Category: Bureaucracy

Yes, Snowden Could have Used Channels to Raise His Concerns ……… Not

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Jeffrey Scudder had his career destroyed by the CIA because he filed Freedom of Information Act Requests to declassify historical documents:

His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files.

 It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations that he concluded were still being stored in secret years after they should have been shared with the public.

 To get them released, Scudder submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act — a step that any citizen can take, but one that is highly unusual for a CIA employee. Four years later, the CIA has released some of those articles and withheld others. It also has forced Scudder out.

 His request set in motion a harrowing sequence. He was confronted by supervisors and accused of mishandling classified information while assembling his FOIA request. His house was raided by the FBI and his family’s computers seized. Stripped of his job and his security clearance, Scudder said he agreed to retire last year after being told that if he refused, he risked losing much of his pension.

What were these documents?

The documents sought by Scudder amount to a catalog of a bygone era of espionage. Among them are articles with the titles “Intelligence Lessons from Pearl Harbor” and “Soviet Television — a New Asset for Kremlin Watchers.”

 Scudder said he discovered them after he took an assignment in 2007 as a project manager for the CIA’s Historical Collections Division, an office set up to comb the agency’s archives for materials — often decades old — that can be released without posing any security risk.

(emphasis mine)

BTW, the CIA has since closed the Historical Collections Division, claiming “budget concerns.”

This is how the US state security apparatus addresses an attempt to hasten the declassification anodyne historical documents.

What do you think would have happened if Edward Snowden had gone further with his complaints?

He would still have had to flee the country for his own safety.

Yes, Blackwater Threatened to Kill a State Department Investigator

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And what’s more, the response of the state department was to expel the investigator from Iraq:

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

 American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.

 After returning to Washington, the chief investigator wrote a scathing report to State Department officials documenting misconduct by Blackwater employees and warning that lax oversight of the company, which had a contract worth more than $1 billion to protect American diplomats, had created “an environment full of liability and negligence.”

(emphasis mine)

This raises the obvious question, just who at the State Department makes a habit of engaging in unnatural acts with sheep, and how did Blackwater get video of them doing this.*

Well, it’s mentioned in passing in the above story that when State investigated this, the investigation was headed by Patrick Kennedy. (Not one of THE Kennedys)

At Foreign Policy, they go into detail on Mr. Kennedy’s repeated roll in this, and similar clusterf%$#s:

Eye-opening new revelations about the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide and its cozy relationship with the State Department are raising new questions about a senior Foggy Bottom bureaucrat who has found himself in Capitol Hill’s crosshairs before — and seems certain to now do so again.

 On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s current under secretary for management, led a review of the private security firm in 2007 after its guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. Kennedy’s review, however, failed to reference a scathing State Department memo on the contractor completed just weeks earlier that found the company had systematically overcharged the government. The memo also alleged a senior Blackwater executive in Baghdad threatened to kill the State Department auditor behind the memo. At the time, Kennedy dismissed questions about early warnings of Blackwater misconduct.

………

 Though the incident is now seven years old, anger remains on Capitol Hill about how the State Department, and in particular, Kennedy, manages relations with government contractors. On Monday, an aide for Senator Claire McCaskill (D-M.O.) noted his boss’s “longstanding frustrations with the failure to improve contract management at the State Department.” He cited an April letter between McCaskill and Kennedy in which she scolds Kennedy for failing to implement recommendations from the Inspector General about the maintenance of contract files dating back seven years.

………

 No one on the panel interviewed Richter, according to the panel’s final report, which includes a list of everyone consulted about the incident. It’s particularly unusual that the panel didn’t talk to Richter given that he specifically visited Iraq to review the State Department’s contract with Blackwater, the firm at the center of the controversy. During a press Q&A on October 23, 2007, then-Time magazine reporter Brian Bennett noted the existence of “complaints about contractor conduct,” and asked “why this review wasn’t done earlier?” In response, Kennedy told reporters that his review found no communications from the embassy in Baghdad complaining about contractor conduct prior to the Nisour Square killings.

It should be noted that a cursory record of Kennedy’s record (his Wiki, for what it’s worth) it appears that Kennedy has had at least one similar incidents previously.

*To be fair, it could also be bribery that is responsible for this behavior, but my money is on a dead hooker in a hotel room in Bayonne, NJ.†
†Actually, it is also possible that this was a product of the cronyism that was rife at the instigation of Rumsfeld and Cheney.‡
‡Or, he could, as a lifelong member of the State Department, he could simply be inculcated in a tradition of CYA and obfuscation, particularly as regards the actions of politically connected ambassadors, but the sheep thing just makes better copy.

