Rep. Chris Stewart, a Republican from Utah made this statement on Monday at the House Intelligence Committee, “Every media organization, every political organization, every government organization that I’m familiar with last fall thought that Secretary Clinton would be the next President of the United States.” and FBI Director James Comey replied “I think the Russians agreed”. The prevailing argument among spurned liberals is that Comey thought the election was close and some bias of his caused him to send his letter to Congress days before the election, knowing that it would shift votes to Donald Trump. But Comey’s statement seems to suggest that not only were the Russians sure of an impending Clinton victory, but so was Jim Comey. If Comey didn’t think Clinton could lose, then the argument about him purposefully trying to elect Trump becomes a little dubious. So why then did he send that letter to Congress?

Jim Comey needed to appear objective, because he was building a case for prosecuting Trump associates, and after Trump had threatened to appoint prosecutors to investigate Clinton during the campaign, he understood he needed to build credibility because he’d be accused of playing revenge politics for President Clinton. Which is understandable, because he’d be leading an investigation, after a very bitter election of the would-be President’s former opponent and whether or not his campaign committed treason.

Or so he thought, but as we know Hillary Clinton won the election and Donald Trump won the presidency.

The FBI had been investigating the Trump campaign and its connections to the Russians since July, and it seems likely that at some point in the fall, the FBI discovered some fire underneath all that smoke. Through that investigation, and leaked documents from intelligence agencies, we now know some things that we might not have known otherwise.

We know that Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been on the payroll of several projects aiding the interests of Vladimir Putin, as recently as May of 2016.

We know that a senior policy advisor, Carter Page, has financial interests in the Russian energy sector and contacted Russian officials on more than one occasion while employed by the Trump campaign.

We know that Trump confidante Roger Stone, had contact with Julian Assange and seemed to have foreknowledge on WikiLeaks document leaks.

We know that the hackers who stole information from the DNC and distributed other classified materials with the intent of helping Trump, did so at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

We don’t know to what extent the Trump campaign was involved in the Russian interference in this election or whether President Trump knew, and if he did when did he know it.

But Comey didn’t need the leaks to know what we’ve all slowly been piecing together in the last few weeks, because as Rep. Trey Gowdy said “I would hope that you had access to everything as the head of the world’s premier law-enforcement agency…So if you had it all, the motive couldn’t have been to help you, because you already had it.”

It would seem that Comey had intelligence linking Trump associates to Russia, had intelligence that Russia was intervening on behalf of Trump, and perhaps had intelligence pointing to collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign for months. Yet, none of that was revealed to us until it was much too late.

Despite taking a very active role in the election, Comey tried his best to appear as a non-political figure with no partisan loyalties. Comey after all was a Republican when he was appointed by former President Obama, a Democrat, to his current position. Commenting on Trump would give the appearance of the FBI being a tool of a Democratic White House, and when he did comment on Clinton many observers maligned Comey as just another part of the “vast right wing conspiracy” against the Clintons.

I don’t imagine Comey wanted to comment on Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump unless he absolutely had to. The recent hearing showed a man who is deeply uncomfortable with making even the vaguest of political statements. But once it became clear, or at least most of us thought it had become clear, that Hillary Clinton was without a doubt going to become President, Comey made a judgement call. He decided that it was worth pissing off his future boss, if it meant that he’d get to see his investigation of the Trump campaign to fruition.

He’d found no criminal wrongdoing the first time he investigated Clinton, he knew that whatever files were on Anthony Weiner’s computer likely weren’t going to amount to the 18½ minutes of missing Nixon tapes. But he announced his re-opening of the investigation anyway. He probably figured that with a week left, voters had already made up their minds, and he had a sure-fire plan for saving face.

Sabotaging Hillary Clinton, in Comey’s mind, might’ve been the only way to maintain his legitimacy. Imagine if after the election, it was leaked that the FBI hid an investigation of Clinton in the final weeks of the campaign. Her presidency would be crippled, the FBI would lose the confidence of the public, he’d be removed from his post and justice would be delayed in the case of the Trump-Russia connection. Russia would intervene in 2018, 2020, or as long as they needed in order to get results. Jim Comey must’ve been cognizant of that. But Hillary lost in the biggest upset since 1948, and now Comey is in the awkward position of investigating the President of the United States of America who is much more powerful than if he were just a loser billionaire.

That’s the theory, Jim Comey was too confident in polling, tried to save America and maybe ended up handing the reins of government to a Russian puppet. There’s also the possibility that Jim Comey is just really bad at his job. Which, isn’t a total stretch of the imagination either. Whatever happened then doesn’t matter now, what matters is following the facts about Trump wherever they may lead.

And so far, they lead to the Kremlin.

The post Theory: Comey’s Pre-Election Letter Was Well Intentioned appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Having missed it during its initial theater run, I finally got to see Citizen Four last night on HBO, the day after it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. It’s an exceptional film, both for its powerful subject matter and for its restrained style, and if the Oscar award drives more people to see it, that would be a good thing.

