Robinson: Love or hate him, we should thank Snowden

Great point by Robinson:

This month, the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a public statement announcing that the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court has renewed the government’s authority to collect “metadata” about our phone calls. This was being disclosed “in light of the significant and continuing public interest in the . . . collection program.”

Isn’t that rich? If the spooks had their way, there would be no “continuing public interest” in the program.  We wouldn’t know it exists.

Aren't we all glad we know about this program, even if some of us happen to support it?  Personally, I don't understand how Snowden's revealing the program compromised U.S. intelligence.  No names were leaked, no agents put in danger.  

Moreover, the DOD-NSA's domestic spying program continues unchanged and unabated... which kind of undermines the argument that Snowden's whistle-blowing damaged the program. Usually, unsavory clandestine operations are cancelled or revamped once they are exposed, since they rely on secrecy.  These domestic spying programs don't rely on secrecy, just brute force collection of all our electronic communications.

In NSA leaks, Edward Snowden performed a service

By Eugene Robinson

July 30, 2013 | Washington Post

Edward Snowden’s renegade decision to reveal the jaw-dropping scope of the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance is being vindicated — even as Snowden himself is being vilified.

Intelligence officials in the Obama administration and their allies on Capitol Hill paint the fugitive analyst as nothing but a traitor who wants to harm the United States. Many of those same officials grudgingly acknowledge, however, that public debate about the NSA’s domestic snooping is now unavoidable.

This would be impossible if Snowden — or someone like him — hadn’t spilled the beans. We wouldn’t know that the NSA is keeping a database of all our phone calls. We wouldn’t know that the government gets the authority to keep track of our private communications — even if we are not suspected of terrorist activity or associations — from secret judicial orders issued by a secret court based on secret interpretations of the law.

Snowden, of course, is hardly receiving the thanks of a grateful nation. He has spent the last five weeks trapped in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow. Russian officials, who won’t send him home for prosecution, wish he would move along. But Snowden fears that if he takes off for one of the South American countries that have offered asylum, he risks being intercepted en route and extradited. It’s a tough situation, and time is not on his side.

You can cheer Snowden’s predicament or you can bemoan it. But even some of the NSA’s fiercest defenders have admitted, if not in so many words, that Snowden performed a valuable public service.

This month, the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a public statement announcing that the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court has renewed the government’s authority to collect “metadata” about our phone calls. This was being disclosed “in light of the significant and continuing public interest in the . . . collection program.”

Isn’t that rich? If the spooks had their way, there would be no “continuing public interest” in the program. We wouldn’t know it exists.

The new position espoused by President Obama and those who kept the NSA’s domestic surveillance a deep, dark secret is that of course we should have a wide-ranging national debate about balancing the imperatives of privacy and security. But they don’t mean it.

I know this because when an actual debate erupted in Congress last week, the intelligence cognoscenti freaked out.

An attempt to cut off funding for the NSA’s collection of phone data, sponsored by an unlikely pair of allies in the House — Justin Amash, a conservative Republican, and John Conyers, a liberal Democrat, both from Michigan — suffered a surprisingly narrow defeat, 217 to 205. The measure was denounced by the White House and the congressional leadership of both parties, yet it received bipartisan support, from 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats.

The Amash-Conyers amendment was in no danger of becoming law — the Senate would have killed it and, if all else failed, President Obama would have vetoed it. But it put the intelligence establishment on notice: The spooks don’t decide how far is too far. We do.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that three out of four Americans believe the vacuum-cleaner collection of phone call data by the NSA intrudes on our privacy rights.  At the same time, nearly three-fifths of those surveyed said it was “more important right now” to investigate possible terrorist threats than to respect privacy. A contradiction, perhaps? Not necessarily.

It is possible to endorse sweeping and intrusive measures in the course of a specific investigation but to reject those same measures as part of a fishing expedition. At the heart of the Fourth Amendment is the concept that a search must be justified by suspicion. Yet how many of those whose phone call information is being logged are suspected of being terrorists? One in a million?