Dianne Feinstein* is Right, Both on the Principal, and the Form

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The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is asking the White House, and not the CIA to conduct the declassification review of the Senate torture report:

The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has called for the White House – not the Central Intelligence Agency – to lead the declassification process for the panel’s summary of its massive, scathing report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

In a letter to President Barack Obama, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., challenged both the White House and CIA, which have suggested in recent days that the agency would spearhead the declassification.

“The CIA, in consultation with other agencies, will conduct the declassification review,” Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, said after the Intelligence Committee voted last week to declassify the 481-page executive summary.

Attorney General Eric Holder said the Obama administration wanted a thorough review.

“I agree that as much of the report as possible should be made public, of course allowing for redactions that are necessary to protect national security,” he told the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. “So I was pleased that the committee voted to send portions of the report forward for declassification.”

Holder recalled that Obama “believes that bringing this program into the light will help the American people understand what happened in the past and can help guide us as we move forward so that no administration contemplates such a program in the future.”

In her letter, Feinstein calls for swift action on the summary, findings and conclusions of the report. The summary, she says, should be released quickly and with minimal redactions.

“As this report covers a covert action program under the authority of the president and National Security Council, I respectfully request that the White House take the lead in the declassification process,” the letter reads.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., a member of the Intelligence Committee, said that while only the CIA could declassify, “We’re trying to build up pressure on the White House and the CIA. It’s not just declassify. It’s to do a minimum of redactions.”

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a longtime critic of the CIA’s interrogation methods – widely regarded as torture – said he fully understood Feinstein’s concerns.

“She doesn’t trust the CIA. I think she’s probably right. I don’t trust them either,” he told McClatchy.

“This is the same outfit that destroyed the videos of the interrogations. That’s one of the most outrageous things I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said.

Also note that a target of the investigation, whose name was mentioned more than 1600 times in the Senate report, was the one who supervised CIA “Cooperation” (i.e. hacking into) Senate computers while staffers were reviewing documents.

The CIA is not to be trusted.

What’s more, they don’t have the authority to take lead on declassification, because they did not classify the program in the first place.

That was the White House:

Five years ago, I reported (BREAKING) that the Bush Administration (aka Dick Cheney) made the torture program a Special Access Program in unusual fashion. Rather than CIA Director George Tenet make torture a SAP, as mandated by the Executive Order governing such things, unnamed people in the National Security Council did so.

………
Since that time, I’ve asked experts in classification and they agree that something funky went down (note, too, that torture wasn’t a SAP at the very beginning).
I believe torture’s odd SAP status is one of the things that has implicated the Presidency, which the Obama Administration went to some lengths to cover up.

But it also should dictate the White House take the lead on declassification of the torture program.

Don’t take my word for it — take Dianne Feinstein’s word. In a letter to the White House, she invoked torture’s status as a “covert action program under the authority of the President and National Security Council” to call for the White House to lead declassification.

In a letter to the President dated April 7 and obtained by McClatchy, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., called for swift action on the summary and the findings and conclusions of the report, which members voted last week to declassify. The summary, Feinstein said, should be released “quickly and with minimal redactions.”
“As this report covers a covert action program under the authority of the President and National Security Council, I respectfully request that the White House take the lead in the declassification process,” the letter reads.


Note, Dianne Feinstein has just formally confirmed the same detail the Obama Administration appealed to keep secret: torture was authorized by the President, not by OLC, not by George Tenet, not by John Rizzo. The President.

Which is why the President should take responsibility for releasing the report.

For some reason Barack Obama has the protection of Bush and Cheney as one of the most important goals of his presidency.

He may think that this position prevents a political schism, but what it really does is normalize corruption and create a criminogenic environment.

H/t Garrett at Daily Kos.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

So Not a Surprise. The CIA F%$#ed Up, and then Covered it Up

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In Newsweek, of all places, we have Jeff Stein explaining part of why the CIA is trying to suppress and discredit the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture.

Rather unsurprising, torturer and tape destroyer Jose Rodriguez figures prominently in all of this:

The hotel bar TVs were all flashing clips of Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein denouncing the CIA for spying on her staff, when I met an agency operative for drinks last week. He flashed a wan smile, gestured at the TV and volunteered that he’d narrowly escaped being assigned to interrogate Al-Qaida suspects at a secret site years ago.

 “I guess I would’ve done it,” he said, implying you either took orders or quit. But everybody in the counterterrorism program knew what was going on in those places, he said, and he was glad the agency found something else for him to do at the last minute. “Look what’s happened.”

 Four years after Feinstein launched her probe of that interrogation program, her committee and the CIA are locked in a death-struggle over what can be released from the panel’s 6,300-page, still-classified report. The impasse is bringing renewed attention to statements by former CIA and FBI agents that buttress the committee’s all-but-official conclusion that the agency exaggerated the interrogation program’s successes and minimized its abuses.

