support me if you can. 

Yesterday, TV Globo published details of NSA spying on Brazil’s oil company, Petrobras, SWIFT, and financial organizations. Besides revealing that man-in-the-middle attacks are sometimes used, the report didn’t offer details of what the NSA was actually collecting. Its sources suggest NSA might be seeking Brazil’s leading deep sea drilling technology or geological information that would be useful in drilling auctions, but it is also conceivable the NSA is just trying to anticipate what the oil market will look like in upcoming years (this is one area where we probably even spy on our allies the Saudis, since they have been accused of lying about their reserves).

To some degree, then, I await more details about precisely what we’re collecting and why.

But what I am interested in is James Clapper’s response. He released this statement on the I Con site.

It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing.

We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries’ economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets.

Our collection of information regarding terrorist financing saves lives. Since 9/11, the Intelligence Community has found success in disrupting terror networks by following their money as it moves around the globe. International criminal organizations, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, illicit arms dealers, or nations that attempt to avoid international sanctions can also be targeted in an effort to aid America’s and our allies’ interests.

What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.

As we have said previously, the United States collects foreign intelligence – just as many other governments do – to enhance the security of our citizens and protect our interests and those of our allies around the world. The intelligence Community’s efforts to understand economic systems and policies and monitor anomalous economic activities is critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security.

Let me take this extraordinary statement in reverse order.

In the fourth paragraph, Clapper reiterates the final defense that NSA defenders use: that we’re better than, say, China and France, because we don’t engage in industrial espionage, stealing technology with our spying. That may be true, but I suspect at the end of the day the economic spying we do might be more appalling.

In the third paragraph, he retreats to the terror terror terror strategy the Administration has used throughout this crisis. And sure, no one really complains that the government is using financial tracking to break up terrorist networks (though the government is awfully selective about whom it prosecutes, and it almost certainly has used a broad definition of “terrorism” to spy on the financial transactions of individuals for geopolitical reasons). But note, while the Globo report provided no details, it did seem to describe that NSA spies on SWIFT.

That would presumably be in addition to whatever access Treasury gets directly from SWIFT, through agreements that have become public.

That is, the Globo piece at least seems to suggest that we’re getting information from SWIFT via two means, via the now public access through the consortium, but also via NSA spying. That would seem to suggest we’re using it for things that go beyond the terrorist purpose the consortium has granted us access for. Past reporting on SWIFT has made it clear we threatened to do just that. The Globo report may support that we have in fact done that.

Now the second paragraph. James Clapper, too cute by half, asserts, spying on financial information,

could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy

Hahahahahaha! Oh my word! Hahahaha. I mean, sure, the US needs to know of pending financial crises, in the same way it wants to know what the actual versus claimed petroleum reserves in the world are (and those are, of course, closely related issues). But with this claim, Clapper suggests the US would actually recognize a financial crisis and do something about it.

Hahahahaha. Didn’t — still doesn’t — work out that way.

Read more →

The End of the American Empire

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I write about our dying empire just about every day in my links posts. But given the debt limit debate and Friday’s S&P downgrade, I wanted to look at four pieces that examine where we are more closely (note, all of these are well worth reading in full–do click through to read them).

There are two issues to grapple with: first, with the undeniable evidence that our government has become a clusterfuck, we have become incapable of taking obvious steps–like taking the profit motive out of our health care system or taxing the wealthy that just got a giant government bailout–that we need for the well-being of the country. At this level, S&P’s downgrade makes sense.

But then there’s the question of why we let a thoroughly discredited entity like the S&P be the one to dictate whether we merit our world leadership position or not. That’s not just a question of letting one of the agencies that created the bubble retain any position of authority in the world afterwards (though, again, the fact we left the rating agencies in place after the crash is another sign our governance has failed), but also why a nation-state would let a corrupted entity like S&P do so in the first place.

Therein lies the paradox here: the downgrade is at once a real measure of the collapse of our governance, one of the best symptoms of it, and a key piece of evidence of why our governance is failing. So what’s going on?

This column at Spiegel Online looks on this as a problem of culture. It argues the US has left “the West.”

America has changed. It has drifted away from the West.

The country’s social disintegration is breathtaking. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently described the phenomenon. The richest 1 percent of Americans claim one-quarter of the country’s total income for themselves — 25 years ago that figure was 12 percent. It also possesses 40 percent of total wealth, up from 33 percent 25 years ago. Stiglitz claims that in many countries in the so-called Third World, the income gap between the poor and rich has been reduced. In the United States, it has grown.

Economist Paul Krugman, also a Nobel laureate, has written that America’s path is leading it down the road to “banana-republic status.” The social cynicism and societal indifference once associated primarily with the Third World has now become an American hallmark. This accelerates social decay because the greater the disparity grows, the less likely the rich will be willing to contribute to the common good. When a company like Apple, which with €76 billion in the bank has greater reserves at its disposal than the government in Washington, a European can only shake his head over the Republican resistance to tax increases. We see it as self-destructive.

The same applies to America’s broken political culture. The name “United States” seems increasingly less appropriate. Something has become routine in American political culture that has been absent in Germany since Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik policies of rapprochement with East Germany and the Soviet Bloc (in the 1960s and ’70s): hate. At the same time, reason has been replaced by delusion. The notion of tax cuts has taken on a cult-like status, and the limited role of the state a leading ideology.

Now, it is true that America’s political culture has been hijacked, and that those who have hijacked it used hatred as a way to convince others to act against self-interest. But that’s what (perhaps) distinguishes us from Europe; that’s what explains why we, a country with our own currency, can be in as dire a situation as Europe with its common currency. Moreover, I’m skeptical whether, mere weeks after the terrorist attack in Norway, Europe should really be lecturing the US about hate.

Craig Murray looks elsewhere–at the military we feed at the expense of feeding our own people. Read more →