Equally antithetical to the idea of a free society, in my view, is the government’s position that we are not permitted to know even how the secret intelligence court interprets our laws and the Constitution. The order that Snowden leaked — compelling a Verizon unit to cough up data on the phone calls it handled — was one of only a few to come to light in the court’s three decades of existence. Now there are voices calling for all the court’s rulings to be released.

We’re talking about these issues. You can wish Edward Snowden well or wish him a lifetime in prison. Either way, you should thank him.

'Falcon' spy: NSA whistleblower 'doomed'

Very interesting interview!  

Convicted U.S. spy Christopher Boyce: 'Snowden is doomed'

By Peter Shadbolt

June 14, 2013 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/14/world/asia/hong-kong-boyce-snowden/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Taibbi: MSM misses the point of Bradley Manning trial

Matt Taibbi argues that the MSM is missing the point of Bradley Manning's public release of classified documents. The U.S. media has made it all about HIM, and whether he's a hero or a traitor:

[T]his case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the "classified" materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.

This whole thing, this trial, it all comes down to one simple equation. If you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself criminal.

Manning, by whatever means, stumbled into a massive archive of evidence of state-sponsored murder and torture, and for whatever reason, he released it. The debate we should be having is over whether as a people we approve of the acts he uncovered that were being done in our names.

As Bradley Manning Trial Begins, Press Predictably Misses the Point

By Matt Taibbi

June 6, 2013 | Rolling Stone

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/as-bradley-manning-trial-begins-press-predictably-misses-the-point-20130605#ixzz2W1lAjKC9

Poll: 29 percent of Americans potential traitors

Forget profiling and surveilling Muslims, Arabs or Chechens, why aren't we profiling and tracking this self-identifying 29 percent of Americans?  You can see the poll results here.

These people are obviously gearing up mentally if not in reality for treason and armed insurrection. Where's the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security when we need them?

Seriously though, let me ask my Republican friends to imagine the FOX headline, "Poll shows 29 percent of immigrants/blacks/Northerners/Democrats think 'armed revolution' might be needed."  If you saw that on FOX, would you react with nonchalance?

No, pro-gun conservatives would be climbing the ceiling, ringing every alarm bell they could find.  

Moreover, has there ever been another time in American history when 29 percent of Americans thought this way?  Well, maybe in 18th century when Americans did not have any representation.  But that's not the case now.  

No, this is not good, not good at all.  These are folks who don't respect the scoreboard of democracy and are about to take matters into their own hands.  

These poll results are ugly any way you spin them.

Poll shows 29 percent of voters think 'armed revolution' might be needed

May 2, 2013 | FoxNews

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/02/poll-shows-2-percent-voters-think-armed-revolution-might-be-needed/?test=latestnews#ixzz2SEpN5MlD

Gun nuts defend Confederate, not U.S., Constitution

YES!  Finally somebody else had the balls to say it: 

Although nullification, secession and armed conflict are not exclusively Southern responses to Obama's gun safety agenda, they certainly are much stronger there than elsewhere and they reflect the historical reality that these same false constitutional doctrines helped pave the way to the Civil War - the only episode of mass treason in US history.  

Once you allow this simple historical fact to sink in, the whole notion of "constitutional conservatism" finally starts to make sense. You see, the constitution these folks are referring to is not the Constitution of the United States of America.  It's the constitution of the Confederate States of America, whose entire reason for existing was to preserve the institution of slavery, and the political power of the slave-owning elite. 

And that constitution, thankfully, has already been shot full of holes, in the bloodiest war in American history, which it was the cause of. Nothing tells us more about what "constitutional conservatives" are really up to than a look back at the horrors of that war, and the unspeakable evils that it sought to preserve and protect. 