The subject is Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower who revealed the NSA’s vast system of spying on American citizens. Snowden’s high security clearances gave him access to essentially everything that the NSA was [and is still] doing to collect and aggregate data from Americans’ [and others’] electronic communications. Even though much has been written about the NSA’s program since Snowden revealed it in 2013, I still got goose bumps while seeing it all again in Citizen Four.

Much has also been written about whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor. What we see in Citizen Four is neither of those: Snowden comes across as a highly intelligent and skilled person who, while doing his job as a systems administrator, began wondering about the constitutionality of the activities he was monitoring, and felt an ethical duty to reveal what was going on.

As he talks with Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras, Snowden is calm and rational. Clearly, he has thought carefully about what he is doing, why he’s doing it, and how best to get the information into the hands of reliable reporters, and out to the American public, whose rights are being violated.

Significantly, Snowden conveys all of his secretly obtained government documents to Greenwald [and others, for backup] in one huge data drop, rather than doling it out piecemeal. He helps Greenwald understand the structure of the documents, but makes no other comments. He has a specific rationale for sharing all of the information at once and with minimal commentary, he explains: He wants to avoid overlaying the documents with his own interpretations and prejudices.

Snowden also emphasizes that he does not want to be the story. He has been stealthy, of necessity, in obtaining and sharing sensitive NSA documents. But he does not want to remain anonymous for long, because he wants the focus to be on the revelations themselves, rather than on the spy-story search for his identity.

Not much happens, in the cinematic sense, in Citizen Four. Poitras creates an ominous tone, but does not sensationalize. She doesn’t have to: Snowden’s revelations themselves provide all the necessary shock value. And although the story itself has a lot of cloak-and-dagger, spy-novel characteristics, Poitras, to her credit, doesn’t overemphasize them. Much of the film focuses on the early conversations between Snowden and Greenwald, during which they figure out the ground rules for their interactions and strategize how Snowden’s information will be revealed through the press.

Poitras could have created a made-for-TV “America’s Most Wanted”-style show, but she didn’t. Instead, she has made a straightforward, as-it-happened documentary that reveals Edward Snowden’s intelligence, his sincerity, and his carefully thought-out plan to share information he sees as critical to the health of American democracy.

Nevertheless, there are some moments of high drama: The encrypted e-mail messages going back and forth between Snowden, Poitras and Greenwald; the paranoiac peak when a fire alarm suddenly blares in the Hong Kong hotel where Snowden is secretly meeting with Greenwald and Poitras; the notes passed between Greenwald and Snowden in Russia, where they fear eavesdropping. These things happened during filming, and they are part of the story.

Of course, this story does not end with the final credits. Today, Snowden is off the front pages, supplanted by the headline du jour. But we are all still wrestling with what he did, why he did it, and what it means in terms of our faith in our government and our sense of safety, privacy and freedom. In Citizen Four, Snowden expresses the wish that, once he has faded from the headlines—whether living in Russia, as he is currently, or possibly in jail, an outcome many hope for—others with similar concerns and information will come forward. I can only hope that, in the interest of democracy, his wish is fulfilled.

The post Citizen Four: The Oscars got this one right appeared first on Occasional Planet.

For me, 2014 was a year of profound revelation. It’s the year I came to fully understand the depth of the corruption of the United States government and its elected officials. The revelations came after I cut my cable, stopped relying on the New York Times and other mainstream print media as a source of information, and turned to independent, left-leaning investigative journalists who are not beholden to a corporate/bank paycheck.

I also broadened my reading beyond the U.S. to journalists and news sources from other countries. My eyes were opened and, I have to say, my stomach was turned. It became clear to me that the United States is the main source of violence in the world—and without a doubt, the most ruthless nation on the planet.

The selling of Wall Street driven wars

Here in the U.S., we are drowning in a sea of government-sponsored propaganda designed to get us onboard with Wall Street driven wars, genetically modified “frankenfoods,” fracking— whatever the corporate funders of political campaigns want. Fear mongering and emotional manipulation, demonization of world leaders targeted for regime change, militarization of the police, and blanket domestic surveillance are sold to a the American public as necessary to keep us safe. The lies have become grotesquely Orwellian. The mainstream media slavishly reports them as truth, and gullible Americans swallow them whole.

The ongoing New York Times reporting on Ukraine was one of the worst examples of government/media lies in 2014. We are told that Russian aggression is dangerous and has to be contained. But, what is really going on? What happened in Kiev in 2014?

The US, taking advantage of local unrest in Ukraine, fanned the flames, funded local Neo Nazi thugs, supplied U.S. mercenaries, and instigated a violent coup in Kiev. The U.S. was behind the overturning a democratically elected government and the installation of a US backed puppet regime. The U.S. was and continues to be the aggressor in Ukraine. The rest of the world knows this but clueless Americans, watching the lies on the evening news, believe Vladimir Putin has horns and is on a rampage to take over the world—the United States and NATO being the only forces willing to step up and hold back the evil Russian hoards.

What are the real reasons the U.S. is involved in Ukraine?