 In early 2008, for example, the committee heard from Ali Soufan, one of the FBI’s top former counterterrorism agents, who has since gone public with his criticism of the enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs, that CIA contractors had used on top Al-Qaida captive Abu Zubaydah. “The staffers present were shocked,” he wrote in his memoir, The Black Banners. “What I told them contradicted everything they had been told by Bush administration and CIA officials. When the discussion turned to whether I could prove everything I was saying, I told them, ‘Remember, an FBI agent always keep his notes.’ “

 A Lebanese-American who was decorated by both the FBI and Defense Department for his counterterrorism work, Soufan laid out a case for the committee that CIA officials, chiefly Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA counterterrorism boss who ordered the destruction of interrogation videotapes, lied about the value of torturing detainees-to the point of altering the dates on documents to show a cause-and-effect that didn’t exist.

 “In this area, it’s not a question of memory but of factual record,” he later told the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson. “There are now thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports that thoroughly rebut what Mr. Rodriguez and others are now claiming. For example, one of the successes of the EITs claimed in the now declassified memos is that after the program began in August 2002, Abu Zubaydah provided intelligence that prevented José Padilla from detonating a dirty bomb on U.S. soil, and identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Rodriguez has been repeating this claim.

This is why the CIA is terrified.

They are not afraid that their immorality will be revealed, they are afraid that their incompetence and mendacity will be revealed.

They are afraid that meaningful oversight will reveal that there are no adults in the room, which will lead to ……… meaningful oversight.

Why the NSA is a Bigger Danger to Our Way of Life than is Al-Qaeda

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We already have a part of our state security apparatus with a history of blackmail for their own benefit, specifically Hoover’s FBI, and now we discover that the NSA has collaborated with their British counterparts to intercept webcam pictures from millions of people:

Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

 GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

 In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

 Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy”.

If you don’t think this sort of stuff cannot be used against you, what happens if they decide that they to shut you up, and your little is stupid enough to sext their boy friend.

Something like 10% of the millions of documents are images of body parts that could get an FCC sanction.

And you wonder why former counter-terrorism Czar Richard Clarke is worrying that NSA actions might presage the establishment of a police state:

Revelations about NSA monitoring activities over the last year show the potential for a police state mechanism, according to the former U.S. cybersecurity czar, but there is still time to avoid the dire consequences.

 At the 2014 Cloud Security Alliance Summit, unofficial RSA Conference opener Richard Clarke, chairman of Washington, D.C.-based Good Harbor Consulting LLC, spoke to a packed audience. The former cybersecurity advisor to President Barack Obama discussed his involvement in the December 2013 report reviewing the data collection and monitoring capabilities at the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

 Clarke said that the reaction to leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has perhaps been overblown, because he described the employees at the three-letter agencies as “incredibly intelligent people” who are focused on combating terrorism and punishing violations of human rights. As part of the review process, Clarke and his group were given what he called carte blanche security clearances to review all of the agencies’ intelligence-gathering capabilities.

 Those employees are not currently listening to random phone calls and reading email, Clarke said, but that doesn’t mean U.S. citizens should ignore the agencies’ growing capabilities.

 “In terms of collecting intelligence, they are very good. Far better than you could imagine,” Clarke said. “But they have created, with the growth of technologies, the potential for a police state.”

 Clarke said such concerns are hardly new, pointing to the government committee headed by Sen. Frank Church in the 1970s. Church warned at the time that the technologies at intelligence agencies were developing at such an alarming rate that, if they were all turned on, the U.S. would never be able to turn them off, effectively creating a permanent police state in which the entire popular would be under constant surveillance.

 Though such warnings seem dire, Clarke noted that the seemingly endless scope of current government surveillance activities stemmed largely from a lack of strict guidance from policy makers. He said a major aspect of the report to the White House was simply prompting the questions that were previously unasked: What are our intelligence agencies collecting? What should they be collecting? If we should be collecting data, how do we safeguard it? If we’re collecting data, how do we stay consistent with U.S. traditions of privacy and government oversight?

This is also why security expert Bruce Schneier is suggesting that the National Security Agency be broken up:

The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission — protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies — has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era.

Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the military’s cyberwar wing, in the same location and under the same commander, expanded the NSA’s power. The result is an agency that prioritizes intelligence gathering over security, and that’s increasingly putting us all at risk. It’s time we thought about breaking up the National Security Agency.

Broadly speaking, three types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding how to divide up the NSA’s missions.

The organization is out of control, and its actions do not properly serve our security needs, and it increasingly sees its mission as simply expanding its reach and power.