If these gun nuts want to re-fight the Civil War then, in the immortal words of George Dubya Bush: "Bring 'em on." The result will be the same. Just ask Randy Weaver and David Koresh.

P.S. -- Rand Paul's complaints about "King Obama" prove he is a blithering idiot who doesn't understand our Constitution or system of government. Even worse, he doesn't have his dad's wit, simple charisma, consistency or the courage of his [absolutely wrong] convictions. I'll say it again: these scions of prominent politicians are the worst kind -- Rand Paul, Mitt Romney, Dubya, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Al Gore -- and we should avoid them like the plague, because they are out to prove something, not to do what they think is right.

Gun lobby's bad aim shoots down myth of 'constitutional conservatism'

By Paul Rosenberg

February 6, 2013 | Aljazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/20132371127714836.html

Banning the rebel flag, one city at a time

Congrats to the Old South for doing something right, albeit 146 years too late. You recall that I've written before about the anti-American Confederate flag, and how it doesn't jibe with latter day Southerners' avowed patriotism for the United States, aka the Union.

But some Southern Tea-Party types just don't get it: "'I am a firm believer in the freedom to express our individual rights, which include flying the flag that we decide to fly,' said Philip Way, a Civil War re-enactor dressed in a Confederate wool uniform despite the summer temperatures. 'That's freedom to me.'"

The ordinance affects only public (municipal) displays of the Confedrate Flag; private displays are unaffected.

So "freedom," it seems, is a relative word. While anti-government conservatives say they want Big Gubument out of their lives, what they really mean -- like the rest of us -- is that they want government to promote their values, while diminishing others'. That's freedom for them.

Those retrograde bumpkins in wool underpants still have the right to fly their treasonous flag; but the People have spoken, and They don't want the rebel flag flown in the victor's halls.

And if you don't like it, look away, Dixieland!

Va. city bans public Confederate flag displays

September 2, 2011 | CBS News

URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/02/national/main20100808.shtml

Instant TV classic: 'Goldman Sachs Are Scum'

Max Keiser wastes no time to make his point. He bursts out of his corner in Round 1 like Butterbean, all haymakers and head butts:

"Well, Goldman Sachs are scum. I mean that's the bottom line. They basically have co-opted the, uh, U.S. government, they have co-opted the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve functionality, they've co-opted the Obama Administration. Barack Obama, you know, dances to Goldman Sachs' tune. And [...] you just remember Hank Paulson held Congress hostage, took 'em in the back room and said, 'Give us $750 billion [or] we're gonna crash this market.' He's an arsonist. He's an outlaw. And yet he's given praise."

Now this is must-watch TV! Care for a big dollop of irony on your freedom fries? Then watch this politically correct, effete Arab-Frenchy business professor actually defending scummy U.S. bank Goldman Sachs against independent financial analyst Max Keiser, who says that GS should be thrown in jail for stealing, should be taking to the Hague for "financial terrorism." Keiser actually called Osama bin Laden a "pussycat" compared to "financial terrorists" Paulson and Geithner!

And when the Frenchy professor praises GS's recent $3.5 billion reported profits for providing value to shareholders, Keiser loses it: "But they were given $3.5 billion from the taxpayers of America!!! You call that a profit?! They didn't make 'em, they stole 'em! If I stole $1,000 from a bank, would you say I made $1,000 profit?!!"

You won't hear unfiltered truth like this on American TV for almost 14 uninterrupted minutes. That's an eternity in corporate television. Relish this. This is what media freedom looks like. Courtesy of France 24.

By the way, Keiser guarantees another world banking crisis in 6-9 months.

Part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSwWy4E6I04

Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoQrYa_NKQQ

Taibbi: Who you callin' a traitor?

It's actually sad that Taibbi has to spend several hundred words explaining the obvious like this.  I hope you're one of the smart ones who already understands his thesis implicitly. 

