August 27, 2013

I Was Vaguely Aware Of Some Of These Details... But Did Not Fully Appreciate Until Now...

Thank (Bradley) Chelsea Manning for helping end the Iraq war
(Bradley) Chelsea Manning exposed the Iraq war's horrors; it's high time we defend and support him.
By Nathan Fuller - (Bradley) Chelsea Manning Support Network
March 25th, 2013 11:30 AM

<snip>

Pundits across the political spectrum are searching for meaning in the tenth anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. The decade-long campaign of bombings and occupation left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and millions wounded, displaced, or scarred. Justified with lies about biological and chemical weapons that never existed, the senseless war cost U.S. tax-payers more than 3 trillion dollars, and far more in blood and shame. Tens of thousands of US soldiers were wounded or killed, and to this day, $490 billion is owed to veterans.

Many credit President Obama with the decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, and almost none mention the fact that it was cables provided by Bradley Manning and published by WikiLeaks that made Obama’s attempt to keep troops there past the 2011 deadline impossible. As CNN reported in October of that year,



Obama had wanted to keep troops beyond President Bush’s 2011 deadline, but required the condition that all U.S. soldiers be guaranteed legal immunity for their actions. Upon reading the WikiLeaks-released cables, the Iraqi government refused.

By revealing the hidden realities of the Iraq War, Pfc. Bradley Manning achieved his noble goal of sparking domestic debate, and he helped begin the end of an aggressive, violent, and counterproductive war.

Here are a few of WikiLeaks’ revelations about the U.S war in Iraq:

<snip>

More: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/june-1-thank-bradley-manning-for-helping-end-the-iraq-war

August 27, 2013

America, Syria And Chemical Weapons - TheEconomist (Warning: Disturbing Pic)

America, Syria and chemical weapons
Guttering, choking, drowning
TheEconomist
Aug 27th 2013, 12:25 by M.S



<snip>

AMERICA is going to attack Syria, it seems, and it is going to do it because of gas. As reasons to attack a murderous dictatorship go, punishment for the use of chemical weapons to kill hundreds of civilians isn't a bad one. For anyone inclined to see America as an avenging angel of international justice, however, this fascinating scoop from Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid at Foreign Policy will come as a bit of a downer. It seems the American government was well aware of the chemical-weapons attacks carried out by Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s, both against the Iranian army and against his own people, and not only did nothing to stop him, but in fact supplied him with the coordinates of Iranian force concentrations in full knowledge that he would use that information to poison them with nerve and mustard gas.

Foreign Policy Piece: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/25/secret_cia_files_prove_america_helped_saddam_as_he_gassed_iran

Now, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) barring nations from possessing chemical arms didn't come into force until 1997. However, the 1925 Geneva Protocol bars the use of chemical weapons in war. (Incidentally, for those who have heard that Syria isn't a party to the CWC: that's true, but it is a party to the Geneva Protocol.) So America ought to have been, if not bombing Saddam's Iraq for using poison gas, at least condemning it and applying sanctions. Instead, it supplied target data.

Apparently American reactions to violations of the international prohibition on using chemical weapons are not entirely consistent. What accounts for the differences?

The simplest explanation is just that America is willing to overlook or even abet the use of poison gas by its allies or associates, which Iraq was in 1988 when the Reagan administration was trying to contain Iran. When America's enemies use poison gas, on the other hand, it serves as a legitimate excuse to use military force against them, as in Syria today, or indeed in Iraq 15 years after its use of chemical weapons. This, however, is an unsatisfying explanation, because it implies that Barack Obama is looking for an excuse to attack Syria today, when he is plainly not. Mr Obama is visibly being dragged into war on Syria against all his inclinations and his better judgment. And you would think one lesson of 1988 is that if the American government doesn't want to punish a regime for using chemical weapons, it doesn't have to. So what is forcing Barack Obama to bomb Syria now?

One factor, obviously, is the fact that Mr Obama committed himself to treating the use of chemicals weapons as a red line. He did so at a moment when America was more disposed to intercede on behalf of the Syrian rebels (at least rhetorically, as with Hillary Clinton's "Assad must go" proclamation) than it is now; at the time, the chemical-weapons ultimatum might have seemed like a handy line in the sand, rather than the albatross neckwear it has since become. Another factor is the mounting international exasperation and sense of helplessness in the face of the carnage of the Syrian civil war. The fact that America views the Syrian regime and army as strategic enemies, whose patrons are Russia and Iran, rather than quasi-allies is certainly a necessary condition.

But the decisive factor is simply the rapid availability of mesmerisingly horrifying video imagery of the gas victims. In Iraq, video imagery of Saddam's Kurdish gas victims ultimately came out, but it took years; there was no sense of urgency or an ongoing threat. Even so, the imagery of the massacres ultimately seeded a longstanding American sympathy for the Kurdish cause and remained the clearest indictment of Saddam as a mass murderer. The impact of such video images rests partly on the unique horror of poison gas in the Western imagination.

This is not an arbitrary horror...

<snip>

More: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/08/america-syria-and-chemical-weapons

August 27, 2013

Oh.. This Is Gonna Get Ugly... Abroad, Here At Home, And Here...