Plain and simple: the powers that be in this country want to stop Russian economic integration and partnership with Europe and Asia. As always, American foreign policy is about money and power—and only about money and power. It’s about government paving the way for bank and corporate exploitation. It’s about oil and gas pipelines, and the control the world and its resources. It’s about the U.S. insisting on a unipolar world where it is the sole superpower. Any country that doesn’t submit to its hegemony is destroyed as were Iraq and Libya.

The Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine, horrified at the Nazi infested regime installed by the U.S., showed their objection by taking over local police stations and arming themselves. The government of Kiev, under the guidance and direction of CIA director John Brennan, (who instructed them to start calling the separatists “terrorists”) marched across the country and attacked them with heavy armor and tanks. (Note: The so-called “Russian-backed separatists” did not march across Ukraine to attack Kiev.)

People suffer and die for the enrichment of U.S. banks and corporations. The stomach turning aspect of American foreign policy can be found in the photos accompanying this post.

The U.S. caused suffering in Eastern Ukraine

The Associated Press reports that as of December 15, 2014, the UN confirmed death toll in Eastern Ukraine is 4,707. These are ordinary human beings—men, women and children of Eastern Ukraine—who died in the past year, because of a U.S.-backed coup and civil war. An additional 10,322 people have been wounded. More than 5 million are facing increasing hardships as winter sets in. The most vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, children and people in state institutional care, are being affected by disruptions in social and medical services.

On December 22, 2014, The Guardian reported that according to the UN high commissioner for refugees, 514,000 people have been internally displaced in Eastern Ukraine since the fighting began. Of those, 233,000 have sought permanent refuge in Russia and smaller numbers in Poland and Belarus.

As far as I’m concerned, the blood and human suffering in Ukraine are on the hands of Barack Obama, Victoria (“fuck the EU”) Nuland and her fellow neocons in the State Department, CIA director John Brennan, as well as John McCain, who was in Kiev encouraging violence in the run up to the the coup. Blood is also on the hands of executives at Monsanto and other corporate CEOs who are salivating at the chance to profit from the resources of Ukraine, and on Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, who was given a lucrative job on the board of a Ukrainian gas company days after the coup. Blood is also on the hands of the IMF and its soul-killing, bank-friendly austerity measures implemented immediately by the U.S. backed regime.

The level of corruption in the United States is sociopathic and the willingness of those in power to kill people for corporate profit is sickening. The fact that those in government lie, routinely, to the American people to hide the true motives for war is despicable.

It was unhooking myself from mainstream media, and seeking out writers and journalists whose progressive, humanitarian values I share, that helped me see the United States more clearly. The mainstream media is a powerful force for keeping people ignorant and uninformed. But there is more going with the American people than being bamboozled by propaganda.

We like being top dog and don’t want to give it up

The most disturbing aspect of Americans, particularly of liberal Democrats, is the acceptance of US militarism as necessary for economic survival and for “safety.” Many liberals, even those who call themselves progressives, are exceedingly comfortable with the United States being top dog in the world. Even when presented with massive evidence to the contrary, most Americans cling to a fantasy of the United States as a force for good, battling against the forces of evil, always defined for them, of course, by the government and its corporate media.

Contrary to popular opinion, The U.S. is not innocent

Journalistic malpractice is a huge problem in the United States, but so is this pervasive American belief in the myth of American innocence. It keeps Americans infantile, clueless and uninformed. The ability of the government and corporate media to manipulate is made easier because the American people are so easy to manipulate. Karl Rove built his career on the gullibility of naive Americans,

At this time, at the beginning of 2015, when it comes to foreign policy, I do not trust the New York Times, or any other major US newspaper, and I consider TV news, with a few exceptions, to be basically worthless as a source of credible information. Is mainstream media overwhelmingly bad? Of course, within the vast corporate owned universe, there are many writers who communicate and report with compassion and integrity. But, I will continue to look outside the mainstream media for my understanding of the United States and the powers that control it. Even if you don’t want to give up mainstream media, I encourage you to do the same.

From a dangerous unipolar world to a peaceful multipolar world

Despite this bleak picture, I am optimistic that in the next decade the world will stand up to the United States, will reject the dollar as reserve currency, and thus curtail our bank and corporate owned government’s ability to bully the world. As I write, Russia, China, and the BRICS nations are deliberately undermining U.S. dominance by forging trade agreements to be settled outside the dollar. The president of France, in the last few days, spoke out against U.S, sanctions against Russia. These are good things, and signs that the U.S. Empire is in decline.

My hope is that we will move from a unipolar world to a multi-polar one dedicated to a peaceful, mutually beneficial coexistence, in which countries opt for fair trade rather than war, and where income and resources are shared in a more balanced way.

I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world. . . .  What is even more important is that the model itself is flawed because at its basis there is, and can be, no moral foundations for modern civilisation.

—Vladimir Putin, speech at Munich Conference on Security Policy, February 12. 2007

The post 2014, the year I cut my cable and cancelled the NYT appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In his book, The Republican Brain, Chris Mooney describes how there are certain types of issues in which Democrats mimic the illogical positions of most Republicans. He cites examples such as the Keystone Pipeline and fracking for natural gas. Both of these involve considerable data analysis. Sometimes Democrats distance themselves from the data because it is so complicated. Thereupon, they let their emotions guide their views, and in these cases like Keystone and fracking, they tend to favor what is perceived as preserving the environment.

