How War Against Terror Became War Against Journalists Turning War Against Terror Again

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Muller

When listening to journalists’ immediate comments after the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001, one could only expect that the world would change forever. Of course, all of us feared long-lasting war with the Islamic world, in particular having a former alcoholic and born-again Christian and crusader sitting in the White House. When George W. Bush struck Afghanistan couple of weeks later, that time, under the world-wide shock of 9-11, with a broad coalition, it was very clear that dumb retaliation was his main motivation, not so much the capture of the assault’s masterminds who might have fled already to neighboring Pakistan (where bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEAL almost a decade later). Let alone building wells and girl schools as was told the public in Germany when its soldiers were sent on a mission which was called a war only in 2010.

As the war went on for a decade and half, setting the whole Middle East on fire, the anti-war movement grew world-wide. But did anybody expect an Orwellian surveillance state developing? Well, there were early warnings, of course.

What essentially shaped much of domestic and foreign politics (after the financial meltdown of 2007/08 and the Eurozone crisis) in the present decade were the massive leaks by Chelsea Manning providing just a glimpse of what was really going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and U.S. American Embassies around the world; and those of Edward Snowden whose leaks have unmasked tactis and means of huge, unelected spying organizations in the U.S. and UK of, well, Orwellian dimension. And they have shown us the true colors of a Peace Nobel Prize awardee whose numerous noble speeches turned out to be rubbish. A useless presidency of someone once regarded nothing but a new messiah.

There are still claims that NSA mass surveillance has made the world a safer place after the terror attacks causing about 3000+ casualties (to be compared with millions of killed and displaced people including the new civil wars in the Middle East). But these claims are heavily questioned meanwhile. The world-wide panopticon via internet and mobile comunication (Jeremy Benthem who had actually invented it, had, it is said,  quite noble intents) has only one aim: total control of all citizens. Earlier attempts were made by Nazi (Gestapo) and Communist Germany (Stasi) and Stalinist USSR. And it’s no wonder that the totalitarian surveillance state turns against those who have courageously exposed it, Convicted Chelsea Manning being locked-up for 35 years in the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange having got stuck in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, UK, since August 2012; Edward Snowden in an undisclosed place having been granted asylum in Russia; and Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in unintended exile in Rio de Janeiro and Berlin, respectively.

The War against Terror, which President Obama had proclaimed to end during his term, has all of the sudden turned into a war on journalists who had dared to report on troves of leaks exposing its highly questionable collateral damages. And while he threw down the gauntlet for only one purpose, intimidation, they picked it up.

Glenn Greenwald, who describes his new magazine The Intercept (of Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media enterprise) as “fearless, adversarial journalism”, has exposed, from Edward Snowden’s archive of leaks, the abject mindset of employees of the British counterpart of NSA, the GCHQ (public servants after all) who actually teach their collaborators “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations”, another document by the GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group which had been presented to the NSA as well as spy organizations in Canada, Australia and New Zealand (the so-called “Five Eyes Alliance”). Given the fact that internet usage and mobile communication of all of us is monitored meanwhile and it is not clear who is “the target to be discredited”, the document on “The Art of Deception” is a war declaration on all citizens. It is of course about sex (“Set up a honey trap”) and defamation (“Write a blog purporting to be one of their victims”; “Email/text their colleagues, neighbours, friends etc”). It is about infiltrating computers with viruses and other malware. It is about “The 4 D’s: Deny/Disrupt/Degrade/Deceive.” As Greenwald writes, “these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.”

I want to go further: this seems to be outright state terrorism. Can new media enterprises ever fight it? We’ll see. At least, Manning’s and Snowden’s leaks may be regarded later as a turning point. A last chance to abrogate a development which has been foreseen by George Orwell in 1949. It didn’t happen in 1984. It happened more or less unnoticed somewhat later. It took about 30 years that people became aware of it.

The internet was just a tool for a desired panopticon. It was never meant to enhance democracy.

25 February 2014 @ 10:15 am.
Last modified February 25, 2014.
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Another Friendly Leak?

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Muller

Just in order to put Germany in its place? Yesterday, Germany’s leading tabloid BamS had reported that, after President Obama had banned in January U.S. eavesdropping on leaders of close U.S. allies, including Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, NSA has right now switched to monitoring up to 320 individuals in Germany including former Minister of Defense and currently chief of the Interior, Thomas de Maizière.

