With winter coming, I love to go out when it snows and the air is so peaceful.  I even like to shovel snow at night when it is a quiet time with few people outside and few cars.  But in other places in the world there is no peace. People hear drones moving across the sky.  There are American troops banging on their doors.  There are battles raging still in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The war on terror continues endlessly. Since 2001 there have already been over 100,000 people killed; some terrorists, some soldiers, some civilians.

What we have done so far has not stopped the terror.  We need to remove all our forces from Afghanistan and Iraq. We need to not be doing anything in other countries that makes more people hate us. Too much money is being used to continue this endless war. Too much money is being used for military endeavors. I think it would be better to find the root causes of conflict and find non-violent ways to create conditions to defuse the hostility.

There are now bills in Congress to repeal the authorization for use of military forces, H.R. 2324  and H.R. 198. We need to support these bills. Since US citizens are war weary, this is the time to influence our Congresspeople. Then we need to turn to the UN Security Council to respond to global threats multilaterally.

[Reprinted, by permission of the author, from WILPF November 2013 newsletter]

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If you’re like me, you haven’t quite figured out what to think about the revelation that the National Security Administration has been amassing a huge database of our phone and internet contacts for more than seven years. Of course, it sounds bad. Really bad. Orwell bad. I’m even afraid that I share some concerns with people on the right—and that’s frightening. But before I knee-jerk react and espouse uninformed opinions, I’d like to hear the answers to some big questions about the program known as Prism. So, I was glad to see that one of my favorite news sources—ProPublica—is asking precisely the big  questions that need answering. Here’s ProPublica’s list, with some of the answers—and further questions—they’ve found so far. Bottom line: We don’t know very much about any of it, and so far, nobody’s talking.

Has the NSA been collecting all Americans’ phone records, and for how long?

It’s not entirely clear.

According to The Guardian, there’s a court order directing a Verizon subsidiary to turn over phone “metadata” for a three-month period. There’s also evidence that the program covers AT&T and Sprint.

How long has the dragnet has existed? At least seven years, and maybe going back to 2001.

What surveillance powers does the government believe it has under the Patriot Act?

That’s classified.

The Verizon court order relies on Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That provision allows the FBI to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a secret order requiring companies, like Verizon, to produce records – “any tangible things” – as part of a “foreign intelligence” or terrorism investigation. As with any law, exactly what the wording means is a matter for courts to decide. But the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s interpretation of Section 215 is secret.

…it appears that the court is allowing a broad interpretation of the Patriot Act. But we still don’t know the specifics.

Has the NSA’s massive collection of metadata thwarted any terrorist attacks?

It depends which senator you ask. And evidence that would help settle the matter is, yes, classified.

How much information, and from whom, is the government sweeping up through Prism?

It’s not clear.

Intelligence director Clapper said in his declassified description that the government can’t get information using Prism unless there is an “appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation) and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States.”

One thing we don’t know is how the government determines who is a “foreign target.” The Washington Post reported that NSA analysts use “search terms” to try to achieve “51 percent confidence” in a target’s “foreignness.” How do they do that? Unclear.

We’ve also never seen a court order related to Prism — they are secret — so we don’t know how broad they are. The Post reported that the court orders can be sweeping, and apply for up to a year. Though Google has maintained it has not “received blanket orders of the kind being discussed in the media.”

So, how does Prism work?

In his statement Saturday, Clapper described Prism as a computer system that allows the government to collect “foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.”

That much seems clear. But the exact role of the tech companies is still murky.

Relying on a leaked PowerPoint presentation, the Washington Post originally described Prism as an FBI and NSA program to tap “directly into the central servers” of nine tech companies including Google and Facebook. Some of the companies denied giving the government “direct access” to their servers. In a later story, published Saturday, the newspaper cited unnamed intelligence sources saying that the description from the PowerPoint was technically inaccurate.

The Post quotes a classified NSA report saying that Prism allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” not the company servers themselves. So what does any of that mean? We don’t know.

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I’m writing this on Sept. 8, as the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 tragedies looms large.  The media loves this.  It’s a chance to re-visit what happened, interview survivors, dig out photos, and talk about heroes.  For the rest of us, it’s a chance to remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard about the attacks, educate our children about that recent page in our history book, and attend commemorative services.

For my part, I’m doing none of the above.  I’m going to spend the day thinking.  Thinking about our newest national obsession, the “war on terror.”  I think terror may be winning.

It’s astonishing to think about what our response to these attacks has cost our county.  We have launched two wars (unfunded) in parts of the world where history would tell us we have little chance of success.  We’ve lost thousands of brave men and women and we’ve spent billions of dollars with little to show for the expenditure.  Few Americans are able to articulate just what it is that we are fighting for.

Some of us have launched a full-scale public relations battle against Islam, a religion that includes peace and justice among its tenets.  It’s been a great victory for bigotry and religious intolerance.  (What do you think would have happened if the attackers had been Presbyterians or Methodists?)

The aftermath of Sept. 11 has caused the world economy to shudder and the U. S. economy to endure a seemingly-endless recession.  It’s hard to sell a house but it’s awfully easy to lose a job.  We have more people visiting food pantries and fewer people with health insurance.