OK, I Did Not Expect this from Pope Francis

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Francis’ Message to The Culture Warrior Bishops

I know about outreach and all, but he just called for outreach to the children of LGBT and divorced parents:

Pope Francis has called for a rethink in the way the Catholic Church deals with the children of gay couples and divorced parents, warning against “administering a vaccine against faith.”

 “On an educational level, gay unions raise challenges for us today which for us are sometimes difficult to understand,” Francis said in a speech to the Catholic Union of Superiors General in November, extracts of which were published on Italian media websites on Saturday.

 ………

 The pontiff said educational leaders should ask themselves “how can we proclaim Christ to a generation that is changing?”

 “We must be careful not to administer a vaccine against faith to them,” the 77-year-old added.

 Though the Church has often been in conflict with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community over its opposition to same-sex marriage and to homosexuality, Francis has drawn praise for attempts to be inclusive.

I think that is equal parts pragmatism (the current crop of Catholics are not getting any younger) and a new focus on ministry as a duty, but nonetheless I am impressed.

Pope Francis Walks the Walk

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For all that Pope Francis has said about changing the focus of the church from right wing agitprop to helping the poor and doing good, it is in the bureaucracy, particularly the personnel structures where change has to be made.

Well the rubber has officially met the road, as he canned a notoriously right wing Cardinal from his position on the Congregation for Bishops, which is responsible for selecting new Bishops:

Pope Francis moved on Monday against a conservative American cardinal who has been an outspoken critic of abortion and same-sex marriage, by replacing him on a powerful Vatican committee with another American who is less identified with the culture wars within the Roman Catholic Church.

The pope’s decision to remove Cardinal Raymond L. Burke from the Congregation for Bishops was taken by church experts to be a signal that Francis is willing to disrupt the Vatican establishment in order to be more inclusive.

Even so, many saw the move less as an effort to change doctrine on specific social issues than an attempt to bring a stylistic and pastoral consistency to the church’s leadership.

“He is saying that you don’t need to be a conservative to become a bishop,” said Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, Italy, a liberal Catholic research institute. “He wants good bishops, regardless of how conservative or liberal they are.”

………

Cardinal Burke still serves as the prefect of the Vatican’s highest canonical court, but analysts say his removal from the Congregation for Bishops will sharply reduce his influence, especially over personnel changes in American churches.

“The Congregation for Bishops is the most important congregation in the Vatican,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest and the author of “Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.”

“It decides who are going to be the bishops all over the world,” he added. “This is what has the most direct impact on the life of the local church.”

Note that when Archbishop of S. Louis, Burke publicly announced that he was refusing communion to John Kerry.

This is a substantive change, assuming that he lives long enough,* for them to take.

*I am not suggesting a Da Vinci Code type conspiracy, I am merely observing that he is 75 years old.

OK, I Get That This Guy Was Scum Who Ripped off the EPA

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But it seems that every story is some variant of, “EPA reels as climate-change expert awaits sentencing for $1m CIA fraud.”

This is simply not true.  Not the “fraud” part, nor the “EPA” part, nor the “CIA”, part, they are all true:

It is a story that flummoxed investigators – how a highly paid climate-change expert at the Environmental Protection Agency managed to defraud the government of nearly $1m, by pretending for a decade to be an undercover CIA agent.

John Beale, 65, is to undergo sentencing in a DC federal court on Wednesday, after pleading guilty to defrauding the government of $900,000 in salary and other benefits. Beale, who used his ruse to disappear for months at a time, has agreed to pay some $1.3m in restitution. He faces up to three years in jail.

The scandal could rebound against the current administrator of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, and her efforts to carry out President Barack Obama’s climate-change agenda. Last week, an official investigation found that she knew of the fraud for more than a year. Other officials who worked with Beale at the agency are under investigation and in a report last week, the EPA inspector general said senior agency officials had “enabled” Beale by failing to challenge any of his stories or expense claims amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Beale, who retired last April after learning he was under investigation, earned salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, far more than his supervisors. His fraud consisted largely of failing to turn up for work – in one instance for 18 months – and offering excuses connected to his fake intelligence role at the CIA.

(emphasis mine)

It’s the “climate change expert” bit that is wrong.  He’s not a scientist, his background in public affairs and law, with a Master’s Degree from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a Law Degree from New York University (PDF, and here is the Google cache if they purge it).

Yes, this sh%$ is mind boggling, but this guy managed (when he was actually, like, you know, there) the office.

But every story that I’ve seen has something like, “Lead Scientist,” or “Lead Expert.”

Still, engineering what is in effect a no show job for over a decade is a pretty remarkable bit of bureaucratic Jiujitsu.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

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Yeah, whoever wrote proposal this is still laughing

It has been disclosed that the NSA and the CIA were aggressively monitoring:

Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents.