Apparently, that information cannot come from NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden since he is no longer in the possesion of any documents which he had leaked to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill in May last year when having defected to Hong Kong. So who has leaked it? BamS said it stemmed from a high-ranking NSA employee in Germany. “We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor’s communication directly,” he conceded. BamS quoted also a security adviser to Obama, Caitlin Hayden, “The United States has made clear it gathers intelligence in exactly the same way as any other states.”

Given the fact that, after Edward Snowden and the upcoming war on journalists who dare to publish that material, unwelcome whistle-blowing from inside the NSA would be punished in the harshest way, frank confessions of a “high-ranking NSA employee in Germany” must be regarded as friendly leak. As has been encouraged on other occasions by Barack Obama and his administration too, see here.

24 February 2014 @ 7:59 am.
Last modified February 24, 2014.
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The Difference Between Tyranny and Freedom

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Muller

After Julian Assange in 2010, Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack in 2011, and Edward Snowden last year, Chelsea Manning has received the 2014 Sam Adams Award, not named after the 18th century Founding Father but CIA whistle-blower during the Vietnam War, Samuel A. Adams. The award is conferred to “reward intelligence officials who demonstrated a commitment to truth and integrity, no matter the consequences,” by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, a group of retired CIA officers around former CIA officer and political activist Ray McGovern.

While Chelsea’s award is in fact overdue (why did she get it years after her massive leaks of documents to WikiLeaks in 2010?), her acceptance statement is worth to be read very carefully. Manning compares her case, when she was accused by the American Executive for “aiding the enemy” (a charge of which she was acquitted in her court martial), with that of Anwar al-Awlaki, the possibly militant hate preacher, al-Qaeda affiliate and, yes, American citizen who had been ordered to be killed by President Obama without due process or even attempt to get hold of him alive, and had actually been killed in a drone attack on 30 September 2011 (his 16-yr-old son, an American citizen too, was killed in another drone strike two weeks later; see an open letter by his grandfather here).

Manning explains,

“In a recent Freedom of Information Act case […] a federal district court judge ruled against the New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union. The Times and the ACLU argued that documents regarding the practice of ‘targeted killing’ of American citizens, such as the radical Sunni cleric Anwar Nasser al-Aulaqi were in the public’s interest and were being withheld improperly.

The government first refused to acknowledge the existence of the documents, but later argued that their release could harm national security and were therefore exempt from disclosure. The court, however, felt constrained by the law and ‘conclud[ed] that the Government [had] not violated the FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and [could not] be compelled . . . to explain in detail the reasons why [the Government’s] actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States.’

However, the judge also wrote candidly about her frustration with her sense that the request ‘implicate[d] serious issues about the limits on the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution and laws of the United States,’ and that the Presidential ‘Administration ha[d] engaged in public discussion of the legality of targeted killing, even of [American] citizens, but in cryptic and imprecise ways.’ In other words, it wasn’t that she didn’t think that the public didn’t have a right to know – it was that she didn’t feel that she had the ‘legal’ authority to compel disclosure.”

Then she asks a troubling question (admitting that she received due process and a fair sentence before a military judge),

“[D]id the American government, and particularly the same President and Department, have the power to unilaterally determine my guilt of such an offense, and execute me at the will of the pilot of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle?”

One intuitively recalls Obama’s irresponsible verdict “He broke the law” in an unwittingly recorded private conversation after a fundraiser speech in April 2011, months before Chelsea’s trial would have commenced, see the video here. Given the fact that Amnesty International had heavily criticized inhumane conditions under which Chelsea Manning was detained at that time in the Marine Corps in Quantico, VA, her question is in fact chilling. And what about the above mentioned Samuel A. Adams awardees Assange and Snowden? What about Glenn Greenwald? The so-called Global War on Terror has turned, it seems so, into a war against an emerging new and “fearless, adversarial journalism”.

Once Obama had crossed the red line by establishing his “disposition matrix” which is meant to identify those foreign hostile combattants (“terrorists”) to be assassinated by unmanned drones but which includes unlawful killing of American citizens as well, despotism is a logic consequence. The shocking confession of being “good at killing people” is something the Peace Nobel Prize laureate of 2009 had better avoided. The whole enterprise can only result in a disaster. Neither American paranoia nor imperial hubris can justify becoming a murderer and tyrant.