It’s possible that another one of these issues is the NSA data collection, which was brought to our attention by Edward Snowden. The legality of what he did may never be determined, because to date he has not come back to the United States. The morality of what he did is certainly up for discussion.

But support for the legality of what the NSA is doing, as opposed to what Snowden did, got a boost on Friday, December 27, 2013. As CNN reported:

(CNN) — The National Security Agency notched a much-needed win in court, after a series of setbacks over the legality and even the usefulness of its massive data collection program.

A federal judge in New York ruled Friday that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of data on nearly every phone call made in the United States is legal.

The ruling contrasts with another ruling last week by a federal judge in Washington, who called the same program “almost Orwellian” and likely unconstitutional.

I certainly don’t envy the judges who have rendered these decisions, as well as those on the Supreme Court who will ultimately decide the constitutionality (or their political preferences) regarding data that the NSA collects, and what the NSA does with it.

Progressives have generally lined up with the ACLU in wanting to curtail the extent of the data collection by the NSA. The arguments in favor of their position are both considerable and valid. The primary one is the right to privacy. While the word privacy does not occur even once in the Constitution, courts have historically recognized it as a legitimate right. Virtually all judgments in favor of privacy are based on the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It is not much of a stretch to extrapolate from here that electronic eavesdropping should require a warrant based on probable cause that some illegality was occurring. The right to privacy is not a luxury for a special class of people; it is a fundamental right for all of us.

We are left with the ongoing dilemma of what is more important: the right to privacy or the right to security. Neither is absolute, so we’re left to find a consensus between the two. It is presumptuous for any of us to say that we know with certainty where that line should be drawn.

I am certainly glad that Snowden provided us with a much more clear knowledge of what the NSA is actually doing. I’m also glad that a set of judges, rather than Congress, is going to set some guidelines as to how far the NSA can go. When they rule, it will not be the end of the discussion, but at least we’ll have rules that are much more reasonable than in the pre-Snowden era. Numerous questions will still remain, but hopefully we’ll be better prepared to try to answer them.

The post NSA data collection raises more questions than answers appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Edward Snowden is back in the news with a story that the government may be considering offering him amnesty in exchange for return of the remaining estimated 1.5 million classified NSA documents in his possession. In the months since Snowden first leaked documents to the press, I’ve found myself engaged in conversations discussing issues I usually don’t talk about with friends and family—issues like privacy, security, and the fundamental relationship between the individual and government.

Those conversations often begin with questions of how concerned each of us should be about government intrusion into our emails, cell-phone records, and private lives as law-abiding citizens who pose no threat to the state or to our neighbors.  Those conversations often grapple as well with the future: how technological innovation could intrude ever more deeply into our privacy and whether history will judge Edward Snowden as hero or traitor for revealing the abuses and dangers inherent in new technologies.

What intrigues me most in those conversations is the hero/traitor discussion. The more I think about it, the less important figuring out how to label Mr. Snowden becomes. I realize two things: first, that the fact that Mr. Snowden sparked a national debate about privacy and security is reason enough to thank him. And second, that Snowden, and how we think about him and others who put themselves at risk to bring to our attention abuse and misuse of power, should encourage us to look more closely at our beliefs and assumptions about heroism.

When thinking about this, it’s inevitable that there are more questions than answers. Questions like who is a hero? What acts rise to the heroic? What is the relationship between heroism and the situation out of which it arises? Can acts of heroism be heroic in what they achieve but traitorous in the means employed? Is it ethical or unethical to exploit the idea of heroism to achieve certain outcomes?

Let’s look at what the dictionary tells us about heroes and heroism. The definition includes courage in the face of danger and actions that put the hero in danger or risk of bodily or other harm.

The definition couldn’t be clearer.  But clarity on paper is one thing. Real life is quite another. What are our commonly held concepts of heroism beyond the page? Without question, we recognize the heroic when the act of heroism is physical: firefighters and cops rushing into a burning building or climbing the stairs of a doomed skyscraper. Spectators rushing to aid victims of a bombing when it’s unclear if there are more explosions to come.  Good Samaritans jumping into raging floodwaters to save strangers caught in the deluge or jumping down next to electrified subway tracks to pull a person to safety and away from an oncoming train. Teachers shielding the bodies of their young charges from a madman’s bullets.

In these situations we rarely discuss or question the heroes’ motives beyond the impulse to aid, to give comfort, to save a life. We focus solely on the outcome of the hero’s act.  But ambiguity rears its head when the hero acts to achieve an outcome that is more abstract—as Snowden did—like protecting privacy or exposing the abuse of power.

Even in combat heroism is not without its ambiguities.  We label unreservedly as heroes those who are physically damaged. Their wounds—the missing limbs, disfigured faces, charred skin, scars from bullet holes—are worn like garments that become the physical manifestation of their heroic acts. Unfortunately, those who are psychologically damaged in combat do not fare as well.