We have a burgeoning Department of Homeland Security that pretends we are safer because we have a fence separating us from Mexico, but still hasn’t figured out how to check the massive shipments of cargo that come into our ports every day.

Our political discourse has deteriorated to new lows.  Everybody is afraid of something (anthrax?  wire-tapping?  trials of Guantanamo Base prisoners on U. S. soil?  gun-toting “patriots”?)

During the past decade we have watched our civil liberties erode in the name of safety, and we have shrugged.  We have taken off our shoes in order to board airplanes, and we have pretended that makes us safer.

The late Helen Keller, in her book “Let Us Have Faith,” wrote:  “Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.  Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.  To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”

I think I’ll think about this on Sept. 11.

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Like most of us, I’ve been reading responses to the killing of Osama Bin Laden by order of President Obama to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the black ops forces that ultimately took his life. I found the following four comments especially compelling and thought-provoking. Below are excerpts, but, if you have time, I encourage reading the entire post using the links provided:

From From Chris Hedges, former New York Times correspondent, and fluent Arabic speaker, who has reported, extensively, on al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden. He is a regular contributor on Truthdig:

So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. And we had major religious figures like Sheikh Tantawi, the head of al-Azhar—who died recently—who after the attacks of 9/11 not only denounced them as a crime against humanity, which they were, but denounced Osama bin Laden as a fraud, someone who had no right to issue fatwas or religious edicts, no religious legitimacy, no religious training. And the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are.

We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence. What were the explosions that hit the World Trade Center, huge explosions and death above a city skyline? It was straight out of Hollywood. When Robert McNamara in 1965 began the massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam, he did it because he said he wanted to “send a message” to the North Vietnamese—a message that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.

These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of occupation—the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the brute and brutal force of empire.

From Glenn Greenwald, lawyer, author and columnist for Salon magazine:

But beyond the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice, there are two points worth considering. The first is the question of what, if anything, is going to change as a result of the two bullets in Osama bin Laden’s head? Are we going to fight fewer wars or end the ones we’ve started? Are we going to see a restoration of some of the civil liberties, which have been eroded at the altar of this scary Villain Mastermind? Is the War on Terror over? Are we Safer now?

Those are rhetorical questions. None of those things will happen. If anything, I can much more easily envision the reverse. Whenever America uses violence in a way that makes its citizens cheer, beam with nationalistic pride, and rally around their leader, more violence is typically guaranteed. Futile decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may temporarily dampen the nationalistic enthusiasm for war, but two shots to the head of Osama bin Laden — and the We are Great and Good proclamations it engenders — can easily rejuvenate that war love. One can already detect the stench of that in how Pakistan is being talked about: did they harbor bin Laden as it seems and, if so, what price should they pay? We’re feeling good and strong about ourselves again — and righteous — and that’s often the fertile ground for more, not less, aggression.

From Matthew Hoh, ex-State Department official, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and the director of the “Afghanistan Study Group. Hoh has served with the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq and on U.S. embassy teams in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He is interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

What I think this means for the United States is, this gives closure on 9/11. Ten years after that horrible event, we finally have some degree of closure. We’ve the bogeyman, if you will, who caused all this. So, I think this gives the American public closure on 9/11. And what that—what I hope that translates into is provides some backbone for members of Congress who do not want to engage on the war in Afghanistan. I think everybody should be asking themselves today in the United States, if Osama bin Laden was hiding in an upscale villa an hour or two drive north, northeast of Islamabad, then why did we put 50,000 troops in Afghanistan over the last two years? I think we have to have a real serious conversation on where our war on terror has taken this country, and I think we need to reflect on the real threat. As Josh just stated, Osama bin Laden was more of a figurehead or a spiritual leader than any kind of operational leader. And if we have—so we need to understand al-Qaeda as they exist, as some form of a syndicate that operates through individuals and small cells worldwide that won’t be affected by putting hundreds of thousands of foreign troops in Afghanistan, but is affected by good intelligence work, good police work, and good work by our Special Operations forces in conjunction with foreign governments. So I think this is a very good time for some real somber and rational reflection on the last 10 years.

From Tom Hayden, author, activist, and contributor to the Nation magazine. Hayden has played an active role in American politics and history for over three decades, beginning with the student, civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. The following excerpt is from the Nation:

If bin Laden is gone, and his network heavily damaged, what is left of the terrorist threat to our national security that justifies so many trillions of dollars and costs in thousands of lives? Because of a fabricated fear of bin Laden, we invaded Iraq. The invasion of Afghanistan was to deny sanctuaries to bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In response, Al Qaeda moved into Pakistan, where bin Laden was killed tonight. So why are the Taliban in Afghanistan a threat to the security of the United States with bin Laden gone? Surely there are terrorist cells with lethal capacity scattered around the world, surely there might be revenge attacks, but there is hardly a centralized conspiratorial threat that justifies the deployment of hundreds of thousands of American troops.

Now we shall learn whether there is another agenda that keeps 150,000 American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

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