Being anti-torture doesn't make you pro-terrorist
By Matt Taibbi
May 12, 2009  |  SmirkingChimp.com

"WASHINGTON — Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, "You do what you have to do." And then take the responsibility.

Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don't entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen.

The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. We know we must act but have no idea where or how — and we can't know that until we have information. Catch-22.

Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding."

-- Charles Krauthammer, Townhall.com.

So I got pelted with emails from the usual lunatics this weekend after making the mistake of saying on television that I thought the lawyers who greenlighted the waterboarding program should be prosecuted. I'm not going to delve into this too deeply, because this is clearly one of those issues that few people are willing to change their minds about, but I feel like I've got to talk about one particular aspect of this debate, because it's just too crazy to let go.

Here's a snippet from one letter I got: "What really gets me about liberals like you is that when other countries torture and kill our people, and cut off their heads, [there's] not a peep from you. But you dunk some terrorist's head underwater for a few minutes and you go all weepy."

I saw the same kind of thing in a letter from a guy named Robert Reeg to the New York Post this morning:

My chest was crushed in the collapse of 2 WTC. If people think waterboarding is torture, they should try having their chest cracked while fully conscious. I haven't had a pain-free day since then, never mind the memories. What outrages me most is the "selective" outrage. No one complains when Americans are tortured and murdered.

Obviously Mr. Reeg suffered a terrible experience; I would never make light of that. What I do want to say is that there seems to be this idea that those of us who are against making torture an allowable practice in the U.S. are somehow condoning the behavior of those wacko/asshole religious extremists, that we're picking "their side" in the debate, like it's an either/or proposition or something. I don't think I could count the number of times I've had this argument on the campaign trail at Republican rallies:

ME: No, actually I'm not even talking about whether torture works or not, although incidentally it doesn't. I'm just saying that no civilized society does it, and we probably shouldn't either, so –

ANGRY WHITE PERSON: But what about what those monsters did to our boys in Fallujah? I suppose you're not outraged about that!

ME: (perplexed) Well, I — wait, what? Where the fuck do you get that from?

ANGRY WHITE PERSON: You're standing in front of me complaining about water-boarding! It just follows that you're not outraged about what they did to our boys in Fallujah!

ME: (scratching head, confused) Um…

The thing is, we've been listening to this stuff for so long that when we hear it, we don't recoil in confused disbelief anymore — we're so familiar with these arguments we've forgotten that they don't make any sense. It's similar to that other Bush-era standard: "We fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them here."

I never understood what the hell that was all about. The best I could figure is that the people who were saying this think of the world like a big Stratego game, and they think that if we commit a big force to some place like Iraq, the "other side" will have to leave all his forces over there or something to keep us from moving through Eurasia. This might make sense in a real war, in a war-between-nations war, but it's completely absurd in a conflict where the "other side" is actually hundreds if not thousands of different/unrelated actors and can successfully attack a country like the U.S. using just a few people at a time. Sending 160,000 troops to Iraq does absolutely nothing to prevent a terrorist group like al-Qaeda from sending over a couple of "exchange students" to dump botulinum toxin into the Akron reservoir.

Okay check that — it does nothing positive. Because it might prevent such attacks in the sense of giving foreign terrorists an array of more enticing targets to shoot at who are closer to home. But in real terms the idea "we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" is just magical thinking, the kind of notion that feels like it makes sense because your brain is running amok in the unconscious making unsupervised connections between unrelated things, sort of like an OCD patient who believes that if he steps on every third sidewalk crack he won't get into a car accident. What's amazing about this sort of propaganda is that once it gets hammered into your head enough, the logic of it begins to feel self-evident, above the need for explanation. Over and over again on the campaign trail last year I had people explain this concept to me by simply repeating themselves. I once asked a guy in South Carolina who had laid that line on me if he thought our forces in Iraq were, simultaneous to their occupation mission, physically blocking the airports in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to keep potential terrorists from coming to the U.S.– if that was why fighting them over there kept "them" from committing terrorist acts here.