 Fearing that terrorist or criminal networks could use the games to communicate secretly, move money or plot attacks, the documents show, intelligence operatives have entered terrain populated by digital avatars that include elves, gnomes and supermodels.

 The spies have created make-believe characters to snoop and to try to recruit informers, while also collecting data and contents of communications between players, according to the documents, disclosed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. Because militants often rely on features common to video games — fake identities, voice and text chats, a way to conduct financial transactions — American and British intelligence agencies worried that they might be operating there, according to the papers.

 Online games might seem innocuous, a top-secret 2008 NSA document warned, but they had the potential to be a “target-rich communication network” allowing intelligence suspects “a way to hide in plain sight.” Virtual games “are an opportunity!,” another 2008 NSA document declared.

 But for all their enthusiasm — so many CIA, FBI and Pentagon spies were hunting around in Second Life, the document noted, that a “deconfliction” group was needed to avoid collisions — the intelligence agencies may have inflated the threat.

I kind of think that the pitch for the program went like this:

Even if you do not have privacy issues with NSA spying, the fact that they were paying people to play video games indicates that they have way too big a budget.

Yes, the Administrators at My Alma Mater are Complete Prats

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At UMass, the administration has banned electronic music parties because concerns about XTC use:

The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMASS) has banned all Electronic Dance Music events from its campus, in response to a surge in MDMA use in the United States.

MDMA, or ‘Molly’ as the drug is referred to in the US is being categorised as a health and safety risk to students and EDM is seen by College administrators as the reason for its rise in popularity.

In a campus wide email the UMASS interim Vice Chancellor, Enku Gelaye said, “We have grown even more concerned about the ongoing reports of overdoses…The Molly taking culture at these shows is real and now exceedingly dangerous to the health and safety of concert attendees.”

The response from students at UMASS has been strong, with a number of petitions being set up and a flash mob started outside the students’ union in protest. Many feel the majority are being punished for the actions of the few.

When I was at the school, I got a good education, audited a thoroughly corrupt athletic department, and dealt with an administration that was a miasma of incompetence and hypocrisy in their attempts to eliminate the “Zoo Mass” reputation of the institution.

Let me repeat something to tweak the administration and the search engines:  Zoo Mass, Zoomass.

I am seriously considering adding it to my metadata.

Please note that nothing here should be construed as an endorsement of Electronic Dance Music.

Not Eleventy Dimensional Chess, Just a Clusterf%$#

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The latest adjustment to Obamacare is a complete mess.

This is why he should have pushed for single payer, and settled for a public option, but Obama buys into the neoliberal consensus, so he took a rather uninspired idea from the f%$#ing Heritage Foundation, brushed off the dust, and presented it as the liberal “Great White Hope.”

While I will be saving a chunk of change next year, Obama chose what is the worst possible way of improving our failed healthcare system.

The NSA is the Inmate Running the Asylum

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Eugene Robinson says that the, “NSA, in its quest for omniscience beyond anything Orwell could have imagined, is simply out of control.”

He’s right, and he is right when he says that their, “This is not just a massive invasion of privacy that the people of France, Spain and other countries understandably resent. It’s also a mistake.”

The problem here is that the NSA, By Design wants it all. It is their organizational imperative.

This is why Obama’s fondness for “bringing in stakeholders” has failed.

They are not a reasonable stakeholder whose needs to be heard, they are akin to the barbarian warriors hired by the Romans toward the end of their empire.

They are a tool that must be kept on a tight leash.

It is also clear that the NSA is pushing back aqainst Obama, because even as they officially deny that Obama was notified, anonymous sources are saying that their wiretapping were authorized:

The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping.

Professional staff members at the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies are angry, these officials say, believing the president has cast them adrift as he tries to distance himself from the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have strained ties with close allies.

Think about this: Is there anyone in the NSA who would even talk to a reporter without assuming that the NSA was listening?

This is the NSA sending a not so subtle message, “Don’t f%$# with us,” and if be it’s not NSA director General Keith Alexander, he gave tacit approval to the leak.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!? The IMF is calling for Taxing the Rich?!?!?!

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I’m not joking. The IMF actually suggesting that countries need to tax the rich in order to reduce deficits and improve economies:

Tax the rich and better target the multinationals: The IMF has set off shockwaves this week in Washington by suggesting countries fight budget deficits by raising taxes.

 Tucked inside a report on public debt, the new tack was mostly eclipsed by worries about the US budget crisis, but did not escape the notice of experts and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

 “We had to read it twice to be sure we had really understood it,” said Nicolas Mombrial, the head of Oxfam in Washington. “It’s rare that IMF proposals are so surprising.”