Once upon a time the bar was set so high for the heroic that few could reach it. To be a hero was to be truly extraordinary.  It meant taking risks and actions almost beyond imagination. Today the jingoistic language of our elected officials—from commander-in-chief on down—commonly equates the choice to become an armed combatant with heroism itself.

The concept of heroism has been altered even more radically since the advent of all-day, all-night, all-media, everywhere-you-look-listen-or-read marketing. The shift is perceptual and semantic in nature. The hero and the heroic have been stretched and twisted into nearly unrecognizable shapes to fit into a package of marketing tools. Word devaluation is the most accurate way to describe what’s happened.  Just look at how the word is casually thrown around.  Television recruitment ads for the armed forces sell the promise of heroism for all. Bumper stickers extol those in uniform as “our heroes.”

It’s beyond question that young men and women who choose to devote a time of out of their lives and risk their health and lives for us deserve our admiration and gratitude.  But to label every one of them as heroes, regardless of their duties and the way in which they carry out those duties, is to diminish the heroism of the true hero. What we have today is hero-lite.

Something more insidious is going on as well. Call it spin or propaganda, whichever you choose. But heroism is not just about the person and the act. Calling something heroic bestows upon the act the seal of approval and justification.  We assume that if an act is labeled heroic then the cause for which the act was taken must also be just.   If every soldier, sailor, and pilot is a hero then the fight itself must necessarily be just.

No commander nor politician will ever admit that the lives of Americans lost in service to their country were sacrificed for naught. To admit that is to break a solemn trust with the families of those who have died. It is to admit as a society that we asked those men and women to defend us in a false cause. If the men and women of our military are all heroes, as our politicians and the advertising world tell us, then how can we question the justness of the wars they are engaged in? These brave individuals cannot be heroes for nothing. And so goes the self-reinforcing circle of logic.

But let’s return to Edward Snowden. It’s revealing that a majority of Americans recognize the ambiguities in judging Snowden’s actions.  In one poll, 46 percent said they didn’t know if Snowden should be called a traitor or a patriot. In another, 23 percent labeled Snowden a traitor, and 31 percent labeled him a patriot.

And what about Snowden himself? After fleeing the U.S., Snowden granted an interview to the South China Morning Post in which he articulated his view of the path he’s followed. Snowden chose his words carefully: “I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.”

After much thought, I understand exactly what he means.

The post NSA leaker Snowden and the debatable definition of “heroism” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Alfred McCoy over at TomDispatch.com has taken the time to provide us with a brief, sordid history of the U.S. surveillance state and proven, to me at least, that there is still much to learn about where we are and how we got here. I was surprised, for example, to discover that the path to an Orwellian future began in the late 19th century with our presence in the Philippines.

McCoy writes (and elaborates later in the piece):

In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a colonial land. The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I.  A half-century later, as protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the foundations of that old security structure, launched large-scale illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar activists, while President Richard Nixon’s White House created its own surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies.

Perhaps the most damaging [domestically speaking] interference via illegal government surveillance took place during the civil rights movement and amidst heavy war opposition.

In response to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, the FBI deployed its COINTELPRO operation, using what Senator Frank Church’s famous investigative committee later called “unsavory and vicious tactics… including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

In assessing COINTELPRO’s 2,370 actions from 1960 to 1974, the Church Committee branded them a “sophisticated vigilante operation” that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity.” Significantly, even this aggressive Senate investigation did not probe Director Hoover’s notorious “private files” on the peccadilloes of leading politicians that had insulated his Bureau from any oversight for more than 30 years.

After New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh exposed illegal CIA surveillance of American antiwar activists in 1974, Senator Church’s committee and a presidential commission under Nelson Rockefeller investigated the Agency’s “Operation Chaos,” a program to conduct massive illegal surveillance of the antiwar protest movement, discovering a database with 300,000 names.  These investigations also exposed the excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, forcing the Bureau to reform.

To prevent future abuses, President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, creating a special court to approve all national security wiretaps.  In a bitter irony, Carter’s supposed reform ended up plunging the judiciary into the secret world of the surveillance managers where, after 9/11, it became a rubberstamp institution for every kind of state intrusion on domestic privacy.

It’s not all bleak. It turns out that Republicans of the early 20th century were actually a force of opposition to government sponsored violations of privacy.

In the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against secret surveillance.  Republican privacy advocates abolished much of President Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during the 1920s, and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the 1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon’s illegal domestic wiretapping.

The two leading parties have, at times, agreed that unchecked government surveillance is a danger to all and took steps to prevent the massive levels of information gathering that we have today. For all the good it did, right? Unfortunately, public consent is a pretty large part of this history lesson. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have participated (and still do), perhaps misguidedly, in the surveilling of anti-war protesters, dissidents, and suspected terrorists. In the 20th century, remember, it was suspected communists and/or spies.

Just one example, as follows:

After the U.S. entered World War I in 1917 without an intelligence service of any sort, Colonel Van Deman brought his Philippine experience to bear, creating the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) and so laying the institutional foundations for a future internal security state.