"You're not listening to me," he said. "The point is that if we weren't over there, we'd be fighting them here. Now that we're over there, they fight us there."

"But why can't they attack us here anyway?" I asked.

He stared at me for something like thirty seconds. I remember having enough time to check to make sure I had tape left on my recorder. "Because we're over there," he said finally.

It's the same thing with this torture business.  There are a lot of people in this country who genuinely believe that torture opponents are "not upset" about things like 9/11 or the beheading of American hostages.  The idea that "no one complains when Americans are murdered" is crazy — of course we "complained," and of course we'd all like to round up those machete-wielding monsters and shoot them into space — but these people really believe this, they really believe that torture opponents are secretly unimpressed/untroubled by Islamic terrorism, at least as compared to American "enhanced interrogation." For them to believe that, they must really believe that such people are traitors, nursing a secret agenda (an agenda perhaps unknown even to themselves, their America-hatred being ingrained so deep) against their own country. Which is really an amazing thing for large numbers of Americans to believe about another large group of Americans, when you think about it.

The reason it's possible is that it's been drilled into their heads to instinctively perceive opposition to their point of view as support for their enemies. They've lost the ability to distinguish between real, honest-to-God enemies (al Qaeda, Kim Jong-Il) and people they simply disagree with or dislike (Boston liberals, the French, gays, the ACLU, etc).

If you give a Yankee fan shit about Joba Chamberlain's fist pumps, his first answer is going to be to wonder why you're not also complaining about Jonathan Papelbon's screaming — because he assumes everyone who disagrees with a Yankee is a Red Sox fan. The same sort of thing is at work here. You bring up the subject of torture as an American citizen, concerned about what allowing torture would do to us as a society, how it would change us, and these people answer the issue by wondering why we're not also complaining about the terrorists on 9/11 or in Fallujah. Because the thinking here is that everyone who disagrees with the torture position is in some degree or another in league with a real murderous enemy.

They don't understand that this is not a question of taking different sides in a war; this is two groups of Americans having a disagreement about how best to deal with a foreign enemy both of these groups of Americans despise, fear and revile equally. My group, the anti-torture group, believes that what should make us superior to terrorists is respect for law and due process and civilization, and that when we give in and use these tactics, we forfeit that superiority and actually confer a kind of victory to the al Qaedas of the world, people who should never be allowed any kind of victory in any arena. We furthermore think that the war on terror doesn't get won with force alone, that it's a conflict that ultimately has to be won politically, by winning a propaganda battle against these assholes, and we can't win that battle so easily if people in the Middle East see us openly embrace these tactics.

Whether or not you agree with that is up to you — we could be wrong, after all — but when you respond to these arguments by asserting that people like me didn't "complain" when Americans were tortured and murdered, what you're really doing is calling me a traitor. And while it may be more interesting and exciting for you to think like that, in reality it's just nuts. Seriously. Trust us on this one. So think it over and ask yourself again if it really makes sense to say that torture opponents like me didn't "complain" when Americans get their heads chopped off. Ask yourself if you really mean that, before you say it. And then get back to me.

Buchanan: McCain's top foreign policy adviser also $$ lobbyist for Georgia !!

And None Dare Call It Treason
By Patrick J. Buchanan
August 22, 2008 | HumanEvents.com

Who is Randy Scheunemann?

He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.

But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.

He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 -- pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.

What were Mikheil's marching orders to Tbilisi's man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.

Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann's client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.

U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?

Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.

That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality -- namely, that Russia's control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with Russia.

If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain, Barack Obama, Bush, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.

Not only did Scheunemann's two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.

Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June 1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.

The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of protector of Russians left behind in the "near abroad" when the Soviet Union broke apart.

Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians out.

This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.

Scheunemann's resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9-11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9-11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.

Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain's camp.

The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.

Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?

Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George Bush?

"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence ... a free people ought to be constantly awake," Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call it treason.