 Guardian of financial orthodoxy, the International Monetary Fund, which is holding its annual meetings with the World Bank this week in the US capital, typically calls for nations in difficulty to slash public spending to reduce their deficits.

 But in its Fiscal Monitor report, subtitled “Taxing Times”, the Fund advanced the idea of taxing the highest-income people and their assets to reinforce the legitimacy of spending cuts and fight against growing income inequalities.

 “Scope seems to exist in many advanced economies to raise more revenue from the top of the income distribution,” the IMF wrote, noting “steep cuts” in top rates since the early 1980s.

 According to IMF estimates, taxing the rich even at the same rates during the 1980s would reap fiscal revenues equal to 0.25 percent of economic output in the developed countries.

 “The gain could in some cases, such as that of the United States, be more significant,” around 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, said the IMF report, which also singled out deficient taxation of multinational companies.

I did not expect that the IMF would suggest this before pigs ……… Well, you know.

I guess they have been following the purchase levels of pitchforks and torches, and have become concerned.

Now if only they start supporting a Tobin Tax on financial transactions.

Why You Should Not Listen to the United States Air Force, Part 29

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Because, once again, they are trying to kill the A-10 again. (Paid Subscription Requited)

The USAF has been trying to kill the A-10 since they first entered service, since “real pilots” don’t fly dedicated close air support platforms.

Thankfully, a bunch of people who have not drunk too much of the Wild Blue Yonder juice are pushing back:

Now that the Air Force has placed the A-10 Thunderbolt II under consideration for cuts in a worst-case budget scenario, a grassroots movement is building to keep the aircraft, flying since 1977, around longer.

The A-10 is not one of those programs, like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter or the KC-46A tanker, that the service wants to protect. In fact, a chart from Air Combat Command shows the entire fleet of close-air support aircraft may be divested by 2015.

The A-10, affectionately known as the Warthog, does have a following. The lumbering aircraft was designed to loiter over the battlefield until it unleashes firepower that can shred through tanks. Originally made by Fairchild Republic, it carries a 30 mm Gatling gun that can fire up to 3,900 rounds per minute. The service’s A-10s can carry all kinds of bombs, including laser-guided ones, joint direct attack munitions, and the AIM-9 Sidewinder. Ground troops love it.

They are not alone. From a Save-the-A-10 Facebook page with 2,722 likes, to the back room of a military base bar and even on Capitol Hill, the proposal to scrap the aircraft is meeting resistance.

………

Coram himself recently published a column on the Project on Government Oversight’s website articulating the case: “No $160 million F-35 is going to get down in the weeds where a single bullet can take it out. A host of small arms fire hitting an A-10 can be fixed with what amounts to duct tape,” Coram writes. “No F-35 can maneuver under an 800-foot ceiling with two-mile visibility as can an A-10. No F-35 has more than three combat trigger pulls before running out of ammo. The A-10 has twenty. No F-35 has the battlefield survivability of the A-10.”

Whether the efforts will make a difference within the Pentagon remains to be seen as high-level budget politics on Capitol Hill and in the Obama administration are sorted out.

But lawmakers have been working to maintain the A-10 fleet, at least in the short term.

Last year the Air Force recommended carving out nearly a third of the A-10 fleet, much of it from the Air National Guard. Congress slowed that suggestion by creating the National Commission on the Structure of the Air Force.

Yet more evidence that the independent Air Force does not serve our defense needs.

Air power is essential in modern warfare, but I do not think that the pilots are up to running their own branch of the service.

I Think that this is a Diss of John Paul II

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It’s generally being presented as a unifying gesture, but I think that the decision to canonize Popes John Paul II and John XXIII on the same day:

Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII will be declared saints on 27 April 2014, Pope Francis has announced.

 The Pope said in July that he would canonise his two predecessors, after approving a second miracle attributed to John Paul.

 Polish John Paul, the first non-Italian pope for more than 400 years, led the Catholic Church from 1978-2005.

 Pope John was pontiff from 1958-1963, calling the Second Vatican Council that transformed the Church.

 The decision to canonise the two at the same time appears designed to unify Catholics, correspondents say.

 John Paul II is a favourite of conservative Catholics, while John XXIII is widely admired by the Church’s progressive wing.

………

The double canonisation will be the first in the Church’s history.

Here is why I think that this is a comment on

John Paul has been on a fast track to sainthood since his death, when crowds in St Peter’s Square chanted “santo subito” (“sainthood now”).

 During his own papacy he simplified the process by which people are made saints, and created more of them than all previous popes combined.

 John XXIII is remembered for introducing the vernacular to replace Latin in church masses and for creating warmer ties between the Catholic Church and the Jewish faith.

 He has a big following in Italy, where he is known as Il Papa Buono, the good pope.