The AntiWar Protest Marches Start Once Again: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/08/27/18742178.php

I could not have imagined this back in 2008.

August 27, 2013

Breaking: Curiouser And Curiouser...

New York Times website taken down, likely by malicious attack
CNBC
Published: Tuesday, 27 Aug 2013 | 4:40 PM ET

Link: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100988768

August 27, 2013

Is The NYPD Worse Than The NSA? - TheAtlantic

Is the NYPD Worse Than the NSA?
New details about innocent Americans targeted for surveillance by undercover officers.
Conor Friedersdorf - TheAtlantic
Aug 26 2013, 8:30 AM ET

<snip>

The surveillance debate triggered by Edward Snowden's leaks frequently features government spokespeople assuring Americans that the authorities aren't targeting us with their spying activities. Implicit is the notion that if Americans were being targeted, that would be an abuse of power.

In New York City, the debate is different, because there's no doubt about the NYPD's surveillance tactics: They're definitely targeting innocent Americans citizens and legal residents. And that's an ongoing abuse of power, even if comparatively fewer people have heard about it.

We've known for some time that innocent Muslim Americans were ethnically profiled by undercover NYPD officers, causing significant, under-acknowledged hardship in affected communities. Earlier this summer, Charlie Savage reported on four CIA officers embedded within the NYPD, despite the strict rules governing the spy agency's behavior within the United States. And today, New York has published "The NYPD Division of UnAmerican Activities," in which Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman unearth even more alarming details about the NYPD Demographics Unit: http://nymag.com/news/features/nypd-demographics-unit-2013-9/#print

•Official secrecy defined the program from the start. "Documents related to this new unit were stamped NYPD SECRET. Even the City Council, Congress, and the White House -- the people paying the bills -- weren't told about it."

•This is straight-up profiling. "They mapped, looking for 28 'ancestries of interest.' Nearly all were Muslim. There were Middle Eastern and South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Syria, and Egypt. Former Soviet states like Uzbekistan and Chechnya were included because of their large Muslim populations. The last 'ancestry' on the list was 'American Black Muslim.'"

•Files on New Yorkers were started on the flimsiest of pretexts. "One Muslim man made it into files even though he praised President Bush's State of the Union address and said people who criticized the U.S. government didn't realize how good they had it. Two men of Pakistani ancestry were included for saying the nation's policies had become increasingly anti-Muslim since 9/11. Muslims who criticized the CIA's use of drones to launch missiles in Pakistan were documented."

•Inevitably, spying was used for purposes other than counterterrorism. "Surveillance turned out to be habit-forming .... Undercover officers traveled the country, keeping tabs on liberal protest groups like Time's Up and the Friends of Brad Will. Police infiltrated demonstrations and collected information about antiwar groups and those that marched against police brutality. Detectives monitored activist websites and copied the contents into police files, including one memo in 2008 for Kelly that reported the contents of a website about a group of women organizing a boycott to protest the police shooting of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man killed the morning before his wedding.

The full story contains a lot more objectionable behavior...

<snip>

More: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/is-the-nypd-worse-than-the-nsa/279020/

August 27, 2013

WOW... In Case You Missed This... 'The NSA Is Losing The Benefit Of The Doubt' - Ruth Marcus/WaPo

The NSA is losing the benefit of the doubt
By Ruth Marcus - WaPo
August 22, 2013

<snip>

Footnote 14 should scare every American. Even the parts that aren’t blacked out.

The footnote is contained in the just-declassified 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John Bates, then the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

In the ruling, Bates found that the government had been sweeping up e-mails before receiving court approval in 2008 and, even after that, was illegally collecting “tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications.”

That’s not the really scary part. This is: “The court is troubled that the government’s revelations .?.?. mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program,” Bates wrote in Footnote 14.

He cited a 2009 finding that the court’s approval of the National Security Agency’s telephone records program was premised on “a flawed depiction” of how the NSA uses metadata, a “misperception .?.?. buttressed by repeated inaccurate statements made in the government’s submissions, and despite a government-devised and Court-mandated oversight regime

“Contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, NSA had been routinely running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the required standard for querying. The Court concluded that this requirement had been ‘so frequently and systemically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall .?.?. regime has never functioned effectively.’?”

Followed by two full paragraphs of redactions. We can only imagine what that episode entailed.

To judge the significance of Bates’s footnote, it helps to know something about the judge...

<snip>

More: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-22/opinions/41435729_1_oversight-nsa-national-security-agency

August 27, 2013

The Scariest Thing About NSA Analysts Spying On Their Lovers Is How They Were Caught - BusinessInsi

The Scariest Thing About NSA Analysts Spying On Their Lovers Is How They Were Caught
Michael Kelley - BusinessInsider
8/27/13

<snip>

Last week Siobhan Gorman of The Wall Street Journal reported that National Security Agency analysts have occasionally used vast surveillance tools to spy on love interests.

NSA Chief Compliance Officer John DeLong told reporters that willful violations of spying rules — dubbed "LOVEINT" — happened on “very rare” occasions, adding that he didn't have exact numbers because most of the violations were self-reported.