The often quoted Founding Fathers had been aware of temptations by those in power. Chelsea Manning, in accepting the Award, concludes,

“When the public lacks the ability to access what its government is doing, it ceases to be involved in the governing process. There is a distinct difference between citizens, in which people are entitled to rights and privileges protected by and from the state, and subjects, in which people are placed under the absolute authority and control of the state. In essence, this is the difference between tyranny and freedom. To echo a maxim from Milton and Foes Friedman: a society that puts secrecy – in the sense of state secrecy – ahead of transparency and accountability will end up neither secure nor free.”

22 February 2014 @ 3:07 pm.
Last modified February 22, 2014.
 
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Intelligence Yields

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Muller

Two to five unnamed U.S. government officials have alerted the public today that, according to intelligence colected by the U.S. and other states, shoebombers may have invented new shoe-designs to blow up airplanes in relentless attempts to terrorize innocent and well-surveilled citizens. As CNN emphasizes, the officials stressed that there is no specific threat or known plot, though. One of the unnamed intelligence sources said the warning went beyond a concern about explosives in shoes to include cosmetics and liquids. The threat is unrelated, however, to recent warnings about toothpaste and cosmetic tubes potentially being used to hide explosives on flights to the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, something some had interpreted as a U.S. spoilsport anyway.

We understand that the continuing reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks may soon drive members of the intelligence community crazy. As a matter of fact, NSA’s mass surveillance has not prevented a single terrorist attack in the United States since 9-11. In the CNN report, just two failed incidents are mentioned.

“In December 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, passengers aboard an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami thwarted another passenger’s attempt to detonate explosives hidden in his sneakers. Richard Reid, a British citizen, pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence.

A failed attempt to blow up an overseas flight heading to Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 involved a bomb concealed in a passenger’s underwear.”

Shouting fire in a crowded theater principally creates unnecessary panic. Since nobody would pay attention after a while anymore, it must be regarded an act of terrorism itself.

20 February 2014 @ 6:16 pm.
Last modified February 20, 2014.
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WikiLeaks a Terrorist Organization?

Posted on February 19, 2014 by Muller

The recent revelations, leaked by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, that both NSA and itsUK counterpart GCHQ had targeted whistle-blower platform WikiLeaks and, after the publication of the Afghanistan Warlogs had pressured other countries with forces in Afghanistan such as Australia, the UK and Germany to prosecute WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange doesn’t come as a surprise.

What does is

“U.S. attempt[s] to pressure other nations to prosecute Assange […] recounted in a file that the intelligence community calls its ‘Manhunting Timeline.’ The document details, on a country-by-country basis, efforts by the U.S. government and its allies to locate, prosecute, capture or kill alleged terrorists, drug traffickers, Palestinian leaders and others. There is a timeline for each year from 2008 to 2012.”

So, Assange among people such as Khaled Mashaal? A manhunt? Other papers leaked by Snowden mention WikiLeaks and its “network of supporters” as “malicious foreign actors”. And GCHQ had, in a top-secret PowerPoint presentation at the 2012 annual gathering of its Five-Eye alliance, the U.S, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, made sure that it is willing to target even users who accessed the WikiLeaks web page, storing IP numbers.

Well, all of this is outrageous. That Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, had been detained for nine hours at Heathrow Airport last summer when on his way from Berlin, where he had met with Laura Poitras and probably received USB sticks with further leaks by Snowden, back to Rio de Janeiro is one thing. That today a lower court in the UK had ruled that the detention and interrogation was legal under the terrorism law is just ridiculous. As is possibly placing Edward Snowden’s legal advisor Jesselyn Radack on a “inhibited persons list” when having been stopped and interrogated at Heathrow last Sunday.

When Greenwald was addressed, in the comment section (18 Feb 2014 @ 4:50 am), “Would you widen your scope please? This is interesting but you seem obsessed with the US/UK. What about Russia, China, Iran etc?” he responded,

“Two points:

(1) When a source provides you with tens of thousands of top secret documents from one of the most secretive agencies of the world’s most powerful governments, constituting the biggest security leak in American history, you tend to focus on reporting those documents. I know that’s really strange, but that’s how it is.

(2) As for one’s duties as a citizen and a journalist, see here” (rightfully referring to Noam Chomsky).

19 February 2014 @ 6:50 pm.
Last modified February 19, 2014.
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