 ………

 Two miracles have been officially attributed to Pope John Paul II – the number usually needed for canonisation.

 ………

 Pope John XXIII was beatified by John Paul II in 2000, and Pope Francis took the unusual step of waiving the requirement of a second miracle in his case.

John Paul II’s canonization was on a rocket docket that Francis knew could not be stopped, but by making John XXIII, he takes some of the wind out of the sails of the inevitable JPII, and by waiving waiving the “2nd miracle” for John, he makes a comment on how standards were relaxed by John Paul.

Then again, ich bin a Yid, so my knowledge on the Catholic Church is neither deep nor broad.

I’m Beginning to Really Like His Holiness

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He may not be John XXIII, but he is a breath of fresh air after the reactionary JP II and Benedict.

Latest case, he makes the obvious observation that the exclusive focus on abortion and gays by the reactionary wing of the Church is not a good thing:

Six months into his papacy, Pope Francis sent shock waves through the Roman Catholic church on Thursday with the publication of his remarks that the church had grown “obsessed” with abortion, gay marriage and contraception, and that he had chosen not to talk about those issues despite recriminations from critics.

His surprising comments came in a lengthy interview in which he criticized the church for putting dogma before love, and for prioritizing moral doctrines over serving the poor and marginalized. He articulated his vision of an inclusive church, a “home for all” — which is a striking contrast with his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, the doctrinal defender who envisioned a smaller, purer church.

Francis told the interviewer, a fellow Jesuit: “It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time. The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.

“We have to find a new balance,” the pope continued, “otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”

It is noteworthy that this is an interview with a Jesuit which was released in Jesuit publications.  This is more than public assertion of his views, but an assertion of the traditional role of the Jesuits as being intellectual gadflies for the church, something which John Paul II detested,

As to the reactionary bigots, like this guy, who are upset that they no longer get to use the institutions of the church to go after people they find “icky”, I say go pound sand:

But there has been a low rumble of discontent from some Catholic advocacy groups, and even from some bishops, who have taken note of his silence on abortion and gay marriage. This month, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I., told his diocesan newspaper that he was “a little bit disappointed in Pope Francis” because he had not spoken about abortion. “Many people have noticed that,” he said.

My heart bleeds for the right wingers like Tobin who are intent on abandoning the poor in order to wage war against women and the LGBT community.

This is actually pretty mild.  The Pope is telling the officers of the church to chill out, and remember that there is a lot more to the Catholic Church than abortion, birth control, and gay marriage.

It’s not like he’s forcing them out of the priesthood, like JPII did.

Quote of the Day

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The upshot is that it is now known that “the N.S.A. cannot be trusted on the issue of cyber security,” said Soghoian. He continued, “My sincere hope is that the N.S.A. loses its shine. They’re the bad guy; they’re breaking into systems; they’re exploiting vulnerabilities.” It’s conceivable that they have good intentions. And yet, Soghoian continued, “they act like any other hacker. They steal data. They read private communications.” With that methodology, how easy can it be, though, to give the agency the benefit of the doubt? As many have, Thomas Drake compared the worldview of what he calls the “rogue agency” to the total surveillance of George Orwell’s “1984,” in which the only way to escape was “to cower in a corner. I don’t want to live like that. I’ve already lived that and it’s not pleasant.”

—Matt Buchanan in The New Yorker

(Emphasis mine)

Obama’s “Independent Panel” to Review Domestic Spying Isn’t

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Outside experts, you say?
Note: this is the actual caption of the photo used in Washington Post story

As you may be aware, Obama has promised to bring in “Outside Experts.” What will surprise no one, including the graphic editors at the Washington Post, (See pic and caption) is that these “experts” are all
tightly connected to the administration or the state security apparatus:

ABC reports that the Obama administration’s surveillance review panel will include former intelligence and White House staffers, including Michael Morell, Richard Clarke, Cass Sunstein and Peter Swire. An official announcement of the members of the panel is expected soon.

 The review panel was first announced in a White House press conference on Aug. 9, when Obama said the administration would form “a high-level group of outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies.”

 Privacy advocates aren’t happy with the composition of the group revealed so far. Some privacy groups believe that the White House will insist on all members having top secret clearances, effectively barring most independent privacy watchdogs from consideration for the panel.

 Amie Stepanovich, director of the domestic surveillance project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) found the choices reported by ABC troubling:

An independent evaluation of the NSA’s surveillance programs is needed. But a worthwhile review requires an independent team of evaluators. We continue to learn how each of the oversight mechanisms that the Administration has pointed to have continuously failed. The background of this panel indicates that it, too, is unlikely to be meaningful or effective.

True dat.