(One situation in which self-reported abuses arise is when an employee takes a polygraph test as part of a renewal of a security clearance.)

D.B. Grady, who co-authored the book "Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry" with fellow investigative journalist Marc Ambinder, said that the lack of oversight regarding abuse by NSA analysts is the most troubling part of the admission.

"The real shocking revelation about all that is that this information is self-reported," Grady told Business Insider. "You mean there's no record? I can't download something from BitTorrent without my ISP shutting me down and these guys can spy on their girlfriends and boyfriends across the planet and nobody finds out? That's the most shocking thing of all; all of the security mechanisms lack teeth."

<snip>

More: http://www.businessinsider.com/most-nsa-abuses-are-self-reported-2013-8

August 27, 2013

Here’s How Phone Metadata Can Reveal Your Affairs, Abortions, And Other Secrets - WaPo

Here’s how phone metadata can reveal your affairs, abortions, and other secrets
By Timothy B. Lee - WaPo
Published: August 27 at 11:12 am

<snip>

The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance of Americans’ phone calling records. On Monday, the ACLU asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction halting the program while its legality is litigated.

The program only collects metadata about Americans’ phone calls—who they call, when, and how long the calls last. In defending the program, the government has cited a controversial 1979 Supreme Court decision that held that phone records are not protected by the Fourth Amendment because consumers do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling records.

But Ed Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton University (and, full disclosure, my former graduate school advisor) argues that this intuition is wrong. In a legal brief supporting the ACLU’s request, Felten argues that the distinction between call “contents” and “metadata” isn’t always clear. Sometimes, the mere fact that someone called a particular number reveals extremely sensitive personal information.

Certain telephone numbers are used for a single purpose, such that any contact reveals basic and often sensitive information about the caller. Examples include support hotlines for victims of domestic violence and rape, including a specific hotline for rape victims in the armed services.

Similarly, numerous hotlines exist for people considering suicide, including specific services for first responders, veterans, and gay and lesbian teenagers. Hotlines exist for suffers of various forms of addiction, such as alcohol, drugs, and gambling.

Similarly, inspectors general at practically every federal agency—including the NSA—have hotlines through which misconduct, waste, and fraud can be reported, while numerous state tax agencies have dedicated hotlines for reporting tax fraud. Hotlines have also been established to report hate crimes, arson, illegal firearms and child abuse. In all these cases, the metadata alone conveys a great deal about the content of the call, even without any further information.

And, Felten argues, metadata becomes even more revealing when it’s collected in bulk:

<snip>

More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/27/heres-how-phone-metadata-can-reveal-your-affairs-abortions-and-other-secrets/

August 27, 2013

New Poll: Syria Intervention Even Less Popular Than Congress - WaPo

New poll: Syria intervention even less popular than Congress
By Max Fisher - WaPo
Published: August 26 at 2:37 pm

<snip>

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll has finally found something that Americans like even less than Congress: the possibility of U.S. military intervention in Syria. Only 9 percent of respondents said that the Obama administration should intervene militarily in Syria; a RealClearPolitics poll average finds Congress has a 15 percent approval rating, making the country’s most hated political body almost twice as popular.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was taken Aug.19-23, the very same week that horrific reports emerged strongly suggesting that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people, potentially killing hundreds or even thousands of civilians. If there were ever a time that Americans would support some sort of action, you’d think this would be it. But this is the lowest support for intervention since the poll began tracking opinion on the issue. The survey also found that 60 percent oppose intervention outright, with the rest, perhaps sagely, saying that they don’t know.

Strangely, 25 percent said that they support intervention if Assad uses chemical weapons. I say strangely because the United States announced way back in June that it believed Assad had done exactly this. A large share of people who answered that the United States should intervene if Assad uses chemical weapons are apparently unaware that this line has already been crossed. Presumably, some number of these people would drop their support if they realized the question was no longer hypothetical.

<snip>

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/26/new-poll-syria-intervention-even-less-popular-than-congress/

August 27, 2013

'Devastating': California's Biggest Wildfire Of The Year Seen From Space - MSNBC

'Devastating': California's biggest wildfire of the year seen from space
Alan Boyle, Science Editor NBC News
8/26/13


NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg transmitted this image of smoke wafting from California's Rim Fire, as seen from the International Space Station, via Twitter on Monday. North is to the left in this image.

The 150,000-acre fire blazing in and around Yosemite National Park made a big impression on NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, who was watching the smoke from the International Space Station on Monday.

"Our orbit took us directly over California's Rim Fire about an hour ago. Devastating," Nyberg wrote in a Twitter update.

Nyberg isn't the only one keeping track of the blaze from outer space: The MODIS imaging spectrometers that NASA has aboard its Aqua and Terra satellites are keeping watch on the Rim Fire as well as other wildfires across the West.


A map from the National Interagency Fire Center helps you get a fix on the extent of the Rim Fire, in relation to California's Mono Lake as well as Yosemite National Park's famous Half Dome.


An image from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra Satellite, acquired on Aug. 25, shows the active burning areas of the Yosemite Rim Fire in red outlines.

Link: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/devastating-californias-biggest-wildfire-year-seen-space-8C11008420