In collaboration with the FBI, he also expanded the MID’s reach through a civilian auxiliary organization, the American Protective League, whose 350,000 citizen-operatives amassed more than a million pages of surveillance reports on German-Americans in just 14 months, arguably the world’s most intensive feat of domestic surveillance ever.

This brief history is at turns horrifying and breathtaking. It seems to me the missing ingredient is a massive popular uprising against such illegal violations of our amendment and human rights. Much of what we have seen these past decades is apathy, as Mark Twain predicted.

During the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined history of twentieth-century America.  In it, he predicted that a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American] Republic,” because  “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”

It’s true, sadly. Under President Obama, we have seen an unprecedented and largely unopposed prosecution of whistleblowers using the Espionage Act. There have been seven prosecutions thus far under Obama, preceded by only three since the law’s 1917 origins. As Linda Greene wrote back in 2011, proving once again the utter disconnect between what the president says to us and what he and those he appointed actually do:

When campaigning in 2008, Obama promised to protect whistleblowers, saying their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled,” ABC News’ Megan Chuchmach and Rhonda Schwartz reported on Aug. 4, 2009.

Regrettably, Campaign Obama is not around to protect the likes of Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning from either the media persecution or from government prosecution. It is difficult for an uniformed public to protest something they are unaware of, such as the NSA’s PRISM program. But it seems to me that when we allow the imprisonment and prosecution of those whistleblowers who seek to inform and empower us, we are granting the government permission to carry on with illegal acts of surveillance against us.

The people’s unspoken permission also sets the stage for our own possible imprisonment. When everything you say or do is subject to secret recordings and filed away in vast government-owned digital storage facilities, anything you have said or done can be used against you by a government with a history of “unsavory and vicious tactics… including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

At the very least, the mere possibility of such is an effective tool of suppression and submission, perhaps most starkly proven by how easy it was for the NSA to obtain near-total corporate complicity in illegal information gathering. And as McCoy’s history lesson teaches us, this is not just an American fear. U.S. surveillance is of global concern; it is a much-used weapon in our war chest, as it is with some foreign governments.

Perhaps it is time to learn from our history, both distant and recent past, and act upon what we learn…in large, unimpeachable bipartisan numbers.

The post A brief history of the U.S. surveillance state appeared first on Occasional Planet.

On Tuesday, July 16, at an event in Atlanta, ex-president Jimmy Carter made his blockbuster statement referring to, among other issues, the mass surveillance of U.S. citizens. The event was sponsored by a German organization devoted to building German American relations. Der Spiegel and the International Business Times reported on Carter’s comments. His comments have yet to appear in American mainstream media.

This is not the first time ex-president Carter has expressed deep concern about the direction the country is headed.

In a 2012 New York Times op-ed, Carter criticized the Obama administration and Democratic and Republican legislators for abandoning the role of the United States as the global champion of human rights. He chastised a complacent public for allowing that to happen.

Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.. . .

In addition to American citizens’ being targeted for assassination or indefinite detention, recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications.

In June of this year, Carter expressed his opinion about the newly revealed NSA surveillance scandal and Edward Snowden. Speaking to CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux, he said:

I think the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far, and I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive. . . Bringing it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.

He added that although Snowden violated US law, by bringing the issue to light, he may have ultimately done good for the country.

A few days ago, at the meeting in Atlanta, Carter cited the excessive influence of money in U.S, election campaigns and confusing election rules as playing key roles in the destruction of our democracy. The ex-president, who through his “Carter Center,” monitors elections worldwide, doubts the United States meets the Center’s standards for fair elections.

I only hope it begins to sink in among the general public that we have exchanged whatever fragile democracy we once had for a bi-partisan, secret military surveillance state whose main purpose is to protect and promote the interests of banks and multinational corporations at home and abroad. Perhaps an ex-president, a Democrat, will shake us out of our complacency.

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Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSA’s surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans’ and foreign citizens’ privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we’re trying to protect. —Daniel Ellsberg, Guardian 6/10/13

Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago. —Daniel Ellsberg, Washington Post, 7/7/13

Long time contractor for the CIA and the NSA, Edward Snowden, became increasingly troubled by the domestic and international surveillance  activities of the US government under the Bush and Obama administrations. He told the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, that the NSA was intent “on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them.”

He made the decision to leak the NSA’s massive surveillance of U.S. citizens (and others around the world) to the press because he knew that whistle blowing within official channels would be futile. When previous whistleblowers, like high-ranking NSA executive Thomas Drake, used official channels to complain about government wrongdoing, they were ignored or demonized by superiors. When they eventually went to the press they were tried under the Espionage Act. Like Daniel Ellsberg before him, who Henry Kissinger called “the world’s most dangerous man” he knew the Obama administration would demonize him and label him a traitor. He knew President Obama had, six times since he took office, charged whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, and that if he went forward, he would become the seventh.

Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

In 1971, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press. Like Edward Snowden, he was charged under the Espionage Act for copying and leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press. His trial was dismissed in 1973 after evidence of government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, was introduced in court. In 2007, in an interview with Democracy Now, Ellsberg said the documents he leaked “demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates” He leaked the Papers to end what he perceived to be “a wrongful war”. Writing in the Guardian, in a piece titled “Edward Snowden: Saving us from the United Stasi of America,” Ellsberg, in condemnation of the Obama administration’s policies and actions, says “Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us a chance to roll back what is tantamount to an ‘executive coup’ against the US constitution. “ Strong words, indeed.

One of main complaints leveled at Snowden is that he did not stay and face arrest in the United States as Ellsberg had done in 1971, but as Ellsberg explains, these are different times. After the New York Times was enjoined from publishing the Pentagon Papers, he went underground for 13 days to elude authorities while he approached other newspapers to publish the material. When he finally surrendered to arrest, he was released on a personal recognizance bond the same day. For the whole two years he was under indictment, he was free to speak to the media, to speak at anti-war rallies, and to give public lectures. In a recent op ed in the Washington Post Ellsberg  fully endorses Edward Snowden actions and defends his decision to flee the United States.

There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era—and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment—but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to “incapacitate me totally”).

I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.” (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)

The Obama administration’s “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of whistleblowers is designed to deter others from doing the same. Obama’s attempt to make a journalist a co-conspirator in a leak case, and his ordering of the widespread surveillance of the cellphones of AP journalists, is designed to have a chilling effect on reporting what the government is doing, with the help of private contractors, in secret. Ellsberg believes Snowden has done nothing wrong and that such leaks are the “lifeblood” of a free press. They are essential for democracy to survive. He hopes Snowden

. . .finds a haven, as safe as possible from kidnapping or assassination by U.S. Special Operations forces, preferably where he can speak freely.

It is painful, and frightening, to write Ellsberg’s matter-of-fact comment. That a man with Ellsberg’s integrity feels the Obama administration could be trying to silence whistleblower Edward Snowden by kidnapping or killing him should send a chill down the spines of every U.S. citizen. That the Obama administration has openly lied to Congress should send up additional warning flags that the constitution is being violated.

Most journalists today are in a sycophantic relationship with government. The David Gregorys and Wolf Blitzers of the world function as stenographers to power. The true purpose of journalism is to be in opposition to the government, to hold it accountable to the people it is supposed to be serving. Leaks and whistleblowers are essential in a democracy to keep government in check. A government that operates in secrecy is not a democratic government. Ellsberg, in his full throated endorsement of Edward Snowden, reminds us that “secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts.”

d States will be.

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I wasn’t much interested in all of the hullabaloo about the government spying on our phone calls, emails, etc., until I read this article about how the definition of “eco terrorist” is being stretched to include peaceful protests. If a “tree hugger” or “tree sitter” is a terrorist, then those of us who are members of any environmental or conservation group might also be labeled terrorists, too. I know there have been some people who have gone to extremes, like destroying the property of a company doing business that harms the environment or that tortures animals, and maybe those illegal acts can be stretched to fit the definition of “terrorism.” But even that is a stretch.

If all the protesters along the route of the Keystone pipeline are arrested, charged, convicted and jailed, what do we do?  I’m thinking of those civil rights activists in the 50’s and 60’s who just kept filling in the places of the ones arrested, until the police didn’t have any more jail space. Do we have to do that?  And would we?

And what about those of us who write articles and letters to newspapers criticizing the polluters? Are we a “danger” to the security of our nation? This past Tuesday evening, several dozen citizens spoke at a public hearing in Union, Mo., testifying under oath and for the record that we don’t trust Ameren Missouri to build a coal ash landfill in the Missouri River floodplain at Labadie. Some of us even hinted that Ameren bribes the decision makers with campaign contributions and by wining and dining them at parties when the American Legislative Exchange Council meets at fancy resorts. Since Ameren provides an essential product and service, does that make us subversive? Our faces are now in the video record, and our testimony transcribed by a court reporter. It would be incredibly easy for someone who wanted to intimidate us to find out where we live, get into our electronic devices, and do some real damage.

If this seems far-fetched, read in this DeSmog Blog article about the protesters outside a meeting of ALEC  in Phoenix in 2012. I happen to know some of the folks who were there and protested. They are hardly the dangerous type, since most are middle aged or older and couldn’t do any real harm even if they tried. But that didn’t matter to the powers-that-be.
I’ve been to many protests where we were allowed to walk peacefully up and down a public sidewalk carrying signs. The operative word here is “allowed.”  There are local rules and regulations about protests, rallies, parades, etc., and that’s fine. But how those rules are enforced can change pretty quickly. As long as we are not a real threat to the power structure, the police are told to just keep an eye on us.  But step on some toes, as the Occupy protesters did, and permits are canceled, and off to jail they go.

Like the frog in warm water, we may be getting used to limits on our freedom of assembly and our right to criticize the government or the corporations that actually run the government. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has to think twice about speaking out and ask myself how much I am willing to risk. I had a poster in the 70’s that said, “Just because you’re paranoid, don’t think they’re not out to get you.”  Where is the line between fear/paranoia and the need to be really careful?  I don’t know.