First, it was James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, a man who unequivocally perjured himself to Congress over the program who was supposed to run the program, but when there was too much push-back over that, so they backed off, and now they have a panel of faux independent experts.

It’s so bad that the some anonymous graphic editor felt compelled to call out the lie in the accompanying photograph.

The Post also reports an interesting factoid about Cass Sunstein, one of the proposed members, has written a paper supporting the idea of government paid trolls to combat the tin-foil hat conspiracy crowd:

The Obama administration is reportedly proposing Cass Sunstein as a member of a panel to review the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency (NSA), among other former White House and intelligence staffers. Sunstein was the head of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs until last year, when he returned to teaching at Harvard Law School.

 As one of our intrepid commenters pointed out yesterday, while at Harvard in 2008, Sunstein co-authored a working paper that suggests government agents or their allies “cognitively infiltrate” conspiracy theorist groups by joining ”chat rooms, online social networks or even real-space groups” and influencing the conversation.

 Sunstein’s paper defined a conspiracy theory as “an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role,” and acknowledges that some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true. It also specifically notes that his plan of “cognitive infiltration” should only be used against false conspiracy theories that could be harmful to the government or society.

The Washington Post is perhaps the 2nd most authoritative source (Politico being number 1) of the vapid blather that qualifies as villager “wisdom” in Washington, DC, and their pattern is to be relentlessly support of the security state, so this is a statement against interest.

What they are saying is not that Obama cannot be trusted, they are saying something far more radical, that the Obama administration’s statements are simply laughable.

They have quite literally become a laughing stock of the “very serious people”.

For the First Time in 27 Years, an ITC Import Ban has Been Overturned by the USTR

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One of the problems with our patent system is that the US International Trade Commission, can, and frequently does, ban imports of infringing products, which provides an additional way to allow patent trolls to extort productive companies.

This has become more of a problem since recent court rulings have made injunctive relief less likely.

The fact that the US Trade Repreresentative has overrruled the ITC is therefore a very big deal:

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman’s Aug. 3 decision on Apple found that a product ban wasn’t appropriate because the patent at the heart of the dispute was part of an industry standard and was supposed to be licensed at reasonable terms. Froman’s conclusion is expected to affect several pending cases at the U.S. International Trade Commission, including Ericsson AB and InterDigital Inc. (IDCC)’s claims against Samsung for infringing patented network standards technology.

“A huge swath of everybody’s patent portfolio has just been rendered impotent,” said Rodney Sweetland, a patent lawyer with Duane Morris in Washington. Standards patents “are dead on arrival” at the commission now, he said.

DOA, huh?  My heart bleeds borscht.  You can still go to court, where they actually have to prove their case.

The reason that the ITC has this power is the theory that patent violations constitute an illegal trade subsidies.

Hopefully, this particular method of patent abuse will see increasingly large numbers of smack-downs from the executive branch.

Speaking of Fails………

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How about that funny looking guy with the big ears?

You know, the one who ran against John McCain in 2008?

Well, there are reports that that he will nominate Bush Administration apparatchik James Comey as the next FBI director:

President Obama plans to nominate James B. Comey, a former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, to replace Robert S. Mueller III as FBI director, according to two people with knowledge of the selection process.

 Comey, 52, was at the center of some of the most bruising debates over counterterrorism during the Bush administration and established a reputation as a fierce defender of the law and the integrity of the Justice Department regardless of the political pressures of the moment.

 The expected nomination of Comey, a Republican, was seen in some quarters as a bipartisan move by a president besieged by Republicans in Congress. But Chuck Hagel’s prior service as a Republican senator from Nebraska did not spare him from a bruising nomination battle for secretary of defense.

(emphasis mine)

Yes, more of the PPUS (Post Partisan Unity Schtick).  It does not work, and neither does starting the negotiation process with capitulation does a disservice to the basic morals on that Obama purports to believe it.

Notwithstanding the fact that he opposed one the most egregious excesses of the Cheney Bush administration, he is a bad guy, who has next to no interest in supporting civil rights, as the ACLU has observed:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: 212-549-2666, media@aclu.org

WASHINGTON – Below is a statement from Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, on President Obama’s reported plan to nominate James B. Comey as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“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. Although Comey, despite tremendous pressure from the Bush White House, deserves credit for courageously stopping the reauthorization of a secret National Security Agency program, he reportedly approved programs that struck at the very core of who we all are as Americans.

“It’s critical that the Senate ensures that the men and women of the FBI know that they have a leader who will demand adherence to the rule of law and will hold those accountable who do not, wherever he or she may find them.”

Seeing the Obama administration’s consistently dismissive attitude towards civil rights (Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever), they may see his role in the some of the worst excesses of the Bush administration, including torture, as a plus.