If you go to the website of the Labadie Environmental Organization, you can see a photo of the Labadie bottoms and the Ameren plant sitting right there next to the river. For now, no one has been charged as an “eco terrorist” for posting that photo or for taking interested citizens on tours around the area on public roads. At least not yet.

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) felt compelled to comment on Obama’s May 30 announcement of his choice of James Comey to head the FBI:

While the ACLU does not take official positions on nominations to appointed office, there are many questions regarding Comey’s record that deserve careful scrutiny from the Senate Judiciary Committee. As the second-highest ranked Justice Department official under John Ashcroft, Comey approved some of the worst abuses committed by the Bush administration. Specifically, the publicly available evidence indicates Comey signed off on enhanced interrogation techniques that constitute torture, including waterboarding. He also oversaw the indefinite detention without charge or trial of an American citizen picked up in the United States and then held for years in a military brig. . . .

Most relevant to today’s events, Comey authorized Bush’s illegal NSA warrantless eavesdropping program. Comey is a registered Republican who donated to McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. Glenn Greenwald comments on Comey’s nomination with respect to the NSA spying issue:

How are Obama’s most devoted media loyalists reacting to the news that he is about to put in charge of the FBI the Bush lawyer who authorized the illegal NSA warrantless eavesdropping program based on warped right-wing legal theories? Exactly as you would expect. Here’s one of them [Josh Marshall of TPM]—who wrote post after post after post in 2006 and 2007 vehemently denouncing the NSA program which Comey authorized and the theories on which it was based—hailing Comey as “not only non partisan in [his] job but consistently put constitutional equities at center [of his] thinking”.

It is true that Comey was at the center of a dramatic Bush-era political controversy that earned him praise from many Bush critics, including me. Comey was one of the Bush DOJ lawyers who, along with Ashcroft, Goldsmith, and FBI Director Robert Mueller, had threatened to resign if Bush did not modify the NSA program in order to make it legal in Comey’s eyes. He then went to the hospital where Ashcroft was quite ill to prevent then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and then-White House chief of staff Andy Card from bullying the infirm and barely cogent Attorney General into signing off on the legality of the NSA program. In other words, there was something the NSA was doing for years that we still don’t know—even more extreme than the illegal NSA program revealed by the NYT in 2005. It was Comey, along with Ashcroft, Mueller, and Goldsmith, who threatened to resign if it did not stop, and they deserve credit for that.

But the reason they didn’t end up resigning was because Bush officials “modified” that NSA program into something those lawyers could and did endorse: the still-illegal, still-radical NSA eavesdropping program that spied on the communications of Americans without warrants and in violation of the law. And this was accomplished by inventing a new legal theory to accompany the old one: that Congress, when it enacted the 2001 AUMF, silently and “implicitly” authorized Bush to eavesdrop in exactly the ways the law expressly forbade.

Thus, it was Comey who gave his legal approval to enable that NSA eavesdropping program to spy on Americans without warrants: the same program that produced so much outrage and scandal when revealed by the NYT.

How can any progressive who spent the Bush years vehemently denouncing that domestic spying program as the symbol of Bush radicalism and lawlessness now cheer when the lawyer who approved it is about to be put in charge of the FBI?

Since his election in 2008, Obama has worked to normalize the radical policies of the Bush administration. Obama’s legacy will be that he not only continued, but dramatically expanded Bush’s spying on U.S. citizens. Given the recent revelation, by whistleblower Edward Snowden, of the extent of Obama’s NSA dragnet, his nomination of the man who enabled the NSA to spy on us under Bush makes perfect sense.

But wait, there’s more . . .

Stephen Lendmen, at Global Research, provides us with an annotated resume for James Comey:

From 2005 to 2010, Comey was Lockheed Martin general counsel. It’s the world’s largest weapons maker. It’s the largest war profiteer. It benefits from death and destruction. Comey provided legal cover to do it.

In 2010, he became Bridgewater Associates general counsel. Its web site says it “manages approximately $150 billion in global investments for a wide array of institutional clients, including foreign governments and central banks, corporate and public pension funds, university endowments and charitable foundations.” In 2010 and 2011, it “ranked as the largest and best-performing hedge fund manager in the world, and in both 2012 and 2013 Bridgewater was recognized for having earned its clients more than any other hedge fund in the history of the industry.”

Comey is also a London-based HSBC Holdings board member. HSBC a giant banking and financial services firm. It makes money the old-fashioned way. It steals it. It commits fraud and grand theft multiple ways.

In 2012, [HSBC] paid the largest ever bank-imposed penalty. It settled money-laundering charges for $1.9 billion.

[HSBC] worked with Mexican drug cartels and other crime bosses. Officials involved weren’t prosecuted. They operate freely. They prioritize grand theft. So do other major banks. Government officials permit it. They’re partners in crime.

As general counsel and board member, Comey was intimately involved. Culpability doesn’t matter. It’s true throughout Washington. Rogue officials infest the nation’s capital. Their records speak for themselves.

Democrats praised Comey’s selection. Given their own reprehensible practices, it’s no surprise. His Republican and tainted business credentials don’t matter. He represents corporate empowerment and imperial America. That’s all that counts.

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